Use the zip file. Just unzip right into program directory. Then run it, load additional XPIs to taste, xcopy the program folder up to a server. To install on each station, just xcopy or wrap into an.msi and deploy to workstations automatically via a GPO.
Mozilla is easy to deploy, but a bitch to configure. See my other note in this thread for that nightmare...
I tried, went through hell. I assume you're doing this in a Windows environment. If so, be aware of some real killer limitations.
First of all, Mozilla doesn't understand UNC paths. If your GPO redirects %appdata%, you're screwed. Quit now. The mozilla registry.dat file goes in %appdata%\mozilla and if %appdata% is in a UNC of DFS share, it won't find it.
Then... if you allow users to create profiles in the default location, below %appdata%\mozilla, expect profiles to go missing. Windows has a nasty habit of duplicating roaming profiles, like profiles\user, profiles\user.domain, profiles\user.domain.000, etc... Since your profile location is a hardcoded path in registry.dat, Mozilla will find it, but will try to load the profile in the stale profile location. If that doesn't exist now, it'll throw up a profile manager asking you to recreate one.
The solution to above is to create the profile manually via a command like:
mozilla.exe -CreateProfile "default z:\mozilla"
That will move the bulk of the profile (except registry.dat) to a fixed location out of the roaming profile.
For a lot more detail and my rant, read bug #162025, comment #28.
We have done a lot to get it working finally, including some logon vbscripts to create the profiles, repair prefs.js file, have some mandatory prefs.js entries that are replaced during logon if user changes them (like home page for us), etc...
We've been through hell but think we finally have it licked by working around mozilla bugs. We intend to post a page on our experiences, but not in the next 12 hours (the effective life of a slashdot story)
When it's ready, I'll e-mail you or feel free to contact me if you want the scripts as they stand now (we are still debugging some things).
NWN no good for me because I lack self-control...
on
Neverwinter Nights Update
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I had high hopes for NWN and Dungeon Seige to break me of my Diablo 2 habit, but it hasn't happened (much to my chagrin). You see, I lack self-control. Soon as I hear about a cheat code to give me unlimited XP, gold, weapons, goodies, etc, I can't help but use it.
A battle.net hosted d2 world (even with the occasional cheating bugs, which I don't persue at least), is far more challenging. Running a hardcore character that you have had for months and gone through hell with (puns intended) just has far more of a rush and satisfaction (for me at least). If my character dies, it's permanent, and I've suffered a real loss. Death has meaning, and death sucks. It's great!
That must be it, because why else do I waste so much time on an aging game, running the same quests and acts over and over and over again... I don't get it personally, and I guess neither did those two Asians that dropped dead after playing D2 non-stop for more than a day.
(At least I understand my condition well enough to stay away from worlds where I have to pay to play, like Evercrack. If battle.net charged, that would finally cure me....)
NASA does what it has to do in order to get funding. That means that it has to have jobs in several different states,
Sounds like the same problem Amtrak has. It has to ensure it runs money losing routes through every state to get support from that state's congressmen. When they try to cut non-profitable routes, those congressmen scream. When they lose money because of it, those congressmen scream.
(Please don't start an Amtrak thread. This post is to relate that NASA isn't the only publically-funded agency that suffers from the selfish stupidity described in the parent post. I'm sure the military does as well, with bases and operations all over...)
And, let me add, why should businesses in states that don't have sales taxes, like Delaware, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Alaska, have to collect sales taxes for other states? It's a big overhead to calculate and handle all that paperwork.
Ah, in that example, they made the bookmark bar title slashdot. Everyone knows the bookmark bar should have/. as the title. Much less space on the bar. (unless you use IE that is, then it has to be sd...;-)
Well, the one thing that confuses me is why Apple's website store still says "new" for ibooks and powerbooks as well as "the new imac." Hmm, even the ipods say "new 20GB."
If they update the hardware, what will it say next? Really gosh-darn new?
They now allow changing of org name on an account via the normal manage accounts tab on their website. I did it to one domain and it worked fine.
There is still a separate procedure for transfering ownership, although I have no idea why you can't now transfer ownership yourself by changing the org name, address, and admin/billing/tech contact handles yourself. Technically they want the new owner to enter a legal agreement with them (and charge big bucks to do an express transfer of course...)
You can't pgpmail your changes to them anymore, as far as I know. It's all done via SSL web pages using an id/password they give you. This kicked in over the past several months. I must have like 20 different id/passwords now, although they do have a form for allowing you to consolidate accounts.
So unless they've reduced the effective key size by a lot, there probably isn't enough matter in the universe to make the computers that would be required to break that key.
Yeah, but there's always the chance you get lucky and happen upon it early, plus it's more likely that you'll crack this one than there is finding aliens in white noise (*ducks*)
Executive summary: Microsoft employees are arrogant assholes. (insert sweeping generalization disclaimer here)
Quote from interview: Microsoft constructed an enabling environment for socially obnoxious behavior: it was welcomed and rationalized into positives. If you were late for meetings it meant you were busy doing important work, if you were extremely confrontational it meant you were passionate about your job, if you required subordinates to work long hours it meant you were committed to the product, if you turned down everyone you interviewed it meant you weren't soft, and so on.... And some of that behavior trickled out into meetings with customers and partners, where they were correctly seen as negatives and helped foster the anti-Microsoft attitude. But since Microsoft kept hiring and promoting obnoxious people, they kept being obnoxious.
Now this is just one former employee's opinion. But in sales meetings I have had with Microsoft, (I'm an IT manager for a 13,000 user college), I've seen the same attitudes.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to another one of those dead silences in the audience when Steve says "And we're going to charge you for the upgrades, isn't that great?"
Oh well, as far as I'm concerned, if you can afford to drive a luxury car, then you don't bitch about spending an extra 20c/gallon for Premium to go in it.
If you don't like it, go buy the commodity crap like the rest of the commoners.:-)
(But I *do* honestly think this is a stupid move. But Mac loyalists will bend over and take it, and I'm now one of them too...)
Well, he's a bit of an idiot for his choice of words, but it's not a complete fabrication. I remember fairly well over 10 years ago when he first became VP. At the time the Internet was research only, no commercialism allowed. At the time Gore was pushing for a "similar" internet for the public and described fairly well the benefits it could bring to business and the public. He called it at the time the "information super highway" (gack) and at the time it was thought that this new public internet would be separate from the academic internet. It was also supposed to use a different protocol, OSI, instead of TCP/IP. (Not that he knew what OSI was, that was just the conventional wisdom at the time).
He was also instrumental in supporting the academic internet during his years in Congress when all other people in Congress didn't have a clue about these things.
I know first hand about this because I was in IT at the time -- yes, I'm old -- and worked in a community college where we were debating whether or not we should halt the rollout of our TCP/IP network and switch to OSI because we were a two-year college and more tilted to serving business and not research and maybe the upcoming information super highway thing would be better than hooking to the then non-commerical Internet.
Now, as it turns out, the separate networks never materialized, OSI fizzled, and the non-commerical Internet became the Internet we know today and serious research institutions are going off on their own with Internet 2.
So, he's a tithead, but he *was* the leader in congress in understand the benefits of an internet (of some sort) and that commercialization of the internet is what was a large factor for the economic boom of the 90s.
Remember, no one outside of academia heard of the Internet before like 1992. The first mass media cartoon regarding the internet was in the new yorker in 1993 (the "no one knows your a dog on the net" one) which we all, at the time, were amazed (and scared) that mass media noticed the Internet.
p.s. I find it interesting, however, that conservatives are so quick to jump on someone's bad choice of words when their own people who can't choose good words in speeches are somehow to be given understanding, ala Bush and former VP Dan Quayle (and visa-versa of course).
As a switcher, I can tell you that I got my iMac because it's an iMac (and runs BSD). The iMac may canabalize some Power Mac sales, but I can assure you, if it wasn't for the iMac, I wouldn't have switched (actually, I go both ways. I also love my year old Dell 8100 with 2.0 ghz processor).
Making the Power Macs all dual processors was a wise way to go. It gives the products enough difference to make a Power Mac a viable premium. How about a three-way? Think of the advertising potential for THAT one!;-)
As for the clock problem, they should do something cheesy and advertise their power macs as something like 2.5 Ghz machines (in small print, two 1.25 ghz processors). Hell, others do it. Buy one of those nice 500 watt stereo systems and you find out it's really only 100 watts per channel!
Where did you get 80.61%? It's closer to 96% on my site.
You missed the parent post because you're lame and browse at score 2.:-)
The 80% refers the the current stats of the Pocket PC web site the article pointed to. It's slowly dropping the precent of IE users on it, demonstrating once and for all that slashdotters browser choice doesn't match the browser choice the general public uses.
Yes, it's true, for the most part. Many plans now charge for "air time" during peak hours (0600-2100 M-F) only, weekends and evenings are unlimited (free). Long distance all around the country is no extra charge so basically on weekends I can make a call to a landline or other cell phone 3,000 miles away and talk for several hours and not be charged a single penny.
The U.S. mobile market may be chaotic because of all of the different "standards" here (CDMA, TDMA, GSM, iDEN, PCS [aka CDMA-1900]), but the competition for customers is so fierce that the companies are doing this.
Mind you, the peak minutes are expensive (I get 400 minutes for $40 and extra minutes are 45 cents), and incoming calls are tallied against that as well -- except during off peak time.
My addresses show up on a lot of web pages and others' addressbooks, so not only do I get a lot of Klez messages, I get a lot of them sent out to others in my name.
I am then subjected to dozens of e-mail scanning auto-responders telling me I have a virus, auto replies from people I've never heard of, and the occasional jerk who thinks they know everything screaming at me in e-mail telling me I am stupid for letting myself get infected.
The fact I am also the postmaster admin to 13,000 users means I get users contacting me in a panic thinking they have a virus because one of the three above things happens to them. This, despite a faq and notices on intranet etc etc that this thing is out there.
Klez is probably the primary reason I am starting to hate Microsoft. It doesn't matter if my computer and all computers I am responsible for are completely patched and that my mail gateway blocks it, I still get to be a victim indirectly, and I doubt we'll ever see the entire planet fully patched.
Exactly, scale *does* make all the difference. I would believe that in a 10-person office with a simple print and file server, a Windows solution would require less expertise than a Linux solution. Once you start to scale up, I have my reservations about which is really more difficult or requires the greater expertise and even if Linux does require more expertise, the increased per-seat licensing costs of Windows is far from insignificant. For example, my 13,000 Windows users get their e-mail from free (license wise) Linux servers. If I was to convert to Exchange, I'd have to get 13,000 Exchange CALs as well as multiple windows servers to handle the load. For that price, I can hire an army of Linux techs...
The same arguments are ones I have with Mac fans. While it may be true that if you compare a large desktop installation of Macs versus PCs, Macs may be easier to support, it doesn't necessarily mean that in a PC shop, adding a few Macs isn't going to reduce support costs. It will INCREASE them since now I'd have to have support staff trained in Macintosh issues. Now at some point of increasing installed base and ratio of Macs to PCs, the reduced Mac costs might reduce the TCO, but not at a ratio of n-1 to 1 for certain.
(Not that I'm convinced Macs have a lower TCO than PCs, just throwing that out as another example of how stupid these wild claims thrown out about TCO are from all sides of the platform wars...)
Isn't windows administration nothing more than just "point, click, reboot"?
Pick up a copy of the windows 2000 server resource kit, read it, and then get back to me. (I realize you may be being sarcastic or trolling here, but still...:)
I will give you an example, point and click just doesn't work in a large environment. I have 13,000 users in my Active Directory for example. To administer a Windows environment successfully, you need to be able to script everything you can in ADSI, WMI, etc... Otherwise you'll spend all your life pointing and clicking or running out to visit client PCs. Let's say your company gets bought out and everyone's e-mail address gets changed. Are you going to sit there and point and click 13,000 accounts in Active Directory Users and Groups and manually type in the new e-mail domain name into each account? If you have to deploy a program to 2,000 desktops, are you going to run around to each PC, stick in a CD and run setup, or are you going to try to figure out how to use GPOs and msi packages to deploy it automatically?
Having Microsoft say that running a Windows environment doesn't take any real (ie, expensive) expertise is an insult to all of us who administer the things.
Microsoft claims on one hand that Linux is more expensive, because you have to hire expensive experts to maintain it. On the other hand they push the value of an MCSE to IT people, how it's a serious certification and not something that any chump can get, and how much more money we can make if we just become certified.
So which is it? I administer a nice big AD domain on w2k servers and I personally am insulted that Microsoft is doing their best to convince my administrators as well as others that Windows administration can be done by a non-expert. How long before CFOs believe this and wonder why they are paying for all of these expensive personnel down in IT? It's bad enough they don't understand the complexity of our jobs, now Microsoft is telling them it doesn't require an "expert" to administer Windows servers.:-(
Ouch, and I bet no one would listen to your opinion about the situation either, right? Or they'd listen and dismiss it.
What gets me is that everytime I throw out an opinion regarding an educational issue, it's basically "mind your own business." But many teachers fashions themselves as computer experts and insists on giving me advice on how to run things, and if I don't bend, trying to force it via administrative means...
The sad part of this is, most of this is just for show. "We have computers in every classroom." I bet that is why there is two in each, so they can say computers instead of "a computer." Sounds so much more impressive.
Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla is easy to deploy, but a bitch to configure. See my other note in this thread for that nightmare...
First of all, Mozilla doesn't understand UNC paths. If your GPO redirects %appdata%, you're screwed. Quit now. The mozilla registry.dat file goes in %appdata%\mozilla and if %appdata% is in a UNC of DFS share, it won't find it.
Then ... if you allow users to create profiles in the default location, below %appdata%\mozilla, expect profiles to go missing. Windows has a nasty habit of duplicating roaming profiles, like profiles\user, profiles\user.domain, profiles\user.domain.000, etc... Since your profile location is a hardcoded path in registry.dat, Mozilla will find it, but will try to load the profile in the stale profile location. If that doesn't exist now, it'll throw up a profile manager asking you to recreate one.
The solution to above is to create the profile manually via a command like:
That will move the bulk of the profile (except registry.dat) to a fixed location out of the roaming profile.
For a lot more detail and my rant, read bug #162025, comment #28.
We have done a lot to get it working finally, including some logon vbscripts to create the profiles, repair prefs.js file, have some mandatory prefs.js entries that are replaced during logon if user changes them (like home page for us), etc...
We've been through hell but think we finally have it licked by working around mozilla bugs. We intend to post a page on our experiences, but not in the next 12 hours (the effective life of a slashdot story)
When it's ready, I'll e-mail you or feel free to contact me if you want the scripts as they stand now (we are still debugging some things).
A battle.net hosted d2 world (even with the occasional cheating bugs, which I don't persue at least), is far more challenging. Running a hardcore character that you have had for months and gone through hell with (puns intended) just has far more of a rush and satisfaction (for me at least). If my character dies, it's permanent, and I've suffered a real loss. Death has meaning, and death sucks. It's great!
That must be it, because why else do I waste so much time on an aging game, running the same quests and acts over and over and over again... I don't get it personally, and I guess neither did those two Asians that dropped dead after playing D2 non-stop for more than a day.
(At least I understand my condition well enough to stay away from worlds where I have to pay to play, like Evercrack. If battle.net charged, that would finally cure me....)
Sounds like the same problem Amtrak has. It has to ensure it runs money losing routes through every state to get support from that state's congressmen. When they try to cut non-profitable routes, those congressmen scream. When they lose money because of it, those congressmen scream.
(Please don't start an Amtrak thread. This post is to relate that NASA isn't the only publically-funded agency that suffers from the selfish stupidity described in the parent post. I'm sure the military does as well, with bases and operations all over...)
And, let me add, why should businesses in states that don't have sales taxes, like Delaware, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Alaska, have to collect sales taxes for other states? It's a big overhead to calculate and handle all that paperwork.
In 1986 I bought an "HD 20 SC" for my Mac Plus for $1,195.
God you young kids don't know how lucky you are to avoid the dark ages! :)
Looks like that same 486 is running their web site! :-)
Ah, in that example, they made the bookmark bar title slashdot. Everyone knows the bookmark bar should have /. as the title. Much less space on the bar. (unless you use IE that is, then it has to be sd... ;-)
If they update the hardware, what will it say next? Really gosh-darn new?
There is still a separate procedure for transfering ownership, although I have no idea why you can't now transfer ownership yourself by changing the org name, address, and admin/billing/tech contact handles yourself. Technically they want the new owner to enter a legal agreement with them (and charge big bucks to do an express transfer of course...)
You can't pgpmail your changes to them anymore, as far as I know. It's all done via SSL web pages using an id/password they give you. This kicked in over the past several months. I must have like 20 different id/passwords now, although they do have a form for allowing you to consolidate accounts.
Yeah, but there's always the chance you get lucky and happen upon it early, plus it's more likely that you'll crack this one than there is finding aliens in white noise (*ducks*)
Read the interview with a former microsoft developer on kuro5hin for an insight into maybe why this is so.
Executive summary: Microsoft employees are arrogant assholes. (insert sweeping generalization disclaimer here)
Quote from interview: Microsoft constructed an enabling environment for socially obnoxious behavior: it was welcomed and rationalized into positives. If you were late for meetings it meant you were busy doing important work, if you were extremely confrontational it meant you were passionate about your job, if you required subordinates to work long hours it meant you were committed to the product, if you turned down everyone you interviewed it meant you weren't soft, and so on. ... And some of that behavior trickled out into meetings with customers and partners, where they were correctly seen as negatives and helped foster the anti-Microsoft attitude. But since Microsoft kept hiring and promoting obnoxious people, they kept being obnoxious.
Now this is just one former employee's opinion. But in sales meetings I have had with Microsoft, (I'm an IT manager for a 13,000 user college), I've seen the same attitudes.
Much better to defend others I guess...
(No, it's not a criticism, just an observation)
Oh well, as far as I'm concerned, if you can afford to drive a luxury car, then you don't bitch about spending an extra 20c/gallon for Premium to go in it.
If you don't like it, go buy the commodity crap like the rest of the commoners. :-)
(But I *do* honestly think this is a stupid move. But Mac loyalists will bend over and take it, and I'm now one of them too...)
He was also instrumental in supporting the academic internet during his years in Congress when all other people in Congress didn't have a clue about these things.
I know first hand about this because I was in IT at the time -- yes, I'm old -- and worked in a community college where we were debating whether or not we should halt the rollout of our TCP/IP network and switch to OSI because we were a two-year college and more tilted to serving business and not research and maybe the upcoming information super highway thing would be better than hooking to the then non-commerical Internet.
Now, as it turns out, the separate networks never materialized, OSI fizzled, and the non-commerical Internet became the Internet we know today and serious research institutions are going off on their own with Internet 2.
So, he's a tithead, but he *was* the leader in congress in understand the benefits of an internet (of some sort) and that commercialization of the internet is what was a large factor for the economic boom of the 90s.
Remember, no one outside of academia heard of the Internet before like 1992. The first mass media cartoon regarding the internet was in the new yorker in 1993 (the "no one knows your a dog on the net" one) which we all, at the time, were amazed (and scared) that mass media noticed the Internet.
p.s. I find it interesting, however, that conservatives are so quick to jump on someone's bad choice of words when their own people who can't choose good words in speeches are somehow to be given understanding, ala Bush and former VP Dan Quayle (and visa-versa of course).
Some more on this at snopes.com
Making the Power Macs all dual processors was a wise way to go. It gives the products enough difference to make a Power Mac a viable premium. How about a three-way? Think of the advertising potential for THAT one! ;-)
As for the clock problem, they should do something cheesy and advertise their power macs as something like 2.5 Ghz machines (in small print, two 1.25 ghz processors). Hell, others do it. Buy one of those nice 500 watt stereo systems and you find out it's really only 100 watts per channel!
You missed the parent post because you're lame and browse at score 2. :-)
The 80% refers the the current stats of the Pocket PC web site the article pointed to. It's slowly dropping the precent of IE users on it, demonstrating once and for all that slashdotters browser choice doesn't match the browser choice the general public uses.
The U.S. mobile market may be chaotic because of all of the different "standards" here (CDMA, TDMA, GSM, iDEN, PCS [aka CDMA-1900]), but the competition for customers is so fierce that the companies are doing this.
Mind you, the peak minutes are expensive (I get 400 minutes for $40 and extra minutes are 45 cents), and incoming calls are tallied against that as well -- except during off peak time.
Those stats are clearly incorrect. Everyone knows IE has 95% market share, not 80.61% (current stat).
<voice>
I am then subjected to dozens of e-mail scanning auto-responders telling me I have a virus, auto replies from people I've never heard of, and the occasional jerk who thinks they know everything screaming at me in e-mail telling me I am stupid for letting myself get infected.
The fact I am also the postmaster admin to 13,000 users means I get users contacting me in a panic thinking they have a virus because one of the three above things happens to them. This, despite a faq and notices on intranet etc etc that this thing is out there.
Klez is probably the primary reason I am starting to hate Microsoft. It doesn't matter if my computer and all computers I am responsible for are completely patched and that my mail gateway blocks it, I still get to be a victim indirectly, and I doubt we'll ever see the entire planet fully patched.
The same arguments are ones I have with Mac fans. While it may be true that if you compare a large desktop installation of Macs versus PCs, Macs may be easier to support, it doesn't necessarily mean that in a PC shop, adding a few Macs isn't going to reduce support costs. It will INCREASE them since now I'd have to have support staff trained in Macintosh issues. Now at some point of increasing installed base and ratio of Macs to PCs, the reduced Mac costs might reduce the TCO, but not at a ratio of n-1 to 1 for certain.
(Not that I'm convinced Macs have a lower TCO than PCs, just throwing that out as another example of how stupid these wild claims thrown out about TCO are from all sides of the platform wars...)
Pick up a copy of the windows 2000 server resource kit, read it, and then get back to me. (I realize you may be being sarcastic or trolling here, but still... :)
I will give you an example, point and click just doesn't work in a large environment. I have 13,000 users in my Active Directory for example. To administer a Windows environment successfully, you need to be able to script everything you can in ADSI, WMI, etc... Otherwise you'll spend all your life pointing and clicking or running out to visit client PCs. Let's say your company gets bought out and everyone's e-mail address gets changed. Are you going to sit there and point and click 13,000 accounts in Active Directory Users and Groups and manually type in the new e-mail domain name into each account? If you have to deploy a program to 2,000 desktops, are you going to run around to each PC, stick in a CD and run setup, or are you going to try to figure out how to use GPOs and msi packages to deploy it automatically?
Having Microsoft say that running a Windows environment doesn't take any real (ie, expensive) expertise is an insult to all of us who administer the things.
So which is it? I administer a nice big AD domain on w2k servers and I personally am insulted that Microsoft is doing their best to convince my administrators as well as others that Windows administration can be done by a non-expert. How long before CFOs believe this and wonder why they are paying for all of these expensive personnel down in IT? It's bad enough they don't understand the complexity of our jobs, now Microsoft is telling them it doesn't require an "expert" to administer Windows servers. :-(
What gets me is that everytime I throw out an opinion regarding an educational issue, it's basically "mind your own business." But many teachers fashions themselves as computer experts and insists on giving me advice on how to run things, and if I don't bend, trying to force it via administrative means...
The sad part of this is, most of this is just for show. "We have computers in every classroom." I bet that is why there is two in each, so they can say computers instead of "a computer." Sounds so much more impressive.