It will use 256-bit AES if your using a mozilla based browser. If your using IE you'l be restricted to the obsolete and flawed 128-bit RC4 algorythm since IE doesnt support AES or any ciphers stronger than 128-bit.
You had no problems connecting to windows 2003 a few years ago? Did windows 2003 exist a few years ago or were you connecting to a 2000 or nt4 server? And if so.. maybe it's microsoft that intentionally broke compatibility with opensource apps? Wouldn't be the first time they've done that.
The best introduction to linux is when someone has a need for it.. Not when they just get given a cd and told to "go play". With no goal in mind they will quickly get bored playing aimlessly with it and just complain about how different it is.. At work someone needed to cut+paste some data from some spreadsheets to a single one, i gave him a linux box running windowmaker and openoffice, and showed him how to resize his source spreadsheet and position the destination underneath it so he could easily cut+paste between the two. He liked the way the window he was pasting into didn't pop to the front and obscure his source spreadsheet like it would on windows, he also liked the highlight / middlebutton cut+pasting of linux which was much easier and quicker than the convoluted windows method.. Having had a positive first experience with linux he is interested in trying more.
Then they should make sure the hardware itself is not capable of monitoring illegal frequencies. Someone could reverse engineer the existing drivers to modify the behavior
A default linux install need not have any network listening daemons open, it's impossible to close certain network listening services on windows, the only thing you can do is firewall them off. Aside from that, a linux install should have you running as an unpriveleged user by default so any user-space app you were running which got infected wouldn't be able to infect the system files.
Then it's not your fault that your work computer gets infected with a worm, and perhaps if that happens often enough your employer will start to see ie as a liability and give you something else (that happened where i work)
This is only a usability issue under windows.. Photoshop on MAC (and most other apps) work the same way as gimp under unix, photoshop under windows works differently - all the toolbars are contained within a single large background window. This is to do with the way the different interfaces are designed. Windows comes from a simple task switching environment, where you have a single foreground app taking up the whole screen which you use until you switch to another full screen app. Basically it's designed for people who can't concentrate on more than one thing at once. Most unix window managers and the apple interface however, are designed to arrange multiple apps on the screen and with most unix window managers, to have multiple virtual screens laid out that you can flip between.. So you never need to minimise 20 windows like you would on a windows system..
As a linux user, i am actually insulted that we're seen as only being good enough to run the servers and not to actually play the game.. This is just as bad as ie-only websites being hosted on linux servers. People who are willing to take from linux and the community but not give anything back.
I have a broken indy, the psu works perfectly and the nvram seems to, but the machine crashes whenever you try to boot an os (the prom works perfectly and the ram works perfectly having been moved to an indigo2). I think the scsi controller is fried (90% of the time it wont detect a disk) and judging from the crash messages from netbsd, it seems the cpu is fried... So if anyone is interested in the psu and nvram (and whatever else still works) feel free to drop me a line
I imagine that's not much more than the original price tho, and end of lifed products will only be manufactured in small quantities for enterprise customers who absoloutely NEED such components, mostly mainframe components and the like... You could quite easily replace your ps/2 286 with a more modern system for $2k, but if your among the 0.001% of people who has an essential business requirement for that specific hardware you would quite happily pay $2k for 1mb of ram.
And with this system, you put far less load on the windows server.. I saw a company where a windows terminal server used by all users (and heavily overloaded) was replaced with linux clients with the terminal server kept for one or two windows-specific apps.. The load on the server dropped massively, and because users were no longer using it to browse the web there's far less risk of virus infection.
Re:The Mozilla brand is probably stronger now
on
Netscape Reborn?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, browsers that follow the specs don't, lynx for instance does not, neither does wget.. Firefox/Mozilla and other browsers based upon that identify themselves as mozilla/5.0 (ie identifies itself as mozilla/4.0) but they should do, since they *ARE* mozilla browsers.. I wonder if netscape could sue microsoft for trademark infringement..
There is no such thing as "firefox for windows" there is simply "firefox compiled for windows". The same sourcecode will build and run on linux or other systems... Also you can run the windows compile under linux using wine, ofcourse that would be a pointless thing to do since there's a native version available, but it *can* be done and there is nothing in the license agreement to say that your not allowed to do that.
Actually if you have a windows computer running 98/nt4 or higher you can upgrade to the latest version of ie for free, this is because you already have a paid for version of ie with the os. If you have a fresh machine with no os installed, it will cost you if you want to run ie because you have to buy it as a component of windows, even if subsequent upgrades to it are free.
The 32bit compatibility of the alpha is known as the "taso" flag, as documented in the DEC/Compaq compiler manpage:
[Tru64] -taso
Directs the linker to load the executable file in the lower 31-bit addressable virtual address
range. The -T and -D options to the ld command can also be used, respectively, to ensure that the
text and data segments are loaded into low memory.
The -taso option, however, in addition to setting default addresses for text and data segments,
also causes shared libraries linked outside the 31-bit address space to be appropriately relocated
by the loader. If you specify -taso and also specify text and data segment addresses with -T and
-D, those addresses override the -taso default addresses. The -taso option can be helpful when
porting programs that assume address values can be stored in 32-bit variables (that is, programs
that assume that pointers are the same length as int variables).
If MacOS didn`t have 32bit memory addressing, then what did it have? it was certainly greater than 24bit (as supported by the original 68000 cpu) although even the 68000 used 32bits to store a pointer, and ignored the upper 8 bits.
Since when is pre-emptive multitasking a requirement for a 32bit os?
It is well known that NT was never capable of direct 64bit processing on the alpha, nor was it capable of 64bit memory addressing. It processes 64bit values in the same way a 32bit system would. Aside from that, all the alpha systems had a 40 bit address space and i believe 48bit virtual address space, there is no such thing as compatibility to lower end alphas in this respect.
I also have the windows 2000 beta for alpha, it`s true they were developing (but never released) a 64bit version for the alpha, which is also why the port to the itanium wasn`t so hard to do. As for the 2 itanium version being released so closely, this is because they were both developed at the same time, with most of the code being shared between that and the x86 version.
And nodoubt the custom applications will be as tightly coupled to windows as possible, to prevent future migration away. The NHS should force custom applications to follow published standards and operate on more than one platform, afterall theres no migration/porting costs involved for a custom app thats yet to be developed.
No, they got a very poor deal... The price of hardware has been falling for years, there is competition in the hardware market, hardware is getting better and cheaper at an astonishing rate.. The price of software has just been going up, because there is little or no competition, and there are underhanded ways to eliminate competition than making a better product.. It still costs real money to produce a piece of hardware, it costs absoloutely nothing to produce a "windows license", hardware is a physical item which has raw materials and production costs associated with each sale, software is write once sell infinite times.. According to economies of scale, software should cost pennies by now.. You should only have to pay for hardware and manpower (support) since these have real costs associated with them.
It`s better to spend 2 billion in britain than to send 1 billion to america... Why? This is a government department, what they spend in britain goes to british companies and british citizens who then pay a good chunk of it back as tax... Also they should be able to inspect the sourcecode and compile it themselves (to verify the source they have is actually the same as theyre running) No matter how closely we may be allied to america, the british government should not blindly trust any foreign corporation.. British government departments don`t use checkpoint firewall-1 because they dont trust israel, and i doubt the american government would trust closed source apps coming from iraq or afghanistan.
The NHS should source as much as possible from the local market, the british government doesn't exist to fund foreign corporations. It exists to provide for the british people, it is funded by the british people and as much as possible of that money should go back to the british people, to keep it in a loop inside britain..
Perhaps once the problems started showing with windows, you could have pushed for a switch to a free unix, linux or BSD... A switch from solaris to a free unix is much easier than a switch to/from windows, you can run many of the same programs, and those which are only available on solaris can still be run over remote X11 from existing sparc servers to your linux workstations, so theres far less load on the solaris machines..
Why do you *have* to upgrade? I can understand security fixes, but why upgrade to newer versions of software which simply has features you dont need? If you were getting on just fine with the old version, why not stick with it? Your users will be very familiar with it, and if it`s opensource and you have someone with a little coding knowlege on staff you can gradually fix the bugs as you go along, so you end up with a familiar but absoloutely rock solid program which doesn`t have the unused features or extra bloat of the latest version. This also means you have less need to update your hardware... If you find you can no longer buy the hardware you had, and absoloutely need newer hardware, you can still run the same software on it.. You can still run your ancient apps on a modern linux kernel, and all you *might* need to change would be the hardware drivers - the kernel and X, everything else can remain the same old tried and tested rock solid version, and users will actually notice that the new machines are *Faster* and not just *prettier but slower*
Well, OS/2 was originally designed as a non networked desktop OS, same as windows, and is likely to suffer from the same problems (no thought of security during the design phase, support for networking and attempts at security shoehorned in) which only haven`t been identified due to the small marketshare of the OS. BeOS, well that may suffer the same problems, tho its far more modern so likely they were more security conscious when designing it.. If you want a secure OS, try VMS...
Actually, in terms of manual attacks: UNIX Systems are far more usefull for the typical things crackers will use them for, such as scanning for more machines to hack, connecting to irc, storing files etc.. The more flexible commandline interface of unix and the wider availability of exploits to launch *from* unix machines... The much higher chance of there being a working compiler installed on a unix machine.. Many manual attacks are done by people who are up to no good on IRC, to load irc bots, ddos tools or to scan for more machines, all of which is easier to do, and achieves better results on unix machines. Windows machines are also more often rebooted, an attacker doesn't want a machine to get rebooted while he's using it as that would disrupt his activity.
Windows machines are typically compromised for one of 2 reasons: 1, DDOS Drones (windows boxes actually make very poor ddos drones, the raw sockets implementation of windows is much slower than any unix... what windows boxes lack in power however, they make up for in quantity) however since theres plenty of windows boxes to be used as ddos drones, and it takes many windows ddos drones to equal the effect of a single unix box, ddos drones are usually installed by automated tools 2, website defacements - here windows has a lower marketshare than unix in terms of web hosting, however windows actually accounts for a higher percentage of defaced sites.
Noone breaks into a windows machine and uses it to interactively scan for and exploit other machines, the scanners available for windows are much slower than those for unix, and the default commandline interface of windows is far less flexible than a typical unix. Using a gui remotely takes up far more bandwidth and is far more hindered by latency than a commandline, also take into account the fact that attackers will often relay through multiple machines to try and cover their tracks, thus increasing the latency.
In short, windows machines are far less usefull to attackers but are more plentifull, in order to achieve the same result as a single unix box (for ddos or scanning) you need multiple windows boxes, so it makes sense to automate the process rather than login to tons of machines at once.
So they support an architecture that noone is using, and have no support for one that`s selling quite well.. Infact, NT4 for the Alpha has a larger userbase than the itanium, despite being discontinued...
It will use 256-bit AES if your using a mozilla based browser. If your using IE you'l be restricted to the obsolete and flawed 128-bit RC4 algorythm since IE doesnt support AES or any ciphers stronger than 128-bit.
It builds and runs on Solaris, IRIX, the *BSD`s and i'm sure many other unix platforms too with little difficulty..
You had no problems connecting to windows 2003 a few years ago? Did windows 2003 exist a few years ago or were you connecting to a 2000 or nt4 server? And if so.. maybe it's microsoft that intentionally broke compatibility with opensource apps? Wouldn't be the first time they've done that.
The best introduction to linux is when someone has a need for it.. Not when they just get given a cd and told to "go play". With no goal in mind they will quickly get bored playing aimlessly with it and just complain about how different it is..
At work someone needed to cut+paste some data from some spreadsheets to a single one, i gave him a linux box running windowmaker and openoffice, and showed him how to resize his source spreadsheet and position the destination underneath it so he could easily cut+paste between the two.
He liked the way the window he was pasting into didn't pop to the front and obscure his source spreadsheet like it would on windows, he also liked the highlight / middlebutton cut+pasting of linux which was much easier and quicker than the convoluted windows method.. Having had a positive first experience with linux he is interested in trying more.
Then they should make sure the hardware itself is not capable of monitoring illegal frequencies. Someone could reverse engineer the existing drivers to modify the behavior
A default linux install need not have any network listening daemons open, it's impossible to close certain network listening services on windows, the only thing you can do is firewall them off.
Aside from that, a linux install should have you running as an unpriveleged user by default so any user-space app you were running which got infected wouldn't be able to infect the system files.
Then it's not your fault that your work computer gets infected with a worm, and perhaps if that happens often enough your employer will start to see ie as a liability and give you something else (that happened where i work)
This is only a usability issue under windows..
Photoshop on MAC (and most other apps) work the same way as gimp under unix, photoshop under windows works differently - all the toolbars are contained within a single large background window. This is to do with the way the different interfaces are designed. Windows comes from a simple task switching environment, where you have a single foreground app taking up the whole screen which you use until you switch to another full screen app. Basically it's designed for people who can't concentrate on more than one thing at once.
Most unix window managers and the apple interface however, are designed to arrange multiple apps on the screen and with most unix window managers, to have multiple virtual screens laid out that you can flip between.. So you never need to minimise 20 windows like you would on a windows system..
As a linux user, i am actually insulted that we're seen as only being good enough to run the servers and not to actually play the game.. This is just as bad as ie-only websites being hosted on linux servers. People who are willing to take from linux and the community but not give anything back.
I have a broken indy, the psu works perfectly and the nvram seems to, but the machine crashes whenever you try to boot an os (the prom works perfectly and the ram works perfectly having been moved to an indigo2). I think the scsi controller is fried (90% of the time it wont detect a disk) and judging from the crash messages from netbsd, it seems the cpu is fried... So if anyone is interested in the psu and nvram (and whatever else still works) feel free to drop me a line
I imagine that's not much more than the original price tho, and end of lifed products will only be manufactured in small quantities for enterprise customers who absoloutely NEED such components, mostly mainframe components and the like... You could quite easily replace your ps/2 286 with a more modern system for $2k, but if your among the 0.001% of people who has an essential business requirement for that specific hardware you would quite happily pay $2k for 1mb of ram.
And with this system, you put far less load on the windows server.. I saw a company where a windows terminal server used by all users (and heavily overloaded) was replaced with linux clients with the terminal server kept for one or two windows-specific apps.. The load on the server dropped massively, and because users were no longer using it to browse the web there's far less risk of virus infection.
Actually, browsers that follow the specs don't, lynx for instance does not, neither does wget..
Firefox/Mozilla and other browsers based upon that identify themselves as mozilla/5.0 (ie identifies itself as mozilla/4.0) but they should do, since they *ARE* mozilla browsers.. I wonder if netscape could sue microsoft for trademark infringement..
There is no such thing as "firefox for windows" there is simply "firefox compiled for windows". The same sourcecode will build and run on linux or other systems...
Also you can run the windows compile under linux using wine, ofcourse that would be a pointless thing to do since there's a native version available, but it *can* be done and there is nothing in the license agreement to say that your not allowed to do that.
Actually if you have a windows computer running 98/nt4 or higher you can upgrade to the latest version of ie for free, this is because you already have a paid for version of ie with the os.
If you have a fresh machine with no os installed, it will cost you if you want to run ie because you have to buy it as a component of windows, even if subsequent upgrades to it are free.
The 32bit compatibility of the alpha is known as the "taso" flag, as documented in the DEC/Compaq compiler manpage:
[Tru64] -taso
Directs the linker to load the executable file in the lower 31-bit addressable virtual address
range. The -T and -D options to the ld command can also be used, respectively, to ensure that the
text and data segments are loaded into low memory.
The -taso option, however, in addition to setting default addresses for text and data segments,
also causes shared libraries linked outside the 31-bit address space to be appropriately relocated
by the loader. If you specify -taso and also specify text and data segment addresses with -T and
-D, those addresses override the -taso default addresses. The -taso option can be helpful when
porting programs that assume address values can be stored in 32-bit variables (that is, programs
that assume that pointers are the same length as int variables).
If MacOS didn`t have 32bit memory addressing, then what did it have? it was certainly greater than 24bit (as supported by the original 68000 cpu) although even the 68000 used 32bits to store a pointer, and ignored the upper 8 bits.
Since when is pre-emptive multitasking a requirement for a 32bit os?
It is well known that NT was never capable of direct 64bit processing on the alpha, nor was it capable of 64bit memory addressing. It processes 64bit values in the same way a 32bit system would. Aside from that, all the alpha systems had a 40 bit address space and i believe 48bit virtual address space, there is no such thing as compatibility to lower end alphas in this respect.
I also have the windows 2000 beta for alpha, it`s true they were developing (but never released) a 64bit version for the alpha, which is also why the port to the itanium wasn`t so hard to do.
As for the 2 itanium version being released so closely, this is because they were both developed at the same time, with most of the code being shared between that and the x86 version.
And nodoubt the custom applications will be as tightly coupled to windows as possible, to prevent future migration away.
The NHS should force custom applications to follow published standards and operate on more than one platform, afterall theres no migration/porting costs involved for a custom app thats yet to be developed.
No, they got a very poor deal...
The price of hardware has been falling for years, there is competition in the hardware market, hardware is getting better and cheaper at an astonishing rate..
The price of software has just been going up, because there is little or no competition, and there are underhanded ways to eliminate competition than making a better product..
It still costs real money to produce a piece of hardware, it costs absoloutely nothing to produce a "windows license", hardware is a physical item which has raw materials and production costs associated with each sale, software is write once sell infinite times.. According to economies of scale, software should cost pennies by now..
You should only have to pay for hardware and manpower (support) since these have real costs associated with them.
It`s better to spend 2 billion in britain than to send 1 billion to america...
Why? This is a government department, what they spend in britain goes to british companies and british citizens who then pay a good chunk of it back as tax...
Also they should be able to inspect the sourcecode and compile it themselves (to verify the source they have is actually the same as theyre running)
No matter how closely we may be allied to america, the british government should not blindly trust any foreign corporation.. British government departments don`t use checkpoint firewall-1 because they dont trust israel, and i doubt the american government would trust closed source apps coming from iraq or afghanistan.
The NHS should source as much as possible from the local market, the british government doesn't exist to fund foreign corporations. It exists to provide for the british people, it is funded by the british people and as much as possible of that money should go back to the british people, to keep it in a loop inside britain..
Perhaps once the problems started showing with windows, you could have pushed for a switch to a free unix, linux or BSD... A switch from solaris to a free unix is much easier than a switch to/from windows, you can run many of the same programs, and those which are only available on solaris can still be run over remote X11 from existing sparc servers to your linux workstations, so theres far less load on the solaris machines..
Why do you *have* to upgrade?
I can understand security fixes, but why upgrade to newer versions of software which simply has features you dont need? If you were getting on just fine with the old version, why not stick with it? Your users will be very familiar with it, and if it`s opensource and you have someone with a little coding knowlege on staff you can gradually fix the bugs as you go along, so you end up with a familiar but absoloutely rock solid program which doesn`t have the unused features or extra bloat of the latest version. This also means you have less need to update your hardware...
If you find you can no longer buy the hardware you had, and absoloutely need newer hardware, you can still run the same software on it.. You can still run your ancient apps on a modern linux kernel, and all you *might* need to change would be the hardware drivers - the kernel and X, everything else can remain the same old tried and tested rock solid version, and users will actually notice that the new machines are *Faster* and not just *prettier but slower*
Well, OS/2 was originally designed as a non networked desktop OS, same as windows, and is likely to suffer from the same problems (no thought of security during the design phase, support for networking and attempts at security shoehorned in) which only haven`t been identified due to the small marketshare of the OS. BeOS, well that may suffer the same problems, tho its far more modern so likely they were more security conscious when designing it..
If you want a secure OS, try VMS...
Actually, in terms of manual attacks:
UNIX Systems are far more usefull for the typical things crackers will use them for, such as scanning for more machines to hack, connecting to irc, storing files etc.. The more flexible commandline interface of unix and the wider availability of exploits to launch *from* unix machines...
The much higher chance of there being a working compiler installed on a unix machine..
Many manual attacks are done by people who are up to no good on IRC, to load irc bots, ddos tools or to scan for more machines, all of which is easier to do, and achieves better results on unix machines.
Windows machines are also more often rebooted, an attacker doesn't want a machine to get rebooted while he's using it as that would disrupt his activity.
Windows machines are typically compromised for one of 2 reasons:
1, DDOS Drones (windows boxes actually make very poor ddos drones, the raw sockets implementation of windows is much slower than any unix... what windows boxes lack in power however, they make up for in quantity) however since theres plenty of windows boxes to be used as ddos drones, and it takes many windows ddos drones to equal the effect of a single unix box, ddos drones are usually installed by automated tools
2, website defacements - here windows has a lower marketshare than unix in terms of web hosting, however windows actually accounts for a higher percentage of defaced sites.
Noone breaks into a windows machine and uses it to interactively scan for and exploit other machines, the scanners available for windows are much slower than those for unix, and the default commandline interface of windows is far less flexible than a typical unix. Using a gui remotely takes up far more bandwidth and is far more hindered by latency than a commandline, also take into account the fact that attackers will often relay through multiple machines to try and cover their tracks, thus increasing the latency.
In short, windows machines are far less usefull to attackers but are more plentifull, in order to achieve the same result as a single unix box (for ddos or scanning) you need multiple windows boxes, so it makes sense to automate the process rather than login to tons of machines at once.
So they support an architecture that noone is using, and have no support for one that`s selling quite well..
Infact, NT4 for the Alpha has a larger userbase than the itanium, despite being discontinued...