I don't know what the GP was doing, but AutoIt and AutoHotkey are excellent, and the best in their fields. Use AutoIt for scripting, AutoHotkey for hotkeys. Free.
You won't need much technical support, because they work.
Use the SciTe IDE for AutoIt. Very nice. The install package takes care of installing AutoIt, too.
People call the command line interface in Windows XP "DOS" because it has mostly the same lame, unfinished utilities. In 1983 I sold computers with the CP/M operating system that came with a CLI called Pilot that was better in many ways than the Windows XP CLI. Of course, there was no GUI, only the CLI. And its true that the native CLI in CP/M was worse than DOS.
In my opinion, anyone who has been attentive to the computer industry in the last 8 years has seen plenty of evidence that Symantec is to be avoided. Such a person would have seen the amazing number of serious bug reports. Often Symantec is even worse than Microsoft in attentiveness, and that is extreme.
We stopped using Symantec software, other than to buy copies and test them, many years ago when a Symantec technical support representative cheerfully explained that the very misleading operating system error message we were getting was due to Symantec software being corrrupted by another program. The other program? Symantec WinFax Pro.
In recent years, Symantec technical support has been very angry and adversarial. It is not difficult to guess that things are not going well inside the company.
My experience is that Symantec has a high percentage of employees who know almost nothing about technical things. Such employees are cheaper to hire; I imagine that is the reason.
It was obvious that the writer did not understand what he was writing. Nothing about the article is reliable. The Slashdot editors should not have posted it.
This is a quote from the story: "His recommendation: a hard-drive disk with 7,200 revolutions per minute." That's a way to have secure storage?
That's a recommendation? It's quite obvious that the author of the referenced story, John Blau, has no technical knowledge.
Another quote: "Kurt Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at IBM Deutschland GmbH, takes this view: If you want to avoid having to burn new CDs every few years, use magnetic tapes to store all your pictures, videos and songs for a lifetime."
I suppose that article was written by a public relations person and was published because someone was paid. Magnetic tapes are NOT reliable, in my experience.
Tapes? Tape drives? Someone is trying to sell a stock of old drives, I'll bet. My $1,300 Seagate tape drive and expensive tapes were very unreliable compared to CDs and DVDs.
CDs and DVDs stored in ziplock bags seem to last a long time.
Changes in atmosperic pressure cause other methods of storage to breathe. Eventually pollution enters. Ziplock bags don't breathe, they just expand and contract as the weather changes.
I know what I'm about to say is very unpopular with Slashdot editors.
However, I'm not the only person who thinks this way.
It is amazing, after all these years, how little Slashdot editors have
learned about grammar or spelling. No matter how good the writer, stories need
the assistance of an editor. However, Slashdot stories often don't receive
enough attention.
Often a re-organization of a Slashdot story or a bit of research would
vastly increase the quality of the discussion. I definitely know how difficult
improvement would be; it would use vast amounts of brainpower.
I'm very appreciative of Slashdot. It helps me educate myself about
computing.
CmdrTaco's biggest problems with Slashdot, and they are big, are made much
worse by Slashdot policies.
The biggest problem for Slashdot, in my opinion, is the fact that
moderators cannot post comments to stories. That means moderation only comes
from people who are not enough interested in a story to comment. That lack of
interest and maybe boredom distorts every story. If the moderator sees an idea
that he or she hasn't seen before, he or she is likely to mod it down.
Since the moderator has no serious interest in the discussion, comments at the
beginning are much more likely to receive moderation, for example. The present
moderation system causes many more kinds of distortion, too; the problem is
much worse than is immediately obvious.
To function correctly, a moderation system must be very sophisticated.
Slashdot's moderation system is too simplistic.
The second biggest problem, in my opinion, is that Slashdot members
are composed of two groups that are very different and largely incompatible.
The first group is computing professionals who need a place to learn more
about the fast-changing field of computing.
I know the following will be difficult to hear for some people, but I
think it is a useful understanding that could lead to improvement for both
groups. The second group is people who are mostly interested in being
spectators: Those who play computer games. They often have little real
interest in technical things. Their comments on technical articles are usually
non-technical in nature, such as an attempt at joking. Anyone who spends his
or her time pretending to kill people probably has a lot of anger. Such a
person may be rigid and cynical. The anger, rigidity, and cynicism lowers the
quality of every discussion.
The solution would be to separate the two groups. The games stories
that involve minimal technical discussion of computer issues could be given
their own web site: Gamesdot.
Such a division would bring more advertising for both groups because
the quality of the discussion in both groups would be higher and the ads could
be more targeted.
What normally happens to comments such as this is that someone who is
interested in games and who has little insight into his own behavior will
moderate it down. "Troll" originally meant someone in a discussion who is
intentionally causing trouble. Now it has come to mean "If you disagree with
me, you must be a troublemaker."
The numbers are generated inside a label making machine, and transferred securely to the web site with encryption. No humans ever see the numbers, until the covering paint is removed.
The web site can ask for identification, the name of the store where the item was bought, and an email address.
You can't see all the numbers without scratching off the material that covers them.
Legitimate distributors don't want fake products. A few reports would cause the distributor to suspect that a shipment was counterfeit. The distributor could identify the supplier. Remember, a few reports are all that is necessary. False positives are easy to check, by checking more numbers in the same shipment.
Random numbers cost nothing. No number would be used more than once.
Web pages with delayed responses stop password crackers. Anyone checking many numbers from the same internet address would cause the system to delay even more.
There are only 31,536,000 seconds in a year. That's an extremely small proportion of a sixteen digit random number. Therefor, a one-second delay in responding to a web request prevents cracking.
The problem with counterfit hardware can be easily fixed:
Generate random numbers 12 digits long, for example.
Put those numbers in a database available to the secure web site of the
legitimate manufacturer, immediately after the items have been shipped to a
distributor. Design a web page so that, when one of the numbers is entered in
a form, the web page displays either "Good" or "Unknown, please call the
manufacturer at 1-800-xxx-xxxx." List toll-free numbers for many
countries.
Put labels containing four of the numbers on each of the items to be
protected. Hide three of the numbers below a scratch-off surface.
Manufacturing company employees could not see the hidden numbers, so a
dishonest employee could not reveal them to counterfeiters.
Customs can then open crates and check ten of the items at random. There
is virtually no chance a manufacturer of fakes would guess one of the random
numbers correctly. A customs official could scratch off the paint hiding one
of the numbers, leaving three still hidden.
The distributor could scatch off and check the numbers of a few
items.
Buyers could put an item in a cart and call a friend or family member with
a number shown on the outside of the box to know if an item is legitimate.
After purchase, there would be a card with more numbers inside the box. Items
could be returned as counterfeit if at least two numbers were not scratched
off. That would allow the store where the item was returned, and the
distributor, to verify the item was counterfeit.
The system would discourage counterfeiting so much that few checks would
be necessary.
Another use: Put the numbers on cards inside boxes of
prescription drugs, and require pharmacies to put one card in each bottle
sold. In some cases, numbers could be printed on individual pills. I would never buy a drug without checking the number, would you?
Obviously, there are variations of this plan that would be appropriate
in other situations. In some cases, bar codes of random numbers, or a
combination of bar codes and a list of printed numbers, would be useful.
Customs officials would find it more efficient to have a bar code with a
number and a web page URL coded in an international format on the outside of
packing crates. They could wand the number and listen for a verifying beep.
It amazes me how often marketing people are monumentally stupid. In the sentence that begins "Most of the cooling system is external..." in the Hexus.net article, the words "cooling system" are green and underlined twice. When I mouse over the green, I see an ad for Sears. Is Sears selling radical computer gear now? No, it's an ad for heating and air conditioning.
The only way I can imagine that Sears could profit from that ad is if I were willing to pay Sears not to be annoyed.
From the Slashdot story: "Charlie Rose will post his interviews the day after a broadcast, allowing a free streaming for the first 24 hours then making it downloadable afterward for 99 cents each."
This is excellent. Charlie Rose interviews are often the only way to know more about the leaders who affect our lives so much.
In the past, Charlie Rose interviews have been available in transcript form, for a lot of money, and the transcripts are not guaranteed to be accurate. Videotape cost maybe $30, with another $20 for rush delivery.
Moderators: "Troll" originally meant someone in a discussion who is intentionally causing trouble. Now it has come to mean "If you disagree with me, you must be a troublemaker."
I stand by what I said in my parent comment.
I sold computers that came with Microsoft's first product, Microsoft Basic, which Bill Gates had a hand in writing. The sloppiness of Windows XP is identical to the sloppiness in Microsoft Basic. Both are, in my opinion, products in which the level of sloppiness is finely tuned so that it doesn't interfere too much with sales. Bill Gates set the tone for Microsoft products: They are not really finished when they are released.
It amazes me how weak-minded people are concerning public relations. Bill Gates makes billions of dollars making products so sloppy that they waste the time of millions of people worldwide. Then he gives back a little of that money, and instantly the abuses are forgotten.
Super-rich people like philanthropy because it helps them feel superior. They can spend a lot of time with people who are very happy with what they are doing, and who never voice disagreement. Giving away their husband's money is the pasttime of the wives of super-rich men everywhere.
Yes, it is good that there is money available to solve major world problems. But we should not stop realizing that Microsoft has cost tens of billions of dollars just in viruses for vulnerabilities of kinds that don't exist anywhere else in the world of software.
This week's vulnerability is an example. Graphics in Windows MetaFile format (WMF) are allowed to execute code!!! Yes, graphics files. You should be safe with other formats? No. Windows operating systems check.GIF and.JPG files to see if they are really WMF files, and, if they are, will execute any code in them!!! It's amazing.
"When I see MS do something stupid I don't generally blame Bill Gates. I
mean, the day to day vulnerabilities, the crappy design, the shoddy
interfaces, none of that can really be attributed (in my understanding) to
Bill."
In my opinion, Bill Gates is to be blamed. Look at the vulnerabilities
and bad design more carefully and you will see that they are a result of
planning. They are not accidents. They are the result of Bill making money the
center of his whole life. They are the result of his sneaky aggressive
behavior.
The vulnerabilities and extremely bad design are the result of not
letting Microsoft programmers finish their jobs. The vulnerabilities and
extremely bad design make Microsoft more money. For example, most businesses
would have been happy to remain with Windows 98, but Windows 98 often
corrupted its big central configuration file called the registry. Windows 98
would literally self-destruct.
Windows 98 regularly crashed because operating system resources like
something called GDI and others were allowed a maximum of 128K of memory.
128K! That limitation was easily fixable, but it wasn't fixed.
Windows 98 self-destruction made Bill Gates more money because he is
exploiting his virtual monopoly. Businesses paid a huge amount to buy another
operating system from Microsoft, Windows XP.
Note that Bill Gates suffers from depression. This is exactly what you
would expect of a man who has spent his entire adult life acting out sneaky
aggression.
The reason Apple does so well under Steve Jobs is because Steve Jobs
is idealistic, an unusual characteristic for a CEO. Remember, however, that
Steve Jobs is also a monumentally abusive person, and suffers enormously
because of that. Mr. Jobs just often doesn't let his abusiveness be in the way
of his idealism.
Apple does well partly because Microsoft is not interested in doing
well. Microsoft is "maximizing shareholder value" by delaying delivering good
products so that customers will always have a reason to buy the next version.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what the GP was doing, but AutoIt and AutoHotkey are excellent, and the best in their fields. Use AutoIt for scripting, AutoHotkey for hotkeys. Free.
You won't need much technical support, because they work.
Use the SciTe IDE for AutoIt. Very nice. The install package takes care of installing AutoIt, too.
My experience with the newest version of Acronis is that it is far better than Ghost.
Acronis is not perfect, but much less stupid than Symantec, in my experience.
People call the command line interface in Windows XP "DOS" because it has mostly the same lame, unfinished utilities. In 1983 I sold computers with the CP/M operating system that came with a CLI called Pilot that was better in many ways than the Windows XP CLI. Of course, there was no GUI, only the CLI. And its true that the native CLI in CP/M was worse than DOS.
MOD PARENT UP +5 funny and +5 insightful = +10
In my opinion, anyone who has been attentive to the computer industry in the last 8 years has seen plenty of evidence that Symantec is to be avoided. Such a person would have seen the amazing number of serious bug reports. Often Symantec is even worse than Microsoft in attentiveness, and that is extreme.
We stopped using Symantec software, other than to buy copies and test them, many years ago when a Symantec technical support representative cheerfully explained that the very misleading operating system error message we were getting was due to Symantec software being corrrupted by another program. The other program? Symantec WinFax Pro.
In recent years, Symantec technical support has been very angry and adversarial. It is not difficult to guess that things are not going well inside the company.
My experience is that Symantec has a high percentage of employees who know almost nothing about technical things. Such employees are cheaper to hire; I imagine that is the reason.
Hours of things you can do to stop memory Memory Leaks in Firefox.
Firefox is the most crashy, CPU hogging, memory leaking software in common use on Windows.
Somehow Opera never has any of these problems. So, it is possible to have a well-behaved browser.
Oh, we're talking about planet Earth. Well, then, it is 52 weeks each year.
It's great. But many of those stories appear on the main Slashdot page, mixing spectator interests with professional interests.
It was obvious that the writer did not understand what he was writing. Nothing about the article is reliable. The Slashdot editors should not have posted it.
You probably know this, but it is not the oxide that degrades. It is the binding that sticks the oxide to the tape.
Another comment:
This is a quote from the story: "His recommendation: a hard-drive disk with 7,200 revolutions per minute." That's a way to have secure storage?
That's a recommendation? It's quite obvious that the author of the referenced story, John Blau, has no technical knowledge.
Another quote: "Kurt Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at IBM Deutschland GmbH, takes this view: If you want to avoid having to burn new CDs every few years, use magnetic tapes to store all your pictures, videos and songs for a lifetime."
I suppose that article was written by a public relations person and was published because someone was paid. Magnetic tapes are NOT reliable, in my experience.
Tapes? Tape drives? Someone is trying to sell a stock of old drives, I'll bet. My $1,300 Seagate tape drive and expensive tapes were very unreliable compared to CDs and DVDs.
CDs and DVDs stored in ziplock bags seem to last a long time.
Changes in atmosperic pressure cause other methods of storage to breathe. Eventually pollution enters. Ziplock bags don't breathe, they just expand and contract as the weather changes.
Adding to my comments above:
I know what I'm about to say is very unpopular with Slashdot editors. However, I'm not the only person who thinks this way.
It is amazing, after all these years, how little Slashdot editors have learned about grammar or spelling. No matter how good the writer, stories need the assistance of an editor. However, Slashdot stories often don't receive enough attention.
Often a re-organization of a Slashdot story or a bit of research would vastly increase the quality of the discussion. I definitely know how difficult improvement would be; it would use vast amounts of brainpower.
I'm very appreciative of Slashdot. It helps me educate myself about computing.
CmdrTaco's biggest problems with Slashdot, and they are big, are made much worse by Slashdot policies.
The biggest problem for Slashdot, in my opinion, is the fact that moderators cannot post comments to stories. That means moderation only comes from people who are not enough interested in a story to comment. That lack of interest and maybe boredom distorts every story. If the moderator sees an idea that he or she hasn't seen before, he or she is likely to mod it down. Since the moderator has no serious interest in the discussion, comments at the beginning are much more likely to receive moderation, for example. The present moderation system causes many more kinds of distortion, too; the problem is much worse than is immediately obvious.
To function correctly, a moderation system must be very sophisticated. Slashdot's moderation system is too simplistic.
The second biggest problem, in my opinion, is that Slashdot members are composed of two groups that are very different and largely incompatible. The first group is computing professionals who need a place to learn more about the fast-changing field of computing.
I know the following will be difficult to hear for some people, but I think it is a useful understanding that could lead to improvement for both groups. The second group is people who are mostly interested in being spectators: Those who play computer games. They often have little real interest in technical things. Their comments on technical articles are usually non-technical in nature, such as an attempt at joking. Anyone who spends his or her time pretending to kill people probably has a lot of anger. Such a person may be rigid and cynical. The anger, rigidity, and cynicism lowers the quality of every discussion.
The solution would be to separate the two groups. The games stories that involve minimal technical discussion of computer issues could be given their own web site: Gamesdot.
Such a division would bring more advertising for both groups because the quality of the discussion in both groups would be higher and the ads could be more targeted.
What normally happens to comments such as this is that someone who is interested in games and who has little insight into his own behavior will moderate it down. "Troll" originally meant someone in a discussion who is intentionally causing trouble. Now it has come to mean "If you disagree with me, you must be a troublemaker."
All those objections are easily resolved.
The numbers are generated inside a label making machine, and transferred securely to the web site with encryption. No humans ever see the numbers, until the covering paint is removed.
The web site can ask for identification, the name of the store where the item was bought, and an email address.
You can't see all the numbers without scratching off the material that covers them.
Legitimate distributors don't want fake products. A few reports would cause the distributor to suspect that a shipment was counterfeit. The distributor could identify the supplier. Remember, a few reports are all that is necessary. False positives are easy to check, by checking more numbers in the same shipment.
Random numbers cost nothing. No number would be used more than once.
Web pages with delayed responses stop password crackers. Anyone checking many numbers from the same internet address would cause the system to delay even more.
There are only 31,536,000 seconds in a year. That's an extremely small proportion of a sixteen digit random number. Therefor, a one-second delay in responding to a web request prevents cracking.
Another use: Put the numbers on cards inside boxes of prescription drugs, and require pharmacies to put one card in each bottle sold. In some cases, numbers could be printed on individual pills. I would never buy a drug without checking the number, would you?
Obviously, there are variations of this plan that would be appropriate in other situations. In some cases, bar codes of random numbers, or a combination of bar codes and a list of printed numbers, would be useful.
Customs officials would find it more efficient to have a bar code with a number and a web page URL coded in an international format on the outside of packing crates. They could wand the number and listen for a verifying beep.
"Charity is in fact a very popular PR move."
I mentioned that the other day, but got modded down:
Blame Bill Gates for originating the culture of Microsoft: Yes, blame Bill Gates.
It amazes me how weak-minded people are concerning public relations: Moderators: I stand by what I said.
Interesting link. Thanks.
It amazes me how often marketing people are monumentally stupid. In the sentence that begins "Most of the cooling system is external..." in the Hexus.net article, the words "cooling system" are green and underlined twice. When I mouse over the green, I see an ad for Sears. Is Sears selling radical computer gear now? No, it's an ad for heating and air conditioning.
The only way I can imagine that Sears could profit from that ad is if I were willing to pay Sears not to be annoyed.
From the Slashdot story: "Charlie Rose will post his interviews the day after a broadcast, allowing a free streaming for the first 24 hours then making it downloadable afterward for 99 cents each."
This is excellent. Charlie Rose interviews are often the only way to know more about the leaders who affect our lives so much.
In the past, Charlie Rose interviews have been available in transcript form, for a lot of money, and the transcripts are not guaranteed to be accurate. Videotape cost maybe $30, with another $20 for rush delivery.
Moderators: "Troll" originally meant someone in a discussion who is intentionally causing trouble. Now it has come to mean "If you disagree with me, you must be a troublemaker."
.GIF and .JPG files to see if they are really WMF files, and, if they are, will execute any code in them!!! It's amazing.
I stand by what I said in my parent comment.
I sold computers that came with Microsoft's first product, Microsoft Basic, which Bill Gates had a hand in writing. The sloppiness of Windows XP is identical to the sloppiness in Microsoft Basic. Both are, in my opinion, products in which the level of sloppiness is finely tuned so that it doesn't interfere too much with sales. Bill Gates set the tone for Microsoft products: They are not really finished when they are released.
It amazes me how weak-minded people are concerning public relations. Bill Gates makes billions of dollars making products so sloppy that they waste the time of millions of people worldwide. Then he gives back a little of that money, and instantly the abuses are forgotten.
Super-rich people like philanthropy because it helps them feel superior. They can spend a lot of time with people who are very happy with what they are doing, and who never voice disagreement. Giving away their husband's money is the pasttime of the wives of super-rich men everywhere.
Yes, it is good that there is money available to solve major world problems. But we should not stop realizing that Microsoft has cost tens of billions of dollars just in viruses for vulnerabilities of kinds that don't exist anywhere else in the world of software.
This week's vulnerability is an example. Graphics in Windows MetaFile format (WMF) are allowed to execute code!!! Yes, graphics files. You should be safe with other formats? No. Windows operating systems check
"When I see MS do something stupid I don't generally blame Bill Gates. I mean, the day to day vulnerabilities, the crappy design, the shoddy interfaces, none of that can really be attributed (in my understanding) to Bill."
In my opinion, Bill Gates is to be blamed. Look at the vulnerabilities and bad design more carefully and you will see that they are a result of planning. They are not accidents. They are the result of Bill making money the center of his whole life. They are the result of his sneaky aggressive behavior.
The vulnerabilities and extremely bad design are the result of not letting Microsoft programmers finish their jobs. The vulnerabilities and extremely bad design make Microsoft more money. For example, most businesses would have been happy to remain with Windows 98, but Windows 98 often corrupted its big central configuration file called the registry. Windows 98 would literally self-destruct.
Windows 98 regularly crashed because operating system resources like something called GDI and others were allowed a maximum of 128K of memory. 128K! That limitation was easily fixable, but it wasn't fixed.
Windows 98 self-destruction made Bill Gates more money because he is exploiting his virtual monopoly. Businesses paid a huge amount to buy another operating system from Microsoft, Windows XP.
Note that Bill Gates suffers from depression. This is exactly what you would expect of a man who has spent his entire adult life acting out sneaky aggression.
The reason Apple does so well under Steve Jobs is because Steve Jobs is idealistic, an unusual characteristic for a CEO. Remember, however, that Steve Jobs is also a monumentally abusive person, and suffers enormously because of that. Mr. Jobs just often doesn't let his abusiveness be in the way of his idealism.
Apple does well partly because Microsoft is not interested in doing well. Microsoft is "maximizing shareholder value" by delaying delivering good products so that customers will always have a reason to buy the next version.
I agree with what you said, but I think most spammers would think this was an avoidable problem.
Anyhow, we know what spammers think; they aren't worried; the evidence is in our inboxes.
Ilfak's unofficial patch did not require a re-boot. Microsoft's does. Supposedly both patches do exactly the same thing.