Roaming profiles nice idea. Home directories that travel. Watch 20 users save everything to their desktop for about a month- train wreck.
PSU uses roaming directories. They (almost always*) work fine. They need a third-party tool to enforce a 20MB quota on desktop size, and have actually I think completely changed the setup so that the desktop gets loaded from a network path so that they don't even need that.
If I were making a network with Windows machines in which people moving between computers was common I'd say there's no other way to approach things than roaming profiles. It's WAY too useful.
* There's been a couple hiccups in my 4 years here, but they consisted of it just taking an incredibly long time to log on.
Face it. Microsoft has been saying things will get fixed with the next version since windows 95. They've not delivered on that yet as far as I can tell. More features get added, but nothing gets fixed, and the reason is because it makes for good marketing.
I'll grant you that there's a lot of empty promises and vapourware. (WinFS anyone?)
However, to say that the quality of Windows 95 is anywhere near the quality of 2K or XP is completely and utterly ridiculous.
something like DOS's "rename *.bat *.bak", for instance, would actually be possible on unix
I have found myself in want of this on a number of occasions in Unix. Any Unix guru have a solution? Will it work if you change "rename" to "mv" and quote the file patterns? I tried it on Bash under Cygwin and no luck...
At least in XP Pro, tab completion is on by default. In fact, I don't see a way (other than reghacking) in my brief search to turn it off. I believe it was in 2K too, but I'm not sure about that one.
I doubt that the rules are there to be enforced as such. Rather, they are there so that if, say, an instructor emails the class a new requirement for a HW assignment say and you come in without it done, saying you didn't know about it because you didn't check your email wouldn't help you.
And as much as the rule is meant this way, I believe it to be reasonable.
What it's saying (I think) is that if you are running at a high DPI and just display low-DPI content as written it will be too small. Thus programs will scale up the measurements currently given for low-DPI stuff.
Depends on how you view the question. netBSD (or any of them) runs on more platforms. But if you confine yourself to the x86, Windows has better hardware support.
All sorts of stuff. Picures for instance. I could put most of my photo album online and let people see it. That's one of the more practical uses I can think of off the top of my head. It might be useful for collaboration purposes.
I *do* know that I use the university's network drives constantly, and suspect I'd use something like GDrive if I didn't have access to them.
IM your friends so they can d/l some files? OK...give them the pw and off the go. Either they are really good friends, or you change your pw regularly.
Um, or if they let you have public files...
You could even have a access-control system if your friends have GDrive accounts.
Yes. Buy something instead of using this free service. Something you can forget. Or lose. Or have stolen. Or leave behind because you incorrectly thought you wouldn't need it. Something you can't IM your friends as a way to distribute files.
Flash drives have their place. There are other benefits to them. Like you don't need to have a working 'net connection to use them, and you don't have as much worry about security. (Though see above about losing it or having it stolen; if you've got sensitive stuff, it should be encrypted anyway.) But there is more than a little reason why something like the GDrive would be useful.
I'm going to revoke the force with which I said that. I've read a few links and it seems like MITM attacks are more broadly defined than the impression I had. HOWEVER, I stand by it to the point that usually a MITM attack is what I said:
Wikipedia lists eavesdropping as a possible MITM attack, but also says "MITM is typically used to refer to active manipulation of the messages, rather than passively eavesdropping."
Both Network Security by Kaufman, Perlman, and Speciner, and Computer Secuity: Art and Science by Bishop define MITM as the more narrow definition I gave.
A Blackhat conference paper defines it more broadly, but includes my definition and doesn't include eavesdropping.
quantum encryption, which is perfectly immune to man-in-the-middle attacks
This isn't true. It's immune to *eavesdropping* attacks but what is usually called a MITM attack (also known as a "bucket brigade") is perfectly possible, at least in a naive implmentation.
There's nothing that quantum cryptography brings to the table that would make it any harder to, before communication commenses, cut the line and insert essentially a repeater.
Think about classic crypto. Say Alice is trying to talk to Bob and doing Diffie-Hellman to establish a key. Alice sends out a message with her "public key" to Bob. Eve intercepts this message, picks out her own key pair, and forwards her public keys to both Alice and Bob. Bob gives his public key to Eve (thinking he's giving it to Alice). Now when Alice sends a message to Bob, she encrypts it with what she thinks is a private key known only to Bob but is, in fact, a private key known only to Eve. Eve gets the message, decrypts it, encrypts it using the key she shares with Bob, and sends it to Bob. Without authentication outside of DH, Alice and Bob both know they are talking securely to someone, but don't know who.
Quantum crypto has the same vulnerability. Unless you can verify the endpoints of your fibre cable, or do some authentication above what QC provides you, you would not be able to tell that Eve was listening. (Beyond perhaps a delay.)
What QC gives you is guaranteed integrity of the channel with whomever you are talking to, not just the classical "guarantee" of it being really hard to break, so Eve can't eavesdrop on Alice and Bob without them knowing. BUT -- this is not a MITM attack.
"As another poster said, however, it may be a good thing that this patent is valid - if Philips hold a patent on the technology then it's only their equipment we need to avoid."
Yeah, because God knows companies can't license patents...
Um, for 99.9% of the time, the solution always works.
I can think of one example -- and only one example -- of something the US will prosecute you for that you did abroad. Almost all other countries are the same. As long as we're talking about posting evidence of doing something physical on the internet and not some sort of new-age internet crime (where jurisdiction is still being sorted out), if you post evidence you did something in country X where it isn't a crime and travel to country Y where it is, country Y is NOT going to arrest you for what you did in X.
They can get people who DO have accounts to share it probably. Also, no doubt if they had reasonable suspicion of incriminating stuff online they could serve them with a subpoena.
NetBeans is also pure Java, written on Swing, while Eclipse uses its proprietary SWT, which uses native calls to get its GUI work done.
This is a *good* thing, and one of the main reasons I used Eclipse instead of NetBeans for my last Java product.
First, calling SWT proprietary is disingenuous; it's still open source, no? Or am I just horribly misinformed?
If anything, it's Swing and Java itself that's proprietary.
Anyway, I'm a big fan of native widgets. It's somewhat superficial, but one of the big reasons I don't use OpenOffice when I'm booted to Windows is because it doesn't feel/look "right", and that's almost entirely due to the non-native widgets.
I don't know what you mean by "free", but just in case you don't know, there's a free-as-in-beer version for non-commercial use. I don't know what features it's missing, but with the little that I've done I haven't encountered any.
never wanted this. though i think there was some development of grammar checker for english
I like it because it catches typos I make and I can tell when it's full of crap.
when i first tried oo.org, i was unable to find page setup in file menu. after blinking for five seconds, i looked in format menu. so far i have given/set up oo.org for a lot of people. 3 or four have asked me "where is page setup ?" - i told them "now, think about what you want to do." - "ahh, found it". took 15 seconds at most for less computer savvy person. that seriously is an improvenment.
Yes, it takes 15 seconds to find it. (I suspect that's an exaggeration for someone who doesn't have someone else there. I know at least I started going through menus just reading every option. I'd guess that'd take 30 seconds.)
But then it takes another 15 seconds to find the track changes feature. Maybe another 15 seconds to figure out how to add a header or footer (depending on what version of Word you're coming from). And another 15 seconds to figure out how to insert the page number.
It's the "and another 15 seconds" that make it so that people don't change software. You have to have pretty compelling features in order to overcome the momentum of knowing how to use software. Right now, the biggest thing OO.o has going for it over Office is price. And that's not big for a lot of people who get it for free legally, pirate it, or get it with their computer. (E.g. I have it for free thanks to a university site license.)
pdf output
That's not hard to overcome though... you can add a 3rd party PDF output tool. It's more complicated, but I'd have it anyway for other programs. It's more flexible too.
page styles (!), styles as such (they are much better implemented in oo.org)
I don't know my way around styles much, especially in OO.o; can you explain how it's better?
cross-platform
Office is probably the worse MS software to use as an example of this actually. The MacOS version works at least okay, and Word is one of the main objects of Wine, and my understanding is that it runs well under CrossOver Office. The Linux situation is FAR inferior to OO.o, but it's not hopless either.
(Personally I use OO.o in Linux and Office in Windows. OO.o is good enough it's no where close to worth it trying to get Wine or CrossOver Office running.)
Oh, and isn't the Mac build not native, and runs through X11, causing problems with window raising, copy, paste, etc? Or is that old information? Or am I just making it up?
I'm also a big fan of native widgets too. I know look and feel shouldn't matter all that much... but it just doesn't match anything else. This may actually be the biggest reason I go with Word over OO.o...
odf (integrating with document management or any other system is so goddamn easy, it's not funny anymore;) )
I can name a number of features I use on a regular basis on Word that are missing from or vastly inferior in OO.o too.
For instance, Word has page view, normal view, outline view, and web view. I like to write in normal view. OO.o doesn't have it. The next-best thing usually in Word is page view with the top and bottom margins collapsed; OO.o doesn't have it. The navigator in OO.o provides some of the usefulness of the outline view in Word, and each lacks benefits of the other.
The track changes feature works a lot better in Word (at least starting with 2002). In OO.o deleting text while recording changes acts like Word 97 and before; it turns the deleted text red and strikethrough. Word 2002 and higher pulls the deleted text out of the body and puts it in a marginal note. In addition to looking nicer and being more readable, this avoids the disruption in format that the former approach causes in where the text flows. (I don't know what approach 2000 takes.)
Or what about a grammar checker? Something else OO.o lacks entirely. (And yes, I know Word's has problems, but at least for me it does a lot more good than harm.)
As well as the "Master Document" concept which I do not think exists in word (or is also very well hidden).
Has been present since at least version 6.0. I've used a master document running Windows 3.1 on a 386.
Anchoring images in Word is a pain, it's in 3 dialogs deep worth of crap.
Perhaps you could explain what you mean by this. I can't even see how you can get 3 dialogs deep in something related to images. Which doesn't mean that you can't, just that you're not looking in the right place. (This is in 2002.)
The menus are generally much much more intuitive
And yet a fairly common dialog, page setup, moves to Format -> Page. Sure, if you think about it, it fits better there. However, that argument loses its validity when you take into consideration that almost every other program, at least under Windows,* puts it at file->page setup.
* This is an exageration, and I don't want to hear "so-and-so put it in the Window menu!" My point is that it's an established standard that page setup goes in File, and breaking that caused at least me much headache when I was looking for how to set margins.
OO.o has done a great job of using the context menu
Examples?
Actually in my experimentation just now I found one place where OO.o is sorely lacking: right clicking on an edit when using track changes doesn't give you an option to accept or reject.
One last point but one that is important when writing a thesis or technical papers in scientific and engineering fields, the equation editor in Word SUCKS BIG TIME
Agreed. Though I posit that if you're doing that much in equations you shouldn't be using EITHER editor and should drop to your favorite TeX variant.
Actually I posit that if you're doing almost any document you want to look good you should drop to LaTeX, because there are a lot of subtle (e.g. ligatures; compare "fi" in Word or OO.o to "fi" in TeX output) and not-so-subtle things (better line break allocation) that it does while typesetting that make its output, IMO, *MUCH* nicer than a word processor.
It takes a bit to learn, but it's well worth it, and if you're working on either a book or thesis the time spent learning will be insignificant in the total amount worked. In fact, it may save you time long-term.
What makes you so sure that all the commercials that were in the broadcast of the show will be included in the web download? The linked article says there would be 16-18 minutes of commercials, but I suspect this is no less surmise on their part than your post.
I'd wager that even people as short-sighted as the network executives would realize that people wouldn't watch that many, and that there'd be 5 or 10 minute in the episode. 3 commercials per break instead of 10 or something.
A more fitting example would be this crash of an A320, though the cause is not settled between a failure of the filght computer and/or instrumentation and pilot error.
There's plenty of reasons why you might want OS isolation besides stability, etc.
Think about the benefits of giving people their own VM. Then they can set up anything at all on it without any worry really about hurting anyone else. Like they can run unsecured CGI apps and not disrupt other VMs.
Slashdot Mirror
Roaming profiles
nice idea. Home directories that travel. Watch 20 users save everything to their desktop for about a month- train wreck.
PSU uses roaming directories. They (almost always*) work fine. They need a third-party tool to enforce a 20MB quota on desktop size, and have actually I think completely changed the setup so that the desktop gets loaded from a network path so that they don't even need that.
If I were making a network with Windows machines in which people moving between computers was common I'd say there's no other way to approach things than roaming profiles. It's WAY too useful.
* There's been a couple hiccups in my 4 years here, but they consisted of it just taking an incredibly long time to log on.
Face it. Microsoft has been saying things will get fixed with the next version since windows 95. They've not delivered on that yet as far as I can tell. More features get added, but nothing gets fixed, and the reason is because it makes for good marketing.
I'll grant you that there's a lot of empty promises and vapourware. (WinFS anyone?)
However, to say that the quality of Windows 95 is anywhere near the quality of 2K or XP is completely and utterly ridiculous.
something like DOS's "rename *.bat *.bak", for instance, would actually be possible on unix
I have found myself in want of this on a number of occasions in Unix. Any Unix guru have a solution? Will it work if you change "rename" to "mv" and quote the file patterns? I tried it on Bash under Cygwin and no luck...
And you -- still typing after all these years, over a hundred now, since the invention of the keyboard
But probably on a QWERTY keyboard.
Which actually swings in favor of his argument to a point.
At least in XP Pro, tab completion is on by default. In fact, I don't see a way (other than reghacking) in my brief search to turn it off. I believe it was in 2K too, but I'm not sure about that one.
I doubt that the rules are there to be enforced as such. Rather, they are there so that if, say, an instructor emails the class a new requirement for a HW assignment say and you come in without it done, saying you didn't know about it because you didn't check your email wouldn't help you.
And as much as the rule is meant this way, I believe it to be reasonable.
What it's saying (I think) is that if you are running at a high DPI and just display low-DPI content as written it will be too small. Thus programs will scale up the measurements currently given for low-DPI stuff.
Depends on how you view the question. netBSD (or any of them) runs on more platforms. But if you confine yourself to the x86, Windows has better hardware support.
Might I suggest Color_Theory too?
Yeah, 'cause there aren't any expansion or maintenance or bandwidth or colocation facility costs to running a website, are there?
what are you really going to host there?
All sorts of stuff. Picures for instance. I could put most of my photo album online and let people see it. That's one of the more practical uses I can think of off the top of my head. It might be useful for collaboration purposes.
I *do* know that I use the university's network drives constantly, and suspect I'd use something like GDrive if I didn't have access to them.
IM your friends so they can d/l some files? OK...give them the pw and off the go. Either they are really good friends, or you change your pw regularly.
Um, or if they let you have public files...
You could even have a access-control system if your friends have GDrive accounts.
Go buy a 2GB flash drive, and use that.
Yes. Buy something instead of using this free service. Something you can forget. Or lose. Or have stolen. Or leave behind because you incorrectly thought you wouldn't need it. Something you can't IM your friends as a way to distribute files.
Flash drives have their place. There are other benefits to them. Like you don't need to have a working 'net connection to use them, and you don't have as much worry about security. (Though see above about losing it or having it stolen; if you've got sensitive stuff, it should be encrypted anyway.) But there is more than a little reason why something like the GDrive would be useful.
I'm going to revoke the force with which I said that. I've read a few links and it seems like MITM attacks are more broadly defined than the impression I had. HOWEVER, I stand by it to the point that usually a MITM attack is what I said:
Wikipedia lists eavesdropping as a possible MITM attack, but also says "MITM is typically used to refer to active manipulation of the messages, rather than passively eavesdropping."
Both Network Security by Kaufman, Perlman, and Speciner, and Computer Secuity: Art and Science by Bishop define MITM as the more narrow definition I gave.
A Blackhat conference paper defines it more broadly, but includes my definition and doesn't include eavesdropping.
quantum encryption, which is perfectly immune to man-in-the-middle attacks
This isn't true. It's immune to *eavesdropping* attacks but what is usually called a MITM attack (also known as a "bucket brigade") is perfectly possible, at least in a naive implmentation.
There's nothing that quantum cryptography brings to the table that would make it any harder to, before communication commenses, cut the line and insert essentially a repeater.
Think about classic crypto. Say Alice is trying to talk to Bob and doing Diffie-Hellman to establish a key. Alice sends out a message with her "public key" to Bob. Eve intercepts this message, picks out her own key pair, and forwards her public keys to both Alice and Bob. Bob gives his public key to Eve (thinking he's giving it to Alice). Now when Alice sends a message to Bob, she encrypts it with what she thinks is a private key known only to Bob but is, in fact, a private key known only to Eve. Eve gets the message, decrypts it, encrypts it using the key she shares with Bob, and sends it to Bob. Without authentication outside of DH, Alice and Bob both know they are talking securely to someone, but don't know who.
Quantum crypto has the same vulnerability. Unless you can verify the endpoints of your fibre cable, or do some authentication above what QC provides you, you would not be able to tell that Eve was listening. (Beyond perhaps a delay.)
What QC gives you is guaranteed integrity of the channel with whomever you are talking to, not just the classical "guarantee" of it being really hard to break, so Eve can't eavesdrop on Alice and Bob without them knowing. BUT -- this is not a MITM attack.
"As another poster said, however, it may be a good thing that this patent is valid - if Philips hold a patent on the technology then it's only their equipment we need to avoid."
Yeah, because God knows companies can't license patents...
Um, for 99.9% of the time, the solution always works.
I can think of one example -- and only one example -- of something the US will prosecute you for that you did abroad. Almost all other countries are the same. As long as we're talking about posting evidence of doing something physical on the internet and not some sort of new-age internet crime (where jurisdiction is still being sorted out), if you post evidence you did something in country X where it isn't a crime and travel to country Y where it is, country Y is NOT going to arrest you for what you did in X.
They can get people who DO have accounts to share it probably. Also, no doubt if they had reasonable suspicion of incriminating stuff online they could serve them with a subpoena.
NetBeans is also pure Java, written on Swing, while Eclipse uses its proprietary SWT, which uses native calls to get its GUI work done.
This is a *good* thing, and one of the main reasons I used Eclipse instead of NetBeans for my last Java product.
First, calling SWT proprietary is disingenuous; it's still open source, no? Or am I just horribly misinformed?
If anything, it's Swing and Java itself that's proprietary.
Anyway, I'm a big fan of native widgets. It's somewhat superficial, but one of the big reasons I don't use OpenOffice when I'm booted to Windows is because it doesn't feel/look "right", and that's almost entirely due to the non-native widgets.
I don't know what you mean by "free", but just in case you don't know, there's a free-as-in-beer version for non-commercial use. I don't know what features it's missing, but with the little that I've done I haven't encountered any.
Anyone who's doing XML work should check it out.
Thanks for the issue links!
;-)
;) )
I have a few votes in place now.
never wanted this. though i think there was some development of grammar checker for english
I like it because it catches typos I make and I can tell when it's full of crap.
when i first tried oo.org, i was unable to find page setup in file menu. after blinking for five seconds, i looked in format menu. so far i have given/set up oo.org for a lot of people. 3 or four have asked me "where is page setup ?" - i told them "now, think about what you want to do." - "ahh, found it". took 15 seconds at most for less computer savvy person. that seriously is an improvenment.
Yes, it takes 15 seconds to find it. (I suspect that's an exaggeration for someone who doesn't have someone else there. I know at least I started going through menus just reading every option. I'd guess that'd take 30 seconds.)
But then it takes another 15 seconds to find the track changes feature. Maybe another 15 seconds to figure out how to add a header or footer (depending on what version of Word you're coming from). And another 15 seconds to figure out how to insert the page number.
It's the "and another 15 seconds" that make it so that people don't change software. You have to have pretty compelling features in order to overcome the momentum of knowing how to use software. Right now, the biggest thing OO.o has going for it over Office is price. And that's not big for a lot of people who get it for free legally, pirate it, or get it with their computer. (E.g. I have it for free thanks to a university site license.)
pdf output
That's not hard to overcome though... you can add a 3rd party PDF output tool. It's more complicated, but I'd have it anyway for other programs. It's more flexible too.
page styles (!), styles as such (they are much better implemented in oo.org)
I don't know my way around styles much, especially in OO.o; can you explain how it's better?
cross-platform
Office is probably the worse MS software to use as an example of this actually. The MacOS version works at least okay, and Word is one of the main objects of Wine, and my understanding is that it runs well under CrossOver Office. The Linux situation is FAR inferior to OO.o, but it's not hopless either.
(Personally I use OO.o in Linux and Office in Windows. OO.o is good enough it's no where close to worth it trying to get Wine or CrossOver Office running.)
Oh, and isn't the Mac build not native, and runs through X11, causing problems with window raising, copy, paste, etc? Or is that old information? Or am I just making it up?
I'm also a big fan of native widgets too. I know look and feel shouldn't matter all that much... but it just doesn't match anything else. This may actually be the biggest reason I go with Word over OO.o...
odf (integrating with document management or any other system is so goddamn easy, it's not funny anymore
Agreed.
I can name a number of features I use on a regular basis on Word that are missing from or vastly inferior in OO.o too.
For instance, Word has page view, normal view, outline view, and web view. I like to write in normal view. OO.o doesn't have it. The next-best thing usually in Word is page view with the top and bottom margins collapsed; OO.o doesn't have it. The navigator in OO.o provides some of the usefulness of the outline view in Word, and each lacks benefits of the other.
The track changes feature works a lot better in Word (at least starting with 2002). In OO.o deleting text while recording changes acts like Word 97 and before; it turns the deleted text red and strikethrough. Word 2002 and higher pulls the deleted text out of the body and puts it in a marginal note. In addition to looking nicer and being more readable, this avoids the disruption in format that the former approach causes in where the text flows. (I don't know what approach 2000 takes.)
Or what about a grammar checker? Something else OO.o lacks entirely. (And yes, I know Word's has problems, but at least for me it does a lot more good than harm.)
As well as the "Master Document" concept which I do not think exists in word (or is also very well hidden).
Has been present since at least version 6.0. I've used a master document running Windows 3.1 on a 386.
Anchoring images in Word is a pain, it's in 3 dialogs deep worth of crap.
Perhaps you could explain what you mean by this. I can't even see how you can get 3 dialogs deep in something related to images. Which doesn't mean that you can't, just that you're not looking in the right place. (This is in 2002.)
The menus are generally much much more intuitive
And yet a fairly common dialog, page setup, moves to Format -> Page. Sure, if you think about it, it fits better there. However, that argument loses its validity when you take into consideration that almost every other program, at least under Windows,* puts it at file->page setup.
* This is an exageration, and I don't want to hear "so-and-so put it in the Window menu!" My point is that it's an established standard that page setup goes in File, and breaking that caused at least me much headache when I was looking for how to set margins.
OO.o has done a great job of using the context menu
Examples?
Actually in my experimentation just now I found one place where OO.o is sorely lacking: right clicking on an edit when using track changes doesn't give you an option to accept or reject.
One last point but one that is important when writing a thesis or technical papers in scientific and engineering fields, the equation editor in Word SUCKS BIG TIME
Agreed. Though I posit that if you're doing that much in equations you shouldn't be using EITHER editor and should drop to your favorite TeX variant.
Actually I posit that if you're doing almost any document you want to look good you should drop to LaTeX, because there are a lot of subtle (e.g. ligatures; compare "fi" in Word or OO.o to "fi" in TeX output) and not-so-subtle things (better line break allocation) that it does while typesetting that make its output, IMO, *MUCH* nicer than a word processor.
It takes a bit to learn, but it's well worth it, and if you're working on either a book or thesis the time spent learning will be insignificant in the total amount worked. In fact, it may save you time long-term.
Why not just add a program to the startup sequence that does it?
I've actually thought about doing something like what you suggest but have been repulsed by the notion of not having a password required for sign-on.
Ah well, I don't have a laptop anyway (yet -- I plan on getting a tablet next winter) so it doesn't really matter.
What makes you so sure that all the commercials that were in the broadcast of the show will be included in the web download? The linked article says there would be 16-18 minutes of commercials, but I suspect this is no less surmise on their part than your post.
I'd wager that even people as short-sighted as the network executives would realize that people wouldn't watch that many, and that there'd be 5 or 10 minute in the episode. 3 commercials per break instead of 10 or something.
I have a Q clearance.
Does this mean you are the one who makes all the gadgets that James Bond destroys?
A more fitting example would be this crash of an A320, though the cause is not settled between a failure of the filght computer and/or instrumentation and pilot error.
There's plenty of reasons why you might want OS isolation besides stability, etc.
Think about the benefits of giving people their own VM. Then they can set up anything at all on it without any worry really about hurting anyone else. Like they can run unsecured CGI apps and not disrupt other VMs.