If it's in the dorm rooms, it's not there just for education. The rest of the campus is just for learning, but the dorms are for everything else people do in their spare time. Nobody is going to be thinking about school 24/7. If a student moves into a dorm room, then the school is not just a school anymore: it's a landlord and an ISP. It's their home, and they will be playing games, downloading stuff, etc. just like they were at home on broadband. Which is perfectly fine. I think it's especially important to have a good internal network without anything blocked between dorm rooms, since the geeks can set up their file mirrors and game servers and reduce the load on the (probably saturated) Internet connection. If file transfers are slowing down the Internet connection, start doing some traffic shaping. Linux can do this, so it won't cost much money at all.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be reasonable rules, though. Record everyone's MAC address, with an easy way to re-register in case of a NIC swap. Require virus scanners (and possibly firewalls, hardware or software) on Windows and Mac systems (especially Windows) and regular security updates. Get a site license for a good virus scanner and post it up for download and/or distribute it on CD. Distribute major software patches as well. If someone gets MSBlaster or something, turn off their switch port until they shape up. Better yet, post their name and room number on the "Idiots Who are Screwing Up the Network" list mentioned earlier a couple of times.
The old Home Alone game for DOS had a half-sheet of letters arranged like a word jumble, printed faintly to prevent photocopying. Each time the game was started, the user would need to type random letters from that sheet. What a PITA.
"This part of the French government controls which words are 'officially' to be used in France, and has been very aggressive about keeping English terms (such as email and computer) out of the language. It is against the law to use the word 'email' in France."
IIRC, the law only prohibits government employees from using the words in their official government work, such as paperwork. I doubt a French policeman would even bat an eye at the use of "email" or similar words by the general public.
I do think the law is absurd, though, since mose (all?) languages borrow and use words from other languages. It's just part of languages evolving.
Check out the hard drive cooler. Am I missing something, or are the heat pipes just connecting one side of the hard drive to the other? That would just make two hot ends and the heat pipes would be doing diddly sqat. Tell me what I missed that makes this cool the hard drive.
Even though only a small percentage of Slashdot readers look at the comments, Slashdot's readership is so huge that the number of people reading the comments is still significant. It's not enough to kill a server, but I posted links to three images, around 80KB each, on my home server a few days ago fairly deep down in the discussion and got 3904 hits from it. It didn't kill my server (Pentium 133MHz, 64MB RAM, Debian 3.0, Apache 1.3.26, 3000/256 cable) and didn't result in any nasty letters from my ISP.
OT: It was interesting reading the logs. There are quite a few Linux users on here (but even more Windows users), and I saw lots of people using Mozilla, Opera, Safari, etc. Compare that to sites aimed at the average user where 95% of visitors are using IE or AOL and don't know that there's anything better out there.
I haven't done any black magic with 2K/XP; they're pretty much default installs. I did set Samba's OS level much higher than it needs to be, and set preferred master and local master to yes; that way Samba is always the master browser and LAN browsing always goes smoothly.
You probably already did this, but make sure everything is on the same workgroup or domain.
Another option is to add the line "wins support = yes" to make Samba a WINS server. Set your Windows boxes to use you Samba server as the WINS server manually or with DHCP and LAN browsing may improve. Browsing stopped working every few days and I needed to restart nmbd with this on, though, but it might work for you. Who knows.
Apps using networked files in XP randomly hang when accessing the Samba shares, but not on 2K. It also happens when printing to a printer hooked to a Win98 system when I'm on XP. Does anyone else have this problem? It's something I haven't figured out yet. My only fix was going back to Win2K on my main box, but my laptop still has WinXP.
Here's part of my working smb.conf if you need it. I think the OS level only needs to be 64, and I've never seen anyone else use anything near 999 like mine's at. Seems to work, though, so I have no reason to change it back at the moment.
[global] security = share workgroup = workgroup netbios name = fileserver server string = Samba File Server os level = 999 preferred master = yes local master = yes announce version = 4.5 smb passwd file =/etc/samba/smbpasswd encrypt passwords = true log file =/etc/samba/logfiles/log.%m log level = 2 max log size = 1024 #wins support = yes
Windows 2000 Professional
Here's my network in Win2K SP4. Mapped drives are marked neatly as "share at machine." Machine names show in My Network Places, with the comment showing to the right in details view.
Windows XP Professional
This is my network in WinXP SP1. Microsoft got rid of the nice mapped drive names of Win2K, so now it uses the longer and less useful "share at comment (machine)." That's one thing they shouldn't have changed IMHO. The Entire Network part of My Network Places hasn't changed at all; however, the root of My Network Places shows all the shares on the network in alphabetical order, which I think is stupid and disorganized. Worse, it still uses "share at comment (machine)" for the listing so it's even harder to follow, especially on a large network.
Sorry, I forgot to switch to plain text instead of HTML. My post should read:
Linux and other *nixes that I know of:/etc/hosts
Notes for Windows: %systemroot% is your Windows directory, normally c:\windows or c:\winnt. The hosts file has no extension.
Windows 95, 98, and ME: %systemroot%\hosts
Windows NT 4, 2000, and XP: %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
On both operating systems, a line is:
0.0.0.0 hostname
where 0.0.0.0 is the IP address you want the name to resolve to (like 127.0.0.1) and hostname is the name you want to redirect (like ads.doubleclick.net)
Linux and other *nixes that I know of:/etc/hosts
Notes for Windows: %systemroot% is your Windows directory, normally c:\windows or c:\winnt. The hosts file has no extension.
Windows 95, 98, and ME:
%systemroot%\hosts
Windows NT 4, 2000, and XP:
%systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
On both operating systems, a line is:
0.0.0.0 hostname
where 0.0.0.0 is the IP address you want the name to resolve to (like 127.0.0.1) and hostname is the name you want to redirect (like ads.doubleclick.net)
Re:Link renders bad on Mozilla?
on
Open Source Law
·
· Score: 1
Did anyone else notice that the page is 16KB, but the text on it is only 8KB?
Re:Ethical use of software
on
Random Humor
·
· Score: 1
There's also the people who write documentation, test software, make and host the software project's website, provide a mirror to download the software, pass out CD-Rs with the software, tell their friends, etc. They all make huge contributions to free software.
That's probably because not only is the printer a loss-leader for ink, but the cartridges that come with the printers supposedly aren't even close to being full.
Try SneakEmail. Much easier to manage 100 @sneakemail.com addresses that forward to a real one than 100 Hotmail addresses that need to be checked individually.
Or you can get a domain name where any message to the domain gets sent to you, and give each comany an address of companyname@yourdomain.
It's the other way around. Netscape takes a slightly out-of-date version of Mozilla, replaces the red dinosaur with a big N and little AOL running guys, and adds AOL-TW sites to the popup blocking exemptions list.
Did I just feed a troll?
If it's because of the small type, try Ctrl and + a couple times. With the font size way up, it looks just fine in Mozilla 1.2.1 on the RedHat 9 laptop I'm usinng. Also, the PrefBar (forgot the URL; just google for "prefbar") allows you to change the font size easily. Microsoft apparently tries to go out of its way to look its websites look bad in all browsers other than IE.
I just took a Windows 2000 Server (please, no flames) class in college in a room with Robotel's SmartClass system. Each computer had a little box mounted under the table that the monitor, headphones, and possibly the keyboard and mouse passed through like a KVM switch, and they were all hooked together with CAT5. They also connected to a control panel on top of the table next to each computer that looked like it could be used for quite a few different collaborative things. I don't know if the boxes themselves were hosts on the network or connected in some proprietary way. Although they looked like they could project any computer onto any other, and be used for student-to-student or student-to-instructor communication, my instructor only used it to project his screen onto all the others. It was great because there was no software to install (we were constantly reinstalling Win2K Server anyway), and only the monitor needed to be on to see what the instructor was showing.
Another awesome thing those computers had were Romtec Trios in each machine, connected to two hard drives. They had Win98 on one for the programming classes, and Win2K Server on the other for our class. Unlike a software OS selector and boot loader like LILO or the NT loader, it physically disconnected the drive that wasn't being used, so my screwing around with Win2K server and partitioning and stuff wouldn't bork the Win98 install that needed to be up and running. Neat.
Aw crap, sorry about that; I forgot to put in the paragraph tags. My post should read:
n+1. Seeing that I paid for this software, I shall use it as I see fit. There are to be no restrictions on use.
n+2. I may reverse engineer anything I damn well please to make your product interact properly with another, or to get around your DRM restricting my legitimate use.
n+3. My desktop, quick launch bar, the top of my Start menu, my StartUp menu, my NT services, and the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run key are sacred. Your installer will not put anything in any of these locations without my express permission, and by default it won't touch them.
n+4. I will choose exactly which icons are installed on my Start menu, and where. You are not to make yourself a program group (or FIVE in the case of Epson) and dump icons for your program, EULA, website, help file, and uninstaller in it. I'm tired of cleaning up after program installs.
n+5. Your EULA shall NOT change when I install bug fixes, ESPECIALLY security updates.
n+6. You may ask me to register, but I may choose not to and still receive all the benefits of your software.
n+7. Shrink-wrap licenses are hereby banned. Any EULA must be printed on the front of the box. If it doesn't fit in a reasonably-sized typeface, shorten it until it does.
n+8. Your uninstaller must work properly.
n+9. Ads are forbidden in paid-for software; spyware is forbidden in ALL software, including free downloads. If Ad-Aware catches anything after I install your software, you owe me $500, plus the cost of your software.
n+10. No crippleware. For instance, DVD-playing software must ignore user operation prohibition on DVDs, play DVDs from all regions, and be able to copy the DVD to the hard drive.
n+11. I may review your product either positively or negatively without asking permission.
n+12. DRM is hereby banned. It will be cracked anyway and cracked copies will be all over the Internet eventually, likely even before your software is released. Only the honest people will pay, DRM or not, but DRM hurts everyone.
Okay, that was long-winded, but I feel better now.
n+1. Seeing that I paid for this software, I shall use it as I see fit. There are to be no restrictions on use.
n+2. I may reverse engineer anything I damn well please to make your product interact properly with another, or to get around your DRM restricting my legitimate use.
n+3. My desktop, quick launch bar, the top of my Start menu, my StartUp menu, my NT services, and the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run key are sacred. Your installer will not put anything in any of these locations without my express permission, and by default it won't touch them.
n+4. I will choose exactly which icons are installed on my Start menu, and where. You are not to make yourself a program group (or FIVE in the case of Epson) and dump icons for your program, EULA, website, help file, and uninstaller in it. I'm tired of cleaning up after program installs.
n+5. Your EULA shall NOT change when I install bug fixes, ESPECIALLY security updates.
n+6. You may ask me to register, but I may choose not to and still receive all the benefits of your software.
n+7. Shrink-wrap licenses are hereby banned. Any EULA must be printed on the front of the box. If it doesn't fit in a reasonably-sized typeface, shorten it until it does.
n+8. Your uninstaller must work properly.
n+9. Ads are forbidden in paid-for software; spyware is forbidden in ALL software, including free downloads. If Ad-Aware catches anything after I install your software, you owe me $500, plus the cost of your software.
n+10. No crippleware. For instance, DVD-playing software must ignore user operation prohibition on DVDs, play DVDs from all regions, and be able to copy the DVD to the hard drive.
n+11. I may review your product either positively or negatively without asking permission.
n+12. DRM is hereby banned. It will be cracked anyway and cracked copies will be all over the Internet eventually, likely even before your software is released. Only the honest people will pay, DRM or not, but DRM hurts everyone.
Okay, that was long-winded, but I feel better now.
As long as Outlook uses IE to render HTML mail, it will be vulnerable. This integration bullshit from Microsoft has made vulnerablilities in one program affect many others. If Outlook was secure, it would have an option to turn of HTML mail rendering. If it was turned on, it would only be able to format text and layout, and download and display images (while checking to make sure that they really are images and not viruses/worms/trojans). And images could be turned off. This all seems like common sense to me, but apparently it's not common sense at MSFT, which makes it easy for worms like this to spread.
Sure, I use Windows. But it's the only MS product I use on a regular basis. I use Calypso 3.3 to read mail, which has HTML rendering turned off by default (and I keep it off). I'm typing this in Mozilla 1.3.1. They're both well designed programs that don't do stupid things like Outlook. Did I mention I've never gotten a virus? Well, I haven't. Ever. Sure, I've had the occasional Outlook worm mailed to me, but I'm not so dumb as to open the attachment (which has no way to auto-execute on my machine, by the way). Part of the virus/worm problem is stupid users, but another part is badly designed software, and most Microsoft software has historically been badly designed when it comes to security.
The difference is that not only did Ford recall the Pinto, but everyone knows about it. With Outlook, people refuse to update their software, and even the fix from MS still doesn't solve a huge problem: using IE to render HTML e-mail.
HTML mail shouldn't be used, but since people insist on using it, the viewer for mail should format text, retrieve and show images (while making sure they really are images), and NOTHING else. There is no good reason to use a browser to render mail, especially one as insecure as IE. Outlook (and any other mail reader) should have an option to turn off images, or HTML rendering in its entirety.
If one government does this, then another, then another, eventually all governments would be forced to use open formats. Not to mention that governments can tell people to give them documents in open formats or else. It could spread similarly to how MS.doc format became the de-facto standard. Of course, MSFT and possibly other closed-source vendors would lobby against this and pay off representatives to keep this from happening, so who knows if any of this will work.
I don't care nearly as much about what software governments use as I do about their interoperability with other systems. A law based on this bill would help erase vendor lock-in and force MSFT to compete on a level playing field, as well as allow me access to public info without having to buy the same $400 program used to create it.
Sure, that doesn't explain badly-designed software like Outlook that used to auto-execute attachments and still uses IE to render HTML mail whether you like it or not. It does, however, make it harder to test, and makes problems more frequent. I damn well expect such a rich company to test every major piece of hardware and as many obsure ones as they can, in as many combinations as is feasable, but they can't cover everything. For instance, they don't have any test machines exactly like mine that I built myself, but I expect them to at least have some similar hardware, somewhere in their test bed. There's bound to be problems with certain combinations of supposedly-supported hardware and software.
Yes, even Linux has problems with some hardware combinations that it's supposed to support. For instance, X-Windows locks up when it loads the driver for the NeoMagic audio in my older laptop, even with the hack that's supposed to keep that from happening, but Windows works without a problem.
Hear, hear! My old laptop that I bought used, a PII366 with 128MB of PC66 SDRAM and a 4200RPM 10GB hard drive, runs WinXP Pro beautifully. I disabled useless services and all the eye candy, though, but I do that on even the fastest machines. And I don't keep much of anything running in the background.
Also, there's addictive games for nearly any platform of any vintage. Windows, MacOS, and the various unixes and clones all have games written for them. There's probably even some for BeOS and OS/2. If you're not addicted to UT2003, BF1942, or WCIII, you'll be addicted to Rogue or Tetris. So just have some self-control and get your work done instead of playing games (yeah, easier said than done).
The difference is who has control. In the office, the sysadmin deserves to have control over who can run what. At my house on my computers, only I deserve control. I'd better be able to do anything I damn well please on my own equipment. The security policy in Windows XP and Server 2003 lets this happen. Palladium/NGSCB, on the other hand, puts this control in Microsoft's hands. It's their security, not ours. I think "trusted computing" should be me trusting my computer to do what I say, not Microsoft or the *AA's trusting my computer to be crippled enough for their DRM crap. MS's view of "trusted computing" is way off base.
About signing patches, I think Microsoft should make one of Software Update Services' features be automatic signing of patches that the sysadmin has chosen to be installed.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's in the dorm rooms, it's not there just for education. The rest of the campus is just for learning, but the dorms are for everything else people do in their spare time. Nobody is going to be thinking about school 24/7. If a student moves into a dorm room, then the school is not just a school anymore: it's a landlord and an ISP. It's their home, and they will be playing games, downloading stuff, etc. just like they were at home on broadband. Which is perfectly fine. I think it's especially important to have a good internal network without anything blocked between dorm rooms, since the geeks can set up their file mirrors and game servers and reduce the load on the (probably saturated) Internet connection. If file transfers are slowing down the Internet connection, start doing some traffic shaping. Linux can do this, so it won't cost much money at all.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be reasonable rules, though. Record everyone's MAC address, with an easy way to re-register in case of a NIC swap. Require virus scanners (and possibly firewalls, hardware or software) on Windows and Mac systems (especially Windows) and regular security updates. Get a site license for a good virus scanner and post it up for download and/or distribute it on CD. Distribute major software patches as well. If someone gets MSBlaster or something, turn off their switch port until they shape up. Better yet, post their name and room number on the "Idiots Who are Screwing Up the Network" list mentioned earlier a couple of times.
The old Home Alone game for DOS had a half-sheet of letters arranged like a word jumble, printed faintly to prevent photocopying. Each time the game was started, the user would need to type random letters from that sheet. What a PITA.
"This part of the French government controls which words are 'officially' to be used in France, and has been very aggressive about keeping English terms (such as email and computer) out of the language. It is against the law to use the word 'email' in France."
IIRC, the law only prohibits government employees from using the words in their official government work, such as paperwork. I doubt a French policeman would even bat an eye at the use of "email" or similar words by the general public.
I do think the law is absurd, though, since mose (all?) languages borrow and use words from other languages. It's just part of languages evolving.
Check out the hard drive cooler. Am I missing something, or are the heat pipes just connecting one side of the hard drive to the other? That would just make two hot ends and the heat pipes would be doing diddly sqat. Tell me what I missed that makes this cool the hard drive.
Even though only a small percentage of Slashdot readers look at the comments, Slashdot's readership is so huge that the number of people reading the comments is still significant. It's not enough to kill a server, but I posted links to three images, around 80KB each, on my home server a few days ago fairly deep down in the discussion and got 3904 hits from it. It didn't kill my server (Pentium 133MHz, 64MB RAM, Debian 3.0, Apache 1.3.26, 3000/256 cable) and didn't result in any nasty letters from my ISP.
OT: It was interesting reading the logs. There are quite a few Linux users on here (but even more Windows users), and I saw lots of people using Mozilla, Opera, Safari, etc. Compare that to sites aimed at the average user where 95% of visitors are using IE or AOL and don't know that there's anything better out there.
I haven't done any black magic with 2K/XP; they're pretty much default installs. I did set Samba's OS level much higher than it needs to be, and set preferred master and local master to yes; that way Samba is always the master browser and LAN browsing always goes smoothly.
/etc/samba/smbpasswd /etc/samba/logfiles/log.%m
You probably already did this, but make sure everything is on the same workgroup or domain.
Another option is to add the line "wins support = yes" to make Samba a WINS server. Set your Windows boxes to use you Samba server as the WINS server manually or with DHCP and LAN browsing may improve. Browsing stopped working every few days and I needed to restart nmbd with this on, though, but it might work for you. Who knows.
Apps using networked files in XP randomly hang when accessing the Samba shares, but not on 2K. It also happens when printing to a printer hooked to a Win98 system when I'm on XP. Does anyone else have this problem? It's something I haven't figured out yet. My only fix was going back to Win2K on my main box, but my laptop still has WinXP.
Here's part of my working smb.conf if you need it. I think the OS level only needs to be 64, and I've never seen anyone else use anything near 999 like mine's at. Seems to work, though, so I have no reason to change it back at the moment.
[global]
security = share
workgroup = workgroup
netbios name = fileserver
server string = Samba File Server
os level = 999
preferred master = yes
local master = yes
announce version = 4.5
smb passwd file =
encrypt passwords = true
log file =
log level = 2
max log size = 1024
#wins support = yes
directory mask = 777
create mask = 777
Good luck.
Let's see some pictures, shall we?
Windows 2000 Professional
Here's my network in Win2K SP4. Mapped drives are marked neatly as "share at machine." Machine names show in My Network Places, with the comment showing to the right in details view.
Windows XP Professional
This is my network in WinXP SP1. Microsoft got rid of the nice mapped drive names of Win2K, so now it uses the longer and less useful "share at comment (machine)." That's one thing they shouldn't have changed IMHO. The Entire Network part of My Network Places hasn't changed at all; however, the root of My Network Places shows all the shares on the network in alphabetical order, which I think is stupid and disorganized. Worse, it still uses "share at comment (machine)" for the listing so it's even harder to follow, especially on a large network.
Sorry, I forgot to switch to plain text instead of HTML. My post should read:
/etc/hosts
Linux and other *nixes that I know of:
Notes for Windows: %systemroot% is your Windows directory, normally c:\windows or c:\winnt. The hosts file has no extension.
Windows 95, 98, and ME:
%systemroot%\hosts
Windows NT 4, 2000, and XP:
%systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
On both operating systems, a line is:
0.0.0.0 hostname
where 0.0.0.0 is the IP address you want the name to resolve to (like 127.0.0.1) and hostname is the name you want to redirect (like ads.doubleclick.net)
Linux and other *nixes that I know of: /etc/hosts
Notes for Windows: %systemroot% is your Windows directory, normally c:\windows or c:\winnt. The hosts file has no extension.
Windows 95, 98, and ME:
%systemroot%\hosts
Windows NT 4, 2000, and XP:
%systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
On both operating systems, a line is:
0.0.0.0 hostname
where 0.0.0.0 is the IP address you want the name to resolve to (like 127.0.0.1) and hostname is the name you want to redirect (like ads.doubleclick.net)
There's also the people who write documentation, test software, make and host the software project's website, provide a mirror to download the software, pass out CD-Rs with the software, tell their friends, etc. They all make huge contributions to free software.
That's probably because not only is the printer a loss-leader for ink, but the cartridges that come with the printers supposedly aren't even close to being full.
Try SneakEmail. Much easier to manage 100 @sneakemail.com addresses that forward to a real one than 100 Hotmail addresses that need to be checked individually.
Or you can get a domain name where any message to the domain gets sent to you, and give each comany an address of companyname@yourdomain.
It's the other way around. Netscape takes a slightly out-of-date version of Mozilla, replaces the red dinosaur with a big N and little AOL running guys, and adds AOL-TW sites to the popup blocking exemptions list. Did I just feed a troll?
It doesn't take years in Linux, either. The Windows guys at work were impressed with my home Linux server's uptime after it had only run for a month.
If it's because of the small type, try Ctrl and + a couple times. With the font size way up, it looks just fine in Mozilla 1.2.1 on the RedHat 9 laptop I'm usinng. Also, the PrefBar (forgot the URL; just google for "prefbar") allows you to change the font size easily. Microsoft apparently tries to go out of its way to look its websites look bad in all browsers other than IE.
I just took a Windows 2000 Server (please, no flames) class in college in a room with Robotel's SmartClass system. Each computer had a little box mounted under the table that the monitor, headphones, and possibly the keyboard and mouse passed through like a KVM switch, and they were all hooked together with CAT5. They also connected to a control panel on top of the table next to each computer that looked like it could be used for quite a few different collaborative things. I don't know if the boxes themselves were hosts on the network or connected in some proprietary way. Although they looked like they could project any computer onto any other, and be used for student-to-student or student-to-instructor communication, my instructor only used it to project his screen onto all the others. It was great because there was no software to install (we were constantly reinstalling Win2K Server anyway), and only the monitor needed to be on to see what the instructor was showing.
Another awesome thing those computers had were Romtec Trios in each machine, connected to two hard drives. They had Win98 on one for the programming classes, and Win2K Server on the other for our class. Unlike a software OS selector and boot loader like LILO or the NT loader, it physically disconnected the drive that wasn't being used, so my screwing around with Win2K server and partitioning and stuff wouldn't bork the Win98 install that needed to be up and running. Neat.
Aw crap, sorry about that; I forgot to put in the paragraph tags. My post should read:
n+1. Seeing that I paid for this software, I shall use it as I see fit. There are to be no restrictions on use.
n+2. I may reverse engineer anything I damn well please to make your product interact properly with another, or to get around your DRM restricting my legitimate use.
n+3. My desktop, quick launch bar, the top of my Start menu, my StartUp menu, my NT services, and the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run key are sacred. Your installer will not put anything in any of these locations without my express permission, and by default it won't touch them.
n+4. I will choose exactly which icons are installed on my Start menu, and where. You are not to make yourself a program group (or FIVE in the case of Epson) and dump icons for your program, EULA, website, help file, and uninstaller in it. I'm tired of cleaning up after program installs.
n+5. Your EULA shall NOT change when I install bug fixes, ESPECIALLY security updates.
n+6. You may ask me to register, but I may choose not to and still receive all the benefits of your software.
n+7. Shrink-wrap licenses are hereby banned. Any EULA must be printed on the front of the box. If it doesn't fit in a reasonably-sized typeface, shorten it until it does.
n+8. Your uninstaller must work properly.
n+9. Ads are forbidden in paid-for software; spyware is forbidden in ALL software, including free downloads. If Ad-Aware catches anything after I install your software, you owe me $500, plus the cost of your software.
n+10. No crippleware. For instance, DVD-playing software must ignore user operation prohibition on DVDs, play DVDs from all regions, and be able to copy the DVD to the hard drive.
n+11. I may review your product either positively or negatively without asking permission.
n+12. DRM is hereby banned. It will be cracked anyway and cracked copies will be all over the Internet eventually, likely even before your software is released. Only the honest people will pay, DRM or not, but DRM hurts everyone.
Okay, that was long-winded, but I feel better now.
n+1. Seeing that I paid for this software, I shall use it as I see fit. There are to be no restrictions on use. n+2. I may reverse engineer anything I damn well please to make your product interact properly with another, or to get around your DRM restricting my legitimate use. n+3. My desktop, quick launch bar, the top of my Start menu, my StartUp menu, my NT services, and the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run key are sacred. Your installer will not put anything in any of these locations without my express permission, and by default it won't touch them.
n+4. I will choose exactly which icons are installed on my Start menu, and where. You are not to make yourself a program group (or FIVE in the case of Epson) and dump icons for your program, EULA, website, help file, and uninstaller in it. I'm tired of cleaning up after program installs.
n+5. Your EULA shall NOT change when I install bug fixes, ESPECIALLY security updates.
n+6. You may ask me to register, but I may choose not to and still receive all the benefits of your software.
n+7. Shrink-wrap licenses are hereby banned. Any EULA must be printed on the front of the box. If it doesn't fit in a reasonably-sized typeface, shorten it until it does.
n+8. Your uninstaller must work properly.
n+9. Ads are forbidden in paid-for software; spyware is forbidden in ALL software, including free downloads. If Ad-Aware catches anything after I install your software, you owe me $500, plus the cost of your software.
n+10. No crippleware. For instance, DVD-playing software must ignore user operation prohibition on DVDs, play DVDs from all regions, and be able to copy the DVD to the hard drive.
n+11. I may review your product either positively or negatively without asking permission.
n+12. DRM is hereby banned. It will be cracked anyway and cracked copies will be all over the Internet eventually, likely even before your software is released. Only the honest people will pay, DRM or not, but DRM hurts everyone.
Okay, that was long-winded, but I feel better now.
As long as Outlook uses IE to render HTML mail, it will be vulnerable. This integration bullshit from Microsoft has made vulnerablilities in one program affect many others. If Outlook was secure, it would have an option to turn of HTML mail rendering. If it was turned on, it would only be able to format text and layout, and download and display images (while checking to make sure that they really are images and not viruses/worms/trojans). And images could be turned off. This all seems like common sense to me, but apparently it's not common sense at MSFT, which makes it easy for worms like this to spread.
Sure, I use Windows. But it's the only MS product I use on a regular basis. I use Calypso 3.3 to read mail, which has HTML rendering turned off by default (and I keep it off). I'm typing this in Mozilla 1.3.1. They're both well designed programs that don't do stupid things like Outlook. Did I mention I've never gotten a virus? Well, I haven't. Ever. Sure, I've had the occasional Outlook worm mailed to me, but I'm not so dumb as to open the attachment (which has no way to auto-execute on my machine, by the way). Part of the virus/worm problem is stupid users, but another part is badly designed software, and most Microsoft software has historically been badly designed when it comes to security.
The difference is that not only did Ford recall the Pinto, but everyone knows about it. With Outlook, people refuse to update their software, and even the fix from MS still doesn't solve a huge problem: using IE to render HTML e-mail.
HTML mail shouldn't be used, but since people insist on using it, the viewer for mail should format text, retrieve and show images (while making sure they really are images), and NOTHING else. There is no good reason to use a browser to render mail, especially one as insecure as IE. Outlook (and any other mail reader) should have an option to turn off images, or HTML rendering in its entirety.
If one government does this, then another, then another, eventually all governments would be forced to use open formats. Not to mention that governments can tell people to give them documents in open formats or else. It could spread similarly to how MS .doc format became the de-facto standard. Of course, MSFT and possibly other closed-source vendors would lobby against this and pay off representatives to keep this from happening, so who knows if any of this will work.
I don't care nearly as much about what software governments use as I do about their interoperability with other systems. A law based on this bill would help erase vendor lock-in and force MSFT to compete on a level playing field, as well as allow me access to public info without having to buy the same $400 program used to create it.
Sure, that doesn't explain badly-designed software like Outlook that used to auto-execute attachments and still uses IE to render HTML mail whether you like it or not. It does, however, make it harder to test, and makes problems more frequent. I damn well expect such a rich company to test every major piece of hardware and as many obsure ones as they can, in as many combinations as is feasable, but they can't cover everything. For instance, they don't have any test machines exactly like mine that I built myself, but I expect them to at least have some similar hardware, somewhere in their test bed. There's bound to be problems with certain combinations of supposedly-supported hardware and software.
Yes, even Linux has problems with some hardware combinations that it's supposed to support. For instance, X-Windows locks up when it loads the driver for the NeoMagic audio in my older laptop, even with the hack that's supposed to keep that from happening, but Windows works without a problem.
Hear, hear! My old laptop that I bought used, a PII366 with 128MB of PC66 SDRAM and a 4200RPM 10GB hard drive, runs WinXP Pro beautifully. I disabled useless services and all the eye candy, though, but I do that on even the fastest machines. And I don't keep much of anything running in the background.
Also, there's addictive games for nearly any platform of any vintage. Windows, MacOS, and the various unixes and clones all have games written for them. There's probably even some for BeOS and OS/2. If you're not addicted to UT2003, BF1942, or WCIII, you'll be addicted to Rogue or Tetris. So just have some self-control and get your work done instead of playing games (yeah, easier said than done).
The difference is who has control. In the office, the sysadmin deserves to have control over who can run what. At my house on my computers, only I deserve control. I'd better be able to do anything I damn well please on my own equipment. The security policy in Windows XP and Server 2003 lets this happen. Palladium/NGSCB, on the other hand, puts this control in Microsoft's hands. It's their security, not ours. I think "trusted computing" should be me trusting my computer to do what I say, not Microsoft or the *AA's trusting my computer to be crippled enough for their DRM crap. MS's view of "trusted computing" is way off base.
About signing patches, I think Microsoft should make one of Software Update Services' features be automatic signing of patches that the sysadmin has chosen to be installed.