1/4 of the people who buy new Dell's (source: my ass) buy a new machine because their current computer takes them to an advertisement site whenever they try to go to Google.com -- or IE keeps crashing, etc.
The point is lots of people can't tell what's a software problem and what's the fault of the logo on the outside of the computer.
Now apply that to Linux, give someone a copy of Red Hat 9 and tell them to replace Mozilla with Firefox. You need serious knowledge to do this -- On Windows or Mac you go to mozilla.com, click download, run the program and click yes a bunch of times.
If Dell supported all Linuxes (like Red Hat 9) people would start calling Dell with 100s of (GPL licensed) variations on the same problems and Dell's already limited support would be crippled. Dell's got the right idea to wait for a real standardization between distros, between desktops, etc.
In case no one noticed, I'm implying that was the editorial decision behind posting the article. It's certainly not how I feel as someone who just implemented AJAX on one of my sites and a big digg.com fan.
MSN search better be doing something with search, I've paid for a lot of bandwidth for them to have something to search! The MSN Search often triples the indexing of Google in my logs!
I saw WebCT Campus Edition six at last month's early Canadian Preview (because none of our universities are sending us to San Francisco).
Are you sure moving to Vista is a good move now that CE is running on Vista's code-base? Are you using People Soft or something that only plugs into Vista?
The more I think about this the more it looks like Microsoft is using WebCT development model too.
I don't know why I'm a Troll. I know the question was about Windows XP and I gave a UNIX answer, but I thought on a place like Slashdot a UNIX/Linux/OSX based answer might be appreciated anyway. I guess not.
I know XP has no cron system, I was being facisious about the fact that I didn't directly answer the question.
In fact, I even got an E-Mail asking about how this technique works. What follows is my responce to this slashdot reader:
I am curious, i'm soon to buy a Powerbook with interest of delving deeper into OSX than what the iMacs and Powermacs on my campus (www.purdue.edu) will allow me to do, and saw your blurb on the laptop security. I was hoping you'd give me a brief explaination of what's goign on there, i understand you're quietly appending a text file, but not sure with what and to what end. I would like to employ a similar setup with my system, that's why i'm asking:)
Here's what I had to share:
I got this running a few years ago, but I saw it in 2600 Magazine about 3 issues ago. The basic idea os your machine automatically calls up a web site with a unique name every hour. If your Laptop gets nicked you can hopefully check the logs on your server and trace it back to an ISP and hopefully they can tell you who has your laptop. That might not work so well, so what I would do is try to regain control over it while it's online -- I may not be able to get it come back to me like professor Frink's autodialer, but I can at-least erase my files (another tip - turn on filevault) and use the say command to taunt the guy (you can type ' say go to hell ' in the terminal and the Mac will say whatever you tell it to).
OSX is the best part about a Mac, and one of it's best features is it's base of a UNIX-type operating system, named Darwin. UNIX/Linux/FreeBSD/Darwin all make use of a number of common, free, open source, tools for the basics of the operating system. One of these tools that all UNIXs share is a tool called cron that is used for scheduling tasks. Each user can schedule tasks, so long as they can edit their 'crontab' with the proper syntax. Here's more info on cron: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron
One thing you will need, as the writer on Slashdot implied, is a web site with access to the logs. These logs show you who visited, the IP number, and what web browser they used. Without another machine with a web server, with logs you can read, this won't work.
OK, so you've got your new shinny PowerBook setup and every thing else. Open the Terminal (Spotlight can find it for you) and type:
crontab -e
(for edit the crontab - in my example I fed in the -l for list my crontab )
Note - if there is no menu on the bottom read the *
Now you need to enter when this is to run, using the ancient standard for cron tabs: minute, hour, day of the month, month, day of the week. You can use wild cards like * to mean anything in this field is OK. So for the first minute of every hour forever enter:
1 * * * *
after the time you need to enter in the command you want, in this case we want to use curl, a tool for getting files off the web. We want to tell it -s for be silent -f for fail silently and -A for append user agent, this is so you can have in your web server logs a user agent you'll notice - like "My Laptop", or in my case, "PowerMatt" and just to make this all REALLY silent, -o to send the output to the null device at/dev/null. You want this to execute silently so you don't logs full of curl's output. The last field is the URL to hit, so make someplace on your website that'll be unique. That ONE line entry in your crontab should look like this now:
I like my job at Brock University. But don't do anything without getting paid! They may have you confused with the slaves they commonly refer to around here as interns.
I'm really glad to read this, I figured this couldn't be the best made mouse of men.
I think the fact that it's so small is good, and my hands are big enough to plam a basket ball. But I'm sure if your fingers weren't longer than the mouse itself then it could be awkward.
As for tracking, I find it just as good as any other LED mouse, but bluetooth does get stomped when you move 52MB/s through your WiFi card.
If you've got a laptop (PowerBook?) I'd go with BlueTake. I use the BT500 and couldn't be happier with it's 3 button & scroll wheel setup.
http://bluetake.com/products/BT500.htm
Slashdot Mirror
Bang on man. I wish I had mod points to give.
It used to be Gnome was SOOO slow and KDE was quick by comparison, but 2.12 is when I switched back to Gnome.
Well, to 2.14 is closer to 10.4 than 2.13. I wouldn't say the metric is false.
1/4 of the people who buy new Dell's (source: my ass) buy a new machine because their current computer takes them to an advertisement site whenever they try to go to Google.com -- or IE keeps crashing, etc.
The point is lots of people can't tell what's a software problem and what's the fault of the logo on the outside of the computer.
Now apply that to Linux, give someone a copy of Red Hat 9 and tell them to replace Mozilla with Firefox. You need serious knowledge to do this -- On Windows or Mac you go to mozilla.com, click download, run the program and click yes a bunch of times.
If Dell supported all Linuxes (like Red Hat 9) people would start calling Dell with 100s of (GPL licensed) variations on the same problems and Dell's already limited support would be crippled. Dell's got the right idea to wait for a real standardization between distros, between desktops, etc.
All the cool script kidies use pico or nano. ;)
In case no one noticed, I'm implying that was the editorial decision behind posting the article. It's certainly not how I feel as someone who just implemented AJAX on one of my sites and a big digg.com fan.
AJAX sucks, take that digg.
We hate you.
MSN search better be doing something with search, I've paid for a lot of bandwidth for them to have something to search! The MSN Search often triples the indexing of Google in my logs!
He's Canadian.
I saw WebCT Campus Edition six at last month's early Canadian Preview (because none of our universities are sending us to San Francisco).
Are you sure moving to Vista is a good move now that CE is running on Vista's code-base? Are you using People Soft or something that only plugs into Vista?
The more I think about this the more it looks like Microsoft is using WebCT development model too.
I don't think sales of Windows upgrades have been a factor for a while or will be a factor any time soon.
Well, there is a story on Google every other day, maybe if you read on of those stories you'll figure out what Drupal is.
I hope this company doesn't have a 1-800 number:
"Ma' Bell didn't tell all the callers that they could only dial our number if they were going to buy something".
I don't know why I'm a Troll. I know the question was about Windows XP and I gave a UNIX answer, but I thought on a place like Slashdot a UNIX/Linux/OSX based answer might be appreciated anyway. I guess not.
I know XP has no cron system, I was being facisious about the fact that I didn't directly answer the question.
In fact, I even got an E-Mail asking about how this technique works. What follows is my responce to this slashdot reader:
Here's what I had to share:
I got this running a few years ago, but I saw it in 2600 Magazine about 3 issues ago. The basic idea os your machine automatically calls up a web site with a unique name every hour. If your Laptop gets nicked you can hopefully check the logs on your server and trace it back to an ISP and hopefully they can tell you who has your laptop. That might not work so well, so what I would do is try to regain control over it while it's online -- I may not be able to get it come back to me like professor Frink's autodialer, but I can at-least erase my files (another tip - turn on filevault) and use the say command to taunt the guy (you can type ' say go to hell ' in the terminal and the Mac will say whatever you tell it to).
OSX is the best part about a Mac, and one of it's best features is it's base of a UNIX-type operating system, named Darwin. UNIX/Linux/FreeBSD/Darwin all make use of a number of common, free, open source, tools for the basics of the operating system. One of these tools that all UNIXs share is a tool called cron that is used for scheduling tasks. Each user can schedule tasks, so long as they can edit their 'crontab' with the proper syntax. Here's more info on cron: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron
One thing you will need, as the writer on Slashdot implied, is a web site with access to the logs. These logs show you who visited, the IP number, and what web browser they used. Without another machine with a web server, with logs you can read, this won't work.
OK, so you've got your new shinny PowerBook setup and every thing else. Open the Terminal (Spotlight can find it for you) and type:
(for edit the crontab - in my example I fed in the -l for list my crontab )
Note - if there is no menu on the bottom read the *
Now you need to enter when this is to run, using the ancient standard for cron tabs: minute, hour, day of the month, month, day of the week. You can use wild cards like * to mean anything in this field is OK. So for the first minute of every hour forever enter:
after the time you need to enter in the command you want, in this case we want to use curl, a tool for getting files off the web. We want to tell it -s for be silent -f for fail silently and -A for append user agent, this is so you can have in your web server logs a user agent you'll notice - like "My Laptop", or in my case, "PowerMatt" and just to make this all REALLY silent, -o to send the output to the null device at /dev/null. You want this to execute silently so you don't logs full of curl's output. The last field is the URL to hit, so make someplace on your website that'll be unique. That ONE line entry in your crontab should look like this now:
This is the type of thing scientists do when they can't get their hands on stem cells. Imagine what they'd do if lab rats were banned?
Media Wiki is a PHP/MySQL project, not a Perl/MySQL project.
I don't know why, but that's just what you say when something impressive is linked to /.
I like my job at Brock University. But don't do anything without getting paid! They may have you confused with the slaves they commonly refer to around here as interns.
I'm shocked!
An Intel P4 that can run both Windows and Linux. Can it do something like dubble boot, or maybe 'dual' boot? Just guessing here.
The player is at least free as in beer, the SWF standard is open, and apps like PHP currently use an open library to render SWF files (ImageMagic???).
Shouldn't talented coders be working on Wiki tools, web browsers, spam assassins, P2Ps and kernels.... - stuff we could all innovate with?
Once open source has conquered the world could we then come back and make sure we have a free, as in speech, flash player?
You're the birthday, You're the birthday, You're the birthday man or women.
I'm really glad to read this, I figured this couldn't be the best made mouse of men.
I think the fact that it's so small is good, and my hands are big enough to plam a basket ball. But I'm sure if your fingers weren't longer than the mouse itself then it could be awkward.
As for tracking, I find it just as good as any other LED mouse, but bluetooth does get stomped when you move 52MB/s through your WiFi card.
If you've got a laptop (PowerBook?) I'd go with BlueTake. I use the BT500 and couldn't be happier with it's 3 button & scroll wheel setup.
http://bluetake.com/products/BT500.htm
The part of the the article I didn't like was when she kept going on about the kettle being black.