So? What you do would be more easily detected as most people DON'T know those methods. I can get around it too. The majority of students can't.
Like I said, it may be a joke but it beats nothing. I wouldn't stake my life on MS security but if I am forced to run Windows on the desktop, I'd rather have it there than to have the machines pretty much open.
Yeah, but GPO's make it tougher. Retarded Medical Assistant students are less likely to get around it. Our Network Technician and Network Admin students are more likely to find holes but it makes it more difficult.
BTW, GPO's can be used to restrict execution of programs to a list if the admin is so inclined. He could have locked it down further, it's just that he would have had a support nightmare on his hands when some instructor wanted to run some oddball app that came with a new book.
Security is a real balancing act. MS Security may be a joke but if you have to run Windows on the desktop (which we do), it beats nothing.
And BTW, I took the admin job at a tech school because I got sick of office politics and crap products being shoved down my throat and I can teach tomorrow's network admins to be competent and learn other solutions instead of "the microsoft way".
Grow up. I had over a decade of REAL IT experience before I started teaching. It wasn't as a grunt tech either.
Either eliminating Active Directory or eliminating Windows on the desktop in a school environment, take your pick.
You need the support for either locking down Winders desktops server-side or running decent commercial apps natively on another OS that can be managed by a server client-side.
This is the reality at the moment.
Samba 4 may help change things and allow people to migrate to other good client-side OS's when feasible.
It works OK for older versions of Photoshop, but if your going to go through the effort of running Photoshop in a dodgy reimplementation of the Win32 API, why not just run Windows? You'll get screwed everytime a new version of photoshop comes out that uses Win32 calls in a weird fashion.
A better idea would be a massive campaign to promote a port of Photoshop to GTK or QT. Microsoft will make damn sure that Win32 is a moving target if any massive movement to use WINE is successful.
The mac version of Photoshop is the better version IMHO anyway despite the lack of a true 64-bit port due to Adobe's laziness rewriting using Cocoa instead of Carbon. The MDI interface in the Windows version sucks, especially if you use multiple monitors and want to run other applications at the same time.
If your going to run non-native apps, it's usually better to just say "screw it" and run those apps in the native environment.
Really, I've gone through this fight trying to ditch Windows in an educational environment. You meet stiff resistance from all angles, including the vendors. I've eliminated it where I can but in the end, to ensure a good bullet-proof computing environment where Windows on the desktop in necessary for certain software products, group policy and automated software deployment is a MUST, not a WANT.
In most corporate environments, I've ditched Windows with good success but in a school, things are a bit different. Especially a tech school where our job is to teach people products to get them a job. Our goal is not to "create the thinkers of tomorrow".
We HAVE to have windows desktops. manageable Group policy and automated deployment are not available in other directory environments. You can't easily lock down Windows desktops centrally with other directory environments.
If you have other solutions, prove me wrong so I can use them as ammo to ditch Windows directory servers here. REAL solutions that are as easy to manage for other less-skilled folks I have dealing with daily problems.
I'm a network admin for a tech college here in the states. We really use the hell out of group policy. We use an AD server for managing the directory and UNIX (FreeBSD mostly) boxes for handling everything else. The UNIX boxes act as member servers in the domain.
Unfortunately there's nothing that really supports things like group policy and the like for Windows but well..... Windows Server.
Samba4 is supposed to change this but it may be a while before it's ready for widespread use.
In a school environment, you really want the Group Policy and automated software deployment features. Unfortunately, due to the closed nature of Windows, Windows Server is the only product capable of pulling off managing windows desktops well. You can hand-create policy files for machines but it's a pain in the ass and hard to maintain in the long run. Samba3 can act like an NT4 PDC if you wanted to do this though.
This is rapidly changing. If I were you, I'd deploy Linux or BSD for everything BUT the directory servers and then migrate when Samba4 is ready for prime time.
Students are great at f**king up machines, group policy is almost a must.
If you don't need centralized management of the desktops themselves, just the users and groups, etc, then there are several solutions that would work well. In a school though, I really recommend either dumping PC's entirely and go with OSX on the desktop and OSX Server or sticking with AD for directory services.
Don't even start with the flames. Linux and BSD are awesome but until you can run Photoshop, Indesign, etc that the syllabii for certain classes call for in a supported fashion, it's NOT going to happen. OSX happens to be a UNIX with good commercial desktop apps that aren't half-assed and it's semi-open.
Actually it's not flying over the state house anymore. It's still on the grounds though above the confederate memorial. That was their compromise with the NAACP.
That's actually where it really belonged and should stay.
You also have to realize what the union's Gen. Sherman did to this state to understand why it was still being flown. Especially in the capitol city of Columbia. Seriously evil atrocities committed against the civilian population and militia. Go do your homework.
You also seem to think that the battle flag is a racist statement. It's not. Slavery was not the reason SC seceded. It wasn't even at the top of the list. It was A reason but not THE reason. The flag is not a symbol of racism.
Unfortunately it tends to be the racist rednecks who fly it here in SC though. Most of them don't even know the history behind it or really know anything about the civil war.
When you lose, it's a civil war. When you win, it's a revolution.
The problem there is that for the most part, people here don't give a crap until it DIRECTLY affects THEM.
In fact, the majority of [redneck, unintelligent] Americans were behind the war, guantanomo bay and even the patriot act because it was a kneejerk reaction that helped them sleep better at night.
Once we hit 50% unemployment, have even more insane taxes thrust upon us, our constitution gets completely usurped (not just "mostly"), then you will probably start to see bullets flying.
BTW, my old surplus CZ-52 pistol has indeed saved my life twice and thankfully I didn't even have to pull the trigger. Oddly enough, one of those times it was a knife-wielding teenager in a dark parking lot.
Oh and for the record, our guns were VERY effective against you brits. Sadly the sun glaring from your countrymen's ugly horse-like teeth probably caused a few shots to miss their mark.
we're talking about people going out armed with knives and harbouring aggressive intentions. Knife crime is a growing problem. Poisoned dart attacks are very much a minority sport and one we can live with.
Don't you already have laws against murder? Why not just enforce those?! Execution and lifetime prison sentences tend to make people at least think twice. Especially when the laws get applied to young teenagers.
Here we tend to prosecute teenagers who commit murder as adults. Some even end up on death row.
Better to punish the criminals than waste tax dollars on imprisoning honest people who happen to have a knife under their seat and end up removing yet another source of useful state income. In fact, that person COSTS the state money at that point. Aren't your prisons a bit over crowded over there anyway?
Lethal injection, firing squad or a quick hanging for a few dumbass teenagers with some media coverage would seriously scale back the problem a bit without a doubt.
Instead of making new laws, why not enforce or improve upon the ones you already have?
You can embed sounds in web pages and stream MP3's just fine without flash. Hell, I was doing that in 1997.
As for video, isn't HTML5 supposed to rectify that eventually? It also isn't hard to stream an MPEG or Quicktime movie without flash.
I for one would be much happier without gay streaming flash ads/movies/games sucking up bandwidth on my network at the office. I can filter MP3's and video files easily enough at the proxy but flash is used as a UI on some pages so I can't justify blocking all of it.
Flash has kinda fractured the web a bit and gone against what the web was intended to be. Searchable, linkable and indexable.
Your whining about 10-25% loss in efficiency to run an 80 watt laptop. The impact on your electric bill would be negligible.
Why not dig that old Sun SPARC classic or 386 out of the closet because it's more power efficient than your desktop?
I love it when people here get all googly-eyed and excited over quad core machines with 1000 watt power supplies then whine about wireless power being an inefficient pipe dream.
I can't see this being marketed for pole->house electricity but for a wireless laptop/phone/pda charger I'll take the 10% hit. I wouldn't want to run a desktop on it however.
and have them learn traditional line numbered BASIC and maybe 6502 ASM. The machines were simple, easy to program and had hardware sprites (at least the Ataris did, not sure about C64), etc.
You didn't have to play nice with the OS or go through 10 layers of abstraction to get to the hardware. You didn't have to learn a complex API yet you could still do really neat things on the machine.
It also would emphasize code efficiency due to limited system resources. I was able to wrap my brain around the guts of an 800XL and master ATARI BASIC by age 10.
Then have them learn a more modern language like TCL, Python or even Common LISP.
Hell you could probably get them a real Atari 800XL on ebay for $10.
Just a thought.
Fortunately none of my kids want to be programmers. They've seen the horror and stress that is software development.
Should I scan for Apple II and Atari 8-bit virii too?
I'm not going to take a 20% performance hit on my old G4 just to make life slightly easier for Windows users. They have their own solutions on their own bugridden platform for dealing with that. Not my problem.
The last virus threat I had on a mac was NVIR on my old Mac Plus. I'm not going to waste CPU cycles I don't have to.
There's plenty of other operating systems Windows users can run to alleviate this problem. Most are even designed from the ground up with multiple users and security in mind and have been around a lot longer than Windows (as an OS platform, not the graphical DOS shell).
I don't remember being given a choice. Just try "leaving society behind" and let me know how that straitjacket or that cold slab in the morgue feels. I'll give you a hint, it doesn't work very well.
And yes, you could *try* to take my stuff. You wouldn't get far. No government intervention or laws would be required for me to solve that problem.
And no, I'm not an anarchist. I am a libertarian but not to the point of being a weird luddite.
Picking a choosing laws can be a slippery slope but I like to refer to it as "civil disobedience".
Not an X server. Yet another attempt at a new window system. It's a pity it's not a new XServer. I'd love to see the original X concept modernized and called X12. A fast, network-transparent window system.
Most of the people calling for X replacements want to remove exactly what makes X cool and why it was originally used..... network transparency.
Accepted by who? Lazy developers and sheep end users who will download anything that is required to play SuperBejeweled3D 2010 and watch a video of their cousin Clevon jumping a Jetski from a lake into a swimming pool?
The point of networking standards and the internet in general was to allow computers built by *ANY* manufacturer running *ANY* TCP/IP-capable operating system to exchange data over long distances with some degree of fault tolerance.
Flash works reasonably well for Windows users, OS X and if you work at it, several linux variants. Gnash kinda sucks but is getting there. It works well enough to play YouTube videos on my FreeBSD box.
Flash is *NOT* a standard and is *FAR* from open. Flash also breaks the web in general. Flash is not searchable. Flash was a buggy kludge because the HTML standard had no video or scalable graphics/animation support at the time.
Now HTML5 wants to make video content standard and easy to slap together with open tools without anyone paying Adobe and YOU'RE BITCHING?!?!?!
I'm an atheist, I don't believe in happy marshmallow land when I die and that sacrificing my life because another action MIGHT hurt somebody else will get me there.
I was involved in an accident where a 76-year-old man ran a stop sign in front of me when I was doing 55mph (posted limit) on a narrow two-lane road. I quickly judged that I wouldn't be able to stop and had a choice of him or a phone pole. I applied the brakes then aimed for the softest, weakest point of his old Ford LTD with my 91 Pontiac Grand Am, square between the two doors (that thing was a big hunk of old-school American steel, anywhere else and I'd probably be dead and he'd just have to buff out a scratch).
His vehicle was totaled but he wasn't really hurt (a little bruised and shaken up). If I had chosen the pole both me and my wife would have probably been killed as she was not wearing a seatbelt and I would have most likely eaten a steering column. I drove my vehicle home and the repairs were only about 1900 bucks.
When it comes to survival, yeah, I'm going to survive. PERIOD. I don't care if it means eating you, your grandmother or a helpless quadriplegic in a wheelchair. I will live.
The only things I would consider dying for are my family and my constitutional rights. Unfortunately it seems I am pretty much alone on that last one these days so it would be futile and pointless.
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So? What you do would be more easily detected as most people DON'T know those methods. I can get around it too. The majority of students can't.
Like I said, it may be a joke but it beats nothing. I wouldn't stake my life on MS security but if I am forced to run Windows on the desktop, I'd rather have it there than to have the machines pretty much open.
Hey that's pretty slick! I may have to check that out. Might let me get rid of another Windows server.
Yeah, but GPO's make it tougher. Retarded Medical Assistant students are less likely to get around it. Our Network Technician and Network Admin students are more likely to find holes but it makes it more difficult.
BTW, GPO's can be used to restrict execution of programs to a list if the admin is so inclined. He could have locked it down further, it's just that he would have had a support nightmare on his hands when some instructor wanted to run some oddball app that came with a new book.
Security is a real balancing act. MS Security may be a joke but if you have to run Windows on the desktop (which we do), it beats nothing.
And BTW, I took the admin job at a tech school because I got sick of office politics and crap products being shoved down my throat and I can teach tomorrow's network admins to be competent and learn other solutions instead of "the microsoft way".
Grow up. I had over a decade of REAL IT experience before I started teaching. It wasn't as a grunt tech either.
No, I'm saying if you want to eliminate Windows right now, the best solution at the MOMENT is to use OSX and OSX Server.
If you are patient, you can wait for Samba4 to become mature.
Either eliminating Active Directory or eliminating Windows on the desktop in a school environment, take your pick.
You need the support for either locking down Winders desktops server-side or running decent commercial apps natively on another OS that can be managed by a server client-side.
This is the reality at the moment.
Samba 4 may help change things and allow people to migrate to other good client-side OS's when feasible.
It works OK for older versions of Photoshop, but if your going to go through the effort of running Photoshop in a dodgy reimplementation of the Win32 API, why not just run Windows? You'll get screwed everytime a new version of photoshop comes out that uses Win32 calls in a weird fashion.
A better idea would be a massive campaign to promote a port of Photoshop to GTK or QT. Microsoft will make damn sure that Win32 is a moving target if any massive movement to use WINE is successful.
The mac version of Photoshop is the better version IMHO anyway despite the lack of a true 64-bit port due to Adobe's laziness rewriting using Cocoa instead of Carbon. The MDI interface in the Windows version sucks, especially if you use multiple monitors and want to run other applications at the same time.
If your going to run non-native apps, it's usually better to just say "screw it" and run those apps in the native environment.
Really, I've gone through this fight trying to ditch Windows in an educational environment. You meet stiff resistance from all angles, including the vendors. I've eliminated it where I can but in the end, to ensure a good bullet-proof computing environment where Windows on the desktop in necessary for certain software products, group policy and automated software deployment is a MUST, not a WANT.
In most corporate environments, I've ditched Windows with good success but in a school, things are a bit different. Especially a tech school where our job is to teach people products to get them a job. Our goal is not to "create the thinkers of tomorrow".
We HAVE to have windows desktops. manageable Group policy and automated deployment are not available in other directory environments. You can't easily lock down Windows desktops centrally with other directory environments.
If you have other solutions, prove me wrong so I can use them as ammo to ditch Windows directory servers here. REAL solutions that are as easy to manage for other less-skilled folks I have dealing with daily problems.
I'm a network admin for a tech college here in the states. We really use the hell out of group policy. We use an AD server for managing the directory and UNIX (FreeBSD mostly) boxes for handling everything else. The UNIX boxes act as member servers in the domain.
Unfortunately there's nothing that really supports things like group policy and the like for Windows but well..... Windows Server.
Samba4 is supposed to change this but it may be a while before it's ready for widespread use.
In a school environment, you really want the Group Policy and automated software deployment features. Unfortunately, due to the closed nature of Windows, Windows Server is the only product capable of pulling off managing windows desktops well. You can hand-create policy files for machines but it's a pain in the ass and hard to maintain in the long run. Samba3 can act like an NT4 PDC if you wanted to do this though.
This is rapidly changing. If I were you, I'd deploy Linux or BSD for everything BUT the directory servers and then migrate when Samba4 is ready for prime time.
Students are great at f**king up machines, group policy is almost a must.
If you don't need centralized management of the desktops themselves, just the users and groups, etc, then there are several solutions that would work well. In a school though, I really recommend either dumping PC's entirely and go with OSX on the desktop and OSX Server or sticking with AD for directory services.
Don't even start with the flames. Linux and BSD are awesome but until you can run Photoshop, Indesign, etc that the syllabii for certain classes call for in a supported fashion, it's NOT going to happen. OSX happens to be a UNIX with good commercial desktop apps that aren't half-assed and it's semi-open.
Actually it's not flying over the state house anymore. It's still on the grounds though above the confederate memorial. That was their compromise with the NAACP.
That's actually where it really belonged and should stay.
You also have to realize what the union's Gen. Sherman did to this state to understand why it was still being flown. Especially in the capitol city of Columbia. Seriously evil atrocities committed against the civilian population and militia. Go do your homework.
You also seem to think that the battle flag is a racist statement. It's not. Slavery was not the reason SC seceded. It wasn't even at the top of the list. It was A reason but not THE reason. The flag is not a symbol of racism.
Unfortunately it tends to be the racist rednecks who fly it here in SC though. Most of them don't even know the history behind it or really know anything about the civil war.
When you lose, it's a civil war. When you win, it's a revolution.
Heh, I moved to SC because I thought VA was oppressive. This better not fucking pass. Like seriously, I've about had it with this shit.
This is also the state that abolished car inspections. Not even after a sale. Not annually. Never. This is even more braindead.
In other news....
The U.K. has announced a nationwide ban on the following items:
charcoal
sulfur
bird droppings
hollow sections of pipe
ball bearings
matches
ZOMGWTFBBQ The hellspawn youths of today have been killing people en masse with HOMEMADE MUSKETS. OH THE HORROR. Think of the children!!!!!!!!!
Sadly, the US won't be far behind the UK soon enough.
The problem there is that for the most part, people here don't give a crap until it DIRECTLY affects THEM.
In fact, the majority of [redneck, unintelligent] Americans were behind the war, guantanomo bay and even the patriot act because it was a kneejerk reaction that helped them sleep better at night.
Once we hit 50% unemployment, have even more insane taxes thrust upon us, our constitution gets completely usurped (not just "mostly"), then you will probably start to see bullets flying.
BTW, my old surplus CZ-52 pistol has indeed saved my life twice and thankfully I didn't even have to pull the trigger. Oddly enough, one of those times it was a knife-wielding teenager in a dark parking lot.
Oh and for the record, our guns were VERY effective against you brits. Sadly the sun glaring from your countrymen's ugly horse-like teeth probably caused a few shots to miss their mark.
Dude.....it's a joke......really.
we're talking about people going out armed with knives and harbouring aggressive intentions. Knife crime is a growing problem. Poisoned dart attacks are very much a minority sport and one we can live with.
Don't you already have laws against murder? Why not just enforce those?! Execution and lifetime prison sentences tend to make people at least think twice. Especially when the laws get applied to young teenagers.
Here we tend to prosecute teenagers who commit murder as adults. Some even end up on death row.
Better to punish the criminals than waste tax dollars on imprisoning honest people who happen to have a knife under their seat and end up removing yet another source of useful state income. In fact, that person COSTS the state money at that point. Aren't your prisons a bit over crowded over there anyway?
Lethal injection, firing squad or a quick hanging for a few dumbass teenagers with some media coverage would seriously scale back the problem a bit without a doubt.
Instead of making new laws, why not enforce or improve upon the ones you already have?
Could also be useful the other way around.
1.) Rapidly sequence a suspect's DNA
2.) Find a cheap way to make "good enough" copies
3.) Plant evidence
4.) ????????
5.) PROFIT!!!!
You can embed sounds in web pages and stream MP3's just fine without flash. Hell, I was doing that in 1997.
As for video, isn't HTML5 supposed to rectify that eventually? It also isn't hard to stream an MPEG or Quicktime movie without flash.
I for one would be much happier without gay streaming flash ads/movies/games sucking up bandwidth on my network at the office. I can filter MP3's and video files easily enough at the proxy but flash is used as a UI on some pages so I can't justify blocking all of it.
Flash has kinda fractured the web a bit and gone against what the web was intended to be. Searchable, linkable and indexable.
Your whining about 10-25% loss in efficiency to run an 80 watt laptop. The impact on your electric bill would be negligible.
Why not dig that old Sun SPARC classic or 386 out of the closet because it's more power efficient than your desktop?
I love it when people here get all googly-eyed and excited over quad core machines with 1000 watt power supplies then whine about wireless power being an inefficient pipe dream.
I can't see this being marketed for pole->house electricity but for a wireless laptop/phone/pda charger I'll take the 10% hit. I wouldn't want to run a desktop on it however.
and have them learn traditional line numbered BASIC and maybe 6502 ASM. The machines were simple, easy to program and had hardware sprites (at least the Ataris did, not sure about C64), etc.
You didn't have to play nice with the OS or go through 10 layers of abstraction to get to the hardware. You didn't have to learn a complex API yet you could still do really neat things on the machine.
It also would emphasize code efficiency due to limited system resources. I was able to wrap my brain around the guts of an 800XL and master ATARI BASIC by age 10.
Then have them learn a more modern language like TCL, Python or even Common LISP.
Hell you could probably get them a real Atari 800XL on ebay for $10.
Just a thought.
Fortunately none of my kids want to be programmers. They've seen the horror and stress that is software development.
If they can't even get Combat Flight Simulator 3 to be remotely accurate how the hell do they expect to do an accurate PLANET?!
CFS3's flight model sucks ass, especially compared to IL2/Pacific Fighters. I want a REAL SIMULATOR, not an arcade game.
Should I scan for Apple II and Atari 8-bit virii too?
I'm not going to take a 20% performance hit on my old G4 just to make life slightly easier for Windows users. They have their own solutions on their own bugridden platform for dealing with that. Not my problem.
The last virus threat I had on a mac was NVIR on my old Mac Plus. I'm not going to waste CPU cycles I don't have to.
There's plenty of other operating systems Windows users can run to alleviate this problem. Most are even designed from the ground up with multiple users and security in mind and have been around a lot longer than Windows (as an OS platform, not the graphical DOS shell).
I don't remember being given a choice. Just try "leaving society behind" and let me know how that straitjacket or that cold slab in the morgue feels. I'll give you a hint, it doesn't work very well.
And yes, you could *try* to take my stuff. You wouldn't get far. No government intervention or laws would be required for me to solve that problem.
And no, I'm not an anarchist. I am a libertarian but not to the point of being a weird luddite.
Picking a choosing laws can be a slippery slope but I like to refer to it as "civil disobedience".
Not an X server. Yet another attempt at a new window system. It's a pity it's not a new XServer. I'd love to see the original X concept modernized and called X12. A fast, network-transparent window system.
Most of the people calling for X replacements want to remove exactly what makes X cool and why it was originally used..... network transparency.
Accepted by who? Lazy developers and sheep end users who will download anything that is required to play SuperBejeweled3D 2010 and watch a video of their cousin Clevon jumping a Jetski from a lake into a swimming pool?
The point of networking standards and the internet in general was to allow computers built by *ANY* manufacturer running *ANY* TCP/IP-capable operating system to exchange data over long distances with some degree of fault tolerance.
Flash works reasonably well for Windows users, OS X and if you work at it, several linux variants. Gnash kinda sucks but is getting there. It works well enough to play YouTube videos on my FreeBSD box.
Flash is *NOT* a standard and is *FAR* from open. Flash also breaks the web in general. Flash is not searchable. Flash was a buggy kludge because the HTML standard had no video or scalable graphics/animation support at the time.
Now HTML5 wants to make video content standard and easy to slap together with open tools without anyone paying Adobe and YOU'RE BITCHING?!?!?!
I'm an atheist, I don't believe in happy marshmallow land when I die and that sacrificing my life because another action MIGHT hurt somebody else will get me there.
I was involved in an accident where a 76-year-old man ran a stop sign in front of me when I was doing 55mph (posted limit) on a narrow two-lane road. I quickly judged that I wouldn't be able to stop and had a choice of him or a phone pole. I applied the brakes then aimed for the softest, weakest point of his old Ford LTD with my 91 Pontiac Grand Am, square between the two doors (that thing was a big hunk of old-school American steel, anywhere else and I'd probably be dead and he'd just have to buff out a scratch).
His vehicle was totaled but he wasn't really hurt (a little bruised and shaken up). If I had chosen the pole both me and my wife would have probably been killed as she was not wearing a seatbelt and I would have most likely eaten a steering column. I drove my vehicle home and the repairs were only about 1900 bucks.
When it comes to survival, yeah, I'm going to survive. PERIOD. I don't care if it means eating you, your grandmother or a helpless quadriplegic in a wheelchair. I will live.
The only things I would consider dying for are my family and my constitutional rights. Unfortunately it seems I am pretty much alone on that last one these days so it would be futile and pointless.
It's called the Libertarian Party. They just don't have funding from the good ol' boys.