Agreed that ClamAV is indeed awesome. It's worth pointing out for Windows users that it can be used effectively on Windows machines in much the same way.
ClamAV is a part of the official Cygwin port repository and I believe there's a GUI available for it as well (for those inclined to those kinds of things). Just as importantly, if using Cygwin, one can easily set up a mail system such as:
POP3 -> Fetchmail -> Procmail -> mbox
or, going the other way,
client -> SSMTP -> YourISP_SSMTP_Server
in which ClamAV can be integrated seamlessly, with all the goodness of reliability, control, logging, etc.
For everything, on-demand scanning with ClamAV can make more sense (and is always less problematic) than loading NAV, McAfee, etc. at boot time.
Maybe this should have been a Slashdot poll. 35% download legally, 40% download illegally and 25%...
The other 25% were involved in ongoing litigation, or were subject to the confidentiality provisions of a settlement agreement, and chose not to responded to the poll.
Actually, I think I have heard/read that since Windows 2000 (and maybe earlier for the NTs), every administration task in Windows was required to be manageable via command line, as well. Something like that, at least - there certainly are a lot of command line apps in/system32 that I never ever came close to using.
You heard wrong and most of what you wrote is somewhere between vaguely misinformed and deluded.
There is an almost infinite list of Things You Can't Do on the Command-Line. If such a list existed, it would be called Unix.
But before you cry foul, allow me to cite off the top of my head a small list of perfectly ordinary if not mundane tasks that can't be accomplished without using a GUI: manage hardware or access hardware information; monitor basic system status; make changes to environmental variables; perform backups or restore files (yes, the ntbackup GUI runs even when the job is scripted); check or send email; change settings (unless your settings are in win.ini and not the registry); monitor or manage event logs; set user rights; read documentation (compiled html!); download, install or otherwise configure any program; manage Windows Update. And we're still not doing any real work, yet.
Not only can you *not* manage a local system with any degree of effectiveness, but also most definitely you cannot manage another system remotely with any measure of success.
Windows was constructed around the registry, wizards, property sheets, and rebooting. That means pointing and clicking in graphical widows. Any tools that Microsoft thought necessary were made into mmc snap-ins. A very small subset of needed tools were written as gosh-honest-to-goodness command-line programs. The rest is comprised of DOS-type utilities, and miscellaneous rubbish like vbscript and an interface to rundll32. Hell, there's even a GUI provided to modify boot.ini, along with warnings against not using the GUI!
I don't know what exactly makes cmd.exe anemic - it's perfectly fine, in my opinion...It does name completion (command.com didn't), which is basically THE killer feature for me.
Dear God! I'm not quite sure how to respond to that without going over 5000 words. However, I would be remiss if I didn't point that the above statements present an honest, albeit extremely low threshold against which to measure the value of cmd.exe. You do know that command-line completion is not enabled by default and requires a registry change?
there is a lot more than what you expect. The NET command certainly is well-known and used for about a thousand things, notable starting and stopping services
No, there is definitely not a thousand things. In fact, there is not more than a few desperately needed things, leaving a grand canyon-sized gap to be filled with tidbits from Sysinternals (often wholesale rewrites of the crappy Microsoft version), or Perl, or perhaps a full Cygwin installation. For the sake of argument, and assuming a low-threshold of usefulness, perhaps you can enlighten me which of those thousand things allows me to do something like actually manage currently installed services (past the stopping and starting part). A hint: you can't.
If one does need to administer a Windows system using nothing other than a terminal, one would have no choice but to install the handful of oddball utilitities provided in the Resource Kit (not installed by default), and then install Cygwin and the GNU toolset and possibly just about everything else typically available on systems which *can* be be effectively administered on the command-line. And while that may be a good solution, it is, regrettably, still one giant workaround for some of the deficiencies I've been going on about.
As for Microsoft's Latest and Greatest, I have zero doubt that it will be interesting, if not useful, but it's laughable to suggest that Microsoft, or anyone else, for that matter, can reinvent t
Personally, I find it both your opinion and reasoning somewhere between laughable and uninformed. But putting that aide for the moment (cuz we're talking about Windows) and consider the following:
Now let's say you go about administering a Windows system using the command-line only, tell us which of the above service names are you typing in? Which do you have memorised? Or do you have any? And which service names bear any resemblance to name of the actual executable (when applicable) responsible for providing the service? Forgetting that Windows is case-insensitive but case-preserving, let us know how your typing accuracy and speed is enhanced when typing long names using both upper and lower case.
SnprBoB86@work $ net start Windows Management Instrumentation Drive Extensions
???
Didn't think so.
Add to this simple but bizarro example the poorly documented quoting/escaping voodoo required for anything more than the trivial execution of a single command, muddled even further with the all-purpose 'net' command (which isn't really a command) and the 'start' command (which is a command, but not in the context of using it with the 'net' command), and the truth soon becomes obvious:
The folks at Microsoft have no concept how to use the command-line, and if the wildly varying command syntax constructed from a tortured mix of spaces, slashes, dashes, colons and backslashes is any indication, they most likely wouldn't know how to write a program that is made to be run from it.
replace the standard incandescent lightbulbs in your house with compact flourescent bulbs... this will result in you using about 1/8 the electricity to get the same light
No, fluorescent bulbs give you a different light. Great if you want that hospital/industrial look and prefer yellow-green skin tones.
This has nothing to do with IBM or Microsoft. Both are publicly traded corporations. They are not...
What they are or are not is entirely a construct, and a very modern one at that. Arguing in the abstract may be appropriate when writing a term paper for a Dead German Philosophers 101 class, or when drinking espressos and smoking Gauloise at a cafe, but it has little place in the real world where Life has a tendency to intervene and bitch slap you when you get out of line or otherwise behave in a manner that's not in the common good.
Is it such a challenge to consider that corporations are made up of people, and hence share a collective social responsibility?
If it is, may I suggest watching The Discovery Channel or Animal Planet.
Final talks in a patent infringement lawsuit involving the popular BlackBerry e-mail messaging device have reached an impasse, the two companies involved said Thursday, raising the possibility that the BlackBerry service could be banned from the United States market.
In the past two years, the Senate provided BlackBerry devices and updated electronic pagers to Senators and key staff. The number of BlackBerry devices in use at the Senate continues to expand. Every office has a Senate "Group Alert" telephone system and approximately 1,000 telephones throughout the Senate are connected to the System.
Can't imagine someone informing members of the Senate they have to turn in their favourite devices because they're no longer legal.
And someone who no doubt considers the state of/. discourse to be beyond any need for improvement modded this comment as off-topic?
Hell, I'd say it was to a certain degree insightful, if not +1 funny. But if you want informative, here's a random clicky link for anyone trying to better themselves. Or to better understand what the OP meant which may, incidentally, relate to the article itself.
There are many people who think that doing just the opposite makes things more sane. I guess it probably comes down to the slow typists vs. the people with poor memory...
Slow typists? Don't think so. I type close to 100 when inspired, so I'd be the last to complain. Anybody who would advocate the opposite is blithely unaware of the shell quoting voodoo issues when dealing with spaces in file/dir names. And that's before a few single or double quotes or escape characters are thrown into the confused mess of colons, dashes, slashes required of most all Microsoft programs. And all hidden files/dirs that litter the windows dir, yeah, we don't need to concern themselves with those, at all, do we.;-)
The "My" prefix was apparently an attempt to create a personal connection between people and their computers at a time when the idea of using a computer might have been forbidding.
Personally, the "My" prefix struck me as infantile and insulting, but to the degree it distinguished content in the home directory (vs. the disorganised mess I'll refer to as the 'System' directory -- which, for Microsoft, seems to be pretty much anything), the concept had some merit.
The overlooked question is whether Microsoft will institute a saner shell folder structure more akin to what's found elsewhere. Removing overlong directory names would go a long way, and removing spaces from those names and announcing the person in charge for coming up with that scheme was fired would also help.
As for what consitutes a home directory, I'll promise not to laugh if Microsoft also decides that implementing a permission structure where the user is automagically the owner of those files (without requiring yet another registry edit).
I'll not hold my breath, however. The sanest approach has historically always been to work around the limitations imposed by Microsoft whenever and wherever possible. A customised install defining Documents and Settings to Users, and Program Files to Programs will no doubt be as necessary in Longhorn as it is for 2000/XP.
That was painful to read so I opted not to quote any part of it.;-)
A bit general, but what the hell...
Rule 1. All contractions demand apostrophes. If you're trying to fashion a contraction of "it" and "is" you need an apostrophe This yields "it's". A contraction of "what" and "is" yields "what's". If you're confused already, stop using contractions and write out your words in full like a grownup. Or maybe turn the baseball hat around and use "whassup".
Rule 2. All possessives demand apostrophes.
Rule 3. If you can distinguish between a possessive form and a contraction, there is no Rule 3.
In the rare event you need a possessive for some entity referred to as "it", rewrite the bloody sentence. Go directly to Rule 2 and don't look back. Before you do, however, note that constructs like "It's big pointy teeth.", while correct, are generally better written as "Godzilla's big pointy teeth."
BTW, it's "correlation". Syntax is important, but in language, you won't get there unless you're able to enunciate your words properly. Put another way, if you can't type worth a sh*t, the correct placement of braces won't help.
The only market for a small and pretty 'PC mini' that sacrifices upgradability for size is as a media centre...
Maybe, but for everyone that's chimed in with a similar comment, I'd suggest that anyone who owns a computer (yeah, even Grandma) could easily make good use of a second computer or third computer.
Simple backup storage is the most obvious use. How many people do you think have implemented any sort of disaster recovery strategy? And then, of course, there's a media centre (or two), a firewall, file server, web server, mail server, etc.
Unless you're prepared to build a server room, or willing to sacrifice valuable space and live with the extra noise, a mini PC of any sort is a Good Idea. The more of them in the marketplace, the merrier for everyone.
A "senior program manager" at Microsoft is an American job and deserves an American spelling.
Only if the job description is not a job description, but a formal Job Title.
Which it isn't.
The lack of capitalisation could have been a clue, but only if you paid a bit more attention to the submission than to your own tortured sentence structure.
As an ex user of opiates I can tell you one thing... They should remain illegal (or, at least, controlled as they are now). Marijuana, LSD, and mushrooms are another matter.
It may help to remember that a motivation to help others often grows from a personal need that wants to be fulfilled. The "Think of the Children!" crowd, for example, can be made up of folks who want to make up for their lousy childhoods, folks who feel guilty for spending so much time at work and being a lousy parent, or simply folks who genuinely care about kids but otherwise lack more selfish motives.
As for opiates, you should be aware that the biggest problem in palliative care today is that the general population is as terrified as you seem to be about opiate usage. Regrettably, that includes the doctors who would otherwise be cognisant that the tragedy of addiction is irrelevant when treating a dying patient.
The problem, if there is a single "one," is where it always is, in the perception.
However, Lucas, now age 60, says he won't be captaining such a ship if it ever happens.
Lucas appeared in an hour-long interview with Charley Rose a few days ago. I'm not a fan of the Star Wars saga, but the interview was interesting enough. He made the comment that one of the reasons he took so long to make the Star Wars movies (and also why he had made so few movies in his career as compared with other directors) was simply that he enjoyed spending time raising his kids, more so than making movies.
Given his demeanor in the interview when he made the above comment, and the fact that he's now 60, it seems unlikely he'll be taking on new projects of any sort.
A mostly guaranteed unlimited stream of pure content that includes movies, images, music, whatever-you-can-think and stuff you-haven't-thought-of-yet, along with a wealth of specialised technical information and advice offered for free from a world-wide user base, all for an extra $9.95 extra per month?
The passwords are prompted for, and nothing typed appears on screen (fairly standard stuff). If using ccrypt, the only thing that appears in plaintext is the decrypted contents of your encrypted file, after you've chosen to decrypt it (and before you cleared your screen buffer, of course).
Clipboard-anything is always a Bad Idea(TM). It's fairly trivial (read "ActiveX, among other methods), to read the contents of the Windows clipboard. Then again, I think clicking/double clicking anything is a Bad Idea, as well, especially when the multiple steps of loading and clicking your way through GUI can be repaced with a one line command.:-)
Seems to me that a list of OverlongSuperComplexHardToRemember passwords can easily be stored and read from a simple text file that's been encrypted. Using something like ccrypt (available for Windows with Cygwin) and typing
"information exists, but it is not in one place and cannot be easily viewed in a meaningful way using today's software",
he's referring to the information needed to run and/or administer Windows properly (can you say "Event Logs") or the absence of any useful tools provided by Microsoft.
One workaround, of course, is a full Cygwin installation with its compliment of shells, interpreters, text editors, compiler, network utilities and so on, along with a handful of other third-party programs to add to or replace what Bill and friends thought to provide, and a few more programs to fix what's left over and keeps breaking.
But more to the point, email looks better (and is by far easier to read, search, process, etc.) in mutt.
Even more to the point, I'm having trouble grasping why anyone would want to use someone else's home page. Is it that difficult to cobble together some html to roll your own?
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed that ClamAV is indeed awesome. It's worth pointing out for Windows users that it can be used effectively on Windows machines in much the same way.
ClamAV is a part of the official Cygwin port repository and I believe there's a GUI available for it as well (for those inclined to those kinds of things). Just as importantly, if using Cygwin, one can easily set up a mail system such as:
POP3 -> Fetchmail -> Procmail -> mbox
or, going the other way,
client -> SSMTP -> YourISP_SSMTP_Server
in which ClamAV can be integrated seamlessly, with all the goodness of reliability, control, logging, etc.
For everything, on-demand scanning with ClamAV can make more sense (and is always less problematic) than loading NAV, McAfee, etc. at boot time.
Maybe this should have been a Slashdot poll. 35% download legally, 40% download illegally and 25% ...
The other 25% were involved in ongoing litigation, or were subject to the confidentiality provisions of a settlement agreement, and chose not to responded to the poll.
Actually, I think I have heard/read that since Windows 2000 (and maybe earlier for the NTs), every administration task in Windows was required to be manageable via command line, as well. Something like that, at least - there certainly are a lot of command line apps in /system32 that I never ever came close to using.
...It does name completion (command.com didn't), which is basically THE killer feature for me.
You heard wrong and most of what you wrote is somewhere between vaguely misinformed and deluded.
There is an almost infinite list of Things You Can't Do on the Command-Line. If such a list existed, it would be called Unix.
But before you cry foul, allow me to cite off the top of my head a small list of perfectly ordinary if not mundane tasks that can't be accomplished without using a GUI: manage hardware or access hardware information; monitor basic system status; make changes to environmental variables; perform backups or restore files (yes, the ntbackup GUI runs even when the job is scripted); check or send email; change settings (unless your settings are in win.ini and not the registry); monitor or manage event logs; set user rights; read documentation (compiled html!); download, install or otherwise configure any program; manage Windows Update. And we're still not doing any real work, yet.
Not only can you *not* manage a local system with any degree of effectiveness, but also most definitely you cannot manage another system remotely with any measure of success.
Windows was constructed around the registry, wizards, property sheets, and rebooting. That means pointing and clicking in graphical widows. Any tools that Microsoft thought necessary were made into mmc snap-ins. A very small subset of needed tools were written as gosh-honest-to-goodness command-line programs. The rest is comprised of DOS-type utilities, and miscellaneous rubbish like vbscript and an interface to rundll32. Hell, there's even a GUI provided to modify boot.ini, along with warnings against not using the GUI!
I don't know what exactly makes cmd.exe anemic - it's perfectly fine, in my opinion
Dear God! I'm not quite sure how to respond to that without going over 5000 words. However, I would be remiss if I didn't point that the above statements present an honest, albeit extremely low threshold against which to measure the value of cmd.exe. You do know that command-line completion is not enabled by default and requires a registry change?
there is a lot more than what you expect. The NET command certainly is well-known and used for about a thousand things, notable starting and stopping services
No, there is definitely not a thousand things. In fact, there is not more than a few desperately needed things, leaving a grand canyon-sized gap to be filled with tidbits from Sysinternals (often wholesale rewrites of the crappy Microsoft version), or Perl, or perhaps a full Cygwin installation. For the sake of argument, and assuming a low-threshold of usefulness, perhaps you can enlighten me which of those thousand things allows me to do something like actually manage currently installed services (past the stopping and starting part). A hint: you can't.
If one does need to administer a Windows system using nothing other than a terminal, one would have no choice but to install the handful of oddball utilitities provided in the Resource Kit (not installed by default), and then install Cygwin and the GNU toolset and possibly just about everything else typically available on systems which *can* be be effectively administered on the command-line. And while that may be a good solution, it is, regrettably, still one giant workaround for some of the deficiencies I've been going on about.
As for Microsoft's Latest and Greatest, I have zero doubt that it will be interesting, if not useful, but it's laughable to suggest that Microsoft, or anyone else, for that matter, can reinvent t
Personally, I find it both your opinion and reasoning somewhere between laughable and uninformed. But putting that aide for the moment (cuz we're talking about Windows) and consider the following:
LmHosts (TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper Service)
postmaster (postmaster)
PlugPlay (Plug and Play)
PolicyAgent (IPSEC Policy Agent)
RasMan (Remote Access Connection Manager)
Spooler (Print Spooler)
TrkWks (Distributed Link Tracking Client)
Wmi (Windows Management Instrumentation Driver Extensions)
Now let's say you go about administering a Windows system using the command-line only, tell us which of the above service names are you typing in? Which do you have memorised? Or do you have any? And which service names bear any resemblance to name of the actual executable (when applicable) responsible for providing the service? Forgetting that Windows is case-insensitive but case-preserving, let us know how your typing accuracy and speed is enhanced when typing long names using both upper and lower case.
SnprBoB86@work
$ net start Windows Management Instrumentation Drive Extensions
???
Didn't think so.
Add to this simple but bizarro example the poorly documented quoting/escaping voodoo required for anything more than the trivial execution of a single command, muddled even further with the all-purpose 'net' command (which isn't really a command) and the 'start' command (which is a command, but not in the context of using it with the 'net' command), and the truth soon becomes obvious:
The folks at Microsoft have no concept how to use the command-line, and if the wildly varying command syntax constructed from a tortured mix of spaces, slashes, dashes, colons and backslashes is any indication, they most likely wouldn't know how to write a program that is made to be run from it.
I am impressed. More correctly, however, it's a participial phrase
replace the standard incandescent lightbulbs in your house with compact flourescent bulbs ... this will result in you using about 1/8 the electricity to get the same light
No, fluorescent bulbs give you a different light. Great if you want that hospital/industrial look and prefer yellow-green skin tones.
This has nothing to do with IBM or Microsoft. Both are publicly traded corporations. They are not ...
What they are or are not is entirely a construct, and a very modern one at that. Arguing in the abstract may be appropriate when writing a term paper for a Dead German Philosophers 101 class, or when drinking espressos and smoking Gauloise at a cafe, but it has little place in the real world where Life has a tendency to intervene and bitch slap you when you get out of line or otherwise behave in a manner that's not in the common good.
Is it such a challenge to consider that corporations are made up of people, and hence share a collective social responsibility?
If it is, may I suggest watching The Discovery Channel or Animal Planet.
Final talks in a patent infringement lawsuit involving the popular BlackBerry e-mail messaging device have reached an impasse, the two companies involved said Thursday, raising the possibility that the BlackBerry service could be banned from the United States market.
What I don't get is how the Blackberry, being so popular with members of our legislature, wound up on the wrong side of a patent lawsuit. To wit: Legislative Branch Subcommittee Hearing on the FY05 Budget [2004]:
In the past two years, the Senate provided BlackBerry devices and updated electronic pagers to Senators and key staff. The number of BlackBerry devices in use at the Senate continues to expand. Every office has a Senate "Group Alert" telephone system and approximately 1,000 telephones throughout the Senate are connected to the System.
Can't imagine someone informing members of the Senate they have to turn in their favourite devices because they're no longer legal.
"It's not easy to test an IE update .... We have to make sure it doesn't break the Internet."
Sometime a joke doesn't need a punch line.
And someone who no doubt considers the state of /. discourse to be beyond any need for improvement modded this comment as off-topic?
Hell, I'd say it was to a certain degree insightful, if not +1 funny. But if you want informative, here's a random clicky link for anyone trying to better themselves. Or to better understand what the OP meant which may, incidentally, relate to the article itself.
There are many people who think that doing just the opposite makes things more sane. I guess it probably comes down to the slow typists vs. the people with poor memory...
;-)
Slow typists? Don't think so. I type close to 100 when inspired, so I'd be the last to complain. Anybody who would advocate the opposite is blithely unaware of the shell quoting voodoo issues when dealing with spaces in file/dir names. And that's before a few single or double quotes or escape characters are thrown into the confused mess of colons, dashes, slashes required of most all Microsoft programs. And all hidden files/dirs that litter the windows dir, yeah, we don't need to concern themselves with those, at all, do we.
Well, to be fair, the article states:
The "My" prefix was apparently an attempt to create a personal connection between people and their computers at a time when the idea of using a computer might have been forbidding.
Personally, the "My" prefix struck me as infantile and insulting, but to the degree it distinguished content in the home directory (vs. the disorganised mess I'll refer to as the 'System' directory -- which, for Microsoft, seems to be pretty much anything), the concept had some merit.
The overlooked question is whether Microsoft will institute a saner shell folder structure more akin to what's found elsewhere. Removing overlong directory names would go a long way, and removing spaces from those names and announcing the person in charge for coming up with that scheme was fired would also help.
As for what consitutes a home directory, I'll promise not to laugh if Microsoft also decides that implementing a permission structure where the user is automagically the owner of those files (without requiring yet another registry edit).
I'll not hold my breath, however. The sanest approach has historically always been to work around the limitations imposed by Microsoft whenever and wherever possible. A customised install defining Documents and Settings to Users, and Program Files to Programs will no doubt be as necessary in Longhorn as it is for 2000/XP.
For what it's worth, here's to hoping you and your wife have a healthy and happy child!
From my own experience, once you count the fingers and toes, all you'll care about is the happiness part.
That was painful to read so I opted not to quote any part of it. ;-)
...
A bit general, but what the hell
Rule 1. All contractions demand apostrophes. If you're trying to fashion a contraction of "it" and "is" you need an apostrophe This yields "it's". A contraction of "what" and "is" yields "what's". If you're confused already, stop using contractions and write out your words in full like a grownup. Or maybe turn the baseball hat around and use "whassup".
Rule 2. All possessives demand apostrophes.
Rule 3. If you can distinguish between a possessive form and a contraction, there is no Rule 3.
In the rare event you need a possessive for some entity referred to as "it", rewrite the bloody sentence. Go directly to Rule 2 and don't look back. Before you do, however, note that constructs like "It's big pointy teeth.", while correct, are generally better written as "Godzilla's big pointy teeth."
BTW, it's "correlation". Syntax is important, but in language, you won't get there unless you're able to enunciate your words properly. Put another way, if you can't type worth a sh*t, the correct placement of braces won't help.
That's around mach-10.
... in addition to the fan noise, I might need to worry about sonic booms?
So
The only market for a small and pretty 'PC mini' that sacrifices upgradability for size is as a media centre...
Maybe, but for everyone that's chimed in with a similar comment, I'd suggest that anyone who owns a computer (yeah, even Grandma) could easily make good use of a second computer or third computer.
Simple backup storage is the most obvious use. How many people do you think have implemented any sort of disaster recovery strategy? And then, of course, there's a media centre (or two), a firewall, file server, web server, mail server, etc.
Unless you're prepared to build a server room, or willing to sacrifice valuable space and live with the extra noise, a mini PC of any sort is a Good Idea. The more of them in the marketplace, the merrier for everyone.
A "senior program manager" at Microsoft is an American job and deserves an American spelling.
Only if the job description is not a job description, but a formal Job Title.
Which it isn't.
The lack of capitalisation could have been a clue, but only if you paid a bit more attention to the submission than to your own tortured sentence structure.
It may help to remember that a motivation to help others often grows from a personal need that wants to be fulfilled. The "Think of the Children!" crowd, for example, can be made up of folks who want to make up for their lousy childhoods, folks who feel guilty for spending so much time at work and being a lousy parent, or simply folks who genuinely care about kids but otherwise lack more selfish motives.
As for opiates, you should be aware that the biggest problem in palliative care today is that the general population is as terrified as you seem to be about opiate usage. Regrettably, that includes the doctors who would otherwise be cognisant that the tragedy of addiction is irrelevant when treating a dying patient.
The problem, if there is a single "one," is where it always is, in the perception.
Lucas appeared in an hour-long interview with Charley Rose a few days ago. I'm not a fan of the Star Wars saga, but the interview was interesting enough. He made the comment that one of the reasons he took so long to make the Star Wars movies (and also why he had made so few movies in his career as compared with other directors) was simply that he enjoyed spending time raising his kids, more so than making movies.
Given his demeanor in the interview when he made the above comment, and the fact that he's now 60, it seems unlikely he'll be taking on new projects of any sort.
I'll say it again... alt.binaries.movies.divx
A mostly guaranteed unlimited stream of pure content that includes movies, images, music, whatever-you-can-think and stuff you-haven't-thought-of-yet, along with a wealth of specialised technical information and advice offered for free from a world-wide user base, all for an extra $9.95 extra per month?
Nah. No clicky links.
But that will display your password in plaintext.
:-)
The passwords are prompted for, and nothing typed appears on screen (fairly standard stuff). If using ccrypt, the only thing that appears in plaintext is the decrypted contents of your encrypted file, after you've chosen to decrypt it (and before you cleared your screen buffer, of course).
Clipboard-anything is always a Bad Idea(TM). It's fairly trivial (read "ActiveX, among other methods), to read the contents of the Windows clipboard. Then again, I think clicking/double clicking anything is a Bad Idea, as well, especially when the multiple steps of loading and clicking your way through GUI can be repaced with a one line command.
Isn't a full blown GUI program a bit overkill?
Seems to me that a list of OverlongSuperComplexHardToRemember passwords can easily be stored and read from a simple text file that's been encrypted. Using something like ccrypt (available for Windows with Cygwin) and typing
$ ccrypt -c path/to/secret_password_file | grep slashdotlogin
and entering the requisite password when prompted allows you to read the information from your screen.
A bit simpler, no?
I think when he says:
"information exists, but it is not in one place and cannot be easily viewed in a meaningful way using today's software",
he's referring to the information needed to run and/or administer Windows properly (can you say "Event Logs") or the absence of any useful tools provided by Microsoft.
One workaround, of course, is a full Cygwin installation with its compliment of shells, interpreters, text editors, compiler, network utilities and so on, along with a handful of other third-party programs to add to or replace what Bill and friends thought to provide, and a few more programs to fix what's left over and keeps breaking.
That and Google.
Agreed.
But more to the point, email looks better (and is by far easier to read, search, process, etc.) in mutt.
Even more to the point, I'm having trouble grasping why anyone would want to use someone else's home page. Is it that difficult to cobble together some html to roll your own?
He doesn't need to swing his cock around. That's why he nominated that Ted Selleck wanna-be-look-alike as ambassador to the UN.
My guess is that both Bush and Bolton believe size does matter, moustaches included.