Never mind being disabled by a targetted infestation - I've dealt with several systems that have been crippled by Norton software itself.
Yep, 95% CPU usage from a Norton process is always a fun sight to behold. McAfee is even worse because certain versions have a bug that causes CPU usage to go through the roof when a certain logfile exceeds a size limit. Solution is to move or delete the old log.
Personally, I prefer Kaspersky because its definitions are updated almost instantly after a new virus comes out. And what's more, it's easy to disable. I turn it off completely except when I'm doing risky stuff and of course I do complete monthly checks. It doesn't shout "OMG YOUR VIRUS PROTECTION IS DISABLED YOU'RE GOING TO LOSE ALL DATA".
I'll have to try Kaspersky, though, so far, Avast has worked pretty well for me. Avast's "OMG" warnings can be disabled, AFAIK, and all you get if you have a disabled component(s) is a little red slash on the Avast icon in the systray. And, even so, the warnings aren't as obnoxious as Norton.
When I took CS at Iowa State I had to learn VB. Mind you, it was in the CS "Intro" class and also involved the history of the computer and using Office.
Our "intro class for total n00bs" was actually taught in Scheme. Yep, talk about a language that was "different"!
4) It can also help you maintain legacy apps or business apps developed for Access or Excel. Maybe you can do new development in the language of your choice, but you have to maintain whatever legacy apps are already there. At least having exposure to VB can make it a much easier process.
I had to write a fairly complex Excel app for one job - took text capture from a Telnet session with a mainframe and converted it into something usable in spreadsheet form by the worker drones. Before that, people had just printed the screen cap and retyped it manually into Excel. I didn't really know VB - it still took me less than a day with an online VB help site and the Excel macro editor to write the thing. Maybe it wasn't pretty, but it worked fine!
Lastly, a university is not a vo/tech school. It's purpose is to develop and hone critical and analytical thinking skills, not to directly be a job training centre.
Which is broken in any browser other than Explorer. Good times.
-b.
Re:Consumers don't care about their privacy
on
The Death of Privacy
·
· Score: 1
Most Consumers, barely consider privacy implications when purchasing software or signing up for services.
I wonder how much of the "voluntarily" provided customer info consists of the following:
Fu H. Kew
44 Noe Street
Ware, MA 02666
e-mail: spammers@must.die.com
Optimized OS, set hardware profiles, little to no multi-tasking... do you mean like an XBox?
Yep, exactly like that, except for the set hardware profiles. Why should I pay $200+ for a specialized piece of hardware for obtimized gaming when I already own one - my PC. Assuming that PC games weren't encumbered with a general purpose OS, whether it be Windows, Linux, or OS X, they could run as well or faster than on specialized consoles. This was done all the time until the early 90s - I wonder why game cos stopped.
in the UK, and just about every institution seems to be entirely Microsoft-based.
I think that the US has a much stronger entrenched tradition of computing from before Microsoft, when the "Internet" was academic/military UNIX boxes talking to each other. Most campus e-mail systems, even now, will still be based on some sort of UNIX or Linux - a lot of schools even give shell accounts where mail can be read with 'pine' or 'mutt' and where the 'finger' command still works...
-boso "Last login Tue June 6 2006 01:23 from ttyS1" zoku
For example, the start menu has been reorganized. When you open it, it looks pretty much just like the start menu in XP, however, when you click "All Programs", the quick access menu on the left is replaced by a scroll down list with all the programs listed - rather than having menus expand across your screen. It is simply more organized.
I love the gadgets bar on the right side of the screen as you can customize it to have a clock, the recycle bin, calculator, and my personal favorite, dials that track memory usage and percentage of processor clock time being used.
IMHO, NeXTSTEP had the UI down in the early 90s. An easily-customizable "start" menu that you could open anywhere on the desktop by clicking on an area without a window. A window list that you could do the same with by clicking the other button. And the ability to "dock" applications and create application launchers on the right side of the screen. NeXTSTEP UI was clean, efficient, fast, and good-looking. The only thing that was missing was the ability to drag data files directly to the desktop, but that's easily remedied from a UI perspective. Nothing since or before has matched NeXTSTEP's good looks and ease of use, IMHO. Even OS X is slightly worse with their mish-mash of opened app icons and app launchers that they call a "Dock."
Windows 2000 and XP are VERY stable. I literally cannot remember the last time ive seen a blue screen, or had the OS crash on me where I needed to reboot, and ive been working in IT for 15 years.
Agreed: BSoD's are pretty rare now. It's the *other* problems that suck, like Windows allowing 3rd party programs to grab 99% of CPU by default and slow the machine to a crawl, and the fact that Windows installs older than 6 months are often slow as molasses until you remove all of the malware, defrag, and figure out what else is slowing them down.
And, if you dare promote open source -- firefox, linux, apache, sendmail
So go freelance and start supporting smaller corps. They often embrace open source, if only because things like Firefox seem to be more secure, and a computer down in a company with 5 computers matters more than one computer down out of 10,000 machines.
If I have learned anything from Slashdot, it is that incompetents prefer Linux.
Nah, just people who want their servers to run well without too much maintenance and want to understand how everything works. Biggest problem with Windows is that it's non-transparent and relies too much on Registry-type databases.
Speaking of incompetents - when will Ford come out with a car (outside of Australia) that I'd actually want to drive? Either a hybrid that isn't a top-heavy truckette or a rear-wheel-drive (preferably manual) sedan that isn't gigantic like the Crown Vic..
As a matter of fact, up until SuSE 10.1, Linux and its various programs have been far more unstable than Windows XP.
Actually, SuSE seems to be the worst as far as out-of-the-box stability in UNIX-type OSs, especially with that gahdahful graphical 132x50 console mode that's turned on by default and tends to freeze the machine when switching consoles. Fortunately, vga=normal passed to the kernel solves *that* problem!
The best in my experience have been, in order: OpenBSD, Debian Stable, CentOS.
Two: I still have to suffer through using Microsoft at college. Visual BASIC. Blech.
What (US) college actually uses VB for teaching computer science or in the engineering dept? My school's CS lab didn't even have x86 hardware until about 3 years ago when they switched from Sun workstations to Linux and BSD white boxes. The engineering dept seems to have mostly used C++, assembler for microcontrollers, and various modelling languages (Matlab, anyone?).
Usable for gamers... except for the fact that most games don't run under Linux period, and those that do through Cedega are often hit-and-miss and not "supported" until months if not years after release. Oh, and 3D card drivers tend to suck horribly for Linux...
Anyone think that graphics/CPU-intensive games that run under *any* OS are a stupid idea. Wouldn't it be far better for them to use either their own partition or a DVD/Ramdisk filesystem and run a mini-OS that's optimized for speed and performance? The OS could use existing Windows drivers and hardware profiles read from the Windows partition so as not to have to reinvent the wheel afa drivers.
It's not like you have any real need for multitasking when playing certain games.
If you want to run Windows on a server, choose a version with Server in the name.
Actually, 2000 Server (can't speak for 2003) makes a rock-solid desktop OS as well, probably better than 2000 Pro or XP Pro. My install's been (knock on plastic!) running for 2 yrs now and gahd only knows how many years before that.
Norton had screwed up with the "title of update file unparsable" error
Surprise, surprise. Despite being a big name in the anti-malware business, Symantec seems to put out CPU hogging, slow, virus-insensitive crap. I tend to replace Norton with Avast! on most computers that I work with, since Avast! is faster and actually seems to detect viruses better than Norton.
Linux - it just runs and runs, although it's a server, not a workstation.
It makes a darn good workstation, IMHO. I'm typing this on my Debian laptop, and Ubuntu/Kubuntu are relatively easy to install and use.
Speaking of server OS's, I got an old HP Kayak station that had Win 2k server installed on it for free since the company was upgrading to new servers running 2k3. When used as a workstation, 2k Server seems rock freaking solid as compared to any other version of Windows that I've seen.
Some people won't have the option to stick with XP though. At home, sure you can run whatever OS you want, but at work it is a different story. Corporate IT departments are going to start forcing upgrades down (once they've tested it and found all the bugs relevant to that company's required apps).
Why bother? Most business software - word processing, spreadsheets, DB front ends, image editing, browsers, etc, will run just fine on XP over the next few years.
since most of the new features of vista seem to be either eye-candy, or not THAT difficult to recreate, does anybody know whether there's any way to make XP 'feel like' vista?
Take out half your RAM. Put in a hard drive 75% the size of your old drive. Remove your processor's clock crystal and replace it with one of half the frequency. Done.
And given the tendancy of the solar wind to strip off the atmosphere and our reversing magnetic field, mightn't some extra gas in the atmosphere be a good thing in the extreme long term
We're talking about 80ppm here, or.008% of the atmosphere. Not going to make any difference in the long term.
I am unwilling to shut down half a dozen industries, reduce lifestyles back to the 17th century and potentially kill millions through half a dozen causes that can be avoided by maintaining an oil based economy (think no fertilizers, no shipping, no refrigeration), based on, "Well this *might* be really bad."
Yes; conservation is important, but oil is also fundamantally *replaceable* as a source of energy! Think: orbiting solar power stations beaming power down via microwaves, nuclear fission, (eventually probably) nuclear fusion, wind, hydroelectric, etc. We also can use much less energy than we are currently using by conserving in ways that don't impact out lifestyles directly.
New houses can be designed to be more energy efficient and to take advantage of passive solar heat and cooling via natural air circulation
Incandescent light bulbs can be replaced with more efficient fluorescent lights
More efficient modern cars which aren't necessarily any smaller inside
this data supports the hypothesis that co2 and temperature are related, not that coal or hummers cause global warming. straw man #1.
Well, if increases levels of CO2 cause global warming, should we really be emitting more of it from previously sequestered sources into the atmosphere? My vote is No.
I do hope that this won't mean that ap/router manufacturers will actually start forcing people to pop those useless cds in and then read through several screens of EULAs and warnings before letting them use the device.
Why would they? The Web interface could also post a warning the first time that it was used. For that matter, it could even ask users what level of security they want outright. Either:
(a) pick a WPA key
(b) pick a WEP key
(c) firewall the unencrypted wireless off from the rest of the 'net (for shared wireless)
(d) no security
-b.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, 95% CPU usage from a Norton process is always a fun sight to behold. McAfee is even worse because certain versions have a bug that causes CPU usage to go through the roof when a certain logfile exceeds a size limit. Solution is to move or delete the old log.
-b.
Not really. Hetrogeneity of OS's will do a lot to prevent virus spread, because the same bugs are unlikely to be repeated across OS's.
-b.
I'll have to try Kaspersky, though, so far, Avast has worked pretty well for me. Avast's "OMG" warnings can be disabled, AFAIK, and all you get if you have a disabled component(s) is a little red slash on the Avast icon in the systray. And, even so, the warnings aren't as obnoxious as Norton.
-b.
Our "intro class for total n00bs" was actually taught in Scheme. Yep, talk about a language that was "different"!
4) It can also help you maintain legacy apps or business apps developed for Access or Excel. Maybe you can do new development in the language of your choice, but you have to maintain whatever legacy apps are already there. At least having exposure to VB can make it a much easier process.
I had to write a fairly complex Excel app for one job - took text capture from a Telnet session with a mainframe and converted it into something usable in spreadsheet form by the worker drones. Before that, people had just printed the screen cap and retyped it manually into Excel. I didn't really know VB - it still took me less than a day with an online VB help site and the Excel macro editor to write the thing. Maybe it wasn't pretty, but it worked fine!
Lastly, a university is not a vo/tech school. It's purpose is to develop and hone critical and analytical thinking skills, not to directly be a job training centre.
-b.
Which is broken in any browser other than Explorer. Good times.
-b.
I wonder how much of the "voluntarily" provided customer info consists of the following: Fu H. Kew 44 Noe Street Ware, MA 02666 e-mail: spammers@must.die.com
Yep, exactly like that, except for the set hardware profiles. Why should I pay $200+ for a specialized piece of hardware for obtimized gaming when I already own one - my PC. Assuming that PC games weren't encumbered with a general purpose OS, whether it be Windows, Linux, or OS X, they could run as well or faster than on specialized consoles. This was done all the time until the early 90s - I wonder why game cos stopped.
-b.
I think that the US has a much stronger entrenched tradition of computing from before Microsoft, when the "Internet" was academic/military UNIX boxes talking to each other. Most campus e-mail systems, even now, will still be based on some sort of UNIX or Linux - a lot of schools even give shell accounts where mail can be read with 'pine' or 'mutt' and where the 'finger' command still works...
-boso "Last login Tue June 6 2006 01:23 from ttyS1" zoku
Is this an XP SP2 thing? I've definitely seen the BSoD in a stock install of XP SP1.
-b.
I love the gadgets bar on the right side of the screen as you can customize it to have a clock, the recycle bin, calculator, and my personal favorite, dials that track memory usage and percentage of processor clock time being used.
IMHO, NeXTSTEP had the UI down in the early 90s. An easily-customizable "start" menu that you could open anywhere on the desktop by clicking on an area without a window. A window list that you could do the same with by clicking the other button. And the ability to "dock" applications and create application launchers on the right side of the screen. NeXTSTEP UI was clean, efficient, fast, and good-looking. The only thing that was missing was the ability to drag data files directly to the desktop, but that's easily remedied from a UI perspective. Nothing since or before has matched NeXTSTEP's good looks and ease of use, IMHO. Even OS X is slightly worse with their mish-mash of opened app icons and app launchers that they call a "Dock."
-b.
Agreed: BSoD's are pretty rare now. It's the *other* problems that suck, like Windows allowing 3rd party programs to grab 99% of CPU by default and slow the machine to a crawl, and the fact that Windows installs older than 6 months are often slow as molasses until you remove all of the malware, defrag, and figure out what else is slowing them down.
-b.
So go freelance and start supporting smaller corps. They often embrace open source, if only because things like Firefox seem to be more secure, and a computer down in a company with 5 computers matters more than one computer down out of 10,000 machines.
-b.
Nah, just people who want their servers to run well without too much maintenance and want to understand how everything works. Biggest problem with Windows is that it's non-transparent and relies too much on Registry-type databases.
Speaking of incompetents - when will Ford come out with a car (outside of Australia) that I'd actually want to drive? Either a hybrid that isn't a top-heavy truckette or a rear-wheel-drive (preferably manual) sedan that isn't gigantic like the Crown Vic..
-b.
Actually, SuSE seems to be the worst as far as out-of-the-box stability in UNIX-type OSs, especially with that gahdahful graphical 132x50 console mode that's turned on by default and tends to freeze the machine when switching consoles. Fortunately, vga=normal passed to the kernel solves *that* problem!
The best in my experience have been, in order: OpenBSD, Debian Stable, CentOS.
-b.
What (US) college actually uses VB for teaching computer science or in the engineering dept? My school's CS lab didn't even have x86 hardware until about 3 years ago when they switched from Sun workstations to Linux and BSD white boxes. The engineering dept seems to have mostly used C++, assembler for microcontrollers, and various modelling languages (Matlab, anyone?).
-b.
Anyone think that graphics/CPU-intensive games that run under *any* OS are a stupid idea. Wouldn't it be far better for them to use either their own partition or a DVD/Ramdisk filesystem and run a mini-OS that's optimized for speed and performance? The OS could use existing Windows drivers and hardware profiles read from the Windows partition so as not to have to reinvent the wheel afa drivers.
It's not like you have any real need for multitasking when playing certain games.
-b.
Actually, 2000 Server (can't speak for 2003) makes a rock-solid desktop OS as well, probably better than 2000 Pro or XP Pro. My install's been (knock on plastic!) running for 2 yrs now and gahd only knows how many years before that.
-b.
Surprise, surprise. Despite being a big name in the anti-malware business, Symantec seems to put out CPU hogging, slow, virus-insensitive crap. I tend to replace Norton with Avast! on most computers that I work with, since Avast! is faster and actually seems to detect viruses better than Norton.
-b.
It makes a darn good workstation, IMHO. I'm typing this on my Debian laptop, and Ubuntu/Kubuntu are relatively easy to install and use.
Speaking of server OS's, I got an old HP Kayak station that had Win 2k server installed on it for free since the company was upgrading to new servers running 2k3. When used as a workstation, 2k Server seems rock freaking solid as compared to any other version of Windows that I've seen.
-b.
Why bother? Most business software - word processing, spreadsheets, DB front ends, image editing, browsers, etc, will run just fine on XP over the next few years.
-b.
Take out half your RAM. Put in a hard drive 75% the size of your old drive. Remove your processor's clock crystal and replace it with one of half the frequency. Done.
-b.
We're talking about 80ppm here, or .008% of the atmosphere. Not going to make any difference in the long term.
-b.
Yes; conservation is important, but oil is also fundamantally *replaceable* as a source of energy! Think: orbiting solar power stations beaming power down via microwaves, nuclear fission, (eventually probably) nuclear fusion, wind, hydroelectric, etc. We also can use much less energy than we are currently using by conserving in ways that don't impact out lifestyles directly.
New houses can be designed to be more energy efficient and to take advantage of passive solar heat and cooling via natural air circulation
Incandescent light bulbs can be replaced with more efficient fluorescent lights
More efficient modern cars which aren't necessarily any smaller inside
More efficient appliances
-b.
Well, if increases levels of CO2 cause global warming, should we really be emitting more of it from previously sequestered sources into the atmosphere? My vote is No.
-b.
Why would they? The Web interface could also post a warning the first time that it was used. For that matter, it could even ask users what level of security they want outright. Either: (a) pick a WPA key (b) pick a WEP key (c) firewall the unencrypted wireless off from the rest of the 'net (for shared wireless) (d) no security -b.