Personally, I wasn't clear on that. Did they mean that I can't use it at work for in-house systems at all, or did they only that I can not use it in commercial software development efforts where the actual product is a piece of software to be purchase/licensed/rented by paying customers?
The way it's written, both uses seems prohibited, but something tells me that's not exactly what they had in mind.
It also gives them something to play with besides that silly Java stuff.:-)
That would be the reason they did this IMHO. The fact that the source is out there too will give people no end of pleasure too, especially teachers. I think they're trying to convince the acedemic world that they're really a kinder, nicer, more open company now.
They may well be that.... I can hope can't I?!
I dunno what to think anymore. I know Java has some definite advantages in terms of being open, but there again, we're essentially at the mercy of vendors who will support open (or shared - whatever) source supporters as long as it suits their purposes in the market.
However, I would need a sterile clean room to build one that would function properly and not go beserk in orbit. I know everyone out there has thought about this at least once?
Maybe I'm just weird, but the idea of constructing a clean room in my house has NEVER occurred to me. But then, I'm probably just the odd one out.
I frankly don't know enough about the situation to get really specific, but my idea was that they would proxy within the network before they got to the ISP that's doing the filtering. Now, if by "ISP" we mean before the traffic leaves Panama, that could be a proxy server several hops up from the client and the software would only need to be installed there. If by "ISP", we mean the direct ISP for the user, then that might be a proxy "server" that runs locally on the client's workstation and the client is configured to proxy to itself on port 8080 or something like that.
In fact, I think it would be a piece of cake to cobble together a proxy server that did just that. The clients wouldn't even have to change their software other than to point to the intermediate proxy server.
The problem here though comes in talking to the rest of the world. The above-mentioned servers have to direct the traffic to the destination servers at some point. Those servers are completely outside the control of the subversives to be. Those servers have to know that the traffic being received is actually VoIP and deal with it appropriately.
It can be done, but it will require servers outside of Panama to cooperate with the scheme.
Of course, once the Panama government locates those sites (shouldn't be hard) they'll start gopher whacking them with a variety of tactics: legal shutdowns through warrants, DOS attacks, etc. Vendors from outside of Panama will also rush to fill the void, and that software will also subsequently be outlawed.
The bottom line though is that the government will not be able to control the VoIP "problem" entirely without just pulling the plug on all Internet activity. That would be a steep price and they will face economic pressure to not do it.
Oh well, they'll learn this one the hard way I guess.
I understand the concept of real-time and hard real-time vs. "soft" real-time, so I'm not totally ignorant. But, what I don't understand is why one would not want real-time characteristics in an OS? In other words, from my uninformed perspective, real-time design techniques always seem to improve system performance. Therefore, it looks to me like we would always want this to be part of any OS we use.
No? If not, why not?
(I guess one of my assumptions here is that real-time techniques always lead to faster systems.)
That point is that you work/fight for something you believe in. I don't know anyone who accomplished anything who simply wanted to have things . Even the most materialistic people I know feel some deeper meaning in their activity; they don't do it for its own sake.
You talk about the dotcom boom as if it were some kind of freak accident, but it wasn't. The eager engineers who founded all these companies really truly believed that their ideas and products had added value.
I'm sorry, but I don't think they did think that. They just wanted the money to give them an opportunity to do something fun. It was a good time for that. No one expected a major economic downturn to appear because so many people at once had fun on someone else's dime, but that's exactly what happened.
Everyone one of those "innovators" lost their jobs, and good riddance I say. I hope they spend a few months serving up lattes at Caribou or some such for their sins. Really... Maybe they'll re-enter the field again in the future and appreciate a decent job and interesting with decent and interesting people.
It was stupidity on a grand scale and I hope it never happens again in my lifetime.
"This is one case where dead trees win every time."
I'll disagree on this. I would agree if the only recipes one had available were ones that had been typed in by oneself. However, with the big bad Internet available, it's very feasible to obtain recipes that you will never see in print (unless you print them out of course - just try fitting those into a traditional recipe book!).
I do agree that a test drive with a laptop is a great idea to prove things out. She may very well decide that the laptop is the ideal anyway. See my other post for why.
.. and your really nice options are super expensive and will probably require custom carpentry.
What we wound up doing is buying a older used laptop on eBay for about $400 and putting a wireless card in it that goes to my WAP11 in the office. We just leave the laptop on the counter all the time, with a piece of wood underneath it. The wood will prevent the countertop from discoloring from the heat of the laptop's CPU and it also raises the laptop off the counter a bit, so if something spills on the counter, the laptop isn't necessarily going to fry (although a direct hit would still take it out).
So there you have it. It works great for my wife and she uses it everyday. It's much less intrusive than one might think since a CRT isn't involved. I guess if you must have a truly hidden option, then you could look into an iMac.
I suggest that you convince your management that staff augmentation is a really cool market to be in and doesn't present nearly the headaches that project work does, but does present all the upside.
One little problem here: the staff augmentation market is dying a violent death. A resurgence in that market segment is not in the cards at this point. Your consulting firm will either get with the project work program (for real, not just on paper), or it will fold.
I suppose Mozilla might cover some of the WebWasher functionality, but WebWasher also rids your of web bugs and other annoyances. Furthermore, WebWasher also runs on Linux. I haven't used it, but I'm betting it works just fine.
This is from my previous post at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=42016&cid=4432 394
Note, I'm not karma whoring, I could care less.
--
(You will have to graduate from newbie status in order to take advantage of my advice. This means that you will have to climb the learning curve and actually go read some stuff. You can spend a chunk of cash on products to avoid doing just that, but that's much less fun.)
If you're doing things like turning on file sharing or sharing printers, it's (supposedly) very easy to hack you. I say supposedly only because I haven't actually tried this. It's such an infamous hole though that I do believe it. To turn this off, unbind the NetBIOS protocol from the modem/network card that connects you to the Internet. In Windows 2000, that you means you go to the Properties for your network connection (in the Control Panel) and uncheck the 'File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks' option. (It's very easy to fix this in Win9x too using roughly the same technique.) You may have to reboot, I don't recall. That problem will then be solved.
Now to protect yourself from other intrusions and threats.
If you're just running a dial-up connection and don't leave your machine on the network for extended periods of time, then a product like ZoneAlarm (www.zonelabs.com - look for the free version) will serve you well. Actually, it serves you well in two ways: 1) it protects your machine from the outside world coming into your machine in an unauthorized fashion and 2) it protects adware on your machine from phoning home without your permission (actually it prevents everything from using the Internet until you grant permission, not just adware). This is sufficient for dialup.
For broadband users and users who want to leave their machine on the Internet for extended periods of time (more than a couple hours at a time), I recommend using an honest to goodness separate firewall. There is a lot that can be said about this, far more than I know really, but I well give you a couple pointers.
First of all, one of your options is to use a second PC as the firewall. It will need to have 2 network cards, you will need a router or hub for your home LAN, and you will have to get the cable modem (or DSL for that matter; with which I have no experience - shouldn't be too hard) working with that extra PC (via Windows would be easiest to start with). Once that's setup, go grab a Linux distribution like IPCop (or SmoothWall - they're very similar, in fact they were the same product at one time), and install it on that PC. It will require that you reformat the hard drive, so don't plan on storing any files on it. A small hard drive is sufficient. There are FAQs and forums on the IPCop and SmoothWall sites that will help get you setup.
Your second option in the category of 'real protection' (for home users anyway) is to just go buy a hardware firewall. So instead of a second PC, you just go buy a device that does essentially the same thing. I won't go into detail on these as I have no experience with them. I just thought you should know about them.
Two last points: -PLEASE keep a current anti-virus product actively running on your machine and keep it up to date. If you need a free one, go to http://www.grisoft.com to get the free personal version of the AVG anti-virus product. This one has saved my butt several times from several infections. It may or may not be the best product out there, but it works for me.
-To protect yourself from browser window popups and other shenanigans, go grab WebWasher at http://www.webwasher.com/en/products/wwash/downloa d_license.htm. You will occasionally find that it interferese with pages that make heavy use of Javascript, but you can turn it off when needed. The added protection from annoying web sites is worth the small inconvenience it may sometimes cause.
As always, this advice is just a starting point. Today's perfect security solution may be an open door tomorrow. It's up to you to keep yourself informed and to take action when problems arise.
Nope, sorry, I can't agree. If you want the best browser going on Linux, you need to use Mozilla. If you want to use Mozilla, you need X.
Why should command line users have to sacrifice the best apps so they can work in their preferred manner?
My pet peeve with all of this is that almost all window managers (Windows XP included) do not give you an intuitive way to ditch the mouse in all situation. You've got to dig deep and long to find all the keyboard shortcuts available, and some aren't even documented anymore. Why?!
Re:It's $14.00 at the Tattered Cover
on
Slack
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, well with security like theirs, the FBI or whomever hardly has to *ask* for permission. They can just download the data at will.
They had better get used to it. The type of scripting you're talking about is now easily automated with code generation tools. It won't be too long now that the price point on this sort of activity (assuming you're in a consulting role here) for these projects get so low, that anyone who still does it all by hand won't be able to stay in business. Heck, it's already happening.
Abstraction = less code Less code = shorter project Shorter project = less expensive project Less expensive project = happier customers Happier customers = more business for you and less for the competition
Please, do me a favor and ignore my advice.;+)
Re:HOW-TO: CYA on the Internet while using Windows
on
Stopping NetBIOS Spam?
·
· Score: 2
Simply put, you get a virus by running a program which is already infected with the virus. The infected program can come from someone who purposefully infected it, or it can come from someone who is unintentially spreading it to you.
Let's take a couple of examples:
1. Someone sends you an executable game via email, 'ElfBowling.exe' for example. You trust this person, so you save the file, fire up the game, and proceed to knock over some elves. The next day, you find out that everybody in your email address book received messages from you encouraging them to visit some porn sites. What happened? You ran an untrusted program. I think you'll understand this example.
2. Someone sends you their resume. You trust this person, so you save the file, and fire up MS Word to see it. The next day, you find out that everybody in your email address book received messages from you encouraging them to visit some porn sites. What happened? You didn't run an untrusted program, right? Well, no you didn't, not knowingly at least. See, Word documents can contain macros. Macros can do a number of things, like make text bold, save files, etc. Macros can also be used for bad things, like deleting all your files, for example. Again, we're back to a program that's causes the problem.
I *really* recommend that you get an anti-virus program and check out your system(s). You may have a virus and not even know it. Many viruses don't give you any visible clue that they're present until they do something obnoxious. Then it's too late. You may have to trash the entire hard drive just to clean up.
Hope that helps...
Computer games = generation gap?
on
The Aging Gamer
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I wonder if, when we're all senior citizens and fragging away on each other with Quake XXXVI, and taunting each other with broadband audio and vidio feeds, if the kids will pass us by and scoff. Maybe they would says things like "What's wrong with those old farts?! Why do they play that crap when they could just talk to each other?"
Perhaps there *is* hope for our species after all.
of course since the languages are so similiar why not just use Java in the first place?
That's somewhat true from a pure language standpoint, but I think you'll find developing for the two environments to be *vastly* different in terms of all the little details that matter and can make life pleasant or a living hell. Whether you're making your life pleasant or hellish is a function of how much you have to swim against the current in your current organization to use one tool set or the other.
Surprise, surprise, this isn't a technical issue. Within the context of a corporate operational environment, it's a cultural issue.
I think Microsoft is correct in stating that language choice is no longer the most relevant problem in software development anymore (if it ever really was).
(You will have to graduate from newbie status in order to take advantage of my advice. This means that you will have to climb the learning curve and actually go read some stuff. You can spend a chunk of cash on products to avoid doing just that, but that's much less fun.)
If you're doing things like turning on file sharing or sharing printers, it's (supposedly) very easy to hack you. I say supposedly only because I haven't actually tried this. It's such an infamous hole though that I do believe it. To turn this off, unbind the NetBIOS protocol from the modem/network card that connects you to the Internet. In Windows 2000, that you means you go to the Properties for your network connection (in the Control Panel) and uncheck the 'File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks' option. (It's very easy to fix this in Win9x too using roughly the same technique.) You may have to reboot, I don't recall. That problem will then be solved.
Now to protect yourself from other intrusions and threats.
If you're just running a dial-up connection and don't leave your machine on the network for extended periods of time, then a product like ZoneAlarm (www.zonelabs.com - look for the free version) will serve you well. Actually, it serves you well in two ways: 1) it protects your machine from the outside world coming into your machine in an unauthorized fashion and 2) it protects adware on your machine from phoning home without your permission (actually it prevents everything from using the Internet until you grant permission, not just adware). This is sufficient for dialup.
For broadband users and users who want to leave their machine on the Internet for extended periods of time (more than a couple hours at a time), I recommend using an honest to goodness separate firewall. There is a lot that can be said about this, far more than I know really, but I well give you a couple pointers.
First of all, one of your options is to use a second PC as the firewall. It will need to have 2 network cards, you will need a router or hub for your home LAN, and you will have to get the cable modem (or DSL for that matter; with which I have no experience - shouldn't be too hard) working with that extra PC (via Windows would be easiest to start with). Once that's setup, go grab a Linux distribution like IPCop (or SmoothWall - they're very similar, in fact they were the same product at one time), and install it on that PC. It will require that you reformat the hard drive, so don't plan on storing any files on it. A small hard drive is sufficient. There are FAQs and forums on the IPCop and SmoothWall sites that will help get you setup.
Your second option in the category of 'real protection' (for home users anyway) is to just go buy a hardware firewall. So instead of a second PC, you just go buy a device that does essentially the same thing. I won't go into detail on these as I have no experience with them. I just thought you should know about them.
Two last points: -PLEASE keep a current anti-virus product actively running on your machine and keep it up to date. If you need a free one, go to http://www.grisoft.com to get the free personal version of the AVG anti-virus product. This one has saved my butt several times from several infections. It may or may not be the best product out there, but it works for me.
-To protect yourself from browser window popups and other shenanigans, go grab WebWasher at http://www.webwasher.com/en/products/wwash/downloa d_license.htm. You will occasionally find that it interferese with pages that make heavy use of Javascript, but you can turn it off when needed. The added protection from annoying web sites is worth the small inconvenience it may sometimes cause.
As always, this advice is just a starting point. Today's perfect security solution may be an open door tomorrow. It's up to you to keep yourself informed and to take action when problems arise.
Good luck and have fun!
Re:An indictment of the Python programming languag
on
The Python Cookbook
·
· Score: 2
Ah yes, another attack from yet another person too cowardly to actually own up to their writing. I don't normally make mistakes like that, but I am big enough to own up to them and correct myself when needed. I can't say the same thing about most ACs.
For the record (without even using a dictionary): their = possessive they're = they are there = not here
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I wasn't clear on that. Did they mean that I can't use it at work for in-house systems at all, or did they only that I can not use it in commercial software development efforts where the actual product is a piece of software to be purchase/licensed/rented by paying customers?
The way it's written, both uses seems prohibited, but something tells me that's not exactly what they had in mind.
It also gives them something to play with besides that silly Java stuff. :-)
That would be the reason they did this IMHO. The fact that the source is out there too will give people no end of pleasure too, especially teachers. I think they're trying to convince the acedemic world that they're really a kinder, nicer, more open company now.
They may well be that.... I can hope can't I?!
I dunno what to think anymore. I know Java has some definite advantages in terms of being open, but there again, we're essentially at the mercy of vendors who will support open (or shared - whatever) source supporters as long as it suits their purposes in the market.
However, I would need a sterile clean room to build one that would function properly and not go beserk in orbit. I know everyone out there has thought about this at least once?
Maybe I'm just weird, but the idea of constructing a clean room in my house has NEVER occurred to me. But then, I'm probably just the odd one out.
*sheesh*
I frankly don't know enough about the situation to get really specific, but my idea was that they would proxy within the network before they got to the ISP that's doing the filtering. Now, if by "ISP" we mean before the traffic leaves Panama, that could be a proxy server several hops up from the client and the software would only need to be installed there. If by "ISP", we mean the direct ISP for the user, then that might be a proxy "server" that runs locally on the client's workstation and the client is configured to proxy to itself on port 8080 or something like that.
More clear?
In fact, I think it would be a piece of cake to cobble together a proxy server that did just that. The clients wouldn't even have to change their software other than to point to the intermediate proxy server.
The problem here though comes in talking to the rest of the world. The above-mentioned servers have to direct the traffic to the destination servers at some point. Those servers are completely outside the control of the subversives to be. Those servers have to know that the traffic being received is actually VoIP and deal with it appropriately.
It can be done, but it will require servers outside of Panama to cooperate with the scheme.
Of course, once the Panama government locates those sites (shouldn't be hard) they'll start gopher whacking them with a variety of tactics: legal shutdowns through warrants, DOS attacks, etc. Vendors from outside of Panama will also rush to fill the void, and that software will also subsequently be outlawed.
The bottom line though is that the government will not be able to control the VoIP "problem" entirely without just pulling the plug on all Internet activity. That would be a steep price and they will face economic pressure to not do it.
Oh well, they'll learn this one the hard way I guess.
I understand the concept of real-time and hard real-time vs. "soft" real-time, so I'm not totally ignorant. But, what I don't understand is why one would not want real-time characteristics in an OS? In other words, from my uninformed perspective, real-time design techniques always seem to improve system performance. Therefore, it looks to me like we would always want this to be part of any OS we use.
No? If not, why not?
(I guess one of my assumptions here is that real-time techniques always lead to faster systems.)
So, then who is your 'Prince'? Your family.
That point is that you work/fight for something you believe in. I don't know anyone who accomplished anything who simply wanted to have things . Even the most materialistic people I know feel some deeper meaning in their activity; they don't do it for its own sake.
You talk about the dotcom boom as if it were some kind of freak accident, but it wasn't. The eager engineers who founded all these companies really truly believed that their ideas and products had added value.
I'm sorry, but I don't think they did think that. They just wanted the money to give them an opportunity to do something fun. It was a good time for that. No one expected a major economic downturn to appear because so many people at once had fun on someone else's dime, but that's exactly what happened.
Everyone one of those "innovators" lost their jobs, and good riddance I say. I hope they spend a few months serving up lattes at Caribou or some such for their sins. Really... Maybe they'll re-enter the field again in the future and appreciate a decent job and interesting with decent and interesting people.
It was stupidity on a grand scale and I hope it never happens again in my lifetime.
Same thing. ;+)
"This is one case where dead trees win every time."
I'll disagree on this. I would agree if the only recipes one had available were ones that had been typed in by oneself. However, with the big bad Internet available, it's very feasible to obtain recipes that you will never see in print (unless you print them out of course - just try fitting those into a traditional recipe book!).
I do agree that a test drive with a laptop is a great idea to prove things out. She may very well decide that the laptop is the ideal anyway. See my other post for why.
Where the heck do you find these? I've never heard of them.
.. and your really nice options are super expensive and will probably require custom carpentry.
What we wound up doing is buying a older used laptop on eBay for about $400 and putting a wireless card in it that goes to my WAP11 in the office. We just leave the laptop on the counter all the time, with a piece of wood underneath it. The wood will prevent the countertop from discoloring from the heat of the laptop's CPU and it also raises the laptop off the counter a bit, so if something spills on the counter, the laptop isn't necessarily going to fry (although a direct hit would still take it out).
So there you have it. It works great for my wife and she uses it everyday. It's much less intrusive than one might think since a CRT isn't involved. I guess if you must have a truly hidden option, then you could look into an iMac.
Enjoy!
http://www.controlchaos.com/
I suggest that you convince your management that staff augmentation is a really cool market to be in and doesn't present nearly the headaches that project work does, but does present all the upside.
One little problem here: the staff augmentation market is dying a violent death. A resurgence in that market segment is not in the cards at this point. Your consulting firm will either get with the project work program (for real, not just on paper), or it will fold.
Good luck.
I suppose Mozilla might cover some of the WebWasher functionality, but WebWasher also rids your of web bugs and other annoyances. Furthermore, WebWasher also runs on Linux. I haven't used it, but I'm betting it works just fine.
This is from my previous post at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=42016&cid=4432 394
a d_license.htm. You will occasionally find that it interferese with pages that make heavy use of Javascript, but you can turn it off when needed. The added protection from annoying web sites is worth the small inconvenience it may sometimes cause.
Note, I'm not karma whoring, I could care less.
--
(You will have to graduate from newbie status in order to take advantage of my advice. This means that you will have to climb the learning curve and actually go read some stuff. You can spend a chunk of cash on products to avoid doing just that, but that's much less fun.)
If you're doing things like turning on file sharing or sharing printers, it's (supposedly) very easy to hack you. I say supposedly only because I haven't actually tried this. It's such an infamous hole though that I do believe it. To turn this off, unbind the NetBIOS protocol from the modem/network card that connects you to the Internet. In Windows 2000, that you means you go to the Properties for your network connection (in the Control Panel) and uncheck the 'File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks' option. (It's very easy to fix this in Win9x too using roughly the same technique.) You may have to reboot, I don't recall. That problem will then be solved.
Now to protect yourself from other intrusions and threats.
If you're just running a dial-up connection and don't leave your machine on the network for extended periods of time, then a product like ZoneAlarm (www.zonelabs.com - look for the free version) will serve you well. Actually, it serves you well in two ways: 1) it protects your machine from the outside world coming into your machine in an unauthorized fashion and 2) it protects adware on your machine from phoning home without your permission (actually it prevents everything from using the Internet until you grant permission, not just adware). This is sufficient for dialup.
For broadband users and users who want to leave their machine on the Internet for extended periods of time (more than a couple hours at a time), I recommend using an honest to goodness separate firewall. There is a lot that can be said about this, far more than I know really, but I well give you a couple pointers.
First of all, one of your options is to use a second PC as the firewall. It will need to have 2 network cards, you will need a router or hub for your home LAN, and you will have to get the cable modem (or DSL for that matter; with which I have no experience - shouldn't be too hard) working with that extra PC (via Windows would be easiest to start with). Once that's setup, go grab a Linux distribution like IPCop (or SmoothWall - they're very similar, in fact they were the same product at one time), and install it on that PC. It will require that you reformat the hard drive, so don't plan on storing any files on it. A small hard drive is sufficient. There are FAQs and forums on the IPCop and SmoothWall sites that will help get you setup.
Your second option in the category of 'real protection' (for home users anyway) is to just go buy a hardware firewall. So instead of a second PC, you just go buy a device that does essentially the same thing. I won't go into detail on these as I have no experience with them. I just thought you should know about them.
Two last points:
-PLEASE keep a current anti-virus product actively running on your machine and keep it up to date. If you need a free one, go to http://www.grisoft.com to get the free personal version of the AVG anti-virus product. This one has saved my butt several times from several infections. It may or may not be the best product out there, but it works for me.
-To protect yourself from browser window popups and other shenanigans, go grab WebWasher at http://www.webwasher.com/en/products/wwash/downlo
As always, this advice is just a starting point. Today's perfect security solution may be an open door tomorrow. It's up to you to keep yourself informed and to take action when problems arise.
Good luck and have fun!
Well, I am on very thin ice here, knowledge-wise, but doesn't Autocad do this very thing?
So, yeah, it's feasible.
Nope, sorry, I can't agree. If you want the best browser going on Linux, you need to use Mozilla. If you want to use Mozilla, you need X.
Why should command line users have to sacrifice the best apps so they can work in their preferred manner?
My pet peeve with all of this is that almost all window managers (Windows XP included) do not give you an intuitive way to ditch the mouse in all situation. You've got to dig deep and long to find all the keyboard shortcuts available, and some aren't even documented anymore. Why?!
Yeah, well with security like theirs, the FBI or whomever hardly has to *ask* for permission. They can just download the data at will.
Sheesh... I think I'll stick with Amazon.
They had better get used to it. The type of scripting you're talking about is now easily automated with code generation tools. It won't be too long now that the price point on this sort of activity (assuming you're in a consulting role here) for these projects get so low, that anyone who still does it all by hand won't be able to stay in business. Heck, it's already happening.
;+)
Abstraction = less code
Less code = shorter project
Shorter project = less expensive project
Less expensive project = happier customers
Happier customers = more business for you and less for the competition
Please, do me a favor and ignore my advice.
Simply put, you get a virus by running a program which is already infected with the virus. The infected program can come from someone who purposefully infected it, or it can come from someone who is unintentially spreading it to you.
Let's take a couple of examples:
1. Someone sends you an executable game via email, 'ElfBowling.exe' for example. You trust this person, so you save the file, fire up the game, and proceed to knock over some elves. The next day, you find out that everybody in your email address book received messages from you encouraging them to visit some porn sites. What happened? You ran an untrusted program. I think you'll understand this example.
2. Someone sends you their resume. You trust this person, so you save the file, and fire up MS Word to see it. The next day, you find out that everybody in your email address book received messages from you encouraging them to visit some porn sites. What happened? You didn't run an untrusted program, right? Well, no you didn't, not knowingly at least. See, Word documents can contain macros. Macros can do a number of things, like make text bold, save files, etc. Macros can also be used for bad things, like deleting all your files, for example. Again, we're back to a program that's causes the problem.
I *really* recommend that you get an anti-virus program and check out your system(s). You may have a virus and not even know it. Many viruses don't give you any visible clue that they're present until they do something obnoxious. Then it's too late. You may have to trash the entire hard drive just to clean up.
Hope that helps...
I wonder if, when we're all senior citizens and fragging away on each other with Quake XXXVI, and taunting each other with broadband audio and vidio feeds, if the kids will pass us by and scoff. Maybe they would says things like "What's wrong with those old farts?! Why do they play that crap when they could just talk to each other?"
Perhaps there *is* hope for our species after all.
of course since the languages are so similiar why not just use Java in the first place?
That's somewhat true from a pure language standpoint, but I think you'll find developing for the two environments to be *vastly* different in terms of all the little details that matter and can make life pleasant or a living hell. Whether you're making your life pleasant or hellish is a function of how much you have to swim against the current in your current organization to use one tool set or the other.
Surprise, surprise, this isn't a technical issue. Within the context of a corporate operational environment, it's a cultural issue.
I think Microsoft is correct in stating that language choice is no longer the most relevant problem in software development anymore (if it ever really was).
(You will have to graduate from newbie status in order to take advantage of my advice. This means that you will have to climb the learning curve and actually go read some stuff. You can spend a chunk of cash on products to avoid doing just that, but that's much less fun.)
a d_license.htm. You will occasionally find that it interferese with pages that make heavy use of Javascript, but you can turn it off when needed. The added protection from annoying web sites is worth the small inconvenience it may sometimes cause.
If you're doing things like turning on file sharing or sharing printers, it's (supposedly) very easy to hack you. I say supposedly only because I haven't actually tried this. It's such an infamous hole though that I do believe it. To turn this off, unbind the NetBIOS protocol from the modem/network card that connects you to the Internet. In Windows 2000, that you means you go to the Properties for your network connection (in the Control Panel) and uncheck the 'File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks' option. (It's very easy to fix this in Win9x too using roughly the same technique.) You may have to reboot, I don't recall. That problem will then be solved.
Now to protect yourself from other intrusions and threats.
If you're just running a dial-up connection and don't leave your machine on the network for extended periods of time, then a product like ZoneAlarm (www.zonelabs.com - look for the free version) will serve you well. Actually, it serves you well in two ways: 1) it protects your machine from the outside world coming into your machine in an unauthorized fashion and 2) it protects adware on your machine from phoning home without your permission (actually it prevents everything from using the Internet until you grant permission, not just adware). This is sufficient for dialup.
For broadband users and users who want to leave their machine on the Internet for extended periods of time (more than a couple hours at a time), I recommend using an honest to goodness separate firewall. There is a lot that can be said about this, far more than I know really, but I well give you a couple pointers.
First of all, one of your options is to use a second PC as the firewall. It will need to have 2 network cards, you will need a router or hub for your home LAN, and you will have to get the cable modem (or DSL for that matter; with which I have no experience - shouldn't be too hard) working with that extra PC (via Windows would be easiest to start with). Once that's setup, go grab a Linux distribution like IPCop (or SmoothWall - they're very similar, in fact they were the same product at one time), and install it on that PC. It will require that you reformat the hard drive, so don't plan on storing any files on it. A small hard drive is sufficient. There are FAQs and forums on the IPCop and SmoothWall sites that will help get you setup.
Your second option in the category of 'real protection' (for home users anyway) is to just go buy a hardware firewall. So instead of a second PC, you just go buy a device that does essentially the same thing. I won't go into detail on these as I have no experience with them. I just thought you should know about them.
Two last points:
-PLEASE keep a current anti-virus product actively running on your machine and keep it up to date. If you need a free one, go to http://www.grisoft.com to get the free personal version of the AVG anti-virus product. This one has saved my butt several times from several infections. It may or may not be the best product out there, but it works for me.
-To protect yourself from browser window popups and other shenanigans, go grab WebWasher at http://www.webwasher.com/en/products/wwash/downlo
As always, this advice is just a starting point. Today's perfect security solution may be an open door tomorrow. It's up to you to keep yourself informed and to take action when problems arise.
Good luck and have fun!
Ah yes, another attack from yet another person too cowardly to actually own up to their writing. I don't normally make mistakes like that, but I am big enough to own up to them and correct myself when needed. I can't say the same thing about most ACs.
For the record (without even using a dictionary):
their = possessive
they're = they are
there = not here
It's a typo that's all. I made a mistake.