At the risk of this thread becoming a list of statistics: 41.0% Internet explorer 6 17.7% \"Window (W.T.F.?!?) 14.4% e-SocietyRobot 8.92% Mozilla 5 4.05% Internet explorer 5 2.33% Googlebot 2.13% Ocelli 2.11% Mozilla 3.01 1.13% Slurp 1.07% Jetbot 0.65% msnbot 0.49% HenryTheMiragoRobot 0.35% Wget 0.26% NaverBot 0.24% Googlebot-Image
What's worse is that most of those "MSIE" hits are probably robots too -- just look at the number of copies of internet explorer downloading pages only linked-to from invisible hyperlinks...
(that's from a site serving about 7000 pages per day)
"The Association of Shareware Professions has loads of good info in and around its website. There are member-only newsgroups that are also very useful. It costs $100/year to be a member, but if you are planning to make a business out of it it is well worth it."
Presumably you can download some sort of crack that you type in to get free membership?
"Also, will using AdAware be enough to get these slimes to invoke the DMCA? "Circumventing access controls" and all that? And if they do, could they succeed?
If you think that's a problem, simply sue them for circumventing the access controls [adaware] to copy copyrighted material [your personal details] on your computer. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, and in this case, the game developers are behaving significantly more illegally than you are.
Don't bother with funny mods here, this is how the law is supposed to work, and those who crack your computer to "steal" from you are in the wrong, EULA or no.
"Very simple...any game that also installs adware on my system doesn't get installed on my system nor does it get bought to put on my system."
Yet gamers traditionally, are the group who put-up with "copy-protection" features, despite great inconvenience to themselves, and despite such software having occasional destructive effects. Basically, gamers have already shown that they have no need to be fully in control of their own computers.
We also note that gamers are one of the last groups of software users to staunchly resist any open-source or auditable software, often vociferously arguing the benefits of closed-source games, video-drivers, and operating systems (including the DRM-enabled WindowsXP). Many gamers on slashdot are vocally in opposition to those who use open-source software on their computers, the best example being in any "nVidia/xfree86 driver" debate. So again, gamers have shown that they have no interest in verifying the trustworthiness of software which runs on their computer.
Can you really say straightfaced, that gamers are likely to oppose some new form of malware? It would seem very uncharacteristic of them.
"If the situation would be reversed; if a technologically superior force invaded and occupied the country we live in and enforced the same type of government that exist in Iraq today, wouldn't you try to fight back until the enemy was gone, no matter what?"
Quintus: "People should know when they're conquered"
"I think this goes along with the saying: 'If you make something idiotproof, someone will build a better idiot'."
The article mentioned accelerometers whose orientation could only be determined by x-raying the component -- regardless of the people involved, you'd imagine that that would cause the odd problem or three
"WHEATON, Maryland (AP) -- A pregnant woman said she was handcuffed by transit police and forced to lie on her stomach during an arrest that began with her talking too loudly on her cell phone."
* 3 times the capacity of equvalently-priced iPod. * Replaceable batteries * Batteries last 10 hours if you don't set the backlight to turn on each time you press a button, or 1.5 hours if you do. * USB * Doesn't take power from a USB socket. If you plug it into a computer to transfer files, the battery dies in about 15 minutes * Batteries £30, power-adapters £20 * Mini version available * Bloody inconvenient driver software * Windows only * Driver software has EULA saying you're only allowed to install it on one machine. So you can't transfer files from one PC to another with it. * Someone started a linux project to interface with it, but I couldn't get it to compile. [gnomad]. No official support for linux.
Nice enough as capacity/price goes, but I'm planning to replace it with something I can synchronise with my actual computer, rather than having to take it to work and find a Windows computer each time I want to add music to it.
"Why isn't that relative in tyour address book? / Why don't you have whitelisting set up?"
(a) Because it would whitelist any emails sent from a virus-infected computer that that person had previously sent an email to.
(b) Because people like that change their address all the time. "Hi! I'm on AOL now -- see my new address?"
(a+b) Because people like that never sign their emails, nor do they use different email-addresses for personal, public, shopping, and mailing-lists.
I think his point was that you need to be able to check the things which might be legit, without having to wade through reams of stuff which is clearly crap.
For example, I put any HTML email into a special folder, and check it every couple of weeks in case some friend has a new hotmail account.
But stuff in the "contains GREETINGS FROM THE DESK OF..." folder can be deleted without any such consideration. So putting both types of email into a generic "spam" folder isn't always as helpful as it sounds.
"Unfortunately, probably not much you can do about this without blocking all such legit system messages."
Which many of us do routinely. So why bother sending faked "virus warning" messages at all, if the only effect is to worry some people with clean computers, and get the rest of us to block anything with "postmaster" in the header of the email.
As practicalities go, the one thing I really liked about the last APress book I got ('Dive into Python') was that when I wanted to refer to it at work, I didn't have to carry the book in, I just read the section I wanted on their website.
It was one of those "never going to buy another book without this facility" moments... how could we have missed something so useful for so long?
So back on topic, this book only has one chapter available for download, and it's in PDF rather than anything useful, so I guess it's not general policy to make all APress books downloadable.
I did find it amusing how Visual Basic, C#, and.NET each get their own top-level section at the APress website, while PHP, Perl and Python are down in the "Open-Source" section next to books describing products (Apache, Linux, Plone, MySQL, etc.)
"Let's not forget, the focus here is "business desktops". Not "development desktops". That means we need 100% interoperability with a variety of MS document formats, including"
Strangely, I just like to have a good word-processor. Getting stuff done quickly and easily can be more important than being able to open whatever random crap people send you in emails.
You mention that Word documents and Excel documents are fully-compatible with OpenOffice, but I'd like to extend that by saying: These file formats are compatible NOW. Migrate within the next year or forever lose your chance. The file formats will change, and history shows that microsoft will make it more difficult in the future for you to choose alternatives.
Powerpoint presentations... well let's just say most people don't keep them for long (new presentation for each meeting, etc.) so perhaps it's possible to (a) create new projects in some nice new tool such as kpresent or OpenOffice, (b) convert some old files by exporting as a common file format, (c) if there's any polically-inconvenient naysayers (i.e. the management team), hire a trained monkey to convert/retype their presentations for them, and (d) if anyone is monumentally stupid enough to use powerpoint as a graphics program, give them crossover-office to use. And don't encourage them in the future.
Phil Greenspun has some web-based presentation software which might be worth looking at, which doesn't support whoosh-y text:-) and has a nice centralised searchable, repository. You might even create a CSS file for your company's presentation format, so they all get updated each time for free.
MS-Project: I just mentioned in another post that I've written a web-based project planning software which is truly multi-user (assign owners to projects, and those owners can create sub-projects and assign tasks in each project to people etc.) which will be commercial but free (with source) for the first company to try it. Reply for details.
Also I notice that with project-planing software, you can't read MPP directly, but you can export from MS-Project to an XML format, and loads of programs read the exported format.
oh, p.s. Even if you've got MS everywhere, have a play with OpenOffice Draw for some diagrams, charts, etc. - thoroughly reccomended program!
"Corporate datastorage is about storing all the data of all your oil fields, in a way you're sure you don't loose it. It is about storing every single product that you make in a database, complete with tracking of location and which customer bought it."
Actually, we use Word documents for that. Lots and lots of word documents. On Windows servers with blank administrator passwords.
Don't you just love the corporate IT myth of everything being neat and organised, and running suitable good-quality software?
"These arguments get made a lot, but the fact of the matter is that they actually do own the copyrights on the materials, and legally should be allowed to dictate what happens to them."
Well the debate here is, whether they should be allowed to overturn laws that they find inconvenient, to replace them with laws specially-designed to help them make money.
Nothing to do with copyright at all. They're asking for their competitors, their critics, and lots of innocent bystanders, to be outlawed. And the worst thing? This could only happen when someone with that much money gets involved. Anyone else has to follow the laws. The RIAA* follows laws where it suits them, and when one stands in their way, they demand that it be changed. Did any of the little girls whose families were sued into bankrupcy get the chance to make what they were doing legal? Did anyone who wanted to copy something have the high courts at their beck and call, falling over themselves to do the bidding of whoever paid the most to congress? No. They just got trampled upon.
* p.s. let's not say RIAA for now, it's one layer above the people who are relevant. Let's call them "Junior Boys Own, the publishers of all records by The Underworld"
"However, that doesn't give them the right to participate in debates arranged by other groups."
If the debate is entitled "presidential candidates' debate", then I'd say that being a presidential candidate gives them the right to participate.
Especially if these debates are considered to be a big part of the election process (which they are), then claiming that it's some private party is rather ridiculous. It's the official debate between candidates for the election. The public, american, free election. Where people will vote for a leader for their country, hopefully with full knowledge of what each candidate has to offer. If such debates are private (which they aren't), then they should be scrapped in favour of a public debate. But they aren't: it's public money and university grounds, and it may be illegal but certainly undemocratic, to invent artibtrary rules to prevent some candidates from speaking.
"Crack sites and (my friend told me this) some pron sites used to have XPI install spyware (but you had to click ok to install it)"
You also have to be running Windows (or WINE) -- the XPI trojans all seem to contain just a regular windows.EXE file.
Presumably there's some way to modify this for unix-like systems, but you'd have to circumvent another layer of protection, i.e. the filesystem "executable" tag (unless mozilla does this automatically when you click "Install")
As a side-issue, I do quite like the way Mozilla makes you wait 5 seconds before enabling the "install" button -- I imagine that could prevent a lot of unintentional installs by distracted people, or those in the middle of pressing "enter" in another window when the XPI dialog appears.
"Let's see - $30/mo or a liability in the six figures. That's a tough call."
Did anyone else read this, and go straight to the XS4ALL website-hosting page? If I can find a way of paying in Euros, my websites are definitely moving.
Simple reason too. If I were ever unfortunate enough to be targeted by jokers with fraudulent takedown notices, an XS4ALL hosting would give my website a big advantage over "normal" hosting companies (yes including rackspace, if I remember the indymedia story correctly)
As to the $30/month thing, the cost of a website needs to include consideration of what it would cost you if the website were to fail (either though legal problem, technical problem, or natural disaster), so being able to mostly-eliminate one of those risks sounds like a pretty good proposition to me.
Slashdot Mirror
At the risk of this thread becoming a list of statistics:
41.0% Internet explorer 6
17.7% \"Window (W.T.F.?!?)
14.4% e-SocietyRobot
8.92% Mozilla 5
4.05% Internet explorer 5
2.33% Googlebot
2.13% Ocelli
2.11% Mozilla 3.01
1.13% Slurp
1.07% Jetbot
0.65% msnbot
0.49% HenryTheMiragoRobot
0.35% Wget
0.26% NaverBot
0.24% Googlebot-Image
What's worse is that most of those "MSIE" hits are probably robots too -- just look at the number of copies of internet explorer downloading pages only linked-to from invisible hyperlinks...
(that's from a site serving about 7000 pages per day)
"You can't null-route a slashdotting."
Bugzilla does
"The Association of Shareware Professions has loads of good info in and around its website. There are member-only newsgroups that are also very useful. It costs $100/year to be a member, but if you are planning to make a business out of it it is well worth it."
Presumably you can download some sort of crack that you type in to get free membership?
"For the college student, 2 is pretty much the only option available."
For the college rooms I've seen, it would probably cost less than $3 in tinfoil...
"Also, will using AdAware be enough to get these slimes to invoke the DMCA? "Circumventing access controls" and all that? And if they do, could they succeed?
If you think that's a problem, simply sue them for circumventing the access controls [adaware] to copy copyrighted material [your personal details] on your computer. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, and in this case, the game developers are behaving significantly more illegally than you are.
Don't bother with funny mods here, this is how the law is supposed to work, and those who crack your computer to "steal" from you are in the wrong, EULA or no.
"Very simple...any game that also installs adware on my system doesn't get installed on my system nor does it get bought to put on my system."
Yet gamers traditionally, are the group who put-up with "copy-protection" features, despite great inconvenience to themselves, and despite such software having occasional destructive effects. Basically, gamers have already shown that they have no need to be fully in control of their own computers.
We also note that gamers are one of the last groups of software users to staunchly resist any open-source or auditable software, often vociferously arguing the benefits of closed-source games, video-drivers, and operating systems (including the DRM-enabled WindowsXP). Many gamers on slashdot are vocally in opposition to those who use open-source software on their computers, the best example being in any "nVidia/xfree86 driver" debate. So again, gamers have shown that they have no interest in verifying the trustworthiness of software which runs on their computer.
Can you really say straightfaced, that gamers are likely to oppose some new form of malware? It would seem very uncharacteristic of them.
"$500 and $600? Lucky they're using Linux to keep the price down."
That's $600-as-in-beer, not $600-as-in-freedom...
"If the situation would be reversed; if a technologically superior force invaded and occupied the country we live in and enforced the same type of government that exist in Iraq today, wouldn't you try to fight back until the enemy was gone, no matter what?"
Quintus: "People should know when they're conquered"
Maximus: "Would you? Would I?"
"I think this goes along with the saying: 'If you make something idiotproof, someone will build a better idiot'."
The article mentioned accelerometers whose orientation could only be determined by x-raying the component -- regardless of the people involved, you'd imagine that that would cause the odd problem or three
"And we need devices to shut people up who talk too loud, or get rid of the fat people that sit beside you on the bus"
And your third wish?
"WHEATON, Maryland (AP) -- A pregnant woman said she was handcuffed by transit police and forced to lie on her stomach during an arrest that began with her talking too loudly on her cell phone."
"You have NO right to turn off TV's that don't belong to you."
Hmm, that reminds me of a theme from some sort of novel. A classic novel, I think. Can't remember the title though.
Good Citizen. Listen to the televisions.
"So which ones have user replacable batteries?"
The Nomad Zen does. Here's my review of it:
* 3 times the capacity of equvalently-priced iPod.
* Replaceable batteries
* Batteries last 10 hours if you don't set the backlight to turn on each time you press a button, or 1.5 hours if you do.
* USB
* Doesn't take power from a USB socket. If you plug it into a computer to transfer files, the battery dies in about 15 minutes
* Batteries £30, power-adapters £20
* Mini version available
* Bloody inconvenient driver software
* Windows only
* Driver software has EULA saying you're only allowed to install it on one machine. So you can't transfer files from one PC to another with it.
* Someone started a linux project to interface with it, but I couldn't get it to compile. [gnomad]. No official support for linux.
Nice enough as capacity/price goes, but I'm planning to replace it with something I can synchronise with my actual computer, rather than having to take it to work and find a Windows computer each time I want to add music to it.
"Why isn't that relative in tyour address book? / Why don't you have whitelisting set up?"
(a) Because it would whitelist any emails sent from a virus-infected computer that that person had previously sent an email to.
(b) Because people like that change their address all the time. "Hi! I'm on AOL now -- see my new address?"
(a+b) Because people like that never sign their emails, nor do they use different email-addresses for personal, public, shopping, and mailing-lists.
I think his point was that you need to be able to check the things which might be legit, without having to wade through reams of stuff which is clearly crap.
For example, I put any HTML email into a special folder, and check it every couple of weeks in case some friend has a new hotmail account.
But stuff in the "contains GREETINGS FROM THE DESK OF..." folder can be deleted without any such consideration. So putting both types of email into a generic "spam" folder isn't always as helpful as it sounds.
"Unfortunately, probably not much you can do about this without blocking all such legit system messages."
Which many of us do routinely. So why bother sending faked "virus warning" messages at all, if the only effect is to worry some people with clean computers, and get the rest of us to block anything with "postmaster" in the header of the email.
"This application is intended for single user machines"
Redundant. They already said it runs on Windows.
"PS: good luck trying to find someone who want to ride with you on this thing"
To be truly corporate, it should have 7 steering-wheels, and just one set of pedals...
"Also my binding broke after a week"
.NET each get their own top-level section at the APress website, while PHP, Perl and Python are down in the "Open-Source" section next to books describing products (Apache, Linux, Plone, MySQL, etc.)
As practicalities go, the one thing I really liked about the last APress book I got ('Dive into Python') was that when I wanted to refer to it at work, I didn't have to carry the book in, I just read the section I wanted on their website.
It was one of those "never going to buy another book without this facility" moments... how could we have missed something so useful for so long?
So back on topic, this book only has one chapter available for download, and it's in PDF rather than anything useful, so I guess it's not general policy to make all APress books downloadable.
I did find it amusing how Visual Basic, C#, and
"Let's not forget, the focus here is "business desktops". Not "development desktops". That means we need 100% interoperability with a variety of MS document formats, including"
:-) and has a nice centralised searchable, repository. You might even create a CSS file for your company's presentation format, so they all get updated each time for free.
Strangely, I just like to have a good word-processor. Getting stuff done quickly and easily can be more important than being able to open whatever random crap people send you in emails.
You mention that Word documents and Excel documents are fully-compatible with OpenOffice, but I'd like to extend that by saying: These file formats are compatible NOW. Migrate within the next year or forever lose your chance. The file formats will change, and history shows that microsoft will make it more difficult in the future for you to choose alternatives.
Powerpoint presentations... well let's just say most people don't keep them for long (new presentation for each meeting, etc.) so perhaps it's possible to (a) create new projects in some nice new tool such as kpresent or OpenOffice, (b) convert some old files by exporting as a common file format, (c) if there's any polically-inconvenient naysayers (i.e. the management team), hire a trained monkey to convert/retype their presentations for them, and (d) if anyone is monumentally stupid enough to use powerpoint as a graphics program, give them crossover-office to use. And don't encourage them in the future.
Phil Greenspun has some web-based presentation software which might be worth looking at, which doesn't support whoosh-y text
MS-Project: I just mentioned in another post that I've written a web-based project planning software which is truly multi-user (assign owners to projects, and those owners can create sub-projects and assign tasks in each project to people etc.) which will be commercial but free (with source) for the first company to try it. Reply for details.
Also I notice that with project-planing software, you can't read MPP directly, but you can export from MS-Project to an XML format, and loads of programs read the exported format.
oh, p.s. Even if you've got MS everywhere, have a play with OpenOffice Draw for some diagrams, charts, etc. - thoroughly reccomended program!
"The thing that we couldn't get a replacement for is MS Project, since there appears to be no freebie program that can read project files."
I've written a fairly nice web-based project planning system you could try. Can't help you with reading MS-Project files though.
"Corporate datastorage is about storing all the data of all your oil fields, in a way you're sure you don't loose it. It is about storing every single product that you make in a database, complete with tracking of location and which customer bought it."
Actually, we use Word documents for that. Lots and lots of word documents. On Windows servers with blank administrator passwords.
Don't you just love the corporate IT myth of everything being neat and organised, and running suitable good-quality software?
"These arguments get made a lot, but the fact of the matter is that they actually do own the copyrights on the materials, and legally should be allowed to dictate what happens to them."
Well the debate here is, whether they should be allowed to overturn laws that they find inconvenient, to replace them with laws specially-designed to help them make money.
Nothing to do with copyright at all. They're asking for their competitors, their critics, and lots of innocent bystanders, to be outlawed. And the worst thing? This could only happen when someone with that much money gets involved. Anyone else has to follow the laws. The RIAA* follows laws where it suits them, and when one stands in their way, they demand that it be changed. Did any of the little girls whose families were sued into bankrupcy get the chance to make what they were doing legal? Did anyone who wanted to copy something have the high courts at their beck and call, falling over themselves to do the bidding of whoever paid the most to congress? No. They just got trampled upon.
* p.s. let's not say RIAA for now, it's one layer above the people who are relevant. Let's call them "Junior Boys Own, the publishers of all records by The Underworld"
"However, that doesn't give them the right to participate in debates arranged by other groups."
If the debate is entitled "presidential candidates' debate", then I'd say that being a presidential candidate gives them the right to participate.
Especially if these debates are considered to be a big part of the election process (which they are), then claiming that it's some private party is rather ridiculous. It's the official debate between candidates for the election. The public, american, free election. Where people will vote for a leader for their country, hopefully with full knowledge of what each candidate has to offer. If such debates are private (which they aren't), then they should be scrapped in favour of a public debate. But they aren't: it's public money and university grounds, and it may be illegal but certainly undemocratic, to invent artibtrary rules to prevent some candidates from speaking.
"Crack sites and (my friend told me this) some pron sites used to have XPI install spyware (but you had to click ok to install it)"
.EXE file.
You also have to be running Windows (or WINE) -- the XPI trojans all seem to contain just a regular windows
Presumably there's some way to modify this for unix-like systems, but you'd have to circumvent another layer of protection, i.e. the filesystem "executable" tag (unless mozilla does this automatically when you click "Install")
As a side-issue, I do quite like the way Mozilla makes you wait 5 seconds before enabling the "install" button -- I imagine that could prevent a lot of unintentional installs by distracted people, or those in the middle of pressing "enter" in another window when the XPI dialog appears.
"Let's see - $30/mo or a liability in the six figures. That's a tough call."
Did anyone else read this, and go straight to the XS4ALL website-hosting page? If I can find a way of paying in Euros, my websites are definitely moving.
Simple reason too. If I were ever unfortunate enough to be targeted by jokers with fraudulent takedown notices, an XS4ALL hosting would give my website a big advantage over "normal" hosting companies (yes including rackspace, if I remember the indymedia story correctly)
As to the $30/month thing, the cost of a website needs to include consideration of what it would cost you if the website were to fail (either though legal problem, technical problem, or natural disaster), so being able to mostly-eliminate one of those risks sounds like a pretty good proposition to me.
"When will we be dropping HTTP and HTML in favor of more metadata-friendly protocols and file formats?"
When google-spammers stop putting 8 million irrelevant words in their
<meta name="" content="">
tags?