I started mapping wifi networks with openwlanmap, which will likely be used by GNOME, a few weeks ago. Now it seems like Mozilla products will use their own database. Why cannot projects just work together, so we have 1 good database used by all FLOSS applications?
The problem is that xda is full of this kind of crap. Kernels which disable fsync (libEAT-MY-DATA, anyone?), exotic I/O schedulers and CPU governors, overclocking processors and other hacks... Very often, they do not have any measurable effect, or even cause new problems, such as freezes, hangs, sleep of death,...
I wonder if the Chinese government is aware of MediaSentry's track record â" i.e. all the good things it has accomplished so far for the Big 4 record companies
KDE 4 has great ideas, but kde 4.0 was not ready for use by the masses and was very buggy (I have a collegue using 4.0.5 and he's constantly having kwin crashes and other problematic behaviour especially with dual screens in either extend and clone mode).
While KDE 4.1 will be a lot better, again several important features have been moved to 4.2. For example with KDE 4.1, users will have a desktop where they can put desktop icons the a folderview widget or outside of that widget, on the plasma desktop itself. These two "desktop icon types" have very different behaviour, which will be extremely different to understand to non-geeks. This will be really fixed in 4.2 where it will be possible to set the folderview as the desktop itself. The number of plasma widgets shipped by default in KDE 4.2 is still rather limited (no good RSS reader, weather applet, system monitor etc). Phonon/xine/knotify4 as included in KDE 4.1 is not very friendly for your laptop's battery life. All of this will probably be fixed for KDE 4.2.
I heard the administrator mode in systemsettings is not working and that a migration to policykit to make this work, is planned for kde 4.2. GNOME is using policykit already since a year if I'm not mistaken.
So while KDE 4.1 is a great release for advanced users (I'm typing this from KDE 4.1 RC1 with nice desktop effects!), you don't want to migrate your average non-geek family member friend or collegue to it.
It's unfortunate that KDE developers still try to deny or at least greatly minimize the impact of these kind of problems. A little bit more understanding from both sides (developers and users) and a bit less technology hyping, would be a nice thing.
No it was not a false positive. Another friend who received the file and who was using a different anti-virus program, got the same alert. After installing an anti-virus program on the first friend's PC, he could indeed confirm that his system was infected.
This nonsense if you are using Windows. Several years ago, when I was still using Windows, I received an executable file, developed by a friend for a computer science course. My anti-virus alerted me that the file had been infected. My friend was not even aware of this infection on his system, and I surely would be infected too if I did not have an anti-virus program. The file was coming from a friend who's an advanced computer user. The file was a self-written program, and I was really expecting this file. Even if I am an advanced computer user, there was not reasonable way to expect this file to be a virus.
Personally I think that rather the source of these spam should be dealt with. Since about 1,5 week, I'm receiving a lot of German spam for companies on the Frankfurt stock exchange. Authorities should rather investigate these companies. This is not some innocent spam anymore, but financial fraud on a very large scale. Companies have gone broke already for other kinds of fraud...
And of course, (l)users and mail server sysadmins should start to secure there machines, so there would not be those huge botnets:-(
I have some experience with Mac OS X in a mixed enterprise environment, consisting of Linux servers and Linux and Windows desktops. Linux desktops use NFS and NIS, while Windows machines are using a Samba domain controller on the Linux servers. So far so good. Till the moment we got some Mac OS X desktops. Mac OS X is Unix, so using NFS and NIS should be easy, right? Wrong! First, Mac OS X has really crippled the Unix back-end: there's no more fstab file, no more init scripts we *nix users are used too,... To integrate Mac OS X in NIS, there's a graphical interface. But: it does not really work! Most of the time, network accounts simply won't be available when the login screen appears, if you configure it like that. Using the configuration files, already works a bit better, but even then it often does not work. Workarounds mentioned in a Mac OS X and NIS HOWTO, consist of adding ugly sleeps and killall -HUP lookupd commands in some scripts. We found out, things work most reliable, if you force lookupd to use at maximum 1 thread. It seems like lookupd is full of race conditions:-/ And even now, sometimes machines hang on a blue screen when shutting down Mac OS X. And when a user gets over quota, his whole session hangs with a "spinning beachball of death".
On the above mentioned web page, the conclusion is: "we officially withdraw the statement that NIS features are compatible with current versions of 10.4."
I cannot agree more. Mac OS X is certainly not enterprise ready to be integrated in mixed environments.
If you are really worried about your users downloading viruses by webmail, I think there are much more fundamental problems with your setup. There are much more other ways your users can get infected than by webmail. What about malicious web sites? What about non-malicious websites which have been compromised? What if your user brings along an infected file on USB memory key? Etc...
Get a good virus scanner (a really good one, not Norton or Mcafee, but Kaspersky or F-Secure or something like that), get some virus filtering and firewalling done on your gateway. Make them use an alternative web browser and e-mail client, which is much less target of attacks than Internet Explorer and Outlook. And most of all: learn your users about potential dangers. Explain how they can recognise suspicious files and web sites. Explain them that they should be careful with their passwords. Explain them that they should do so not only at work, but also at home.
Still I have the impression that lack of manufacturer willingness to publish documentation, is abused all too often to explain that there are no drivers for Linux, while the reality shows some other interesting facts. Here are some of my experiences I had with wireless in Linux:
First I bought a card based on fullmac prism54 chipset. It was known as one of the best supported chipsets in Linux, at the time the only 802.11g driver included in Linux kernel IIRC. It worked fine for basic operation yes, but it did not seem to support WPA. Prism54 development seems to be halted completely already for some time. People are developing the islsm driver which would also support freemac cards, but this is far from usable at the moment.
Intel Centrino ipw2200: had this in my laptop. Just installing firmware (which was as easy as adding PLF repository to my Mandriva system and running urpmi ipw2200-firmware) and it worked perfectly, WPA included!
Ralink rt2500 based PC card: I bought this again because I knew the manufacturer published documentation. Well, actually there are two drivers. The legacy driver, which should be somewhat stable, but which you cannot use when using multi-processor (dual core, etc), and the new driver which is beta and still unstable. Well, I tried both, but did not succeed in getting my wireless network to work.
Broadcom 43xx based PC card: was known at the time as one of the worst chipsets for Linux, because Broadcom was unwilling to publish documentation. Still bought it, because a new reverse engineering project started at that time. Today with kernel 2.6.19, this driver is included in Linux. And it works very good, WPA included. Yes, I had to install firmware by hand by means of bcm-fwcutter.
So I'm arriving at the bizarre conclusion that for me, the best working wireless chipsets, are these from the category of manufacturers that are not very willing to work together with community. Still, there's a free driver, with only the firmware being proprietary and not freely distributable. Other drivers which should be in the recommended category, failed for me.
Some reflections:
Good Linux support depends of much more than just the manufacturer publishing documentation. There should be an active community of developers: if that is lacking, even with good documentation, support will remain problematic.
Even without documentation it is possible to create good drivers by means of reverse engineering. If a card is popular enough and the right people at the right time start reverse engineering, then this could be a big success.
The presence of a proprietary, non-free driver could harm development of a free driver. For example take a look at the nvidia driver. Since a year, there's a reverse-engineering project to create a free dri-driver for nvidia, but it's not advancing at all. I guess lack of developer interest, because there's already the proprietary driver. Also look at ipw2945 driver: OpenBSD proved it can work without the the Intel binary-only daemon, but for Linux, nobody cared to reverse engineer it.
apt has nothing to do with rpm. If you search an alternative for rpm, there is dpkg which uses the deb format. apt on the other hand, is an alternative to yum, urpmi, yast, smart,...
ubuntu has firestarter for configuring a firewall, although its a standalone application which isnt installed by default.
It's not an Ubuntu specific application, and it is not installed by default, so that's exactly the point why Mandriva is better here. Mandriva has developed a firewall system themselves, and install and configure it by default. Mandriva's firewall also supports automatic blacklisting and a whitelist.
Mandriva has firestarter available too by the way:
[frederik@nova Desktop]$ urpmq -rY firestarter
firestarter-1.0.3-4mdv2007.0
The administration tools of Mandriva are *a lot* better than Ubuntu's. Have you read all the blog posts about how difficult it was to get a printer working with Dapper's default Cups configuration. In Mandriva, your printer will be configured automagically during install if it is switched on or connected to the network, and after install, it suffices to start an automatic detection of printers, and there you go.
Mandriva also has graphical tools for configuring a basic firewall, setting up xgl and aiglx, configuring a VPN connection, configuring back-ups, configuring your UPS,.. Ubuntu has none of these.
Thanks to parallell init, Mandriva 2007.0 also boots faster than Dapper, and it has a more recent kernel and better support of some very recent hardware. Remember that Ubuntu is already some months out.
What a bad idea this seems to me. Actually I do not understand why the W3C defines this behaviour. It leaves the door open for non-standard (embrace, extend,... anyone?) and/or invalid code, which I think is a bad idea to define in the standard itself. If a site really uses 100% valid code, then there won't be any problem, so I think this test is for somehow useless and largely overhyped.
... that the CSS used in the test is invalid. This is deliberate, as a means of exposing the ability of user agents to handle invalid CSS properly
Now these two messages seem completely contradictory to me. And especially if the second message which states that the CSS is invalid, is true, how can you expect browsers to render it correctly? If the CSS is invalid, than it seems to me it is completely undefinded how a browser should render this.
While Kopete could be a very nice application (it has some great plug-ins, particulary I like the listening-to plug-in), it has some serious flaws. Usability wise, I think it is overcomplicated, with protocol actions in a submenu of the right click menu (I have seen a screenshot of Gaim 2.0 showing the same, uh oh...), and too much toolbar buttons while Kopete does not show tool text by default... Furthermore it is rather buggy. I have Kopete from KDE 3.5 crashing often when leaving IRC chats, on IRC, it considers almost all messages as "priority messages", and makes a sound for that, MSN avatar sending does not work according to my buddies, in some cases, it only downloads avatars when starting a chat with somebody,... Most of these problems have been reported on kde's bugzilla, but I haven't seen much progress lately. It seems developers do care more about adding yet more (useless and buggy?) features instead of fixing current problems.
I read the review of Mandriva 2006.0, and I have to conclude the review is of a really very low quality. Firstly, they are complaining about the lack of a tool to configure network printers. Was it that difficult to find the add printer item in the Mandriva Control Center, and check the two checkboxes for auto-detection of networked and Windows printers?
They say that partitioning was difficult. Actually, first you have the choice to do everything automatically, choosing "use entire hard disk" or "use free space on Windows partition". Instead, they chose Custom partitioning, where again there is a button "Auto Allocate", which do everythinhg automatically once you resized the windows partitions. Now if they call this difficult, they should not have chosen the customized partitioning scheme in the first place. Actually I have heard of users having a lot more difficulties with the SuSE or Ubuntu partitioners.
They say the Exchange connector for Evolution was not there. Did they actually bothered looking for it during half a minute? Then at least they would have found the package evolution-exchange!
The real weak points of Mandriva 2006.0 are not talked about on the other hand. Not a word about the instabilities caused by the buggy beta X.org 6.9 included, by kat which makes kded eat all CPU time sometimes, and nothing about the old version of OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 which is included, and which is buggy (it crashes on SXI files it has created itself).
Of course, the level of quality is not always very high on Slashdot, but don't we love the way Slashdot is, with a funny troll and flamebait here and a lot of nerdy humour there.
I always enjoy reading the Wikipedia articles about Slashdot, the standard trolls still make me laugh. Come on, this is just Slashdot, don't take it all too seriously, we're here for some "news for nerds" but still more, for fun!
I've been given OpenOffice.org trainings to people who had never used it before, and all of them were very impressed by the program. They think the interface is almost completely the same at first sight. There are just some small differences in the way you use it (related to styles etc), but it's only a matter of a few hours to explain these differences. After that, people are at least as productive with OOo as with MS Office. Some are even more productive, because during the training they learned things they did not even knew in MS Office!
[blockquote]Suppose... If it had... hypothetically speaking...[/blockquotequote]
That's exaclty why it does not matter actually. Who cares about if's, suppositions and hypothetical situations?? The only thing Joe User is interested in, is that it performs better in reality. If that is, because it's overclocked, that's fine, others are free to also apply this trick. Of course, for overclockers it could matter, becaues that could mean their board will overclock less, but that's just another point which can be verified and compared in benchmarks, for those who care
Slashdot Mirror
I started mapping wifi networks with openwlanmap, which will likely be used by GNOME, a few weeks ago. Now it seems like Mozilla products will use their own database. Why cannot projects just work together, so we have 1 good database used by all FLOSS applications?
Then posing it to slashdot was not your smartest move
And finally we got rid of this terrible KOffice name, and now they call this Coffice? What was wrong with Calligra Mobile?
The problem is that xda is full of this kind of crap. Kernels which disable fsync (libEAT-MY-DATA, anyone?), exotic I/O schedulers and CPU governors, overclocking processors and other hacks... Very often, they do not have any measurable effect, or even cause new problems, such as freezes, hangs, sleep of death,...
This sounds very much like the guessing game done as part of the talking heads experiments in 1999 at the VUB Artificial Intelligence Lab and Sony Computer Science Lab Paris by professor Luc Steels. These experiments already date from 1999.
I wonder if the Chinese government is aware of MediaSentry's track record â" i.e. all the good things it has accomplished so far for the Big 4 record companies
No, that news was probably censored in China.
KDE 4 has great ideas, but kde 4.0 was not ready for use by the masses and was very buggy (I have a collegue using 4.0.5 and he's constantly having kwin crashes and other problematic behaviour especially with dual screens in either extend and clone mode).
While KDE 4.1 will be a lot better, again several important features have been moved to 4.2. For example with KDE 4.1, users will have a desktop where they can put desktop icons the a folderview widget or outside of that widget, on the plasma desktop itself. These two "desktop icon types" have very different behaviour, which will be extremely different to understand to non-geeks. This will be really fixed in 4.2 where it will be possible to set the folderview as the desktop itself. The number of plasma widgets shipped by default in KDE 4.2 is still rather limited (no good RSS reader, weather applet, system monitor etc). Phonon/xine/knotify4 as included in KDE 4.1 is not very friendly for your laptop's battery life. All of this will probably be fixed for KDE 4.2.
I heard the administrator mode in systemsettings is not working and that a migration to policykit to make this work, is planned for kde 4.2. GNOME is using policykit already since a year if I'm not mistaken.
So while KDE 4.1 is a great release for advanced users (I'm typing this from KDE 4.1 RC1 with nice desktop effects!), you don't want to migrate your average non-geek family member friend or collegue to it.
It's unfortunate that KDE developers still try to deny or at least greatly minimize the impact of these kind of problems. A little bit more understanding from both sides (developers and users) and a bit less technology hyping, would be a nice thing.
No it was not a false positive. Another friend who received the file and who was using a different anti-virus program, got the same alert. After installing an anti-virus program on the first friend's PC, he could indeed confirm that his system was infected.
This nonsense if you are using Windows. Several years ago, when I was still using Windows, I received an executable file, developed by a friend for a computer science course. My anti-virus alerted me that the file had been infected. My friend was not even aware of this infection on his system, and I surely would be infected too if I did not have an anti-virus program. The file was coming from a friend who's an advanced computer user. The file was a self-written program, and I was really expecting this file. Even if I am an advanced computer user, there was not reasonable way to expect this file to be a virus.
Personally I think that rather the source of these spam should be dealt with. Since about 1,5 week, I'm receiving a lot of German spam for companies on the Frankfurt stock exchange. Authorities should rather investigate these companies. This is not some innocent spam anymore, but financial fraud on a very large scale. Companies have gone broke already for other kinds of fraud...
:-(
And of course, (l)users and mail server sysadmins should start to secure there machines, so there would not be those huge botnets
I have some experience with Mac OS X in a mixed enterprise environment, consisting of Linux servers and Linux and Windows desktops. Linux desktops use NFS and NIS, while Windows machines are using a Samba domain controller on the Linux servers. So far so good. Till the moment we got some Mac OS X desktops. Mac OS X is Unix, so using NFS and NIS should be easy, right? Wrong! First, Mac OS X has really crippled the Unix back-end: there's no more fstab file, no more init scripts we *nix users are used too,... To integrate Mac OS X in NIS, there's a graphical interface. But: it does not really work! Most of the time, network accounts simply won't be available when the login screen appears, if you configure it like that. Using the configuration files, already works a bit better, but even then it often does not work. Workarounds mentioned in a Mac OS X and NIS HOWTO, consist of adding ugly sleeps and killall -HUP lookupd commands in some scripts. We found out, things work most reliable, if you force lookupd to use at maximum 1 thread. It seems like lookupd is full of race conditions :-/ And even now, sometimes machines hang on a blue screen when shutting down Mac OS X. And when a user gets over quota, his whole session hangs with a "spinning beachball of death".
On the above mentioned web page, the conclusion is:
"we officially withdraw the statement that NIS features are compatible with current versions of 10.4."
I cannot agree more. Mac OS X is certainly not enterprise ready to be integrated in mixed environments.
If you are really worried about your users downloading viruses by webmail, I think there are much more fundamental problems with your setup. There are much more other ways your users can get infected than by webmail. What about malicious web sites? What about non-malicious websites which have been compromised? What if your user brings along an infected file on USB memory key? Etc...
Get a good virus scanner (a really good one, not Norton or Mcafee, but Kaspersky or F-Secure or something like that), get some virus filtering and firewalling done on your gateway. Make them use an alternative web browser and e-mail client, which is much less target of attacks than Internet Explorer and Outlook. And most of all: learn your users about potential dangers. Explain how they can recognise suspicious files and web sites. Explain them that they should be careful with their passwords. Explain them that they should do so not only at work, but also at home.
- First I bought a card based on fullmac prism54 chipset. It was known as one of the best supported chipsets in Linux, at the time the only 802.11g driver included in Linux kernel IIRC. It worked fine for basic operation yes, but it did not seem to support WPA. Prism54 development seems to be halted completely already for some time. People are developing the islsm driver which would also support freemac cards, but this is far from usable at the moment.
- Intel Centrino ipw2200: had this in my laptop. Just installing firmware (which was as easy as adding PLF repository to my Mandriva system and running urpmi ipw2200-firmware) and it worked perfectly, WPA included!
- Ralink rt2500 based PC card: I bought this again because I knew the manufacturer published documentation. Well, actually there are two drivers. The legacy driver, which should be somewhat stable, but which you cannot use when using multi-processor (dual core, etc), and the new driver which is beta and still unstable. Well, I tried both, but did not succeed in getting my wireless network to work.
- Broadcom 43xx based PC card: was known at the time as one of the worst chipsets for Linux, because Broadcom was unwilling to publish documentation. Still bought it, because a new reverse engineering project started at that time. Today with kernel 2.6.19, this driver is included in Linux. And it works very good, WPA included. Yes, I had to install firmware by hand by means of bcm-fwcutter.
So I'm arriving at the bizarre conclusion that for me, the best working wireless chipsets, are these from the category of manufacturers that are not very willing to work together with community. Still, there's a free driver, with only the firmware being proprietary and not freely distributable. Other drivers which should be in the recommended category, failed for me. Some reflections:apt has nothing to do with rpm. If you search an alternative for rpm, there is dpkg which uses the deb format. apt on the other hand, is an alternative to yum, urpmi, yast, smart,...
The administration tools of Mandriva are *a lot* better than Ubuntu's. Have you read all the blog posts about how difficult it was to get a printer working with Dapper's default Cups configuration. In Mandriva, your printer will be configured automagically during install if it is switched on or connected to the network, and after install, it suffices to start an automatic detection of printers, and there you go.
Mandriva also has graphical tools for configuring a basic firewall, setting up xgl and aiglx, configuring a VPN connection, configuring back-ups, configuring your UPS,.. Ubuntu has none of these.
Thanks to parallell init, Mandriva 2007.0 also boots faster than Dapper, and it has a more recent kernel and better support of some very recent hardware. Remember that Ubuntu is already some months out.
What a bad idea this seems to me. Actually I do not understand why the W3C defines this behaviour. It leaves the door open for non-standard (embrace, extend,... anyone?) and/or invalid code, which I think is a bad idea to define in the standard itself. If a site really uses 100% valid code, then there won't be any problem, so I think this test is for somehow useless and largely overhyped.
On the introduction page they write:
Now these two messages seem completely contradictory to me. And especially if the second message which states that the CSS is invalid, is true, how can you expect browsers to render it correctly? If the CSS is invalid, than it seems to me it is completely undefinded how a browser should render this.
Can anybody enlighten me?
While Kopete could be a very nice application (it has some great plug-ins, particulary I like the listening-to plug-in), it has some serious flaws. Usability wise, I think it is overcomplicated, with protocol actions in a submenu of the right click menu (I have seen a screenshot of Gaim 2.0 showing the same, uh oh...), and too much toolbar buttons while Kopete does not show tool text by default... Furthermore it is rather buggy. I have Kopete from KDE 3.5 crashing often when leaving IRC chats, on IRC, it considers almost all messages as "priority messages", and makes a sound for that, MSN avatar sending does not work according to my buddies, in some cases, it only downloads avatars when starting a chat with somebody,... Most of these problems have been reported on kde's bugzilla, but I haven't seen much progress lately. It seems developers do care more about adding yet more (useless and buggy?) features instead of fixing current problems.
I read the review of Mandriva 2006.0, and I have to conclude the review is of a really very low quality. Firstly, they are complaining about the lack of a tool to configure network printers. Was it that difficult to find the add printer item in the Mandriva Control Center, and check the two checkboxes for auto-detection of networked and Windows printers?
They say that partitioning was difficult. Actually, first you have the choice to do everything automatically, choosing "use entire hard disk" or "use free space on Windows partition". Instead, they chose Custom partitioning, where again there is a button "Auto Allocate", which do everythinhg automatically once you resized the windows partitions. Now if they call this difficult, they should not have chosen the customized partitioning scheme in the first place. Actually I have heard of users having a lot more difficulties with the SuSE or Ubuntu partitioners.
They say the Exchange connector for Evolution was not there. Did they actually bothered looking for it during half a minute? Then at least they would have found the package evolution-exchange!
The real weak points of Mandriva 2006.0 are not talked about on the other hand. Not a word about the instabilities caused by the buggy beta X.org 6.9 included, by kat which makes kded eat all CPU time sometimes, and nothing about the old version of OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 which is included, and which is buggy (it crashes on SXI files it has created itself).
Really, nothing to see here, move on people!
http://www.gamepc.com.nyud.net:8090/labs/view_cont ent.asp?id=paxville&page=1
Seems it's slashdotted already after 8 posts. Finally when will all slashdot-links be coralized automatically?
Please leave some bandwith for all other fans of such tastiness:
i ctures/nightcliff4/images/10_anne-marie%20en%20ver o.jpge amlid_annemarie.phpe amlid_veronique.phpe amlid_laura.php
http://www.nuonsolarteam.nl.nyud.net:8090/nuna3/p
http://www.nuonsolarteam.nl.nyud.net:8090/nuna3/t
http://www.nuonsolarteam.nl.nyud.net:8090/nuna3/t
http://www.nuonsolarteam.nl.nyud.net:8090/nuna3/t
Of course, the level of quality is not always very high on Slashdot, but don't we love the way Slashdot is, with a funny troll and flamebait here and a lot of nerdy humour there.
I always enjoy reading the Wikipedia articles about Slashdot, the standard trolls still make me laugh. Come on, this is just Slashdot, don't take it all too seriously, we're here for some "news for nerds" but still more, for fun!
What have you been smoking?
I've been given OpenOffice.org trainings to people who had never used it before, and all of them were very impressed by the program. They think the interface is almost completely the same at first sight. There are just some small differences in the way you use it (related to styles etc), but it's only a matter of a few hours to explain these differences. After that, people are at least as productive with OOo as with MS Office. Some are even more productive, because during the training they learned things they did not even knew in MS Office!
[blockquote]Suppose... If it had... hypothetically speaking...[/blockquotequote]
That's exaclty why it does not matter actually. Who cares about if's, suppositions and hypothetical situations?? The only thing Joe User is interested in, is that it performs better in reality. If that is, because it's overclocked, that's fine, others are free to also apply this trick. Of course, for overclockers it could matter, becaues that could mean their board will overclock less, but that's just another point which can be verified and compared in benchmarks, for those who care