Just a question: why is it beneficial for AOLTW to continue to release the movies so close together? Do they/you think that people will somehow sense the competition and therefore feel they have to see both to be able to judge? Or is it more likely that people will decide, right, I'm going to see a film this weekend, which one shall I see? and basically go for whichever has had the better reviews/whichever one a friend has just seen/etc. Both films have a significant family following, so I can see this might be an issue as there are few times a whole family can go to the cinema together. It's not as if each film won't be hyped up so much that everybody who was going to see it would see it anyway whenever it's released - can someone explain what the cunning plan is in having them both at the same time (unless it's just that they're then both at Christmas when lots of people want to go and see films...)
Yeah, that's fine for people who have some experience with Unix, but for Joe Random User who's just bought this new Red Hat thing 'cos his friend said it was quite good and he doesn't want to spend more money on Windows it doesn't really help. I mean, he's not going to instinctively sit down and start ntsysv and appreciate what 'nfslockd' and 'portmap' do and whether he does or doesn't need them; he's probably not even going to understand the concept of services for a while. It's basically the old argument about Linux on the desktop again: everything has to work properly out-of-the-box, not work well if you just tweak this configuration file and patch and recompile your X server or people simply won't bother and will run away screaming because of all the scary things they're now being exposed to whereas with Windows it 'just worked'. Now, personally I'd hate it if all the distributions became like Windows and had irritating wizards all over the place and friendly quickstarts and so on, but making the default settings for things like security right is not hard and wouldn't have any negative effects at all as far as I can see. I think Red Hat's firewall set up is a good compromise; of course, the way Debian does it (not enabling this by default, and so on) is far better, but whatever its advocates might say Debian is not really as user-friendly for newbies as Red Hat (or particularly Mandrake) and isn't really designed to be. That said, I started with it...
Yes, Java applications are trusted and so can do anything they like without security warnings or the SecurityManager stopping them, but my point was that there's no Registry.addKey() or similar such evil things, so you cannot do anything platform-specific like that from within the Java home. However, as Jay Carlson point ed out, even on the installer-free versions for Linux etc. the actual.jar file contains a pair of.DLL files, so it's eminently possible that LimeWire could check to see if the platform is Windows and if so call native methods to do nasty stuff like install spyware from those.DLLs... Is there a way to make the JVM report a different operating system?
On the page I linked to in my original post you can download versions for Linux, Solaris etc. which come WITHOUT AN INSTALLER - i.e. you just un-tar/zip them and get some.jar files you can run (and if you're lucky a shell script to do it for you) - no Windows or spyware nonsense at all. That's what I was talking about; I don't know about the Linux installer at all as I've never used it.
More and more distros ARE becoming aware of security issues. Red Hat 7.x turns off a lot of things that used to be on by default and has far more sensible policies in xinetd etc., but importantly it also prompts the user to configure a firewall at install time and the default setting, 'Medium', will give fairly good protection (basically denies access to all common services but allows others in case they want to run a random multiplayer game/whatever). Mandrake has something fairly similar, AFAIK, so they are starting to get better in this regard. Slowly...
and so on. Symantec/Norton also has a Linux/UNIX binary which is certainly bundled with the network-wide thing, I don't know if it's available separately. The trouble with all of these things is that although they are Linux applications, they detect Windows virii - they use the same signature files as the versions on other platforms do. This means they're very good for running on file/e-mail servers to protect the poor Windows machines behind them (which is what they're intended for) but they probably won't stop the subject of this post, for example. Basically, yes, they exist and work well but make sure you know what you're hoping for them to do...
It has come to Lime Wire's attention over the past 24 hours that one of the bundled software installers included with LimeWire 2.0.2 for the PC is now considered a SpyWare/Trojan by various anti-virus software packages. We have received complaints from our users and we have worked quickly to resolve this issue by putting out a new beta immediately yesterday and rolling LimeWire 2.0.3 for the PC into production at 3:30PM EST today (Jan 1. Note that this did not affect LimeWire 2.0.2 P (LimeWire PRO) users.. We will be communicating further with LimeWire 2.0.2 PC users as information becomes available.
Workaround for all of this nonsense: don't download the Windows-specific version, get one of the ones without an installer (such as the Linux or Solaris versions) from here and use that instead. It removes one layer of laziness as you have to install the JRE and make the icon yourself, but it does mean that the ONLY code that LimeWire can install and execute on your system is a) visible and b) written in Java, which means it can't do anything too evil (read: anything platform-specific).
Hmm... well, I'm in the UK, but I liked it and so did pretty much everyone I've spoken to who's seen it (I haven't read the book though...) What did you think was so bad about it?
As for the ending - admittedly the last line ("I'm really glad you're here, Sam" or similar) was a little cheesy but some people like that sort of thing... it couldn't've had a big, dramatic ending because there's still another 2 books/films to get through before you're allowed that. I'd just be interested to see what you disliked about it...
I very much doubt that for the artists on these projects it's 'another week's work'. I think it could be great fun, experimenting with the characters you've created, trying things, making them behave differently and so on. Still, each to his own...
Some of the 'fake' bloopers are absolutely hilarious... I can't remember exactly which films, but I think one of the Toy Stories and certainly either Bug's Life or Antz they had, in the cinema, right at the VERY end, after all the credits and so on, a bunch of deliberately made bloopers that the CGI people had evidently spent ages amusing themselves with. Exactly the sort of thing you'd expect in a standard film, but animated: people messing up lines etc. but also things collapsing when they lean on them, things hitting people, props disappearing, etc. And there was hardly anyone there to watch as they all left during the credits...
Having just got the video of Shrek I note that they've added 'Shrek's Karaoke' at the end - all the characters doing a medley of different songs with cool 'video', etc. It's that sort of thing that makes me think it would be great fun to work on one of these projects...
I've helped setting up an experimental lab full of machines of all sorts (mainly Linux on various types of hardware, some Windows 9x/NT and a few others such as Solaris, Irix and HPUX) - but only about 25 machines in all. This is on a shoestring - most of the hardware is fairly old and slow, and we're certainly not about to go out and spend any of our small budget on software if we can avoid it. Anyway, our solution for authentication was to use OpenLDAP on the server (this was relatively easy once we figured out how - there are plenty of HOWTOs drifting around, but reply if you can't find them and I'll dig them out for you) - on the Linux clients we could use the PAM module, on Windows, the latest Samba can pretend to be a domain server and take its information out of LDAP and there were various bits of code we found for the other Unix boxes. In the event, we just used our own little Perl scripts to do user admin, but there are plenty of web/pretty-clicky interfaces to it available. I disagree with the poster who said this was overkill for less than a hundred machines - as I say, it was easy to set up and works well for our couple of dozen slow machines (primary server is an old HP NetServer at 100Mhz). I'm afraid we're still using NFS for home directories, though, and I'm not particularly happy about that - we'll move to something better at some point, but I'm watching this thread with interest to see what suggestions the rest of the (Ask)Slashdot community might have!
For simple, multiplayer fun, BZFlag is very hard to beat. Sure, the graphics aren't THAT amazing (although they are fairly decent) but it's so easy to pick up and so addictive if you're playing against people you know. There's just something amusing about bouncing tanks, and Giant "LASER"s, and so on:-) I made a couple of dozen bootable CDs with a minimal Linux + BZFlag and used them in a lab full of machines as part of a summer festival money-spinner thing and people who'd never tried it before were simply hooked... Definitely worth a go if you haven't seen it already.
I think you've made a mistake here and haven't quite understood what XML-RPC is for... it's not designed and can't be used for general bells-and-whistles on websites, but instead in its simplest form is a way for two applications to communicate with each other by invoking remote methods, passing parameters, getting results back etc, as any RPC protocol is. It shouldn't affect web design at all...
Try Ximian's Evolution, available here. If you use Red Carpet, you can use that to get the latest snapshots. It hasn't hit 1.0 yet but it's getting pretty close and it is almost a feature-complete clone of Outlook (groupware).
Funny little blue thing, with big screen and small keyboard. Designed just for SMS - but you can use it as a phone with a hands-free kit. Orange/BTCellnet have them, I think. HTH
A while back IBM gave NASA one of their ThinkPad laptops to try out in space (I expect there was some useful reason, too, but it escapes me...) It might even have been one of the little 701 'Butterfly' ones where the keyboard folds out... Someone correct me? It ran OS/2 and worked fine, AFAIK.
AFAIK, MS doesn't have copyright on enough of WPS to make a fuss. It did, in the 2.0 days or even earlier, but enough of that has been rewritten that it doesn't matter. They do, however, have copyright on other parts, like WinOS/2 etc.
Definitely. I totally agree. Like, in Warp 4, the way that the Warpcenter displays things on the desktop - don't have to add things to the menu. Like templates. Like all sorts of other things. OS/2's WPS is great; I'm still using it on a day-to-day basis on a number of machines.
This couldn't happen 'secretly', without people knowing about it, because, as soon as the Palm receives a program via infrared it pops up a little dialog box, saying, 'Are you sure you want to accept ?' If you say no, it's deleted, no problem. So you have to confirm that you want to accept the code; then you have to deliberately start it. It would have to work as a trojan, where people think it's a game or something, but even so, most people wouldn't accept a strange application which has been suddenly beamed to them...
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They do have descriptions - in ntsysv, just hit F1 for information on what a particular service does. Often it's quite good, e.g. apmd:
apmd is used for monitoring battery status and logging it via syslog(8). It can also be used for shutting down the machine when the battery is low.
Trouble is, for many of them it's not helpful - e.g. chargen:
'A chargen server. This is the tcp version.'
If they just improved those it'd be a start...
Just a question: why is it beneficial for AOLTW to continue to release the movies so close together? Do they/you think that people will somehow sense the competition and therefore feel they have to see both to be able to judge? Or is it more likely that people will decide, right, I'm going to see a film this weekend, which one shall I see? and basically go for whichever has had the better reviews/whichever one a friend has just seen/etc. Both films have a significant family following, so I can see this might be an issue as there are few times a whole family can go to the cinema together. It's not as if each film won't be hyped up so much that everybody who was going to see it would see it anyway whenever it's released - can someone explain what the cunning plan is in having them both at the same time (unless it's just that they're then both at Christmas when lots of people want to go and see films...)
Yeah, that's fine for people who have some experience with Unix, but for Joe Random User who's just bought this new Red Hat thing 'cos his friend said it was quite good and he doesn't want to spend more money on Windows it doesn't really help. I mean, he's not going to instinctively sit down and start ntsysv and appreciate what 'nfslockd' and 'portmap' do and whether he does or doesn't need them; he's probably not even going to understand the concept of services for a while. It's basically the old argument about Linux on the desktop again: everything has to work properly out-of-the-box, not work well if you just tweak this configuration file and patch and recompile your X server or people simply won't bother and will run away screaming because of all the scary things they're now being exposed to whereas with Windows it 'just worked'. Now, personally I'd hate it if all the distributions became like Windows and had irritating wizards all over the place and friendly quickstarts and so on, but making the default settings for things like security right is not hard and wouldn't have any negative effects at all as far as I can see. I think Red Hat's firewall set up is a good compromise; of course, the way Debian does it (not enabling this by default, and so on) is far better, but whatever its advocates might say Debian is not really as user-friendly for newbies as Red Hat (or particularly Mandrake) and isn't really designed to be. That said, I started with it...
Yes, Java applications are trusted and so can do anything they like without security warnings or the SecurityManager stopping them, but my point was that there's no Registry.addKey() or similar such evil things, so you cannot do anything platform-specific like that from within the Java home. However, as Jay Carlson point ed out, even on the installer-free versions for Linux etc. the actual .jar file contains a pair of .DLL files, so it's eminently possible that LimeWire could check to see if the platform is Windows and if so call native methods to do nasty stuff like install spyware from those .DLLs... Is there a way to make the JVM report a different operating system?
On the page I linked to in my original post you can download versions for Linux, Solaris etc. which come WITHOUT AN INSTALLER - i.e. you just un-tar/zip them and get some .jar files you can run (and if you're lucky a shell script to do it for you) - no Windows or spyware nonsense at all. That's what I was talking about; I don't know about the Linux installer at all as I've never used it.
More and more distros ARE becoming aware of security issues. Red Hat 7.x turns off a lot of things that used to be on by default and has far more sensible policies in xinetd etc., but importantly it also prompts the user to configure a firewall at install time and the default setting, 'Medium', will give fairly good protection (basically denies access to all common services but allows others in case they want to run a random multiplayer game/whatever). Mandrake has something fairly similar, AFAIK, so they are starting to get better in this regard. Slowly...
and so on. Symantec/Norton also has a Linux/UNIX binary which is certainly bundled with the network-wide thing, I don't know if it's available separately. The trouble with all of these things is that although they are Linux applications, they detect Windows virii - they use the same signature files as the versions on other platforms do. This means they're very good for running on file/e-mail servers to protect the poor Windows machines behind them (which is what they're intended for) but they probably won't stop the subject of this post, for example. Basically, yes, they exist and work well but make sure you know what you're hoping for them to do...
I quote:
It has come to Lime Wire's attention over the past 24 hours that one of the bundled software installers included with LimeWire 2.0.2 for the PC is now considered a SpyWare/Trojan by various anti-virus software packages. We have received complaints from our users and we have worked quickly to resolve this issue by putting out a new beta immediately yesterday and rolling LimeWire 2.0.3 for the PC into production at 3:30PM EST today (Jan 1. Note that this did not affect LimeWire 2.0.2 P (LimeWire PRO) users.. We will be communicating further with LimeWire 2.0.2 PC users as information becomes available.
Workaround for all of this nonsense: don't download the Windows-specific version, get one of the ones without an installer (such as the Linux or Solaris versions) from here and use that instead. It removes one layer of laziness as you have to install the JRE and make the icon yourself, but it does mean that the ONLY code that LimeWire can install and execute on your system is a) visible and b) written in Java, which means it can't do anything too evil (read: anything platform-specific).
Hope this helps...
I wouldn't know - I haven't seen either of them, I'm afraid...
Hmm... well, I'm in the UK, but I liked it and so did pretty much everyone I've spoken to who's seen it (I haven't read the book though...) What did you think was so bad about it?
As for the ending - admittedly the last line ("I'm really glad you're here, Sam" or similar) was a little cheesy but some people like that sort of thing... it couldn't've had a big, dramatic ending because there's still another 2 books/films to get through before you're allowed that. I'd just be interested to see what you disliked about it...
I very much doubt that for the artists on these projects it's 'another week's work'. I think it could be great fun, experimenting with the characters you've created, trying things, making them behave differently and so on. Still, each to his own...
Some of the 'fake' bloopers are absolutely hilarious... I can't remember exactly which films, but I think one of the Toy Stories and certainly either Bug's Life or Antz they had, in the cinema, right at the VERY end, after all the credits and so on, a bunch of deliberately made bloopers that the CGI people had evidently spent ages amusing themselves with. Exactly the sort of thing you'd expect in a standard film, but animated: people messing up lines etc. but also things collapsing when they lean on them, things hitting people, props disappearing, etc. And there was hardly anyone there to watch as they all left during the credits...
Having just got the video of Shrek I note that they've added 'Shrek's Karaoke' at the end - all the characters doing a medley of different songs with cool 'video', etc. It's that sort of thing that makes me think it would be great fun to work on one of these projects...
Sorry, I misunderstood. Apologies.
Forgot to mention - this also works beautifully with Mac OS X, and that has various neat tools with it for the admin side...
I've helped setting up an experimental lab full of machines of all sorts (mainly Linux on various types of hardware, some Windows 9x/NT and a few others such as Solaris, Irix and HPUX) - but only about 25 machines in all. This is on a shoestring - most of the hardware is fairly old and slow, and we're certainly not about to go out and spend any of our small budget on software if we can avoid it. Anyway, our solution for authentication was to use OpenLDAP on the server (this was relatively easy once we figured out how - there are plenty of HOWTOs drifting around, but reply if you can't find them and I'll dig them out for you) - on the Linux clients we could use the PAM module, on Windows, the latest Samba can pretend to be a domain server and take its information out of LDAP and there were various bits of code we found for the other Unix boxes. In the event, we just used our own little Perl scripts to do user admin, but there are plenty of web/pretty-clicky interfaces to it available. I disagree with the poster who said this was overkill for less than a hundred machines - as I say, it was easy to set up and works well for our couple of dozen slow machines (primary server is an old HP NetServer at 100Mhz). I'm afraid we're still using NFS for home directories, though, and I'm not particularly happy about that - we'll move to something better at some point, but I'm watching this thread with interest to see what suggestions the rest of the (Ask)Slashdot community might have!
For simple, multiplayer fun, BZFlag is very hard to beat. Sure, the graphics aren't THAT amazing (although they are fairly decent) but it's so easy to pick up and so addictive if you're playing against people you know. There's just something amusing about bouncing tanks, and Giant "LASER"s, and so on :-) I made a couple of dozen bootable CDs with a minimal Linux + BZFlag and used them in a lab full of machines as part of a summer festival money-spinner thing and people who'd never tried it before were simply hooked... Definitely worth a go if you haven't seen it already.
I think you've made a mistake here and haven't quite understood what XML-RPC is for... it's not designed and can't be used for general bells-and-whistles on websites, but instead in its simplest form is a way for two applications to communicate with each other by invoking remote methods, passing parameters, getting results back etc, as any RPC protocol is. It shouldn't affect web design at all...
Try Ximian's Evolution, available here. If you use Red Carpet, you can use that to get the latest snapshots. It hasn't hit 1.0 yet but it's getting pretty close and it is almost a feature-complete clone of Outlook (groupware).
Funny little blue thing, with big screen and small keyboard. Designed just for SMS - but you can use it as a phone with a hands-free kit. Orange/BTCellnet have them, I think. HTH
... available here.
A while back IBM gave NASA one of their ThinkPad laptops to try out in space (I expect there was some useful reason, too, but it escapes me...) It might even have been one of the little 701 'Butterfly' ones where the keyboard folds out... Someone correct me? It ran OS/2 and worked fine, AFAIK.
AFAIK, MS doesn't have copyright on enough of WPS to make a fuss. It did, in the 2.0 days or even earlier, but enough of that has been rewritten that it doesn't matter. They do, however, have copyright on other parts, like WinOS/2 etc.
Definitely. I totally agree. Like, in Warp 4, the way that the Warpcenter displays things on the desktop - don't have to add things to the menu. Like templates. Like all sorts of other things. OS/2's WPS is great; I'm still using it on a day-to-day basis on a number of machines.
This couldn't happen 'secretly', without people knowing about it, because, as soon as the Palm receives a program via infrared it pops up a little dialog box, saying, 'Are you sure you want to accept ?' If you say no, it's deleted, no problem. So you have to confirm that you want to accept the code; then you have to deliberately start it. It would have to work as a trojan, where people think it's a game or something, but even so, most people wouldn't accept a strange application which has been suddenly beamed to them...
...try www.blackbox.co.uk. They sell some - look quite nice.