Well, you'd specifically mentioned you recommended other things, so I was curious...
As for me, leaving aside the matter I'm mostly running Linux and OS X, I can't look at any AV companies in my area: there are none.
The market would be too small and way too cheap.
And among all the spam I get -- and since I don't hide my e-mail address, I get tons of it (helping Google evolve spam detection algorithms) -- I have yet to see a phishing mail spoofing a Croatian bank.
We mostly get threats that are a bit more global.
I do find the idea of whitelisting software intriguing, and definitely worth considering among business users at the very least.
BTW, I recall an article a few months ago, on how to make a laser pointer from a DVD laser.
It also said you could disassemble a CD and get an IR laser.
If someone decides to blind people with that, they'll never see it coming. Literally.
I'm going to need the definition of interoperability that includes breaking huge amounts of existing pages.
In the good old days, my grandfather tells me, if an apprentice failed to do something right, he would be forced to do it all over again.
I feel that this kind of apprenticeship has -- quite undeservedly -- gone out of style among web designers.
Re:Why aren't other browsers standards compliant?
on
IE 8 Passes Acid2 Test
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
With all the puling about IE not being compliant with the arbitary standards set by a bunch of MS-haters, I've always been amazed at how poorly non-MS browsers do about conforming to IE standards.
If something is implemented by only one application, it is not a standard.
And MS is a member of the W3C, if I'm not severely mistaken.
There is no such thing as "IE standard". If there were, then different versions of IE wouldn't render pages completely differently.
Now if only those evaluations really meant something...
They do, at some schools. I remember this lousy Physics prof; everyone trashed him in the review. He was on probation the next semester, and fired the one after that.
In the US, I bet they mean something. Here in Croatia... well, in a decade or four, things might change; nowadays, everyone's concern is how to improve teachers' evaluation results. No-one seems to think about firing the incompetent.
I'm a failed EE/CS student myself (too much maths and EE for my taste); then I went on to linguistics and English, with IS added as an afterthought.
And I do ace these things, but by FSM's noodly appendage, it's dreadful.
If I complain/correct some teachers, it results in a fight. If I do not, I end up having to learn te wrong way to do things, and then look at my classmates struggling with it and knowing they aren't going to learn jack shit.
And I no longer have the energy required to fight those windmills; I have better things to do with my life.
A teacher does not by definition know everything; very often, teachers are wrong about stuff, too.
A teacher who can stand being corrected is nearly a treasure to be cherished these days.
Some of the teachers I've had have been patently wrong on come counts, blatantly unknowledgeable on others, yet would not accept any kind of correction, criticism or comment.
I got my revenge by getting a high grade and writing a poor evaluation.
Now if only those evaluations really meant something...
Jesus, where do you guys go? ITT Tech? If so, what do you expect? I have a hard time believing that any real university would offer an actual class in web design (except maybe as part of a graphics design program or something). Sounds like a really bad vo-tech college, though.
Ah, I see you failed to notice the translation bit I mentioned.
While I am attending a real university, the program I enrolled in isn't a techie one. It's more or less information science dumbed down for librarians, with added bits and pieces.
Some of these crap courses are obligatory, but basically, I'm doing it for the few good ones about text/language processing, as they complement my linguistics courses nicely.
I'm attending a course on web design in my college this semester.
The TA that's giving the lectures:
allegedly copied those lectures from the lectures given by our academic research network (I was told that by a fellow student who took the course given by said network)
once actually explained we could use <div> tags as line breaks
teaches all kinds of utterly wrong stuff, including advising us to encode our work in Windows-1250 instead of UTF.
However, two years ago I took a course given by a guy who told a friend of mine "Stop surfing the internet! Or else you won't know how to use Internet Explorer!" (yeah, it loses a bit in translation).
He could spend two hours explaining how to navigate to a bloody webpage from IE 6. And then how to add a crappy link to whatever IE calls bookmarks.
And when I said "could", I mean "did".
Repeatedly.
By the FSM's noodly appendage, I wish I was making this crap up.
I just remembered... I once had an argument about optics with one of the guys who worked on early semi-conductors... later on he told me I was right and that the only reason I lost the argument was:
A: He was the teacher and
B: He was the teacher
In school, the teacher is always right, particularly when they're wrong AND foul tempered.
Only last Friday, I heard one of my college professors say: "Wow. I've taught this for twenty years and this has never crossed my mind. You just ruined my beautifully constructed lecture, but this is a perfectly valid interpretation. I've never thought about it in that way."
Of course, I've had some assholes for teachers as well, but generally, I've been lucky: most have been honest enought to admit they were wrong.
I'll probably be a teacher at some point in the future. And I hope I'll be able to admit when I'm wrong.
But, and this is much more alarming, it also can execute arbitrary commands. It connects to the remote server, asks it what to execute, and then executes it. That's VERY scary, no matter what is currently collected. Imagine a hacker getting access to the server customers connect to.
Does this software run setuid root?
Of course, even if it is not, this is a huge issue.
m$ does not understand the significances of free and open source software.
This is patently ridiculous.
If MS didn't understand the significance of F/OSS, they would never even bother about it.
The fact that they are doing everything they can to stop it means that they understand it all too well, but don't want to give their users any freedom they don't have to.
And why would they?
Vendor lock-in means a steady revenue stream. And that's all that matters.
Give your users freedom, and they might fly away. And then you'd have to work on getting them back.
I think you may have hit upon a novel concept: A desktop memory manager. Click-to-swap?
I am sorry, but this feature has already been implemented in Windows Vista.
Not only is it obvious prior art, but implementing it will just add another item to the list of patents Linux is currently violating.
Cut-and-paste garbage collection?
Surely you jest. Microsoft implemented a graphical representation of a trashcan, i.e. a "Recycle Bin", back in 1995.
And you can cut and paste or simply move items to that trashcan.
Having said all that, no I don't agree with Opera on this one - but Opera is still my choice of browser for speed and compliance.
Funnily enough, I do agree with Opera on this one, though I don't use Opera.
It may be faster and nicer in many ways, but some Firefox extensions are simply way too valuable to me.
Enlightenment used to be considered bloated way back when we were mostly still using fvwm.
I remember switching from CDE to fvwm, then to WindowMaker (only later to be renamed Window Maker), on a Solaris machine... fvwm was great, WindowMaker a revelation.
Then I got a computer of my own, started dabbling in Linux, examined a great deal of rather obscure DEs for a magazine article I never wrote in the end... fvwm95 was the rage at one point; then we all got to see exactly how ugly Windows was.
And fvwm was great. But I took to Gnome in those early days, and never really left.
Anyway, I remember how Enlightenment was at first regarded as bloated, then as too shiny but relatively modest... but that was E16.
E17[1] is really blazingly fast, rewritten (almost?) completely... I don't know how it would work on a K5-100 with 32 MB RAM, but it's really a lovely desktop.
As I already mentioned, on a Duron 600 with 256 MB RAM, I had four desktops with different animated backgrounds (had to see how it worked), and it was still way more responsive than anything else with a similar set of features.
[1] I still sometimes curse the annoying teen magazine which had a "TT vs. E17 Corner", where bunches of fans flamed each other. So this abbreviation is still tainted in my mind.
I remember when I first starting using linux (I think I was 12 or 13 at the time), I tried Ubuntu, and it was gnome. The taskbar was at the top of the screen and I almost couldn't handle it.
After several years I'm now running fluxbox under arch linux...having a taskbar seems weird when I have to use windows now:P
I bought a MacBook Pro. Menu bar and tray at the top of the screen, dock a the bottom.
Under Linux, I've always had some kind of a dock at the bottom, as well as a pager, and a menu bar and tray at the top. (OK, not in WindowMaker. And I hated CDE, back in the day.)
Then I moved the Start button to the top of the screen under Windows as well, and installed RocketDock.
Needless to say, my cursor often wanders to the top of the screen for no apparent when working on machines other than my own.
And one of the things I'm not missing in OS X is the Windows-like taskbar. Gods, what a nuisance it really is...
Yeah funny that, it's almost as if notepad was just meant to be a light weight text editor to be used for not much more than jotting down notes. If only they hadn't chosen such a misleading name to make us think that it would be on par with vim and emacs!
Because it's plainly obivious from their very names that vim and emacs are much more than text editors.
OK, so one of them is an operating system, but that's beside the point.
When my mother's (albeit computer-illiterate, or almost so) clients can't read something[1], if she doesn't re-send the data in an acceptable format, she loses business.
OTOH, in your case it would be considered rude to simply bounce the.xlsx and.docx files as unreadable.
I therefore suggest routing them all through a computer-illiterate employee with Office 97. If (s)he cannot open the file, something must be wrong, please re-send in a tried and tested format like Office 97, thank you so very much.
But really, don't people have any manners anymore?
Isn't sending files in an unknown/unreadable/not-yet-universally-accepted format impolite?
I avoid sending anything in MS formats; if PDF won't do, and ODF is not an option, then I save as RTF. But even when I do send MS-formatted files, it's never newer than Office 97, because many people still use that and have no need for anything newer.
[1] up to and including unzipping... imagine attaching 20 different files in one e-mail just because your clients can't be bothered to learn how to fscking Extract here. *sob*
When was the last time you used windows? What you have wrote just isn't true. The memory footprint for apps such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint are much lower than comparable Linux apps like OpenOffice, AbiWord and KWrite. Almost all Linux desktop programs takes longer to cold start than their windows (XP or 2000, I've no experience of Vista) equivalents thanks to the huge amount of dynamic libraries Linux uses.
First, you have just switched the issue from the OS to the applications.
That's almost-justified, as users generally care more about their apps than the OS.
Anyway, I won't challenge the fact that MS Office is made well, at least in the features vs. footprint and speed respect.
The UI is a whole new part of discussion, and quite irrelevant here.
Anyway, footprint and startup times are not necessarily equivalent.
EOG is slower than the image viewer in Windows, GEdit is much slower than notepad.exe, write.exe and so on. Internet Explorer and even Firefox starts faster on Windows than Linux.
Don't know about EOG, but Enlightenment's image viewer is about the fastest I've ever seen. I haven't measured its startup time, but I have never seen anything display or resize pictures faster.
Notepad cannot be compared to any other editor, as it is the most useless piece of crap in the editor world.
GEdit has tabs, syntax highlighting, and a whole bunch of other features that Notepad doesn't have.
And yet again: startup times and memory footprint are not the same.
Anyway, the issue here was the OS and its interface; KDE vs. Aero, if you like.
KDE added new features, and so did Aero; KDE has a lower memory footprint than the previous version, while Aero patently doesn't.
On Linux, a compositing UI is available on a much lower-spec'd machine than on Windows.
I have absolutely no idea how their startup times compare, but once up and running, the difference is evident.
I have two 600 MHz machines, one with Linux, the other with WinXP.
Linux is slow, especially if running Gnome, like most people do, but WinXP is a slideshow.
And if you start E17 under Linux, the difference is amazing.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you'd specifically mentioned you recommended other things, so I was curious...
As for me, leaving aside the matter I'm mostly running Linux and OS X, I can't look at any AV companies in my area: there are none.
The market would be too small and way too cheap.
And among all the spam I get -- and since I don't hide my e-mail address, I get tons of it (helping Google evolve spam detection algorithms) -- I have yet to see a phishing mail spoofing a Croatian bank.
We mostly get threats that are a bit more global.
I do find the idea of whitelisting software intriguing, and definitely worth considering among business users at the very least.
So what would an Opportunist recommend?
<captainobvious>The price?</captainobvious>
(And I'm not really sure about the thermal and sound proofing either.)
Point.
BTW, I recall an article a few months ago, on how to make a laser pointer from a DVD laser.
It also said you could disassemble a CD and get an IR laser.
If someone decides to blind people with that, they'll never see it coming. Literally.
In the good old days, my grandfather tells me, if an apprentice failed to do something right, he would be forced to do it all over again.
I feel that this kind of apprenticeship has -- quite undeservedly -- gone out of style among web designers.
If something is implemented by only one application, it is not a standard.
And MS is a member of the W3C, if I'm not severely mistaken.
There is no such thing as "IE standard". If there were, then different versions of IE wouldn't render pages completely differently.
They do, at some schools. I remember this lousy Physics prof; everyone trashed him in the review. He was on probation the next semester, and fired the one after that.
In the US, I bet they mean something. Here in Croatia... well, in a decade or four, things might change; nowadays, everyone's concern is how to improve teachers' evaluation results. No-one seems to think about firing the incompetent.
Ah, a kindred spirit.
I'm a failed EE/CS student myself (too much maths and EE for my taste); then I went on to linguistics and English, with IS added as an afterthought.
And I do ace these things, but by FSM's noodly appendage, it's dreadful.
If I complain/correct some teachers, it results in a fight. If I do not, I end up having to learn te wrong way to do things, and then look at my classmates struggling with it and knowing they aren't going to learn jack shit.
And I no longer have the energy required to fight those windmills; I have better things to do with my life.
The acid test is currently broken.
Coincidence?
Are you saying that the only way IE could pass the test is if the test were broken?
I call BS.
They could have simply photoshopped it, too.
Hey, you had it great.
A teacher does not by definition know everything; very often, teachers are wrong about stuff, too.
A teacher who can stand being corrected is nearly a treasure to be cherished these days.
Some of the teachers I've had have been patently wrong on come counts, blatantly unknowledgeable on others, yet would not accept any kind of correction, criticism or comment.
I got my revenge by getting a high grade and writing a poor evaluation.
Now if only those evaluations really meant something...
Ah, I see you failed to notice the translation bit I mentioned.
While I am attending a real university, the program I enrolled in isn't a techie one. It's more or less information science dumbed down for librarians, with added bits and pieces.
Some of these crap courses are obligatory, but basically, I'm doing it for the few good ones about text/language processing, as they complement my linguistics courses nicely.
I'm attending a course on web design in my college this semester.
The TA that's giving the lectures:
However, two years ago I took a course given by a guy who told a friend of mine "Stop surfing the internet! Or else you won't know how to use Internet Explorer!" (yeah, it loses a bit in translation).
He could spend two hours explaining how to navigate to a bloody webpage from IE 6. And then how to add a crappy link to whatever IE calls bookmarks.
And when I said "could", I mean "did".
Repeatedly.
By the FSM's noodly appendage, I wish I was making this crap up.
I just remembered... I once had an argument about optics with one of the guys who worked on early semi-conductors... later on he told me I was right and that the only reason I lost the argument was:
In school, the teacher is always right, particularly when they're wrong AND foul tempered.
Only last Friday, I heard one of my college professors say: "Wow. I've taught this for twenty years and this has never crossed my mind. You just ruined my beautifully constructed lecture, but this is a perfectly valid interpretation. I've never thought about it in that way."
Of course, I've had some assholes for teachers as well, but generally, I've been lucky: most have been honest enought to admit they were wrong.
I'll probably be a teacher at some point in the future. And I hope I'll be able to admit when I'm wrong.
Does this software run setuid root?
Of course, even if it is not, this is a huge issue.
Eggs.
This is patently ridiculous.
If MS didn't understand the significance of F/OSS, they would never even bother about it.
The fact that they are doing everything they can to stop it means that they understand it all too well, but don't want to give their users any freedom they don't have to.
And why would they?
Vendor lock-in means a steady revenue stream. And that's all that matters.
Give your users freedom, and they might fly away. And then you'd have to work on getting them back.
I am sorry, but this feature has already been implemented in Windows Vista.
Cut-and-paste garbage collection?Not only is it obvious prior art, but implementing it will just add another item to the list of patents Linux is currently violating.
Surely you jest. Microsoft implemented a graphical representation of a trashcan, i.e. a "Recycle Bin", back in 1995.
And you can cut and paste or simply move items to that trashcan.
Funnily enough, I do agree with Opera on this one, though I don't use Opera.
It may be faster and nicer in many ways, but some Firefox extensions are simply way too valuable to me.
I remember switching from CDE to fvwm, then to WindowMaker (only later to be renamed Window Maker), on a Solaris machine... fvwm was great, WindowMaker a revelation.
Then I got a computer of my own, started dabbling in Linux, examined a great deal of rather obscure DEs for a magazine article I never wrote in the end... fvwm95 was the rage at one point; then we all got to see exactly how ugly Windows was.
And fvwm was great. But I took to Gnome in those early days, and never really left.
Anyway, I remember how Enlightenment was at first regarded as bloated, then as too shiny but relatively modest... but that was E16.
E17[1] is really blazingly fast, rewritten (almost?) completely... I don't know how it would work on a K5-100 with 32 MB RAM, but it's really a lovely desktop.
As I already mentioned, on a Duron 600 with 256 MB RAM, I had four desktops with different animated backgrounds (had to see how it worked), and it was still way more responsive than anything else with a similar set of features.
[1] I still sometimes curse the annoying teen magazine which had a "TT vs. E17 Corner", where bunches of fans flamed each other. So this abbreviation is still tainted in my mind.
After several years I'm now running fluxbox under arch linux...having a taskbar seems weird when I have to use windows now
I bought a MacBook Pro. Menu bar and tray at the top of the screen, dock a the bottom.
Under Linux, I've always had some kind of a dock at the bottom, as well as a pager, and a menu bar and tray at the top. (OK, not in WindowMaker. And I hated CDE, back in the day.)
Then I moved the Start button to the top of the screen under Windows as well, and installed RocketDock.
Needless to say, my cursor often wanders to the top of the screen for no apparent when working on machines other than my own.
And one of the things I'm not missing in OS X is the Windows-like taskbar. Gods, what a nuisance it really is...
Because it's plainly obivious from their very names that vim and emacs are much more than text editors.
OK, so one of them is an operating system, but that's beside the point.
When my mother's (albeit computer-illiterate, or almost so) clients can't read something[1], if she doesn't re-send the data in an acceptable format, she loses business.
OTOH, in your case it would be considered rude to simply bounce the .xlsx and .docx files as unreadable.
I therefore suggest routing them all through a computer-illiterate employee with Office 97. If (s)he cannot open the file, something must be wrong, please re-send in a tried and tested format like Office 97, thank you so very much.
But really, don't people have any manners anymore?
Isn't sending files in an unknown/unreadable/not-yet-universally-accepted format impolite?
I avoid sending anything in MS formats; if PDF won't do, and ODF is not an option, then I save as RTF. But even when I do send MS-formatted files, it's never newer than Office 97, because many people still use that and have no need for anything newer.
[1] up to and including unzipping... imagine attaching 20 different files in one e-mail just because your clients can't be bothered to learn how to fscking Extract here. *sob*
First, you have just switched the issue from the OS to the applications.
That's almost-justified, as users generally care more about their apps than the OS.
Anyway, I won't challenge the fact that MS Office is made well, at least in the features vs. footprint and speed respect.
The UI is a whole new part of discussion, and quite irrelevant here.
Anyway, footprint and startup times are not necessarily equivalent.
EOG is slower than the image viewer in Windows, GEdit is much slower than notepad.exe, write.exe and so on. Internet Explorer and even Firefox starts faster on Windows than Linux.Don't know about EOG, but Enlightenment's image viewer is about the fastest I've ever seen. I haven't measured its startup time, but I have never seen anything display or resize pictures faster.
Notepad cannot be compared to any other editor, as it is the most useless piece of crap in the editor world.
GEdit has tabs, syntax highlighting, and a whole bunch of other features that Notepad doesn't have.
And yet again: startup times and memory footprint are not the same.
Anyway, the issue here was the OS and its interface; KDE vs. Aero, if you like.
KDE added new features, and so did Aero; KDE has a lower memory footprint than the previous version, while Aero patently doesn't.
On Linux, a compositing UI is available on a much lower-spec'd machine than on Windows.
I have absolutely no idea how their startup times compare, but once up and running, the difference is evident.
I have two 600 MHz machines, one with Linux, the other with WinXP.
Linux is slow, especially if running Gnome, like most people do, but WinXP is a slideshow.
And if you start E17 under Linux, the difference is amazing.
I'm sure Major Major Major Major would have something to say here...
Yes, but under Wine, applications that crash do so consistently.