Procmail has really, really, really awful documentation - a set of the most horrible man pages in an ordinary setup (and that includes bash) and a load of mostly useless example files. I've been using various freenixes on and off for seven years and yet Procmail syntax basically stumped me. I had to search for decent rulesets on the Web before I was able to understand actually what was going on, and that took quite a lot of time.
Procmail is neither simple nor straightforward, unless you have used it far too often before and are prepared to decipher far too much overtechnical documentation in order to make it do what you want it to (in my case, filter my IMAP mailbox depending on +whatever extension). This, of course, comes from the fact that it is far too much like sendmail syntax for comfort.
(Put it this way: I found ISC DHCPD easier to configure than Procmail. And I'm not even using SA, since unfortunately the machine I'm using as my mail server is a Pentium-120. Somehow, I think that a P120's probably too underpowered for that.)
(Note: I define 'spam' as not just dodgy commercial email from Penis Pill Ltd or Pyramid Scheme Inc or whomever, and not just UCE from any business in general, but as bulk email unrequested by the recipient. Full stop.)
The US-originating spammers already use open proxies, r00ted cablemodem boxes and other funness to market their sites, generally hosted on dodgy ISPs in the Far East (China especially) using fake WHOIS registrations and idiotic registrars (VeriSign et al). You really think this law is going to stop these people? There's no trail of proof with these guys. Only the idiots will go to jail, and that's if the government can be bothered prosecuting; a good comparison is fax.com, which is illegal (and knows it) but still keeps on running, flipping the bird at the FTC.
(In the UK, we're getting a fudge of a spam law; spam to consumers is banned, but spam to businesses is just fine. Even that's better than this thing.)
And besides, just banning 'fraudulent' spam will mean that people will just spam 'legitimately'. "This is a commercial advertisment as specified by the CAN SPAM act (S.823). Therefore, it is not spam since we provide the following add-your-name-to-our-billions-CDs^Wremove link." We already had that with S.1618 and that didn't even become law.
This bill is a disaster waiting to happen, just designed to let the DMA open the floodgates; so therefore, be prepared for a wave of 'legitimate' spam from every business you can think of (given their 'get out of jail free' card.) Won't be fraudulent, won't be forged. Will be spam, but the government won't care.
I didn't read the bill enough to see whether it prevented us from blocking them, but let's hope it doesn't; even then, it'll be a whack-a-mole worse than Sanford Wallace at his peak.
By the looks of it, this law isn't even going to stop some nimrod in the United States from spamming you.
The crime is "sending FRAUDULENT spam". It's an opt-out law. It lets 'charities' and 'political organisations' spam you. And there's a nice little clause in there which means that it's only fraudulent if you forge five or more addresses. NOT GOOD.
Be prepared for spam to dwarf Swen as the biggest bandwidth hit on the Net next year. And legally, you can't do a goddamn thing; it's whack-a-mole all over again.
Well, I'm a UK keyboard owner - and I'd be really really pissed if I selected "English (United Kingdom)" and all my keys were in the Dvorak order; since I don't actually *know* the Dvorak order.
The current Debian installer requires you to know that the UK's keyboard layout is, in fact, "gb" ("uk" is the Ukraine). Now the new one requires you to select a US keyboard just so you can get QWERTY, without the small rearrangements that we have on UK keyboards (the UKP symbol is on Shift-3, for example).
And it's STILL using dselect for packaging. Oh well, at least it's a beta, so they'll hopefully change these stupidities before sarge comes out. It looks like a pretty nice installer otherwise.
(On the other hand, they didn't fix the stupidities of the last installer either...)
By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself. No, no, no it's just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they'll take root - I don't know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself.
Seriously though, if you are, do. Aaah, no really, there's no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan's little helpers, Okay - kill yourself - seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No this is not a joke, you're going, "there's going to be a joke coming," there's no fucking joke coming. You are Satan's spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It's the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself.
Functionality like this actually exists in Windows since Windows 2000 (at least); it just isn't automated yet. Try holding down SHIFT when you right click on an icon; this will produce a "Run As..." menu option.
At this, some distros (eg. Mandrake) are much much better than Windows. The problems with doing this in Windows are basically that:
Most users HATE passwords. XP attempts to get around this by setting (by default) that you can't access an unpassworded account via a network, but it still lets you create one. This is entirely a usability issue.
There are a lot of dumb and/or older applications which require finely grained permissions; whilst current versions of, say, the Microsoft, Adobe or Macromedia suites store settings in %appdata% (not to mention Mozilla, Firebird and Thunderbird), older versions and/or badly written software may not. This would cause an absolute pain.
And, of course, something well-engineered like, say, Swen would easily bypass this. "Oh, look, it's a Microsoft Security Update. It looks professional enough. That always asks for my password when I've done it before." That's the problem with autodetecting stuff that needs 'root privileges', and the fact is that the time it would take to make up a list of 'OK Applications' would be far too long and cause *far* too many complaints, especially from the "Microsoft is evil" crowd. "Microsoft is deciding what I can and can't use! STOP THEM!!1!!11!"
Pity, really; if it wasn't for the fact that Microsoft would recieve a huge number of complaints from the new and the clueless if they tried it, it would be a good idea.
The entire purpose for DUL-type lists (the MAPS DUL is non-free, so there are other variants generally used now) is to block idiots who leave Wingate or AnalogX running on their cable modem connections. It is a *big* problem; most of my spam comes from open proxies on, yes, cable modems and DSL. Those users who run properly-maintained, well secured mail servers on their DSL or cable are very, very rare; open proxies aren't.
The fact is that I don't have to accept your mail if I don't want to. It's the same at the ISP level. It doesn't matter whether I'm rejecting using my own lists or dynablock or SBL or SPEWS or whatever, it's that the benefit of rejecting (say) mail from cable modems outweighs the risk of me losing any legitimate mail. ISPs get users complaining about spam all the time; they don't want it marked, they want it completely gone. DUL-type services go very far towards that, since hardly any legitimate mail ever comes out of cable modem space. That's life.
Now, I'm about to set up a personal (fully secure, encrypted communications et al) mail server on my own cable modem, since it isn't prohibited by my acceptable use policy; and, yes, it's going to use blocklists *including* SBL, SPEWS, Easynet and friends. It is, however, going to smarthost its outgoing SMTP through my provider's mail server. I suggest you do the same.
I think that movie did a lot of harm to the Open Source movement, actually.
In case you're not familiar with the film (and let's face it, it was a major league disaster so not many people are), the main plotline is this: Ryan Phillipe is poached by a large multinational corporation run by a Bill Gates figure from some "open source" development team run out of a garage, taking his wife up to Oregon. In the mean time, Ryan Phillipe's old "open source" buddy gets killed by some security guys with baseball bats, and Ryan starts to suspect his company might be responsible.
Even taking into account the somewhat unlikely idea that Bill Gates would have people killed just because they were in the same area as he was, or that Bill Gates figure was actually watching them through hidden fibreoptic security systems, or that Bill Gates figure would even be interested in doing away with such a loser as Ryan Phillipe, the movie still stinks both actually and technically. The McGuffin is a program called "Synapse", which apparently links every electronic device in the world together using "back doors placed in company's OS software for the last four years" - strange, since the company is using GNOME on Linux (admittedly a version of GNOME on Linux with a unified look and a working, integrated CD burner). And the whole Synapse stuff is, in any case, 100% impossible technically; was in 1999, still is now.
Oh, and you want to know the best part? It's written in Java.
Yes, that's right, this movie had big involvement from the GNOME Foundation - but an even bigger involvement from Sun Microsystems. Scott ("you have no privacy, get over it") McNealy even shows up in the movie, giving a prize to Ryan Phillipe's open source mate. The movie seems suspiciously designed to be a propaganda blast from Sun, aimed at pushing open source into the mainstream. As such, it is the open source version of "Mac And Me" or "The Wizard".
It's not even that good at that; the whole incessant preaching about how open source saves the day gets cloying and nasty and sore. Quite frankly, I think people would get turned off of open source by this movie. Bad propaganda is worse than no propaganda at all, always.
I'd rather watch "The Net" - for the fact it's vaguely technically competent for the first half of the movie (and then goes way OTT), and is OK as a thriller. Hell, I'd even rather watch "Hackers" (for the probably-intentional, probably-not humour) than this, and that's saying something.
Dell kit is pretty easily spotted, really (it's all black and silver now), so it's getting product placement at about the same rate as Apple now. As a recent example, "Terminator 3" has an absolutely gigantic level of Dell product placement.
Phoenix have owned Award for quite some time, and practically every board I've seen lately has had an Award/Phoenix BIOS. AMI are making their money mostly on RAID solutions right now.
On the original story: from the press release on Phoenix's site, it looks like the byline might be a bit OTT (ain't it always?). Basically, it looks just like a turfing-out of legacy crud, turning the BIOS into something more like OpenFirmware or a mainframe BIOS. Just because it's in conjunction with Microsoft doesn't always mean it's a bad thing, but we've got to wait and see.
Old sendmails do open relays, not open proxies, and there are way less old sendmails now - most of them had bought a Sun, left it on its infamous SMI-SVR4 default configuration, and stuck it in a corner. These people have mostly gone to Microsoft Exchange, which was a default open relay for way longer than sendmail was.
Proxies aren't just a Windows problem (there's a lot of badly configured squids) but with idiotic, "user-friendly" default-open-without-logging stuff like AnalogX out there, it's pretty much one. It's not Microsoft's fault that AnalogX make godawful software either.
[inq@aragorn net/py-bittorrent]> uname -sr
FreeBSD 4.8-STABLE
[inq@aragorn net/py-bittorrent]> make fetch
===> Define WITHOUT_GUI to disable GUI installation
The GUI is optional. It only depends on WX if you've set it up that way. Same with, say, CVSup on FreeBSD; there's a version which requires X, and cvsup-without-gui which doesn't. Same code; cvsup-without-gui just doesn't compile the X bits.
Oh, and you can use mldonkey for BitTorrent, which doesn't need a GUI either. Nice try.
They already do. ISTR that a couple of recent viruses drop open proxies, even more evil than open relays (because of the other uses they have: bombing USENET, DDoSing, attacking websites and blaming it on someone else...)
Also, a certain popular provider of faux-"internet connection sharing" proxy software not only leaves it fully open in its default configuration, but it doesn't log either. You can guess the result.
When I started with Linux, in around 1996, all there were were text-based installers - unfortunately, Debian's worst than most.
1. dselect sucks (as other people have commented.)
2. tasksel is horrific too; no easy customisation.
3. The installer seems to expect you know every little thing about Linux, resulting in such infuriating choices as the keyboard-select screen - there's no guide as to what to enter, just a prompt. There is potential for confusion there (UK is actually the Ukraine, not the United Kingdom, and it doesn't tell you this).
4. Similarly, there's hardly any auto-detection; especially in problem areas, like X11, which also expects you to know weird information about your video card. Why not even XFree86 -configure, and allowing fine-tuning?
I am *not* scared of text-based installers. However, Debian is by far the worst one I've used; that includes the old RedHat 5.x installer, Slackware, and FreeBSD. (In fact, I think the FreeBSD installer is the most efficient one I've ever used, text-based or no.)
And if Deb can't get anywhere near the Redhat 5.x installer, it's in deep trouble.
However, I'm not sure about other people. Looks like you need a good-quality (Tosh/Plextor/Pioneer) type CD drive to work around this BS copy protection. Fantastic.
AFAIK, EMI UK aren't using the Cactus "protection" yet (the official UK 100th Window wasn't), so there is still some hope. I am therefore no longer buying CDs from copy-protected labels using online importers; it's causing me an extra expense, but for less hassle in the end. Of course, my rip was entirely for "fair use" reasons (playing the CD on my computer), and we don't have a DMCA in Britain (yet), so there is still hope.
I think I know what you mean - I had a Live 5.1 that had very few of the problems other Live 5.1 owners were going through, even though it was in PCI slot one on a VIA-based (but admittedly very good) Athlon mobo. As soon as the data corruption problem got fixed (by MSI's BIOS team), and as long as I stayed with the Windows XP default drivers, everything else was fine.
I had a very early Live 5.1, and this might have been the reason why.
Your friend doesn't happen to have a Dell, does he?
Recent Dell BIOSes (on all the Dell P4s I've seen) do not autodetect IDE hardware. This means that while Windows will detect it, it will only run in PIO mode; you have to force the BIOS to autodetect the CD drive to enable DMA. (And then you have to remember to enable it in Windows...)
And don't bother just setting it all to auto, as that's broken: an empty IDE slot will cause the BIOS to hang for twenty seconds or so. Just another fine example of how apart from the easy-open case (ripped off the PowerMac towers anyway), modern Dells suck.
They are actually being updated by Lucent/Agere: the basic version of the binary module keeps changing (the last version was updated to include GCC3 support). I'm rather hoping they're going to include support for their AMR modems soon, since the current version doesn't support them...
Actually, most Win98 drivers won't work on WinXP - due to the fact that they're completely different kernels. Some drivers (written to the 'Windows Driver Model', an encapsulation of the Win2K driver interface) will work on both OSes, but I've seen precious few. Most Win2K drivers will work though, excepting Creative Labs products.
And FYI, there is a Lucent/Agere driver for WinXP included in the base OS (and a newer one available from Agere themselves); they're not giving up support yet. For those of us with Lucent kit, we can only hope...
I've installed both Debian Woody and FreeBSD on my laptop, so on the record I agree with you.
FreeBSD 4.7 detects almost everything. You can install this thing by just doing a quick partition, accepting auto defaults, installing the boot manager, and setting a Root Password (although it's probably best to set up a UK keyboard and stuff.) You can actually install this thing off 802.11b... While X is still a configuration blackspot (and one which is fixable), and audio isn't loaded by default, the only thing FreeBSD didn't detect was the audio (a quick kldload later...) and the non-supported softmodem.
But then, Debian doesn't support the softmodem either, and it has many other problems too. Not only do you need to know that under Linux the keyboard for the United Kingdom is 'gb' ('uk' is the Ukraine), which no newbie is going to know, but the X Windows configuration is insane (at least xf86config has names like "NVIDIA GeForce"), and dselect is the Spawn of Satan. The only thing I used dselect for was installing aptitude, but who apart from the Slashdot crowd has ever heard of aptitude? And besides, they shouldn't need to read three pages of obfuscated 'help' to be able to install a package.
I know there are problems with FreeBSD too, my rubbish on-board sound system being a case in point - it needs IIC and other non-default options compiled in to work. But in comparison to Debian it's a veritable OS X; and besides, I had much the same trouble with Deb too. Most of the problems with Debian originate from its boneheaded installer and, of course, dselect: once those are fixed, it will become a much better distribution for techie and newbie alike.
FYI: all versions of Notepad on Windows NT (including Win2K and XP) do *not* have the asinine file limit, and I've opened 1MB+ files in Notepad on these operating systems. The only reason the file limit exists in the first place is because of Win9x's boneheaded text box implementation: Notepad is just a text box connected to a file save mechanism.
I own a Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100... afaik, Tosh actually make at least one of the 1600x1200 panels that Dell uses. It's got very decent video for a laptop (GF4 Go, separate DDR VRAM - same as the Dell Inspiron I compared it with), so there appears to be at least one exception to your statement. It's also more than a desktop replacement - real mobile P4, WiFi, Bluetooth, lasts more than two hours on battery... It's being repaired right now, but I'm not blaming them (hard drive failure).
A friend owns a Dell Optiplex with a P4 2.53GHz and integrated i830 graphics - it runs UT2K3 so badly it's unplayable at everything higher than 640x480x16xreally-low-detail, so it'll be even worse on a laptop. Thankfully, I don't have that problem - admittedly I own the top-of-the-line model, but still...
The Word.DOC format has been exactly the same since Word 97. The extensions made since then (highlighting, Smart Tags etc.) are backwards-degradable; the files will still open. The only reason they changed it for 97, actually, was to support Unicode and foreign languages better; the 95 format was exactly the same as that in Word 6.0.
Actually, there's a Microsoft-written extension available to allow you to support Word 97 (and by extension, 2000 and XP) files in Word 95, and the free readers are still available (no $$$ required) for all Office applications. Hell, there's even one for Windows 3.1, and that was three versions of Office ago...
And as for my experiences with word-processing on Linux, AbiWord is an excellent light-duties word processor; while OOo is a bloated heap of non-portable junk (have you seen how many patches it needs to compile properly on FreeBSD?), and that's before you take its capabilities into account. Unfortunately, I don't use my WP for light-duties; I actually use Word's document styling and templating features, which even StarOffice 5.2 (with Sun's considerable backing) couldn't import correctly. I appreciate that I'm meant to use DTP for styling, but a word processor should at least be able to import a 'use Courier New, indented 3"' style - and especially when Word, on a different machine without my template, can display the documents 100% correctly. Last time I tried this with AbiWord, it imported it as Times New Roman flush left, throughout the whole document file. (It did import line spacing correctly, though - there's hope yet.)
The fact is: I like Word 2000, and I'm staying with it until I find another WP that works better for me. I did the same with Internet Explorer, until Mozilla got really good around 0.9.9; now, I use Mozilla instead. Right now, AbiWord is not it; and I'm not even going to bother with OpenOffice, a program which takes up more space un-tarred than the whole of Office 2000. And besides, Linux printing support (even with CUPS, whose Internet-based administration is a root hole waiting to happen) is a dark art that only Faust could probably master. No thanks.
While I haven't been in the NANAE community for some months now, I *do* remember that this depends on his registrar. If it's someone good like OpenSRS, it'll be looked at - if it's netsol or whomever, they just won't care.
BTW, the last time I remember seeing anti-leech.com was on a pirate MP3 site... this appears to be their main customer area.
I actually bought a NVidia-based laptop (a Toshiba SatPro 6100) deliberately, over the field of Radeon 7500s I could have chosen from; while the main reason was because the SatPro is a beautiful laptop, a subsidiary reason was ATI's infamous driver team (and complete lack of worthwhile Linux, and especially FreeBSD, support).
The DVD playback I get from this thing, using PowerDVD 4.0 and hardware acceleration, is absolutely stunning; admittedly that's on a digital, 15", 1600x1200 LCD panel, but it's better than I've seen from some desktop DVD players (and a lot better than my Dxr3 hardware decoder at home). It might be just the surrounding hardware causing your DVD playback problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Procmail has really, really, really awful documentation - a set of the most horrible man pages in an ordinary setup (and that includes bash) and a load of mostly useless example files. I've been using various freenixes on and off for seven years and yet Procmail syntax basically stumped me. I had to search for decent rulesets on the Web before I was able to understand actually what was going on, and that took quite a lot of time.
Procmail is neither simple nor straightforward, unless you have used it far too often before and are prepared to decipher far too much overtechnical documentation in order to make it do what you want it to (in my case, filter my IMAP mailbox depending on +whatever extension). This, of course, comes from the fact that it is far too much like sendmail syntax for comfort.
(Put it this way: I found ISC DHCPD easier to configure than Procmail. And I'm not even using SA, since unfortunately the machine I'm using as my mail server is a Pentium-120. Somehow, I think that a P120's probably too underpowered for that.)
(Note: I define 'spam' as not just dodgy commercial email from Penis Pill Ltd or Pyramid Scheme Inc or whomever, and not just UCE from any business in general, but as bulk email unrequested by the recipient. Full stop.)
The US-originating spammers already use open proxies, r00ted cablemodem boxes and other funness to market their sites, generally hosted on dodgy ISPs in the Far East (China especially) using fake WHOIS registrations and idiotic registrars (VeriSign et al). You really think this law is going to stop these people? There's no trail of proof with these guys. Only the idiots will go to jail, and that's if the government can be bothered prosecuting; a good comparison is fax.com, which is illegal (and knows it) but still keeps on running, flipping the bird at the FTC.
(In the UK, we're getting a fudge of a spam law; spam to consumers is banned, but spam to businesses is just fine. Even that's better than this thing.)
And besides, just banning 'fraudulent' spam will mean that people will just spam 'legitimately'. "This is a commercial advertisment as specified by the CAN SPAM act (S.823). Therefore, it is not spam since we provide the following add-your-name-to-our-billions-CDs^Wremove link." We already had that with S.1618 and that didn't even become law.
This bill is a disaster waiting to happen, just designed to let the DMA open the floodgates; so therefore, be prepared for a wave of 'legitimate' spam from every business you can think of (given their 'get out of jail free' card.) Won't be fraudulent, won't be forged. Will be spam, but the government won't care.
I didn't read the bill enough to see whether it prevented us from blocking them, but let's hope it doesn't; even then, it'll be a whack-a-mole worse than Sanford Wallace at his peak.
By the looks of it, this law isn't even going to stop some nimrod in the United States from spamming you.
The crime is "sending FRAUDULENT spam". It's an opt-out law. It lets 'charities' and 'political organisations' spam you. And there's a nice little clause in there which means that it's only fraudulent if you forge five or more addresses. NOT GOOD.
Be prepared for spam to dwarf Swen as the biggest bandwidth hit on the Net next year. And legally, you can't do a goddamn thing; it's whack-a-mole all over again.
Well, I'm a UK keyboard owner - and I'd be really really pissed if I selected "English (United Kingdom)" and all my keys were in the Dvorak order; since I don't actually *know* the Dvorak order.
The current Debian installer requires you to know that the UK's keyboard layout is, in fact, "gb" ("uk" is the Ukraine). Now the new one requires you to select a US keyboard just so you can get QWERTY, without the small rearrangements that we have on UK keyboards (the UKP symbol is on Shift-3, for example).
And it's STILL using dselect for packaging. Oh well, at least it's a beta, so they'll hopefully change these stupidities before sarge comes out. It looks like a pretty nice installer otherwise.
(On the other hand, they didn't fix the stupidities of the last installer either...)
At this, some distros (eg. Mandrake) are much much better than Windows. The problems with doing this in Windows are basically that:
- Most users HATE passwords. XP attempts to get around this by setting (by default) that you can't access an unpassworded account via a network, but it still lets you create one. This is entirely a usability issue.
- There are a lot of dumb and/or older applications which require finely grained permissions; whilst current versions of, say, the Microsoft, Adobe or Macromedia suites store settings in %appdata% (not to mention Mozilla, Firebird and Thunderbird), older versions and/or badly written software may not. This would cause an absolute pain.
- And, of course, something well-engineered like, say, Swen would easily bypass this. "Oh, look, it's a Microsoft Security Update. It looks professional enough. That always asks for my password when I've done it before." That's the problem with autodetecting stuff that needs 'root privileges', and the fact is that the time it would take to make up a list of 'OK Applications' would be far too long and cause *far* too many complaints, especially from the "Microsoft is evil" crowd. "Microsoft is deciding what I can and can't use! STOP THEM!!1!!11!"
Pity, really; if it wasn't for the fact that Microsoft would recieve a huge number of complaints from the new and the clueless if they tried it, it would be a good idea.The entire purpose for DUL-type lists (the MAPS DUL is non-free, so there are other variants generally used now) is to block idiots who leave Wingate or AnalogX running on their cable modem connections. It is a *big* problem; most of my spam comes from open proxies on, yes, cable modems and DSL. Those users who run properly-maintained, well secured mail servers on their DSL or cable are very, very rare; open proxies aren't.
The fact is that I don't have to accept your mail if I don't want to. It's the same at the ISP level. It doesn't matter whether I'm rejecting using my own lists or dynablock or SBL or SPEWS or whatever, it's that the benefit of rejecting (say) mail from cable modems outweighs the risk of me losing any legitimate mail. ISPs get users complaining about spam all the time; they don't want it marked, they want it completely gone. DUL-type services go very far towards that, since hardly any legitimate mail ever comes out of cable modem space. That's life.
Now, I'm about to set up a personal (fully secure, encrypted communications et al) mail server on my own cable modem, since it isn't prohibited by my acceptable use policy; and, yes, it's going to use blocklists *including* SBL, SPEWS, Easynet and friends. It is, however, going to smarthost its outgoing SMTP through my provider's mail server. I suggest you do the same.
I think that movie did a lot of harm to the Open Source movement, actually.
In case you're not familiar with the film (and let's face it, it was a major league disaster so not many people are), the main plotline is this: Ryan Phillipe is poached by a large multinational corporation run by a Bill Gates figure from some "open source" development team run out of a garage, taking his wife up to Oregon. In the mean time, Ryan Phillipe's old "open source" buddy gets killed by some security guys with baseball bats, and Ryan starts to suspect his company might be responsible.
Even taking into account the somewhat unlikely idea that Bill Gates would have people killed just because they were in the same area as he was, or that Bill Gates figure was actually watching them through hidden fibreoptic security systems, or that Bill Gates figure would even be interested in doing away with such a loser as Ryan Phillipe, the movie still stinks both actually and technically. The McGuffin is a program called "Synapse", which apparently links every electronic device in the world together using "back doors placed in company's OS software for the last four years" - strange, since the company is using GNOME on Linux (admittedly a version of GNOME on Linux with a unified look and a working, integrated CD burner). And the whole Synapse stuff is, in any case, 100% impossible technically; was in 1999, still is now.
Oh, and you want to know the best part? It's written in Java.
Yes, that's right, this movie had big involvement from the GNOME Foundation - but an even bigger involvement from Sun Microsystems. Scott ("you have no privacy, get over it") McNealy even shows up in the movie, giving a prize to Ryan Phillipe's open source mate. The movie seems suspiciously designed to be a propaganda blast from Sun, aimed at pushing open source into the mainstream. As such, it is the open source version of "Mac And Me" or "The Wizard".
It's not even that good at that; the whole incessant preaching about how open source saves the day gets cloying and nasty and sore. Quite frankly, I think people would get turned off of open source by this movie. Bad propaganda is worse than no propaganda at all, always.
I'd rather watch "The Net" - for the fact it's vaguely technically competent for the first half of the movie (and then goes way OTT), and is OK as a thriller. Hell, I'd even rather watch "Hackers" (for the probably-intentional, probably-not humour) than this, and that's saying something.
Dell kit is pretty easily spotted, really (it's all black and silver now), so it's getting product placement at about the same rate as Apple now. As a recent example, "Terminator 3" has an absolutely gigantic level of Dell product placement.
AMI maybe, but http://www.award.com redirects to http://www.phoenix.com/en/home/.
Phoenix have owned Award for quite some time, and practically every board I've seen lately has had an Award/Phoenix BIOS. AMI are making their money mostly on RAID solutions right now.
On the original story: from the press release on Phoenix's site, it looks like the byline might be a bit OTT (ain't it always?). Basically, it looks just like a turfing-out of legacy crud, turning the BIOS into something more like OpenFirmware or a mainframe BIOS. Just because it's in conjunction with Microsoft doesn't always mean it's a bad thing, but we've got to wait and see.
Old sendmails do open relays, not open proxies, and there are way less old sendmails now - most of them had bought a Sun, left it on its infamous SMI-SVR4 default configuration, and stuck it in a corner. These people have mostly gone to Microsoft Exchange, which was a default open relay for way longer than sendmail was.
Proxies aren't just a Windows problem (there's a lot of badly configured squids) but with idiotic, "user-friendly" default-open-without-logging stuff like AnalogX out there, it's pretty much one. It's not Microsoft's fault that AnalogX make godawful software either.
Since when did BitTorrent require a GUI?
[inq@aragorn net/py-bittorrent]> uname -sr
FreeBSD 4.8-STABLE
[inq@aragorn net/py-bittorrent]> make fetch
===> Define WITHOUT_GUI to disable GUI installation
The GUI is optional. It only depends on WX if you've set it up that way. Same with, say, CVSup on FreeBSD; there's a version which requires X, and cvsup-without-gui which doesn't. Same code; cvsup-without-gui just doesn't compile the X bits.
Oh, and you can use mldonkey for BitTorrent, which doesn't need a GUI either. Nice try.
Interestingly, Intel also supplied the P4EE clock-unlocked, so that reviewers could OC it as a spoiler for the Athlon 64.
It will almost certainly disable both the clock-lock and the SMP capability before shipping; a very Intel thing to do. A64 scares them hard. Good.
They already do. ISTR that a couple of recent viruses drop open proxies, even more evil than open relays (because of the other uses they have: bombing USENET, DDoSing, attacking websites and blaming it on someone else...)
Also, a certain popular provider of faux-"internet connection sharing" proxy software not only leaves it fully open in its default configuration, but it doesn't log either. You can guess the result.
When I started with Linux, in around 1996, all there were were text-based installers - unfortunately, Debian's worst than most.
1. dselect sucks (as other people have commented.)
2. tasksel is horrific too; no easy customisation.
3. The installer seems to expect you know every little thing about Linux, resulting in such infuriating choices as the keyboard-select screen - there's no guide as to what to enter, just a prompt. There is potential for confusion there (UK is actually the Ukraine, not the United Kingdom, and it doesn't tell you this).
4. Similarly, there's hardly any auto-detection; especially in problem areas, like X11, which also expects you to know weird information about your video card. Why not even XFree86 -configure, and allowing fine-tuning?
I am *not* scared of text-based installers. However, Debian is by far the worst one I've used; that includes the old RedHat 5.x installer, Slackware, and FreeBSD. (In fact, I think the FreeBSD installer is the most efficient one I've ever used, text-based or no.)
And if Deb can't get anywhere near the Redhat 5.x installer, it's in deep trouble.
I sure could.
However, I'm not sure about other people. Looks like you need a good-quality (Tosh/Plextor/Pioneer) type CD drive to work around this BS copy protection. Fantastic.
AFAIK, EMI UK aren't using the Cactus "protection" yet (the official UK 100th Window wasn't), so there is still some hope. I am therefore no longer buying CDs from copy-protected labels using online importers; it's causing me an extra expense, but for less hassle in the end. Of course, my rip was entirely for "fair use" reasons (playing the CD on my computer), and we don't have a DMCA in Britain (yet), so there is still hope.
I think I know what you mean - I had a Live 5.1 that had very few of the problems other Live 5.1 owners were going through, even though it was in PCI slot one on a VIA-based (but admittedly very good) Athlon mobo. As soon as the data corruption problem got fixed (by MSI's BIOS team), and as long as I stayed with the Windows XP default drivers, everything else was fine.
I had a very early Live 5.1, and this might have been the reason why.
Your friend doesn't happen to have a Dell, does he?
Recent Dell BIOSes (on all the Dell P4s I've seen) do not autodetect IDE hardware. This means that while Windows will detect it, it will only run in PIO mode; you have to force the BIOS to autodetect the CD drive to enable DMA. (And then you have to remember to enable it in Windows...)
And don't bother just setting it all to auto, as that's broken: an empty IDE slot will cause the BIOS to hang for twenty seconds or so. Just another fine example of how apart from the easy-open case (ripped off the PowerMac towers anyway), modern Dells suck.
They are actually being updated by Lucent/Agere: the basic version of the binary module keeps changing (the last version was updated to include GCC3 support). I'm rather hoping they're going to include support for their AMR modems soon, since the current version doesn't support them...
Actually, most Win98 drivers won't work on WinXP - due to the fact that they're completely different kernels. Some drivers (written to the 'Windows Driver Model', an encapsulation of the Win2K driver interface) will work on both OSes, but I've seen precious few. Most Win2K drivers will work though, excepting Creative Labs products.
And FYI, there is a Lucent/Agere driver for WinXP included in the base OS (and a newer one available from Agere themselves); they're not giving up support yet. For those of us with Lucent kit, we can only hope...
I've installed both Debian Woody and FreeBSD on my laptop, so on the record I agree with you.
FreeBSD 4.7 detects almost everything. You can install this thing by just doing a quick partition, accepting auto defaults, installing the boot manager, and setting a Root Password (although it's probably best to set up a UK keyboard and stuff.) You can actually install this thing off 802.11b... While X is still a configuration blackspot (and one which is fixable), and audio isn't loaded by default, the only thing FreeBSD didn't detect was the audio (a quick kldload later...) and the non-supported softmodem.
But then, Debian doesn't support the softmodem either, and it has many other problems too. Not only do you need to know that under Linux the keyboard for the United Kingdom is 'gb' ('uk' is the Ukraine), which no newbie is going to know, but the X Windows configuration is insane (at least xf86config has names like "NVIDIA GeForce"), and dselect is the Spawn of Satan. The only thing I used dselect for was installing aptitude, but who apart from the Slashdot crowd has ever heard of aptitude? And besides, they shouldn't need to read three pages of obfuscated 'help' to be able to install a package.
I know there are problems with FreeBSD too, my rubbish on-board sound system being a case in point - it needs IIC and other non-default options compiled in to work. But in comparison to Debian it's a veritable OS X; and besides, I had much the same trouble with Deb too. Most of the problems with Debian originate from its boneheaded installer and, of course, dselect: once those are fixed, it will become a much better distribution for techie and newbie alike.
FYI: all versions of Notepad on Windows NT (including Win2K and XP) do *not* have the asinine file limit, and I've opened 1MB+ files in Notepad on these operating systems. The only reason the file limit exists in the first place is because of Win9x's boneheaded text box implementation: Notepad is just a text box connected to a file save mechanism.
I own a Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100... afaik, Tosh actually make at least one of the 1600x1200 panels that Dell uses. It's got very decent video for a laptop (GF4 Go, separate DDR VRAM - same as the Dell Inspiron I compared it with), so there appears to be at least one exception to your statement. It's also more than a desktop replacement - real mobile P4, WiFi, Bluetooth, lasts more than two hours on battery... It's being repaired right now, but I'm not blaming them (hard drive failure).
A friend owns a Dell Optiplex with a P4 2.53GHz and integrated i830 graphics - it runs UT2K3 so badly it's unplayable at everything higher than 640x480x16xreally-low-detail, so it'll be even worse on a laptop. Thankfully, I don't have that problem - admittedly I own the top-of-the-line model, but still...
The Word .DOC format has been exactly the same since Word 97. The extensions made since then (highlighting, Smart Tags etc.) are backwards-degradable; the files will still open. The only reason they changed it for 97, actually, was to support Unicode and foreign languages better; the 95 format was exactly the same as that in Word 6.0.
Actually, there's a Microsoft-written extension available to allow you to support Word 97 (and by extension, 2000 and XP) files in Word 95, and the free readers are still available (no $$$ required) for all Office applications. Hell, there's even one for Windows 3.1, and that was three versions of Office ago...
And as for my experiences with word-processing on Linux, AbiWord is an excellent light-duties word processor; while OOo is a bloated heap of non-portable junk (have you seen how many patches it needs to compile properly on FreeBSD?), and that's before you take its capabilities into account. Unfortunately, I don't use my WP for light-duties; I actually use Word's document styling and templating features, which even StarOffice 5.2 (with Sun's considerable backing) couldn't import correctly. I appreciate that I'm meant to use DTP for styling, but a word processor should at least be able to import a 'use Courier New, indented 3"' style - and especially when Word, on a different machine without my template, can display the documents 100% correctly. Last time I tried this with AbiWord, it imported it as Times New Roman flush left, throughout the whole document file. (It did import line spacing correctly, though - there's hope yet.)
The fact is: I like Word 2000, and I'm staying with it until I find another WP that works better for me. I did the same with Internet Explorer, until Mozilla got really good around 0.9.9; now, I use Mozilla instead. Right now, AbiWord is not it; and I'm not even going to bother with OpenOffice, a program which takes up more space un-tarred than the whole of Office 2000. And besides, Linux printing support (even with CUPS, whose Internet-based administration is a root hole waiting to happen) is a dark art that only Faust could probably master. No thanks.
While I haven't been in the NANAE community for some months now, I *do* remember that this depends on his registrar. If it's someone good like OpenSRS, it'll be looked at - if it's netsol or whomever, they just won't care.
BTW, the last time I remember seeing anti-leech.com was on a pirate MP3 site... this appears to be their main customer area.
I actually bought a NVidia-based laptop (a Toshiba SatPro 6100) deliberately, over the field of Radeon 7500s I could have chosen from; while the main reason was because the SatPro is a beautiful laptop, a subsidiary reason was ATI's infamous driver team (and complete lack of worthwhile Linux, and especially FreeBSD, support).
The DVD playback I get from this thing, using PowerDVD 4.0 and hardware acceleration, is absolutely stunning; admittedly that's on a digital, 15", 1600x1200 LCD panel, but it's better than I've seen from some desktop DVD players (and a lot better than my Dxr3 hardware decoder at home). It might be just the surrounding hardware causing your DVD playback problems.