It isn't that surprising to me. The good apps are hard to find on the web if you're used to Windows. (In Linux it's even easier, it's all in the repositories, and there's a choice of 5 apps for pretty much every task). You have to look on different sites (I still don't know which site i should use to get freeware for macs specifically), and google doesn't seem to work so well to get results.
When I tried OS X, I was looking for a good free text editor, but I didn't find one (I like Notepad++ on Windows and Gedit/Kate/Scite/Geany on Linux: light apps, with syntax highlighting for tons of languages and tabs, that's all I want).
If you're a longtime mac user, you'll probably find the opposite true, as you already know where to find good Mac freeware, but not where to get Windows freeware (without getting spyware bundled preferably).
It seems like a lot of Mac users shell out for (or crack) BBedit instead of using a free alternative, though.
Agreed, if the 'web designer' doesn't know enough css and html to code everything by hand, he should just create something in Photoshop/The Gimp and let a skilled coder write clean css and xHTML. Using any kind of WYSIWYG editor will resuult in crappy code.
No, I'm suggesting that people use bookmarks to go to their bank's website instead of following links in e-mails, not to get rid of anchors altogether. Or do you send e-mails with links to banks to other people at work?
No, the 'fix' has been available in browsers since 1993, and it's called 'bookmarks'. Don't be so stupid to follow links to your bank/paypal/ebay from some random e-mail/website, just use the bookmark in your browser to go to the website instead.
As long as the phishers haven't hijacked your dns settings, this method is safe. And if someone managed to either compromise your hosts file/dns servers, you have other things to worry about...
Manufacturing cd's costs next to nothing here too, the record companies just ask more because they can. It's cheaper in Hong Kong because the people there wouldn't be able to afford any otherwise.
I take you've never written a search function for a website? It's not simple, especially if you want the results to be as good as or better than Google. Why do you think so many sites have a 'search this site with Google' box?
That's not the point. Getting the original trojan installed is the difficult part. After it's installed it can do whatever it wants. Getting it installed on the system is easier on Windows than on Linux / OS X, but this article is about something that happens after the trojan was run, and that's something no OS can't protect you from.
What do you want MS to do? disallow even the administrator from writing to system files? The only thing that could protect you against stuff like that is "trusted computing", which means your computer isn't yours any more.
However, Microsoft said that for BITS to be exploited, machines first had to become infected with the trojan that Mr Boldewin discovered.
Well, Microsoft's response makes a lot of sense. You could trick a user into running sudo trojan.sh on Ubuntu too. After that the user is screwed anyway, as trojan.sh could contain anything, including something that edits/etc/apt/sources.list to the attacker's repo's.
What do you want MS to do to stop this from being possible? If the user runs a random executable as root/admin that modifies the system, he's screwed on any OS. If the executable got onto the system through a security hole, that hole should be plugged.
I don't like MS either, but cut them some slack here...
perhaps adding a.htaccess rulz to redirect those requests to http://www.microsoft.com/ could satify your need to get back at MS for inventing that stupid feature... (bonus points if you link it to a huge image).
Creating a seperate/home/ partition worked for me on the live installer (for Edgy), I'm not sure why it didn't work for you. I don't get why the installer doesn't do that by default, though. They probably don't want to confuse the users with picking a size for each partition, but still, having it on a seperate partition is an excellent idea.
I personally prefer the command line and/or editing a.conf file for some tasks too (It sure beats navigating huge preference dialogs. Imagine how a preference dialog for Apache would look like if it were to include all possible options Apache has).
But the average user (browses the web, checks e-mail, gets pictures off his camera,...) won't need the command line on any of those OS's, while the advanced user will have to resort to using the command line/editing.conf files/editing the registry once in a while. (Yes, I count the Windows registry as a huge.conf file, as that's what it basicly is, except that there's no comments with an explanation for *any* of the options).
it is also impossible (at least last time I checked) to automatically include all databases in a scheduled backup. You can only select the databases that are present at the time you schedule the backup.
The command line doesn't even have to exist to operate either of these systems, ever
If you're trying to do anything that doesn't have a GUI tool on both these OS's, you still need the command line. 2 concrete examples: -in windows, if you want to know what connections your computer is making, what applications are doing it, etc, what application do you use? I use netstat -ab for that, because AFAIK Windows has no GUI for this. (in Ubuntu I can just do system>network tools, and I have a graphical netstat right there). And I'm not even mentioning all the stuff you need to dig into the registry for, which is worse than a CLI, IMHO.
-In Mac OS X, if you want to put Safari in debug mode, what do you do? you fire up your terminal, and paste the following:
(ooh, how polished! It probably was way too hard to add a checkbox to enable debug mode in the menu...)
You may want to claim that that's stuff that's far from trivial, which the average user wouldn't need to do, and you'd be right. But if you put an average user in front of Ubuntu, he wouldn't need the command line either. Installing software is done through add/remove or synaptic, and there are GUI tools available for just about everything if you really don't like the command line.
Microsoft should have probably done what Apple later did: rebuild their OS on top of UNIX.
If they had rebuilt it on an Unix base, they would've been on a weaker position: applications and skills would be easily ported between OS's, which would mean people wouldn't be forced to use MS' products like they are now.
MS' business plan has been to lock people into their products as much as possible (cfr. Office, DOS, Windows itself, Internet Explorer,...). Sticking with win32 is what allows them to keep doing that.
Sure, the OS itself would be better, more stable, more secure, etc. but MS isn't trying to make a good OS, they just want one that people absolutely need to buy because everything works with it. That's why they could get away with not having a new OS release in 6 years (I'm not counting win2k3, since the average consumer doesn't buy server OS's).
I'm a web designer, and I run Windows on an intel iMac (Working on an iMac wasn't my choice). I have to disagree with your post: -rebooting to test something in OS X is a pain. I hardly ever use OS X on this box. -setting up a triple boot is hard. OS X + Windows is easy, as it's just following the boot camp wizard, but adding Ubuntu (or any other distro) to the mix isn't for the faint of heart. Just read the how-to's to see what I mean. I'd love to boot Ubuntu too, but I don't want to risk bricking the machine for obvious reasons.
The best solution I've found is VMware server (on either Linux or Windows). You can have images for Windows XP + IE7, Windows XP + IE6, Vista (if you care about it), any Linux distro, and Mac OS X (look on the piratebay for osx86). You won't be able to run all images at the same time, but you can easily pause them and restart them to test things.
Shareaza has been doing this for years. When hashing MP3 files, it disregards what(s in the id3 tags, and just computes a hash for the audio information. This means that files with different id3 tags will still be added to the swarm, whicj is great. Unfortunately, there are some issues with it: -Only Shareaza supports it, other clients didn't want to play along. -Shareaza has/d a bug where it would fail to reconstruct the id3 tag after downloading, giving you files with empty tags -Only mp3 is supported, so no ogg, aac or wma
So this paper isn't as revolutionary (if that's what they mean).
This will only work with identical files that have metadata that is frequently changed by end-users, because there's no way you're going to be able to get a good file if you try to mix a cam with a dvdrip, or an ogg with an mp3, or an xvid file with a divx file. It just doesn't work that way.
How is that spyware? It sends anonymous statistics on what packages you have installed throught apt, and you have to choose to enable it.
It does exactly what it claims it does, and you really have to go out of your way to enable it (add/remove software>preferences>statistics>enable popularity contest )
Right under the checkbox there's a clear explanation of what it does:
To improve the user experience of Ubuntu please take part in the popularity contest. If you do so the list of installes software and how often it was used will be collected and sent anonymously to the uubuntu project on a weekly basis.
The results are used to improve support for popular applications in the search results
Compare that to Windows update, which 'inspects your system' every time you update, and you have no way to know what exactly it's inspecting, and what it's sending back to MS.
You're probably trolling, and I'm probably wasting my time, but someone modded you up, so I guess at least one person believed you.
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It isn't that surprising to me. The good apps are hard to find on the web if you're used to Windows. (In Linux it's even easier, it's all in the repositories, and there's a choice of 5 apps for pretty much every task). You have to look on different sites (I still don't know which site i should use to get freeware for macs specifically), and google doesn't seem to work so well to get results.
When I tried OS X, I was looking for a good free text editor, but I didn't find one (I like Notepad++ on Windows and Gedit/Kate/Scite/Geany on Linux: light apps, with syntax highlighting for tons of languages and tabs, that's all I want).
If you're a longtime mac user, you'll probably find the opposite true, as you already know where to find good Mac freeware, but not where to get Windows freeware (without getting spyware bundled preferably).
It seems like a lot of Mac users shell out for (or crack) BBedit instead of using a free alternative, though.
Agreed, if the 'web designer' doesn't know enough css and html to code everything by hand, he should just create something in Photoshop/The Gimp and let a skilled coder write clean css and xHTML. Using any kind of WYSIWYG editor will resuult in crappy code.
No, I'm suggesting that people use bookmarks to go to their bank's website instead of following links in e-mails, not to get rid of anchors altogether. Or do you send e-mails with links to banks to other people at work?
No, the 'fix' has been available in browsers since 1993, and it's called 'bookmarks'. Don't be so stupid to follow links to your bank/paypal/ebay from some random e-mail/website, just use the bookmark in your browser to go to the website instead.
As long as the phishers haven't hijacked your dns settings, this method is safe. And if someone managed to either compromise your hosts file/dns servers, you have other things to worry about...
Manufacturing cd's costs next to nothing here too, the record companies just ask more because they can. It's cheaper in Hong Kong because the people there wouldn't be able to afford any otherwise.
I take you've never written a search function for a website? It's not simple, especially if you want the results to be as good as or better than Google. Why do you think so many sites have a 'search this site with Google' box?
That's not the point. Getting the original trojan installed is the difficult part. After it's installed it can do whatever it wants. Getting it installed on the system is easier on Windows than on Linux / OS X, but this article is about something that happens after the trojan was run, and that's something no OS can't protect you from.
What do you want MS to do? disallow even the administrator from writing to system files? The only thing that could protect you against stuff like that is "trusted computing", which means your computer isn't yours any more.
Well, Microsoft's response makes a lot of sense. You could trick a user into running sudo trojan.sh on Ubuntu too. After that the user is screwed anyway, as trojan.sh could contain anything, including something that edits
What do you want MS to do to stop this from being possible? If the user runs a random executable as root/admin that modifies the system, he's screwed on any OS. If the executable got onto the system through a security hole, that hole should be plugged.
I don't like MS either, but cut them some slack here...
I have one too, and I'm young (23y old). I kinda like having one, and I think I'll keep it as long as it's not deprecated yet.
Ofcourse, I wouldn't recommend it if you need to call a lot, as dialing is slow, but I like it.
Ever heard of print stylesheets?
perhaps adding a .htaccess rulz to redirect those requests to http://www.microsoft.com/ could satify your need to get back at MS for inventing that stupid feature... (bonus points if you link it to a huge image).
Right, configure your website to crash the visitor's browser. That'll get you lots of visits...
Creating a seperate /home/ partition worked for me on the live installer (for Edgy), I'm not sure why it didn't work for you. I don't get why the installer doesn't do that by default, though. They probably don't want to confuse the users with picking a size for each partition, but still, having it on a seperate partition is an excellent idea.
Looks like they were real creative with their themes...
I personally prefer the command line and/or editing a .conf file for some tasks too (It sure beats navigating huge preference dialogs. Imagine how a preference dialog for Apache would look like if it were to include all possible options Apache has).
...) won't need the command line on any of those OS's, while the advanced user will have to resort to using the command line/editing .conf files/editing the registry once in a while. (Yes, I count the Windows registry as a huge .conf file, as that's what it basicly is, except that there's no comments with an explanation for *any* of the options).
But the average user (browses the web, checks e-mail, gets pictures off his camera,
You could also just keep the iso (or even the files that make up the cd) on your HD, if you care about speed.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/automysqlbackup/
Sure, it's a shell script, but it does what you want (in the list of databases, just type 'all').
If you're trying to do anything that doesn't have a GUI tool on both these OS's, you still need the command line. 2 concrete examples:
-in windows, if you want to know what connections your computer is making, what applications are doing it, etc, what application do you use? I use netstat -ab for that, because AFAIK Windows has no GUI for this. (in Ubuntu I can just do system>network tools, and I have a graphical netstat right there).
And I'm not even mentioning all the stuff you need to dig into the registry for, which is worse than a CLI, IMHO.
-In Mac OS X, if you want to put Safari in debug mode, what do you do? you fire up your terminal, and paste the following: (ooh, how polished! It probably was way too hard to add a checkbox to enable debug mode in the menu...)
You may want to claim that that's stuff that's far from trivial, which the average user wouldn't need to do, and you'd be right. But if you put an average user in front of Ubuntu, he wouldn't need the command line either. Installing software is done through add/remove or synaptic, and there are GUI tools available for just about everything if you really don't like the command line.
If they had rebuilt it on an Unix base, they would've been on a weaker position: applications and skills would be easily ported between OS's, which would mean people wouldn't be forced to use MS' products like they are now.
MS' business plan has been to lock people into their products as much as possible (cfr. Office, DOS, Windows itself, Internet Explorer,
Sure, the OS itself would be better, more stable, more secure, etc. but MS isn't trying to make a good OS, they just want one that people absolutely need to buy because everything works with it. That's why they could get away with not having a new OS release in 6 years (I'm not counting win2k3, since the average consumer doesn't buy server OS's).
I'm a web designer, and I run Windows on an intel iMac (Working on an iMac wasn't my choice). I have to disagree with your post:
-rebooting to test something in OS X is a pain. I hardly ever use OS X on this box.
-setting up a triple boot is hard. OS X + Windows is easy, as it's just following the boot camp wizard, but adding Ubuntu (or any other distro) to the mix isn't for the faint of heart. Just read the how-to's to see what I mean. I'd love to boot Ubuntu too, but I don't want to risk bricking the machine for obvious reasons.
The best solution I've found is VMware server (on either Linux or Windows). You can have images for Windows XP + IE7, Windows XP + IE6, Vista (if you care about it), any Linux distro, and Mac OS X (look on the piratebay for osx86). You won't be able to run all images at the same time, but you can easily pause them and restart them to test things.
That release dat has been out for a while now...
Shareaza has been doing this for years. When hashing MP3 files, it disregards what(s in the id3 tags, and just computes a hash for the audio information. This means that files with different id3 tags will still be added to the swarm, whicj is great.
Unfortunately, there are some issues with it:
-Only Shareaza supports it, other clients didn't want to play along.
-Shareaza has/d a bug where it would fail to reconstruct the id3 tag after downloading, giving you files with empty tags
-Only mp3 is supported, so no ogg, aac or wma
So this paper isn't as revolutionary (if that's what they mean).
This will only work with identical files that have metadata that is frequently changed by end-users, because there's no way you're going to be able to get a good file if you try to mix a cam with a dvdrip, or an ogg with an mp3, or an xvid file with a divx file. It just doesn't work that way.
How is that spyware? It sends anonymous statistics on what packages you have installed throught apt, and you have to choose to enable it.
It does exactly what it claims it does, and you really have to go out of your way to enable it (add/remove software>preferences>statistics>enable popularity contest )
Right under the checkbox there's a clear explanation of what it does:
Compare that to Windows update, which 'inspects your system' every time you update, and you have no way to know what exactly it's inspecting, and what it's sending back to MS.
You're probably trolling, and I'm probably wasting my time, but someone modded you up, so I guess at least one person believed you.
It's for the same reason people install Linux on their iPods in the first place: because they can.