You seem to have little to no experience with Apple's handheld devices. The entire iPodLinux project was started because, among other things, there is no native support for Vorbis or FLAC in the iPod firmware. If people do not hack the devices and write the code, there won't be any support for unpatented free formats. There will only be locked AAC audio and MP4 video. MP3 will appear (with the inferior Fraunhofer codec) because of popular demand, but that's it.
(Note: Fraunhofer is ironically not the highest quality encoder for MP3s anymore. LAME is considered much higher quality.)
Well, here's what branding I see on my Gentoo box when I boot:
* The GRUB menu lists "Gentoo Linux, 2.6.18-r6." * The inittab also says "Gentoo Linux." Seems reasonable. * My kernel package is gentoo-sources, not vanilla-sources. * I have gnu-binutils, debianutils, and bsdutils.
I think that's it. I know there's a splash screen and GDM skin if you're graphical, but this is a server.
Um, Kodak is a terrible example, as they do not defend their trademark very well. A better example for trademarks Google couldn't compare Picasa to might be Fireworks (formerly Macromedia) or Photoshop from Adobe.
I could say, "Buy MostAwesomeDude bandages! Better'n Bandaids!" and I would probably be alright unless Johnson & Johnson decide to C&D me fer the trademark. At any rate, all Google is saying is that ye can't use their trademarks in yer ads on their site. It's perfectly legal....Bye-bye mod points. Sorry I wasted ye by posting here.
Because I was using APT. The be-all-and-end-all for software installation, remember?
Oh, is VLC back in the main repo? Sweet. Mine comes from the VLC repository. On the VLC front page, click "Debian Linux" under installs, and follow the directions. About as painful as, say, fetching.NET or MFC libraries for the first time on Windows.
Uh-huh, but, did you have to quit X? If so, how is a newbie supposed to know how to stop GDM/KDM, install the drivers and restart the X server? How do they know if they have the kernel headers installed or not? If not, how would they know how to install them?
I remember quite well that restarting a Windows computer is standard procedure after installing new video drivers. A reboot is adequate on Linux as well, no console-work needed. I just tend to avoid restarts on this computer due to a laggy BIOS which adds about 90 seconds to every cold boot.
I am trying desperately to remember if build-essential is still automatically installed by the Debian installer. However, I do remember for sure that kbuild is included with the stock kernels, and at least the ATI installer automatically builds the kernel modules when installing via the GUI. No out-of-console work is needed; even if the build package is not there, you can request it through your package manager.
Huh. I'm not sure if you should be Informative or Troll. Anyway, I'll bite.
So, Nvidia drivers aren't all that bad. There's a nice installer for them nowadays that you can download from their site. Same for ATI. Not really that big of a deal; you have to do it on Windows, too.
DVDs are a bit of a pain, but it's not as bad as you make it out to be. You can add sources to your APT list from within most package managers (in a GUI), and you only have to add one source to make it work.
If your 5.1 actually works magically in Windows XP, then I congratulate you, because my nice SB card never bothered to correctly work in Windows. Only the ALSA drivers could make it go into surround or digital mode.
My steps for DVDs on Etch:
* Go to ATI's site, and get the ATI driver package. * Install ATI drivers. * Load the fglrx kernel module, and restart the X server. (You could reboot instead, but my BIOS is too slow to boot for my patience.) * Open up KPackage. * Add VLC's repository to APT sources from KPackage. * Download and install vlc and libdvdcss. * Insert DVD and open VLC.
Not actually that bad of a process.
Oh, also, it says on the download page for VLC that you cannot play DVDs in Linux without libdvdcss. I'm not really sure how you missed that the first time...
Reduced bandwidth, less entry vectors, less spam entering mailboxes. I guess the only losers are the people who send those annoying Flash giftcards through email.
Finale is a headache to use and a travesty to the original designers of Postscript. Lilypond actually makes a serious attempt to reproduce music with good fonts and human spacing. I have seen too many ideas slaughtered by Finale's incredibly bad spacing. Both Finale and Lilypond allow you to precisely place things. Just because Finale has a better GUI than Lilypond's (GNU Denemo isn't all that hot...) does not mean that it is magically better somehow.
As a professional musician, I cannot seriously recommend Finale to anyone. A piece of music is like a painting, and Finale's music looks like machine-generated code, with no human touches whatsoever.
Nobody has yet to come out with a effective DRM and it is only used to be abused by companies like Apple and Microsoft so that people have a harder time moving away from using Ipods or Windows, because your file formats that are DRM'd are locking you into a paticular hardware (ipod) or software (future versions of Office).
Microsoft has succeeded (thus far) with the Xbox 360's DRM system. I have not heard about anyone successfully pirating games on an Xbox 360. I would not be surprised if the PS3 and the Wii were similar.
The last wave of consoles was strong enough, CPU-wise, that it got people talking about emulation of older systems. For me, personally, the news that the Wii will eventually have an entire back catalog going back about 10 years or so is sweet enough to me that I won't shed any tears if the internals are never really probed. On top of that, this generation's consoles all use (more) standard architectures: The Xbox 360 has its custom IBM setup, the PS3 uses the Cell, and the Wii uses a PPC-based chip, the Broadway.
My younger sister does just that, as pop music costs about $20 per CD, and our public library stocks modern pop music under an initiative (people can request CDs to be purchased with bond money in a sort of tally system.) So, if she wants to see if a CD is worth buying, she'll check it out for a few days, to see if she likes it. I personally find it helpful for finding classical and old bebop that's out of print or simply not stocked by the braindeads at Sam Goody's.
Is the library to be blamed for "making available" copyrighted works? I mean, after all, the agreement on my library card only says that I have to return materials on a certain timeline, or renew them every week. It says nothing about whether or not I'm allowed to excerpt them (explicit fair use), rip music and sample it for a remix (implied fair use), or copy media wholesale and upload it to a filesharing network (copyright infringement). How liable are libraries?
I use Notepad for programming. I write PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Python, and occasionally C and Perl using Notepad. On Linux, I use vi. The reason has nothing to do with choice and everything to do with efficiency. There's little need for an IDE when I know the entire HTML 4.01 library in my head. Tools like Dreamweaver might help sketch ideas, but in the end typing it out by hand is actually faster than fucking around with a GUI.
Joel is under the (false) impression that choices in GUI design are functionally equivalent. Certainly, the advent of new tools, like the digital mouse, has required GUIs to change immensely. However, he's probably forgotten that Windows was originally designed to be completely navigable without a mouse, and that the Close Window button is just a shortcut for the traditional Alt + F4. Every choice on that Start Menu is there for a reason.
The GPL grants certain allowances of redistribution. It's something like "I'm going to let you download this. I have a copyright on it, though, so you can only give it to others if you follow these rules. If you don't follow these rules, you can't give it to others."
You guys are somewhat right. Python files can be optimized (*.pyo) and compiled (*.pyc), but you've never read the docs on how that works. I'll go and find the relevant sections sometime later, but the bulk of it is this:
Python optimizations and compilations are currently limited to inlining assertions and certain limited unreachable statements. Python's "duck typing" model is too dynamic to be statically compiled. Psyco does JIT-style compiling, but there are many parts of Python that are simply too dynamic to handle outside of the interpreter.
Java files, once compiled, are verified bytecode. Verification is one of the more arcane parts of Java, but it's always been interesting to me. Verification is a guarantee that the code has passed some very basic sanity tests. Verified code is statically sane and complete, just like compiled C code. The bytecode virtual machine is an abstraction used to make device-independent Java runnable anywhere that there is a complete set of core classes. While Java doesn't embrace the "batteries included" philosophy of Python, there are quite a few useful classes in the core runtime environment that make porting things very easy. Most system-dependent files nowadays are things like installers and graphical enhancements.
Java is an embeddable language at the hardware level. So-called "Java chips" provide a very real platform for deployment on handheld devices. It's easier to develop applets in Java than in, say, C, since Java is higher-level. The fact that there is low-level support for such a high-level language makes it popular with cell phone developers.
Your point of Python is a good one. After all, Python is high-level, intelligent, and permits object-oriented development. It's my favorite, and I'm writing a few programs in it right now. However, Java still has a few advantages. First, it's ported more places, the most obvious off the top of my head being that Java's Mac OS X GUIs are far more robust and less buggy than Python's. Second, it's compiled and then byte-interpreted, giving it a fairly good speed compared to Python's interpretation. Python also has structures that, while easier to read, definitely don't execute as fast. (I do concede, however, that Java is no speed demon.)
Also, Java is embeddable as a web applet. Only a few other languages can do that. You can't exactly drag'n'drop a Python application into a web browser, hook it up to a frame, and project it to the world.
Of course, since this is Slashdot, I'll finish up with a low-blow bit of rhetoric. If Python is superior to Java, then why is the leading Bittorrent client, Azureus, written in Java if the original Bittorrent client was written in Python?
Well, on a more practical note, this means that within a few months, I should be seeing a real, complete, working JRE sitting in the main repositories for Debian and Ubuntu. Sweet. We no longer have to go and fetch it ourselves or experiment with incomplete toolkits.
For the ideologues, knowing that there's one less piece of non-free software on your system is a real comfort. For me, personally, all that apparently remains are ATI drivers and Flash Player.
I'll bite, mostly because people might actually believe what you're saying.
Daniel Brandt doesn't like Wikipedia. His article there was started 'against his wishes,' and although he managed to get it deleted once by a few choice threats. it was quite rapidly created again. Ironically, the community now agrees that his anti-Wikipedia rantings have made him notable enough to be included in the encyclopedia.
Mr. Brandt is certainly not a nice person. While your words "politician" and "Republican" are completely unfounded, it is true that Mr. Brandt maintains a web page chock-full of personal data, including the names and addresses of any Wikipedians who he feels have been mean to him in the past.
The interesting part of all this is that Brandt does not have the authority to order Wikipedia to remove content. That kind of copyright enforcement can only be carried out by the copyright holder. However, he is well aware that Wikipedia's "no copyright violations" policy requires users to immediately quash plagarized content.
Recently, it has been confirmed that the Debian Project will be stripping out Mozilla Foundation trademarks such as Firefox and Mozilla from their main repository when Etch is released, renaming the "firefox" package to "iceweasel." What are your thoughts on the usage of such trademarks, and do you have any comments on the non-free permissions of the Mozilla Foundation's trademarks and artwork?
With right-click, a student can go My Computer > Manage... and get a Management dialog, which is not good if there's no group policy on the limited accounts. A student can also arbitrarily execute code. My method for this:
* Put arbitrary code on USB pen drive. Label it "Homework for Typing Class." Put it in USB slot. * Open Internet Explorer. Load any web page. * Hit Ctrl+S. This should bring up the Save... dialog. * Navigate to your pen drive. Right-click on your executable and choose Open.
This will get around the following common protections:
* Blocking the Open... dialog on Internet Explorer. (Nobody ever disables Save..., probably because you can't download things without it!) * Blocking Internet Explorer and using Firefox. (Same system dialog, same exploit.) * Blocking the C: drive from file browser view. (Simply keep your own file browser on the USB drive.) * Blocking executables with a whitelist. (Windows can only check for the names of executables on the list. Just rename it to word.exe or some such.) * Limiting the access of user accounts to system files. (Package a cmd.exe and use the SYSTEM privileges escalation exploit.)
Scary, huh? That's why you can't have the right-click menu.
Oregon is a giant meth producer. My county, Lane County, is supposedly the biggest producer of meth in the United States. The local newspaper runs a PSA every month or so letting us know about uncleaned "meth houses," rental houses used to produce meth. All kinds of icky and toxic substances are required to synthesize amphetamines, and the fumes and waste make meth houses into toxic, unsafe environments. It's expensive as hell to clean up, and (thankfully) we have a law that requires landlords to clean up meth houses before they can be used again. (The cleanup's not cheap, either -- you have to pay OHSA guys to come in with hazmat equipment and detoxify the property.)
Meth users account for an incredible percentage of breakins, burglaries, robberies, property destruction, and violent acts including but not limited to murder, manslaughter, and assault; they also account for a good number of domestic disturbances and evictees. These people are so consumed by their need for meth that they will steal, hurt, and lie as much as they need to in order to pay for it.
Marijuana does not really harm the public, unless you consider hippies gathering every Saturday to sell their arts a harmful act. Meth, however, is a completely different drug, and should not be approved for public consumption under any case.
(Yes, that includes medical usage. I was a Ritalin kid. Being fucked up on meth during elementary school was NOT fun.)
First, lockdown all accounts. Some people mentioned Deep Freeze, some people mentioned group policy. My old school used Active Directory with group policies, so yearbook students and teachers could save files to the central server.
Take away the Task Manager, right-click, and Internet Explorer. Those are the most common amateur attack vectors. I'm at Oregon State University, and have had no problems compromising the "locked" computers here simply because they left me with Internet Explorer. Replace it with Firefox, and read the Firefox docs on how to lockdown the browser settings.
Tell teachers to supervise kids in computer labs. There was one lab at my old school which kids stole drives, memory, and fans from all the time simply because the teacher in that lab was incapable of monitoring his students. It was bemusing but also expensive.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you do not know about the inner workings of the standard extensions to Bittorrent. Don't feel bad; most people don't.
Bittorrent was designed to be as decentralized as possible. Usenet still has to be hosted on servers of one kind or another; Bittorrent shares are distributed by a system of peers. The distributed database system means that Bittorrent metadata does not even need a.torrent container or tracker -- just give your DHT-enabled Bittorrent client (say, Azureus) a magnet link and a starter peer and it will retrieve metadata and content for you without any centralized organization. No tracker, no.torrent. Perfectly legal to distribute magnet links, and perfectly legal to distribute Azureus.
PS FYI, there is at least one client installed with Windows XP capable of handling NNTP -- Outlook Express. Also, Google still has most of the worthwhile news groups.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to have little to no experience with Apple's handheld devices. The entire iPodLinux project was started because, among other things, there is no native support for Vorbis or FLAC in the iPod firmware. If people do not hack the devices and write the code, there won't be any support for unpatented free formats. There will only be locked AAC audio and MP4 video. MP3 will appear (with the inferior Fraunhofer codec) because of popular demand, but that's it.
(Note: Fraunhofer is ironically not the highest quality encoder for MP3s anymore. LAME is considered much higher quality.)
Well, here's what branding I see on my Gentoo box when I boot:
* The GRUB menu lists "Gentoo Linux, 2.6.18-r6."
* The inittab also says "Gentoo Linux." Seems reasonable.
* My kernel package is gentoo-sources, not vanilla-sources.
* I have gnu-binutils, debianutils, and bsdutils.
I think that's it. I know there's a splash screen and GDM skin if you're graphical, but this is a server.
Um, Kodak is a terrible example, as they do not defend their trademark very well. A better example for trademarks Google couldn't compare Picasa to might be Fireworks (formerly Macromedia) or Photoshop from Adobe.
...Bye-bye mod points. Sorry I wasted ye by posting here.
I could say, "Buy MostAwesomeDude bandages! Better'n Bandaids!" and I would probably be alright unless Johnson & Johnson decide to C&D me fer the trademark. At any rate, all Google is saying is that ye can't use their trademarks in yer ads on their site. It's perfectly legal.
Because I was using APT. The be-all-and-end-all for software installation, remember?
.NET or MFC libraries for the first time on Windows.
Oh, is VLC back in the main repo? Sweet. Mine comes from the VLC repository. On the VLC front page, click "Debian Linux" under installs, and follow the directions. About as painful as, say, fetching
Uh-huh, but, did you have to quit X? If so, how is a newbie supposed to know how to stop GDM/KDM, install the drivers and restart the X server? How do they know if they have the kernel headers installed or not? If not, how would they know how to install them?
I remember quite well that restarting a Windows computer is standard procedure after installing new video drivers. A reboot is adequate on Linux as well, no console-work needed. I just tend to avoid restarts on this computer due to a laggy BIOS which adds about 90 seconds to every cold boot.
I am trying desperately to remember if build-essential is still automatically installed by the Debian installer. However, I do remember for sure that kbuild is included with the stock kernels, and at least the ATI installer automatically builds the kernel modules when installing via the GUI. No out-of-console work is needed; even if the build package is not there, you can request it through your package manager.
Huh. I'm not sure if you should be Informative or Troll. Anyway, I'll bite.
So, Nvidia drivers aren't all that bad. There's a nice installer for them nowadays that you can download from their site. Same for ATI. Not really that big of a deal; you have to do it on Windows, too.
DVDs are a bit of a pain, but it's not as bad as you make it out to be. You can add sources to your APT list from within most package managers (in a GUI), and you only have to add one source to make it work.
If your 5.1 actually works magically in Windows XP, then I congratulate you, because my nice SB card never bothered to correctly work in Windows. Only the ALSA drivers could make it go into surround or digital mode.
My steps for DVDs on Etch:
* Go to ATI's site, and get the ATI driver package.
* Install ATI drivers.
* Load the fglrx kernel module, and restart the X server. (You could reboot instead, but my BIOS is too slow to boot for my patience.)
* Open up KPackage.
* Add VLC's repository to APT sources from KPackage.
* Download and install vlc and libdvdcss.
* Insert DVD and open VLC.
Not actually that bad of a process.
Oh, also, it says on the download page for VLC that you cannot play DVDs in Linux without libdvdcss. I'm not really sure how you missed that the first time...
Reduced bandwidth, less entry vectors, less spam entering mailboxes. I guess the only losers are the people who send those annoying Flash giftcards through email.
Finale is a headache to use and a travesty to the original designers of Postscript. Lilypond actually makes a serious attempt to reproduce music with good fonts and human spacing. I have seen too many ideas slaughtered by Finale's incredibly bad spacing. Both Finale and Lilypond allow you to precisely place things. Just because Finale has a better GUI than Lilypond's (GNU Denemo isn't all that hot...) does not mean that it is magically better somehow.
As a professional musician, I cannot seriously recommend Finale to anyone. A piece of music is like a painting, and Finale's music looks like machine-generated code, with no human touches whatsoever.
Microsoft has succeeded (thus far) with the Xbox 360's DRM system. I have not heard about anyone successfully pirating games on an Xbox 360. I would not be surprised if the PS3 and the Wii were similar.
The last wave of consoles was strong enough, CPU-wise, that it got people talking about emulation of older systems. For me, personally, the news that the Wii will eventually have an entire back catalog going back about 10 years or so is sweet enough to me that I won't shed any tears if the internals are never really probed. On top of that, this generation's consoles all use (more) standard architectures: The Xbox 360 has its custom IBM setup, the PS3 uses the Cell, and the Wii uses a PPC-based chip, the Broadway.
My younger sister does just that, as pop music costs about $20 per CD, and our public library stocks modern pop music under an initiative (people can request CDs to be purchased with bond money in a sort of tally system.) So, if she wants to see if a CD is worth buying, she'll check it out for a few days, to see if she likes it. I personally find it helpful for finding classical and old bebop that's out of print or simply not stocked by the braindeads at Sam Goody's.
Is the library to be blamed for "making available" copyrighted works? I mean, after all, the agreement on my library card only says that I have to return materials on a certain timeline, or renew them every week. It says nothing about whether or not I'm allowed to excerpt them (explicit fair use), rip music and sample it for a remix (implied fair use), or copy media wholesale and upload it to a filesharing network (copyright infringement). How liable are libraries?
Why would the RIAA, a cartel, lower prices?
I'm going to expand on a point you brought up.
I use Notepad for programming. I write PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Python, and occasionally C and Perl using Notepad. On Linux, I use vi. The reason has nothing to do with choice and everything to do with efficiency. There's little need for an IDE when I know the entire HTML 4.01 library in my head. Tools like Dreamweaver might help sketch ideas, but in the end typing it out by hand is actually faster than fucking around with a GUI.
Joel is under the (false) impression that choices in GUI design are functionally equivalent. Certainly, the advent of new tools, like the digital mouse, has required GUIs to change immensely. However, he's probably forgotten that Windows was originally designed to be completely navigable without a mouse, and that the Close Window button is just a shortcut for the traditional Alt + F4. Every choice on that Start Menu is there for a reason.
Please, by all means, go out and tase yourself until tasers no longer affect you. Then, register an account, come back, and tell us all about it.
(Goodbye, Excellent karma. We knew ye well...)
Um, no.
The GPL grants certain allowances of redistribution. It's something like "I'm going to let you download this. I have a copyright on it, though, so you can only give it to others if you follow these rules. If you don't follow these rules, you can't give it to others."
I'm on a karma burn this morning, obviously.
You guys are somewhat right. Python files can be optimized (*.pyo) and compiled (*.pyc), but you've never read the docs on how that works. I'll go and find the relevant sections sometime later, but the bulk of it is this:
Python optimizations and compilations are currently limited to inlining assertions and certain limited unreachable statements. Python's "duck typing" model is too dynamic to be statically compiled. Psyco does JIT-style compiling, but there are many parts of Python that are simply too dynamic to handle outside of the interpreter.
Java files, once compiled, are verified bytecode. Verification is one of the more arcane parts of Java, but it's always been interesting to me. Verification is a guarantee that the code has passed some very basic sanity tests. Verified code is statically sane and complete, just like compiled C code. The bytecode virtual machine is an abstraction used to make device-independent Java runnable anywhere that there is a complete set of core classes. While Java doesn't embrace the "batteries included" philosophy of Python, there are quite a few useful classes in the core runtime environment that make porting things very easy. Most system-dependent files nowadays are things like installers and graphical enhancements.
I love how easily you just shrug off that number.
Java is an embeddable language at the hardware level. So-called "Java chips" provide a very real platform for deployment on handheld devices. It's easier to develop applets in Java than in, say, C, since Java is higher-level. The fact that there is low-level support for such a high-level language makes it popular with cell phone developers.
Your point of Python is a good one. After all, Python is high-level, intelligent, and permits object-oriented development. It's my favorite, and I'm writing a few programs in it right now. However, Java still has a few advantages. First, it's ported more places, the most obvious off the top of my head being that Java's Mac OS X GUIs are far more robust and less buggy than Python's. Second, it's compiled and then byte-interpreted, giving it a fairly good speed compared to Python's interpretation. Python also has structures that, while easier to read, definitely don't execute as fast. (I do concede, however, that Java is no speed demon.)
Also, Java is embeddable as a web applet. Only a few other languages can do that. You can't exactly drag'n'drop a Python application into a web browser, hook it up to a frame, and project it to the world.
Of course, since this is Slashdot, I'll finish up with a low-blow bit of rhetoric. If Python is superior to Java, then why is the leading Bittorrent client, Azureus, written in Java if the original Bittorrent client was written in Python?
Well, on a more practical note, this means that within a few months, I should be seeing a real, complete, working JRE sitting in the main repositories for Debian and Ubuntu. Sweet. We no longer have to go and fetch it ourselves or experiment with incomplete toolkits.
For the ideologues, knowing that there's one less piece of non-free software on your system is a real comfort. For me, personally, all that apparently remains are ATI drivers and Flash Player.
Yay!
Are you badmouthing my grandmother?
Heh, and usually I'M the pedant. You're right, that should read "...quash copyrighted content used improperly. Thanks.
I'll bite, mostly because people might actually believe what you're saying.
Daniel Brandt doesn't like Wikipedia. His article there was started 'against his wishes,' and although he managed to get it deleted once by a few choice threats. it was quite rapidly created again. Ironically, the community now agrees that his anti-Wikipedia rantings have made him notable enough to be included in the encyclopedia.
Mr. Brandt is certainly not a nice person. While your words "politician" and "Republican" are completely unfounded, it is true that Mr. Brandt maintains a web page chock-full of personal data, including the names and addresses of any Wikipedians who he feels have been mean to him in the past.
The interesting part of all this is that Brandt does not have the authority to order Wikipedia to remove content. That kind of copyright enforcement can only be carried out by the copyright holder. However, he is well aware that Wikipedia's "no copyright violations" policy requires users to immediately quash plagarized content.
Recently, it has been confirmed that the Debian Project will be stripping out Mozilla Foundation trademarks such as Firefox and Mozilla from their main repository when Etch is released, renaming the "firefox" package to "iceweasel." What are your thoughts on the usage of such trademarks, and do you have any comments on the non-free permissions of the Mozilla Foundation's trademarks and artwork?
At risk of being pedantic...
With right-click, a student can go My Computer > Manage... and get a Management dialog, which is not good if there's no group policy on the limited accounts. A student can also arbitrarily execute code. My method for this:
* Put arbitrary code on USB pen drive. Label it "Homework for Typing Class." Put it in USB slot.
* Open Internet Explorer. Load any web page.
* Hit Ctrl+S. This should bring up the Save... dialog.
* Navigate to your pen drive. Right-click on your executable and choose Open.
This will get around the following common protections:
* Blocking the Open... dialog on Internet Explorer. (Nobody ever disables Save..., probably because you can't download things without it!)
* Blocking Internet Explorer and using Firefox. (Same system dialog, same exploit.)
* Blocking the C: drive from file browser view. (Simply keep your own file browser on the USB drive.)
* Blocking executables with a whitelist. (Windows can only check for the names of executables on the list. Just rename it to word.exe or some such.)
* Limiting the access of user accounts to system files. (Package a cmd.exe and use the SYSTEM privileges escalation exploit.)
Scary, huh? That's why you can't have the right-click menu.
You're clearly not Oregonian.
Oregon is a giant meth producer. My county, Lane County, is supposedly the biggest producer of meth in the United States. The local newspaper runs a PSA every month or so letting us know about uncleaned "meth houses," rental houses used to produce meth. All kinds of icky and toxic substances are required to synthesize amphetamines, and the fumes and waste make meth houses into toxic, unsafe environments. It's expensive as hell to clean up, and (thankfully) we have a law that requires landlords to clean up meth houses before they can be used again. (The cleanup's not cheap, either -- you have to pay OHSA guys to come in with hazmat equipment and detoxify the property.)
Meth users account for an incredible percentage of breakins, burglaries, robberies, property destruction, and violent acts including but not limited to murder, manslaughter, and assault; they also account for a good number of domestic disturbances and evictees. These people are so consumed by their need for meth that they will steal, hurt, and lie as much as they need to in order to pay for it.
Marijuana does not really harm the public, unless you consider hippies gathering every Saturday to sell their arts a harmful act. Meth, however, is a completely different drug, and should not be approved for public consumption under any case.
(Yes, that includes medical usage. I was a Ritalin kid. Being fucked up on meth during elementary school was NOT fun.)
From experience, here's what you need to do.
First, lockdown all accounts. Some people mentioned Deep Freeze, some people mentioned group policy. My old school used Active Directory with group policies, so yearbook students and teachers could save files to the central server.
Take away the Task Manager, right-click, and Internet Explorer. Those are the most common amateur attack vectors. I'm at Oregon State University, and have had no problems compromising the "locked" computers here simply because they left me with Internet Explorer. Replace it with Firefox, and read the Firefox docs on how to lockdown the browser settings.
Tell teachers to supervise kids in computer labs. There was one lab at my old school which kids stole drives, memory, and fans from all the time simply because the teacher in that lab was incapable of monitoring his students. It was bemusing but also expensive.
I was going to ask what version of Windows has grep preinstalled...
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you do not know about the inner workings of the standard extensions to Bittorrent. Don't feel bad; most people don't.
.torrent container or tracker -- just give your DHT-enabled Bittorrent client (say, Azureus) a magnet link and a starter peer and it will retrieve metadata and content for you without any centralized organization. No tracker, no .torrent. Perfectly legal to distribute magnet links, and perfectly legal to distribute Azureus.
Bittorrent was designed to be as decentralized as possible. Usenet still has to be hosted on servers of one kind or another; Bittorrent shares are distributed by a system of peers. The distributed database system means that Bittorrent metadata does not even need a
PS FYI, there is at least one client installed with Windows XP capable of handling NNTP -- Outlook Express. Also, Google still has most of the worthwhile news groups.