chris writes:

> You can - it's trivial. It requires that you know what you're doing (script
> kiddies need not apply).

Describe it.

--
Transpose hotmail and mxsmanic in my e-mail address to reach me directly.

chris wrote in
news:89AYd.48012$y25.16652@fe3.news.blueyonder.co. uk:

> Don't "like" Photoshop at all. It's abysmal. It's expensive, huge,
> slow, unreliable, and doesn't produce the degree of quality required
> by MY company's printshop. We use MUCH better software, all of which
> is available free on the 'net.
>
> C.

Wow, I didn't realize that this thread was going to explode like this. It
is good, healthy discussion though, and all opinions are read by my and
treated with respect. Thanks for your input, guys.

Hey C, if you don't mind my asking, what is this "MUCH better software"
that you use and is available for free on the net? This is not a troll
question, I like to work with digital photos and although Photoshop is
like the industry standard (So far as I can tell.), I think it is kind of
huge and difficult to use, I mostly use Paint Shop Pro because it is
easier for me to use and I can still get good effects and cleanups with
it. What kind of software do you think is better, I would like to
experiment with it.

Thanks.

--
~Ohmster
ohmster at newsguy dot com

Mxsmanic wrote in
news:6k6331tergbmmsc545ulake977sqq01c25@4ax.com:

> If it weren't for Bill-hating, Linux would be little more than a gleam
> in Linus' eye. Hatred of Microsoft is the driving force behind Linux;
> the OS has nothing else to recommend it (people who simply want UNIX
> can find better versions than a Linux clone).

That's pretty scary. A development group driven by hate. Sounds an awful
lot like the Nazis. Of course I don't believe this, nothing that is built
on hate will succeed in the long run. I would rather believe that the
linux movement is built on the love of computing and of finding ways to
accomplish things with new ideas and open source collaboration, where no
one is "hated out of the group". I think that is what makes linux so
successful.

I do enjoy UNIX, my first real ISP was a cybergate dial up shell account.
Back in those days, if you did not "like" UNIX, you were not going to get
very far on the net. Yeah it was daunting, had to learn how to do email
with programs like mail, mutt, elm, and pine. I did alright with pine,
the rest were too hard for me, although I guess I could have mastered
mail or a different email program by doing it enough with a good
reference handy. UNIX is really cool because it was just so darned
powerful what with all of the things it could do and on such a large
scale. Back then, we were all using Windows 3.1 and that OS really
sucked, but that was all there was at the time for most computer users.

Figuring out how to use TIA (The Internet Adapter) and watching it work
was pretty amazing, although it was pretty slow and the ISPs hated it.
They would hunt down running TIA processes on their machines and gun them
down. Of course you could rename TIA to something else and then the ISPs
would have to use TOP or something like that to find your running TIAs.

Yeah UNIX is really cool, running IRC and finding people that wanted to
play Decent in the #decent channel was pretty neat, not many people
around where I lived would want to play, but on the net, there were
always willing players available. Once a player was found, they might be
2300 miles away, they would run IHHD and I would too, then we would close
our COMM programs but leave the modem off hook, and we could start up
Decent and connect directly to the oponent's IP address and really,
really play a good game, all on a dial up connection. The UNIX machine at
the ISP would do all of the work of keeping us together so that we could
play an IPX game over the internet. Pretty darned amazing.


> If you want really good, free UNIX servers, run *BSD.

Hmmm, I have no experience with BSD but I hear nothing but really good
things about it. Is it pretty much the same as linux or UNIX? What is
BSD's strengths? Is it better for networking large groups, more robust,
more secure, or less prone to seg faults or crashes? I have a pile of
computer parts in my living room and a few cases with boards in them. Can
I build a spare pentium class computer and run Free BSD on it and then
connect it to my LAN? I currently run a PIII 800Mhz, 1Gb SDRAM with
Rehdat 9 on it as my gateway/server/firewall for my home LAN with two XP
computers on it. The Redhat machine connects directly to a Westell
Wirespeed DSL modem running in bridged ethernet mode to make it
transparent, and I a run roaring penguin script to connect via PPP to my
provider with DHCP and maintain the connection. The Redhat machine runs
an apache server for 3 FQDNs, vsftpd server for FTP, Firestarter firewall
to provide firewalling, port forwarding and NAT'ing, becaue it is an easy
program to run. The modem itself is a router and could do all of that
stuff for me, minus the servers, but I want to learn Linux and UNIX so I
keep the modem from doing that stuff by running it in bridge mode.

Do you think I could add a Free BSD machine into this mix to experiment
with? What kind of xwindows and desktop do you get with BSD?

Thanks for your comments.



--
~Ohmster
ohmster at newsguy dot com

Spake Mxsmanic:
>> Don't be silly. There is more to the world than your little part of it. On
>> a global scale, MS' share is falling rapidly.
>
> Microsoft's share has hardly moved in years. It's still 97% of all
> desktops. Linux is about 0.2%.

Can either of you cite sources, or will you continue to fabricate
statistics unassisted?

--
Trent Buck, Student Errant
I used to shoplift plastic bags.

Mxsmanic wrote in
news:qi14315u6utmb9ttdnctvd1opuicktq6je@4ax.com:

>> It's easy to gain any level of access you want to any Windows
>> machine if you know what you're doing - either locally or remotely.
>
> Nope, not on NT-based versions of Windows (NT, 200x, XP, CE).

I gotta agree with this, the non NT versions are pretty unstable and have
no security at all, but this is not the case with the NT kernels. There
is one self-defeating option on Windows though in that most Windows
computer users run as administrators and thus, if they download a "free
screensaver" that is packed with mal and spyware, they get their systems
hosed pretty badly. What sets linux apart is that running as a sysadmin
is heavily discouraged and when you run as a non privileged user, you
simply do not have the access to bring the entire system down with a bad
download. Windows does not discourage privileged user accounts so this
does tend to bring down the security quite a bit on a Windows system.

I think that the trouble is that most all Windows software must install
as an administrator, with many *nix programs, you can install them to
your own directory and do not need sysadmin rights for this. It would be
a big plus if the Windows developers could do something like this. When
you run Windows as a non administrator, you pretty much cannot install
anything at all to the computer and can only work with what is already
there. This is a really big drawback to the Windows OS.

--
~Ohmster
ohmster at newsguy dot com

chris wrote in
news:SMzYd.49999$Bk7.37303@fe1.news.blueyonder.co. uk:

> You can - it's trivial. It requires that you know what you're doing
> (script kiddies need not apply).
>
> C.

Not really, yeah if you are a professional hacker you could hack an NT
system, but there are not that many professional hackers out there,
breaking into everyone's home systems. These same professional hackers
could just as easily get into your *nix system if they are that good so I
think that this negates your point, to a degree, C.

I am only talking about the NT based systems though, the Win95, 98, and
previous systems are a big joke and offer no security at all.

--
~Ohmster
ohmster at newsguy dot com

Spake chris:
> I've had algorithms and methods stolen by MS, as have any number of
> other software innovators.

I am curious. What exactly was stolen? Can you post URLs to your
original code, and to the evidence you have collected to support you
claims?

> This is one of the risks of the GPL - anyone
> can steal your work and claim it as their own.

You may wish to reread the GPL. Its purpose is to prevent vendors from
unilaterally ``embracing and extending'' a product.

> Business users are leaving Windoze in droves. They're fed up with the
> insecurities and unreliabilities of MS products. The next generation
> certainly won't be using anything MS-based.

At the SME level, my experience confirms this. I think multinationals
are too inflexible to take the ``risk'' (perceived or real) of
migration.

--
Trent Buck, Student Errant
When your IQ reaches 50, *sell*. You will make a profit.
-- Bob Silverman

Spake chris:
>> Like Photoshop?
>
> Don't "like" Photoshop at all. It's abysmal. It's expensive, huge, slow,
> unreliable, and doesn't produce the degree of quality required by MY
> company's printshop. We use MUCH better software, all of which is
> available free on the 'net.

Kindly cite package names and URLs.

--
Trent Buck, Student Errant
I think Bush has been playing counterstrike too much.

Ohmster writes:

> That's pretty scary. A development group driven by hate.

The development group probably isn't motivated just by hate (or even
primarily by hate). However, most Linux users are very obviously
motivated by a hatred of Microsoft. Everyone else sees it, but they
don't see it themselves. Every time you ask them about Linux, they
shift the conversation towards the evils of Microsoft.

It's a bit like Satanists: Satanism is really just a rejection of
Catholicism, and Satanists tend to be formerly devout Catholics who have
gone off the deep end in their hatred of everything Roman Catholic.
Similarly, Linux users tend to be people who have gone off the deep end
in their hatred of Microsoft.

For people who don't particularly hate (or love) Microsoft, it's
extraordinarily difficult to justify Linux on the desktop. It's such a
pain in so many ways that there really is no reason to fight with it
unless one has some very powerful motivation to do so ... and the only
motivation that seems to be that powerful is an all-consuming hatred of
Microsoft.

Most of the world doesn't hate Microsoft, and those who don't hate
Microsoft have absolutely no reason to switch to Linux--so they aren't
going to. Linux would have to be truly superior to Windows in a great
many ways before people would switch. Currently I see no sign at all of
any trend in that direction.

> I would rather believe that the
> linux movement is built on the love of computing and of finding ways to
> accomplish things with new ideas and open source collaboration, where no
> one is "hated out of the group". I think that is what makes linux so
> successful.

Hype is what makes Linux successful. That and the motivational hatred
of many Linux fans. Objectively, there's no reason to leave Windows for
Linux, and even if one wanted to do so, the other traditional versions
of UNIX (the BSDs, for example, or other UNIX versions) are at least as
attractive as Linux. And finally, the most obvious alternative to
Windows is ... the Mac (which now runs an OS derived from UNIX, but not
Linux).

> UNIX is really cool because it was just so darned
> powerful what with all of the things it could do and on such a large
> scale.

UNIX is nice, but those who have played with Multics wouldn't call UNIX
that powerful. UNIX could actually run on the hardware of its era,
though, whereas Multics was slow even on multi-megabuck purpose-built
mainrames.

> Back then, we were all using Windows 3.1 and that OS really
> sucked, but that was all there was at the time for most computer users.

There was always the Mac, which preceded Windows. But the Mac cost
three times as much as a PC, and Apple priced itself out of market
dominance as a result.

> The UNIX machine at
> the ISP would do all of the work of keeping us together so that we could
> play an IPX game over the internet.

I remember playing some networked text-based games on mainframes. They
were primitive by today's standards, but they still had the same
attraction that similar games have today, namely, the prospect of
playing with other human beings, instead of just the machine.

> Hmmm, I have no experience with BSD but I hear nothing but really good
> things about it. Is it pretty much the same as linux or UNIX?

The BSDs (there are several) are direct descendants of the original
UNIX, being leaves on the branch that started with the Berkeley Software
Distribution version of UNIX. Today, there are three main contenders:
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD.

FreeBSD is by far the leader--in fact, a great many of the Internet's
Web sites today are running FreeBSD UNIX (with an Apache webserver).
It's fast, free, extremely stable and reliable, and well suited to very
heavy-duty server applications, with good hardware support. And it can
run Linux software for those who absolutely must run something intended
for Linux.

OpenBSD, as I recall, emphasizes security, and NetBSD emphasizes
compatibility with as many different hardware platforms as possible (or
perhaps the other way around, I'm not sure). Neither has anything like
the huge following of FreeBSD, but they have their fans and they are
good for certain purposes.

All of the BSDs are extremely similar, almost interchangeable.

> What is BSD's strengths?

The longstanding history of BSD tends to ensure high compatibility with
other traditional UNIX systems, as well as stability and reliability
(the code has been around a long time). The kernel is directly derived
from original UNIX systems, and not just "inspired" by them. All the
BSDs are completely operating systems, not just kernels to which one
must add a ton of other software in order to get a working OS. There
are distinct, single versions of each BSD OS, not dozens of different
"distributions." There's only one FreeBSD release 5.3, not thirty-six
different ones.

> Is it better for networking large groups, more robust, more secure,
> or less prone to seg faults or crashes?

All of these, I'd say (and others would agree). The BSDs also emphasize
servers a lot more than Linux does. Linux spends all its time trying to
be like Windows. The BSDs are happy to be UNIX, and who cares about
Windows?

> I have a pile of
> computer parts in my living room and a few cases with boards in them. Can
> I build a spare pentium class computer and run Free BSD on it and then
> connect it to my LAN?

Absolutely. FreeBSD will run on practically anything from a 486 up
(earlier versions will run on a 386 as well). The OS is very low in
overhead and just about anything built in the past 15 years or so will
run it.

> I currently run a PIII 800Mhz, 1Gb SDRAM with
> Rehdat 9 on it as my gateway/server/firewall for my home LAN with two XP
> computers on it. The Redhat machine connects directly to a Westell
> Wirespeed DSL modem running in bridged ethernet mode to make it
> transparent, and I a run roaring penguin script to connect via PPP to my
> provider with DHCP and maintain the connection. The Redhat machine runs
> an apache server for 3 FQDNs, vsftpd server for FTP, Firestarter firewall
> to provide firewalling, port forwarding and NAT'ing, becaue it is an easy
> program to run. The modem itself is a router and could do all of that
> stuff for me, minus the servers, but I want to learn Linux and UNIX so I
> keep the modem from doing that stuff by running it in bridge mode.
>
> Do you think I could add a Free BSD machine into this mix to experiment
> with?

Sure. It will do anything that Linux does, particularly with respect to
server-side functionality.

> What kind of xwindows and desktop do you get with BSD?

No X is installed by default, although you can request X.Org
installation during system installation. If you really want X and a
pretty Windows-like experience, you can install the software of your
choice. Unlike many Linux distributions, the BSDs don't take for
granted that you want a desktop and GUI; it's up to you to install and
configure one if that's what you really want.

I don't run X on my FreeBSD machines because they are servers, not
desktops. If I want a desktop, I run Windows, since that is by far the
most logical choice for a desktop machine. In practice, I have top
running on my FreeBSD consoles, and I communicate with them via ssh and
ftp sessions from my Windows desktop. One FreeBSD machine is a
production server, and provides essentially all the server functions I
require (including a Web site that receives 300,000+ unique visitors per
month). The other is for experimentation. The third machine is my
Windows XP desktop. None of these machines ever crashes.

--
Transpose hotmail and mxsmanic in my e-mail address to reach me directly.

Spake Mxsmanic:
> > It might be in your neighbourhood, but in the rest of the world, people are
> > waking up to proper operating systems and better quality software.
>
> No, I'm talking about worldwide statistics.

Kindly cite your source, preferably with a URL.

--
Trent Buck, Student Errant
There is more to life than increasing its speed. -- Mahatma Gandhi

Spake Ohmster:
> Hey C, if you don't mind my asking, what is this "MUCH better software"

I hang around the edges of the Inkscape[1] community; they often mention
Scribus[2] as a good compositing tool. There is of course the GIMP[3];
personally I find it nightmarishly unusable, although it is certainly
the most featureful FLOSS GUI raster editor around.

> question, I like to work with digital photos and although Photoshop is
> like the industry standard (So far as I can tell.)


> I mostly use Paint Shop Pro because it is easier for me to use

Heh. I use Emacs to draw raster images (in XPM format). Of course, I
mainly do high-contrast icons. Editing JPEGs in emacs would suck :-)

ImageMagick[4] is another hammer for your toolbox. It makes a lot of
image manipulation operations accessible from the command line. For
example:

for i in *.png; do convert $i ${i%.png}.jpg; done

I'd be surprised if it works, but Wine[5] might run PS or PSP. I read
recently that Adobe, while not actually *supporting* Linux, are trying
to minimize the use of APIs and functions that Wine doesn't support.

Footnotes:
[1] http://inkscape.org
[2] http://www.scribus.org.uk
[3] http://gimp.org
[4] http://imagemagick.org
[5] http://www.winehq.org/

--
Trent Buck, Student Errant
What part of "Ph'nglui mglw'nath Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" don't
you understand?

Spake Mxsmanic:
>>> If you want really good, free UNIX servers, run *BSD.
>> It's just one option!
> It's a better option. If nothing else, it allows one to escape all the
> kiddies who run Linux.

Hah. I once jokingly remarked that "Linux was invented to keep idiots
from annoying BSD users". A Linux user in the audience immediately
pointed out that that sentence could be read two ways. :-)

--
Trent Buck, Student Errant
How much to buy this book?
This is a library, not a bookstore.
Alright, what happens if I lose it?
You have to pay for it.
Alright, I'd like to borrow this book. Oh! Where did it go?

Spake Ohmster:
> > If you want really good, free UNIX servers, run *BSD.
>
> Hmmm, I have no experience with BSD but I hear nothing but really good
> things about it. Is it pretty much the same as linux or UNIX?

The most objective reference I've been able to find briefly is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system_advocacy

My completely anecdotal one sentence summary is this:

BSDen do less ``out of the box'' than Linuces, but they do it more
robustly, securely and efficiently.

--
Trent Buck, Student Errant
If you can't play with words, what good are they?

Spake Mxsmanic:
> The development group probably isn't motivated just by hate (or even
> primarily by hate). However, most Linux users are very obviously
> motivated by a hatred of Microsoft.

I think you'll find that is a vocal minority who give others a bad name.

--
Trent Buck, Student Errant
Here's your cable. We made it fifty feet long, just in case. In case
what, in case tectonic movement makes the serial ports farther apart?
-- Carl Jacobs

Spake Mxsmanic:
> Why does bugtraq seem to have ten Linux security holes for every Windows
> hole?

Feel free to counter any of these rationalizations with hard facts.

- Linux code is read by more people.

- There is more Linux code.

- The Linux community (mostly) WANTS full disclosure of bugs.

- Linux bugs are (mostly) POTENTIAL exploits.

Your question is answered in more detail here (about four blocks from
the top): http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WindowsVsLinux

--
Trent Buck, Student Errant
Yes, one can rant about the program designs, but generally things keep
getting more and more confused as time goes on. --Sea Wasp

Spake Mxsmanic:
> > Because the Linux community is open about such things.
>
> No. The real reason is that more and more people are attacking Linux,
> and there are a great many security holes in the OS that are being
> uncovered more and more as the OS becomes more popular.

How many known bugs are outstanding (i.e. unfixed) and exploitable,
compared to Microsoft's current operating systems? Microsoft have a
reputation[1] for taking months or even years to patch known exploits.

[1] Probably exaggerated, but I doubt it is completely unfounded.

--
Trent Buck, Student Errant
Conspiracies abound: If everyone's against you, the reason can't
_possibly_ be that you're a ****head.
-- The Usenet Guide to Power Posting

Spake Ohmster:
> Not really, yeah if you are a professional hacker you could hack an NT
> system, but there are not that many professional hackers out there,

....and most of them work for governments and other organized crime
syndicates. They're not interested in breaking into your desktop,
stealing your holiday snaps and trashing your disk -- it's not
profitable.

--
Trent Buck, Student Errant
The number of UNIX installations has grown to ten, with more expected.

Trent Buck writes:

> Can either of you cite sources, or will you continue to fabricate
> statistics unassisted?

My own site statistics show the following:

Microsoft Windows . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93.7%
Macintosh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.7%
(unknown) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.0%
Linux . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0.2%
WebTV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0.077%
Sun Solaris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0.035%
FreeBSD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0.032%
OpenBSD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0.016%
CP/M . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0.0012%
AmigaOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0.0008%
Other UNIX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0.0006%
Symbian OS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0.0002%

These reflect a random cross-section of desktop operating systems
visiting my site from nearly 120 different countries. The site receives
about 300,000 unique visitors per month.

Examination of similar statistics on other sites chosen at random shows
much the same pattern.

Linux has a much stronger presence in the server realm, but on the
desktop, it's not even on the radar.

--
Transpose hotmail and mxsmanic in my e-mail address to reach me directly.

Trent Buck writes:

> Hah. I once jokingly remarked that "Linux was invented to keep idiots
> from annoying BSD users".

I don't know if it was invented for that purpose, but that is one of the
happy side effects.

--
Transpose hotmail and mxsmanic in my e-mail address to reach me directly.