Good Evening Ladies & Gentlemen, C'est Moi! (It is I!) Cap'n Buck. I dropped the AOL account and joined the BRLug lists under this one.
I did go to the Symantec website and downloaded the "fix" for Swen and ran it. Afer "forever", it came back and said that Swen was not on my computer. I had a problem with Norton after I installed the 80 gig HD. So, I did as Win XP said to do and deleted it thru the "Add or Delete Programs." This infortunately did not work fully and left some of Norton on the machine. When I tried to re-install Norton, it refused to do so, saying that the SystemWorks 2003 was "out of date" or corupted! I just put in on the computer in May. Since then, I've done a Regedit and deleted any simblance of Norton and again, re-installed it AGAIN. Now, when I try to "update" the virus protection, Norton stupidly looks for a non-existant dial-up connection! (Ohh, Please let me learn Linux faster so I don't have to be in M$ HELL!) If you try to contact Norton, they want you to use the "for-pay" subcontractor to answer your questions and get help. I absolutly refuse to do that. As far as I can see, there was no option or "searching" for my DSL line. Every other program, OE, Google, Yahoo, AOL, ShreveNet, etc, finds the DSL line and it works great. Question: Any ideas as to HOW I can fix this (temporarily until I can learn and change to Linux)? This is driving me nutz and I don't want to expose myself and others to possible virus, trogans, worms, .scr programs. GOD BLESS, ALWAYS, Cap'n Buck "The instructions said to load Windows '98 or better.......So I loaded Knoppix Linux." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://oxygen.nocdirect.com/pipermail/general_brlug.net/attachments/20030925/d1c5f2e6/attachment.htm From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thu Sep 25 18:36:57 2003 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Shannon B. Roddy) Date: Thu Sep 25 17:37:30 2003 Subject: [brlug-general] This is great! was -> Let's bash M$ again! In-Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> References: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Speaking of bashing M$ again... You should see the thread going on the LSU-ITinfo list. It is quite amusing. I like the following statement best: -> "A computer without a Micro$oft operating system is like a dog without -> bricks tied to its head." I think that sums it up nicely. I will try to reconstruct the thread as best I can here in chronological order. I certainly hope I do not get in trouble for reposting this stuff here, but there is no copyright notice or anything like that in the postings or on the mailing list. I have edited out names, phone numbers and .sig lines where I thought necessary. I am personally happy to see so much anti M$/passport sentiment at LSU. It often REALLY ticks me off that they have sold out to M$ in so many places. ------------------------------- LSU Campus Technical contacts: You are invited to join Microsoft for lunch and a quarterly technical update on campus on October 2, 2003. Agenda: *Microsoft Security Update *New Software Assurance Benefits *Sneak Preview of Office 2003 Systems Date: Thursday, October 2, 2003 Time: 11:00-1:00 Location: Atchafalaya Room, LSU Union LSU Baton Rouge Baton Rouge, LA. 70803 Event code: 1032236819 --------------------------------------------------------------- To register for this event using the link provided requires that you sign up (or be signed up) with Microsoft Passport, a service that is so insecure that just last May it was discovered that anyone could easily reset a Passport user's password to whatever he wanted using a browser and then immediately access the Passport account (see http://www.securitytracker.com/alerts/2003/May/1006728.html ). There are other issues with Passport as well. While I would love to attend and be able to berate Microsoft first-hand for its chronic failure to address vital computer security issues, I am unwilling to make myself even less secure online than I already am in order to do so. Is there anyway that we can register through LSU rather than through Microsoft? ---------------------------------------------------------- LSU Campus Technical contacts: Please register using the Microsoft Events signup web site, as we have always done in the past. This will give us an accurate list and count of the attendees. If you need to cancel, you can do this via the Microsoft Events web site as well. However, if you feel that your Passport account may not be secure, you can call the Microsoft Events number at 1-877-673-8368. Here is the web site to register: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/eventdetail.aspx?culture=en-US&eventid=103 2236819 --------------------------------------------------------------- I agree with John concerning the Mico$oft passport requirement. I have no intention of signing up for this account. I would be happy to crash the event however. ------------------------------------------------- Maybe they'll bring some cool cups or something. Wouldn't that be neat? I would like one with the phrase "A computer without a Micro$oft operating system is like a dog without bricks tied to its head." ------------------------------------------------------------- I have a "need to know" reason for attending the Microsoft Technical Update meeting on Oct. 2. Since I am a "Vegan," I am sure that I will not be able to eat. Therefore, there should be no reason for me to have to register on their website. May I still attend? ----------------------------------------------- Microsoft has offered to give LSU a quarterly Technical Update on our campus, so that we do not have to travel to attend such a meeting. Anyone can register for the quarterly Technical Update. You are not required to participate in the lunch, which will be light fare: sandwiches and chips. Please register for the event , whether you eat lunch or not. You may contact me directly if there is a question as to whether you should attend or not. ---------------------------------------------- I think this brings up a very good point. Why don't we have a big push on campus to move away from expensive proprietaire buggy software. There are other operating systems besides Microsoft Windows, this is a educational community so why don't we teach faculty, staff, and students about linux, *bsd, and other operating systems. Windows is the anti-educational operating systems, it is not open, you can not look at the source, and you can not play with the source. You are charged a fortune if you want compilers that will run code on Windows, and even then there are all kinds of nice hidden traps in the EULA for those compilers. Instead of buying site licenses for Microsoft products why don't we use that money to help support operating systems that are willing to cater to are needs and help develop are LSU into better educational facility. Some people would say, but Word does not run on linux or bsd, well if we put the backing of the LSU behind free/open software, then products will be created and improved to fill the gaps in are needs. Microsoft is the buggy lazy way, as a education facility we should be pushing new and improved software not getting in lock step with Microsoft. Why don't we kick them off campus. -------------------------------------------------- AMEN! -------------------------------------------------- Karen, I would like to thank you for taking the time to setup these meetings. We provide desktop support and Microsoft is the OS that requires the least amount of administrative time to keep running. The average user does not want or need open source, they need a computer that they can use in their daily jobs and that they can use to work with users world wide, not just in one small system. Thank you for setting up the meetings! ---------------------------------------------- here are some missions the university must fullfill that do not allow us to completely abandon operating systems as it stands. While computer science, for the most part, teaches programming on unix environments where the students can concentrate on the fundamentals of the algorithms and code and not getting bogged down with the overhead of the OS its running on, the nature of software development outside of school in industry is that it is primarily Windows based applications. As a result - some windows programming educations is actually NEEDED here just to produced computer science graduates that can be of use to industry (in relation to other universities). Likewise, in engineering, there are a slew of applications that graduating engineers need to know how to use from modeling environments and cad packages to mathematical and control systems development packages. Again, industrial use is primarily windows based - and so, unless you can run those windows apps on a non-windows OS box (with their convoluted licensing managers/schemes) - you are locked into windows OS on the lab machines there as well. We can not move away from windows until AFTER an alternative system is operational, and still be viable as a university for the technical disciplines. I also wish it were not so, but the reality of our world is in opposition to our wishes. Even the federal government is moving to strictly commercial off-the-shelf software when possible, and you know what that means. The fact is that the dog that runs the show consistantly bites off more than it can chew and constantly thinks it is better than it is. The result is the folks in the neighborhood get bitten too often. Since we cannot have the dog put to sleep, we should at least learn enough about it to avoid serious conflicts. -------------------------------------------------- I could not agree more. If M$ Word is the only reason not to switch from M$ OSs, we can always use crossover office to run M$ Word on Linux or *Bsds. OpenOffice is a powerful office suite that runs natively on unices. StarOffice 7 has come out and reviewers are saying it's word processor is better than M$ Word. I have some of my lab wrokstations running Linux and users don't find any difficulty using them. I also have one of my users running Linux on her office workstation and she actually likes it better than having her Windoz crash twice everyday. If we had had a large linux/bsd install base (as opposed to M$) on campus we would not be affected as much as we did because of slapper worm, So Big worm, welchia virus, Code Red worm, nimda...... you got the idea........ Let the open source revolution begin at LSU! ------------------------------------------------------ Let's just stop here. That's enough. --------------------------------------------------- This is Zed * writing from this address at the moment, and while those of you who don't know of me can probably easily determine my outlook on the matter of proprietary vs open source software just by searching, right now I see this issue rapidly degenerating into a pointless advocacy war that I would very much like *not* to see on this list. In the Department of Mathematics, we are supporting both MS Windows and Linux on the desktop, including having experimented with Crossover and various free software office applications, and anyone actually interested in how this turned out can contact me privately, either by e-mail to this address, or by phone at 8-****. I can set up a mailing list just for integration or migration issues if there is a call for it -- but in the interest of not fueling the either the people who believe that Unix is unusable or the people who believe that it's all love and roses, I'd ask that all discussion take place off the lsu-itinfo list. To return to the point of this thread, while I was originally greatly concerned at the requirement that I disclose personal information to a third party in order to register for this event (the fact that I also don't trust Microsoft with my personal information made it somewhat more immediate, but it applies generally), I noticed that it is also possible to register by phone (something that was stated elsewhere, I believe). For people that missed it, the number is: 1-877-673-8368 The procedure was fairly painless, and I was allowed to register while disclosing only my name and office address, and they took my request not to receive any mailings from them on this or any other matter. In the future, I would be happier if the phone contacts rather than the web page were given by default, as I feel that encouraging people to sign up for Passport accounts would be highly irresponsible. However this is turning into a tempest in a teapot -- there is an alternate method available, and if you want to register, use it.
