Date: 08/25/05     Keywords: no keywords

Does anyone know how one would implement a password policy in Mac OS X? I looked into pwpolicy, but apparently it requires OS X Server. Unfortunatly, it wouldn't be remotely possible for me to get OS X Server up, so I don't think pwpolicy would work for me. It's so easy to do in Windows XP, but seems like a missing feature in OS X. But, you'd think with the UNIX style subsystem of OS X, you could use passwd or chpass or something in a shell script. I am no shell scripter though.

I'd like to set a minimum password length of 6 characters, a maximum password age of 90 days, a password history of 8, and require passwords to be alphanumeric with both upper and lower case.

Can anyone help?

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/757416.html

Date: 08/25/05     Keywords: no keywords

AOL Fined for Making it Hard to Cancel Service

Posted on Slashdot:

"CNET is carrying an article about a settlement between AOL and New York State that includes AOL paying a $1.25 million fine and agreeing to reform its customer service procedures. The agreement stems from consumers' complaints that AOL customer service representatives would either ignore requests, or make it unduly difficult, to cancel their service, according to a statement from Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. The policy probaby had something to do with rapidly declining customer numbers at AOL as more Americans switch to broadband."

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/757115.html

Date: 08/25/05     Keywords: software, database, virus, spyware, microsoft

Hello, and bare with me. Computerwise I'm a semi-illiterate seeking an answer to a pre-researched, fairly thought-out question (as advised by the mods in userinfo). The problem is I'm getting conflicting answers depending on where I look, and if you computergeeks can't resolve it, I give up. Hopefully you all are not too disappointed that my question won't involve highly technical jargon or tons of acronyms...

By way of background: I'm a graduate student in the social science, and for the first time ever I have the opportunity of purchasing a new laptop. I will be storing important research on my computer, as well as doing a great deal of internet research. At some point I will need to install some sort of academic research software (a database that can cross reference scads of quotes, sources, etc.)

I'm leaning toward a basic mac because I'm hearing that the mac infrastructure is more stable than PCs, and that it is less prone to viruses and spyware. This is important, as viruses ate my last hard drive. On the downside, mac laptops seem to be a bit pricier than comparable PCs. I have never owned a mac before anyway, and have concers about learning a new interface. Additionally, I've been warned by many PC-using faculty and students that e-mailing Word docs (and other Microsoft program stuff) from Mac to PC can be sketchy and that a lot of software is only useable on PC. This can't be true in this day and age, can it?

If I don't go with a mac, I'll need a good reccommendation for a reliable PC. I've used Dell and Gateway, and had problems with both. I've heard fujitsu is good, but more expensive. I didn't feel I could take this inquiry to the Mac communities, because of their obvious bias. ;)

Any advice offered will be met with my profound gratitude. Thanks for the patience.

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/756744.html

Date: 08/24/05     Keywords: no keywords

Im going to build my new computer soon and was wondering if it was common to put in a seperate DVD-ROM drive to play the DVDs as well as a DVD-RW or would the latter be enough to handle reading, writing and re-writing? I was just thinking of extending the life of the drive. any comments or advice would be great :)

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/755975.html

Date: 08/24/05     Keywords: no keywords

Can anyone give me a rundown on what is involved in getting OSX to connect to Active Directory or perhaps just connect a Mac to file server shares?

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/755733.html

Date: 08/24/05     Keywords: no keywords

Anyone awake who does C#?

I have two projects, call them FOO and BAR.

FOO has two classes, call them FOO-A and FOO-B

BAR has two classes, call them BAR-A and BAR-B

I've set it up such that BAR references FOO, so within BAR I can do things like

FOO-A fooa = new FOO.FOO-A();

No worries.

But within FOO, I need to be able to have an instance of a BAR-A. I also need to be able to access static members of BAR-A and BAR-B.

Adding a reference to BAR results in a circular reference, and that's not allowed.

How in the hell can I resolve this?!

(yes, it's 2am where I am, and this needs to be resolved by 9am if I'm going to be a hero - and I do not have time to rework the class structures)

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/755555.html

Date: 08/24/05     Keywords: no keywords

How do I prevent the printer from using the Photo Printing Wizard? I don't like it and I'd pretty much prefer the orginal printing procedure.

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/755340.html

Date: 08/24/05     Keywords: no keywords

I downloaded an application a while ago that would show a radar type display and estimate where a wireless access point/router was based on noise. I have about 800gb of applications on my fileserver and have not bothered to organize them to the best degree :). I would like to know what your favorite wifi tools are and where I might download them. If there is a really good application that can be purchased for a fair amount, by all means list that as well.

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/755085.html

Date: 08/24/05     Keywords: google

Google Talk already out?

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/23/2316223&tid=217&tid=218

Could be interesting...apparently it uses Jabber as it's mode of IMing. Doubt it'll replace AIM though.

~Keith

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/754854.html

Date: 08/23/05     Keywords: no keywords

How do I get the "New Hardware Wizard" to quit popping up everytime I reboot. I reinstalled a printer, or scanner and now it pops up on every reboot. HELP!!!!!!!!!


X-posted to my personal LJ.

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/754572.html

Date: 08/23/05     Keywords: software

does anyone know of any free [or pirate-able] software that can convert avi and mpg files to dvd format so i can burn them? it would need to be fairly simple because i don't know much about that kind of stuff.

also, i need some kind of program where i can edit avi files. really all i need to do is rotate the frames because i took some portrait-style video clips this summer and they're sideways.

thanks. :)

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/754372.html

Date: 08/23/05     Keywords: no keywords

I am putting together a computer for someone using some used parts. The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-72XE. I need to clear the BIOS I think however I can't locate where on the motherboard the jumper setting is for it(I can't get into the BIOS to clear the settings). I can't seem to locate the manual for the damn thing, anyone have any suggestions?

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/754081.html

Date: 08/23/05     Keywords: no keywords

People able to compare Intel 848P Chipset <==> SiS 661FX chipset (or to give some advice about should one prefer Intel chipsets against others at all) are saluted.

*Trying to choose between MSI 848P Neo-V and ASUS P5S800-VM motherboards.

Thanks.

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/753890.html

Date: 08/22/05     Keywords: no keywords

Every time I put in an audio disc, Windows Media Player tries to RIP from the CD.

How do I get the program to stop doing that all the time?

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/753519.html

Date: 08/21/05     Keywords: no keywords

I have a lot of experience in formatting and reformatting modern computers but my friend recently brought me an older Compaq Presario5050 and I cannot figure out how to do this with XP. This is going to be used as a small scale server at an American Legion Hall, and XP will work on this computer. When I went into the BIOS to change boot order, I came to realize there was no such option. I inspected the BIOS for about 15 minutes and there are very few options in general. How can I configure this so that I can get the computer to boot off of the CD? Thanks

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/753140.html

Date: 08/20/05     Keywords: virus, antivirus

Hi all,

Recently I formatted my computer and re-installed Windows 2000 Professional off the cd. I went on the internet and downloaded SP2 & SP4 immediately. However, after about 2 minutes of being on the internet, I started getting a series of Windows Messages like these:

---
Message from SYSTEM to ALERT on 7/24/2005 12:45:21PM

STOP! WINDOWS REQUIRES IMMEDIATE ATTENTION.

Windows has found 47 CRITICAL SYSTEM ERROR!

To fix the errors please do the following:
1. Download Registry Repair from: h t t p : / / w w w . m s - f i x . c o m (don't think it's a good idea to go there)
2. Install Registry Repair
3. Run Registry Repair
4. Reboot your computer
FAILURE TO ACT NOW MAY LEAD TO DATA LOSS AND CORRUPTION!
---
One option on the dialog box: OK.

There are 7 various messages coming up. Here are the other addresses given with different messages.

w w w . p c r e p a i r t o o l . c o m
w w w . c l e a n t h i s p c . c o m
w w w . w i n d o w s r e g . c o m
w w w . m y r e g f i x . c o m
w w w . m s - f i x . c o m
w w w . w i n r e g e d i t . c o m

They keep popping up every 5 minutes or so.

Scanning with AVG didn't much, except a "Virus Detected" warning:
"While opening file: F:\WINNT\system32\jwrxdqg.exe Trojan horse BackDoor.Small.31.AE"

When I click on Info/Heal/Delete File/Move To Vault options on the AVG window, I get "Requested action not available for this object" error. I scanned with Norton AntiVirus, CCleaner, HijackThis, Ad Aware SE, and just about every other tool that claims they can get rid of this to no avail.

Anyone had this happen and/or know the solution?

Thanks heaps in advance,
Cath

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/752507.html

Date: 08/19/05     Keywords: html

Yes it's true. Unless you've already found out, amazon.com now sells sex toys. And not just a few.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=sc_bb_br_3760901_52/102-2150568-4588925?%5Fencoding=UTF8&node=3777371&no=3760901&me=ATVPDKIKX0DER

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0009OSCKM/sr=1-24/qid=1124469949/ref=sr_1_24/102-2150568-4588925?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=3777781&s=hpc&v=glance

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/752015.html

Date: 08/19/05     Keywords: no keywords

Yet more possible speed increase questions:

G4 Quicksilver 733, 10.3.9, 1.125 GB RAM

I've done all of the typical cleaning and optimizations, etc. Upon further inspection, I realize that the main drive is the stock IBM DTLA 305040. 5400 RPM. 512K buffer. Yikes. So, I have come up with a few possible scenarios:

--Replace the system drive with a 7200 drive, with a larger buffer. Maybe even a 10K.

--My system has an adaptec 39160 SCSI PCI card. Perhaps put the system on a SCSI drive and use that as a boot drive?

What questions these raise are:

1. Will the bus the SCSI card is on slow down the performance of the system drive to effectively negate any possible speed benefits?


2. (I've asked this before) What is the bus structure? Shared? If so, which are shared, which are standalone? How fast are the busses?

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/751697.html

Date: 08/19/05     Keywords: web

Can anyone tell me how to do a logfile that collects IPs of everyone who visits the webpage? Only like it logs them to text file nothing fancy. I want this kind of system for my own webpage. It would be under unix server (the log file).

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/751558.html

Date: 08/19/05     Keywords: no keywords

Folks,

I would just like to run this passed you guys...

I need to set up a recovery image of a server so that we can a) quickly get the server back to its pristine configuration if it were to get hit by lightning or something and b) quickly create clones of the machine.

I know there are imaging apps like Ghost, but we don't have any spare cash.

What I thought was perhaps using qemu to set up a virtual machine (or a number of different VMs representing different configurations) and then - somehow - write the .img file to a new hard disk (when needed) and make it bootable.

Does that sound like it might fly or is there an easier way?

Just thinking out loud at the moment :)

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/751180.html