Let me explain some stuff about linux. First of all, about the safety, Linux is structured in a such way that the system is relatively safer than windows, and limiting the control of program (compared to your control) over your system. That's what have prevented Linux from the Virus explosion that happened for windows.
But away from safety, personally I don't use linux because of safety, I use it for 2 exact reasons, "Stability" and "Control" over my OWN hardware :D. That's what windows lacks generally. We could get into details here, if you'd like. There's a lot of examples where you don't have control over your own hardware in windows. For linux, in most cases, this doesn't happen at all. For example, once I had a couple of my friends over in my room, and we all needed internet access... I was able within 10 minutes to turn my laptop to a wireless router. To be honest, this worked for may b 6 months and they did some changes to the driver that made problems. This is control over my hardware. Talking about drivers, one of the main issues with linux, in my opinion is the quality as well as the availability of drivers for the various hardware. The hardware manufacturers are the one to blame for these problems. The usual scenario is that the manufacture makes the hardware and only provides drivers for windows, then the linux programmers have to reverse-engineer the device and write drivers for it. This solution provides a working driver, but sometimes not supporting the full functionality of the hardware. The hardware manufacturers could release the APIs for their devices and thousands of linux programmers would be more than happy to develop the drivers. OR they could write linux drivers for their own hardware as they do for windows, by the way, NVidia started with the second option.
Also, did you know that a lot of the very famous programs were first developed for linux.. like firefox, thunderbird, apache web server, sqlite and a lot of other software.
About stability, we should take a look at the servers field, where stability and reliability (uptime) is the key issue. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html take a look here... Linux software (apache) takes more than half the market share for web servers.
One last thing, if we judge linux before really trying it for a relatively long amount of time, our judgment will will biased. Because the linux things will be really hard and annoying, and the tasks will seem long and complex.. just as they seemed when we started using windows.. we just need to get used to it first, and then judge the difference.
Myself, I used windows form 1998 - 2006 and linux 2006 - current. If, at least for my own needs, windows was a better operating system, I wouldn't have made the switch or I would have switched back.
Give it some thoughts, and may be if you'd like, give it a try.
Andrew Boktor
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
New Type of Stealing - Mobile Credit
Recently in Egypt, some new ways to steal people have emerged. Thieves steal mobile phones credit !!!!
Well I have seen 2 ways of doing that. If you are familiar with GSM providers in Egypt, most if not all of them provide a service called Credit Transfer, allowing a user to transfer a part of his credit to another user.
1. The thief sends a message to a random number, the message is an identical copy of the message received from the service provider upon the reception of a credit transfer.
2. The thief then sends a second message to the same number saying, "sorry, i did a credit transfer to you by mistake, could you please transfer the credit back to me?" or something similar. The naiive user will transfer the credit, that he never received in the first place, back to the thief.
Another way used in stealing mobile phones credit that I have seen many times.
1. The thief manages to get the username and password of an MSN user.
2. The thief talks to random people, preferably an opposing sex to the stolen account's owner, telling them that he/she needs mobile credit really bad, and his/her father is preventing him from leaving the house to buy credit, so can you buy credit for me and just give me the number of the card... or a similar message.
3. The naiive user again buys the credit and sends the credit recharge code to the theif, which recharges his phone immediately to cut any way of going back for the user.
Those thieves probably sell the credit they accumulate either to mobile phone shops (which sell this credit through Credit Transfer to other users that needs small amounts of credit) or to the people on the street that sell the calls to people who don't own a mobile phone on the street.
Well I have seen 2 ways of doing that. If you are familiar with GSM providers in Egypt, most if not all of them provide a service called Credit Transfer, allowing a user to transfer a part of his credit to another user.
1. The thief sends a message to a random number, the message is an identical copy of the message received from the service provider upon the reception of a credit transfer.
2. The thief then sends a second message to the same number saying, "sorry, i did a credit transfer to you by mistake, could you please transfer the credit back to me?" or something similar. The naiive user will transfer the credit, that he never received in the first place, back to the thief.
Another way used in stealing mobile phones credit that I have seen many times.
1. The thief manages to get the username and password of an MSN user.
2. The thief talks to random people, preferably an opposing sex to the stolen account's owner, telling them that he/she needs mobile credit really bad, and his/her father is preventing him from leaving the house to buy credit, so can you buy credit for me and just give me the number of the card... or a similar message.
3. The naiive user again buys the credit and sends the credit recharge code to the theif, which recharges his phone immediately to cut any way of going back for the user.
Those thieves probably sell the credit they accumulate either to mobile phone shops (which sell this credit through Credit Transfer to other users that needs small amounts of credit) or to the people on the street that sell the calls to people who don't own a mobile phone on the street.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
My Ultimate Desktop
This is my new Ultimate desktop :D I edited some xfce and gtk themes, and here was the result. The colors even go with The Perfect Wallpaper. If you need that theme, or anything close to it (may be only a change in the colors), please contact me, otherwise I think when I have a little free time I'll arrange the files and provide a link to them.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Recipe - Carrot Cake
As you might already know, I like cooking, so I thought about posting some recipes here. May be someone could give a try.
I Personally tried ALL recipes posted here.
Carrot Cake Recipe:
Dressing:
1 cup of sugar (then ground it), or 3/4 cup of powder sugar
1 teaspoon of grounded cinnamon
put the oil and the eggs and mix them well then add the vanilla and mix, add the sugar and mix then add the flour and the baking powder slowly while mixing add the salt and the cinnamon while mixing very well. add then the carrot and mix really really well.
get a 26 cm baking pan, oil it, then put some flour in and shake it well so it sticks to the oil. pour ur mix and put in a preheated oven to 170 degrees, leave it for around 45 mins b4 opening to check it (if u open b4 thatyou'll spoil the cake).
it should take around 1 hour to get cooked. to check if it's done, insert a thin knife into the middle of your cake 2 or 3 times, when u get the knife out, if u see ANY traces the cake left on it, then it still needs to stay more in the oven.
put the cinnamon on the grounded sugar, add one table spoon of water and stirr really really well keep doing so and add more water if needed but add it in really really small amounts and stirr well after adding water everytime keep doing it till you get a THICK paste, much thicker than honey, thicker that the cake paste after it was done. spead it on the top of your cake after it has cooled down to room temp. LEAVE the dressing in the air for a while to harden, otherwise it might melt when closed or when subject to some little heat.
Enjoy.
alternations, u might add more sugar, more cinammon or some nuts, peanuts are the best.
the one you ate today was with exactly no alternations from the recipe.
Bon Appetit.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
The Crocodile Project
Well, it's just for fun, I was bored, so I decided to start with the Crocodile project :D.
Here is the work so far. I only use my Swiss Champ.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Our Project Team
From Left to Right, Steffen Koch, Myself (Andrew Boktor), Marleine Daoud, Proff. Dr. Thomas Ertl, Christiane Taras, and Fred Morcos
Monday, June 30, 2008
GUC LOL 2
Well, those 2 mails were sent to me by the GUC admission office. Ignoring that fact that their page doesn't work well with the 2nd most used web-browser, Firefox. Either this was the update in the e-mail, or there's some1 who doesn't know how to sum 1 bus + 1 bus :D
Sunday, June 29, 2008
GUC LOL
Click on the image for a larger viewIt's my first time to see such English, and also first time to see someone asking me to prioritize something using TextFields.
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