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Why UNIX is better than Windows... By Microsoft
BenBenBen writes "According to a whitepaper found on "a fairly insecure server", UNIX not only is more reliable and easier to maintain than Windows (2000 in this case), it's cheaper too. These shock results are reported on both The Register and (the source) Security Office."
At least it shows Microsoft is keeping some goal in mind in developing Windows - personally I was beginning to wonder ...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Agreed. Now, if they would just be a little more upfront about this sort of thing, I'd feel a little better.
It seems like most of what we have in this regard is leaked stuff, so internally MS knows, but their public face would never admit to it (IMHO).
This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
B******s - i just discovered this artive via another site and tried to read - instantly slashdotted!
WTF is it runing on - a quad Xeon IIS 2.0/w2k machine with 1 GB memory?
...constitute some sort of business tort, like disclosing trade secrets? I'm not trying to give MS lawyers any ideas (like they need them) but I've certainly seen Apple goes nuts over this sort of thing.
:P
BTW, that it was on a "fairly insecure server" is as much a defense as "his house had cheap locks."
may have insecure server products(and desktop products for that matter) but whatever Security Office was running is nothing more than a smoking pile of silicon and hard drive.
But Security Office wants us to believe that they hax0red some random MS Server and just happened to find a detailed analysis on Unix vs Windows? And this analysis happened to say "we should eat our own dog food"? Not one analysis I have ever read had such a ridiculous analogy in it.
And let's look at this:
The whitepaper, by MS Windows 2000 Server Product Group member David Brooks, has been posted on the Web by Security Office, which says it discovered the item and numerous other confidential MS documents on a poorly protected server.
So Security Office is admitting to criminal activity? Sorry, I call hoax.
You mean... You mean... That instead of paying for Win2000, I could have installed FreeBSD instead?
Oh, the humanity!
(Yes, this was sarcastic!)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
There has been one hour and 46 minutes since the last MS critical article was posted. You need to wait at least two hours.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
This isn't news. It's business.
-
Read the paper - pretty reasonable stuff. The only thing that may raise eyebrows is the origin of the paper. Goes to show that Microsoft has some competent people working for them (did anybody doubt that, it's after all the company policy that is rotten) but also a horde of absolutely brilliant PR weasels which can turn black to white when you're not watching.
Existence usually comes as a surprise (Idem)
Another strike against Windows is the GUI: "GUI operations are essentially impossible to script. With large numbers of servers, it is impractical to use the GUI to carry out installation tasks or regular maintenance tasks."
I love Unix. But a huge reason for this unnatural affection is the command line, and the enhancements Unix has made to it (pipes, file descriptors, everything-is-a-file, shell scripting). Even if Microsoft turned around tomorrow and made everything GPL, fixed their security holes and sent chocolates and hookers to Linus and RMS, I'd still prefer Unix for the power of the command line.
In Windows, the command line almost seems like an optional afterthought. In Unix, it's the other way around. (Disclaimer: I'm partly joking, and much more familiar w/U. than M [as I'm sure everyone can tell].) And I think for admin purposes, that makes Unix the more powerful choice.
Carousel is a lie!
this seems to be a quite well written paper (as far as I can see from the Register's summary, the server is /.'ed).
Everything I read there points out things I don't like on windows, much better than I am capable of. While there exist many papers pointing out these things, they are often to "evangelistic" to be seriously considered for convincing management types.
I'm eager to get the whole document, it might have its worth even without mentioning the originaters (watch the copyright, though).
> Wouldn't it be neat if MS put out a fully
> reliable, configurable, cheap O/S?
Yeah, they could call it MS/Linux.
I hate Microsoft much as the next guy, but the headline is *way* overwrought. If you actually read the linked article, it's just an honest pro/con comparison. They mention certain advantages of UNIX (text configuration, small size) and certain advantages of Windows (better internationalization, more developer support, better throughput). Entirely realistic and a perfectly fine rationale document. There are some bits I disagree with (eg. Visual Studio being better than the UNIX development tools) but overall, this is just a document written by an engineer weighing the various issues involved in switching from UNIX to Windows.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I tend to view any such "inside" source very suspiciously - the halloween paper about how to bring linux down was fairly believable, but this... Well, the register says:
Now, I didnt read the paper itself, so I apologize if this post is missing the point.
Join the elite! Post at score:2! Ghostwheel is online.
Tit. FTFA: "The whitepaper, by MS Windows 2000 Server Product Group member David Brooks"
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
If Microsoft were to modify their configuration files to be more UNIX like, and offer a decent UNIX-like shell, most of the UNIX advantages would fall away. But this kind of modification would be difficult because of the way Windows is structured. UNIX, on the other hand, doesn't have this problem. It is much easier to build a decent GUI on top of a fundamentally sound architecture than it is to build a fundamentally sound architecture under a good GUI.
This represents a tremendous opportunity for UNIX. The UNIX world must develop GUIs to rival Windows' and make sure that the performance is equal to that of Windows. Then one can have the best of both worlds. And then nobody can argue that Windows is better.
[#include unixfan_disclaimer], but honestly: look at the advantages of Unix over Windows in so many situations. I'd always kind of wondered if MS was ignoring those problems/advantages for marketing purposes, or if they Just Didn't Get It. Looks like the former, which is reassuring.
Carousel is a lie!
Ha, Ha
</simpsons>
Looks like once again, M$ gets busted for lying through it's teeth. Of course, that's what all good marketing is. Not that any of this comes as a suprise for anyone who's administered both Windows and *nix boxen.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Spend money to fix problems with its software? If they know its poorly coded, why don't they launch an entire other branch dedicated to fixing bugs/product maintenance? It's not like they don't have the money. Throw a billion dollars at .net and windows and see if you can make it better. Hell throw five. They'll still have enough money to run the company for a year without any other income.
As much as we'd all like to think, they people over at Microsoft are not idiots. They have enough money to hire the best and the brightest. They do have some quality products (i.e. those whose securities problems are not much of a problem like games, and i personally like their Intellimouse Optical.).
Can anybody tell me why so many smart people won't see the light of day and dedicate big resources to overcome their biggest drawback?
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
I do not know what people are acting all surprised. What MS says and what MS knows are two very seperate things. Why do you think they say Linux is a competitor to be watched? Yea, they say 'MS software is better for xyz reasons, yatta yatta' but you better be damn sure that privately they are analyzing their competition inside and out. The first way to get raped by your competition is to ignore it. The second is to assume that you are automatically better than the competition, product quality wise. If a company is dishonest in its internal evaluations of its products against their competition, they will merely alienate their customers even more due to poor design decisions. Remember, MS has a shitload of investors, so going out publicly saying 'our product is subpar to unix' would result in their stocks playing a rollercoaster game. Never mistake self-honesty with PR.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Hmm, this explanation doesn't fit well with what I read at the Reg:
The whitepaper, by MS Windows 2000 Server Product Group member David Brooks,
Whereas in Win2K: "Some parameters that control the system's [...]
Cleary, the original hotmail guys wouldn't have thought about W2k, which was non-existant at that time.
The team was unable to reduce the size of the image below 900MB
Dito, I doubt any MS operating system's image at that time couldn't be reduced to less than 900MB.
They also mention Advanced Server, that "at" is deprecated, Interix 2.2 and so on.
No, I doubt your are right.
...but being unrealistic isn't one of them. They know what their products are like and they know the golden rule, "You don't have to have the best product to win the product wars."
Beta vs. VHS...Zip drives vs. Jazz drives...etc, etc.
Why bother then? If Apple, with far less resources of any kind whatsoever, managed to plug a decent user interface on the top of a free UNIX-like layer, Microsoft could certainly do the same, only better and faster.
I might be missing this one, as I don't see it in the article, but...
Since when has the windows community had more developer support? MSDN is a bloody nightmare... in 'nix I've had very little problems tracking down assistance, howtos, and code samples.
lamenes filter won't let me post the whole document so I will have to break it up
Abstract
This white paper discusses the approach used to convert the Hotmail web
server farm from UNIX to Windows 2000, and the reasons the features and
techniques were chosen. It will focus primarily on the planners,
developers, and system administrators. The purpose of the paper is to
provide insight for similar deployments using Windows 2000. We will
discuss the techniques from the viewpoint of human engineering as well
as software engineering.
Early results from the conversion, which was limited to the front-end
web servers, are:
Windows 2000 provides much better throughput than UNIX.
Windows 2000 provides slightly better performance than UNIX.
There is potential, not yet realized, for stability of
individual systems to be equal to that of UNIX. The load-balancing
technology ensures that the user experience of the service is that
stability is as good as it was before the conversion.
As this paper will show, while the core features of Windows
2000 are able to run the service, its administrative model is not well
suited to the conversion.
The observations related here are derived from experience gained at a
single site. More work would be needed to establish whether they are
representative.
You have to remember that MS employees are real human beings. They aren't idiots for the most part. This guy was being very candid about the shortfalls of a windows server, perhaps with hopes of seeing it improved it in the future. It's the higher ups in the corporate ladder and the marketers that candy-coat all things windows and belittle all things *nix.
Ironically, many of those (perfectly valid) reasons that *nix can make a better server are the same reasons I don't like it on my desktop. Text configuration is a blessing for server farms but a nightmare for newbies with a fresh install.
Read it on the Internet Archive here:w ww.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20011123043914/http://
Hotmail still runs FreeBSD...behind the Windows 2000 front-end facade.
Go to http://uptime.netcraft.com/ and type in one of the IP addresses that you find in the HTML source at Hotmail's login page.
Having read their section on Windows' Strengths, there are several bits that I disagree with, but really the hardware issue is the most annoying.
Better hardware detection. Setting up UNIX on a new PC is difficult, requiring a more intimate knowledge of how the hardware is built. That's an up-front cost; given the existence of multiple identically configured systems, cloning an established system doesn't present the same problems.
This I don't agree with. Granted that you need a little bit more knowledge to get hardware working, if you do know what you're doing (and this paper is aimed at people who do, or at least should know what they're doing), it is far more reliable. If something goes wrong, there is a reason it went wrong, and a way to fix it. In windows, even the biggest guru finds the hardware detection system to be black magic to say the least. At worst, it can be completely random!
Plus cloning a Linux is very easy and reliable, because as a general rule there are fewer driver dependencies. Think about a Slackware setup booting into console only server mode. How many hardware/module dependencies are there? All I can think of is the Ethernet card. Other than that, the image is completely transferrable.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
memo
The fact that you can ask that question is a key issue. MS has made a decision to be backwards compatible. This represents a huge liability. It isn't such a big deal for BSD since upgrading is just a matter of typing "make." What MS is doing makes a heck of a lot more sense to me than what Appled has done. (Oh great, here goes my karma, but now I've started...) Apple built a culture of bravado about how advanced its OS (interface really) is. Then when they hit a wall they decided to just change the processor and the instruction set. They then did it again when going to OSx.
MS on the other hand is trying to evolve rather than start over. If they are willing to admit that there are flaws then they can make necessary changes. That is the reason that you can ask how old Windows is.
Personally, I wished that they had tossed out a lot of bad baggage a long time ago. I especially liked the last paragraph from the Guardian:
It is terrifying to contemplate the efficiency bonus MS would have enjoyed if it had only been willing to base its entire corporate operations on UNIX instead of eating its own dog food. The software monopolist might today be in the bizarre position of being the world's only consumer of unices.
Agreed - most likely, it's just some guy with a 28K modem who's got a dedicated phone line. Sometimes, his mom picks up the wrong line and the whole site goes down.
I totally agree ... The Register is no more a credible source than Slashdot is. It is entertainment, though.
See, that's the problem.
In almost every instance, The Register has been right. Yeah, it may still be irresponsible journalism - but as individuals, and as a company, these guys know what the hell they're doing. They check their stuff, even if it won't hold up to normal journalistic integrity checks.
It's kind of like the difference between talking to a judge and talking to a jury. When you're talking to a jury, you can still be telling the truth, but you don't need to present *nearly* so much hard evidence as you need were you trying to convince a judge.
Not that you couldn't present evidence everybody on the planet considers "hard", but courtrooms have their own standards (think about all the cases that were overturned because some extremely incriminating piece of evidence was thrown out of court on some technicality).
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I was curious about the author, so I started Googling a bit. Many of his newsgroup posts are in relation to Microsoft's UNIX products (like Outlook Express for HP-UX and IE for Solaris) and his .sig is ususally "Test Lead, Microsoft Corp." Here he mentions being an ex-employee of OSF and The Open Group.
Enquiring minds and all that.
the no
First, is it a real document downloaded while an FTP server had some unsecured directories exposed recently? Possibly. So what? Does this mean that this is official MS scripture? Do you mean that if we review every file on your hard drive we won't find something that a) wasn't written by you, b) you probably don't want us to see, c) doesn't represent your current thoughts.
Ahh the C option... perhaps this was really written by someone who happens to be an MS employee. Perhaps this guy was just given the job; take Hotmail and move it from BSD to Windows and this guy is like many who might say; but it works as it is. Lets not break it to fix it - lets leave it as it is so I'll write up every reason I can think of not to do this!
Has everyone missed/forgotten the MS papers describing the reasons why and exactly how Hotmail WAS moved from BSD to Windows 2000?
In this document you'll find how untrue so much of what was written in the stolen document. No scripting support in windows 2000 because it also includes a GUI? Are you fucking stupid or what? There is complete scripting control in windows 2000, always has been. You can control every part of windows 2000 networking and services and disks and users and security through scripting. Sure, you can use the GUI too. Does the fact that Linux can run a GUI mean that suddenly it's scripting goes away?
In the conversion to Hotmail they employeed scipts and automation tools builtin to windows. They moved because Windows 2000 was faster and more efficient. It is obviously stable as any honest person running W2K/XP can tell you.
I understand there is a need to attack MS at every step around here. I understand the desire to believe every antiMS piece ever submitted. But sometimes even the more ignorant *nix admin has to eventually read the facts and find that NO OS is perfect. That W2K is not utterly and totally flawed and that it actually is a real competitor for other Server OSes. Once you accept this you can drop the zealous approach and do things in a logic, calm and professional manner. If is really better - prove it to us with grown up responses and facts - not running around waving a copy of The Enquirer which tells us Michael Jackson and Bill Clinton were seperated at birth by aliens somewhere near Roswell.
Microsoft's "public" interface is constantly tearing at the bounds of credibility. Witness Balmer's talk about how they didn't adequately sell their customers on the benefits of Software Assurance:)
Internally, though, this shows that Microsoft is quite rational and realistic. As a company, they will survive and prosper a lot longer on that course than if too much of the internal management started to actually believe what is destined for external public consumption in the marketplace.
Let's all learn the good lesson from Microsoft here.
It should be obvious that if you're in a business that relies on evaluation of information technology that you should rely only very loosely upon what is presented to you publicly.
Second, keep your internal evaluations
Shoot, I knew years ago that BSD was a cheap solid workhorse after learning about ftp.cdrom.com
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Three clicks in Computer Management won't shut down all services, only user-administerable services.
/maybe/ some file access port for ftp or sftp to upload files. That's it -- none of those silly TCP/UDP135-139 (generalization) ports!
There are a number of services (RPC, NetBIOS, etc) that are VERY difficult to shutdown, and are only useful if you run in a domain or workgroup.
If I have to run IIS on a standalone Windows 2000 box, I DO NOT want these extraneous services running. I want a box that only has ports 80,443,
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
Nope, not the death penalty.
A special clause on page 394 of the enacting legislation says that anyone convicted of publishing Microsoft's dirty laundy is enjoined from using any other operating system for life. It's Microsoft only, baby!
Repeat offenders are enjoined from using any operating system other than Windows ME.
And for the hard-core cases... they bring out BOB.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
You make some good points, but here's my response:
How many years old is UNIX?
I'm unaware of any significant functional breaks during the evolution of UNIX. As far as I can tell there haven't been any, or if there has been it was on the order of the transition from DOS to NT; minor breaks here and there, but on the whole, compatability is maintained.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
that upon opening http://www.microsoft.com/servers , read "Build and Deploy", as "Build and Destroy"?
The windows command line seems to be built as an emergency backup tool, for when it can't be done in a GUI for some reason. It is in no way intended for the system to be USED from the command line.
Modern unix shells however, are designed to be comfortable, and easy to use. (Easy as in, the lack of the amount of work required from a dos-style shell.)
We probably don't need a whitepaper to tell us what we already knew
No, but this paper shows us that Microsoft already knew what we knew: that FreeBSD is much better in terms of reliability, configuration, and administration. I'd read the "marketingized" version of the (attempted, partially successful) Hotmail conversion before, but this document sheds light on what really happened and why.
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
Where have you been? There was the BSD vs. AT&T Unix compatibility issues, the OSF compatibility issues, and in Linux the switch to glibc5 was a major backwards compatibility breaker. Of course, these problems pale in comparison to the incompatibility problems caused by some new releases of windows, but Unix and Linux in particular have never been shy about breaking backwards compatibility in order to improve functionality.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I am reminded of a time during my short term at Best Buy where I was demoing an eMachine with Windows XP for a customer. All of a sudden, the screen froze and there was no response from keyboard or mouse. Embarrassed, I quickly made up some excuse and went to Start -> "Turn off computer" to restart the machine.
The next words out of the customer's mouth were, "Oooh, I like how it fades."
Apparently, this customer was an ex-Millenium user who looked past computer lockups as commonplace, or perhaps they just really dig user interfaces and could care less about the fact that a new display computer is having problems locking up during a simple mouse meneuver.
Regarding the much touted recent Windows 2000 Common Criteria Certification, see: Chapter 3 - Secure Configuration for this gem:
"Installation of applications conforming to Windows Installer-based package requirements will have difficulty installing from a CD-ROM on a computer running a Windows 2000 operating system in the Evaluated Configuration.
.Cap file directly from a CD-ROM.
"The reason is that the Windows Installer service is not a service that was evaluated and is therefore disabled in the Evaluated Configuration of Windows 2000. Additionally, the AllocateCDRoms Registry value that is set in the Evaluated Configuration will not allow Windows Installer to open a
"Therefore, to install an application conforming to Windows Installer-based package requirements, the Windows Installer service must be temporarily enabled and the "MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\AllocateCDRoms" Registry value must be temporarily set to 0 (this can be accomplished through the Local Security Policy interface)."
So, in order to install any apps on your "secure" Win 2K box, you have to hack the registry and disable the protections that the very Windows 2000 Common Criteria Certification itself were set up to require!
And of course, the "secure" configuration has to have the floppy drive removed, or made inaccessible!
But hey! who's gonna install Office 2K from floppies, anyway?
What are these people smoking?
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
If what's inside is to be taken as facts, it's interesting to see that in a large scale environment:
-IIS management is not easy (due to the metabase, and reloading their custom ISAPI module required an additionnal layer to do it without iisreset)
-there's actually no equivalents for rdist, cron, syslog. They ported them to win32.
-they had to hack the net driver to change MTU on the fly
More important to me: they had an hard time figuring out stuff because of the lack of documentation and all undocumented interfaces. They even didn't suspected all the CLI facilities of Win2000 (nor do I).
So, W2K Server is powerful, yet it's setup in a bloated way making it difficult to manage. I wish some good papers would be written on the subject for all of us stuck with administring such boxes to benefit of other's experiences.
have you been defaced today?
It may depend on what the load balancer gives you. It does look like they're moving more IIS into the back end. Eventually it will probably be all Microsoft. When someone pointed this out to me a year or two ago, it was pretty clear that most files were being served by IIS, but when you went to login (or do anything else) the form was submitted to FreeBSD.
Now I see that 64.4.14.24 is Running IIS 5, but 64.4.14.23 is running Apache on FreeBSD.
At least loginnet.passport.com is running Windows.
But it portrays, about as accurately as I've ever seen it, how systems are created to do one thing and end up doing something very different - and usually not something all that valuable.
The following is quoted (excerpted) from the back cover.
The dominant presentation tool was Harvard Graphics. It was used by EVERY business that needed a tool like that. Microsoft used it all the time.
Then they created PowerPoint. As typical of their strategy, version one and two we're worth wiping your butt with. A friend at MS was ORDERED to stop using HG and start using PowerPoint. He lost animation, audio, etc.
"PPT is a multimedia presentation tool without the burden of being multi or very useful" in his words.
How to get market share for this ? Hmmmm (/me strokes beard).
I know! Bundle it with Word and Excel, call it "Office" and make that the only way for businesses to buy it!
It was a two-fer. If you lived on WordPerfect and Excel, or Word and 1-2-3 or Quattro Pro, well, when you upgraded, you have both MS products. It's now a bad business idea to also go get WordPerfect or 1-2-3 (to be fair, Lotus never really upgraded 1-2-3 in a timely way and Quattro smoked it for $119).
Need a presentation tool? PowerPoint is Free! (no, your honor, it was fair competitive practices - we just gave customers the 3 tools and charged them for Word and Excel but we didn't make PowerPoint "free").
As it aged, it did become more useful. And bloated. And proprietary.
Uh, sorry, but this is just plain wrong. Microsoft took the code they had from OS/2 and made it into Windows NT.
Uh, sorry, but this is just plain wrong. NT is the product of VMS engineers bringing their talents and experience into a different product.
Ever wonder why the first release of Windows NT was called '3.1'?
No, actually. It was to avoid maturity confusion between NT and Windows 3.1. Releasing Windows NT as 1.0 would have made marketing less effective. Given it had the same UI as Windows 3.1 was another reason.
While your last paragraph is true, it hardly constitutes receiving a score of 5. Moderators need less crack.
Why bother.
I don't think that I would accept a hooker from Microsoft. My guess is that she would have a virus.
Chocolate, on the other hand...
Do not think that any experience from working in any Institutional environment maps to the 'real world'.
Disclaimer: Windows is my lifeline. I'm paid to work on Windows machines. And to answer your question, I do it quite often if it's the most convenient way to get things done. Of course, I also have an admin workstation with MMC tools loaded, can telnet in, can run TightVNC, or Terminal Services for remote control, or can use a lot of tools (native Win2K + 3rd party) to administer from the CLI of my own box. Or, I can automate things via WSH using VBScript (my scripting language of choice) if it's something repetitive. Whichever suits me and the problem at hand at the moment and makes my life easier.
Not saying that UNIX is wrong in it's CLI, but saying that a GUI in Windows is not a good excuse for not being able to automate or run from the CLI if you want.
Servers DO go down, both UNIX and Windows. It's a cost of doing business. And you usually don't have to touch a Windows server after it's installed unless you want to change something. That's about the same as for UNIX, isn't it?
So, do you run *nix boxes on the internet without a firewall? I don't. I'd say it's pretty standard practice to put webservers of all kinds behind firewalls, so the paper pointing out open ports is a bit of a red herring.
When the "right way" takes more time, specialized skill, and effort, then it's the "more expensive way". And then you have to weigh the costs involved as well. A forward looking, intelligent individual uses the resources available to him to do the job in the most EFFICIENT manner. When hardware is cheaper than eeking out another .1% performance boost from recoding or optimizing, then throwing hardware at the problem is a viable solution. I can buy 512MB of RAM for less than what it costs for a client to pay me for 1 hour. If that solves the problem, then it makes more sense to buy the RAM. That's business.
Yeah, multicasting a 900MB image requires fiber and 1000BT. And huge terabyte SAN's of course. Right. And don't forget the massive supercomputer cluster to process that huge load. My god, it's almost 1.5 CD's worth! That's half of the RedHat download! (I know, RedHat includes more than just Linux, but it's quite feasible to download all 3 ISO's on a DSL line, so I don't think Gigabit Ethernet is required for a 900MB image).Umm...you can kill every process in Windows that isn't necessary too. That's why they're called unnecessary. Admittedly, if your only tool is the taskmanager then you're not a knowledgeable admin, so Windows will protect you from yourself...but I see that as a good thing.
Like a reboot is that big of a deal. It takes all of 5 minutes, and can even be scheduled. Let's get off the uptime high horse, eh? If you need 24/7 uptime, there's ways to get it, but be prepared to pay for it...both with *nix or Windows.
Like I said, you're probably not a Windows admin. I am, and have never run into a service I couldn't stop. There are some I shouldn't have stopped, but that's another story. =)
Bottom line is that both Windows (2000) and *nix are good operating systems. Well suited to almost any task required of a server. They both require knowledgeable admins to be used to their fullest potential, but Windows has the edge in ease of use. A semi-technical manager can have a Windows network up in an weekend...not so for *nix. Of course, the price the manager pays is that his server isn't really set up correctly, but that's what you get when a manager or low skilled admin sets up a server. Same thing as when I work on my car, I know it's not up to the same standards as a professional mechanic, but sometimes it's worth the tradeoff. Linux and FreeBSD have advantages in that they're free, highly configurable, and can run on old hardware. Strong selling points for some, not so for others. Everything involves tradeoffs.
They found the documents on a publicly announced ftp server. An ftp server that Microsoft links to, that their customers can download all kinds of stuff from. If you say I can take anything from your garage, and you place a stack of 100$ bills in there by accident - does that mean I can't take them? You just told me I could!
That's why I made the example of them handing out free newspapers and then accidently printing a confidential memo in the paper. That's not my fucking fault, and it has absolutely nothing to do with lousy protection. It does, however, have everything to do with the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing.
You can't give me a picture and then tell me I can't look at it when you find out that it's a pornographic picture of you and someone you wish you'd never had sex with. It doesn't work like that. You gave it to me - now it's mine. You still have copyright on it, but you can't claim that I was stealing something that you gave me.
Now
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
I didn't need to read the linked article, as I've read around ... 6 or 7 other articles about the exact same thing. They all say the same thing like this one in Danish:
= 12 577
http://www.comon.dk/index.php?page=news:show,id
"The ftp server is usually used by Microsoft's costumers to fetch drivers and updates and to upload files to the company's PSS Security Response Team."
And comon is nice enough do link to the server in question:
ftp://ftppss.microsoft.com/
Granted, The Register's article does use language like "poorly protected server" and "discovered", but I see no problem in using those words, if whoever placed the files there didn't think about using some kind of authentication and directory access for those documents. Then you would still "discover" the files on a "poorly protected server" since it was used for something it was not supposed to be used for.
So in short - something is amiss, but using "juxtapositioning" in your language, doesn't mean your covering up an illigal act.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.