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IT Practice Within Microsoft
SilentChris writes "Good article over at CNet regarding Microsoft's internal IT practices. Some intriguing statements from the CIO, from the obvious ('It's an easy choice for me--to run Microsoft technology. We don't run Unix. We don't run Linux. We don't run Oracle.') to the not-so-obvious ('Our users are the admins of their machines. They can load whatever software they want on their machines, but we do audit the network continuously.') I wonder how much time is spent combatting spyware?"
I thought that it was normal corporate behaviour to look at their competitors. Long time ago there was a story here on /. where one of the lead devs of IE admitted that he ran firefox. But when this guy doesnt run *nix and oracle, how should he be able to compete with them?
Have you ever tried to run in non-Admin mode? A lot of programs don't work.
That means everyone is able to run adware and spybot. They should audit that!
Aha! So that's why longhorn is taking so many years to write..
feh. stuff.
I'm sure his relatives call him up constantly when their computer has problems.
Microsoft's internal IT practices. of all of their software security/bug/virus problems, I'd say that they show up to play without any practice.
"We get 10 million e-mails a day coming into Microsoft. We delete more than 9 million of those as spam." Well I wonder why you're so popular...
This is one of those witty signatures that you'll remember.
Awww... It's a brand-new baby troll... How cute.
"We don't run Linux....we run GNU/Linux"
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
I bet Microsoft has a panic button on all their computers sporting Firefox, *nix and BSD that immediately displays a WinXP desktop.
they use macs to make their "MS is the best" PDFs
I wonder if that means they can install any Microsoft software they want, or anything anything - I mean, Microsoft sucks, but at least it doesnt have trojans and such in it - if they are installing just anything, They better at least know how to fix it - and I wonder if that applies to the office assistants and the girl at the front desk, and other non-techies.
Don't Tread on Me
users are the admins of their machines.
So even Microsoft has realized you can't do crap under a limited login in XP.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
P.V.SSJ4
Of COURSE they allow users to admin their own machines at Microsoft. Half of their software won't run correctly in XP unless the user has Administrator privileges.
It is a good thing diversity is a bad thing in IT...right?
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
If you follow blogs.msdn.com, you'll find that while many people are admins of their own machine, they rarely actually run as admin. I think all they are saying is that they don't take away the power of the user to be able to install their own hardware or software. But the vast majority of people working at MS seem to understand the risk involved as running as an admin at all time.
Our 800+ users all have local admin rights on their machine. Why? We run some software that doesn't work otherwise. It's an AS400 client that needs admin rights to install updates to the client.
Now, in all fairness, there is a way around it (and we're exploring it). The problem is, that while revoking local admin rights for our users would save us lots of time and effort in combatting spyware, etc, we'll use that time manually updating the AS400 client software.
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
That's the only way to run a network of computer-savvy users. Imagine a metalworking shop that wouldn't let the machinists adjust their own wrenches. You'd have to put a call-ticket in to "Tool Technology Support" and after a few hours (if you are lucky) or days (if you aren't) some kid comes over who doesn't know anything and tries to adjust your hammer.
Do you use any Linux?
As a policy, I don't run anything that competes with Microsoft. My goal is to make sure Microsoft products are the best products in the world.
If you don't run anything other than Microsoft products how can you "make sure Microsoft products are the best"? It's easy to compete with a field you get to choose.
Trolling is a art,
"Well Johnson, we found the latest build of Firefox on your machine and a copy of OpenOffice. Clear out your desk by noon"
Well, that clearly explains why the OS and applications are designed for the end user being an admin. Explains why all the non-admin accounts are such a pain to setup and get working with the permissions you want.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
They can load whatever software they want on their machines, but we do audit the network continuously.') I wonder how much time is spent combatting spyware?
I am a software consultant. The first thing I usually need when I go to a new client is to have local admin to run various coding tools (app servers, for example).
Do those clients have spyware running rampant? No, because the people that have local admin aren't idiots. I'm sure MS spends time educating non-techies on what to d/l and what not to. Its not surprising nor do I necessarily think its a bad thing for people to have local admin on their machines.
Of course, if this wasn't about MS, I'm sure no one would care... but some people simply need someway to stick it to MS....
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Because the various versions of Windows all reveal their bias as a single user operating system, and even it's creators despair at efficiently administering a Windows network.
I guess that means they finally upgraded the phone system. Back when I worked there in Developer Suppport (98-03) the phone system for our incoming customer calls ran on a Unix system. To run the phone monitoring application and see the various queues you had to run an X-desktop emulator (Hummingbird I think) to run the monitoring app. I always thought that was funny at the time.
We were allowed to pretty much install anything we wanted to. I had tons of command line tools, perl and other stuff installed along the way.
Oh, and lots of guys had Linux boxes running at their desks along the way as well.
This space for rent.
As an IT organization, I have no skills and no ability and no purchasing of those (Linux) products.
I would Work for microsoft too if I had no Linux skill.
This is another way of starting a sig with this and ending it with that.
, but we do audit the network continuously
Then I wonder if they allow users to use firefox and Linux.
So if the end-users are the admins (something I let the programming dept at my last job do) that means they can install *n*x or Opera... Hehe, even Solaris :D
"It's too bad she won't live, but then again who does?" - Gaff
Because MS is such a geek culture, I'd be interested in finding out if what the social reprecussions are for someone finding malware on their system. If you consider yourself to be an alpha geek, are you really going to be calling the helpdesk about a computer issue that you brought on yourself?
So, if "We don't run Unix. We don't run Linux.", then WTF did Microsoft feel the need to pay SCO all those millions of dollars for UNIX licenses? Unless, of course, the money actually came out of the "Marketing/FUD" budget instead the "Software Licenses" budget...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
If you read MSDN blogs you occasionally come across references to people using non-Microsoft software, including Firefox, Apache, and *nix. Hotmail uses UNIX tools running on Interix... which includes the "viral" GCC.
We start with the product group that developed the product, so they feel the pain first. Man, truer words have never been spoken (at least by an MS executive.)
Some of the spyware that is out there will utilize known security vulnerabilities to install itself on the machine WITHOUT the user being an Administrator.
Also, quite a bit of spyware will simply install itself to the user profile (hotbar, etc.), the only way to combat these types of spyware is to utilize Mandatory Profiles.
Spyware is an ongoing problem with ANY Windows machine, whether it is "secured" or not.
Pardon me for standing up for them, but
Peeves me off when the people writing the software are not trusted to administrate their own computer which they are writing software for (or some equivalent thereto). What's with this growing American sentiment that nobody should be trusted with tools, that only someone special should be (without noting the perversity that if nobody can be trusted, then nobody can be trusted)?
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
We don't run Unix. We don't run Linux. We don't run Oracle. We're 100 percent Windows, SQL Server.
That makes for a great testing environment for Windows Services for UNIX, huh?
100% Microsoft my foot.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I no longer have access to ISP weblogs, but I seem to remember taking a browser census and noting that vistors from MS were indeed running Mozilla under Linux.
This makes sense and is consistent with the CIO's statement. Since each user is their own administrator, they are allowed to wipeout windows and run any Linux distro they want. They probably use use VMWARE or VirtualPC to host their Windows OS and quickly switch to full screen whenever a manager is around.
I have a hunch that a really good way for MS to make sure it only has (reasonably) computer savvy employees would be to - ahem - "terminate" anybody who couldn't keep their computer clean. I mean, if a guy is coding MS security stuff, and can't keep a single desktop safe, he doesn't belong there...
William George
Notice he didn't say 'Mac'. The mac business unit runs macs as well as the people doing the graphic design and print work. Unless of course he was only referring to the server OS's
>We don't run Unix. We don't run Linux. We don't run
>Oracle.
And our TCO sucks! By giving our users Admin access, we don't have to support them ALL THE TIME, they support themselves. Heck, would you want to? So our TCO numbers are not as bad as they might be at least.
- MS CIO
They have to in order to insure the product works as advertised.
Now I understand why Microsoft is having such a difficult time
making reliable & secure software... They spend most of their
time dialing with viruses & other assorted malware.
'Our users are the admins of their machines. They can load whatever software they want on their machines, but we do audit the network continuously.'
Could that be why they don't run Linux or Unix? It would be interesting to know if they reprimand those who want to run linux, unix or solaris? Policy with regard to people choosing to run open source products, on their machine, would also be interesting.
We do, in areas on the client, have an open-source client running--just for competitive analysis
That's in the paragraph about not running other OS's and stuff. HE doesn't run Linux, but there are people checking it out for competitive analysis.
With every user at MS an Administrator of their own machine, it's no wonder that it's so hard to implement any other security model using Windows.
... but wait, that doesn't work well in an enterprise using Active Directory, does it?
... but Microsoft doesn't make any.
...
I hope some of those users are smart enough to give themselves a luser account and run under it
Maybe they have an enforced policy of using anti-spyware and anti-virus software
Maybe they have extensive training classes with stock options going to those who don't spread viruses (sort of like those "accident free days" campaigns you see at some companies). But wait, no one wants their stock any more
Oh well, they're Microsoft -- they must know what they're doing.
sigs, as if you care.
Is it not true that they use Suns to compile windows itself? Because they need the huge multiprocessor power of a real computer (130+ cpu's)? What about (noso)hotmail? There are still BSD systems running there. I guess the article is only talking about workstations?
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
since when did Hotmail start running on Windows Advanced Server? I think this may be a bit of a lie.
Ross Winn "not just another ugly face..."
The people often bitten the worst by Spyware/Malware are very smart, very computer savy people. The problem is they don't realize all of the tricks that they will use to get onto your system. Besides, it can't happen to them! Many times people will recognize they've been bitten right away by an accident misclick but by then its too late.
So while people might not be idiots, most should never be trusted with elevated privilages. But Windows does give you an option (or they are very painful) so load up the maintaince costs with all sorts of software and network monitoring because MS refuses to learn lessons painfully realized 20 years ago.
For the love of all that is good and holy, I wish MS would abandon certain technologies (Active X hosting in application frameworks), I wish MS would stop requiring user level tasks with elevated privilages, and I wish people would stop making excuses for MS. Reinstalling from a backup image is not the proper way to fix problems on a platform that is supposed to be "enterprise enabled".
but since the users admin their own machines, the CIO can deny any knowledge of it.
You said "girl." That's gonna hurt your karma...
"Good article over at CNet regarding Microsoft's infernal IT practices. Some intriguing "
nothing to see here...
You think a company, ANY company, doesn't have its share of non-techno-savvy idiots installing spyware? I work with people who are somewhat tech savvy, yet they still get spyware. Do you actually think that a company the size of Microsoft is any better, if not worse? They have marketing people, they have sales people, they have non-tech related people. In fact, I would venture a guess that they are proportionally LESS tech-savvy than most small companies. They brought us Clippy for crying out loud!
I don't think that this is an unfair assessment of Microsoft at all, it shows their attitude towards software perfectly.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
There was a time when I worked for Microsoft. It was kinda annoying..... You couldn't build a machine on the Lan without it getting a virus. Be it from lack of a password, or from putting an unpatched machine on the LAN just to download the service packs and patches. You couldn't build a computer on their Lan.
Don't konw if it's true but a guy at Sun told me that hotmail.com runs on Sun gear.
Dell spent millions trying to migrate off Compaq Tandem and onto Windows Servers for their core manufacturing database. They were going to use 100% Dell hardware damnit! Millions of dollars later, Tandem was alive and well.
Can anyone at Dell confirm Tandem is still the heart of the mighty beast?
Currently bidding on sig
Quoted from the article "I have no skills and no ability..." Yep, sounds like Microsoft to me.
Loren Osborn
The question I want to see answered is "How do you deal with the same day to day annoyances that plague other companies running your OS, such as spyware/malware?
We do [...] have an open-source client running--just for competitive analysis. As an IT organization, I have no skills and no ability and no purchasing of those products.
So he's an IT manager with no skills in the IT industry other than MS-related? Someone could call this "to be blind and overconfident".
Me, I call him a lucky guy that is probably paid >= 4000€ a month to say to the world "I don't know a thing about IT, but with MS my income has doubled". Heck, being on Bill's bill, McBride can say that too!
42.
"We're 100 percent Windows, SQL Server" Hold up a second, now. How the heck do they expect to know if their products are good or not, if they have nothing for comparison? You've got to be -very- familiar with both sides of an argument if you expect to win it.
Unpleasantries.
At least in the "eating your own dogfood" department:e orgewbushcom_switches_to_selfhosted_freebsd_server _wwwsuncom_upgrades_to_solaris_9_not_10.html
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/12/11/wwwg
Of course if the Sun admins are going by what the www.sun.com webpage says, they're probably just as confused as I am about when the real version of Solaris 10 is coming, why they had a "release event" without releasing the actual product, why all those "Solaris 10" links go to Solaris Express beta downloads, and so on.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
See http://www.microsoft.com/technet/interopmigration/ case/hotmail/default.mspx.
Of course there were reports that some of the DNS servers were still running FreeBSD: http://www.windowsitpro.com/Windows/Article/Articl eID/22474/22474.html. But that was *3* years ago.
/. is irrelevant.
Likely little to none... oh wait, they probably use MSIE... strike that.
While I service a lot of Windows machines, my own WinXP box remains free of such contamination due in part to my own browse habits (I don't click "yes" to everything and I don't visit a lot of weird sites all of the time.) as well as the browser that I use.
My users are a different story... I keep fairly busy with it.
Ha. I had Microsoft > Sun in the subject but slashcode nerfed it. I'm sure there's a good reason why.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
I like how the interviewer skirted all the Windows vs. Other questions and went right for the latest IT alarmist buzzword "OUTSOURCING". Who cares if MS outsources? I would rather see them turn IE into something useful than I would see them "bring the jobs back". To me, that's a more pressing issue.
-Randy
No dog good here. :)
I'm not trying to start a fight here, but what was the thing about the hotmail servers again?
I heard it ran on some not-windows OS and was mapped through a windows computer so it seems like it ran on windows, or something...
Could be all bullshit; enlighten me.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
I'll bet you anything that they have unix servers and oracles databases for comparison purposes though.
Probably they do, but how mcuh real comparison can you do without running production systems? It could be just a small piece, but to ignore what it's like to maintain other products in production is short-sighted, I would say.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I work for an Electrical and Computer Engineering department. Now one would think that the Computer Engineers at least would be competent. Well, not so much actually. Most of them are... how to put this... MORONS when it comes to computers.
We have a Internet Technologies Lab. This is the lab where they study networking and so on. These are the engineers taht study this, they have degrees in this. However they have the most piss poor understanding of network fundimentals and security I've ever seen. They get boxes hacked all the time, they continually have problems with simple things like getting their subnet set correctly, and if their switch goes down plugging it in is too complecated a concept.
Just because somone works ina computer related field, doesn't mean they are good at the support end of computers. I'd like to think that programmers and engineers ought to know enough to avoid spyware and such, but I know from experience that's not the case. Just because they can write good code doesn't mean they are good system administrators.
From the article:
:)
As an IT organization, I have no skills and no ability
OK, OK, it's from the middle of a sentence but my eye was still arrested by it
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Can you give sources please on that quip about using Suns to compile Windows? To my knowledge, they use their own compilers (the command line Visual C compilers) to build windows. For example, Windows Server 2003 was built using VC's /GZ (I think) option.
Note the subtle line of reasoning there -- what he implied to say is "Our users are the admins of their machines *so* they can load whatever software they want on their machines". Which is perfectly obvious, because it appears that on Windows, to do anything even slightly more advanced (like, say, installing new non-trivial software), you have to be an admin. Personally, I don't know of any Windows development shop where the programmers aren't admins and don't each have their own personal single-user PC...
With colour schemes like these, it's no wonder Microsoft is winning!
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Indeed. From TFA, 2nd paragraph under "Do you use any Linux?":
Apple does something similar. Their employees all have issued PowerBooks and are theirs to use. Everyone has Admin rights and can install what they want. Not that they have as much to worry about in regards to spyware and viruses.
s/making me happy/getting me up/
(interviewer) So if there were enough talent here, (offshoring) probably isn't something you would be looking at?
(CIO) It's an alternative for me when I can't find the talent in the United States.
WTF???
If this guy can't find talented programmers/etc. in the US, he has no business being CIO of Microsoft. There are (supposedly) a gazillion out of work or underemployed computer scientists. The idea that they can't find what they want here in the states is just preposterous.
stuff |
Maybe Microsoft properties like Hotmail.com don't run Linux on their public webservers ANYMORE. But check NetCraft for ".microsoft.com"; the first hundred or so hosts are *all* Linux, possibly lab machines judging from their hostname. And many more throughout those records are Linux, including those at partners plugged directly into Microsoft IT. Then there are all the hosts NetCraft reports as "unknown" - Windows doesn't report as "unknown". And we're just looking at the public hosts that NetCraft can see, not the many thousands of hosts actually run by Microsoft.
Maybe Markezich doesn't know about NetCraft. Maybe he just doesn't care that geeks can easily find out he's telling the big lie. A CNet News article that gets the meaning of "alpha tester" wrong isn't pointed at geeks, but at PHBs who just envy Markezich's salary, and the insider releases his job includes. That there's any Linux around Microsoft at all shows just how important is Linux to any large organization's IT. Especially when they're taking the risk of lying about Linux not existing: it all makes Windows triply bad. Another Open Source advantage over proprietary software: no lying CIO to get caught, discrediting the rest of the organization - there's always "the other" distro, where the truth is at home.
--
make install -not war
If Dante and Randle worked at QuickStop and Microsoft respectively.
Randle: Hey let me borrow your DSL line.
Dante: I don't want to talk to you.
Randle: Fine, just let me borrow your DSL.
Dante: Why should I loan you my DSL?
Randle: I want to download Linux.
Dante: You want to download Linux?
Randle: I want to download Linux!
Dante: Sighs...
Randle: What's that for?
Dante: You work at Microsoft!
Randle: I work at a shitty Microsoft! I want to go to (insert name of favorite distro) for a good operating system!
Dante: (Writes some e-mail)
Randal: Eventhough I work at Microsoft I choose to download Linux, Agreed?
Dante: You are a danger to the dead and the living.
Randal: I like to think I'm the master of my own destiny.
Dante: Get the hell out of here.
Randal: You know I'm your hero!
I wonder how many of them have loaded Linux on their machines.
IBM employees only use thinkpad as thier laptops!
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."--Howard Zinn
If Links draws users into the Help systen and adds a welcome touch of color and animation on the desktop then she has done her job and done it well. The only ones still cracking jokes about Clippy are Geeks.
Seems to me Microsoft has a very successful business model. How can you say they are lagging behind?
Tag line, copyright 2004 RadioActiveLamb
Considering that "billg@microsoft.com" is hard-wired into quite a few tools for use with anonymous FTP ...
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Where all the men are strong, all the women are good looking and all the children are above average.
Do you use any Linux?
As a policy, I don't run anything that competes with Microsoft. My goal is to make sure Microsoft products are the best products in the world.
Ah, the old 'bury your head in the sand' technique. It works well. Maybe if they actually *tried* linux they could see what pisses disenfranchised Windows users off or where these TCO numbers come from.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
Oh come on, you know even non-geeks complain about clippy. The problem is UI design. You don't want something to pop up over what you're doing EVERY TIME something happens. Take note of your web browser with the check box that says "show this message next time." Why can't we just have those instead? The only ones who know how to disable clippy are the very people who say are the only ones complaining ;)
"So since taking over as CIO last spring, Markezich has had a busy time of it. First, he moved Microsoft's entire network to Windows XP Service Pack 2. Nowadays, he's in the midst of testing out new versions of SQL Server and Visual Studio."
Yeah.... SURE "he" is in the midst of that... I can see it now... Markezich, holding a cup of coffee, leaning over his employee's cubical... "Hey Peter, what's happening? We need to test the new versions of SQL Server and Visual Studio ASAP. So if you could just go ahead and work on that over the weekend that would be greeaaattt."
It's one of the things that come up when I talk to college students and they ask, "Is IT a good career?" It's a wonderful career for someone in the United States coming out of college.
Absolutely.
I myself am surprised at the things companies get away with, hiring college kids straight out of their diploma. The kind of stuff that the Teamsters would send The Boys down to...discuss the issue with management.
What EA, Microsoft, and Walmart need are a couple good Jimmy Hoffa's in there.
More like "eating your own dog's shit" department. At least that's how I view running Microsoft products.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
That's funny.
A year ago I applied for a Unix operations position in their network management department.
(I have a family to support; fortunately I didn't have to take the job.)
In the last year they axed all the Unix boxes?
Doubt it.
Used to. They ported it to a Windows environment ... "not developed here", you know.
In short, they aren't even willing to be honest about what they use, even though it's public knowledge and easily verifiable. Hey, this isn't just about Microsoft. I get pissed off when ANY distributor or software developer blatantly lies. Especially when the lie has zero value, because nobody would have cared anyway. It simply isn't important.
There's a story that one generation of Apples was designed on a Cray...
So why go to all these lengths to persuade us that Microsoft is a Microsoft-only shop, when they clearly aren't? Sure, they're 99.99% Microsoft, but why the vehement denial that the other 0.01% exists? Are they becoming so paranoid that even that tiny intrusion is simply too much for them to stomach?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I work at MS and am in the net every day for over 3 years now. Never got any spyware. Of course I only surf to slashdot, anything they reference, cnn, a bunch of blogs.
:)
My machine(s) at home now, which sees the ocasionally porn site, and the kids run all kinds of games (neopets mostly), and god only know what my wife surfs, now that gets spyware all the time. Have to clean everything once a week.
I'd lose all my karma if I didn't check that lil' PA box
Sigs are for wimps.
"I wonder how much time they spend combating spyware?"
HAHAHAHAHA HA heh...
not funny. If you weren't so busy getting ass raped by Slashfud admins, you would have read the article, and seen that they know what their users are doing, and undoubtedly their users are slightly smarter than the average user (say, you, for instance.
I'd like to know how RedHat does it.
How do they handle laptop users, single sign-on, updates, etc.
It doesn't matter much if the user has root access. You may want to keep the user from tinkering with the computer in an unapproved way, but hell, it's a computer, if you have physical access you can ultimately do whatever you want. The point is that not every process on the computer needs admin access to run.
If you give a user a normal login, and rights in sudoers to do whatever they want provided they type in their password first, you've prevented 90% or more of the damage that can be caused simply because (1) the user has to think before doing and (2) software the user runs can't make changes to access-controlled resources secretly. (Oops, Windows doesn't have sudo. Sucks to be Windows.)
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
The point is that MS doesn't rely on Unix/Linux for anything (although Hotmail might..but their status was always dubious).
It is true. I know.
However a large percentage of competent people (a good 60% I would say) have Linux boxes at home, and even at work, just to keep up with the what is happening out there. And that is another reason why MS is in no danger of losing its grip.
Linux is cool. But Windows is too, for a lot of the same reasons.
"They can load whatever software they want on their machines"
Point in case: Radium's release of SoundForge
Quantity != Quality.
Supposedly is right. All the ones that were any good are already employed, and have been for 2 years now. The rest of the "IT for Dummies" programmers who jumped on the bandwagon are the vocal minority...
I spent a year there (before I got outsourced) so here are a few answers to some questions/rants others posed (no particular order):
... but wait, that doesn't work well in an enterprise using Active Directory, does it?
:P
Of COURSE they allow users to admin their own machines at Microsoft. Half of their software won't run correctly in XP unless the user has Administrator privileges
Most don't actually run as an admin. I think you are confusing poorly written third party applications with MS apps. MS apps all run fine on XP as a user. Nice troll though.
I wonder how much time is spent combatting spyware?
Little, if any, IT effort is needed to combat spyware. Individuals are more than capable of preventing or removing spyware without IT help. Our grandmothers don't work at MS you know.
I wonder if that means they can install any Microsoft software they want..
Yep. Generally it's all published in your control panel under add/remove programs. For OSs you just visit a website to get a key.
Because MS is such a geek culture, I'd be interested in finding out if what the social reprecussions are for someone finding malware on their system.
It's painful. There are a number of behaviors that will get your network port swiftly shut down including: spyware, viruses, rogue dhcp servers, network/port probes, unpatched software or operating systems etc.. If you manage to get yourself "ratholed" off the network expect your peers to find out and absolutely clown you relentlessly for weeks after the incident.
And our TCO sucks! By giving our users Admin access, we don't have to support them ALL THE TIME, they support themselves. Heck, would you want to? So our TCO numbers are not as bad as they might be at least.
The TCO there is unbelievable low. All IT has to do is drop off a PC at your desk and they are done. You PXE boot off the NIC, choose your OS, reboot, all security updates and antivirus are done automatically and you pick your own apps off of Active Directory. Basically the whole company IS an IT department if you think about it. The IT dept. at MS just provides the tools and gets out of the way.
Could that be why they don't run Linux or Unix? It would be interesting to know if they reprimand those who want to run linux, unix or solaris? Policy with regard to people choosing to run open source products, on their machine, would also be interesting.
No, they don't reprimand anyone who runs *nix, but it doesn't happen. You may be surprised to know that when given a choice of any software they want, people will choose MS (*gasp*) over *nix. People will run *nix for testing in virtual machines and whatnot; it's fairly common.
I hope some of those users are smart enough to give themselves a luser account and run under it
I think you may be confused. Every day users do not have admin access to any portion of AD beyond the ability to add workstations. As for local admin privileges, everyone creates a local user account for day to day use.
Actually I have heard from a reliable source inside MS that an unpatched machine will have a virus on it within minutes when connected to their own internal network. the network "Ops" do monitor the network and will shut off your port if you do just that. Also, since their users are admins of their own machines, I have heard of at least one guy who uses Linux because it better suited to a certain task, but overall what the CIO said is true unsurprisingly. I also have seen an inflatable Tux punch toy in one of their labs before. I desired to save Tux from the evil MS Server people, but alas, I had to exude professionalism and not let emotion overwhelm me....:P
"When I look at my IT spend as a percent of revenue, it's decreased every year over the last five years for the IT organization--even though head count has grown every year for the company"
That's nice - how much would anyone care to bet that MS IT is not charged for any of the software they run?
If they had to shell out for every server & client license - it would be a different story - they would probably be screaming in pain like the rest of us.
but some animals are more equal than others...
MS is a big company. This guy knows only his (little) corner (sounds big, but it isn't really). Most people don't pay him any attention at all (I never heard of him).
For example MCS (Microsoft Consulting Services) uses a Java based PSA product because their own offering in the arena (Project) is too weak (at the moment anyway).
And the MBS people do whatever they want (but they had better start making a profit soon or they might be toast).
Anyway this is all a tempest in a teapot. The big question is: When will the Office Group be allowed to support Linux?
That is the 30 billion dollar question.
Windows is still subscribing to the 'Personal' computer, one user one box idea. NT and XP covers the aberrant idea of more than one person using a computer, although simultaneous use is still a clusterfsck for the average family or small business.
Disks are duplicated on a variety of industrial strength, quality focused systems. Most of these systems are UNIX-based. The UNIX-based duplication systems used in manufacturing are impervious to MS-DOS-based, Windows- based, and Macintosh-based viruses. The few MS-DOS-based and Windows-based standalone duplication systems do not allow MS-DOS-based operating systems to access the duplication system. Virus protection systems used by these MS-DOS-based and Windows-based duplication systems strictly govern the duplication process, even when they are not running.
That KB article has since disappeared... smirk... ;-)
GCC is included in Interix because it's the only compiler that can make UNIX-style executables in PE/COFF format, and because most applications either explicitely require GCC or require shared objects. But Microsoft doesn't use GCC for the tools that weren't originally GNU (most aren't, they come from some BSD), and GCC and GNU are optional components, not included in a standard installation
Make a difference - use Windows! (open source clone of Windows NT)
I currently work for a good sized international company. Everyone here also has admin access to their machines. Most of us know what we are doing the ones who don't ask the people who do or IT
They do audit for "forbidden" software and use a 3rd party patch system to push updates for windows and other software.
If users are breaking their boxes frequently they need more todo.
Twanfox does have a strong point. IBM and Novell are hailed for running their own distributions of Linux in-house as well.
Yes, they'll need to know the enemy -- so run an extra box under your desk for testing purposes. But your day-to-day work better be hacked out using your own tools.
Heck, I do the same at home. If I'm trying to sell the idea of open source software and Linux to friends and relatives I need to walk the talk.
I sure as heck miss FrontPage 2000 -- Nvu isn't quite as polished for bulk dumps of text and tables into HTML pages. I just keep smiling.
--- Dan
There really is a SFU; it is a subsystem, and these people are using it. But you can't use a subsystem by itself; a subsystem is useful only as part of a whole operating system. SFU now inludes Interix which is normally used in a combination with the GNU development toolchain and libraries : the system is basically GNU, with SFU functioning as the compatibility DDL Library layer.
Many users are not fully aware of the distinction between the compiler toolset, which is SFU, and the whole system, which they also call `SFU''. The ambiguous use of the name doesn't promote understanding.
Programmers generally know that is a Subsystem. But since they have generally heard the whole system called `Interix' as well, they often envisage a history which fits that name. For example, many believe that once Softway Systems finished writing the posix compatibility DDL Libraries, they looked around for other free software, and for no particular reason most everything necessary to port a Unix-like system was already available.
What they found was no accident--it was the GNU system. The available free software added up to a complete system because the GNU Project had been working since 1984 to make one. The GNU Manifesto had set forth the goal of developing a free Unix-like system, called GNU. The Initial Announcement of the GNU Project also outlines some of the original plans for the GNU system. By the time Interix was written, the system was almost finished.
Most software projects have the goal of developing a particular program for a particular job. For example, Softway Systems set out to build an environment to allow UNIX apps to be ported directly to NT. Donald Knuth set out to write a text formatter (TeX); Bob Scheifler set out to develop a window system (X Windows). It's natural to measure the contribution of this kind of project by specific programs that came from the project.
If we tried to measure the GNU Project's contribution in this way, what would we conclude? If you had access to the full source code of SFU with Interix, you might find found that, GNU software was the largest single contingent, around 60% of the total source code, and this included some of the essential major components without which there could be no compatable subsystem. SFU by without Interix itself could be about 20%. So if you were going to pick a name for the system based on who wrote the programs in the system, the most appropriate single choice would be `GNU''.
But we don't think that is the right way to consider the question. The GNU Project was not, is not, a project to develop specific software packages. It was not a project to develop a C compiler, although we did. It was not a project to develop a text editor, although we developed one. The GNU Project's aim was to develop a complete free Unix-like system: GNU.
Many people have made major contributions to the free software in the system, and they all deserve credit. But the reason it is a system--and not just a collection of useful programs--is because the GNU Project set out to make it one. We made a list of the programs needed to make a complete free system, and we systematically found, wrote, or found people to write everything on the list. We wrote essential but unexciting major components, such as the assembler and linker, because you can't have a system without them. A complete system needs
A gazillion out of work and a gazillion that I'd want to employ are two very different things. I have a hard enough time recruiting for a department of 15, let alone trying to do it at the sort of scale he's talking about. The truth is that Sturgeon's Law holds just as well for IT staff as for anything else. In fact, if my experiences are anything to go by, he was being optimistic...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I would say it's always better to try and anticipate what they would want, to have really useful features ahead of time. Listening to your customers is also good but sometimes it can be even more invaluable to have the same kind of problems they will ahead of time and have prepared solutions.
That they work without having any of the integration issues that every other company on the planet has leads to a certain degree of blindness on their part, and to some degree a certain amount of skeptisim that they know what they are talking about when the advertise product interoperability.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Funny. Someone should tell him about all those unix machines with apple logos.
(the advertising/marketing divisions have them, the Mac product group obviously has them, etc).
Please help metamoderate.
*is run over by rotten tomatoes*
phozz
...analogies come to mind. We do this sort of thing all the time in terms of the IT group being the first ones who get to live and die by "dot zero" releases of NOS's, desktop OS's and applications. MS are doing the correct thing here, although the interviewee is beating his chest a bit about it (for the wrong reasons).
I agree with alot of the above comments, if this guy said something like "We use oracle and apache for our web servers, because its more secure and has better performance", you guys would be going nuts...."LOOK EVEN MS DOESNT USE THEIR STUFF!!!!". Its the same reason the parking lot at GM looks like a Chevy/Cadillac dealership.
I once read that Apple were using a Cray to design a computer or something, and Seymore Cray was amused, because he used an Apple to design the next Cray.
We foreigners can only laugh when we hear that a guy at Coca Cola was fired because his wife had bought him a Pepsi.
Bert
Who wonders how hard it would be for Slashdot to detect themselves that if a message doesn't contain HTML it is POT and should be formatted accordingly.
You're allowed to run whatever the heck you want as long as there's a business reason to do so. In fact, at one time I had a RedHat box under my desk and ran MySQL on it, and I used MySQL quite extensively on Windows as well, until I figured out the architecture that allowed me to do bulk inserts into MS SQL backend. I know for a fact that lots of folks run unix command line tools, emacs, firefox, etc.
It's not like Microsoft is the only shop where a bunch of programmers and engineers are local admins. Hell, if it were I suspect that I'd spend a lot less time troubleshooting apps that want to write user preferences to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or insist on storing temporary data in %windir%. My job would be much simpler if the typical programmer had to use a non-admin account for his or her regular work.
They are reducing the field of the "operating system" term, to Microsoft windows, as in the next quotation:
As a policy, I don't run anything that competes with Microsoft. My goal is to make sure Microsoft products are the best products in the world.
It's all too easy to get bogged down in one-offs that customers have issues with, rather than trying to adress the big picture and winning out in the long term.
It's the difference between playing catch-up all the time and being an innovator in a space, which will net you customers because they know you'll solve some problems ahead of time instead of THEM having to tell YOU what to build all the time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From what I remember from nmapping www.microsoft.com years ago was that they were running that on OpenBSD. As it has been said before in previous comments, that quote is a wee bit inaccurate.
A: "It's hard to capture the overall time spent on security, but 10 percent is probably about right."
This is exactly what is wrong with Microsoft Security. It needs to be the total responsibility of a few individuals who work closely with the larger security community, clearly when security is everyone's problem and they spend 10% of their time on it, then it is really nobody's problem. (Except that then it is everybodys problem! )
Microsoft could save money and improve it by outsourcing security. Rather than trying again to fix a broken culture, why not just admit it's broken and realize that other companies use outside resources and it works fine for them. For example, would you but an extension cord without it first having been researched by Underwriters Labs? Would you go to a hospital that was not inspected by JCAHO?
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
after all, there's just nuthin like denial, is there!
...
The richer get richer
While that is a good theory, it fails in practice.
That's because it requires every developer to also learn the skills of a good sysadmin.I look at it the opposite way.
I cannot trust those people to have the sysadmin skills so I cannot trust them with the rights to damage that server.While I look at it as maybe you have the wrong access policy.
They might be a really good developer, and a crappy sysadmin. Which means they would do very well in a place with a different access policy.
Why do I want to base the access rights on an individual rather than a group?
I think Markezich's statement was pretty clear:
We don't run Unix. We don't run Linux. We don't run Oracle. We're 100 percent Windows, SQL Server.
I mean, it doesn't get much clearer than that. I don't think the guy's talking about the development side of things (of course developers would have Unix boxes set up to test Interix or Windows Services for UNIX), or that certain development folks would be running competing products in a testbed environment. He's saying, all of our desktops and production servers are Windows, and by right, that would include the machines that actually do the compilation of Windows itself.
Besides, with the way Server 2003 Datacenter scales, it probably would be safe to assume these days that through some combination of clustering and SMP systems, Microsoft should be able to pull off compiling Windows on its own platform some way or another.
I don't moderate anymore. Karma penalty for 90% fair mods? Can I mod that unfair?
"Firefox requires a plugin to view this webpage. Click to install".
/user:admin.
Click...
installing Sun Java runtime environment...
what? Not enough privileges? =-/
OK I try again. This time, I use RUNAS
Same error! >:(
Seriously, who invented this Windows crap?
That's a helluva lot quicker than logging completely out of the system to install something.
Programming knowledge is not the same as networking knowledge or sysadmin knowledge.Nope. The idea is to have the people who are specially trained work with the tools they're specially trained on.
Ideally, all programmers would FIRST be required to work as sysadmins for 2 years and then netadmins for 2 years before being allowed to write their first line of code.
They aren't.
So why do you believe that learning programming automatically gives you the knowledge of a sysadmin and netadmin?
Even old MS-DOS could run a telnet server and handle multiple connections.
That didn't make DOS "multi-user".
Unix does not require X to be multi-user. Being multi-user requires the ability to run X if the user so desires (and it is installed).
It doesn't matter!
I tried cutting and pasting from Mozilla to IE. It didn't work!
Nothing else needs to be said! If cutting and pasting from another vanilla app to IE doesn't work, then what else do we need to say about Microsoft!
Fuck 'em! Just fuck 'em!
Indeed. We already knew that Microsoft ran a few Linux PCs, as they made a lot of noise about purchaseing licenses from SCO.
In the past, MS has also sold (or given away, free-as-in-beer) some software for Linux. There used to be an SDK that let sites running Apache on Linux use MS Passport for authentication, but I think that went away with the demise of the whole Passport plan.
"But wait, no one wants their stock any more ..."
Pardon me, sir, but I am very happy with my 14% gain this year in MSFT. I'll take 14% year over year forever if I could.
Reality and your emotions are NOT the same thing. MSFT regularly trades around 100mil shares a day. SOMEBODY wants it and for those who have had it, it's been a VERY profitable invesment
"Maybe if they actually *tried* linux they could see..."
I doubt it.
With a few exceptions, the people who genuinely like Windows, Linux, or MacOS like them based on some fundamental principle. Linux users like that nothing is held back from them. Windows users like that they aren't subjected to any of the gritty details. Mac users like the pretty colors and "it just works". (Appologees for the gross over-generalizations.)
Your assertion is a little like saying, "if Republicans would just spend some time at a homeless shelter dishing out soup they'd understand welfare.", or "if Democrats spent some time with crack babies they'd understand drug prohibition."
Sure, there are people who are ignorant, but that's not the real problem. The real problem is that People Are Different. Even if the people on the various sides of the various fences COULD agree on The Facts and The Rules Of The Universe, they STILL wouldn't agree on What We Should Do.
Because People Are Different.
Ah, why have they then bought 200 (in words: two-hundred) boxes of Caldera's Linux distribution (forgot the name, it was before Caldera was the new SCO) a few years ago...?
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
Is it just me, or is the word "administering" being slowly replaced by "administrating"? Administrating seems to be the wrong tense to me.
I once worked for a company that had this desktop mentality. If it was a desktop PC it ran NT, authenticated and connected to an NT server and stored files on an NT controlled file server. Now, as I was hired into the company as a Junior UNIX Admin for all the *outside* boxes (which not a one happened to be MS) I was a little interested in the fact that the other Junior as well as the Senior admins (who focused primarily on the large Cisco gear) never once even raised a stink about it. Just went on with it, not wanting to step on toes, since the *internal* administrator was MS centric.
So, I decided to take myself out of the loop. Formatted my machine, installed Red Hat (still say I should have used SuSE - but we had a couple Red Hat boxes and could get support so *shrugs*) tweaked it up a little to look a little more like NT (not perfect mind you, but it was hard to tell that it wasn't NT with a theme on top to the untrained eye) Plus I was in an office so my machine faced away from the door, so it was hard to see what I was doing anyway.
So when the LAN Admin finally finds out (who was actually a pretty cool guy, but had several hundred desktops he had to deal with on the network) he comes to me and says "So .... you obviously know what you're doing with UNIX, you can authenticate against NT? You have access to files? You can print? ..... I don't have to support you?"
He walked out of my office and I never heard word one about it again. Makes me wonder if there are any *NIX friendly people that got sucked into MS that are still running a *NIX but not telling anyone about it.
Any way, that was my rant, I now return you to your regularly scheduled /.
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
None of which changes the fact that they ship it, and use it internally at Hotmail.
some of their internal systems were well maintained / patched - but a lot of others weren't (like all the desktops).
When the SQL Slammer worm hit -everything- went down. the internal network itself was so saturated with traffic - nothing worked whether it was running SQL or not.
never heard how it got inside - but on a network that size with all the different VPN's / etc - it's not hard to imagine.
People were running around with floppy disks trying to patch everything - truly comic.
It would be interesting to see how much pirated software is loaded on the desktops of developers at Microsoft. I bet they're a bunch of hypocrites.
Elsewhere on this thread somebody quoted a great article pointing out BSD use for Hotmail. I can't find an "official" quote just now but I remember reading in multiple places that for years Microsoft has used IBM AS/400 (now iSeries) servers to run many of their business processes.
So much for Windows-only technology...
I think the key point is that merely listening to your customers is not enough. You have to show some creativity in figuring out how to meet their requirements if you really want to innovate.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I'm an accountant for an insurance firm and I admin my own machine AND the dead rat mail/dns/webserver as well.
That's because all our "technical" people only know how to admin Microsloth products. If a couple of reboots doesn't fix it they re-install from scratch.
All there equiptment is Microsoft based, except all the macs they program on.
And I'm not just referring to people in the Mac Business Unit, either. Remember that load of G5's that showed up for the XBox 2 developers? :)
(Of course, depending who you ask, those Macs may actually have wound up running some PPC64 port of Windows XP. *shudders*)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
scares the living HELL out of me!
picture o' doom
He looks all tweaked out OR has a computer chip installed in his brain!
I thought Microsoft was some brand of diapers but I guess they did some other kinds of shady business including raketeering and anti-trust violations in the past. Perhaps they would be better off making diapers...
Maybe most of their staff uses Microsoft only products but I know I've gotten a few hits from the .microsoft domain on my website from people using Firefox/Mozilla on XP. They are most likely those in charge of researching the competition products or just simply employees with a clue.
[alk]
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So theyre hiring more mexicans than ever before.
root@urquell:/home/jwblack# nmap -vv -sS -O -P0 -T Insane microsoft.com
... good.1 2/14%Time=41BF 8F81%O=80%C=-1)R esp=Y%DF=N%W=4000%ACK=S++%Flags=AS%Ops=MNWNNT) p =N)e sp=N)
Starting nmap 3.70 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2004-12-14 18:11 MST
Initiating SYN Stealth Scan against cps.microsoft.com (207.46.130.108) [1660 ports] at 18:11
Discovered open port 80/tcp on 207.46.130.108
Discovered open port 443/tcp on 207.46.130.108
The SYN Stealth Scan took 29.36s to scan 1660 total ports.
Warning: OS detection will be MUCH less reliable because we did not find at least 1 open and 1 closed TCP port
For OSScan assuming that port 80 is open and port 36502 is closed and neither are firewalled
For OSScan assuming that port 80 is open and port 36846 is closed and neither are firewalled
For OSScan assuming that port 80 is open and port 35462 is closed and neither are firewalled
Host cps.microsoft.com (207.46.130.108) appears to be up
Interesting ports on cps.microsoft.com (207.46.130.108):
(The 1658 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: filtered)
PORT STATE SERVICE
80/tcp open http
443/tcp open https
Device type: general purpose|router|firewall
Running (JUST GUESSING) : NetBSD (89%), Cisco IOS 11.X (88%), DEC IOS 10.X (88%), Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME (88%), Cabletron embedded (88%), HP HP-UX 11.X (85%), IBM AIX 4.X (85%), Secure Computing embedded (84%)
Aggressive OS guesses: NetBSD 1.5_ALPHA i386 (89%), Cisco 4500 router running IOS 11.2(2) (88%), Cisco 1601 (IOS 11.0) or DECbrouter90T1 (Runs Cisco IOS 10.2(5)) (88%), Microsoft Windows 98SE + IE5.5sp1 (88%), Cabletron Smart Switch Router 8600 (88%), HP-UX B11.00 U 9000/839 (85%), IBM AIX 4.3.2.0-4.3.3.0 on an IBM RS/* (85%), Secure Computing SECUREZone Firewall Version 2.0 (84%)
No exact OS matches for host (test conditions non-ideal).
TCP/IP fingerprint:
SInfo(V=3.70%P=i686-pc-linux-gnu%D=
TSeq(Class=TR%IPID=RD%TS=0)
T1(
T2(Resp=Y%DF=N%W=0%ACK=S%Flags=AR%Ops=)
T3(Res
T4(Resp=Y%DF=N%W=0%ACK=O%Flags=R%Ops=)
T5(R
T6(Resp=N)
T7(Resp=N)
PU(Resp=N)
TCP Sequence Prediction: Class=truly random
Difficulty=9999999 (Good luck!)
TCP ISN Seq. Numbers: C39D59C2 61104197 94FC38E7 8CA9A951 6EF250A1 CBBC3177
IPID Sequence Generation: Randomized
Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 69.782 seconds
root@urquell:/home/jwblack#
I personally consider 89% a good bet.
Probably very little. I would imagine they, unlike the majority of people here, have very competant people doing their firewalls (which, since it is a 'chokepoint', can be used to totally control what goes in and out of the company, and thus, the computers themselves).
Show me a company having trouble with spyware, and I'll show you a company with incompetant fools running a firewall.
I thought all windoze boxen users were admin by default???
It may also worth considering that Microsoft probably gives itself a bit of a price break on its licence fees.
I think their CIO needs to qualify his comments to say "We don't Blah Blah Blah, ANYMORE".
I heard rumors from very reliable sources that in the NT4 days, M$ engineers did at least some of their development work on Solaris workstations. I also heard that Hotmail was run on Unix mailservers up until just 3 or 4 years ago (because Exchange sucked so bad!). I also heard that MS used UNIX exclusively in the embrionic days, and that Bad Billie originally wanted to make NT based on a nearly pure Unix kernel. Can anyone confirm any of this?
Not according to a guy I know who worked there during the permatemping era.
He described it as a bunch of feifdoms. Have the right liege lord, and you ran whatever you wanted.
...in use within MS? Windows would be very compelling for universal usage if it didn't cost so much. The issue isn't whether it's solid (it's still the best desktop and the server is pretty full-featured), it's the relatively high cost. This is especially true when you have more than a small number of servers and/or desktops. I bet the retail value (or even the discounted corporate price valuation) of all the Windows licenses being used would be mind-boggling.
http://www.softwareobjectz.com
Windows build system is heavily built on Perl; a lot of the devs use vi and emacs; and SourceForge is a fork of a commercial CVS-like system.
I could probably think of a few more.
They had a decent password policy, better than most. Getting admin rights was just as simple as calling the local IT guy to hook you up. Since I was at MS, they had pretty much the entire MS product catalog available from add/remove programs. (When selecting add, a list of apps would show up.) They also hosted a site for just software that you could find older stuff if needed. (Win3.1 was still available if needed). One site was just called http://linux and it had all the "talking points" needed to host a decent anti-linux conversation with a customer. There were a few iMacs and G5 Macs on the floor but I never saw anyone using them since we shared floorspace with the graveyard shift. Critical updates were sent down pretty much every week or every other week. You had X number of days to install them before your network jack was shut off remotely. Then you had to call the internal helpdesk (staffed by HP employees) to get them to unlock your port just long enough for you to get your update loaded. Basically they were probing the systems constantly to make sure you had all of the critical updates loaded. We used all the standard stuff like MS Office Pro, (we usually got the "Gold" versions forced on to the computers a few weeks before they went retail). I forget the helpdesk software we used... Compass something I think. If you ever make it inside the Irving, Texas office, stop by the Starbucks inside the cafeteria in the morning, say hi to Manuel (the free breakroom coffee is horridly undrinkable for some reason). And for lunch grab a burger from the grill, they are to die for. (Seriously)
#1. "MS-DOS provided preemptive multitasking? No."
That's right. But that only means that DOS was not a pre-emptive, multi-tasking OS.
You may note that this is the first time you've brought that up. Prior to this you've been going on about telnet and ssh.
Windows95 was pre-emptive and multi-tasking with Win32 apps. Yet Win95 was not a multi-user OS.
Yet I could get a telnet login to a Win95 box.
#2. "MS-DOS prevented processes from interfering with each other? It doesn't even HAVE processes."
See above re: Win95
#3. "MS-DOS had privilages? No."
same
#4. "MS-DOS had a user database and a protected component that authenticated users? No."
and so on.I'll let Microsoft answer that one. http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/ProductInfo/ter
Look for the phrase "More than a million users run Windows® based applications today using Citrix WinFrame*, which is a multiuser version of Microsoft Windows NT Server 3.51 platform."Again, getting a telnet prompt is not the same as being multi-user.
Even Microsoft's web page admits it.
Bill is a geek. If he is not using unix, BSD or linux what is using?
I think you mean the /GS compiler switch. This adds buffer overun protection as well as other secuirity enhancements. Windows XP and beyond have been and will be compiled with that switch. In fact starting with VS 8.0 it is no longer an "option", its the default.
Windows is not compiled on sun boxes. The windows build is completely self hosted, i.e. people working on longhorn are running longhorn and building private drops from their own longhorn machines. The official windows builds also happen on wintel hardware.
:)
.net not yet released, using a messaging framework not yet released. Domain controllers in my building are running pre-released versions of upcoming Server 2003 products. Patches that get sent out to WU are deployed via all of the different patch deployment technologies we support internally first (well, usually :)
Sun has not made any kind of hardware in the last 10 years that has been price/performance competitive with wintel, especially for compiling (which is dominated by specint, which SPARC chips are awful at).
There are also few (if any) BSD boxes remaining at hotmail, and it has been that way for a number of years.
Obviously the statement "there are no unix machines anywhere it microsoft" is false. I had an SGI and a linux box in my last office; the linux box i ran certain things on because it was just easier (tcpdump, samba), the SGI machine i brought to work because it broke and there are fantastic resources available to me at work.
Furhtermore, word gets around amongst the UNIX people at MS and before you know it someone with a legitimate need for a unix machine is asking about yours. In my case, we wanted to test that visual studio could consume WSDL files hosted on unix webservers. Best way to do that ? Well, i already had apache 1.3 on redhat running in my office..
On my workstations i also install SFU, as i find real commandline utilities to be extremely helpful for working with code and solving certain problems.
The point of this article is that Microsoft _runs_ on its own software. We don't depend on oracle, we depend on SQL server. We don't depend on NDS, we depend on Active Directory. We don't depend on sendmail, we use exchange. (You would cry if you saw the amount of hardware we've thrown at exchange to handle our userbase of 60k power users with multi-hundred megabyte mailboxes
The MS server products got to where they are today (as opposed to 10 years ago) because MS, the company, runs on them, even before they're released. Microsoft.com is one of the worlds largest web sites. The MS corporate network has one of the highest counts of attached managed PC's of any known organization. The geographical diversity of our AD rivals uh... pretty much everything.
You can't get your products to ever be good enough if you don't bet your business on them. Don't read this article and read "microsoft never looks at unix, they have no idea that firefox exists". Read it and understand that "if there is something MS needs that a competing product seems to do better, MS works at fixing it's own offering until it can solve MS's needs."
As an aside, my team develops in a version of visual studio not yet released, on a version of
The point of all of this is - if it's not good enough to meet the needs of MS, how can it be good enough to meet the needs of other customers?
(this is why we got so much flak about hotmail historically, btw, and why there has always been pressure to convert hotmail to windows, even in the case of the USTOREs, where it made awful financial sense, but needed to happen eventually for a number of reasons)
I'm glad to report that most of the negativity about hotmail not being on windows is just incorrect and recycled bits at this point.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
My first job in an IT department was at a local software development company with around 500 employees and on the order of 750 workstations. All the desktops were running NT4. Everyone had local administrator access to their machines. Every time I've set up a machine based on NT since then, for clients or family, etc..., I've given them admin access to their machine. I tried to impliment a more sane security model but it just doesn't fly with NT based systems. Too many applications require that the user has some measure of administrative access. I gave up even trying. The Linux model for user rights is far more sane and real-world usable. NT basically plays at being a multi-user system. But that's all it does, play.
True, with runas you can do *some* administration and installs, but a lot of your efforts will bite the dust. At least, that is my experience. One example for you... Login to W2K as user, and start cmd as Administrator through runas. Now try to run any program from that cmd. Tough luck - none of what you run from there will work as if you are an administrator! Is it retarded or what? Now have you ever tried running IE or Explorer with runas? They won't run. But IE is needed to run Windows Update...
Just make a shortcut to IE, then right-click on it, and choose `Run as'. I'm doing it to update this workstation right now.
-a-
Therefore, if only the console user has a GUI, the OS is not multi-user.
That is why Citrix and Terminal Services make NT multi-user. Each user has the same access to features and functionality as the console user.GUI sessions are not a requirement for multi-user, as long as none of the users have a GUI. Once that functionality is available to the console user, a multi-user OS would provide it to all users.Like I said, "Whatever".No. What you are doing is attempting to add requirements every time I show that your definition is flawed because you want NT to be multi-user even when Microsoft admits that it was not.Which brings us back to MS-DOS being multi-user under your definition.
Full circle.
Buh bye now.
GCC is included in Interix because it's the only compiler that can make UNIX-style executables in PE/COFF format
Bollocks. I used to be a regular use of a compiler called LCC which can target any platform supported by the NASM assembler, which does support PE as its output format.
which includes the "viral" GCC.
What, exactly, about GCC is "viral"?
System Administrators have to deal every day with people that thought they were "smart" that do not see the forest because they hav a damn bonsai in front of them.
There are system administrators for a reason, one of them is that they have global view of the systems, security, audit issues, etc. while many other IT people, brillant as they may be, have a more limited view normally circumscribed to one machine or a reduced set of them.
The cavalier attitude of MS in regards to security (and on assuming that MS tools are always the best for the job) is completely didiculous (if true, which I pretty mudh doub it) and should not be taken as an example of how to set up IT infrastructure correctly.
I wish some histories of how they are getting infected by nasty virii should be out there to probe my point.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Microsoft does not run microsoft.com on their "own" linux machines.
Microsoft has a content hosting agreement with akamai, and akamai DOES use linux to host lots of things. Netcraft doesn't make any distinction between something inside the microsoft owned ip space and the netcraft content mirrors. The result is that people with a conclusion ("microsoft needs linux in order to run its website") find data to support it ("netcraft says microsoft.com content comes from linux boxes!")
In the URL you pasted, look at the "Netblock" column. Akamai, Energis, etc. HOSTING partners.
Note also that once you get into the "interesting" machines, it's all W2k or W2k3. (and when the Netblock value changes to "Microsoft").
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I always thought it was funny at my old job. I didn't have admin rights to my own machine. But I had full db access. So while I wasn't allowed to defrag my own hard drive, I could delete all the tables in the database and bring the company to it's knees.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
What, exactly, about GCC is "viral"?
You doubt Microsoft's honest word that free software is a "virus"? Would they fib? How could you even IMPLY such a thing?
[in other words, I put "viral" in quotes because I found it ironic that Microsoft would ship GPLed code after claiming that you shouldn't use it because it'd infect your intellectual properties with commie cooties or something...]
The reason I'm going to guess that is because you're thinking in terms of telnet and such.
Telnet is a service that runs on a server. Telnet can run on a single-user system.
With Linux, you can hook up multiple terminals via the serial ports. They have ALL of the functionality that the console has.
They can ALL be use concurrently.
A Linux box without ssh or telnet running or ANY OTHER SERVICE LIKE THAT is STILL a multi-user operating system.
Even if they cannot hear the sound card, they can still access it.Okay, what if? The console can still re-enable it and use it. That functionality is not available to others.The AS/400 is a multi-user operating system.Answer that yourself. The key was not a GUI, but whether every other user had access to all the features and functions that the console user has.
You're flailing.Right. Sure they are.
It's their internal enterprise net, for chrissakes. Why would you run Oracle on the corporate leg? Why would you NEED to run anything else on an internal LAN/VLAN? It's not a test/dev environment, it's not an integration environment, it's a work domain used to join all these different legs together. Of course the users will be running Windows machines.
Their front end is Windows. Just like if Linus set up his own company with an internal LAN, you might expect all Linux OS for their users on the corporate net. Big deal. If Linus wants to run OS/2 on his backbone, who the fuck cares? Shut up with the 'appeal to emotion' rants about how teh_evil_M$ ONLY uses their own product on an internal LAN. Holy fuckin' christ, Batman, you would think that was the hypocrisy to end all contrarian arguments. And you people vote?
No. I said that NT without Citrix/Terminal Services was not multi-user because every user did not have the same access to features and functionality. The console GUI was an example of one feature that the other users did not have access to.
Services do not make a OS multi-user.
The inability to provide all the services to all the users, concurrently means that the OS is NOT multi-user.
But if the console has a GUI, I can get that on a different connection. At the same time as the console has it.
But not the GUI on the console. As I've stated in the past.
No it is not because there is no way for a 2nd user to be logged in, concurrently with the console user and have all the features and functionality that the console user has.
"even if remote users can't see the console GUI, they can still access it". Riiiigggggghhhhhhhttttttt.
It will be very interesting to watch you play minesweeper that way. What? You say you can't? You can just launch the game, move the window and kill the process?
Yes, I thought as much.
And if telnet and ssh and so forth are not enabled? Well, that means that the machine needs to be rebooted with a recovery disk.
Actually, it does have a local console. I believe it is accessed via a 5250 connection. Look up "LCS" if you don't believe me.
Then it isn't Windows.
Windows ships with a console. It is a GUI console.
With Citrix (a multi-user version of Windows) it is possible to still get a console even after all the damage you're trying to do to the box.
A multi-user system is a step UP from a single-user system.
You are trying to REMOVE functionality in order to meet the definition.
It doesn't work like that.
Windows ships with a console. In order for Windows to be multi-user, it must provide that console to all concurrent users.
You keep tryin