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Windows Cheaper to Patch Than Open Source?
daria42 writes "Is Windows cheaper to patch than open source software? Of course this Microsoft-commissioned report thinks so - but a number of people disagree, including a key Novell Asia-Pac exec, Paul Kangro. Kangro highlights problems with the report including the fact that it refers to problems faced by administrators before 2003: before significant improvements were made to Linux patching tools. 'We didn't have tools like Xen for Linux then,' says Kangro. 'When I patch my Linux box I don't need to bring it up and down any number of times.' Kangro also points out the report doesn't mention costs associated with rebooting systems after a patch is applied."
It might be easier if you have no idea how to really use a computer, and are not willing to learn. Those people will never leave the "comfort" of a familiar thing. They fear change, especially when it forces them to actually think for themselves.
And they said zombies weren't real!
So microsoft says windows is cheaper to patch, whereas Novell (who own Suse) say linux is cheaper to patch.
Can someone tell me why this is news?
[...]problems with the report including the fact that it refers to problems faced by administrators before 2003: before significant improvements were made to Linux patching tools. 'We didn't have tools like Xen for Linux then,' [...]
Oh, come on. Practically speaking, we don't have Xen for Linux *now*. Sure it's cool and all (which is why it's slipped into this basically unrelated story) but it's not nearly ready for the Linux mainstream and I'd be surprised if more than a handful of people are using it heavily in production.
Every time I read about another "paid by Billy G" report it always reminds me of the joke.. How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a lightbulb. None Microsoft defines darkness as the new standard..
Really? The 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade' i did earlier today on my debian (testing) box took less than a minute, and isntalled not just the latest security patches but also the latest versions of all my software. That was pretty-much free.
Conversely, windows update only updates windows (not my other apps), and takes at least 15 minutes every time i run it.
Since most of the administrators seem to hold off on windows patch releases until they've been very well tested (sometimes for months) the report should include the damages to unpatched systems while making sure microsoft's patches work.
Me? I apt-get upgrade debian stable every night and sleep easily knowing that in the morning I'll have a well tested and working system. Plus, all my patches from a single location!
...but only if you don't count the hours of lost or reduced productivity waiting for MS to get around to releasing their patches.
GoogleTalk id 47
I didn't RTFA but any company that is going to lose more than a few pennies from a reboot is going to have redundant servers in place already. It is not difficult to stagger the application of patches to server machines in a farm, which all but eliminates the cost of a reboot.
Anything from Novell that is spoken against Microsoft is suspect anyway. I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but the animosity between the two companies is well documented.
Any company where the majority of the cost is in the patching process itself, rather than the testing of the patch, the secondary servers in the test lab that they can make sure it doesn't blow services up on, the payment of skilled people to identify the problems and fix them *when* they happen and various other people costs is of course going to be more expensive than "I set up windows updates once, so now it updates me magically whether I like it or not", even without the reboot thing.
There is also some really iffy logic in breaking down one single piece of the ownership cycle and claiming that it is cheaper and ignoring the rest. I tell you, paying for college for my persistently vegetative child is uber-cheap, I can't say enough for persistent vegetation...
IIRC, this is one of the things Microsoft is working on for Longhorn, being able to patch and install drivers "on the fly" without a reboot.
With XP SP2, if you enable the automatic downloading of updates, it will restart the computer automatically after teh updates are installed, unless you continuously click cancel when it comes up every 5 minutes. If your not at the computer, but have web downloads going on and it does this, it can be a real pain.
Free MacMini
The cost of rebooting on some machines is astronomical. I know we had some management software on a data line connected to the stock exchange. From the hours of 8-5 any downtime would cost over $10k/second, not to mention any lawsuits that could have been processed if someone lost money and couldn't sell their stocks when they wanted. On the other hand, most machines are not nearly that critical, and reboots can be done at off hours. I would say that Windows systems are less costly to patch for another reason. Almost anyone with technical ability can patch windows. You can hire windows admins on the cheap. To get Unix admins will cost more if you want someone that knows what they are doing. I wonder if they take the cost of knowledgable staff into the equation. Otherwise, the cost of patching for either can be huge or trivial depending on the patch and the situation. Also, Windows is a lot better now with the reboots. You don't have to reboot nearly as much as in the past.
/. ++
I'd really like to know what the study means by "cheaper to patch". Does it mean that, since time is money, the cheap is available sooner and installs faster? Are the guys doing the job available for less money? As the article points out, rebooting a mission critical server, especially on windows, after applying a patch, is a royal PITA, something that hardly happens on a *NIX machine.
did someone manage to get a copy of the PDF from Microsoft before it went down?
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
Patching open source is easy and does not need to be done as often. And the patches for Linux are often more stable. We all know that...
So is this more foder for CIOs to reject open source because they have Microsoft stock in their portfolios?
Good to see the Microsoft FUD machine is still working.
Ubuntu has a red button every now and then I click it and I am patched.
To patch my windows I simply gaff-tape plexiglass on top of the glass.
I may be a bit green to the corporate methods of updating a production OS, but I would think that the process would have to be the same. You have to set up a test environmnet, ensure that the updates produce the necessary results. Then you have to test to make suer that no other software/productivity is affected. Then you have to compare baselines. Regardless of the beginning OS, these steps are necessary.
I can see two potential differences between Windows and Linux on this front, though, and they both seem to favor Linux. First, you don't have to buy a second license to run the test server. I would assume you can get away with this in Windows by not activating the product, but I could see some test phases taking over 30 days. Second, since you basically know excatly what you are updating in Linux, and what other packages are dependant on what you are updating, your testing phase can be more focused. This isn't to say that it would take less time, but rather that you know what is prima facie in the testing order.
So corporate sysadmin geeks out here... where is the advantage in this area to using either os?
I believe he may be including lost productivity while employees are rebooting.
I just can't agree with that report. From 1999 to 2002 I did work for a datacentre with 150 Linux servers and 26 NT and then Windows 2000 server servers. Keeping figures on those I can say that the total downtime due to upgrades and patching for both groups in total was almost the same.
It dates back to the time when Novell was evil and Microsoft was good.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Microsoft are obviously going to create a report in their favour. If it wasn't promoting windows then they would not create the report. Rebooting the machine isn't even taken into consideration. Why did this even make /.? *grumble*
Never touch an Irish man's Guinness!@#
until recently, I was in charge for the Windows servers patching for a ~1000 units server farm, and all I can say is Microsoft sucks big time when it comes to fix high availability systems. I even developped in-house a patch management system because of the chronical unreliability of SMS for patch distribution. Comparing to a Linux based system using the simple APT, Microsoft is nowhere, useless, dangerous.
... all are great when you speak about gui, all sucks when you speak about efficiency. Not to mention the poor quality of M$ patches themselves: just have a look at the troubles a MS05-019 can provoke.
SUS, SMS, WUS,
Yeah, a good linux distribution wipes the floor whith the M$ patching goof.
Here's what else the Microsoft report found....
Linux will recalibrate your refrigerator's coolness setting so all your ice cream melts and milk curdles. It will demagnetize the strips on all your credit cards, reprogram your ATM access code, screw up the tracking on your VCR and use subspace field harmonics to scratch any CDs you try to play. It will give your ex-boy/girlfriend your new phone number. It will mix antifreeze into your fish tank. It will drink all your beer and leave its dirty socks on the coffee table when there's company coming over. It will hide your car keys when you are late for work and interfere with your car radio so that you hear only static while stuck in traffic. Linux will make you fall in love with a hardened pedophile. It will give you nightmares about circus midgets. It will replace your shampoo with Nair and your Nair with Rogaine, all while your current boy/girlfriend is dating behind your back and billing their hotel rendezvous to your Visa card. It will seduce your grandmother. It does not matter if she is dead, such is the power of Linux, it reaches out beyond the grave to sully those things we hold most dear. Linux will give you Dutch Elm disease. It will leave the toilet seat up and leave the hairdryer plugged in dangerously close to a full bathtub. It will remove the forbidden tags from your mattresses and pillows, and refill your skim milk with whole. It is insidious and subtle. It is dangerous and terrifying to behold. It is also a rather interesting shade of mauve. These are just a few signs. Be afraid. Be very, very afraid. Windows is so much safer.
The weak spot in the credibility is always..."Microsoft commissioned report".
(Apologies to Laika)
"Kangro also points out the report doesn't mention costs associated with rebooting systems after a patch is applied."
This is a really underated cost that not many people include or even consider. The environment I work in has a few thousand servers and 130K desktops; all running a mix of 2K, 2003, XP - and other Windows flavors. (Like that's my choice).
The reboots after patching are a major pain, everything needs to be checked and always, and I mean ALWAYS, some servers will fail to come back up.
It's costly stuff...
How about desk-bound employees and their patches? Don't we count?
I use a lot of non-MSFT apps, and if one of them fails to work with the patched Windows system, I'm goung to lose a lot of time. I've already had one "security patch" to something do wierd things to my system, making it impossible for me to see the hard drive password prompt. Multiple that by every laptop in the company and you have a lot of support calls.
Another "security patch" seems to have hosed the network finder so that it can't automatically pick up a new IP address from the LAN. I have to manually change the settings and ..... guess what? REBOOT to force it to pick up the new IP address. Every time I have to log on from home, that's TWO reboots and two manual interventions to what should be automatically happening.
does windows have en equivalent? I think not.
James P. Barrett
We, Unixers, usually miss the point that, while we don't have to reboot the whole computer at each and every important patch, we have to bring services down and then back up when they are significantly patched. For a database server it's not the system uptime that counts - it's the database uptime. If it goes down, I could as well have rebooted the whole server - the phone will ring just the same.
While this is a whole lot better than Windows, they are getting closer.
And... Well... The fact it was paid by Microsoft says nothing about the report. I sure would like to see the other reports paid by Microsoft that say FOSS is cheaper, more reliable, more ethical and that are tucked away somewhere in a folder marked "secret"
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
This is another of those reports full of fluff with little meat. I can't stand these documents that say nothing, think they're "stating the obvious" and just go around in circles repeating the same old company line over and over in the name of neutrality. I would argue that this document is one of those sorts of documents which goes around in circles repeating the same company line again and again.
So, all in all, another report with lofty hopes but a poor delivery. It sickens me that people get paid to producing these atrocities, all of which just loop around banging out the same company line each and every time, over and over. It's like listening to a broken record, with the constant reiteration of Microsoft's company line on never ending loop upon loop.
So an exec from a company that owns a Linux distro doesn't agree with a Microsoft commissioned report that finds Windows is cheaper to patch?
Mein Gott im Himmel! This really is astounding! Call the BBC - it'll be front page news in no time!
Get your own free personal location tracker
What a bunch of CTO bound clueless toss.
Hmm.. In my experience, most of the time taken to patch systems is downloading the patches, not actually applying them.
With things like Debian, etc you can have local mirrors of security repositories to speed up the application of patches on lots of machines.
Is the same thing available for Windows Update? If not, I wonder what additional bandwidth costs as well as download times would be incurred from having down download the same patches every time from a Microsoft server via Windows Update.
Not that this nullifies the comparison you've made, but Windows update can also update your MS Office products as well. Naturally, your point is that it does not update non-MS products. Just thought I'd make that distinction a little more clear. Not that I use MS products. Er, that is...
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
well i dont know a thing about windows update but with the linux update systems i know you usually download the whole package for every little change and that definitely uses more bandwidth than it ought to. guess it's a tradeoff between complexity (setup scripts in rpms etc.) and bandwidth cost.
A) Everyone believes it.
B) The report was so crappy that everyone gave up Microsoft and switched to Linux
C) Nothing else exciting is happening in the world right now (yeah, not even a WoW server crash)
In other news, Linus Torvalds says that Linux is good. Richard Stallman reported that OSS is the way to go, and the new pope insists that the only hope for salvation is the acceptance of J.H.C. in your life.
And I just wasted 5 minutes of my life typing this worthless comment to a -1 Flamebait story.
Just
Well, lets look at the facts:
@ Both Linux and Windows can be easily configured to auto-update patches.
@ Windows patches are smaller (binary diffs as opposed to full updated packages).
@ However, there are more critical updates to Windows.
@ Windows has SUS, whereas Linux doesn't seem (excuse me if I'm wrong) to have any kind of distributed patch management for large businesses.
If bandwidth costs (it does), it could well be that Windows easily has less data to transfer for large organisations.
If we're talking about uptime then yes, Linux will be more "cheaper" (better uptime, minimal loss of business) in this respect.
and needs more patches. But Microsoft releases them so slow, and each patch causes more bugs.
I'm sick of this MS nonsense reports. It is not even accessible (or slashdotted ?) for me to check it.
But knowing that a Linux distro allows you to update any program you have, and hey, even third parties can add their repository for the package manager, I don't understand how Windows patching can be cheaper, really.
Do they imply that getting patches by hand and applying them is cheaper than what a package manager with automatic notification does ?
Did they compare patching Windows with patching an entire Linux distro ? I just don't understand this nonsense.
Yah - I'll say - a key number of people disagree. Every sysadmin on the planet -
I don't see how Windows can be cheaper from a compute cycle standpoint. You lose compute cycles during patches on all systems, it's just with Linux, you lose WAY less. You don't have to reboot. All you have to do is bounce services and your up and going. Microsoft just tells you to reboot because of the nutso way they run things. Even on Windows, you can do things to make reboots unnecessary.
Gorkman
When Microsoft continues to fund these highly biased reports and surveys, the Open Source community should be happy. It means that Microsoft considers Open Source to be a real competitor. In effect, Microsoft is doing more to validate Open Source and increase the visibility of Open Source than anyone could hope for.
I think Kangro was referring to more than lost business but also lost productivity.
In the case of desktops, it's going to be lost productivity. Sure you can schedule them to update and reboot in the middle of the night, but what if the user was working on something? The admins have to spend some time planning and scheduling mass updates or leave it to the user. It's trivial to reboot; it's harder to schedule for many machines so that productivity is minimally affected.
Also your argument only applies to mission critical or production machines. It does not include any development and/or testing machines that may not have a backup. Many organizations do not have the money to have a backup for every non-essential machine.
Our company is installing a new enterprise application. Every time we are rebooting the test servers, our consultants and employees are not working on the app. With new system setups, rebooting a lot is not uncommon.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Do you think that Novell's Kangro might have been talking about Novell Zenworks for linux?
http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/
The problem is pretty theoretical, but when I mentioned it to a friend who has administered Linux systems for clients, his response was, "Oh, so that's why that happens." He said that when upgrading libraries he would restart all his important long running processes because he had experienced problems in the past. So apparently this actually does affect people.
I actually prefer the Windows approach of forcing a reboot in order to preserve correctness. I'm not saying Microsoft gets it perfect; the number of reboots forced on a Windows system is way more than it should be. Microsoft has improved over time, but I hope (as a Windows user) that they improve a lot more. I also hope that someone finds a way to eliminate this problem on both platforms.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
Face it, having to reboot when you patch your system is a load of arse!
It almost sounds like you are defending the practice.
Sorry but you have no clue what you are talking about.
:)
Redundant servers for everything isn't possible - but that's mostly moot anyway.
It is difficult to stagger reboots when you're talking about thousands of servers all over the country managed from one location.
OK, the reboot is easy, after all switching crap off is simple
Making sure everything comes back up and is doing the job it is supposed to be doing is harder, fixing broken server boxes all over the country is harder still.
By the time you get all this right you'll find Microsoft has released more critical patches. Happy happy joy joy.
These sorts of surveys about cost, uptime, flexibility serve only to manipulate the PHBs by keeping the discussion off the fact that Microsoft is a reptilian company; dangerous to do business with of any sort.
The way they endevor to crush their competitors, the way they rob and then crush their "allies", the way they openly steal ideas and then tell the courts and the business world 'let us innovate'; it's breath taking. They're liars and phonies who've built an empire upon an incredibly smart bit of opportunistic business savvy a long time ago. So I give them credit for that, and I save the Windows admin-ing for the last of my day so I can go home and take a shower.
However, it has been a long time since I've done that, so I could be mistaken. One would like to assume that if I am correct, OTOH, there will be an option hidden somewhere in the bowels of Windows Update that would let you turn that option on or off. From my experience with MS products, however, this would not necessarily be a safe assumption.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
From the MS summary of the article
- The annual costs of patching the security vulnerabilities of individual Windows-based and similar OSS-based systems are roughly comparable.
- On a per-patching event basis, Windows-based systems require less effort than similar OSS systems.
So it costs less per patch to use MS, but about the same per year as OSS... So MS are saying they have way more patches?? Now thats a surprise!!
Haydn.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
When I patch a windows server, it concerns me when it asks to be rebooted. ;)) but lets say some other program bailed on me, it's not like everything is so tightly coupled together that I got to do a compelte rebuild. The programs that are required for business operations I always have installed manually, so I never really lose more than a few seconds to just change the symlink back to the old version. In this case, people probably wouldn't even know anything happened.
For example, when the latest service pack came up for Windows 2003 Server, It took a lot of balls on my part to hit that restart now button. I've had it in the past where it would break something and I'd end up having to do a complete reinstall, costing my company thousands of dollars of just lost productivity.
Sure, I'm suppose to have an identical machine to test these things out on with an identical setup, but realistically how many companies have the money to buy two of everything?
On my linux machines, I only fear things like a dependancy breaking and losing 1 program, for example KDE, but that isn't necessary for a server to work (well it shouldn't be installed on a server
ya, checking "yum" in the setup --> system services was reeeaallll hard. I should switch back to windows on my servers.....
> And if Microsoft started adding in patches for software that isn't theirs you would be screaming "MONOPOLY" at the top of your lungs.
."
Wrong.
I scream "monopoly" because, if an ISP were to bundle various applications with their PCs, along with Windows, and were to offer an update service for all those applications, along with Windows, then Microsoft would punish that ISP (with higher prices or worse) unless they _removed_ support for any applications that Microsoft did not approve.
Microsoft is not a monopoly because of what they _include_.
Microsoft is a monopoly because of what they _exclude_.
To learn more about what makes Microsoft a monopoly, read the DOJ's Findings of Facts.
For example, there is this passage where Bill Gates threatens Apple to force them to drop support for Netscape:
> Gates informed those Microsoft executives most closely involved in the negotiations with Apple that the discussions "have not been going well at all." One of the several reasons for this, Gates wrote, was that "Apple let us down on the browser by making Netscape the standard install." Gates then reported that he had already called Apple's CEO (who at the time was Gil Amelio) to ask "how we should announce the cancellation of Mac Office . . .
Or these passages where Microsoft threatens Intel to get them to stop helping Sun to improve Java performance on Intel hardware:
> To hinder Sun and Netscape from improving the quality of the Windows JVM shipped with Navigator, Microsoft pressured Intel, which was developing a high-performance Windows-compatible JVM, to not share its work with either Sun or Netscape, much less allow Netscape to bundle the Intel JVM with Navigator. Gates was himself involved in this effort. During the August 2, 1995 meeting at which he urged Intel to halt IAL's development of platform-level software, Gates also announced that Intel's cooperation with Sun and Netscape to develop a Java runtime environment for systems running on Intel's microprocessors was one of the issues threatening to undermine cooperation between Intel and Microsoft. By the spring of 1996, Intel had developed a JVM designed to run well on Intel-based systems while complying with Sun's cross-platform standards. Microsoft executives approached Intel in April of that year and urged that Intel not take any steps toward allowing Netscape to ship this JVM with Navigator.
> In one instance of this effort to stunt the growth of the Java class libraries, Microsoft used threats to withhold Windows operating-system support from Intel's microprocessors and offers to include Intel technology in Windows in order to induce Intel to stop aiding Sun in the development of Java classes that would support innovative multimedia functionality.
> Two months later, Eric Engstrom, a Microsoft executive with responsibility for multimedia development, wrote to his superiors that one of Microsoft's goals was getting "Intel to stop helping Sun create Java Multimedia APIs, especially ones that run well (ie native implementations) on Windows." Engstrom proposed achieving this goal by offering Intel the following deal: Microsoft would incorporate into the Windows API set any multimedia interfaces that Intel agreed to not help Sun incorporate into the Java class libraries. Engstrom's efforts apparently bore fruit, for he testified at trial that Intel's IAL subsequently stopped helping Sun to develop class libraries that offered cutting-edge multimedia support.
As to your suggestion that Microsoft offer an update service, experience has taught us to expect the following:
The updates for Microsoft's own software would work fine.
But the updates for competing products, like Firefox, or Java, would periodically cause those products to break.
It's in Microsoft's nature to cheat. They can't be trusted.
Comparing windows to whatever open source platforms an organization happens to be running is utterly meaningless. Patching procedures vary wildly between Linux distributions, and between Linux and other open source platforms. For example, I know admins who manually recompile software on at least a half dozen platforms for some common daemons (like sshd). Others, including myself, simply test and roll out vendor supplied packages for the most part.
Another aspect they seem to gloss over in the summaries is that a lot of the costs are lower on Linux, and they only come up with reduced numbers for Windows by dividing it by the number of running machines. Well, duh, economies of scale are always a boon. Riddle me this - if the costs are cheaper with OSS for patch preperation, patch management training, management oversight, configuration and inventory management, et cetera, wouldn't a homogenous OSS environment be cheaper than a homogenous Windows environment?
Another bit that's not mentioned in the news story is that the capital outlay for management tools was much higher on Windows. They then go on to break that down to per system costs to prove that OSS is oh so much more expensive. Thing is - fairly sophisticated patch management comes out of the box with a number of major OSS platforms. I'd guess that all the costs on the OSS side were probably a handful of customers who stuck with OpenView or Tivoli because that's what they're standardized on. For them, it'd be a constant cost regardless of platform.
Overall, this just points out the problems with drawing conclusions from numbers dervied from (a fairly small) survey. Differences in platform and practice yeild results that are incredibly different from this survey. I know one person who's responsible for over two hundred systems on his own. According to this report, that would require well over 6000 "hours per year of support effort", despite the fact that he works well under 2000 hours a year (40 hour week minus paid time off) and that's far from all "support effort".
Sorry but this stuff is particularly trivial, patching 10, 100 or 1000 machines.
/afs/admin/scripts/patchme' >> /etc/crontab.master
e.g.
echo 'ALL:root: 15 18 * * *
Where the crontabs are centrally managed, patchme checks for resources, goes to sleep for a while, runs OS, platform and rev specific patch download and install subroutines which run yum update, apt-get update, patchadd, rpm -Uvh etc. Report progress to a central monitoring system like Big Brother or Zabbix as the patching process runs through the various stages.
Even talking about the cost of the patching process itself is missing the point. Anyone who has a lot of machines will already have a largely automated enterprise wide cross platform patching system in place. Applying a specific patch will be a case of dropping a pre-tested file into a directory on a file server. If you don't have such a system WTF are you doing wasting your time on Slashdot?
Deleted
Well, this might be true if you consider just the operating system itself, but it doubt even this. For the begining, let's consider the following : 1). The bare OS (be it linux at a minimal install or windoes) it's mostly unusable except for browsing the web, writing things in notepad or wordpad and a few other minor things. In the real world there are a lot other things you install, from movie players, codecs to complex applications like IDE's, Office suites or business applications. In the end a typical workstation has a bunch of applications NOT included in the OS itself (I'm talking about windows here). 2). Second, Microsoft has the bad habit of counting all applications in a distribution when counting vulnerabilities, so than they can say "look, redhat had 50 security bugs this year, we had only 5". Well, let's take it the microsoft way, and consider all the applications in a distribution. Now, in the linux world a lot of applications are open source and/or supported with patches directly by the vendor (Redhat/Novell-Suse/Debian/Ubuntu,etc). In the windows world on the other hand the whole bunch of installed applications are not controlled by anyone. So, let's consider that 5 of the applications on the system need update (firefox,one office suite, and other applications). The linux way : The distro's update manager signals you that 5 security updates need to be installed. You click on the alert or manually open a terminal and run apt-get upgrade or yum update,etc and you have the system up to date again. The windows way : You go windowsupdate.com where a patch for the kernel is downloaded to prevent a a newly discovered DoS attack, then you launch mozilla firefox, where mozilla firefox's own update manager alerts you that you have to update the browser, then you go to officeupdate and update the office suite, and then you check the following app and learn that you have to download and install the patch manually, and so on for all the 5 apps. No think what happens when there are 20 or more apps to be checked, INCLUDING various supporting libraries that cannot be easily checked automatically and you have to check them one by one and patch them one by one. In the linux world the package manager updates almost anything for you in one move.(With some exceptions, of course). In the windows world, that has not a real update manager/supervisor for the whole list of installed applications, you have to do the updates one by one, by hand because there is no unified windows update manager. So... what way is simpler ? After all, it all comes to the the time required to mantain an IT infrastructure up to date, and windows falls short on this one. And we all know that time is money, right ?
I find it more common, albeit practically nonexistent, that a package fails to compile with emerge, than a binary version from the Windows update site fails to install on Windows.
I do, however, find this study to be a bit strange. It doesn't cost anything to patch OSS or Windows! You use the tools that are provided to you and just do it. I imagine they must have been taking into account down-time and such. That being the case, one could argue that it costs less time to install a binary package than it does for me to compile a new package and then install it. However, one could also argue that I'm not exactly sitting around staring at my Linux systems monitor during the entire process and the system is quite capable of continuing its daily routine while the updates are compiled.
I'm glad somebody pointed out the fact that reboot time was not mentioned in the report.
My lame blog.
I wish I could mod this entire article (-1, Troll) -- it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Another factor tht's not considered is that with FOSS products you are free to write your own patch system if you don't find any that meet your needs. With windows you're stuck with what they offer.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
Reminds me of when i tried to install a netgear card on an SP2 machine. It put up some sort of error garble and started rebooting. Again and again and again. We had to take the card out to get it to stop.
How does it cost to patch free open source software, such as Linux?
Thus, how could it be more expensive?
I'll agree that lost employee productivity is an issue, but - for the larger companies at least - patches are not applied willy-nilly. And even when they are applied, the application of the patches (and subsequent verification that machines will not be affected adversely) is tested in an environment specifically created for the sole purpose of avoiding employee downtime due to this reason.
At said Wall St. firm, there were 15,000 workstations company-wide. I tell you now that patches, service packs, etc. were tested for weeks in advance sometimes to ensure that the application of those patches would be smooth. They weren't 100% problem-free, but the number of problems that occurred was nominal compared to what it could have been.
I'm not going to lie to you and say that the copious numbers of MS patches should be ignored. But I will say that the threat posed by not installing the patches the second they are released can be significantly migitated in other ways (firewalls, anyone?) while testing occurs and solutions / workarounds to problems discovered are developed.
"So microsoft says windows is cheaper to patch, whereas Novell (who own Suse) say linux is cheaper to patch." In reality I think they are both about equal in cost to patch if the person doing the patching knows what they are doing. Sure, Windows has to reboot, but Linux generally releases more patches.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
(MScustomer) Hi Microsoft , Could you patch this to your kernel source compile it and send it to me , thanks ,we will do that right away , and how would you like to pay .
(MSsupport) Yes no problem atall sir
We accept your eternal souls or a couple of Small nation republics.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
"Its all about VOLUME! As a volume distributor of patchware we are able to drive down costs by simply pumping out more volume"
-Microsoft
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
In a corporate environment (or your home for that matter) you can set WinXP to have automatic updates, install automatically and restart the PC in the middle of the nigh if needed. Combine this with a product like Norton Internet Security that handles viruses and spyware, updating for both at night and running automatically and install firefox and you now have Windows system that the average user can use without maintenance for a year at a time. Linux may match one day but there is no way right now for the typical PC user, home or office.
Please why does garbage like this even get reported anywhere let alone on /.
/. needs a new category for Bullshit and FUD. [BS-FUD] And not just for M$ but every organization that pinches these humugous loaves of crap out!
I think
Seriously... if everyone really started to see how quickly this shot piles up they are more likely to smell its quality and relevance too!
From the hours of 8-5 any downtime would cost over $10k/second
I hacked that computer and installed an application. It's pretty brilliant. What it does is every time there's a bank transaction where interest is computed, you know, thousands a day? The computer ends up with these fractions of a cent, which it usually rounds off? What this does is takes those little remainders and puts them into an account.
-- This sounds familiar.
Yeah, they did it in Superman 3.
-- Right.
Underrated movie, actually.
Software Wars
What database engine are you referring to? Most industrial strength database servers manage their cache themselves and when the server goes down, the cache of the database server is reinitialized from scratch.
In most cases a database server will indeed boot faster then the entire server, but the opposite is also possible. A database server deserving it's name has to do a host of recovery operations. When you're unlucky and it either crashed, or was shut down immediately recovery can take hours
Or could it be that you're talking out of your arse and don't have an actual clue whatsoever?
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Why is this a story? I mean seriously. These TCO articles come out all of the time, and they are bullshit all of the time. Don't we already know this? Does anyone with half a brain pay attention to these "studies"? There's nothing we can do to stop them, and we only discredit them here... Where everyone knows they are bullshit. It doesn't even have anything to do with some prejudice against Microsoft. Any company will bs their way to more sales. Welcome to life, people.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
Well... If you mean by "cheaper" as in paying a high school kid $5 bucks an hour to format hard drives and reinstall Windows on all your workstations after a patch push hoses Windows OS... Then yes, I could see your point.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
15,000 workstations is small compared to 130,000 - but no matter. The real issues with patches are the servers. Scheduling and testing reboots on 1000's of servers is different than a single 4 way cluster server.
I'd never call you a simpleton - I don't know you - I'm pointing out that reboots are a real problem and a real cost; and one not to be underestimated.
I'm not an IT pro, just a home user who doesn't understand why I have to reboot Windows just to update an IP address on my home LAN. Sure, it took me a while to learn to do this under Linux, but I can change that address a hundred times without rebooting. How does frequent rebooting help your customers, Bill? You can build a user friendly house, but not a user friendly OS? No thanks, I'll stay with Linux.
This is simply not true. I know of a company in the graphics business (film animation that sort of stuff), who will remain nameless.
Back in about 98/99, most of that industry migrated from Irix to Windows (MS put a lot of money in to supporting vendors who agreed to port their applications from Unix to Windows)
Several years ago they upgraded their render farm (200 machines) with a new version of their vendors NT based application.
That took a week - go to every machine, plug in keyboard and display, install, reboot.
(No Windows didn't/doesn't have remote management - not for installations anyway)
They had even more fun several days later when the vendor contacted them with a patch (some registry setting or other)
Repeat story, go back to every machine, plug in keyboard and display, uninstall, reboot, install, reboot, test.
That took 3 weeks.
In the middle of a 9 month rendering cycle of a heavily animation dependent film (which I've seen, and so have you - good film)
Needless to say the film was a little late (and financial penalties were agreed etc etc etc )
After this debacle, the company's owners demanded a solution to ensure that it *never* happened again.
Answer? Linux. Same cheap hardware, simple to port the old Irix tool chain. And Linux *has* remote
management/installation. You can do it overnight with minimal downtime.
They never looked back, and Windows cannot be spoken of in any more than disparaging terms.
Fact:- the cost of managing Windows in many environments is vastly more than you might expect, and heaps more than *any* variety of Unix you care to name.
Crap, sorry about the lack of line breaks. Here it is fixed
... MS has one good thing going for it, in that for example I installed some Win2k Servers in mid 1999 that are still on the same OS install almost 6 years later. I installed some RedHat servers at the same time, and well needless to say, I've upgraded from RedHat 5.x a number of times since
Utter nonsense, every word of it.
1. If you are actually using the fact that some package is open source and run a modified source tree you need someone to maintain that tree for you. You may have to fuss with patches, especially if large or if they affect areas you have customized.
Well, yes, you can't really expect anyone else to patch your custom software, can you? At least when you're modifying GPLed code you can very easily backport most security fixes to your in house version. It's not as if your custom VB database front-end is going to be patched my Microsoft.
2. Depending on your package patches come willy nilly, with no co-ordination. MS releases patches the second Tuesday of every month. This actually allows some type of planning.
It's called "get the security patch out as soon as possible so users aren't left running vulnerable systems". I can't believe you tried to make quick patch releases look *bad* when it's one of the most important benefits of running Linux. Planning? Does MS plan when a security hole will be found? No, so how can they plan when the patch will be released? They can't really do it, so instead they make you wait longer than you should have to.
you have products that are in "heavy development" with pretty serious point releases weekly or monthly
Yes, but you don't need to install upgrades. All serious distros backport security fixes to older versions of the software so you can keep using it for many years. Heck, Debian stable, which gets kicked around for being so old, still has security fixes being applied to ancient (by Linux standards) software. There is no forced upgrade. You could have upgraded Windows 2000 to 2003, but you chose not to. You can also choose not to in Linux as well. Once difference is that if you do Upgrade Linux from a 1999 distro to a 2005 distro you'll get a massive amount of new functionality. The same can't be said for Win2000 vs. Win2003.
4. Patches for Linux, like Windows, still need to be tested in a production environment. Especially if you are running from a largely source built system
Tested, yes. You don't want to break functionality. Running a source-based system doesn't make a difference.
I admin a heavily customized web server that was built almost entirely from source...
If you are building a your own Linux (like LFS) system, then you must be prepared to do more on your own. That's why almost no one does it. Don't compare home-brew to MS, compare a big distro like RedHat, Suse or Debian to MS and you'll see that your highly customized distro problems go away. At least with Linux you have a choice and can opt to bulid your own system if you want to.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Of course whether linux or mac or windows is cheaper despends upon what is meant by patch. You mean some CUSTOM kernel patch to let it talk to some non standard company tcip system? or do you mean fix a bug? or do you mean downlaod and apply a patch (e.g. software update).
the meaning of those varies. Few would consdier or have the knowledge to tinker with the Windows kernel, but the Linux kernel is more open. Still that's a realm for the hardest core programmers, not user or even most software developers. Applying a patch someone else wrote is entirely another matter. That's certainly going to be easier in a consistent distribution. But it's more likely to exist for linux sooner than for windows.
With macs you have the best of these. See you on the fan-boy list!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Sure this is an inconvenience, but (still) overrated. It's just not a major issue to reboot a machine. Word. Move on.
What continues to be a major road block to widespread adoption of Linux by the masses is not just patching, but just installing applications at all. It just can not be said with a straight face that installing patches or an application on Linux is as easy as with Windows for average computer users. There are just way too many pitfalls that can trap a user in hours and days of searching for strange dependencies and other things. And a smooth GUI installer....
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
This can also be achieved in a MS environment using SUS but I prefer my patch downloads around 30K instead of 3MB a piece (barring some heavy Gnome or KDE package, those are big too). I also think SUS is a bit cumbersome in its approach to patching (you can mark a patch safe for installation in your network, but by default it will download all patches, something you can avoid in Debian... just mirror the packages you want/need and not the whole universe. I know you can select different OSes in SUS, but then you'll still have to test against all OSes you run. I've administered this in a mixed environment (win98, win98se, win2k, winxp, win2003, mssql, exchange 2k) and frankly, it has happened that our nightly downloads were over 100MB in total size on updates alone (and that's just for the OS patches - don't get me started on the numerous other patches I have to download and create an msi package of if it's not an MS product). Yeah... give me a debian mirror anytime with a stable repository for the servers and an unstable repository for the desktops.
So tell me... what is cheaper (measuring bandwidth, testing, downtime , licensing and staffing - especially staffing: I couldn't do all testing on the SUS server alone with all the platforms we were running there, but I had the debian mirror running as well, which took me maybe about 5 minutes of work daily on average for 5 servers and a handful of desktops)... a Microsoft based solution or a linux based solution?
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
Hmmm...yeah. Let's see. One is a VM and one is an asset management system for patches. I'll take the latter, Bob.
I think the real reason that windows costs less to patch is that fewer patches are released for windows. Sort of a "we patch every 6 months whether it needs it or not" sort of scenario.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I am getting that 150 Linux servers had the same downtime as 26 NT servers, giving Linux a factor of 5.77 advantage over NT on a per server basis. Sounds about right to me.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I agree completely. Plus the huge cost we have at work when our main servers have to reboot to apply patches. 24 minutes is the fastest the 2k3 server w/ Exchange 2k5 server takes to reboot, it hurts.
I ate your fish.
I'm assuming that you're not speaking out of direct experience, but instead from the big book of "how things are supposed to be" because in the real world, reboots cause LOTS of disruption. An example:
Most of the Cisco IP Telephony servers run under Win2K, and several platforms (Unity, IPCCEx) don't handle stateful failover well. Do you want to say "my call center is down because I needed to patch?"
Another example: while it's quite possible to virtualize things like databases, most small enterprises ( 5000 employees) have some number of non-redundant services. Now, if the print server is down at 3AM, who cares - but if it's your main database for your online store, that's not so good.
It's a rare company that ACTUALLY has a real farm of redundant servers which can individually be taken offline without disruption.
-David Barak
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
"but a number of people disagree, including a key Novell Asia-Pac exec, Paul Kangro."
OMFG, what a surprise!
Why you didn't add another informative follow up comment like "but a number of people disagree with Kangro, including a key Microsoft exec, Steve Ballmer".
Of course they'll disagree because it's their job.
Give us some real news.
BTW, Windows may require reboots, but it doesn't say anything about the difficulty level - it's easy to patch but it sometimes requires downtime.
Linux - well, tell me how to update Red Hat Enterprise Linux v3.0 to v4.0.
Attention Slashdot reader:
It has recently come to our attention that you have had an original thought and went against the party line. This is very troubling to us. In order to rectify this situation, it is our suggestion that you seek reprogramming at your nearest LUG meeting. You have two weeks to comply. We hope to hear from you soon.
Sincerely,
Slashbot Mentality ("You have offended my world-view and pointed out my hypocrisy! I must now justify my existence!")
How arrogant!
a) Nothing in the report suggests the users 'have no idea how to really use a computer';
b) Nothing in the report remotely suggests anyone is not willing to learn how to use a computer;
c) Everything suggests that people do think. The thinking might be along the lines of: "My computer is a tool. Do I really need to know how to fiddle endlessly setting up the tool?"
Why is it that there is no questioning buying precooked food, taking appliances and vehicles to repair shops for the simplest of servicing, or the persistent use of a favoured carpentry tool because it's 'done the job fine for x years'. And yet when someone treats a computer simply as the tool it should be, they are branded 'fearful of change' and 'unthinking'?
What would you think if there were hammer geeks who spent endless amounts of time refining, modding, and configuring their hammers? Geeks who felt that only unthinking losers wouldn't change their hammers every six months. Geeks that felt it a pathetic display of ignorance that someone would not take the time to know their hammer intimately. Geeks that could endlessly debate shaft lengths, handle materials, and head geometry. In all likelihood, there would be a very large body of people who would think, 'It's a fscking hammer. I don't want to be a craftsman or hammer designer. If the thing don't hammer simply, it's of no use to me.'
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Rubber innertubes are cheaper to patch then Hypalon inflatable hulls. Still I'd much rather face the ocean in a Zodiac then in something "cheap to fix."
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
What would you think if there were hammer geeks who spent endless amounts of time refining, modding, and configuring their hammers? Geeks who felt that only unthinking losers wouldn't change their hammers every six months. Geeks that felt it a pathetic display of ignorance that someone would not take the time to know their hammer intimately. Geeks that could endlessly debate shaft lengths, handle materials, and head geometry. In all likelihood, there would be a very large body of people who would think, 'It's a fscking hammer. I don't want to be a craftsman or hammer designer. If the thing don't hammer simply, it's of no use to me.'
I didn't know they had advocacy among the Amish.
Can Slashdot concede that Microsoft-funded studies will come out in favor of Windows being better, and that some non-Microsoft-funded studied will come out in favor of Linux, and stop wasting our time with this banter?
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Comparing a linux mail server with exchange is bit like comparing 1 grape with a bag of grapes. A more appropriate comparison would be comparing an Exchange server with an Open-Exchange server (Eg: Webserver & Serverlet Engine & Database & LDAP & SMTP mail & IMAP mail - all on the same server)
Personally, I suspect that if your Exchange server users only used mail, and not the contacts/scheduling/groupware features, it would be much more efficient on a #users to processor power scale. Not that anyone would do it since the exchange server includes some number of licences for Outlook...
All I want for my Christmas is Open-exchange to be easy to install on CentOS;) and I'm Jewish!
Apparently, whatever organization owns your computer is smart enough to keep you from screwing around with it.
When they say "per patch" my guess is that they mean per patch AND per machine. i.e. 1 Linux box more expensive to upgrade that 1 Windows box. If not, I'll stand corrected. In my experience, one Linux/Unix sysadmin can manage a larger number of machines than your average MCSE, and one Linux box can be performing more functions than the same box running Windows. "per patch per machine" doesn't account for either of these facts. I'd like to see a similar study performed in an aggregate sense . . . although a methodology might be difficult.
It just can not be said with a straight face that installing patches or an application on Linux is as easy as with Windows for average computer users.
Funny. It takes just 3 mouse clicks: Open Synaptic. Right-click on package icon, select "Mark for Installation"
(or click "Mark all upgrades" to to patch everything). Then click "Apply". Even you could do it.
There are just way too many pitfalls that can trap a user in hours and days of searching for strange dependencies and other things.
apt-get or synaptic calculates and solves all dependencies in milliseconds.
And a smooth GUI installer....
Like synaptic?
I haven't used MS-Windows in years, but I doubt it comes anywhere near Ubuntu for ease of installation or upgrade.
You are confusing 2 entirely different things here. One is patching an existing operating system environment and applications, the other one is upgrading software.
Yast Online Update is not for upgrading software, but for installing fixes for the installed version. They have good reasons for that. Security fixes will be backported by SUSE, that's one of the most important job of their security team. That's what I do on production systems.
Upgrading software is a whole different story. SUSE provides a lot of unsupported ugrades, and Mozilla Firefox is one of them. It's very easy to find them on their ftp mirrors. You can also use third party software packagers like packman. If you use apt4rpm, it's very easy to integrate the different repositories, both from SUSE and third parties. That's what I'm suing on my desktop, laptop etc.
Patching all of my systems is mostly done without notice, just the occasional reboot when the kernel was changed, or restarting servers.
For me, SUSE has the most convenient patching capabilities, Apple comes a close second (and only comes second because with SUSE there are more ways to do it). Windows is much more work for me.
"Windows database servers cost 33 percent less to patch than their OSS counterparts"
"PatchLink's finding is that on a per patch incident basis, the Microsoft patches are cheaper to apply"
Penny wise and pound foolish. This is very much like the "savings" my employer gets on recycled toner cartridges - they cost half the price, but you only get 1/10th the number of copies.
With Win vs Lin, even were Win to cost 1/3 as much per patch, when you have ten times the number of patches to apply, well, do the math yourself.
Besides, of course, what others have pointed out below, that there are new and better Linux patch tools making the report moot.
This looks like MS shooting themselves in the foot again.
The difference is the enormous complexity of a computer compared to a hammer.
I am trolling
"Generally the issue is one of familiarity -- people may be able to potentially patch Windows boxes faster because they have had a lot of practice."
So which side is this quote supporting?
"Sure this is an inconvenience, but (still) overrated. It's just not a major issue to reboot a machine. Word. Move on."
In the real world where you're trying to run a service any downtime is an issue. Especially where you have services which won't automatically start up after a reboot.
"What continues to be a major road block to widespread adoption of Linux by the masses is not just patching, but just installing applications at all. It just can not be said with a straight face that installing patches or an application on Linux is as easy as with Windows for average computer users."
I say rubbish to that. I'm been using both Linux and Windows for years, and Linux has Windows beat by miles. The vast majority of applications you need are packaged by the distribution, so you just search in the distros package manager. Most commercial apps come with graphical installers. You might find the odd application you need to install from source (a lot simpler than installing an app from source on windows), but those tend to be cutting edge version 0.1.0 versions of software that you'd wouldn't normally even see in the windows world.
On the other hand, recently I've had to search for an install some apps for windows at work to do basic stuff that normally comes on the distro CDs under Linux. It involved lots of searching of random websites, no real assurance as to where it came from. Different types of installers, or zip files you decompress to a random location on the c:\ drive. There's simply no comparison.
"There are just way too many pitfalls that can trap a user in hours and days of searching for strange dependencies and other things. And a smooth GUI installer...."
If you're sitting at a commandline, ignoring the package manager and just using rpm maybe, but this is something I've not really seen in a long time. Either with urpmi in Mandrake (GUI installer), or now synaptic (GUI installer) in Ubunutu. Every major distro does this for you now.
oh fuck off... It's as obvious as the nose on my face that you haven't seen a Linux distribution in operation since 1999... things have come a long, long way since those dark, dark days...
oh and by the way... it is a major issue to have to keep rebooting a machine
Bill gates has a stroke and dies on the operating table. He meets St Peter at Heaven's gate, and Peter says "well, Bill, you screwed a lot of people over, and there's that 'camel through a needle" thing, but you gave to charity and gave people tools. So we're going to let you decide where to spend eternity. Lets look at heaven."
Peter and Bill step inside and there are people with wings sitting around playing harps and praying.
"Looks boring," says Gates. So they look at hell.
There are people sitting around drinking, smoking, gambling, having orgys, partying and having a great old time.
"I'll take hell," says Gates.
Six months later Peter decides to see how Bill is doing in hell. He goes down, where Gates is chained to a wall, standing in hot coals, with running sores all over him while small creatures take bites out of him. He sees Peter.
"Pete! Pete! This isn't what you showed me!"
"Oh," says St. Peter, "That was just the beta version!"
Windows installers are nightmares on the enterprise level. Too many dialogs that feature settings that should have been issued on a command line. Too many dialogs with non-installation information. (Hello?...EULA/README SHOULD BE HANDLED IN THE APPLICATION!!) These two create a situation where if you are going to install a piece of software on more than a handful of machines you really wish they had a silent install. More often than not you are stuck babysitting installs blindly clicking "Yes"s and "Okay"s and "Next"s. Yay for the TCO.
A "sin" Microsoft cultavated along time ago is confusing "installing" and "configuration" together. If you tie both of these process together it makes support murky. Did the installation fail to place files or did it mess up setting some value somewhere? Installers should be concerned with tracking/placing software components. Programs should be concerned with configuration. Because of MS including this level of complexity it also had the side effect of making it hard for a user to inspect packages before installing. There is no way for a desktop user to find out what a MSI package provides, what it requires, etc before installation. Another side effect is that people writting installers are often forced to package all depedancies with their application instead of making seemless stacking installs.
Making a Windows installer actually enforce component dependancies suffers from the same "DLL Hell" type problem that has plagued Windows forever. Most installations are written loosely: you can uninstall CompA which ProgramB depends upon and the system happily complies.
With all of that said, Windows installers are bad. Linux and other Unix-like systems are okay but they are more interested in software integraty than ease of use. You can't beat Mac: Drag a folder into the apps folder and its installed, take it out of the folder to uninstall it. At this point I can't imagine why anyone would any system to be more like Windows.
Ah ! the eternal windows vs linux discussion !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
So a company called PatchLink is supporting microsoft... funny thing is, its server will only run on (surprise, surprise) Windows. Also, something rather interesting from their system requirements:
Minimum (for limited evaluations)
Processor Intel Pentium or compatible 1-GHz processor
Memory 1024 MB of RAM
Hard Disk 20 GB of available hard disk space for the server
Recommended*
Pentium 800Mhz
1024 MB of RAM
20 GB of available disk space
Since when is the recommended configuration worse than the minimal configuration? 'Cause last I checked, a gigahert was 1000MHz (or maybe 1024, I never did check that...)
Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It's the only way to mak
You might be able to avoid a reboot by going into network connections and then disabling and enabling the network adapter and/or running "ipconfig /release" and "ipconfig /renew" from the command line. (Assuming NT-based Windows) Or you might have to reboot...never can tell with windows.
Your analogy is a bit skewed. A hammer doesn't exactly have the same power in society as a computer. A hammer can't communicate with another hammer. A hammer doesn't hold bank records or social security numbers or credit card accounts. A hammer doesn't spread hammer viruses that allow other hammer users to steal that information. A geek hammer user doesn't use his hammer skills to exploit the weaknesses of your hammer to break into it.
Your car is a decent analogy to a computer, but as you pointed out most people simply dump it into someone else's lap when something "don't work" - that's why so many people drive broken down heaps, or constantly have their vehicles in the shop, or destroy their engines from years of unmaintained use. A person that never bothered to understand that their car needs brake maintenance will only figure it out when their brakes finally go and they careen into another car. But also those who change their own oil, perform tune-ups themselves, and know How Their Car Works tend to drive well-running vehicles that are not road hazards. It's called responsible ownership. Could you argue that awareness of the care and maintenance of a car is an undesirable thing?
You legally are required to have a license to drive a car. If it's simply a tool, why would that be? Why should you have to intimately know the operation of driving a tool? Well, it's a powerful tool. It's also a dangerous tool. You can cause massive amounts of damage with a car because of its power. An idiot driver that doesn't signal before merging on the highway can cause multi-car wrecks. People cause fatalities by running stop lights and stop signs. Similarly, a person with a computer that doesn't care to understand the need for its security quickly becomes a zombie node in massive DoS attacks on other systems. These cost network providers untold sums of money in downtime and customer dissatisfaction. In some cases it allows their personal information to be stolen, just as if they were to keep their bank records in their cars without locking the doors - or their windows were smashed out and the records taken. Do you see the relationship here? The power that computers and global internetworking have given us must be taken with some measure of responsibility for the technology to be safe. Ignorance is not something to take pride or comfort in - there is no reason that computer users should not be more aware of their computers and how to properly maintain them.
Oh, and the hammer geeks that you mentioned are the reason why we have progressed from hand rocks, animal bones, and tree stumps to clawhammers, ball peen hammers, plastic and rubber mallets, and sledgehammers.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
...is my main gripe with Windows.
With a fresh Linux install, you do install, patch, maybe reboot if a new kernel was installed and then you're done. With Windows though, after the initial install you go into the tedious update/reboot cycle about 10 times before it's finally up to date.
I just recently did my yearly Windows format. And WindowsUpdate was a pain in the ass, I think I had to reboot over 20 times.
I would download 20 critical updates, reboot, and then there would be 20 more critical updates, WTF? Why can't they just put them all there at once, so I only have to reboot once. Do this a few more times, and there are still a couple "new" updates after each reboot.
Now comes the "standalone" packages that require that they be installed seperately (i.e DirectX) and require Yet Another Reboot(tm) because It Just Works(tm).
The whole Windows Update system is horribly designed compared to the update programs of the various distros i've used.
Plus I need to have 3 services running in order to get manual or automatic updates
1) Automatic Update Service (Why do I need this enabled if I'm only doing manual updates?)
2) Background Intelligent Transfer Service
3) Cryptographic Services
For example, Mandrake(driva) has MandrakeUpdate (gui for urpmi). You just run it, pick what you want updated (or just select all), and keep working. No reboot. And, unlike windows, you can actually work while the system is updating. You would think that in the year 2005 that your OS would not slow to a crawl because there is some IO happening. You get a reboot message when its done. In fact, you can update an application WHILE you are using it. It seems that most major distros have a pretty simple patch/update facility. I have never heard of a distro that blocked operation of the computer or its applications while updating. In all distros I have seen, the only time a reboot is required is when patching the kernel. Even then, you can keep working without problems and reboot at your convienence.
Windows might be easier for some things but, patching is definitely not it.
____BEGIN_RANTS_____
- I plugged my new usb jump drive in my linux box (prepared to go through hellish config), one second later, I had a drive icon on my desktop. I could drag files to it. I unplugged when I was finished. I took the drive to a Windows XP Professional box, plugged it in. Waited for a minute while windows found the driver. Waited for another 5 minutes as windows informed me I needed to reboot. Logged back in. Navigated to the new drive. Dragged out the folders. Had to right-click the icon in the task bar and disable the drive before I could unplug it. Even apple doesn't abuse users this bad.
- I plug my new HP Photoprinter into my Linux box (prepared to go through hellish config), a few seconds later, a printer config utility pops up, I click a few options, it informs me it needs to download the drivers. When done, it offers to print a test page. It works.
Total time from plugging in to printing test page <60secs.
I plug same printer into my son's Windows XP box. It begs for driver disk. Reboots. I have to manually add a printer, and configure it.
Total time from plugging in to printing test page ~= 10 minutes.
- I see new Linux vulnerability on Slashdot. When I get home I run Mandrake Update, minimize it. I continue doing what I'm doing. It leaves me alone.
I go sit at my son's computer. Little icon says it needs updates. I click it. The system slows to a crawl. It then decides that it needs to close the browser. It then interupts me to say I should reboot. I'm busy, I say I'll do it later. The system starts acting all wacked, I give in.
- I want to type an email to my wife in Spanish. Linux, click the little icon in the task bar to switch to the Intl-Engligh keymap. ~n becomes ñ.
Windows, alt-0241 every freakin time. Linux, 'i becaomes í, windows, alt-0237. Where's the intuitivness? Where's the easier to use interface? WTF?
____END_RANTS_____I think windows usability arguments are starting to get very thin. I'm really beginning to think that the only thing that windows really has going for it is a larger selection of apps and device drivers.
Disclaimer: I am a developer, not a system admin. My linux box is a pretty standard install. I haven't done anything special to it. I hate all operating systems (I just hate linux about 10% less than the others). I am not an open source advocate but, I don't mind using it.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
Comparing a computer to *a* hammer is just foolishness.
A computer is more like a tool *shop* than a tool. And to that analogy, I'll point out that I was taught about shop safety during middle school. Furthermore, I do know shop geeks that spend a lot of time playing with their tools, looking at new tools, etc. They build their own shop equipment, too. I'll even take the position you propose that it's ignorant to go into a shop without learning proper safety procedures, which as close as I can reasonably apply your "get to know the hammer" comment to a shop.
When you suggest that two dissimilar things are alike for the purposes of metaphor, you show everyone that you have no idea what you're talking about. They're not similar just because you say that they are.
I'm tempted to start thinking that these "paid for by Bllly G" studies are not necessarily how things actually work, but how he thinks they ought to work- a theory vs reality thing.
Maybe, but the article is about servers being patched by admins. They ought to be smart enough to use package management tools like apt-get. Once you've learnt to use these tools, it's a lot easier to keep a whole system, including all the non-OS components, safely patched with all the right security updates. It's much trickier on a Windows machine, as the applications aren't updated the same way as the OS, and in general each application has its own mechanism for applying patches.
In the average lifetime a Windows user is able to apply 42,195 patches, counting updates for AVG, Spybot, AdAware, etc, and reapplying patches when the OS requires reinstallation. The average Linux user applies only 224 patches in the same number of years. If that isn't proof that Windows is easier patch, I don't know what is.
I assume, then, you also do all your own maintenance on your car? Or are you still using "proprietary" automobiles because you don't "really know how to use" a car, and aren't "willing to learn."
You have no more right to condescend to a typical computer user than a mechanic does to you.
I run RHEL 3 and 4, both on my workstation and several servers.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I hate to tell you, but there *ARE* hammer geeks out there... note that said geeks (blacksmiths) are usually building tools to do certain tasks, but they certainly are modding hammers... :-)
Yeah, apt-get is so expensive to use.
I definately agree that their use of a hammer was a bad analogy and that a car is much better, but (s)he makes a good point.
A computer is just a tool, like a car. You use a computer to accomplish a task, much like a car. Sure there are car enthusiests and computer enthusiests. Those people will delve into the deeper aspects of their respective tools.
To use this analogy, recompiling your kernel is akin to rebuilding your engine, sure I could do oil changes and tune-ups, but i'm not going to rebuild my engine.
Do you think that people who can't rebuild their car from top to bottom shouldn't drive them? The level of ability for operating a linux computer has, in general, been more in depth than most people wish to go. Sure they can run windows update and disk defrag, but they're not about to compile something, let alone recompile the kernel.
I think when linux reaches that point, which I think it is quickly approaching, then that will be the fulcrum point when larger groups of people will begin to switch.
Hmmm witty sig or funny sig? Maybe elitest techy sig!
Seeing that I'd have to do it so much more for MS than for OSS, I'd hope that it's cheaper. I'd hate to pay more for more pain in the ...
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
I absolutely agree. Are IT managers going to read this and actually think Linux costs more? Hell no. They are going to say, "Damn, Microsoft is reeeeeeally stretching for new studies."
FUD is great if your audience is morons. If they are aren't, then all you're doing is broadcasting "Hey, I'm a big, fat liar and I think you're stupid."
More FUD, Bill. Truckloads, please. Tell us that Linux t-shirts cost more or that Linux runs too well and causes shorter lifespan on CPU's. TOC, drop, and ROI, Guys.
Is it even neccessary to report these 'non-news' bits of PR fluff? I'm guessing that most Slashdot readers have run both Windows and Linux, and know first hand that Linux is orders of magnitude easier to keep patched, with or without Xen. In addition, most Linux/Unix apps are designed and packaged so you don't need to install them on every single machine in the first place. For most enterprises, application should be installed on application servers and NFS mounted everyplace else. Before somebody says, 'yeah, but then if the network goes down, everybody is down', I would suggest that if enterprises spent a tiny fraction of the money on their network that they spend on Windows and anti-virus software and desktop computers with moving parts, the network isn't going to be down much , if at all, assuming their IT staff is even halfway competent. We run primarily a Windows shop here. The Windows servers have issues on a daily basis. The internal network, to the best of my knowlege, has never prevented anybody from working. In any event, our truly critical data like the exchange server and source control server are already only available when the network is running. Without these servers being network accessible, we are pretty much dead in the water anyway, no matter how much bloatware is installed on our desktop machines.
Not at all. But I do think they should be aware of security in whatever operating system they choose (or are chosen for) to drive their machine with. Naturally, I can't expect that - just like I can't expect the driver next to me on the highway to look beside them before swerving into my lane, but it would be nice.
I used to think that everyone should switch to BSD or Linux, but it's really a naive idea. There will always be Windows fanboys, uninformed computer buyers, technophobes, and simple users that really are better off in that environment. And that's fine. What I am wary of is that many of them are the crazy drivers with the beaten up junkers causing hell on the information highway, because they simply never bothered to get a clue.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
Volume, volume, volume.
The 6 pack of soda is cheeper than buying a single can too.
"There will always be Windows fanboys, uninformed computer buyers, technophobes, and simple users that really are better off in that environment."
Unfortunately, all too true.
Although, I have to say, I have a windows PC at home and it's fine for what I do with it. It doesn't crash, it's no zombie and has no viruses, but I take care of it and have it properly secured.
To say that windows only survives due to ignorance and arrogance is silly. It's just another OS for users to choose from, and as long as that's the case, somebody will always use it.
"crazy drivers with the beaten up junkers causing hell on the information highway"
That is an awesome line.
Hmmm witty sig or funny sig? Maybe elitest techy sig!
I run Novell's Linux desktop and use Zen for Linux (Red Carpet) to update my machine. When updates are available for my machine, a little icon pops up on my status bar to let me know. I simply click on the icon and then enter my root password to begin updates. In my experience it's been faster than Windows update as you never have to reboot for changes to take effect. I support some 60 users who are moving to Novell's Linux desktop and have never had a user complain over difficulty in updating their machines. On the contrary, they're suprised with the speed and impressed that the same program can also be used to install and remove all of their programs for them.
I dissagree, the relative costs and benefits should be discussed. There are significant costs to Winblows that do not exist in your nice apt-get world. There are also significant advantages to free software that will never exist in the non free world. With blowhards paid to publish nonsense about "complication", it's good to do a quick reality check.
The real world of enterprise M$ upkeep is completely foo-bared by useless, paranoid anti-copy mechanisms. A typical upgrade of software is done by third parties who hire gangs of floppy pushing drones for after hour shift work. Not all applications can be upgraded from a central server, regardless of what server you are running, Zen included. Many packages have to be installed individually, so they can update the stupid registry properly.
The cost and complexity of upgrading even single packages is a reason Big Dumb Companies take so long to get new software. They have to wait until enough work is accumulated to justify the costs. This is a significant disadvantage for obvious reasons.
Some of the advantages, other than trivial application, to free systems are worth mentioning as well. By making custom meta packages, accounting or clerical for example, you can precisely control what packages are put onto everyone's systems. Because any old white box can be a repository, outside bandwith can be cut down to a single sync operation per location. Microsoft, I think, still makes patch serving difficult and version upgrading impossible. Even a PHB can understand the benefit of such flexibility - the right tool goes to the right person at the right time at lower costs.
Take your pick, gangs of slaves or a few customized deb repositories. I can't imagine how the gangs could ever be cheaper, and of course, the result shows up in real TCO studdies better than it does marketing BS from M$.
If you don't have such a system WTF are you doing wasting your time on Slashdot?
I don't work for a big company, but one day I'd like to own one. In the mean time, the news is entertaining and helps me keep up the simple home network I have.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
...Wasn't that the color Dilbert's boss thought best for databases, as it had the most RAM?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The idea here is that updates would then be as follows:
In fact, if the new version of the program is "close enough" to the old version, you can probably migrate over the process state information, so that users aren't even aware that the upgrade ever happened at all, other than all the nifty new features being present and the old bugs being absent.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Forget the piddly stuff -- the minor everyday patches and rebooting. The big cost with keeping Windows running is that you need to fork out ton$ of money for new versions every few years, and all the costs associated with that. Older versions aren't supported, or even upgradeable in a practical sense.
OTOH, I have a couple of Linux servers that have had nothing but minor patches for almost ten years. They're still going strong, with no shortcomings WRT running the latest software. In this same time period I would have had to buy and reinstall Windows, and reconfigure the entire system, at least 3 times. Even considering my time as free, this is still too damned costly!
Seriously, because updaters such as up2date, yum, etc, can be run with local servers, you should be able to get the updates served from a local server, rather than over the Internet. That cuts the bandwidth requirements, and is sensible anyway as site admins really should verify an update in a corporate network before deploying it.
Although a lot of corporations DO serve updates for Windows centrally, the standard Windows update tools are not really designed to support such a system, which means you either have a non-standard update scheme OR you have unnecessary load on the WAN.
This doesn't contradict your main points (which are perfectly true for all standard installs and standard update routines) but it does mean that both points are actually reversed in many corporate settings.
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)
Subject says it all. The toll that should be
mentioned is Zenworks not Xen.
That's beacuse your English so f... up with pronounciation.
Actually, I find it surprising that someone would suggest that auto-updates are better in Windows currently than in Linux-based systems; it's the exact opposite. One of the key cultural advantages Linux has over Windows is the use of central distro repositories for the acquisition and updating of virtually all software on the system. This allows one single update process to update everything on the system at whatever interval you set.
In Windows, this is only available for core OS components; even Microsoft Office doesn't support automatic updates. Every other miscellaneous installed application -- including things that at the most risk for exploits because they are constantly exposed to foreign data, such as Macromedia Flash, Quicktime, Realplayer, etc -- must be upgraded individually. Some of them have their own built-in update checking systems, but very few are capable of updating themselves automatically unless you are always running them with administrator rights. The only way the Windows world could have the smooth auto-update functionality of the Linux world would be for each individual application to install its own auto-update service. I'm primarily a Windows users for miscellaneous reasons, but I've found myself paying money to www.versiontracker.com just to try and keep up with new versions of software without spending ungodly amounts of time checking every single individual website manually. The supreme ease of updates in Linux is one of its greatest strengths.
I'm not sure how many Linux distros come with a check box to turn on a daily cron job for fully automatic updating, but any that are intended to be used by fairly clueless users should probably do this by default.
I've used Red Carpet to patch my desktop for over a year. I can also use it to install any package or application I choose and it resolves dependencies for me. The GUI is quite simple and has been easy to use. You ought to give it a try.
" So you are saying that the total downtime for 150 Linux servers was about equal to 26 NT servers? That means the total downtime for each machine indicates Windows had six times more downtime."
If you reboot 10.000 Windows machines and 1 Windows machine simultaneously. On average and ignoring network traffic, the times should be the same.. Of course, the OS might not matter (if you're objective)
So this says nothing about comparisons between the OSes. You'd need a measured DIFFERENCE for that.
Linux does have distributed patch management for large businesses. It's Zen for Linux, formerly Red Carpet. I've used it on my desktop for over a year and I've found it to be very fast and very easy to use. It not only handles patch management, but also handles updates to all applications and the OS as well.
... when pigs fly
This sig is false.
Freedom costs a buck-oh-five you know.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
Lately Windows patch costed me two evenings. It started like my friend asked me for assistance since her computer has started to crash (this was happening for about month). As I've known from her the system was 2 years old (but fully patched, firewalled with AV etc.) - so I decided it would be faster to reinstall it instead of debugging it.
:))) Also my googling revealed that at least 50 people had the same issue. I know that this must be something specific for some hardware that she (and others) had. But mind you - *all* of her hardware was running *certified* (by MS) drivers. So don't give me shit with hardware vendor fault since MS has certified this hardware.
:) And go fuck yourself with this report. Nobody actually belives it instead of stupid fuckers that are too stupid to actually decide about anything.
;)
Reinstalled it (XP SP2). Went smooth. I've just advised her to leave computer on for night to get patches via Automagic Updates.
Next evening she called me that her computer wont boot anymore. I've visited her again and she was right - the machine rebooted constantly without even going into logging screen. None of rescue modes worked.
Since previous night I have installed fresh system I decided to debug it. Hour with Knoppix (Windoze wont boot, and I've needed to access NTFS partition to look at logs) and googling from my laptop at hand I've analyzed the cause of the problem (but I still don't know the details) - it was MS patch issued like month before (since the computer started to crash). The patch that patched something in kernel. I've removed and blocked the patch and now it works.
Now guess what - MS has nothing to say about it. Actually their "support" advised me to install it over again (which I did previous night).
Now this was just not too important home dekstop machine. But I can imagine the same case with more critical stuff.
I have *never* experienced something like this with Linux. I can hardly imagine it. Faultly kernel patch? No problem, just boot previous kernel and it is OK (all modern update mechanisms keep older kernels for this purpose). Report bug. Wait few days for newer kernel and get done with it.
Now with MS in serious setup you need not also to install the patches. You need to do hell lot of stupid shit with them. You need to test them roughly before you apply them to production. And it *is* quite costly - not to mention that if you want proper update mechanisms you need full MS infrastructure (servers etc.) that costs a lot. And it still wont update all your software at once...
So dont give me stupid shitty shit.
Peace.
We take cars to mechanics because parts wear out and fluids need replacing. Why should computers need mechanics for anything except the fried hard drive and the malfunctioning CPU fan?
Software should not need maintainance. Computers should be smart enough to handle that automatically. There is no missing piece of technology to make this happen. Apple's computers are largely maintainance free. Microsoft's OS could be largely maintainance free if spyware removal tools were better (and browsers were more secure). But most Linux distributions are anything but maintainance free, even with decent package managers.
Just to clarify for any comic book geeks who missed it, halber_mensch is just applying that important lesson that Peter Parker learned from Uncle Ben to the current situation. "With great power comes great responsibility."
And yet when someone treats a computer simply as the tool it should be, they are branded 'fearful of change' and 'unthinking'?
I've been involved in the computer industry in various fields for about 20 years now, and I have seen first hand how people interact with computers. Back when mainframes were still mainstream, their operators knew what they were doing. Nowadays all you need is $400 and a credit card to get a home computer, so naturally the skill level of computer users, on average has dropped considerably. That is natural and happens in many different fields when a "specialty" item is released into the general public. You can't swing a dead cat nowadays without hitting someone with a cell phone, but 10 years ago it was almost unheard of to expect someone to have one.
The point is, you have many many people with little or no computer usage skills using computers. These people are (to use the car analogy) the people who don't get their oil changed, don't have the tires rotated, don't check fluids, accelerate too fast just start starting the engine, etc. These are the people who consider the cars to be 'black boxes'. They don't care how they work, just that they work. When they break, they take them to a "certified technician" to fix them. Even though they are SUPPOSED to do routine maintenance, they don't. Who knows why. Maybe they're ignorant about the requirements. (Has a car salesman ever told you explicitly that you need to change the oil? How many of you read the car manual cover to cover?) Maybe they're lazy. Maybe they forget. Maybe they're too busy. With computers its no different. Even though Mr. Average Windows User might know how to click on "Windows Update" on the start menu, if you changed that to a command-line interface, where they would have to type ANYTHING, I guarantee there would be people who don't do it.
More than half (probably close to 3/4s) of the people I've worked with in the past only have up-to-date systems because their computers were set up to automatically patch at a certain time every day (like lunchtime). A small percentage of people make it a routine (like checking email in the morning) of making sure they are up to date. The rest of them are just out of date, waiting for an attack of some variety.
Note that I didn't say that users have no idea how to use a computer. I said that users have no idea how to REALLY use a computer. Extrapolate from that what you like, but what it means is that the average user doesn't know how to adequately take steps to make sure they are current (OS patches, virus updates, etc)
Long story short (yeah I know, too late) if you make something that people are used to just a bit more complex, you won't change everyone's habits. There are always those people who get left behind for various reasons (usually due to their attitude.) For those people, I would recommend this book. Adapting to change is critical to the survival of many species, and humans are no exception. While using Windows over Linux, or vice-versa isn't a life-threatening choice, its the attitude of people not willing to accept change that will leave them in the dust.
And they said zombies weren't real!
`emerge gaim xchat`
Guess what, two programs installed at the same time (sorta), and I don't have to restart my whole computer to upgrade them!
I'm also almost done crafting a nifty little gadget I call a "webslinger" ... basically I strap a large coil of CATV to my back, and I have this little wrist gun that shoots it out about 150 meters... I haven't gotten it to stick to anything but rj45 wall jacks yet, but I'm working on it...
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
...but lousy for enterprise deployments. Using just Windows Update for your maintaince for more than a handful of machines and you'll be tearing your hair out. Simply put: Windows Update is not sufficient for enterprise level control and anyone who thinks so is quite bonkers. It isn't even close to what IT needs and you'd be lucky if your desktop users don't even screw up using it.
well, perhaps then, you should graduate to a modern distro...
Thought you may want to consider changing your sig:
~~~~~~~~~~~~
ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved
While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.iana.org/
The following error was encountered: Connection Failed
The system returned: (113) No route to host
The remote host or network may be down. Please try the request again.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Read this folks - his comment makes sense
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
Plus rebooting a Windows server may take a long time. I have rebooted Win2K Server machines running MSSQL that take up to 1.5 hours to come back up. BTW, this happens not every time but maybe 50% of the time, which just drove us up the wall!
It might be easier if you have no idea how to really use a computer, and are not willing to learn.
You seem to confuse "use" with "maintain", a common failure among OS advocates. Using a computer does not require any knowledge of how to upgrade/patch the OS or apps. Using a computer is simply knowing how to operate the application you need to accomplish your task. Patching may be simple and necessary but it should be entirely automated, if not you are doing maintenance.
In most corporate environments you would not be allowed to set automatic updates on.
Untrue, in corporate environments IT would have their own Windows Update server and have complete control of what patches the users get.
Microsoft can make a patch and post it on its website among other possible venues. That is not the problem, as this among many other discourses on open source vs closed source patching avoids the real issue. That is the issue in the back of the minds of all closed source patchers at one time or another. It is the unspoken and unspeakable question as the eleventy-seventh patch on some obscure 'hang-trap' or security 'issue' yet again involves a web based 'patch that adds unknown and unknowable changes and subtractions and additions to a working system in order to make it 'what'? That question is: "Is this the secret software that will finally make my machine irrevocably no longer mine; is this the secret patch that sends my proprietary data as a gift to a competitor who happens to have made a secret deal with microsoft?; or is this the latest spy from 'homeland security, Xupiter, CWS, or sextrakker, or whatever such that I will never be able to remove it and will never be able to trust my own machine as long as I run windows?"! ....Is this patch the final poison pill that finally does in what remains of my freedoms and privacy in this country. Faced with this question will be almost all computer users eventually. How they answer it will vary. For many, the silent refusal to patch will be the safest and most reasonable answer. Better the devil we know, and better to be at least a little safe than eternally sorry.
Linux is the creation and the voice of the people who are the will and the way of the future of computing. All proprietary or 'closed source' softwares are really security risks by definition. We all know that evil flourishes in the dark.
I feel that Microsoft patches are actually less of a pain in the ass for me. I've not had much of anything break because of a Microsoft patch, compared to what breaks with an FC patch.
MS patches may be "lees of a pain" to you. but I recently went through a number of reinstalls because I used MS update to install patches. I first did a format then a compleat install and things would be alright. Then I'd run update after which I'd keep getting errors. So after doing this a few tymes I finally decided not to run update. With all the problems I've had with WinTel I decided the next computer I get will be a Mac, not that I haven't used one before, to the left of my pc I've got a Mac and have used Macs almost twenty years. Now I'm wondering if I should set it up as dualboot.
FalconShould there be a Law?
or perhaps not
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.