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Microsoft Continues Anti-OSS Strategy
MacDaffy writes "Microsoft's General Manager of Platform Strategy, Michael Taylor, continues Microsoft's press blitz against Open Source in general and Linux in particular in a CNET Interview. He says of Linux: 'You can build it, design it, and it will work great. The trouble begins when you want to add things to it...(due to) the brittle nature of the platform, when you do that, other things break.'"
Its simple really. Microsoft hired a team of scientists to figure out how to implement the third step in the UnderPants Gnome theory of economics. They succeded and thus... profit.
They fear going Open Source would divulge this information and that would put a damper on thier profit margin.
Its rumored that MS is in talks with the Sock Monster as well.
I mean c'mon. That was in 1988; by computing standards that was prehistoric. Everything Microsoft wrote should have been looked at for that bug ever since. They didn't. Microsoft didn't even bother to look at security issues much at all until a few years ago. Unix was ahead of that curve by 5-10 years.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Mod parent up. If you do this with OSS or any OS in a corporate production environment, you shouldn't be in the job you have. Every good amin I know has test machines of whatever flavor OS they run, for just that purpose.
I switched to a Mac a couple years ago, and its handling of applications astounded me. Why can I just drag and drop an application onto my hard drive and have it work? Even better is uninstalling it, which involves just trashing the app. Why hasn't Linux or Windows implemented something like this (maybe Linux can, I don't use it enough to know)? I'm not trying to fan some flamewar, I just don't understand why it works so well, but noone else seems to have implemented it.
However, it turns out that Microsoft doesn't offer much more than FOSS when it comes to backing their product. The following is from the WinXP EULA:
WTF does the NON-INFRINGEMENT statement refer to?
There's really nothing innovative today that Linux does that we can't do.
One word: fork()
839*929
"What you mean 'WE', Kemosabe?"
:o) And when the HD died, the machine kept on ticking. This isn't the first time I'd experienced it, so I recommended to them that they not panic and deal with it during the regular maintenance period (on the weekend.) It kept happily running until I powered it off to replace the drive. I've no doubt that it would have continued to run until the power ran out (which would have been a long time, as it was on a big honking UPS.)
There's really nothing innovative today that Linux does that we can't do.
If by "we" he means Microsoft, then the response is "well duh" (after all, they *do* have the source code.)
But the obvious response is "then why don't you?"
I use Linux machines as routers for a local school district. A couple of weeks ago, the HD in one of them died - and nobody noticed (well, I noticed when the nightly backup didn't happen.) This machine was doing packet filtering, traffic shaping, and policy routing (iproute2 rocks!
Let's see Windows do traffic shaping.
Let's see Windows do policy routing.
Then let's see it keep running when you rip out the hard drive.
Hrmm Microsoft Flight Simulator has done it to me... additionally some programs have done it because "Windows has a lock on the directory" and you have to reboot and manually delete.. definately a Microsoft/OS issue (albiet some of them may be bad uninstallers)
/jumps straight to google groups
. b/browse_frm/thread/d2f6b1b351300c8/0b932aae5d1d45 44?q=%22buffer+overrun%22+1989&rnum=4&hl=en#0b932a ae5d1d4544
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/news.software
a patch announcement from september '89, referring to a buffer overrun as "this nasty problem"
MS' own recommended strategy for servers is one box for each function. AD tree that's a box. An IIS server? That's a box. A SQL server? Yet another box.
I can and have run DNS, Samba, Apache, Netatalk, MySQL and others on the same machine and it just sits in the corner and does it's job. I think MS doesn't want to start throwing stones in this particular glass house.
Depends on the scope of the project. Sure things like Firefox [re: not linux] are hard to add to because they are big ...
But i'd say Linux is a hell of a lot more extensible than windows.
Say I want to develop a new device [/dev/toms] for some reason. I have the Linux Kernel SOURCE CODE for free to look at. What do I get in the windows camp for free?
And they really have to learn to distinguish between the kernel [that is Linux] and distros. The kernel for the most part is very stable. Yes, the bleeding edge [e.g. 2.6.12.3 may not work well] versions are a tad buggy but the recent ones [2.6.12 for instance] works just fine on my AMD laptop, AMD64 dual core desktop and P4 Prescott desktop.
Three different architectures with different drives, graphics, etc [my 64 has SATA drives too and a PCI-X graphics card] but they all work out of the box with a trivial kernel configuration.
I can take the kernel and use it with Gentoo. In this distro I can add/remove programs with a simple emerge command. You think installshield is easy? How hard is
emerge firefox
or
emerge -C firefox
etc, etc, etc.
This is just more fud from a person who obviously doesn't use [or take the time to understand] how the technology actually works.
I guess that's his job, to spread FUD to sell Windows. Unfortunately for him people are waking up and are not FUCKING MORONS anymore.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
MS' own recommended strategy for servers is one box for each function. AD tree that's a box. An IIS server? That's a box. A SQL server? Yet another box.
Hmm, they recommend that, but I'd like to mention 2 things here:
1. This has been a recommended strategy for building servers, one that MS finally adapted itself (tho possibly for the wrong reasons).
It is a very good idea because it ensures physical seperation between the different services and greatly reduces the potential of compromise of one service spreading to other services.
2. You can have IIS, AD and MSSQL on one machine. It is not recommended, but it is quite possible.
Is he seriously suggesting that 10 years ago no one had ever heard of a buffer overrun?
He's not that far away. Aleph1's famous article was from 1996 and is one of the first publications that got mainstream attention.
It begins with "Over the last few months there has been a large increase of buffer
overflow vulnerabilities being both discovered and exploited." - so saying this was unknown in 1995 is not quite true, but it certainly was a fairly new and not entirely well understood problem.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
For those of you who don't get it -- zoom in to the max.
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
The R&D on the space pen thing is an urban legend.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
"no one has a real true standard to enforce anywhere."
"A standard way of doing things are key to appeal to a large audience."
Freedesktop standards
Gnome HIG
KDE Guidelines
If I use either KDE or Gnome, I very rarely use applications that don't match the environment. My desktop of choice is Gnome, and I've found it much more consistent than the windows GUI.
Windows User Experience
Office (XP anyway) is really inconsistent. I normally use Microsoft Word, in which every new document opens in a seperate window. However in Excel, the new documents actually open in a new window inside the main excel window, but they create another application button on the taskbar, giving the illusion that it's opened in a seperate window.
Sometimes I've had 1 document open that I've not edited, and 1 that I have edited. I'm used to Office bugging me to save documents even when I've not edited them, so when I hit the big "X" button on the window, and it asks to save, I just click "no" because being a human, I don't read messages that I expect to say something, stupid I know. I lose my work.
I'm not the only person this has happened to either...
I know I'll probably get modded troll or something...
Nope, you get an MSDN subscription, and you can set up as many machines for development as you want. Still costs some money, but not nearly as much as the actual licenses.
they've had that ever since XP. is that three years now? you have to click a checkbox to turn it on. it couldn't be simpler. you're talking about win 2k, which is eol'd i believe.