Isn't it funny that the only person to sledge their non-choice of OS was a Mac user?
The funny thing is that the brainwashed users did not call the GNU/Linux a cancer or Mac users gay. No, today they are confident in the best Windoze ever. Ha.
On average, a RANDOM 4K read from flash is about 10x faster than from HDD. Now, how does that translate to end-user perf? Under memory pressure and heavy disk activity, the system is much more responsive; on a 4GB machine with few applications running, the ReadyBoost effect is much less noticeable.
Translation: You want 4GB of RAM to run Vista.
Q Isn't user data on a removable device a security risk?
A: This was one of our first concerns and to mitigate this risk, we use AES-128 to encrypt everything that we write to the device.
Unsaid: it was much easier to leave the contents encrypted than it was to create an additional "security risk." This probably has something to do with them encrypting all of your data for the "trusted path."
Ever hear of the hybrid hard drive?
Yes, but I would not buy one programed by Microsoft. We shall see if their 10 year life estimate holds water any more than their previous claims to safe data storage and secure computing.
Don't you just hate how they are paying people to fill Wikipedia with this kind of spam? No bother, the truth will out.
I'm hoping... that this excellent example of free speech will hold up as something for America to follow.
Ma Bell porn? I get this 1911 picture of black plastic, black chords and state sponsored domination. That's kinky but not to my taste.
This violates all sorts of common carrier rules. It's clearly a case of offering a service unrelated to communications. In the US, the carriers are guilty of suppressing their competitors in other services and threatening network neutrality.
If you get your wish, be prepared for your ability to publish to rocket back to the 12th century, but worse. They will be charging you for access both ways and applying extra surcharges where it would benefit their publishing business. They will own the press and you will be a "consumer". Your ability to publish will be limited to handbills no one will bother to read because only lunatics would be denied permission to publish electronically.
I don't think juries take kindly to the LART defense.
You don't have to hurt anyone, you just need to destroy the spam device. Given the level of hatred most people have for spam, you will never be arrested much less convicted by a jury. The local police will probably help you hold the loser down as you happily hammer the device into bent pieces.
For further proof, you should watch this video from 'The Chaser's War On Everything' (comedy show over here) - they go to busy areas with $20 notes, calling "Free money? Free money?" waving it in people's faces - everyone ignores them, says no, or tries extremely hard to avoid them.
It's sad and perverse that people have been screwed over so often by advertisers that an honest person can't give money away on the street. It's as if the monopolist's bad behavior makes people less likely to look elsewhere. Ah yes, wiki has the name for it, battered person syndrome.
... becomes depressed and unable to take any independent action that would allow him or her to escape the abuse. The condition explains why abused people often do not seek assistance from others, fight their abuser, or leave the abusive situation. Sufferers have low self-esteem, and often believe that the abuse is their fault. Such persons usually refuse to press criminal charges against their abuser, and refuse all offers of help, often becoming aggressive or abusive to others who attempt to offer assistance.
If you know who sent it, and can identify the sender, you can thus take legal action against them directly, so it probably should be handled in a different way. If it becomes a big enough problem, something will be done about it.
Great logic - because you know who did it and can do something about it, the existing laws should not be enforced and you can't do anything about it. Legally, that is.
Spam kiosks will be vandalized. Some kind of EMP device would be nice but the kiosks won't last long enough. If the pure psychic energy of spam hatred does not destroy the kiosk instantly, it will be kicked over, smashed by a vehicle or burnt within seconds of being turned on.
Don't buy stuff with DRM. I can do it, i did it so far. But i doubt more than 20% of people who yap against DRM will stay away from it.
So, you don't watch DVDs? That might be good for you, but you are missing out on a diminishing but still significant part of your own culture. Avoiding DRM is hard and becoming harder. Blaming people who don't have real choices is counter productive.
Instead of making the false choice between your freedom and participating in your culture, we need to change the laws that force that choice. The whole point of copyright was to encourage science and the arts so that they would be enjoyed by as many people as possible. Current copyright and patent laws are an abomination and achieve exactly the opposite. Patent law is discouraging innovation and disclosure. Copyright law has kept almost all recorded media out of the public domain and serves only a few large publishers. That needs to change.
It is a little easier, right now, to fight the newer schemes but it's going to get harder. The high definition format wars throws real cold water on purchases. Who wants to buy a $5,000 TV that won't work they way you expect it to? The problem is DRM and it won't go away with the current format war because there can always be a new format and the makers can now remove the keys for the old one. As the price of those TVs drop and the situation starts to look like DVD vrs VCR, it will be harder to convince people not to buy the new junk.
The flip side to not buying DRM'd crap is buying and promoting stuff that respects you. Give away free software and live GNU/Linux CDs. Buy Creative Commons work, give money to the free software foundation and buy Linux games, purchase Star Wreck t-shirts. Sing dance and have fun. Eventually, laws follow popular opinion.
If your portable DVD player is running WinCE, you already have what you are asking for. He managed to push.WMV onto all of them, so you might not even need WinCE.
Gate's is focused on expanding his computing monopoly into entertainment and what he wants was the focus of his keynote speech. The point of treacherous computing is to give M$ the keys to everything, regardless of cost.
Vista offers the best chance of convincing hardware makers that DRM won't sell. The music industry is learning, now it's time to teach the holdouts in the computer industry. With it's slow sales, XP showed up the upgrade train six years ago. Vista is going to blow it apart. There's real hardware improvement out there but the only way to really enjoy it is through free software that the industry is fighting tooth and nail. It's hard to sell stuff while you are busy thwarting your customers with buggy and paranoid shit instead of giving them what they want.
You really are one paranoid little man. Seriously, anyone who even takes a critical look at Linux to you is a sockpuppet of Gates/Ballmer/Allchin/Satan/me.
You are annoying but you should not think you are equal to your masters. They consider you a pawn to be fucked over and discarded.
You must be one of those people who descend on Amazon and "tag" every single Microsoft product with "defectivebydesign".
No, but that sounds like a good idea and I'm glad that someone is doing it.
I wish you would all stay here and here only.
Hmmmm, you don't like me and I don't like you. Let's make a deal. You go away, your friends leave computer vendors, ISPs and everyone else alone and our paths will never cross. How about that? You get to pay Bill Gates for permission to use your computer, I get to use my computer and both of us are happy. Best of all, you can avoid advocating M$ shit to a free software web forum.
Now that would be super, but you've got a job to do don't you? Suck it up and get back to work.
Uhhhh, if someone doesn't know how to burn an ISO or tinker with their BIOS, is this installer really something they should be screwing around with?
I understand that it's dangerous to "screw around" with your computer when it's running Windows, but I did not know that writing a file was one of those dangerous things now.
You would be amazed at how difficult some vendors make it to do what should be very easy. Though burning an ISO image should be the easiest thing a program could do with a blank CD, most burning programs either lack the option or hide it. Telling your computer what device to boot off should also be easy, but the larger vendors don't display the keystroke required to get into the BIOS configuration utility. What should take five minutes can easily take hours and could take a trip to the store to buy burning software. People are usually put off but these types of guessing game, especially when the results are uncertain.
All of it backfires eventually. A user who's insulted enough will do something about it. Sooner or later, they all learn.
Legacy systems, documents, and most importantly user training in said systems and documents. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" rules when computers are the tool rather than the end goal in and of themselves, and it's hard to fault that logic. If you change your systems you're effectively "breaking" your employees in terms of their productivity, and fixing them is quite a job. It's only justified when the end benefits are worth the pain, and to be fair in most cases they probably aren't...
Funny how Microsoft has gotten away with just that. Every version of Windoze has a few pointless GUI changes and little real improvement, yet the Dells of the world push it out. Vista and Office 2007 mark the largest GUI change in a long time. Legacy software is broken. Where does that leave the user's "faultless" logic?
Free software interfaces are more stable. Window maker, is a Next clone and it's basics have not changed in fifteen years. There are several others, like the fvwm or olvwm, and Enlightenment, that have been just as rock stable. At the same time there have been many other excellent interfaces that have grown up. All of them are extensively customizeable so that you can have as much change in each as you like and they all work together, so you can mix and match. The same performance from Microsoft would have Windows 3.1 GUI be adequate, customizable still available and easily interchangeable with a dozen other excellent window managers. Right.
The same arguments apply to file formats and hardware. Vista is bringing with it.DOCX, the M$ "open" format with a 6,000 page spec. It's also going to obsolete 54% of exiting computers and 94% of them are not really "premium" ready, so their users will soon be disappointed by an upsell that degrades their actual performance. DRM promisses to make it all that much worse.
The real hope is that Vista goes nowhere. XP did not move hardware and it had much better driver and legacy application support at launch. It took four long years for it to be majority. People want new hardware and it's time for it to move. There are major improvements that are good for both performance users and people who want something small and quiet. If Vista's changes are so bad that it actually harms sales, look for Dell, HP and others to follow Lenovo's lead to make up the difference. That would break the M$ monopoly once and for all and then we would not have to worry about this upgrade train nonsense.
the high cost of Windows, and the ever-increasing hardware requirements for it, and a free OS that can run on existing hardware looks pretty darn good.
And Blaster didn't infect all the machines that were patched a month before it was released. Your point is valid but hardly some sort of mystical advantage for Linux.
You are right, there's nothing mystical about it.
Thanks for reminding me of the famous Blaster worm, which clearly demonstrates the fragility of non free software and it's adverse effects on the internet and commerce in general. While a patch may have been available, it was not widely deployed because it broke other non free services and programs. Blaster infected computers on Microsoft's own campus and variants remain a menace to this day because people continue to run software from their "original" CD when Windoze goes tits up and must be reinstalled. Businesses that use Windoze were particularly harmed, often having to do without their networks for a week. The infrastructure of the internet itself was overwhelmed by the traffic it generated, so everyone suffered.
Blaster was just one of many demonstrations. The same flaws are what the botnet operators use to build their networks today. The continued existence of those flaws is why one in four internet connected computers is now part of a botnet. The binary Microsoft monoculture simply sucks.
The Ramen story, is the antithesis of all of the above. Despite the high prominence of the hosts, on a small percentage was ever compromised and today the problem has vanished. Virtually no one would be running free software from 2003 unpatched, let alone free software from 2000 or before.
Is it likely that other OS's, as they gain marketshare, will be higher-profile (though more difficult) targets? Maybe. Is it a possibility?... running my user accounts as non-admin, backing up and running Clam A/V are all pretty painless on OS X, and easily worth the effort to set up.
What you know makes your possible scenerio rather unlikely. Free software runs most of the world's web servers, where the best bandwith is, so it's already a big but hard target.
Taking further steps for yourself is still prudent. You want to make backups to ward off hardware failure and your own mistakes, even if your computer never touched an internet connected network. Running anti-virus software is mostly a waste of cycles that negates one of the primary benefits of using a free platform. It might be a nice thing to run on a mail server but non M$ desktops don't need it now. Free software distributions already force a non root user and other reasonable steps will continue to be taken. You can take it for granted that a distribution like Debian uses reasonable defaults and their administration guide is full of good advice.
If you can tell me what the "safe" 75% do that the broken 25% did not do, I'll believe only 25% are owned. It's not the users, it's not the Windoze version, it's not the network, it's not the anti-virus software, it's more like random chance. Dismissed as "harmless" at the time, worms have made it all the way into automated teller machines that never see the internet. Vista is already busted and the anti-virus industry has obviously failed. If the botnet population is only 25% today, it will quickly become 100% because there is no way to hide from one in every four computers.
Like the ramen worm that effected most Redhat systems and then disabled the exploits it used?
Thanks for the link, it's a great example of how free software rocks. Six years ago, Ramen ate through a few poorly maintained Red Hat 6.0 and 7.0 servers running WUFTP. It did not eat through Debian, Mandrake and other distributions because there are lots of ftp servers to chose from. It has not been heard from since. A diversity of software limits the damage any one flaw can cause. Automated update tools insure the problems are fixed quickly. If something goes wrong, the user can download and burn a CD with all new software and then install it without loss of user data.
The Windoze user, on the other hand, is left with their ageing "original" CD to put all the flawed software back with tremendous hassle and loss. That's the problem with non free software - you depend on a single "owner" that can't possibly keep up for everything.
The only short term solution for the user is to leave Windoze. The only long term solution for the internet as a whole is to diversify. The two things are the same.
it's only a matter of time until the cost/benefit of launching a reasonably successful large-scale attack against the OS arrives.
It's only a matter of time before some descendent of pigs evolve wings too.
You have to make decisions based on what you see and know, not speculation. Right now, and for the forseeable future, your best protection from trojans, worms and spyware is to install or purchase any OS besides Windoze.
It's not just a solution, it's the solution. A diverse population of computers will make botnets both expensive and small.
No-one is asking you to choose between what is 'free' and what is useful. They are asking you to choose whatever you find does what you want to do properly.
You must have ignored the anti-trust trials. Only dedicated M$ Defender, such as yourself, could believe that vendors and hardware makers are not coerced into selling M$ and only M$. It's not going to work, but the effort is there and it extends far beyond the world of computing.
So, free software is geeky, useless, childish and no one cares? What an ignorant flame disguised as a thoughtful and informed reflection. Let's have a look.
We have a bunch of OS that are all good, but for vastly different purposes.
There is nothing free software can not do. The Linux desktop has been ready for the general public for years, despite the best efforts of non free software owners to make things like printing and networking difficult.
When you grow up, you realize there's no place for favoritism and politics in here, just tools you pick depending on your task.
Freedom is not a childish goal and you no longer have to chose between it and getting things done. Non free software is the dead hand of the past clinging to control it should never have had.
all Linux does, is way too geeky (by geeks, for geeks) and no one in the general public cares.
Linux does Firefox and Firefox seems to have taken a 20% share of the browser market, despite the effort required to do so on a M$ platform. Sooner or later people are going to realize that all of their favorite applications are free and work better on a free platform.
Her online banking uses incredibly invasive, poorly conceived and programmed software called nProtect. Which installs a bloody device driver to function. It actually blue screened Vista randomly.
Right, so they are going to be buying yet more stuff that does not work? Be on the look out for LAMP jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it funny that the only person to sledge their non-choice of OS was a Mac user?
The funny thing is that the brainwashed users did not call the GNU/Linux a cancer or Mac users gay. No, today they are confident in the best Windoze ever. Ha.
On average, a RANDOM 4K read from flash is about 10x faster than from HDD. Now, how does that translate to end-user perf? Under memory pressure and heavy disk activity, the system is much more responsive; on a 4GB machine with few applications running, the ReadyBoost effect is much less noticeable.
Translation: You want 4GB of RAM to run Vista.
Q Isn't user data on a removable device a security risk? A: This was one of our first concerns and to mitigate this risk, we use AES-128 to encrypt everything that we write to the device.
Unsaid: it was much easier to leave the contents encrypted than it was to create an additional "security risk." This probably has something to do with them encrypting all of your data for the "trusted path."
Ever hear of the hybrid hard drive?
Yes, but I would not buy one programed by Microsoft. We shall see if their 10 year life estimate holds water any more than their previous claims to safe data storage and secure computing.
Don't you just hate how they are paying people to fill Wikipedia with this kind of spam? No bother, the truth will out.
Any questions?
Does it come with a vibrator?
I'm hoping ... that this excellent example of free speech will hold up as something for America to follow.
Ma Bell porn? I get this 1911 picture of black plastic, black chords and state sponsored domination. That's kinky but not to my taste.
This violates all sorts of common carrier rules. It's clearly a case of offering a service unrelated to communications. In the US, the carriers are guilty of suppressing their competitors in other services and threatening network neutrality.
Do you really want your telco as a media outlet?
If you get your wish, be prepared for your ability to publish to rocket back to the 12th century, but worse. They will be charging you for access both ways and applying extra surcharges where it would benefit their publishing business. They will own the press and you will be a "consumer". Your ability to publish will be limited to handbills no one will bother to read because only lunatics would be denied permission to publish electronically.
I don't think juries take kindly to the LART defense.
You don't have to hurt anyone, you just need to destroy the spam device. Given the level of hatred most people have for spam, you will never be arrested much less convicted by a jury. The local police will probably help you hold the loser down as you happily hammer the device into bent pieces.
For further proof, you should watch this video from 'The Chaser's War On Everything' (comedy show over here) - they go to busy areas with $20 notes, calling "Free money? Free money?" waving it in people's faces - everyone ignores them, says no, or tries extremely hard to avoid them.
It's sad and perverse that people have been screwed over so often by advertisers that an honest person can't give money away on the street. It's as if the monopolist's bad behavior makes people less likely to look elsewhere. Ah yes, wiki has the name for it, battered person syndrome.
That describes the majority of Windoze users.
If you know who sent it, and can identify the sender, you can thus take legal action against them directly, so it probably should be handled in a different way. If it becomes a big enough problem, something will be done about it.
Great logic - because you know who did it and can do something about it, the existing laws should not be enforced and you can't do anything about it. Legally, that is.
Spam kiosks will be vandalized. Some kind of EMP device would be nice but the kiosks won't last long enough. If the pure psychic energy of spam hatred does not destroy the kiosk instantly, it will be kicked over, smashed by a vehicle or burnt within seconds of being turned on.
Don't buy stuff with DRM. I can do it, i did it so far. But i doubt more than 20% of people who yap against DRM will stay away from it.
So, you don't watch DVDs? That might be good for you, but you are missing out on a diminishing but still significant part of your own culture. Avoiding DRM is hard and becoming harder. Blaming people who don't have real choices is counter productive.
Instead of making the false choice between your freedom and participating in your culture, we need to change the laws that force that choice. The whole point of copyright was to encourage science and the arts so that they would be enjoyed by as many people as possible. Current copyright and patent laws are an abomination and achieve exactly the opposite. Patent law is discouraging innovation and disclosure. Copyright law has kept almost all recorded media out of the public domain and serves only a few large publishers. That needs to change.
It is a little easier, right now, to fight the newer schemes but it's going to get harder. The high definition format wars throws real cold water on purchases. Who wants to buy a $5,000 TV that won't work they way you expect it to? The problem is DRM and it won't go away with the current format war because there can always be a new format and the makers can now remove the keys for the old one. As the price of those TVs drop and the situation starts to look like DVD vrs VCR, it will be harder to convince people not to buy the new junk.
The flip side to not buying DRM'd crap is buying and promoting stuff that respects you. Give away free software and live GNU/Linux CDs. Buy Creative Commons work, give money to the free software foundation and buy Linux games, purchase Star Wreck t-shirts. Sing dance and have fun. Eventually, laws follow popular opinion.
If your portable DVD player is running WinCE, you already have what you are asking for. He managed to push .WMV onto all of them, so you might not even need WinCE.
Gate's is focused on expanding his computing monopoly into entertainment and what he wants was the focus of his keynote speech. The point of treacherous computing is to give M$ the keys to everything, regardless of cost.
Vista offers the best chance of convincing hardware makers that DRM won't sell. The music industry is learning, now it's time to teach the holdouts in the computer industry. With it's slow sales, XP showed up the upgrade train six years ago. Vista is going to blow it apart. There's real hardware improvement out there but the only way to really enjoy it is through free software that the industry is fighting tooth and nail. It's hard to sell stuff while you are busy thwarting your customers with buggy and paranoid shit instead of giving them what they want.
You really are one paranoid little man. Seriously, anyone who even takes a critical look at Linux to you is a sockpuppet of Gates/Ballmer/Allchin/Satan/me.
You are annoying but you should not think you are equal to your masters. They consider you a pawn to be fucked over and discarded.
Yes, there are plenty of people wasting their life harassing Twitter and Slashdot. It's pathetic, but that's how M$ "competes" through FUD and disruption and it's really all they have. To the point, I quote M$ themselves:
You must be one of those people who descend on Amazon and "tag" every single Microsoft product with "defectivebydesign".
No, but that sounds like a good idea and I'm glad that someone is doing it.
I wish you would all stay here and here only.
Hmmmm, you don't like me and I don't like you. Let's make a deal. You go away, your friends leave computer vendors, ISPs and everyone else alone and our paths will never cross. How about that? You get to pay Bill Gates for permission to use your computer, I get to use my computer and both of us are happy. Best of all, you can avoid advocating M$ shit to a free software web forum.
Now that would be super, but you've got a job to do don't you? Suck it up and get back to work.
Uhhhh, if someone doesn't know how to burn an ISO or tinker with their BIOS, is this installer really something they should be screwing around with?
I understand that it's dangerous to "screw around" with your computer when it's running Windows, but I did not know that writing a file was one of those dangerous things now.
You would be amazed at how difficult some vendors make it to do what should be very easy. Though burning an ISO image should be the easiest thing a program could do with a blank CD, most burning programs either lack the option or hide it. Telling your computer what device to boot off should also be easy, but the larger vendors don't display the keystroke required to get into the BIOS configuration utility. What should take five minutes can easily take hours and could take a trip to the store to buy burning software. People are usually put off but these types of guessing game, especially when the results are uncertain.
All of it backfires eventually. A user who's insulted enough will do something about it. Sooner or later, they all learn.
Legacy systems, documents, and most importantly user training in said systems and documents. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" rules when computers are the tool rather than the end goal in and of themselves, and it's hard to fault that logic. If you change your systems you're effectively "breaking" your employees in terms of their productivity, and fixing them is quite a job. It's only justified when the end benefits are worth the pain, and to be fair in most cases they probably aren't ...
Funny how Microsoft has gotten away with just that. Every version of Windoze has a few pointless GUI changes and little real improvement, yet the Dells of the world push it out. Vista and Office 2007 mark the largest GUI change in a long time. Legacy software is broken. Where does that leave the user's "faultless" logic?
Free software interfaces are more stable. Window maker, is a Next clone and it's basics have not changed in fifteen years. There are several others, like the fvwm or olvwm, and Enlightenment, that have been just as rock stable. At the same time there have been many other excellent interfaces that have grown up. All of them are extensively customizeable so that you can have as much change in each as you like and they all work together, so you can mix and match. The same performance from Microsoft would have Windows 3.1 GUI be adequate, customizable still available and easily interchangeable with a dozen other excellent window managers. Right.
The same arguments apply to file formats and hardware. Vista is bringing with it .DOCX, the M$ "open" format with a 6,000 page spec. It's also going to obsolete 54% of exiting computers and 94% of them are not really "premium" ready, so their users will soon be disappointed by an upsell that degrades their actual performance. DRM promisses to make it all that much worse.
The real hope is that Vista goes nowhere. XP did not move hardware and it had much better driver and legacy application support at launch. It took four long years for it to be majority. People want new hardware and it's time for it to move. There are major improvements that are good for both performance users and people who want something small and quiet. If Vista's changes are so bad that it actually harms sales, look for Dell, HP and others to follow Lenovo's lead to make up the difference. That would break the M$ monopoly once and for all and then we would not have to worry about this upgrade train nonsense.
Vista - the Ow is Now.
the high cost of Windows, and the ever-increasing hardware requirements for it, and a free OS that can run on existing hardware looks pretty darn good.
Is there any place that this is not true?
And Blaster didn't infect all the machines that were patched a month before it was released. Your point is valid but hardly some sort of mystical advantage for Linux.
You are right, there's nothing mystical about it.
Thanks for reminding me of the famous Blaster worm, which clearly demonstrates the fragility of non free software and it's adverse effects on the internet and commerce in general. While a patch may have been available, it was not widely deployed because it broke other non free services and programs. Blaster infected computers on Microsoft's own campus and variants remain a menace to this day because people continue to run software from their "original" CD when Windoze goes tits up and must be reinstalled. Businesses that use Windoze were particularly harmed, often having to do without their networks for a week. The infrastructure of the internet itself was overwhelmed by the traffic it generated, so everyone suffered.
Blaster was just one of many demonstrations. The same flaws are what the botnet operators use to build their networks today. The continued existence of those flaws is why one in four internet connected computers is now part of a botnet. The binary Microsoft monoculture simply sucks.
The Ramen story, is the antithesis of all of the above. Despite the high prominence of the hosts, on a small percentage was ever compromised and today the problem has vanished. Virtually no one would be running free software from 2003 unpatched, let alone free software from 2000 or before.
Is it likely that other OS's, as they gain marketshare, will be higher-profile (though more difficult) targets? Maybe. Is it a possibility? ... running my user accounts as non-admin, backing up and running Clam A/V are all pretty painless on OS X, and easily worth the effort to set up.
What you know makes your possible scenerio rather unlikely. Free software runs most of the world's web servers, where the best bandwith is, so it's already a big but hard target.
Taking further steps for yourself is still prudent. You want to make backups to ward off hardware failure and your own mistakes, even if your computer never touched an internet connected network. Running anti-virus software is mostly a waste of cycles that negates one of the primary benefits of using a free platform. It might be a nice thing to run on a mail server but non M$ desktops don't need it now. Free software distributions already force a non root user and other reasonable steps will continue to be taken. You can take it for granted that a distribution like Debian uses reasonable defaults and their administration guide is full of good advice.
If you can tell me what the "safe" 75% do that the broken 25% did not do, I'll believe only 25% are owned. It's not the users, it's not the Windoze version, it's not the network, it's not the anti-virus software, it's more like random chance. Dismissed as "harmless" at the time, worms have made it all the way into automated teller machines that never see the internet. Vista is already busted and the anti-virus industry has obviously failed. If the botnet population is only 25% today, it will quickly become 100% because there is no way to hide from one in every four computers.
Like the ramen worm that effected most Redhat systems and then disabled the exploits it used?
Thanks for the link, it's a great example of how free software rocks. Six years ago, Ramen ate through a few poorly maintained Red Hat 6.0 and 7.0 servers running WUFTP. It did not eat through Debian, Mandrake and other distributions because there are lots of ftp servers to chose from. It has not been heard from since. A diversity of software limits the damage any one flaw can cause. Automated update tools insure the problems are fixed quickly. If something goes wrong, the user can download and burn a CD with all new software and then install it without loss of user data.
The Windoze user, on the other hand, is left with their ageing "original" CD to put all the flawed software back with tremendous hassle and loss. That's the problem with non free software - you depend on a single "owner" that can't possibly keep up for everything.
The only short term solution for the user is to leave Windoze. The only long term solution for the internet as a whole is to diversify. The two things are the same.
it's only a matter of time until the cost/benefit of launching a reasonably successful large-scale attack against the OS arrives.
It's only a matter of time before some descendent of pigs evolve wings too.
You have to make decisions based on what you see and know, not speculation. Right now, and for the forseeable future, your best protection from trojans, worms and spyware is to install or purchase any OS besides Windoze.
It's not just a solution, it's the solution. A diverse population of computers will make botnets both expensive and small.
you forgot to fuck off
Do posts like these infuriate you?
No, dadazo, your efforts are a waste of time.
No-one is asking you to choose between what is 'free' and what is useful. They are asking you to choose whatever you find does what you want to do properly.
You must have ignored the anti-trust trials. Only dedicated M$ Defender, such as yourself, could believe that vendors and hardware makers are not coerced into selling M$ and only M$. It's not going to work, but the effort is there and it extends far beyond the world of computing.
So, free software is geeky, useless, childish and no one cares? What an ignorant flame disguised as a thoughtful and informed reflection. Let's have a look.
We have a bunch of OS that are all good, but for vastly different purposes.
There is nothing free software can not do. The Linux desktop has been ready for the general public for years, despite the best efforts of non free software owners to make things like printing and networking difficult.
When you grow up, you realize there's no place for favoritism and politics in here, just tools you pick depending on your task.
Freedom is not a childish goal and you no longer have to chose between it and getting things done. Non free software is the dead hand of the past clinging to control it should never have had.
all Linux does, is way too geeky (by geeks, for geeks) and no one in the general public cares.
Linux does Firefox and Firefox seems to have taken a 20% share of the browser market, despite the effort required to do so on a M$ platform. Sooner or later people are going to realize that all of their favorite applications are free and work better on a free platform.
how do you pronounce "M$", anyway?
Shit.
Her online banking uses incredibly invasive, poorly conceived and programmed software called nProtect. Which installs a bloody device driver to function. It actually blue screened Vista randomly.
Right, so they are going to be buying yet more stuff that does not work? Be on the look out for LAMP jobs.