The primary advantage of Vista in an enterprise setting is one I never see discussed: It is far easier to configure and manage Vista clients with users running as normal users, not as administrators. This is a major security advance for Microsoft. No *nix distro enterprise admin would have users running as root. Many organizations have users running as Windows admin and then wonder why they have trouble keeping the systems to standard. You can lock XP clients down, but doing so makes it far harder to manage them. This works much better on Vista.
If you care about security, you can easily configure Vista to be very good. It doesn't even have to be a processor hog. I leave the search indexer going because for my usage I find the gain in my productivity to justify the indexing load, but I optimized my system for performance (under the system: advanced properties tab) and do not have any of the eye-candy running. It runs well on my notebook in maximal battery savings mode.
I assume that the technology would be more useful in radar sources, where you could do a short term illumination of a target and then turn it off. A sensor trying to pick up the antenna when it was not powered might well have a significantly harder time than with a traditional antenna.
You can view it as an electrically switchable conductor. Turn the power on and you have a conductor. Turn it off and you get an insulator. The problem is that it takes power to maintain. As long as you have adequate power, you can make a conductor. If you have lots of power, you can ionize atmospheric pressure air, but we do mean lots of power. At low pressure, you need less power, but you have the corresponding issue of fragility of the supporting structure, which must be both strong and insulating.
An alternate way would be to take a metallic antenna and break it up into a lot of short segments, which you would wire together with electrically controlled switches. If the switches are off, it would appear as a lot of isolated pieces of conductor with a much smaller signal crossection than the full antenna when they are engaged. If you are worried about the antenna survival in a high power environment, you would use gaseous switches rather than the smaller and cheaper solid state devices.
The threat environment and security requirements change over time. When customers didn't care about security issues, Microsoft didn't either. In mid-late 90's I was a security and directory architect at Novell and was not at MS. When security became an important problem to customers, Microsoft started worrying about security. The MSRC patch data as well as third party reports shows that Microsoft has made a great deal of progress, with 2K3 SP1 and XP SP2 having significantly fewer vulnerabilities than their predecessors. Vista has fewer issues as well, particulaily if you configure it for security. You can make a very good case that Vista is at least as secure as the major *nix distros. If you look at SQL security, you see a strking increase in security - compare MS SQL's recent vuln issues with Oracle.
What constituted "good", by which a marketer means "good enough" security 5 years ago is not likely to constitute "good enough" security now, let alone 5 years from now. This is as true in the BSD space as it is in the *nix space as it is in the Windows space. I am an engineer with a number of security startups behind my belt. I don't believe anybody's marketing claims. Security wise, NT was more secure than W95/W98. 2K was more secure that NT. 2K3 was more more secure than 2K. 2K3 SP2 was more secure than 2K RTM. 2K8 will be more secure than 2K3 SP2. The marketing people will trumpet this. They should. It is true as well. The same thing is happening in the BSD and *nix space.
It is the same call. It is not the same code. We keep the API the same. We update the code as issues are discovered and resolved. That way users and applications relying upon the API need do nothing to take advantage of the improved crypto.
With Vista, Microsoft shipped support for Suite B crypto to deal with governmental issues. The government tends to operate in FIPS mode, where they (and any user who is willing to pay for them) also have to option of using hardware security modules (HSMs) to handle crypto if they do not want to rely upon the CNG (Crypto Next Generation) code modules.
There is not a significant security issue here. You first have to compromise the user. Then this issue allows a modest increase in the compromise against the user. It does not allow a compromise of the user. As such, it would be considered for the next service pack. To the best of my knowledge, Win 2K is end of life.
As for evidence, you will have to deduce it. I claim that this issue was discovered internally and addressed. If you check, you will find that it does not reproduce in XP SP2 or 2K3 SP1, so you will see that the issue was dealt with years ago -- and you don't have to believe me.
Everything I have heard in the security community within Microsoft says that there are no backdoors. Since my observation is not evidence to the paranoid, consider the following:
The Common Criteria evaluators have essentially full access to the Windows source code and all supporting documentation. They look for issues that would enable backdoors or security vulnerabilities. Once and a while, they find something interesting. Microsoft then fixes it as a security bug.
Windows platforms are used by numerous nations for secret information that they want to keep secret from the US. They wouldn't be using the platforms without some reasonable level of assurance concerning the code base.
If there were convenient backdoors in Windows, governments wouldn't need to conduct bag jobs to insert hardware loggers or use malware to capture suspect's actions.
My conclusion is that there are vulnerabilites in the Windows codebase, as shown by the MSRC process, but these are not intentional and they are fixed as they are discovered.
I have been working in security for over 20 years and am quite paranoid. Vista is reasonably secure to start with (particularily if you turn off Sidebar, which like all gadget platforms (including those of Google and Yahoo) increases the attack surface). You can configure Vista to be very secure. You can be sure that organizations that really care about security configure their system appropriately. Note that increasing security decreases user features and whiz-bang. My Vista interface looks rather like Win 2K.
Turn off sidebar
Go into system properties, under advanced, optimize for performance
Run as a normal user
Lock down IE
If you run Firefox, install NoScript and be very cautious about granting scripting
The random number generator for XP and 2K3 server was substantially improved over that of Win 2000. Additional work was done for Vista. These systems are used in highly secure military deployments and due to its importance to system security, the random number generator was subjected to extensive analysis and was updated to deal with issues uncovered. When evaluating "random number generators" you need to consider not only the "random number" generator, but entropy harvesting from the system and other issues relating to usage. I assume the bulk of the readers are not MS developers, but if you need a good random number on a Windows platform, call CryptGenRandom. Equivalent functionality is provided for managed code as well.
Win 2K is a very legacy product and its crypto functionality is very limited compared to 2K3 and Vista.
Hashes are used directly in essentially all forms of signatures and integrity verifications, as you hash the data being represented and then sign or protect the hash value. HMAC's are (or should be) used with strong keys for protecting the integrity of communications. As such, hashes should be fast and resistant to capable assault with massive computational resources. Given the birthday effect, collisions will occur with a when a message pool is ~ sqrt(hash size).
The attacks against SHA-1 have reduced the work of collison from 2^80 to 2^6i, where i is a small integer (such as 1, 2 or 3). The SHA2 family is adequately resistant against extant attacks, but given the similarities between SHA-1 and SHA-2, NIST is being wise in starting the design of a successor.
The constant paranoia about backdoors is misplaced here. If you can engineer in a backdoor, somebody else can reverse engineer it, and the Russians and Chinese have a lot of very good mathmeticians. The NSA currently recommends the use of SHA-2 for governmental applications and can be expected to support the use of SHA-3 when it becomes available. They wouldn't be recommending its use if there were a backdoor that would allow compromise of signatures.
Perhaps, but the potential of theft by middlemen of advertising revenues is going to make some very strange allies. You are likely to have the major search engines ally with the major content sites ally with the end-users, the first to protect their add revenue, the second to protect their usage.
I would also note that SSL is all but mandatory to conduct business transactions over the internet. I don't see it being abandoned in the face of massive identity theft and financial fraud.
Actually, I expect a full scale move to encryption for all web traffic. ISP's can rob the web sites (which are supported by advertising) by using deep stream filtering and reconstruction to rip out adds from the web site and replace them with adds that they are paid to display. The equipment that Comcast is using is quite capable of it. Once the web sites realize the threat by malicious middlemen, we will see them pony up for crypto hardware and move en-mass to HTTPS. At that point, essentially all traffic will be encrypted and middlemen will be blocked.
Some sites can be trusted more than others. Indeed, some have to be trusted, as you may choose to download executables from them. To the extent that I am willing to download and then run an executable from a site, I have to trust it.
Given Google, the rise of Firefox and to a lesser extent Opera, and the growth of new middleware vendors, the paranoid cry "MS wants to control the web" seems rather farfetched to me. THe web is far too large and has too many actors for MS to try and control it.
Treating all web sites equivalently is inappropriate security policy. The question is how do you implement a differentiated fine grained security policy to match your risk and benefit issues. Zones are useful, but too coarse. I have approximated it by using Zones with IE, Firefox with fine-grained NoScript policy, and Opera as a static text renderer.
It seems to me that Microsoft is caught in a legacy trap. If they move to full compliance, they break web sites that are coded to their old implementation. Thus, they are moving gradually. Given time, they will move, but it will take a number of major release cycles.
As for other browsers, I use Opera and Firefox as well as IE. I use Opera as a static HTTP renderer if I am doing something relatively dangerous -- all media off, including images, all scripting off, cookies and cache cleared on exit, etc. I use Firefox with NoScript to handle things like ordering supplies from sites with which I do not want to associate full trust. If I fully trust a site, I use IE trusted zone. No other browser that I am aware of supports the zones model, let alone a finer-grained trust model. Thus, I use the combination of IE with Zones, Firefox with partial trust, and Opera with no trust to control my risk exposure appropriately.
The largely unknown secret about Vista is that unlike XP, it is far far easier to have a user run as a normal user than on XP. I run my kids and wife as normal users. There are some issues that they are dealing with for SP1 that I would like to see fixed, but I have found Vista to be quite stable. I am not interested in having my kids run software that requires administrative privledges. In fact, if it requires administrative privledges to run, they can't and I will uninstall it.
IE 7 runs well and is a safe default for them to work from, particularily since they are running as limited users and don't have install rights. I like Firefox with NoScript, but I have enough knowledge to have some idea of what to enable and what to disable.
It is not that simple, although perhaps I should have raised the point earlier. The move to rich media is fine for people with good vision and hearing. What about people who have difficulties with either or both. It is relatively straightforward to move from text and plain HTML to assistive technologies. At some point, commercial web usage in the US will fall under the disabilities act. At that point the webmasters are going to have to make explicit support for plain media.
You are correct about the Linux implementation. I was thinking of the Moonlight implementation, which is rather on a par with the Mono effort to duplicate CLR.
I would be rather less paranoid than you. Microsoft is rapidly moving to a service and web model. Not very happily, but moving. When there is a reasonable user base in Linux and a business model to make money, they will follow the users. They don't want to leave the customer with no choice but Google and Adobe, neither of whom are any more magnamious that Microsoft.
The market is focused upon neat features and gee-whiz issues. Doing this with the OS and applications is what both made Microsoft sucessful and dug them into the security hole they are trying to work their way out of. I am an old fart and remember one of the old security dictums - Thou shall not mix data and executables. Scripting does so. It makes lots of neat features possible, but it also significantly reduces trust. For certain applications, such as banking, or high value financial transactions, trust is far more important to me than features. For others, the neatness may be more important.
I am actually buying a new computer so that the computer I use for my banking can be hardened and restricted and will not run any of my children's games or web snap-ins. It will be running Vista with all users running as normal users, sidebar disabled, and IE7 will be running in enhanced security mode.
I allow my kids machines to run flash and javascript because there is nothing valuable on them and neither my wife or I use them.
Microsoft has a good point here. javascript was designed for a much more trusting world. The combination of script enabled browsers (javascript, flash, etc) with compromised servers is lethal. Web 2.0 is all but identical to cross site scripting and cross site request forgery as a design feature. COntinuing to shove new features into a broken model is dooming us to more of the same. IMHO, leave javascript alone and start working on a sucessor, and make sure that security is a high priority from the beginning.
Silverlight seems to be a reasonable approach. Microsoft has released it for both Linux and OSX as well as Windows, so it has a broad base (at least as broad as Adobe's local gadget technology). Silverlight appears to show reasonable security properties, I would assume as a effect of Microsoft's SDL process. Microsoft seems to be at least as open as Adobe in this arena.
I have a different question to ask? Why do so many web sites requite scripting in the first place? It is one thing to provided reduced functionality if the client does not support scripting (by default I do not run javascript, java, Flash, etc), but why require it? I don't care about the neat media and am quite willing skip it and conserve my bandwidth.
Actually, a cell does not store a binary digit. It stores a value, that is then interpreted into a value. If the real logic reads only as high vs low, you get a binary digit. If the read logic can differentiate 4 levels, then you get 2 bits per cell. You can't go too far this way, as the number of bits you can store is proportional to the log (base 2) of the number of values you can read - noise, drift, and leakage become problems. This stuff is well known in the device community.
I have been running Beta's of server for 2 years now. I ran it on a Dell D610 notebook in maximal battery life mode for a year before I moved to a Dell D620 notebook, upon which I am writing this note. It also is in minimal power mode. Server has been responsive and reliable, even in low power mode. I am using on-board graphics, but the default is essentially a Windows Classic mode, which works well as a windows desktop. Note, I am running as a normal user and use the machine administrator account for management. I have not been troubled by permission prompts.
Vista beta one was a dog. A mean one at that. There are a few real bugs in the released Vista, such as the slow file copy, that will be fixed in SP1. For many users, Microsoft has once again justified the old enterprise rule, evaluate the new release, and plan on installing SP1.
Personally, I find Vista to be much maligned, but I am not a gamer and I am not playing with SW that is screwing around with kernel drivers. Such software is ill-behaved due to the copy protection and anti-cheating mechanisms. I also am not trying to watch or listen to DRM protected content.
A CFO I worked with many years ago called me a "cheap bastard". Apple it too expensive for me. I am an old iBook user who was not willing to purchase a new version of my OS every other release to keep its security updates current. With Microsoft, I get the security updates for 7 to 10 years, without having to pay for maintenance. My wife and kids can easily use their applications on Windows and updates happen in the background. I have no doubt that I could convert to a Linux distro if I wanted to for some of my systems, but I doubt if I could find a driver for some of my special HW.
As for Vista, it can work quite nicely:
Turn off Sidebar
Optimize the system for performance (turns off Glass among other things)
Run all users as normal users keeping a machine administrator account for administration (this keeps the kids from installing stuff I don't want)
If you are concerned about security (I am) Lock down IE 7 (turn off scripting, javascript, etc) Note that this largely kills dynamic web sites
The real advantage of Vista over XP in my mind is the fact that it is far easier to run as a normal user on Vista than it is on XP and search is nice if you have a lot of text to manage.
At work I take an even more minimal approach, I run a beta of Windows Server 2008, running as a normal user.
You didn't go far enough. Comcast and other carriers have a good commercial motive to use deep packet inspection and modification to remove adds from web pages being transferred and replace them with adds that they are paid to display. Clearly, additional results could be added to search results as well. This breaks the business model of the web.
The simplest solution, and one that I think the web sites will eventually support (once they get over the cost for HW encryption support) is to use SSL / TLS. This is the easiest way that they can protect their advertising revenue from middleman parasites.
P2P environments are going to have to go to encryption as well. Note that Diffie-Helleman key agreement is not safe against an active man in the middle, so the crypto will have to be done with some care and great care will have to be taken to deal with a large number of malicious proxies of the various hostile middlemen.
I assume this is to make spamming a bit harder. My DSL line comes with a tie-in to MSN, so I run Outlook 2003 using the connector tool to link to the mail server (I would be much happier with a POP or IMAP access), but I have been told I am an antique who doesn't see the inherent superiority of HTTP / web access.
When my wife was corresponding secretary of an organization with a mailing list in the low hundreds, I had to send out the e-mails. I experimented and found that e-mails with 8 recipients would go out, but that e-mails with 16 recipients had problems. THus I created a large number of 8 element mailing lists and sent stuff out that way.
Pain in the ass, but MSN does seem to be doing a pretty good job of spam supression, far better than I experienced after pacbell shifted its users onto yahoo.
The requirements for flight are rather different than the requirements for being a licensable motor vehicle. For flight, I need very low weight, high power, and appropriate aerodynamics. On ground, I have reqirements for braking and handling, accident protection, etc. Being long and slender is fine for airplanes, but is bad for road manuverability. Wings have to be folded or removed to make the plane narrow enough to drive, but on the road, the airfoils are dead weight. In the air, the wheels and driving machanisms are dead weight.
If you increase the power enough (jets anyone) you can reduce the size of the airfoils as you raise the velocity, but you pay for this with increased takeoff and cruising speeds. There are obvious hazards here as well as very high fuel costs. Helicopters cost a lot more to fly and maintain that fixed wing planes for good reason.
Do you want the average driver trying to fly over your city or land in your neighborhood at very high velocities? I sure don't. Bad weather would make the situation worse.
Even with the current safety status of fixed wing planes, if you ever try to get a very large life insurance policy, they may well ask you if you fly planes. There is a reason they ask.
On what basis do you claim that Microsoft Server is a failure? It is certainly true that Windows 2000 Server was not as reliable as it should have been. Microsoft learned and fixed things. Windows Server SP1 is very solid and capable.
Market results don't show that Microsoft server is a failure. You may not like it, but that does not make it a failure. Personally, I prefer BSD to Linux, but Linux has more mindshare in the OSS community.
I have been running betas of LongHorn server for over a year as my notebook OS. I have found that Server is reliable, stable, and runs well on relatively low powered hardware (my earlier notebook, 2.5 years old, on which I ran server had a 2 GHz processor with 2 GBytes of RAM. I always run in maximal battery life mode and I found the system very responsive).
Is your issue OSS first, or is it solve your organization's or customer needs first? The first is an idealogical goal. Most businesses are primarily concerned with the solution of their problems, as is appropriate. In a rather large fraction of the market, Microsoft offers products that are cost effective solutions for various problems. It is appropriate to consider them on their merits within their context, without allowing your ideological viewpoints to drive your solution.
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If you care about security, you can easily configure Vista to be very good. It doesn't even have to be a processor hog. I leave the search indexer going because for my usage I find the gain in my productivity to justify the indexing load, but I optimized my system for performance (under the system: advanced properties tab) and do not have any of the eye-candy running. It runs well on my notebook in maximal battery savings mode.
I assume that the technology would be more useful in radar sources, where you could do a short term illumination of a target and then turn it off. A sensor trying to pick up the antenna when it was not powered might well have a significantly harder time than with a traditional antenna.
An alternate way would be to take a metallic antenna and break it up into a lot of short segments, which you would wire together with electrically controlled switches. If the switches are off, it would appear as a lot of isolated pieces of conductor with a much smaller signal crossection than the full antenna when they are engaged. If you are worried about the antenna survival in a high power environment, you would use gaseous switches rather than the smaller and cheaper solid state devices.
What constituted "good", by which a marketer means "good enough" security 5 years ago is not likely to constitute "good enough" security now, let alone 5 years from now. This is as true in the BSD space as it is in the *nix space as it is in the Windows space. I am an engineer with a number of security startups behind my belt. I don't believe anybody's marketing claims. Security wise, NT was more secure than W95/W98. 2K was more secure that NT. 2K3 was more more secure than 2K. 2K3 SP2 was more secure than 2K RTM. 2K8 will be more secure than 2K3 SP2. The marketing people will trumpet this. They should. It is true as well. The same thing is happening in the BSD and *nix space.
With Vista, Microsoft shipped support for Suite B crypto to deal with governmental issues. The government tends to operate in FIPS mode, where they (and any user who is willing to pay for them) also have to option of using hardware security modules (HSMs) to handle crypto if they do not want to rely upon the CNG (Crypto Next Generation) code modules.
There is not a significant security issue here. You first have to compromise the user. Then this issue allows a modest increase in the compromise against the user. It does not allow a compromise of the user. As such, it would be considered for the next service pack. To the best of my knowledge, Win 2K is end of life.
As for evidence, you will have to deduce it. I claim that this issue was discovered internally and addressed. If you check, you will find that it does not reproduce in XP SP2 or 2K3 SP1, so you will see that the issue was dealt with years ago -- and you don't have to believe me.
The Common Criteria evaluators have essentially full access to the Windows source code and all supporting documentation. They look for issues that would enable backdoors or security vulnerabilities. Once and a while, they find something interesting. Microsoft then fixes it as a security bug.
Windows platforms are used by numerous nations for secret information that they want to keep secret from the US. They wouldn't be using the platforms without some reasonable level of assurance concerning the code base.
If there were convenient backdoors in Windows, governments wouldn't need to conduct bag jobs to insert hardware loggers or use malware to capture suspect's actions.
My conclusion is that there are vulnerabilites in the Windows codebase, as shown by the MSRC process, but these are not intentional and they are fixed as they are discovered.
Turn off sidebar
Go into system properties, under advanced, optimize for performance
Run as a normal user
Lock down IE
If you run Firefox, install NoScript and be very cautious about granting scripting
I didn't, but I know the people who did the enhancements, and they are very competent and well known cryptographers.
Win 2K is a very legacy product and its crypto functionality is very limited compared to 2K3 and Vista.
The attacks against SHA-1 have reduced the work of collison from 2^80 to 2^6i, where i is a small integer (such as 1, 2 or 3). The SHA2 family is adequately resistant against extant attacks, but given the similarities between SHA-1 and SHA-2, NIST is being wise in starting the design of a successor.
The constant paranoia about backdoors is misplaced here. If you can engineer in a backdoor, somebody else can reverse engineer it, and the Russians and Chinese have a lot of very good mathmeticians. The NSA currently recommends the use of SHA-2 for governmental applications and can be expected to support the use of SHA-3 when it becomes available. They wouldn't be recommending its use if there were a backdoor that would allow compromise of signatures.
I would also note that SSL is all but mandatory to conduct business transactions over the internet. I don't see it being abandoned in the face of massive identity theft and financial fraud.
Actually, I expect a full scale move to encryption for all web traffic. ISP's can rob the web sites (which are supported by advertising) by using deep stream filtering and reconstruction to rip out adds from the web site and replace them with adds that they are paid to display. The equipment that Comcast is using is quite capable of it. Once the web sites realize the threat by malicious middlemen, we will see them pony up for crypto hardware and move en-mass to HTTPS. At that point, essentially all traffic will be encrypted and middlemen will be blocked.
Given Google, the rise of Firefox and to a lesser extent Opera, and the growth of new middleware vendors, the paranoid cry "MS wants to control the web" seems rather farfetched to me. THe web is far too large and has too many actors for MS to try and control it.
Treating all web sites equivalently is inappropriate security policy. The question is how do you implement a differentiated fine grained security policy to match your risk and benefit issues. Zones are useful, but too coarse. I have approximated it by using Zones with IE, Firefox with fine-grained NoScript policy, and Opera as a static text renderer.
As for other browsers, I use Opera and Firefox as well as IE. I use Opera as a static HTTP renderer if I am doing something relatively dangerous -- all media off, including images, all scripting off, cookies and cache cleared on exit, etc. I use Firefox with NoScript to handle things like ordering supplies from sites with which I do not want to associate full trust. If I fully trust a site, I use IE trusted zone. No other browser that I am aware of supports the zones model, let alone a finer-grained trust model. Thus, I use the combination of IE with Zones, Firefox with partial trust, and Opera with no trust to control my risk exposure appropriately.
IE 7 runs well and is a safe default for them to work from, particularily since they are running as limited users and don't have install rights. I like Firefox with NoScript, but I have enough knowledge to have some idea of what to enable and what to disable.
It is not that simple, although perhaps I should have raised the point earlier. The move to rich media is fine for people with good vision and hearing. What about people who have difficulties with either or both. It is relatively straightforward to move from text and plain HTML to assistive technologies. At some point, commercial web usage in the US will fall under the disabilities act. At that point the webmasters are going to have to make explicit support for plain media.
I would be rather less paranoid than you. Microsoft is rapidly moving to a service and web model. Not very happily, but moving. When there is a reasonable user base in Linux and a business model to make money, they will follow the users. They don't want to leave the customer with no choice but Google and Adobe, neither of whom are any more magnamious that Microsoft.
The market is focused upon neat features and gee-whiz issues. Doing this with the OS and applications is what both made Microsoft sucessful and dug them into the security hole they are trying to work their way out of. I am an old fart and remember one of the old security dictums - Thou shall not mix data and executables. Scripting does so. It makes lots of neat features possible, but it also significantly reduces trust. For certain applications, such as banking, or high value financial transactions, trust is far more important to me than features. For others, the neatness may be more important.
I am actually buying a new computer so that the computer I use for my banking can be hardened and restricted and will not run any of my children's games or web snap-ins. It will be running Vista with all users running as normal users, sidebar disabled, and IE7 will be running in enhanced security mode.
I allow my kids machines to run flash and javascript because there is nothing valuable on them and neither my wife or I use them.
Silverlight seems to be a reasonable approach. Microsoft has released it for both Linux and OSX as well as Windows, so it has a broad base (at least as broad as Adobe's local gadget technology). Silverlight appears to show reasonable security properties, I would assume as a effect of Microsoft's SDL process. Microsoft seems to be at least as open as Adobe in this arena.
I have a different question to ask? Why do so many web sites requite scripting in the first place? It is one thing to provided reduced functionality if the client does not support scripting (by default I do not run javascript, java, Flash, etc), but why require it? I don't care about the neat media and am quite willing skip it and conserve my bandwidth.
Actually, a cell does not store a binary digit. It stores a value, that is then interpreted into a value. If the real logic reads only as high vs low, you get a binary digit. If the read logic can differentiate 4 levels, then you get 2 bits per cell. You can't go too far this way, as the number of bits you can store is proportional to the log (base 2) of the number of values you can read - noise, drift, and leakage become problems. This stuff is well known in the device community.
I have been running Beta's of server for 2 years now. I ran it on a Dell D610 notebook in maximal battery life mode for a year before I moved to a Dell D620 notebook, upon which I am writing this note. It also is in minimal power mode. Server has been responsive and reliable, even in low power mode. I am using on-board graphics, but the default is essentially a Windows Classic mode, which works well as a windows desktop. Note, I am running as a normal user and use the machine administrator account for management. I have not been troubled by permission prompts.
Personally, I find Vista to be much maligned, but I am not a gamer and I am not playing with SW that is screwing around with kernel drivers. Such software is ill-behaved due to the copy protection and anti-cheating mechanisms. I also am not trying to watch or listen to DRM protected content.
A CFO I worked with many years ago called me a "cheap bastard". Apple it too expensive for me. I am an old iBook user who was not willing to purchase a new version of my OS every other release to keep its security updates current. With Microsoft, I get the security updates for 7 to 10 years, without having to pay for maintenance. My wife and kids can easily use their applications on Windows and updates happen in the background. I have no doubt that I could convert to a Linux distro if I wanted to for some of my systems, but I doubt if I could find a driver for some of my special HW.
As for Vista, it can work quite nicely:
Turn off Sidebar
Optimize the system for performance (turns off Glass among other things)
Run all users as normal users keeping a machine administrator account for administration (this keeps the kids from installing stuff I don't want)
If you are concerned about security (I am) Lock down IE 7 (turn off scripting, javascript, etc) Note that this largely kills dynamic web sites
The real advantage of Vista over XP in my mind is the fact that it is far easier to run as a normal user on Vista than it is on XP and search is nice if you have a lot of text to manage.
At work I take an even more minimal approach, I run a beta of Windows Server 2008, running as a normal user.
The simplest solution, and one that I think the web sites will eventually support (once they get over the cost for HW encryption support) is to use SSL / TLS. This is the easiest way that they can protect their advertising revenue from middleman parasites.
P2P environments are going to have to go to encryption as well. Note that Diffie-Helleman key agreement is not safe against an active man in the middle, so the crypto will have to be done with some care and great care will have to be taken to deal with a large number of malicious proxies of the various hostile middlemen.
When my wife was corresponding secretary of an organization with a mailing list in the low hundreds, I had to send out the e-mails. I experimented and found that e-mails with 8 recipients would go out, but that e-mails with 16 recipients had problems. THus I created a large number of 8 element mailing lists and sent stuff out that way.
Pain in the ass, but MSN does seem to be doing a pretty good job of spam supression, far better than I experienced after pacbell shifted its users onto yahoo.
If you increase the power enough (jets anyone) you can reduce the size of the airfoils as you raise the velocity, but you pay for this with increased takeoff and cruising speeds. There are obvious hazards here as well as very high fuel costs. Helicopters cost a lot more to fly and maintain that fixed wing planes for good reason.
Do you want the average driver trying to fly over your city or land in your neighborhood at very high velocities? I sure don't. Bad weather would make the situation worse.
Even with the current safety status of fixed wing planes, if you ever try to get a very large life insurance policy, they may well ask you if you fly planes. There is a reason they ask.
Market results don't show that Microsoft server is a failure. You may not like it, but that does not make it a failure. Personally, I prefer BSD to Linux, but Linux has more mindshare in the OSS community.
I have been running betas of LongHorn server for over a year as my notebook OS. I have found that Server is reliable, stable, and runs well on relatively low powered hardware (my earlier notebook, 2.5 years old, on which I ran server had a 2 GHz processor with 2 GBytes of RAM. I always run in maximal battery life mode and I found the system very responsive).
Is your issue OSS first, or is it solve your organization's or customer needs first? The first is an idealogical goal. Most businesses are primarily concerned with the solution of their problems, as is appropriate. In a rather large fraction of the market, Microsoft offers products that are cost effective solutions for various problems. It is appropriate to consider them on their merits within their context, without allowing your ideological viewpoints to drive your solution.