It is really hard to block high atomic mass cosmic rays, which can come in with energies in excess of a GeV/nucleon. When they traverse the eye, you can see the light as they interact with the gel filling the eye. The atmosphere gives a mass shielding equivalent to 10 meters of water. If you are going to spend years in space, you need a lot of shielding.
High energy electrons from the sun are more easily deflected by magnetic shields due to their lower masses. Gammas just have to be absorbed. That is pretty much true for high energy cosmic rays as well.
From the data we have available, it appears that Vista has significantly reduced numbers of and severity of vulnerabilities compared to XP. Knowing what we did in Vista compared to XP, this is not surprising. Looking at the bulletin data, there seems to be at least a 2 fold reduction in issues. I would note that it is far easier to run in a safer default configuration in Vista than it is in XP, making such users all the more safer -- I am writing this from a notebook where I am running a LongHorn beta build as a normal user (my user account does not have administrative privledges). I also have IE7 in locked down mode and am not running IM or sidebar gadgets (reducing my attack surface). I am running Office 12, which has been greatly hardened with respect to Office 11 (At this point I believe that Office 12 is significantly less vulnerable to exploit than current versions of Open Office).
As a side effect of the OS hardening effort, we are seeing attacks move up the stack, as the applications are softer. Hence my use of Office 12. Softest of all targets is the wetware at the top of the stack -- it is vulnerable to social engineering.
I very much doubt in the technolust theory. In general, the quality advances between product versions are rather modest. Over many versions they add up, but the "desirability" seems to be strongly correlated with a small set of features that can be identified and marketed. The issue seems more to be possession of some new device as a social marker for disposable wealth / "good taste".
Since the driving factor of advanced societies is the zero-sum competition for social status via consumption games, we get these otherwise irrational responses.
I have little use for most of the high-tech toys. While I will replace a PC every 6 years or so, there are very few things I replace before I wear them into the ground. A fellow security employee called me "techno-amish". And yes, I do have a cell phone. It costs me $100/year and I may make a call every few days to my wife in case of schedule changes or to see if she needs me to pick up anything at the store.
When I went to college and studied physics, my interest was in deep space power and propulsion systems. I maintain my interest in space exploration, but I am not as romantically blinded by it. Satellites looking down and up and probes going places have had an enormous information return on investment. Manned space flight and the space station have not. Manned space flight is an entertainment issue, and as such gets the public attention and money. Until we can get the cost of lifting matter out of our gravity well down, long term space occupation is precluded by radiation hazards (even with high field superconducting magnetic shielding). If we are seriously interested in space, I would suggest putting more resources into the following:
Ultra-high strength to weight nanotube cables
1 to enable an elevator to space
2 to serve as a kinetic energy battery for launching and receiving matter transfering through a transfer point. This works by spinning a 50,000 km cable and using the rotational kinetic energy of the cable for the energy battery
solar sails -- invaluable for inner solar system work
major investigation of asteroids -- unlike the moon and mars, they don't have significant gravity wells associated with them. The earth crossing asteroids require no more energy than moon missions.
earth facing and observing satellites are exceptionally valuable
more astronomical satellites, both as individual units and as synthrsized arrays
If it acts like a black hole outside of a radius = black hole radius *(1 + epsilon) where epsilon is relatively small, does anyone care? We should be able to observe general relativistic strong field effects relatively soon. This might allow falsification if the range of the effect is large enough. If this theory doesn't affect those results, it is likely more of a semantic issue than a physical issue with observable effects.
Since when can you observe the event horizon? Is the question even meaningful? You get Hawking radiation from the region in space immediately outside of the event horizon.
I love theory. But I value experimental observation even more. We don't have any nearby black holes that we know of, but there is the rather massive black hole in the center of the galaxy and a stellar mass black hole in Scorpius X1. VLBI observation and gamma-ray observation allow us to observe rather close to the event horizon, but at astronomical distances we are highly unlikely to conduct observations within epsilon of an event horizon.
As has been pointed out, a vendor does not have to take cash in payment for services to be rendered. It is not even obvious to me that they "have" to always take cash for items purchased -- cash is expensive and dangerous to handle and large cash transactions have onerous governmental reporting requirements associated with them. -- All large cash transactions have to be reported to the government in the US, and probably in most the rest of the world. I would note that once it becomes known that you keep large amounts of cash around, some of your fellow citizens who are far less trustworthy than the banks will seek you out. You will not enjoy the ensuing transaction.
On a practical operational point, if you have cash and need a check, get a money order or cashier's check. The cost is modest. If your point is to minimize monitoring, open a checking account and use it prudently. You will attract less attention than if you try very hard to fly below the observational radar. The attempt to fly below the observational radar in and of itself makes the flyer of definite interest to both agencies monitoring criminal activity as well as governmental organizations concerned with terrorism. You do not want to have them deciding you are up to no good.
There are very few things in which you can place absolute trust (outside of death and taxes). The question is, what is least untrustworthy? There are lots of potential subjects of interest. If you don't want observation, do not draw attention to yourself. Note, living in a cash world or not, you still will need to file income tax forms when you have income. The IRS can be quite difficult to deal with if you do not have appropriate documentation.
Quite possible. The weather in southern California is in general better for outdoor photography than NJ.
What I was told, which certainly counts as third hand, is that if the industry had been based in NY / NJ, it would have been much easier for Edison to force a royalty sharing agreement under state law that would have been effective across the entire market. By being located in CA, Edison could not effectively use state law to enforce a royalty cut.
My comment is from memory of a presentation that I attended at the Eastman museum (I worked at Kodak Research then), better than 30 years ago, but I believe that it is accurate. Of course, the public reason given would be much different. It is typical the public justifications and explanations may bear little resemblence to actual driving issues. I am sure that some neutral historians of the industry cover the issue accurately. I have never pursued it.
The reason that Hollywood was set up in southern California is that Edison was unable to pursue his royalty and usage claims against movies there. Of course, with eventual financial success came the inevitable incentive to get together to sock it to the customer.
While I am now an engineer, I started out as a physicist. Public debates tend to get tied up on linguistic problems and issues of truth and falsity. Scientific consensus arises when models and approaches provide a good (by which I mean good agreement between theory and observation) representation of the world. Such models, such as the standard model of particle physics, general relativity, evolution, etc. provide a robust, but not complete, description of how the world works. Are such models "true"? Truth is an absolute term and as such is not part of the scientific world view. I can disprove something, but I cannot prove something to be absolutely true -- there are always another few decimal points in the measurement to verify.
Despite the claims of proponents, you do not need absolute proof to take action. You need an appropriate amount of evidence. In courts, this is reflected by the different standards of proof required for civil and criminal convictions in the US court system. And people are still eroneously condemned to death by US courts. The question facing us is "Is the evidence for the hazards of the greenhouse effect sufficient to justify significant changes to start mitigating this?" I believe the answer to this question is yes.
I do not appreciate overstated claims of emergency though. While they motivate the believers, overstatements (which "An Unwelcome Truth" is not immune to) polarize the situation and make it harder to start implementing solutions. 40 years ago I was in favor of nuclear power because of the hazard of the greenhouse effect. 30 years ago I did some solar concentrator power work. There is no magic bullet.
Unfortunately, people tend to work backwards from what they want to believe to the evidence that they choose to believe. While scientists make these errors as well, the fact that experiments can disprove theories/models keeps most of them from drifting off into dream worlds. This self-correcting aspect of science (which can be quite slow) makes it (in my mind) our greatest cultural invention. Unfortunately, there is no similar self-corrective mechanism for politicians and popular movements and they do not like being told that their beliefs are unfounded or inaccurate.
Such fermentation approaches are only able to deal with the sugars (and perhaps the polymerized sugars such as cellulose), which make up a moderate fraction of the biomass. I suspect that Fischer-Tropsch processing of biomass (Fisher-Tropsch processing of coal how coal liquefaction is done) would yield far higher conversion ratios and could also serve as a starting point for synthesis feed stocks. The advantage of the Fischer-Tropsch approach is that it deals well with inedible and otherwise unuseable feedstocks and does not require edible feedstocks.
I should have added that much of the security risk with Windows systems has been associated with the problem that users typically ran as administrator and apps assumed admin privledges, making it difficult to run as a normal user. If you run as a normal user, a scenario that is reasonably well supported in Vista, your risks are much less. The virtualization work in Vista allows many poorly designed apps to be fooled so that they think they have access to admin components, but in fact are writing to per-user deflection directories. With this change, Microsoft has achieved parity with the decades old least privledge principle that the *nix approaches have generally used while at the samed time running many apps that want excessive permissions.
I had a Win 98 box facing the net for years without getting a virus or malware install. W98 boxes had NO security protections. I added a firewall and used Symantec AV and set my browser and e-mail setting to be safe. No issues ever appeared, although once in a while the AV caught malware in e-mail being sent to me by my travel agent.
I upgraded my W98 box to XP (added 512 MB of RAM) and have had it facing the net for the last 3 years. With the inbound firewall, safe browser and e-mail settings, and AV, I have had no issues -- and my wife and kids use the system routinely.
I have my kids on a Vista system now running as normal users, they do NOT have administrative privledges. On their system I have Flash and javascript enabled to allow them to play web games. I do use the firewall and parental controls, but there is no indication of any difficulties with the system.
Why should Microsoft release the source to Office?
Microsoft faces extremely capable competition in the office product arena, and it isn't Open Office or variants thereof. Microsoft's competition is earlier versions of Office, which are quite adequate for virtually all uses. From what I can tell, the feature set by Office 98/2000 was adequate to handle the vast majority of individual and business uses. More features continue to be added to cover edge and corner cases as well as support mission creep. In Office 12, the office team has started to address security issues that have become more important recently. Similar security issues affect Open Office as well. At this point I believe that Office 12 is considerably more secure than Open Office.
Microsoft is publically specifying its XML format, which should make 3d party integration easier. With Open Office playing a (to my mind futile) game of feature catchup with Office, both suites are far more feature rich than needed for most users. What about an OfficeLite that reads and writes standard formats but is faster and smaller? Microsoft has something roughly equivalent on Windows Mobile, but does not offer a realistic version elsewhere.
Actually, we knew this decades ago. The apparent superluminal motion of emission spots from quasars required highly relativistic particle beams. The measurement here is just of an exceptionally high Lorentz factor. From another viewpoint, cosmic rays are matter as well, and some of them are exceptionally energetic. Indeed, particle physics at the highest energies can only be studied with cosmic rays, as no manmade accelerator can reach these energies. There have been particle physicists studying cosmic rays for decades (probably since the 50's).
This is not a MS specific issue. An attacker can run a perfectly good botnet from a user-level compromise of an internet facing application. You don't need a system compromise. Given the difficulty of writing secure browsers and the easy with which a significant fraction of the public can be induced to click on links, there will always be a vast number of user-level compromises available. Look at the patch data for browsers, let alone OS's. Apple has been having to do more security patches than MS.
Due to its ubiquity, MS is attacked much more than other systems, but the assumption that other systems are by default more secure is a statement of belief, not fact. How is your system configured? It makes a big difference. MS systems can be configured for many different security environments. The locked down deployments are very secure (their intended usage is Department of Defense deployments, etc). Wide open rich functionality client deployments are more functional, but less secure. The same tradeoffs exist in the Linix and BSD worlds. The current CERT and related vulnerability databases do not show that the *nix world has a clear superority over current comparable Windows products.
Web 2.0 is all but identical to cross-site scripting as a feature. The vulnerabilities here are so pervasive that users have virtually no way of protecting themselves if they want to have the rich web-based functionality. This is not MS specific.
Microsoft does not prevent Google from installing its search tool. What Google is complaining about is that Microsoft does not allow Google to replace Microsoft's search tool with Google's, which is much different. Google is complaining that the system performance is worse with both search indexers running at the same time. Suprise -- those indexers do take up process power. While I do use search enough to justify keeping it running, in the past when I was using lower powered systems I would reduce the priority of the search indexer to low (use task manager) to get it out of the way. Google could do the same. I am not sympathetic to Google's argument in this case.
I liked OS-X, but I found Apple's business model to be too expensive for my tastes. I bought an early iBook and ran 10.1 (The iBook also came with the earlier OS, I beleive that it was OS 9). A year or so later I found that to get security updates to my OS, I had to go out and buy the newer version of the OS for ~ $150. This is in addition to the ~$100 iMac (if I recall it correctly) service I was running. Apple was very good about replacing the iBook motherboard each time it burned out, typically after 9 months use. By the time I gave up on the notebook, I had been through 4 motherboards. So much for Apple hardware quality.
For comparison, I bought a copy of XP and added 512 MB of RAM to my old Windows 98 box (1.7 GHz P4) 3 years ago. Microsoft does not charge me for my security updates (and at this point there are probably fewer updates to XP SP2 than there are to OS-X) and will continue to support XP for some years yet. My XP system still runs my legacy executables, such as Math Rabbit, that I am using for my second set of children.
Apple makes elegant and expensive consumer products. In many respects, they are what Sony should be. I don't value, nor play such conspicuous consumption games.
It is my understanding that the markup on a PC from Dell, Gateway, etc is now approaching zero and in fact the system could at times be sold at a loss. So how do the vendors make money? By accepting payment for included software, tool-bars, etc. I believe that their payment for this "crapware" may be on the order of $25 to $50/system. If you have less of this software on the Ubuntu variant, you have a lower profit margin.
I doubt if I could get support on my recently purchased Dell desktop. When I got it, I flattened the disc and did a clean install of Vista. No Dell tools, no "crapware". No security issues associated with said "crapware". I got it at a good price, so I am happy. My kids, who use it are happy with it, but they certainly wish I weren't so strict with the parental controls and blacklist.
Server core has been publically demonstrated and is intended to support headless servers. They have introduced a quite elegant command line tool, PowerShell, that is being used for management. I don't know what other tools will be available or will be provided by third parties.
It is also worth remembering that the US had somewhat earlier based nuclear missiles in Turkey, which posed an identical problem to the USSR. As part of the settlement of the Cuban standoff, the US removed its missiles, but not its radar, from Turkey.
How much space an OS takes is dependent upon how much functionality (bells and whistles) you want running to support you. If you are happy with a command prompt, it isn't much. Such a minimal server is easy on the BSD/Linux distros, and will be supported with Windows Server 2008.
If you want a nice slick GUI, search indexer, and lots of other stuff running, you need a lot more memory. It doesn't matter if it is Windows or Linux, the more stuff you run, the more memory you take.
I do not run Glass. I run in Windows classic mode and have optimized my machine for performance not GUI (and then maximized for power savings). It looks rather like Win 2K, but in such a mode Vista is very fast, very secure, and reliable.
Security is a selling point for Vista. For me, it is the most compelling selling point, although I do like search a lot as a feature. Now for my perspective on why Vista is more secure than XP:
A lot of work was done to support running as normal user. This does not get much attention, but it means that I can (and I do) run as a normal user without administrative credentials (it is much harder to do this in XP). If I have to manage the system, I have to use full administrative credentials (read, su root). It also means that malware that might hit me does not have the permissions needed to modify the system. This is even stronger than the UAC protections on administrative users. My wife and kids run as normal users and do not have administrative acess.
A lot of internal work was done to reduce service permissions and internally harden the OS, including the introduction of the integrity level mechanism that is used to support protected mode IE. These changes reduce the scope and impact of local compromises.
Enormous amounts of fuzzing of acessible interfaces and parsers was conducted and many issues were found and fixed.
The security bulletin data since Vista has shipped suggests that there is reduction on the order of 2X or greater in bulletin class vulnerabilities. Indeed, the numbers suggest that Vista is running fewer issues than either OSX or the major Linux distributions.
The user has a great deal of control about their vulnerabilities based upon how they configure and use their system. Microsoft exposes a very rich and neat set of functionality in Vista. If you are trying to reduce your security vulnerabilities, there are a number of things that you can do (at the expense of neatness and functionality):
Run as a normal user, not admin (which is standard UNIX practice)
turn off sidebar (less stuff running means less stuff to compromise)
turn off scripting, activeX, multimedia, etc, in your IE Internet zone
Add sites to your trusted zone (where scripting is allowed) only if you trust the site with your credit card info
If you run a desktop suite, run Office 2007 rather then Office 2003. Note that Office 2007 almost certainly has fewer security vulnerabilities than Open Office.
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High energy electrons from the sun are more easily deflected by magnetic shields due to their lower masses. Gammas just have to be absorbed. That is pretty much true for high energy cosmic rays as well.
As a side effect of the OS hardening effort, we are seeing attacks move up the stack, as the applications are softer. Hence my use of Office 12. Softest of all targets is the wetware at the top of the stack -- it is vulnerable to social engineering.
Since the driving factor of advanced societies is the zero-sum competition for social status via consumption games, we get these otherwise irrational responses.
I have little use for most of the high-tech toys. While I will replace a PC every 6 years or so, there are very few things I replace before I wear them into the ground. A fellow security employee called me "techno-amish". And yes, I do have a cell phone. It costs me $100/year and I may make a call every few days to my wife in case of schedule changes or to see if she needs me to pick up anything at the store.
Ultra-high strength to weight nanotube cables
1 to enable an elevator to space
2 to serve as a kinetic energy battery for launching and receiving matter transfering through a transfer point. This works by spinning a 50,000 km cable and using the rotational kinetic energy of the cable for the energy battery
solar sails -- invaluable for inner solar system work
major investigation of asteroids -- unlike the moon and mars, they don't have significant gravity wells associated with them. The earth crossing asteroids require no more energy than moon missions.
earth facing and observing satellites are exceptionally valuable
more astronomical satellites, both as individual units and as synthrsized arrays
If it acts like a black hole outside of a radius = black hole radius *(1 + epsilon) where epsilon is relatively small, does anyone care? We should be able to observe general relativistic strong field effects relatively soon. This might allow falsification if the range of the effect is large enough. If this theory doesn't affect those results, it is likely more of a semantic issue than a physical issue with observable effects.
I love theory. But I value experimental observation even more. We don't have any nearby black holes that we know of, but there is the rather massive black hole in the center of the galaxy and a stellar mass black hole in Scorpius X1. VLBI observation and gamma-ray observation allow us to observe rather close to the event horizon, but at astronomical distances we are highly unlikely to conduct observations within epsilon of an event horizon.
On a practical operational point, if you have cash and need a check, get a money order or cashier's check. The cost is modest. If your point is to minimize monitoring, open a checking account and use it prudently. You will attract less attention than if you try very hard to fly below the observational radar. The attempt to fly below the observational radar in and of itself makes the flyer of definite interest to both agencies monitoring criminal activity as well as governmental organizations concerned with terrorism. You do not want to have them deciding you are up to no good.
There are very few things in which you can place absolute trust (outside of death and taxes). The question is, what is least untrustworthy? There are lots of potential subjects of interest. If you don't want observation, do not draw attention to yourself. Note, living in a cash world or not, you still will need to file income tax forms when you have income. The IRS can be quite difficult to deal with if you do not have appropriate documentation.
What I was told, which certainly counts as third hand, is that if the industry had been based in NY / NJ, it would have been much easier for Edison to force a royalty sharing agreement under state law that would have been effective across the entire market. By being located in CA, Edison could not effectively use state law to enforce a royalty cut.
Edison was not the copyright owner. Edison, as the inventor of the projector, wanted a cut in all the film profits. This fell under state law.
My comment is from memory of a presentation that I attended at the Eastman museum (I worked at Kodak Research then), better than 30 years ago, but I believe that it is accurate. Of course, the public reason given would be much different. It is typical the public justifications and explanations may bear little resemblence to actual driving issues. I am sure that some neutral historians of the industry cover the issue accurately. I have never pursued it.
The reason that Hollywood was set up in southern California is that Edison was unable to pursue his royalty and usage claims against movies there. Of course, with eventual financial success came the inevitable incentive to get together to sock it to the customer.
Despite the claims of proponents, you do not need absolute proof to take action. You need an appropriate amount of evidence. In courts, this is reflected by the different standards of proof required for civil and criminal convictions in the US court system. And people are still eroneously condemned to death by US courts. The question facing us is "Is the evidence for the hazards of the greenhouse effect sufficient to justify significant changes to start mitigating this?" I believe the answer to this question is yes.
I do not appreciate overstated claims of emergency though. While they motivate the believers, overstatements (which "An Unwelcome Truth" is not immune to) polarize the situation and make it harder to start implementing solutions. 40 years ago I was in favor of nuclear power because of the hazard of the greenhouse effect. 30 years ago I did some solar concentrator power work. There is no magic bullet.
Unfortunately, people tend to work backwards from what they want to believe to the evidence that they choose to believe. While scientists make these errors as well, the fact that experiments can disprove theories/models keeps most of them from drifting off into dream worlds. This self-correcting aspect of science (which can be quite slow) makes it (in my mind) our greatest cultural invention. Unfortunately, there is no similar self-corrective mechanism for politicians and popular movements and they do not like being told that their beliefs are unfounded or inaccurate.
Such fermentation approaches are only able to deal with the sugars (and perhaps the polymerized sugars such as cellulose), which make up a moderate fraction of the biomass. I suspect that Fischer-Tropsch processing of biomass (Fisher-Tropsch processing of coal how coal liquefaction is done) would yield far higher conversion ratios and could also serve as a starting point for synthesis feed stocks. The advantage of the Fischer-Tropsch approach is that it deals well with inedible and otherwise unuseable feedstocks and does not require edible feedstocks.
I should have added that much of the security risk with Windows systems has been associated with the problem that users typically ran as administrator and apps assumed admin privledges, making it difficult to run as a normal user. If you run as a normal user, a scenario that is reasonably well supported in Vista, your risks are much less. The virtualization work in Vista allows many poorly designed apps to be fooled so that they think they have access to admin components, but in fact are writing to per-user deflection directories. With this change, Microsoft has achieved parity with the decades old least privledge principle that the *nix approaches have generally used while at the samed time running many apps that want excessive permissions.
I upgraded my W98 box to XP (added 512 MB of RAM) and have had it facing the net for the last 3 years. With the inbound firewall, safe browser and e-mail settings, and AV, I have had no issues -- and my wife and kids use the system routinely.
I have my kids on a Vista system now running as normal users, they do NOT have administrative privledges. On their system I have Flash and javascript enabled to allow them to play web games. I do use the firewall and parental controls, but there is no indication of any difficulties with the system.
Microsoft faces extremely capable competition in the office product arena, and it isn't Open Office or variants thereof. Microsoft's competition is earlier versions of Office, which are quite adequate for virtually all uses. From what I can tell, the feature set by Office 98/2000 was adequate to handle the vast majority of individual and business uses. More features continue to be added to cover edge and corner cases as well as support mission creep. In Office 12, the office team has started to address security issues that have become more important recently. Similar security issues affect Open Office as well. At this point I believe that Office 12 is considerably more secure than Open Office.
Microsoft is publically specifying its XML format, which should make 3d party integration easier. With Open Office playing a (to my mind futile) game of feature catchup with Office, both suites are far more feature rich than needed for most users. What about an OfficeLite that reads and writes standard formats but is faster and smaller? Microsoft has something roughly equivalent on Windows Mobile, but does not offer a realistic version elsewhere.
Actually, we knew this decades ago. The apparent superluminal motion of emission spots from quasars required highly relativistic particle beams. The measurement here is just of an exceptionally high Lorentz factor. From another viewpoint, cosmic rays are matter as well, and some of them are exceptionally energetic. Indeed, particle physics at the highest energies can only be studied with cosmic rays, as no manmade accelerator can reach these energies. There have been particle physicists studying cosmic rays for decades (probably since the 50's).
Due to its ubiquity, MS is attacked much more than other systems, but the assumption that other systems are by default more secure is a statement of belief, not fact. How is your system configured? It makes a big difference. MS systems can be configured for many different security environments. The locked down deployments are very secure (their intended usage is Department of Defense deployments, etc). Wide open rich functionality client deployments are more functional, but less secure. The same tradeoffs exist in the Linix and BSD worlds. The current CERT and related vulnerability databases do not show that the *nix world has a clear superority over current comparable Windows products.
Web 2.0 is all but identical to cross-site scripting as a feature. The vulnerabilities here are so pervasive that users have virtually no way of protecting themselves if they want to have the rich web-based functionality. This is not MS specific.
Microsoft does not prevent Google from installing its search tool. What Google is complaining about is that Microsoft does not allow Google to replace Microsoft's search tool with Google's, which is much different. Google is complaining that the system performance is worse with both search indexers running at the same time. Suprise -- those indexers do take up process power. While I do use search enough to justify keeping it running, in the past when I was using lower powered systems I would reduce the priority of the search indexer to low (use task manager) to get it out of the way. Google could do the same. I am not sympathetic to Google's argument in this case.
For comparison, I bought a copy of XP and added 512 MB of RAM to my old Windows 98 box (1.7 GHz P4) 3 years ago. Microsoft does not charge me for my security updates (and at this point there are probably fewer updates to XP SP2 than there are to OS-X) and will continue to support XP for some years yet. My XP system still runs my legacy executables, such as Math Rabbit, that I am using for my second set of children.
Apple makes elegant and expensive consumer products. In many respects, they are what Sony should be. I don't value, nor play such conspicuous consumption games.
I doubt if I could get support on my recently purchased Dell desktop. When I got it, I flattened the disc and did a clean install of Vista. No Dell tools, no "crapware". No security issues associated with said "crapware". I got it at a good price, so I am happy. My kids, who use it are happy with it, but they certainly wish I weren't so strict with the parental controls and blacklist.
Server core has been publically demonstrated and is intended to support headless servers. They have introduced a quite elegant command line tool, PowerShell, that is being used for management. I don't know what other tools will be available or will be provided by third parties.
It is also worth remembering that the US had somewhat earlier based nuclear missiles in Turkey, which posed an identical problem to the USSR. As part of the settlement of the Cuban standoff, the US removed its missiles, but not its radar, from Turkey.
If you want a nice slick GUI, search indexer, and lots of other stuff running, you need a lot more memory. It doesn't matter if it is Windows or Linux, the more stuff you run, the more memory you take.
I do not run Glass. I run in Windows classic mode and have optimized my machine for performance not GUI (and then maximized for power savings). It looks rather like Win 2K, but in such a mode Vista is very fast, very secure, and reliable.
A lot of work was done to support running as normal user. This does not get much attention, but it means that I can (and I do) run as a normal user without administrative credentials (it is much harder to do this in XP). If I have to manage the system, I have to use full administrative credentials (read, su root). It also means that malware that might hit me does not have the permissions needed to modify the system. This is even stronger than the UAC protections on administrative users. My wife and kids run as normal users and do not have administrative acess.
A lot of internal work was done to reduce service permissions and internally harden the OS, including the introduction of the integrity level mechanism that is used to support protected mode IE. These changes reduce the scope and impact of local compromises.
Enormous amounts of fuzzing of acessible interfaces and parsers was conducted and many issues were found and fixed.
The security bulletin data since Vista has shipped suggests that there is reduction on the order of 2X or greater in bulletin class vulnerabilities. Indeed, the numbers suggest that Vista is running fewer issues than either OSX or the major Linux distributions.
The user has a great deal of control about their vulnerabilities based upon how they configure and use their system. Microsoft exposes a very rich and neat set of functionality in Vista. If you are trying to reduce your security vulnerabilities, there are a number of things that you can do (at the expense of neatness and functionality):
Run as a normal user, not admin (which is standard UNIX practice)
turn off sidebar (less stuff running means less stuff to compromise)
turn off scripting, activeX, multimedia, etc, in your IE Internet zone
Add sites to your trusted zone (where scripting is allowed) only if you trust the site with your credit card info
If you run a desktop suite, run Office 2007 rather then Office 2003. Note that Office 2007 almost certainly has fewer security vulnerabilities than Open Office.
Be very cautious about what software you install.