Not to be picky. It sounds GOOD though. A lot of the time installing a firewall is a lazy way to get out of knowing your system well enough to shut off external ports and services/daemons you don't really need. If the attack has no point of entry, you really don't need a firewall to protect it. That would be kinda like having a heavily armed door-man for a house with no doors. This "always need a firewall" logic is right up there with portscanning your own machine to find open ports instead of doing a "netstat -an | grep LIST". Unless you are running windows I guess. I don't know windows well enough, but I'd assume it's easier to install a firewall than to attempt to chase down all the open ports and close them. It might even break windows to go shutting off stuff like that. YMMV. If I have a small network of machines that need to talk to each other, and talk to the outside world, I'll set up a simple firewall for them. Most people just have their computer and their dialup/dsl/cable connection to worry about and probably don't need a firewall. Good backups is what most people are lazy about. It doesn't matter how great your firewall is if you don't have any backups.
I think this is a good thing. It was going to happen sooner or later. At least it's happening with a monsterous litigious bastard like IBM in the drivers seat. This is a wet-dream best case scenerio in the happening. I mean, damn. I'm going to have a friggin party. Money talks. Period. SCO could even win their pathetic lawsuit, and still get buried by the IBM patents they are infringing on. SCO is history no matter what. Gone. So long. Thank you for playing. So their only hope is to keep getting a story every single business day to drum up support for their ludicrous licensing scam, and hope more idiots bite.
Microsoft is going to have to start establishing a long term track record of having rational discussions and doing things right. At this point, most people associate Microsoft with that company that wrote the thing they use at work the reboots on them and gets slow. They MIGHT have heard about how they were judged a monopoly. Go a little higher to the technical manager level, and they might know about a few of the highly embarassing things that have happened to Microsoft like the lawsuits or the navy ship getting towed back to shore that was running NT, etc. The prevailing attitude has been:
"We have to like it. It's the only choice".
Or for the more hardcore fans,
"we have to love it and defend it because they have all the money and power and I always side with the winner because that's all I know to do. I am afraid of change".
And even though that gets them what they want in the end, market domination, not many people actually take them seriously. I can remember being at a coffee shop recently and 3 older, more mature looking suits were joking about how Microsoft was getting "more secure" and remarking on a outlook trojan problem they were having currently. Nobody buys it. They just have accepted that they have no choice. That's why a effort like this, no matter how much money they throw behind it, won't convince too many people. It will create some really great boilerplate for the zealots to recite. That's about it. They are going to have to actually make their products better and actually work very hard to clean up their public image before anybody takes anything like this seriously. Just look at the general body of the responses to this article already! If Linus submitted a story saying he was going to do some sort of security audit, he would pretty much universally be taken seriously. You'll never have that with Microsoft given the reputation they have forged for themselves. Windows Server 2003 is a good step in the RIGHT direction for once. It's the smartest thing they've done to DATE to combat Linux in any way. Why? They actually listened to what their customers wanted, and sorta did it instead of doing what THEY deemed right and push it on everyone. It actually looks to be a decent product. But, it doesn't help that Oracle put out their July/August 2003 magazine and there is a HUGE Penguin on the front cover. Pages 46-62 can be summed up like this:
"Get redhat and a dell and oracle9 or you are stupid."
They might as well have said:
"SCO is completely batshit. This is what you want to do now".
And they basically came out and said
"Federal Aviation Air Traffic and Control, as well as these hospitals are now running Oracle on Redhat on HP and Dell servers. We are now meeting the holy grail of reliability with Linux. You can trust it with your life, and the lives of your loved ones".
The message is pretty clear for any CIO or manager type that I've shown this issue to. With the momentum behind Linux at the moment, I don't see Microsoft being able to do much of anything to lower their TCO in time. Every time a CIO, CEO, VP, etc. hears about all the money Amazon have saved, They want some of that luvin.
Prince, Purple Rain Nirvana, Nevermind Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine Toadies, Rubberneck NOFX, Heavy Petting Zoo ANY Pixies album Faith No More, Angel Dust Van Halen, Diver Down Metallica, Master Of Puppets
And those are just the ones off the top of my head. The Cars, Candy-o was one of my all time favorites. I had the cd in the cdplayer on repeat for 3 days while I beat metroid the first time and never felt the need to swap it out. I can still remember trying to sneak up on ridley while the intro piece before candy-o comes on, then the guitar kicking in at the beginning of the song right as I found him. I jumped 3 feet.:) I then proceeded to sing along at the top of my lungs while destroying ridley my first time out. I wish kraid had been as easy.
This just makes me smile an evil little grin. Simply awesome.:) I bet the high phone bill was worth it. At least your telco let you off the hook for half the bill.
What an awesome slashcode idea. Regardless of how offensive you seemed to feel about my obvious scarcasm, I think there is some mechanism you can use to permanantly block my messages. I've never used it myself, but I remember there used to be this "troll" list you add to your foes list or something, then chose to not see posts from those people. As my comments are highly rated at times, when I'm on slashdot which is rare, you are probably going to be subjected to more of them. You might want to pursue this blocking gimmick you can set up with your account because I genuinely wouldn't want you to feel discomfort by accidentally reading my posts.:) When I'm spewing forth my rhetoric, I'm almost always playing a heavy devils advocate with a kernel of truth theme and it rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
Just watch what you are thinking....
on
Linking Dangerously
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
and the thought police won't throw you in jail for a year. Don't assume you have the right to say just ANYTHING. You have the right to free speach as long as the powers that be are cool with it. For example, it's not ok to yell "OVERTHROW THE GOVT! BUSH IS AN ASSHOLE!" in a crowded theater because you might cause a panic that could result in loss of life. Justice is great if you can afford it, but most of us can not. You have to have a lot of money to stay "innocent" of most things you can be accused of. But that's part of the reward of being successful. You do get to be in an exclusive club where you have more and better rights than those with less money. That's how the system works.
I think it has a lot to do with what you work with early on. You build up prejudices based on work experience then back them. I disliked SunOS until I got to the point that I could rapidly accomplish whatever I wanted. As soon as I knew it like the back of my hand, I was pushing it on all my friends. I started disliking sun right around the time they released solaris. Bam, new job, BSDI. Loved BSDI. Suddenly, tons of FreeBSD. LOVED FreeBSD above all others. Then Digital UNIX 4.0, which turned into Tru64. Much much love for Tru64. I've worked with and developed on just about every UNIX platform in the "enterprise". I can remember having a damn near conniption fit when I found out an early version of SCO UNIX I was forced to develope for didn't have friggin JOB CONTROL. Half the fun is working around crap like this. At least for me. Ninety percent of all of it is the exact same thing. I can remember developing a simple big brother type server monitoring suite for HPUX without ever actually using HPUX before without an ounce of fear. As long as you ignore the pretty administration tools and concentrate on rocking the command line, most UNIX is nearly identical. It sounds like you had a bad experience with a Debian install, and swore off it forever. Personally, I could care whether an init is sysv or bsd style. Comfort with either doesn't pay my bills. Being realistic, I'm way way above petty hatreds towards perfectly fine UNIX and UNIXish systems because I'm paid to do my jobby job. It's all UNIX to me. I can still play favorites with the rest of them.:) If it's RISC based, I love Tru64. If it's running on Intel, I love FreeBSD. For my workstations, I've completely fallen in love with Gentoo. Contrast that with what the enterprise loves though.
RISC: Solaris Intel: Redhat (especially with Oracle) Workstation: Windows
And I'm cool with that too.:) Doesn't mean I have to like it much, but I'm cool with it.
We have learned that Gentoo runs like crap if it's set up by someone clueless. The whole point to Gentoo is to optimize the crap out of it. And NO, most users do not run a stage3 install. Almost all users I know run a stage1, or stage2. That's kinda the point. But yeah. This test makes perfect sense. They don't like Gentoo. They had an axe to grind. Amazing that Debian came out on top.
If you can wait til quakecon....
on
OpenGL 1.5
·
· Score: 1
Not to bring "your" down, but they'll release a playable beta version that we'll have for FREE for a long damn time like they always do. Are you old enough to remember when Quake3 Demo was the most popular game on the net? If wasn't even a full game. Nobody paid for it. They will do the exact same thing with Doom3. Rumor has it they are releasing the first multiplayer Doom3 demo next month at quakecon. Considering they have already announced they will be having Doom3 deathmatch at quakecon, this rumor is probably close to the truth.
King Kong died. He fell off his perch and fell very fast. He then proceeded to mess up a bunch of road and create a traffic hazard. That and the Federal Gov't wasn't looking the other way when King Kong did his thing.
Oh, you totally got the wrong impression. I didn't take what you said as a personal attack. And likewise, I wasn't trying to personally attack you either. Three years of experience with linux on a desktop isn't quite the same as my background. And games do stress certain parts of an operating system and hardware. I had much hell with quake3 on linux a year or so ago before the nvidia linux driver quality matched the windows driver quality. A hardcore game is going to stress, like you said, different things on a system. Whereas something like an MTA, webserver, database, etc. is going to stress different things. And like I said a few posts back in this thread, Win2k is stable. I wouldn't call it "very" stable based on my experience with many other OS's, but I'd say it's almost as stable as a vanilla redhat install with no optimization. There is no comparison to say, Tru64 or Solaris, or even Mac OSX though. The true stability under load king at the moment is definitely FreeBSD. You can load a FreeBSD machine up to the point that X doesn't respond and key presses take 45 minutes to register in a terminal and it still will not die. As a contractor, I have a windows partition for access to Office, Project, and a few other programs I simply need sometimes. Even a few games I can't get working under Linux or FreeBSD. There are still issues with windows that someone with my background simply doesn't understand happening given the thousands of dollars I've spent on that windows software. I've been please with a once or twice weekly lockup with XP. I was happier with the once every two weeks or so lockups I'd have with Win2k. If I spent all my time in windows, instead of perhaps 5 percent of it, it would probably bother me more. The fix-action is to save often and hope for the best. But I much prefer playing games on Linux or FreeBSD for the reliability and stability factors. I had UT2003 hard lock Win2k numerous times before I found out I could run it on Linux. It's amazing to me that I haven't had a single problem with it since. Same hardware, different OS's on different partitions. Amazing the difference it makes.
I didn't say 20+ years of windows experience. Said 20+ years of experience. And if you had read closely, you'd have noticed I specified "under load". There is a huge difference between a machine that's idle and one that is loaded. there is no "depends" about it. Put a windows machine under extreme load, and it will fall apart significantly faster than any UNIX machine. Usually that means a server, but not necessarily. A windows workstation under extreme load will fall apart significantly faster than a UNIX workstation under similar load. whether you throw X in the mix or not. You are kidding yourself, or simply lacking experience if you think otherwise. Missions critical applications like say, hospital databases or ATC radar, or any other system where lives hang in the balance are run on UNIX and Unixlike OS's for a reason.
First of all Carmack is still fuming PISSED that an ATI tech let that e3 demo get loose on the net. They have been very friendly towards NVidia since.
Second of all, they ALWAYS release a demo before the retail game comes out. Remember Doom3? How about RTCW ET? They'll release a Doom3 multiplayer demo, and probably a single player demo that they'll watch like hawks for a good long time. That's how they ALWAYS do it. Because it works. You get millions of unpaid betatesters that way who don't mind because they are playing the absolute best FPS games made for free.
And I'm guessing you aren't an admin at all or you'd know that's not how it works. You can't make all the people happy all the time. You will get called an "asshole". An admin that's never called one is what we call a "kissass". Kissasses don't last long because they are bending over backwards trying to please everyone. Someday when when and if you become a real admin, you'll learn this lesson. In the meantime, do some tech support. You'll learn that lesson there as well.
Windows 2000 is a somewhat stable operating system by my standards. I'd go so far as to say that it's second in stability only to 2003 server. XP is not as stable as win2k. Granted this is all from my experience. I'd also say that most 2k and XP boxes that are not stable were upgraded from earlier windows versions, and not fresh installs. That has also been my experience. I'd also say that there is NO microsoft operating system yet that can compare in stability under load to just about ANY UNIX varient, or workalike. Period. That's also from 20+ years of experience.
But even with my limited experience with windows, I'm willing to bet your Win2k box was an upgrade done overtop of a previous version of windows. Probably ME or 98. I had problems with a Win2k machine I had to use for a contract recently. Same deal. All patches. All security updates. Still bombed 3 times a day. Seems that Microsoft doesn't do upgrades very well. I wiped the drive, started over with a fresh Win2k install, and that did the trick. Now it bombs about once a week. Much much nicer. Still not anywhere near as stable as ANY free UNIX workalike I've ever used. Even turbolinux was more stable and acted better under load.
Get used to that. Being an admin means being an "asshole" a lot. You have to learn now to be firm and tell people how it is. It's one of the reasons why a lot of ex-admin types make great managers. A good admin has no problem telling people how things are.
And this old white haired guy that has trained the whole world is selling them and stuff. Strangely, the shipping is 7 bucks.
Seriously though,
I knew UNIX first. When my buddies were raving about dos and windows 3.0 being the next big thing, I was busy with other stuff and kinda ignored them. Next thing I knew I had NT 3.51 on a DEC workstation staring me in the face in the form of a new flight scheduling system. FUN! NOTHING like UNIX in any way shape or form. So I started with the basics. Operating systems all do pretty much the same types of things. The idea is to find out how to do those things. How do you:
Set up a network card
Install drivers
Configure user accounts
Change passwords
Modify the filesystem
Schedule jobs
and so on and so on.
The way I learned windows was to make a list of all the things I could think of that I had to do on a daily basis to admin a UNIX machine, and do research to find out how to accomplish those things on windows. After you've done that, you can fill in the rest of the blanks later. I spent a lot of time on USENET searching newsgroups for answers to silly things. The Microsoft Knowlege Database is an excellent tool. In the end, I learned something truly valuable. Windows NT 3.51 sucked. Thoroughly. And I threw a party 5 months later when they scraped the NT Alpha box and replaced it with a Sparc running SunOS. Still, that initial exposure to Windows NT has helped me fix all kinds of things on family and friends Windows machines for quite some time. You just have to get used to touching a mouse a lot more than a UNIX person should. You have to get comfortable navigating point and click mazes to find things that aren't always were you'd think they would be logically. You have to get used to not always having the blessed log file to look at for help when something isn't working right, and being fed error messages that make no sense at all and give you no clue as to what the actual problem is. Today, USENET can be searched very easily with groups.google.com. A short time ago, you used deja.com.:) It's very rare if I run into a problem with any OS platform that someone else hasn't already run into that problem and asked someone on a newsgroup how to fix it. Hope this helps.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to be picky. It sounds GOOD though. A lot of the time installing a firewall is a lazy way to get out of knowing your system well enough to shut off external ports and services/daemons you don't really need. If the attack has no point of entry, you really don't need a firewall to protect it. That would be kinda like having a heavily armed door-man for a house with no doors. This "always need a firewall" logic is right up there with portscanning your own machine to find open ports instead of doing a "netstat -an | grep LIST". Unless you are running windows I guess. I don't know windows well enough, but I'd assume it's easier to install a firewall than to attempt to chase down all the open ports and close them. It might even break windows to go shutting off stuff like that. YMMV. If I have a small network of machines that need to talk to each other, and talk to the outside world, I'll set up a simple firewall for them. Most people just have their computer and their dialup/dsl/cable connection to worry about and probably don't need a firewall. Good backups is what most people are lazy about. It doesn't matter how great your firewall is if you don't have any backups.
I think this is a good thing. It was going to happen sooner or later. At least it's happening with a monsterous litigious bastard like IBM in the drivers seat. This is a wet-dream best case scenerio in the happening. I mean, damn. I'm going to have a friggin party. Money talks. Period. SCO could even win their pathetic lawsuit, and still get buried by the IBM patents they are infringing on. SCO is history no matter what. Gone. So long. Thank you for playing. So their only hope is to keep getting a story every single business day to drum up support for their ludicrous licensing scam, and hope more idiots bite.
yet excellent page on just this topic. :)
HERE
Hope this helps!
Microsoft is going to have to start establishing a long term track record of having rational discussions and doing things right. At this point, most people associate Microsoft with that company that wrote the thing they use at work the reboots on them and gets slow. They MIGHT have heard about how they were judged a monopoly. Go a little higher to the technical manager level, and they might know about a few of the highly embarassing things that have happened to Microsoft like the lawsuits or the navy ship getting towed back to shore that was running NT, etc. The prevailing attitude has been:
"We have to like it. It's the only choice".
Or for the more hardcore fans,
"we have to love it and defend it because they have all the money and power and I always side with the winner because that's all I know to do. I am afraid of change".
And even though that gets them what they want in the end, market domination, not many people actually take them seriously. I can remember being at a coffee shop recently and 3 older, more mature looking suits were joking about how Microsoft was getting "more secure" and remarking on a outlook trojan problem they were having currently. Nobody buys it. They just have accepted that they have no choice. That's why a effort like this, no matter how much money they throw behind it, won't convince too many people. It will create some really great boilerplate for the zealots to recite. That's about it. They are going to have to actually make their products better and actually work very hard to clean up their public image before anybody takes anything like this seriously. Just look at the general body of the responses to this article already! If Linus submitted a story saying he was going to do some sort of security audit, he would pretty much universally be taken seriously. You'll never have that with Microsoft given the reputation they have forged for themselves. Windows Server 2003 is a good step in the RIGHT direction for once. It's the smartest thing they've done to DATE to combat Linux in any way. Why? They actually listened to what their customers wanted, and sorta did it instead of doing what THEY deemed right and push it on everyone. It actually looks to be a decent product. But, it doesn't help that Oracle put out their July/August 2003 magazine and there is a HUGE Penguin on the front cover. Pages 46-62 can be summed up like this:
"Get redhat and a dell and oracle9 or you are stupid."
They might as well have said:
"SCO is completely batshit. This is what you want to do now".
And they basically came out and said
"Federal Aviation Air Traffic and Control, as well as these hospitals are now running Oracle on Redhat on HP and Dell servers. We are now meeting the holy grail of reliability with Linux. You can trust it with your life, and the lives of your loved ones".
The message is pretty clear for any CIO or manager type that I've shown this issue to. With the momentum behind Linux at the moment, I don't see Microsoft being able to do much of anything to lower their TCO in time. Every time a CIO, CEO, VP, etc. hears about all the money Amazon have saved, They want some of that luvin.
Good list
:) I then proceeded to
I'd only add:
Prince, Purple Rain
Nirvana, Nevermind
Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine
Toadies, Rubberneck
NOFX, Heavy Petting Zoo
ANY Pixies album
Faith No More, Angel Dust
Van Halen, Diver Down
Metallica, Master Of Puppets
And those are just the ones off the top of
my head. The Cars, Candy-o was one of my all
time favorites. I had the cd in the cdplayer
on repeat for 3 days while I beat metroid the
first time and never felt the need to swap
it out. I can still remember trying to sneak
up on ridley while the intro piece before
candy-o comes on, then the guitar kicking in
at the beginning of the song right as I found
him. I jumped 3 feet.
sing along at the top of my lungs while
destroying ridley my first time out. I wish
kraid had been as easy.
:)
:) I bet the high phone bill
This just makes me smile an evil little grin.
Simply awesome.
was worth it. At least your telco let you off
the hook for half the bill.
What an awesome slashcode idea. Regardless of how :) When I'm spewing forth my
offensive you seemed to feel about my obvious
scarcasm, I think there is some mechanism you can
use to permanantly block my messages. I've never
used it myself, but I remember there used to be
this "troll" list you add to your foes list or
something, then chose to not see posts from those
people. As my comments are highly rated at times,
when I'm on slashdot which is rare, you are probably
going to be subjected to more of them. You might
want to pursue this blocking gimmick you can set
up with your account because I genuinely wouldn't
want you to feel discomfort by accidentally
reading my posts.
rhetoric, I'm almost always playing a heavy
devils advocate with a kernel of truth theme
and it rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
and the thought police won't throw you in jail for
a year. Don't assume you have the right to say
just ANYTHING. You have the right to free speach as
long as the powers that be are cool with it. For
example, it's not ok to yell "OVERTHROW THE GOVT!
BUSH IS AN ASSHOLE!" in a crowded theater because
you might cause a panic that could result in loss
of life. Justice is great if you can afford it, but
most of us can not. You have to have a lot of money
to stay "innocent" of most things you can be accused
of. But that's part of the reward of being
successful. You do get to be in an exclusive club
where you have more and better rights than those
with less money. That's how the system works.
PS: Jesus votes republican. Everyone knows that.
I think it has a lot to do with what you work with :) If it's
:) Doesn't mean I
early on. You build up prejudices based on work
experience then back them. I disliked SunOS until I got
to the point that I could rapidly accomplish
whatever I wanted. As soon as I knew it like the
back of my hand, I was pushing it on all my friends.
I started disliking sun right around the time they
released solaris. Bam, new job, BSDI. Loved BSDI.
Suddenly, tons of FreeBSD. LOVED FreeBSD above all
others. Then Digital UNIX 4.0, which turned into
Tru64. Much much love for Tru64. I've worked with
and developed on just about every UNIX platform
in the "enterprise". I can remember having a
damn near conniption fit when I found out an
early version of SCO UNIX I was forced to
develope for didn't have friggin JOB CONTROL.
Half the fun is working around crap like this.
At least for me. Ninety percent of all of it
is the exact same thing. I can remember developing
a simple big brother type server monitoring suite
for HPUX without ever actually using HPUX before
without an ounce of fear. As long as you ignore
the pretty administration tools and concentrate
on rocking the command line, most UNIX is nearly
identical. It sounds like you had a bad experience
with a Debian install, and swore off it forever.
Personally, I could care whether an init is sysv
or bsd style. Comfort with either doesn't pay
my bills. Being realistic, I'm way way above
petty hatreds towards perfectly fine UNIX and
UNIXish systems because I'm paid to do my jobby
job. It's all UNIX to me. I can still play
favorites with the rest of them.
RISC based, I love Tru64. If it's running on
Intel, I love FreeBSD. For my workstations, I've
completely fallen in love with Gentoo. Contrast
that with what the enterprise loves though.
RISC: Solaris
Intel: Redhat (especially with Oracle)
Workstation: Windows
And I'm cool with that too.
have to like it much, but I'm cool with it.
HERE
Hawking already figured out that blackholes:
:)
Aren't really all that black
Don't last forever (they dissipate then explode)
Radiate an amount of crap equal to what goes in it
(and with some help) The disk of crap floating
around it is it's entropy.
Massive simplification of what I think I saw
on TV.
Got bless the science channel at 2am.
We have learned that Gentoo runs like crap if it's
set up by someone clueless. The whole point to
Gentoo is to optimize the crap out of it. And NO,
most users do not run a stage3 install. Almost all
users I know run a stage1, or stage2. That's kinda
the point. But yeah. This test makes perfect sense.
They don't like Gentoo. They had an axe to grind.
Amazing that Debian came out on top.
Not to bring "your" down, but they'll release a
playable beta version that we'll have for FREE
for a long damn time like they always do. Are you
old enough to remember when Quake3 Demo was the
most popular game on the net? If wasn't even a full
game. Nobody paid for it. They will do the exact
same thing with Doom3. Rumor has it they are
releasing the first multiplayer Doom3 demo next
month at quakecon. Considering they have already
announced they will be having Doom3 deathmatch
at quakecon, this rumor is probably close to the
truth.
Since the handgun ban, crime has steadily gotten :) So much for the myth of the safer britain.
much much much much worse.
King Kong died. He fell off his perch and fell very
fast. He then proceeded to mess up a bunch of road
and create a traffic hazard. That and the Federal
Gov't wasn't looking the other way when King Kong
did his thing.
Oh, you totally got the wrong impression. I didn't
take what you said as a personal attack. And
likewise, I wasn't trying to personally attack you
either. Three years of experience with linux on
a desktop isn't quite the same as my background.
And games do stress certain parts of an operating
system and hardware. I had much hell with quake3
on linux a year or so ago before the nvidia linux
driver quality matched the windows driver quality.
A hardcore game is going to stress, like you said,
different things on a system. Whereas something
like an MTA, webserver, database, etc. is going
to stress different things. And like I said a few
posts back in this thread, Win2k is stable. I
wouldn't call it "very" stable based on my
experience with many other OS's, but I'd say it's
almost as stable as a vanilla redhat install
with no optimization. There is no comparison to
say, Tru64 or Solaris, or even Mac OSX though.
The true stability under load king at the moment
is definitely FreeBSD. You can load a FreeBSD
machine up to the point that X doesn't respond
and key presses take 45 minutes to register
in a terminal and it still will not die. As
a contractor, I have a windows partition for
access to Office, Project, and a few other
programs I simply need sometimes. Even a few
games I can't get working under Linux or
FreeBSD. There are still issues with windows
that someone with my background simply doesn't
understand happening given the thousands of
dollars I've spent on that windows software.
I've been please with a once or twice weekly
lockup with XP. I was happier with the once
every two weeks or so lockups I'd have with
Win2k. If I spent all my time in windows, instead
of perhaps 5 percent of it, it would probably
bother me more. The fix-action is to save often
and hope for the best. But I much prefer playing
games on Linux or FreeBSD for the reliability
and stability factors. I had UT2003 hard lock
Win2k numerous times before I found out I could
run it on Linux. It's amazing to me that I haven't
had a single problem with it since. Same hardware,
different OS's on different partitions. Amazing
the difference it makes.
I didn't say 20+ years of windows experience. Said
20+ years of experience. And if you had read
closely, you'd have noticed I specified "under load".
There is a huge difference between a machine that's
idle and one that is loaded. there is no "depends"
about it. Put a windows machine under extreme load,
and it will fall apart significantly faster than
any UNIX machine. Usually that means a server,
but not necessarily. A windows workstation under
extreme load will fall apart significantly faster
than a UNIX workstation under similar load.
whether you throw X in the mix or not. You are
kidding yourself, or simply lacking experience if
you think otherwise. Missions critical
applications like say, hospital databases or
ATC radar, or any other system where lives hang
in the balance are run on UNIX and Unixlike OS's
for a reason.
First of all Carmack is still fuming PISSED that
an ATI tech let that e3 demo get loose on the net.
They have been very friendly towards NVidia since.
Second of all, they ALWAYS release a demo before
the retail game comes out. Remember Doom3? How
about RTCW ET? They'll release a Doom3 multiplayer
demo, and probably a single player demo that they'll
watch like hawks for a good long time. That's how
they ALWAYS do it. Because it works. You get
millions of unpaid betatesters that way who don't
mind because they are playing the absolute best
FPS games made for free.
http://groups.google.com
Search: *
Then save to file.
DONE!
And I'm guessing you aren't an admin at all or you'd
know that's not how it works. You can't make all the
people happy all the time. You will get called an
"asshole". An admin that's never called one is what
we call a "kissass". Kissasses don't last long
because they are bending over backwards trying to
please everyone. Someday when when and if you
become a real admin, you'll learn this lesson. In
the meantime, do some tech support. You'll learn
that lesson there as well.
Yup. I do all my posting on a web enabled phone. :). You are the first AC that actually figured it
out in 3 years. I'm not even kidding.
Windows 2000 is a somewhat stable operating system
by my standards. I'd go so far as to say that it's
second in stability only to 2003 server. XP is not
as stable as win2k. Granted this is all from my
experience. I'd also say that most 2k and XP boxes
that are not stable were upgraded from earlier
windows versions, and not fresh installs. That has
also been my experience. I'd also say that there
is NO microsoft operating system yet that can
compare in stability under load to just about ANY
UNIX varient, or workalike. Period. That's also
from 20+ years of experience.
But even with my limited experience with windows,
I'm willing to bet your Win2k box was an upgrade
done overtop of a previous version of windows.
Probably ME or 98. I had problems with a Win2k
machine I had to use for a contract recently. Same
deal. All patches. All security updates. Still
bombed 3 times a day. Seems that Microsoft doesn't
do upgrades very well. I wiped the drive, started
over with a fresh Win2k install, and that did the
trick. Now it bombs about once a week. Much much
nicer. Still not anywhere near as stable as ANY
free UNIX workalike I've ever used. Even
turbolinux was more stable and acted better under
load.
Get used to that. Being an admin means being an
"asshole" a lot. You have to learn now to be firm
and tell people how it is. It's one of the reasons
why a lot of ex-admin types make great managers.
A good admin has no problem telling people how
things are.
AND THEY ARE FREE!!!
:) It's very rare if I run into a
And this old white haired guy that has trained the
whole world is selling them and stuff. Strangely,
the shipping is 7 bucks.
Seriously though,
I knew UNIX first. When my buddies were raving about
dos and windows 3.0 being the next big thing, I was
busy with other stuff and kinda ignored them. Next
thing I knew I had NT 3.51 on a DEC workstation
staring me in the face in the form of a new
flight scheduling system. FUN! NOTHING like UNIX
in any way shape or form. So I started with the
basics. Operating systems all do pretty much the
same types of things. The idea is to find out how
to do those things. How do you:
Set up a network card
Install drivers
Configure user accounts
Change passwords
Modify the filesystem
Schedule jobs
and so on and so on.
The way I learned windows was to make a list of
all the things I could think of that I had to do
on a daily basis to admin a UNIX machine, and
do research to find out how to accomplish those
things on windows. After you've done that, you
can fill in the rest of the blanks later. I spent
a lot of time on USENET searching newsgroups for
answers to silly things. The Microsoft Knowlege
Database is an excellent tool. In the end, I
learned something truly valuable. Windows NT 3.51
sucked. Thoroughly. And I threw a party 5 months
later when they scraped the NT Alpha box and
replaced it with a Sparc running SunOS. Still,
that initial exposure to Windows NT has helped
me fix all kinds of things on family and friends
Windows machines for quite some time. You just
have to get used to touching a mouse a lot more
than a UNIX person should. You have to get
comfortable navigating point and click mazes
to find things that aren't always were you'd think
they would be logically. You have to get used to
not always having the blessed log file to look at
for help when something isn't working right, and
being fed error messages that make no sense at all
and give you no clue as to what the actual problem
is. Today, USENET can be searched very easily with
groups.google.com. A short time ago, you used
deja.com.
problem with any OS platform that someone else
hasn't already run into that problem and asked
someone on a newsgroup how to fix it. Hope this
helps.