Solution: buy a console and keep your XP box for current games. Give up new windows games. most of them are the same old crap anyway.
Best shoot-em-up available on console. best platformers available on console. best driving game (GT4 or Forza) on console. RPGs seem to be mostly dead (baldurs gate 2 runs on xp anyway) and the FPS market on linux isn't too bad.
Out of the remainder, a fair chunk will run with Cedega (Transgaming) on Linux.
I'm in this current situation myself... the only games really keeping me with a Windows install are Falcon 4: Allied Force and a couple of RTSs...
Thing is, with KDE you have the option to install/deinstall individual components. You don't *need* to run konqueror, kwm or any particular K app. The KDE apps are "tightly integrated" where that means "work well together". Not "integrated" in the microsoft sense, where they're non-optional...
Get back to me when someone figures out how to backup the data on all these distributed devices in a reliable manner.
Sure technology scales, but so does the rate of data consumption. You can miniaturize your devices all you like, but "enough" (in terms of what's "enough" for the data usage of the day) reliable, redundant, backed up data storage has certain requirements which have remained pretty consistent for the past couple of decades.
We run gigabit all over site (i work on a mine) and the Telco's link coming into site from the nearest city is just being upgraded to 12x512gigabit cores.
If you don't mind me asking, what exactly did you gain from upgrading to Windows XP to make it "totally worth it"?
We still run a mix of 2k and XP workstations, and there is nothing useful that the XP machines can do that the 2k ones can't (well, other than running windows 2k3 server admin consoles, but that's not a typical *user* task).
Given that the 2k machines use less memory to boot, they actually perform better with the 512mb most of them currently have, too.
if OsX had to support all the random hardware out there, i am sure that it's complexity (and bloat, instability, and tendency to crash) would skyrocket.
Sorry but I don't buy into this argument.
I have no experience with OS/X in this regard, but...
I will concede that most Windows instability these days is due to crappy drivers, however Microsoft isn't the vendor that has to support it all.
For the past 8 years or so, I have been required to install hardware-vendor supplied drivers to get my hardware to work with Windows (chipset drivers, video drivers, nic drivers, raid drivers, sound drivers, etc), whilst the only hardware I ever need to do this for on FreeBSD or Linux is 3D video (and yes, all my current hardware works with both Linux and BSD, and I purchased it all 3 months ago).
FreeBSD/Linux has *no* control at all over the hardware platform, supports more hardware (well, hardware that people actually *use*) out of the box, and both are still way more stable than Windows in my experience in dealing with both (and Windows) in a corporate environment.
I don't like Microsoft either, but lumping the hardware costs into the vista equation is a little unfair.
Sure, vista needs decent hardware, but any company with more than say, 50 desktops is going to upgrade to vista when they do hardware replacement due to warranty lapse/hardware failure anyway. In my experience, hardware either dies or is unusable for most users in a business environment after 4-5 years.
If they don't upgrade to vista, they'll still replace hardware regardless - i.e., continuing to run windows XP will incur hardware costs as well.
I see what you're getting at, but on the other hand, why should you presume that you live in the only *blue* room in existance, if you know for a fact that there are more than thousands of trillions of other rooms out there?
Why is it that those in the scientific community have been presuming for the past few decades that our solar system is so unbelievably special becaue it has planets?
We don't even really have a confirmed number of planets for our own solar system yet (we know of what, 9 or 10), and they presume on the basis of "we can't see them" that most of the rest of the galaxy's systems have no planets?
Yes, I know they have methods of detecting certain planets on remote systems, but I doubt that they're even somewhat accurate...
IMHO, by extension, if planets are common, life (in some form or another, not necessarily sentient) should be reasonably common as well...
I didn't claim securelevels are the solution to all security problems:)
They are, however an additional line of defense... that in some circumstances may be useful. It's no good jailing all your network services for example, if they require access to the root filesystem (eg, remote admin via ssh?)
On the contrary, i've seen more security issues with Windows XP (all versions) than Windows 2000.
Both OSes are insecure, so you put them behind a firewall and install a virus scanner. Most of the vulnerabilities that count when protected in this way are IE related, so don't run IE and keep firefox up to date (at least its patched somewhat regularly).
Given that Windows 2000 uses less resources, does less behind your back, will install to SATA devices with no issue (XP will not even install on my current system configuration) and will run everything that counts... its a no-brainer imho. I've currently got a pentium 930 with 2 gigs of ram an over 500gb of disk, and I prefer to run 2k or FreeBSD/Linux on it:)
The recent nvidia drivers even do some sort of font-smoothing, so it doesn't look like crap on my LCD any more...
Knowing about how linux works doesn't exclude you from the set of potential ubuntu users.
I've adminned Linux since 1996 (1996-2001 as an ISP sysadmin, 2001-2004 for corporate mail, proxy, IPSec gateway, etc), yet most of the time these days for a desktop I install/use/recommend Kubuntu. Why? Because it just works for the most part. I've been through the rolling my own distro from scratch, building all my stuff from source games and to be honest, I have more important things to do these days:)
Sure I'll muck around with that sort of thing from time to time, but when I just want to get work done, *ubuntu is quick and easy.
It used to be risky. Password hashes used to actually be stored in/etc/passwd, where anyone could read your password hash. If there was a weakness in the hash algorithm, or your password was particularly short, they could brute-force it that way -- hence, "time consuming".
Juse in case people reading the parent don't realise... "used to be stored in/etc/password" means "used to" = about 10 years ago.
I haven't seen a linux distribution of any repute that doesn't use password shadowing by default for about 10 years...
Comparing that to the Windows world and you're comparing to Windows 95 (most users still on 3.1x), or Windows NT 3.x.
IANASE (i am not a security expert), however I *believe* the issue is that an exploit using this method does not need to refer to the syscall table, and the code required to inject to modify a linked list in memory is much smaller (and therefore easier to inject) than traditional exploit code (can't rtfpdf as the site is currentl slashdotted)
Perhaps it would be an idea for Linux to adopt something similar to the FreeBSD securelevel system, whereby you can configure a server to disallow modification of kernel memory, etc even by root?
Again, IANASE so its possible i'm on the wrong track here...
On the contrary, the only reason we have thousands of muslim extremists willing to die in attacks on foreign soil is due to the abysmal choices made in US foreign policy over the past few hundred years. Earliest fuk up I can think of is when your rocked up on the shores of Japan (who had happily isolated themselves from the rest of the world for eons) and basically gave them the ultimatum of "open up for trade or be invaded!"
... unless you're dealing with large quantities of drives, personal experience is just that.
I've had a couple of seagates die on me and they've been replaced under warranty. Does this mean they're unreliable? Not really considering the vast majority of drives I buy/use are seagate. One of them was even replaced with a larger capacity drive (several years ago) as that was the smallest capacity they sold at the time of replacement (though this could have been the vendor's doing, as i returned to a vendor rather than direct to seagate).
On the other hand, I still have a notoriously unreliable model hard drive (IBM Deskstar 13.5gig aka the "Deathstar" for their high failure rate) that has been working flawlessly since 1999 or so:)
OT - whats all the fuss & hype about Ubunto/Kubunto ? I've install it a couple of times and I can't see any compelling reason for those distros compared to anything else like debian (apart from an easy install) or SuSE ? They just feel like a cut-down debian for some weird reason.
As said, it's because they ARE a cut down version of debian.
Or rather, (more specifically) a sane collection of default packages pulled from the debian unstable tree.
The big thing with *ubuntu is that if you run "ubuntu" it's a known quanitity - you *will* have at least a given base set of packages installed, that have been tested to work together.
If you want something more complete/customised, then use Debian... Personally I've been using Kubuntu any time I use Linux recently (i used debian exclusively between 1997 and 2001, nowadays I'm swinging more towards FreeBSD instead of Linux) because of the liveCD (run it on any machine that doesn't otherwise have linux installed) and because you can be up and running with a fairly complete, usable desktop in well under an hour.
I did the whole compiling/upgrading from source thing back in the mid-late 90s with slackware:D I'd rather spend my time working on my own code, instead of buggerising around compiling somebody elses.
Hrm, regardless of what wikipedia says, i take 0 day to mean "zero warning"... whether it's out before the vulnerability is made public (which it kinda is anyway, by way of the exploit being out for it:D) or at the same time, the end result is the same...
If they are wise (Personal Opinion) I would scrap the entire codebase of IE and start with an entireley new one for VISTA and change the name so the product gets a new start at life.
This is not necessarily a smart idea.
If you simply start afresh, chances are that you're going to end up with all the same exploits all over again.
They either need to do a full security audit of the code (unlikley for microsoft), or they need to start afresh *and* write it in a language/toolkit that is impossible/much harder to attack via buffer-overflow.
I guess my point is that simply starting over (without changes made to the development method) will not help. I'll be interested to see how many issues vista has actually, seeing as they finally got the TCP/IP stack working reasonably well in XP SP2 and have decided to re-write it for vista from scratch:D
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Best shoot-em-up available on console. best platformers available on console. best driving game (GT4 or Forza) on console. RPGs seem to be mostly dead (baldurs gate 2 runs on xp anyway) and the FPS market on linux isn't too bad.
Out of the remainder, a fair chunk will run with Cedega (Transgaming) on Linux.
I'm in this current situation myself... the only games really keeping me with a Windows install are Falcon 4: Allied Force and a couple of RTSs...
Thing is, with KDE you have the option to install/deinstall individual components. You don't *need* to run konqueror, kwm or any particular K app. The KDE apps are "tightly integrated" where that means "work well together". Not "integrated" in the microsoft sense, where they're non-optional...
Sure technology scales, but so does the rate of data consumption. You can miniaturize your devices all you like, but "enough" (in terms of what's "enough" for the data usage of the day) reliable, redundant, backed up data storage has certain requirements which have remained pretty consistent for the past couple of decades.
We run gigabit all over site (i work on a mine) and the Telco's link coming into site from the nearest city is just being upgraded to 12x512gigabit cores.
... "3.141 should be enough accuracy for anybody"
If you don't mind me asking, what exactly did you gain from upgrading to Windows XP to make it "totally worth it"?
We still run a mix of 2k and XP workstations, and there is nothing useful that the XP machines can do that the 2k ones can't (well, other than running windows 2k3 server admin consoles, but that's not a typical *user* task).
Given that the 2k machines use less memory to boot, they actually perform better with the 512mb most of them currently have, too.
Sorry but I don't buy into this argument.
I have no experience with OS/X in this regard, but...
I will concede that most Windows instability these days is due to crappy drivers, however Microsoft isn't the vendor that has to support it all.
For the past 8 years or so, I have been required to install hardware-vendor supplied drivers to get my hardware to work with Windows (chipset drivers, video drivers, nic drivers, raid drivers, sound drivers, etc), whilst the only hardware I ever need to do this for on FreeBSD or Linux is 3D video (and yes, all my current hardware works with both Linux and BSD, and I purchased it all 3 months ago).
FreeBSD/Linux has *no* control at all over the hardware platform, supports more hardware (well, hardware that people actually *use*) out of the box, and both are still way more stable than Windows in my experience in dealing with both (and Windows) in a corporate environment.
Sure, vista needs decent hardware, but any company with more than say, 50 desktops is going to upgrade to vista when they do hardware replacement due to warranty lapse/hardware failure anyway. In my experience, hardware either dies or is unusable for most users in a business environment after 4-5 years.
If they don't upgrade to vista, they'll still replace hardware regardless - i.e., continuing to run windows XP will incur hardware costs as well.
I haven't seen any truly intelligent life on this planet. Perhaps you mean sentient?
Yeah, bring back the petrification, nakedness, hot grits and natalie portman stuff :D
I see what you're getting at, but on the other hand, why should you presume that you live in the only *blue* room in existance, if you know for a fact that there are more than thousands of trillions of other rooms out there?
We don't even really have a confirmed number of planets for our own solar system yet (we know of what, 9 or 10), and they presume on the basis of "we can't see them" that most of the rest of the galaxy's systems have no planets?
Yes, I know they have methods of detecting certain planets on remote systems, but I doubt that they're even somewhat accurate...
IMHO, by extension, if planets are common, life (in some form or another, not necessarily sentient) should be reasonably common as well...
They are, however an additional line of defense... that in some circumstances may be useful. It's no good jailing all your network services for example, if they require access to the root filesystem (eg, remote admin via ssh?)
Both OSes are insecure, so you put them behind a firewall and install a virus scanner. Most of the vulnerabilities that count when protected in this way are IE related, so don't run IE and keep firefox up to date (at least its patched somewhat regularly).
Given that Windows 2000 uses less resources, does less behind your back, will install to SATA devices with no issue (XP will not even install on my current system configuration) and will run everything that counts... its a no-brainer imho. I've currently got a pentium 930 with 2 gigs of ram an over 500gb of disk, and I prefer to run 2k or FreeBSD/Linux on it :)
The recent nvidia drivers even do some sort of font-smoothing, so it doesn't look like crap on my LCD any more...
I've adminned Linux since 1996 (1996-2001 as an ISP sysadmin, 2001-2004 for corporate mail, proxy, IPSec gateway, etc), yet most of the time these days for a desktop I install/use/recommend Kubuntu. Why? Because it just works for the most part. I've been through the rolling my own distro from scratch, building all my stuff from source games and to be honest, I have more important things to do these days :)
Sure I'll muck around with that sort of thing from time to time, but when I just want to get work done, *ubuntu is quick and easy.
Juse in case people reading the parent don't realise... "used to be stored in /etc/password" means "used to" = about 10 years ago.
I haven't seen a linux distribution of any repute that doesn't use password shadowing by default for about 10 years...
Comparing that to the Windows world and you're comparing to Windows 95 (most users still on 3.1x), or Windows NT 3.x.
Perhaps it would be an idea for Linux to adopt something similar to the FreeBSD securelevel system, whereby you can configure a server to disallow modification of kernel memory, etc even by root?
Again, IANASE so its possible i'm on the wrong track here...
On the contrary, the only reason we have thousands of muslim extremists willing to die in attacks on foreign soil is due to the abysmal choices made in US foreign policy over the past few hundred years. Earliest fuk up I can think of is when your rocked up on the shores of Japan (who had happily isolated themselves from the rest of the world for eons) and basically gave them the ultimatum of "open up for trade or be invaded!"
I've had a couple of seagates die on me and they've been replaced under warranty. Does this mean they're unreliable? Not really considering the vast majority of drives I buy/use are seagate. One of them was even replaced with a larger capacity drive (several years ago) as that was the smallest capacity they sold at the time of replacement (though this could have been the vendor's doing, as i returned to a vendor rather than direct to seagate).
On the other hand, I still have a notoriously unreliable model hard drive (IBM Deskstar 13.5gig aka the "Deathstar" for their high failure rate) that has been working flawlessly since 1999 or so :)
Maybe because very few people run a 64 bit O/S, and even fewer run 64bit ready software?
As said, it's because they ARE a cut down version of debian.
Or rather, (more specifically) a sane collection of default packages pulled from the debian unstable tree.
The big thing with *ubuntu is that if you run "ubuntu" it's a known quanitity - you *will* have at least a given base set of packages installed, that have been tested to work together.
If you want something more complete/customised, then use Debian... Personally I've been using Kubuntu any time I use Linux recently (i used debian exclusively between 1997 and 2001, nowadays I'm swinging more towards FreeBSD instead of Linux) because of the liveCD (run it on any machine that doesn't otherwise have linux installed) and because you can be up and running with a fairly complete, usable desktop in well under an hour.
I did the whole compiling/upgrading from source thing back in the mid-late 90s with slackware :D I'd rather spend my time working on my own code, instead of buggerising around compiling somebody elses.
Try typing in something like: get http://www.google.com/ HTTP/1.0 into the terminal window :D
They might not kill *you*, but it's quite feasible they'll kill your bandwidth, your bandwidth usage quota, your mailbox, etc...
Hrm, regardless of what wikipedia says, i take 0 day to mean "zero warning"... whether it's out before the vulnerability is made public (which it kinda is anyway, by way of the exploit being out for it :D) or at the same time, the end result is the same...
This is not necessarily a smart idea.
If you simply start afresh, chances are that you're going to end up with all the same exploits all over again.
They either need to do a full security audit of the code (unlikley for microsoft), or they need to start afresh *and* write it in a language/toolkit that is impossible/much harder to attack via buffer-overflow.
I guess my point is that simply starting over (without changes made to the development method) will not help. I'll be interested to see how many issues vista has actually, seeing as they finally got the TCP/IP stack working reasonably well in XP SP2 and have decided to re-write it for vista from scratch :D