you won't get any spyware or data-mining cookies sneaked onto your computer
What, you're saying that not a single Linux web browser supports cookies? A "data-mining" cookie is just a cookie to track you as you browse the web - one set by an advertising site such as doubleclick. They work just as well whatever OS you're running.
6. Use your new shiny computer as you're pleased
Well, y'see, it pleases me to run games like Dungeon Siege, Postal 2, Warcraft 3, and a whole host of others that don't have native Linux versions (don't mention Wine, please). It also pleases me to write code in C# (again, forget mono, it's not nearly there yet). Until Linux provides me the means to do these things, it'll always be my secondary OS, Windows will be my primary, and "advice" to secure my PC by wiping Windows and installing Linux will be treated with the contempt that it deserves.
However, none of those bugs/holes will expose your PC to worms such as Blaster
You are of course aware that the first internet-borne worm utilised a buffer overflow in sendmail to infect computers? Don't go getting over-confident - true, I can't think of any Linux-targetting worms at the moment, but it's been done before, and it will be done again.
Oops, shoulda waited a few minutes before posting:
" Update: 12/24 19:15 GMT by T: Besides the workaround suggested below, Roblimo has a good suggestion on avoiding the first-day-of-Windows altogether."
They couldn't let a not-entirely-anti-MS article go, without linking to an unrelated, "run linux!" article.
30 or 60, the point was that within the time limit, the OS is fully functional. You do not have to activate (which incidently takes a few seconds) just in order to be able to download the patches.
Slashdot does hate Windows. Just wait for all the "Windows - so insecure, they have to write a guide to getting through a single day without getting r00ted!!" comments.
For what little it's worth, I've run a variety of Windows versions on my home machine over the last 6 years and have never been compromised. I currently run a software firewall on this box, and I'm not even being portscanned, despite having an ADSL connection running pretty-much 14 or 15 hours a day, every day.
At one time we didn't need any law - what the village elder(s) said, everyone did. Failure to comply would generally see you left to fend for yourself, banished, or killed.
Then society got too big and too complex, and laws had to be made, and people employed and charged with upholding them.
I see the net as being similar. Back when it was small, as you say everyone agreed to get along, or was kicked out. Now, it's too big for that - you get me kicked off my current ISP today, I'll be back with on new one tomorrow.
On the other hand, with its distributed, no single owner nature, I'm not sure how we can make laws for the net as it is. There's simply no-one to enforce them.
In any other industry, you'd see the producers of a product jumping on the chance to produce something that millions of people want.
And in any other industry, you wouldn't have the same problems of unauthorised reproduction and redistribution.
I'm not going to argue whether "most" people will pay or not - the point is that enough people won't if they don't have to that it'll seriously impact the companies's profits. It's got to be pretty damn hard to sell that to your shareholders - "Sure, this'll make it easier for people to rip us off, but they'll like us more!".
IIRC, when you first install XP (or patch a 2k machine so that it has AutoUpdate installed), AutoUpdate pops up a little systray icon asking you if you want to enable it. At that point, you can tell it to switch off.
Even if I got that bit wrong (and it has been a while), one thing is definitely true - the default config is to prompt you to download, then prompt you again to install updates. No Windows machine automatically downloads and installs updates unless someone configures it to do so.
"All Windows XP computers are vulerable to Blaster during bootup. "
My point was that that's bullshit. All XP machines are not vulnerable, only unpatched ones. That's not to say that the firewall isn't distinctly lacking, but the OP greatly exaggerates the scale of the problem.
It also doesn't affect people who make their internet connection from that box using a dial-up or ADSL modem - the firewall will be in place before they can log in and start the connection.
don't feel like logging on? Just hit the cancel button at the logon screen.
That's because user accounts on the 9x series of Windows are intended only to allow people to set up preferences - desktop background and theme, etc.
As you say, if you want security, run a proper multi-user OS like XP or Linux. I'd not recommend 2003 for a home user - it's a server OS, and so is designed with server tasks in mind, not playing games. It also costs a damn sight more than XP.
Regarding point 3), what we have here is a classic lack of discipline. I have a young daughter, and when she's naughty, she's punished. Imagine what would happen if I didn't punish her - she'd quickly realise that she could get away with doing stuff, and so probably keep on doing it, progressively pushing a little further to see how far she could go. That's just human nature.
Now, change "I" to "the governement" and "my daughter" for "MS", etc. See the problem?
Sure, they're in the wrong for doing those things, but the government is just as wrong for not smacking them down. Hate MS? Hate your government too, and any number of large companies while you're at it.
Since I am unwilling to give new MS operating systems a try, I take it as a matter of faith that by now they must be at least a decade behind Linux.
That's the problem with a lot of people on slashdot - they've not tried something (Java, Windows, whatever) in so long that they have absolutely no idea what the current status of the thing is, yet go on bashing it based on what they think (ie want to believe) is true.
Hey, I did the same thing about Windows myself, until I was forced to use Win 2K and found that, to my amazement, it was actually a good operating system. Linux has its strengths and advantages, and so does Windows.
Did you ever stop to think that perhaps, that's a config that MS didn't think anyone would ever want to modify? That's why it has a guid rather than a name - it's something you're not meant to want to touch.
Now, we can argue the pros and cons of that all day, and personally no, I don't think it's right - slapping in a guid for it stinks of a lazy, "oh, no-one'll want to touch it anyway, I can't be bothered to think of a decent name for it" approach.
It's just one isolated example though, specifically chosen to make the registry & MS look bad. Here's one for Unix - the Sendmail config file.
That is the biggest disadvantage to the registry. You never know where your program's settings are and therefore can't edit/copy/back up everything related to it unless you image the entire drive.
Bullshit. The registry is just a file (okay, a couple of files), sat on the disk like any other, and like any other, it can be copied. Regedit has an export function - if you like, you can export individual keys/branches or the whole damn thing. That gives you a file you can dump on another machine, double-click and have merged automatically. (And yes, if you do the whole thing, you're liable to trash the other machine, just as if you copied the whole of/etc over to a different machine with different hardware, etc)
If your applications are dumping settings all over the place willy-nilly, that's not MS's fault. You'll be wanting to talk to the application developers.
No, I don't find it much easier. (I consider myself an advanced user)
In my experience, most registry keys have much more sensible, descriptive names than the quoted example, in which case there's no practical difference between editing the text file and editing the registry. In both cases, you open the file in an editor (vi/emacs/joe/whatever or regedit), search for the thing to edit, and change it.
In both cases, an advanced user will be fine, while a new user may well not be. New users will still want to change their screen resolution, though...
I have a daughter. Sometimes she's good, sometimes she's bad. When she's bad, she's told off and punished. It doesn't necessarily stop her from being naughty again, but if we didn't discipline her, then she'd almost certainly misbehave more rather than less. It's human nature - people tend, for the most part, to do what they think they can get away with.
It's the same with businesses. MS has been convicted of illegally abusing their monopoly position (they've been bad, and have been told off). For whatever reason, that's as far as it's going - noone seems to be doing anything more (they're not being punished). And now people are surprised that, having been caught misbehaving and not having been punished, that they're not particularly repentent?
Oh, and while what you say is true, don't think for one second that a company like Sony wouldn't absolutely love to be able to crush their competition. I guarantee you that the thought of being the only manufacturer of consumer electronics equipment in the world would give a high proportion of Sony management wet dreams for weeks. The biggest difference between them (or any other company) and MS is that they're not big enough to be able to do it.
most hardware drivers are included and you don't have to separately download/install them (NVidia is an exception)
NVidia's drivers are also the exception in that they're of equal or better quality than the Windows equivalent.
Maybe it's changed recently, but the last time I checked, if you wanted good 3D graphics performance under Linux (ie comparable to that available under Windows), you needed an NVidia card and NVidia's drivers. No open source drivers even came close.
What? You wanted an IDE? That's what we call a crutch for the weak.
Yeah, I used to think that way too. Then I grew up a little, actually tried using an IDE instead of letting my prejudices blind me and found how much more productive I was with an environment that actually supports the development process.
Don't get me wrong - if you can't write code using a text editor and command line build/compilatation tools, then you've no right to consider yourself able to code in it. But if you refuse to use an IDE because of some misplaced machismo, well you've no right to consider yourself a programmer.
A "crutch for the weak" indeed; I'm sure plenty of assembler guys felt the same way about C, too.
"yum install programname" which is pretty self explantory as far as I can see
Why "yum" though? What does it mean? Why not just "install programname"? Or perhaps "update system install programname", etc.
It's a rhetorical question - I'm just trying to point out that calling your software installer "yum" does not make things particularly self-explanatory. Imagine being sat at a command line, trying to remember what your computer whizz-kid friend said about how to install stuff - would you really think "Of course, it was called 'yum', that makes sense!"?
It's a better system, as long as the program you want is known to the system, but it's a damn silly name:-)
Never installed windows, have you? Far more difficult then the streamlined install that most new linux distros have
I've installed XP Pro a couple of times this year on a couple of machines, and Win 2k Server under VMWare. I've also installed a couple of versions of Mandrake (9.1 and 9.2, 9.0 may have been last year), Fedora Core 1, Redhat 8.something, and gentoo.
I'd say that the installation procedures for all of them (with the obvious exception of Gentoo) is roughly comparable. Once you hit whatever "expert" mode the Linux installers have, then you're in much more complicated territory of course, but that's your own fault.
In fact, the Windows install process has been easy since at least Win95 - the only lack of streamlining was in the numerous reboots that were requried as you installed third party hardware drivers. Even that has diminished greatly with recent versions.
Uninstallation is a crapshoot, so much so that tons of software has been written to fix this problem (like Adaware.)
Now I really suspect you're trolling. Adaware, as I'm sure you know, is designed to track down and remove malicious software, not to clean up after faulty uninstallers.
It is reasonable that Microsoft wants to declare war on my profession. They want to take the bread off my table. They want complete and total domination.
Swap "Microsoft" with "the FSF", and see if that still makes sense. I've read many a comment here and on other sites from people who would like nothing better than to see proprietary, closed source software disappear, and all those who write it out on the streets.
MS has declared war on Linux and open source? Perhaps - but Stallman declared war on them first.
TweakUI *is* the gui workaround in this case. Hacking that key out of the registry is the WIndows equivalent of editing a config file.
The average computer user is going to find editing their XF86Config file every bit as daunting, difficult to do and error prone as editing their registry.
Slashdot Mirror
you won't get any spyware or data-mining cookies sneaked onto your computer
What, you're saying that not a single Linux web browser supports cookies? A "data-mining" cookie is just a cookie to track you as you browse the web - one set by an advertising site such as doubleclick. They work just as well whatever OS you're running.
6. Use your new shiny computer as you're pleased
Well, y'see, it pleases me to run games like Dungeon Siege, Postal 2, Warcraft 3, and a whole host of others that don't have native Linux versions (don't mention Wine, please). It also pleases me to write code in C# (again, forget mono, it's not nearly there yet). Until Linux provides me the means to do these things, it'll always be my secondary OS, Windows will be my primary, and "advice" to secure my PC by wiping Windows and installing Linux will be treated with the contempt that it deserves.
However, none of those bugs/holes will expose your PC to worms such as Blaster
You are of course aware that the first internet-borne worm utilised a buffer overflow in sendmail to infect computers? Don't go getting over-confident - true, I can't think of any Linux-targetting worms at the moment, but it's been done before, and it will be done again.
Oops, shoulda waited a few minutes before posting:
" Update: 12/24 19:15 GMT by T: Besides the workaround suggested below, Roblimo has a good suggestion on avoiding the first-day-of-Windows altogether."
They couldn't let a not-entirely-anti-MS article go, without linking to an unrelated, "run linux!" article.
Because we're not all no good, low down filthy pirates like you - some of us pay for our software, even Windows.
30 or 60, the point was that within the time limit, the OS is fully functional. You do not have to activate (which incidently takes a few seconds) just in order to be able to download the patches.
Slashdot does hate Windows. Just wait for all the "Windows - so insecure, they have to write a guide to getting through a single day without getting r00ted!!" comments.
For what little it's worth, I've run a variety of Windows versions on my home machine over the last 6 years and have never been compromised. I currently run a software firewall on this box, and I'm not even being portscanned, despite having an ADSL connection running pretty-much 14 or 15 hours a day, every day.
AOL offers broadband, at least here in the UK.
exploitative shills like Running with Scissors
What exactly are they exploiting? Who exactly are they shilling for?
At one time we didn't need any law - what the village elder(s) said, everyone did. Failure to comply would generally see you left to fend for yourself, banished, or killed.
Then society got too big and too complex, and laws had to be made, and people employed and charged with upholding them.
I see the net as being similar. Back when it was small, as you say everyone agreed to get along, or was kicked out. Now, it's too big for that - you get me kicked off my current ISP today, I'll be back with on new one tomorrow.
On the other hand, with its distributed, no single owner nature, I'm not sure how we can make laws for the net as it is. There's simply no-one to enforce them.
In any other industry, you'd see the producers of a product jumping on the chance to produce something that millions of people want.
And in any other industry, you wouldn't have the same problems of unauthorised reproduction and redistribution.
I'm not going to argue whether "most" people will pay or not - the point is that enough people won't if they don't have to that it'll seriously impact the companies's profits. It's got to be pretty damn hard to sell that to your shareholders - "Sure, this'll make it easier for people to rip us off, but they'll like us more!".
IIRC, when you first install XP (or patch a 2k machine so that it has AutoUpdate installed), AutoUpdate pops up a little systray icon asking you if you want to enable it. At that point, you can tell it to switch off.
Even if I got that bit wrong (and it has been a while), one thing is definitely true - the default config is to prompt you to download, then prompt you again to install updates. No Windows machine automatically downloads and installs updates unless someone configures it to do so.
Precisely my point. Quoting the OP:
"All Windows XP computers are vulerable to Blaster during bootup. "
My point was that that's bullshit. All XP machines are not vulnerable, only unpatched ones. That's not to say that the firewall isn't distinctly lacking, but the OP greatly exaggerates the scale of the problem.
It also doesn't affect people who make their internet connection from that box using a dial-up or ADSL modem - the firewall will be in place before they can log in and start the connection.
don't feel like logging on? Just hit the cancel button at the logon screen.
That's because user accounts on the 9x series of Windows are intended only to allow people to set up preferences - desktop background and theme, etc.
As you say, if you want security, run a proper multi-user OS like XP or Linux. I'd not recommend 2003 for a home user - it's a server OS, and so is designed with server tasks in mind, not playing games. It also costs a damn sight more than XP.
No, the original poster said that the patch made his computer unstable, not that it made it less secure.
;-)
Although to be honest, quite how he could tell that Win98 was being less stable I don't know...
All Windows XP computers are vulerable to Blaster during bootup.
Even those that are patched for it?
Regarding point 3), what we have here is a classic lack of discipline. I have a young daughter, and when she's naughty, she's punished. Imagine what would happen if I didn't punish her - she'd quickly realise that she could get away with doing stuff, and so probably keep on doing it, progressively pushing a little further to see how far she could go. That's just human nature.
Now, change "I" to "the governement" and "my daughter" for "MS", etc. See the problem?
Sure, they're in the wrong for doing those things, but the government is just as wrong for not smacking them down. Hate MS? Hate your government too, and any number of large companies while you're at it.
Since I am unwilling to give new MS operating systems a try, I take it as a matter of faith that by now they must be at least a decade behind Linux.
That's the problem with a lot of people on slashdot - they've not tried something (Java, Windows, whatever) in so long that they have absolutely no idea what the current status of the thing is, yet go on bashing it based on what they think (ie want to believe) is true.
Hey, I did the same thing about Windows myself, until I was forced to use Win 2K and found that, to my amazement, it was actually a good operating system. Linux has its strengths and advantages, and so does Windows.
Did you ever stop to think that perhaps, that's a config that MS didn't think anyone would ever want to modify? That's why it has a guid rather than a name - it's something you're not meant to want to touch.
/etc over to a different machine with different hardware, etc)
Now, we can argue the pros and cons of that all day, and personally no, I don't think it's right - slapping in a guid for it stinks of a lazy, "oh, no-one'll want to touch it anyway, I can't be bothered to think of a decent name for it" approach.
It's just one isolated example though, specifically chosen to make the registry & MS look bad. Here's one for Unix - the Sendmail config file.
That is the biggest disadvantage to the registry. You never know where your program's settings are and therefore can't edit/copy/back up everything related to it unless you image the entire drive.
Bullshit. The registry is just a file (okay, a couple of files), sat on the disk like any other, and like any other, it can be copied. Regedit has an export function - if you like, you can export individual keys/branches or the whole damn thing. That gives you a file you can dump on another machine, double-click and have merged automatically. (And yes, if you do the whole thing, you're liable to trash the other machine, just as if you copied the whole of
If your applications are dumping settings all over the place willy-nilly, that's not MS's fault. You'll be wanting to talk to the application developers.
No, I don't find it much easier. (I consider myself an advanced user)
In my experience, most registry keys have much more sensible, descriptive names than the quoted example, in which case there's no practical difference between editing the text file and editing the registry. In both cases, you open the file in an editor (vi/emacs/joe/whatever or regedit), search for the thing to edit, and change it.
In both cases, an advanced user will be fine, while a new user may well not be. New users will still want to change their screen resolution, though...
That's true.
I have a daughter. Sometimes she's good, sometimes she's bad. When she's bad, she's told off and punished. It doesn't necessarily stop her from being naughty again, but if we didn't discipline her, then she'd almost certainly misbehave more rather than less. It's human nature - people tend, for the most part, to do what they think they can get away with.
It's the same with businesses. MS has been convicted of illegally abusing their monopoly position (they've been bad, and have been told off). For whatever reason, that's as far as it's going - noone seems to be doing anything more (they're not being punished). And now people are surprised that, having been caught misbehaving and not having been punished, that they're not particularly repentent?
Oh, and while what you say is true, don't think for one second that a company like Sony wouldn't absolutely love to be able to crush their competition. I guarantee you that the thought of being the only manufacturer of consumer electronics equipment in the world would give a high proportion of Sony management wet dreams for weeks. The biggest difference between them (or any other company) and MS is that they're not big enough to be able to do it.
most hardware drivers are included and you don't have to separately download/install them (NVidia is an exception)
NVidia's drivers are also the exception in that they're of equal or better quality than the Windows equivalent.
Maybe it's changed recently, but the last time I checked, if you wanted good 3D graphics performance under Linux (ie comparable to that available under Windows), you needed an NVidia card and NVidia's drivers. No open source drivers even came close.
What? You wanted an IDE? That's what we call a crutch for the weak.
Yeah, I used to think that way too. Then I grew up a little, actually tried using an IDE instead of letting my prejudices blind me and found how much more productive I was with an environment that actually supports the development process.
Don't get me wrong - if you can't write code using a text editor and command line build/compilatation tools, then you've no right to consider yourself able to code in it. But if you refuse to use an IDE because of some misplaced machismo, well you've no right to consider yourself a programmer.
A "crutch for the weak" indeed; I'm sure plenty of assembler guys felt the same way about C, too.
"yum install programname" which is pretty self explantory as far as I can see
:-)
Why "yum" though? What does it mean? Why not just "install programname"? Or perhaps "update system install programname", etc.
It's a rhetorical question - I'm just trying to point out that calling your software installer "yum" does not make things particularly self-explanatory. Imagine being sat at a command line, trying to remember what your computer whizz-kid friend said about how to install stuff - would you really think "Of course, it was called 'yum', that makes sense!"?
It's a better system, as long as the program you want is known to the system, but it's a damn silly name
Never installed windows, have you? Far more difficult then the streamlined install that most new linux distros have
I've installed XP Pro a couple of times this year on a couple of machines, and Win 2k Server under VMWare. I've also installed a couple of versions of Mandrake (9.1 and 9.2, 9.0 may have been last year), Fedora Core 1, Redhat 8.something, and gentoo.
I'd say that the installation procedures for all of them (with the obvious exception of Gentoo) is roughly comparable. Once you hit whatever "expert" mode the Linux installers have, then you're in much more complicated territory of course, but that's your own fault.
In fact, the Windows install process has been easy since at least Win95 - the only lack of streamlining was in the numerous reboots that were requried as you installed third party hardware drivers. Even that has diminished greatly with recent versions.
Uninstallation is a crapshoot, so much so that tons of software has been written to fix this problem (like Adaware.)
Now I really suspect you're trolling. Adaware, as I'm sure you know, is designed to track down and remove malicious software, not to clean up after faulty uninstallers.
It is reasonable that Microsoft wants to declare war on my profession. They want to take the bread off my table. They want complete and total domination.
Swap "Microsoft" with "the FSF", and see if that still makes sense. I've read many a comment here and on other sites from people who would like nothing better than to see proprietary, closed source software disappear, and all those who write it out on the streets.
MS has declared war on Linux and open source? Perhaps - but Stallman declared war on them first.
TweakUI *is* the gui workaround in this case. Hacking that key out of the registry is the WIndows equivalent of editing a config file.
The average computer user is going to find editing their XF86Config file every bit as daunting, difficult to do and error prone as editing their registry.