:-) Man, I remember that one! scary. But yes, I like Windows Update because it saves me time looking that the infernal mess called downloads.microsoft.com. Only thing, I read the notes that come with each patch -- no "automatically apply all updates" for me, thankyouverymuch.
You're entitled to block them if you wish, of course, but if the ads don't consume too many bits, and bring the site-owner some moolah, and don't interfere with your browsing, how does blocking text ads help?
Knee-jerk ad-blocking will only kill free content on the net, imho.
That doesn't make a ton of sense either, though./bin contains plenty of applications that a regular user will need. In particular, the shells, not to mention a TON of other apps (g[un]zip, tar, etc). Whereas/sbin contains apps only necessary for system administration. The name/boot is totally opaque to this, and would be even more confusing, at least IMHO.
I didn't mean club/sbin and/bin into/boot/bin. I meant,/sbin =>/boot/sbin and/bin =>/boot/bin./boot would contain the kernel.
This way you could still move the 'essential-to-boot' files off to another partition by mounting 1 parition --/boot -- elsewhere (instead of mounting 3), make it read-only, whatever.
Well, part of me thinks that people have trouble with the Unix filesystem simply because they expect it to be organized one way (like Windows) when it's not. So, rather than trying to understand the system, they decry it as poorly designed, and refactor it so it's "easier".
You are right in saying people decry Unix's filesystem (or Unix's GUI, for that matter;)) because they don't understand it. However, Unix's failure to provide alternatives that make sense to different classes of users is unforgivable. Its love-it-or-leave-it image and resistance to anything that makes Joe User's life easier has cost it dearly in the personal computer market, and will continue to cost it.
My point is simple: the traditional Unix FHS is *not ok* for joe user. The OSX FHS is. Which one a joe-user-targeting-distro should use is a no-brainer. The small mercy here is that symlinks can continue to ensure that compatibility is maintained.
Err, this is common sense, I think./bin and/sbin contain system-critical applications that belong in the root filesystem. Things that are necessary to boot.
Actually, having booted linux boxes off small disks (and subsequently mounting larger ones), I'm aware that splitting must-have files (ls, chmod) and non-must-have files (cc, emacs) makes sense. However, that doesn't mean/bin vs/usr/bin as a filesystem layout makes sense, however, beyond the fact that lots of Linux users are used to it.
By the "things that are necessary to boot" metric,/boot,/sbin and/bin perform a common function -- they contain the bare essentials that get a system to minimal level.
IMO/bin and/sbin should just go into/boot -- many people allocate a separate partition for/boot anyway, and/boot/bin makes it crystal clear that its contents are needed by the system to run. Keeping only the kernel on a/boot partition is senseless unless you're play with test kernels all day.
But why would you use multiple partitions, you ask? Why not just use one big one?
The problem (well, it's really a feature, not a bug) is that the unix FHS standard comes with a very strong multi-user background. Most *desktop* users (especially those switching from Windows) in fact do just that -- use just one big partition. And these are the people who have the most trouble understanding why the FHS was designed the way it was.
/usr and/usr/local are entirely different things, and not the worry of users. they are also very intuitive.
/usr/ and/usr/local/ is indeed reasonably intuitive. But why is there cruft like/bin vs./usr/bin and/sbin vs./usr/sbin in a typical linux FS?
Again,/usr/local/ is used by some apps only -- many others use/opt/. I've often found myself wishing there was a standard place that locally installed apps would go to across Linux distros.
For consumer-oriented Linux distros, IMHO the OSX FS standard (with symlinks for compatibility) is probably the best. That and a case-insensitive FS.
> What would an OS's base services require from a component object model?
An OS wouldn't need a component model if you define 'OS' to be Unix V7. The world has progressed since then (think OSX vs. Darwin).
> Does microsoft use them in the base of their OSes?
Well, insofar as windows shell services is part of the OS (try uprooting explorer.exe from the system, you can't), COM is very much there. (remember, from MS' standpoint, the irreplaceable shell (like Apple's Finder) is a feature, not a bug)
> COM is primarily for GUI and GUI-development
Not necessarily. COM has been used for lots of other things, including remoting and message passing. It's (relatively) hard, I grant you -- which is why both Java/.NET/Mono are the way forward.
> UNIX is not object-oriented
And that is really the root of all this. The services a plain Unix core provides is minimal. IMO Apple did the right thing -- took a core and added some really sweet proprietary stuff around it to make it usable*. Will some company is able to find the courage to do the same under the GPL? I don't know.
*usable to end-users, of course. Unix's bare-metal philosophy actually makes it more usable, not less, to people who actually want to build custom solutions, like Google's cluster or a MASSIVE render farm.
Actually Windows supports command line, DDE *and* OLE/COM. You also get the shared memory, named pipes etc. And if you don't want to struggle with DCOM,.NET has some very easy to use APIs for remoting.
Each has pros and cons, use what's best for your situation.
I hear a lot of sneers about COM in the Unix world, but it (and systems like it) are essential if you want to build sophisticated desktop applications. Mozilla (XPCOM) and Gnome (Bonobo) are examples of projects who rolled their own because Unix had nothing to offer them. Unfortunately, no one spent enough time *designing* Unix clones -- otherwise a XPCOM-like subsystem would be a standard part of every Unix distro.
An OS without a/standard/ component model today is like an OS without IPC in 1990.
Re:Why do "next gen" OSs have such GIANT interface
on
Looking at Longhorn
·
· Score: 1
> but it seems that the further along we get I like their OS's less and less.
Two words: classic `theme'. I use it all the time if I've to use an XP box, and I have a feeling it'll be there even in the final Longhorn builds, if only so that the Windows system team can keep their own sanity:)
Btw, it's pretty easy to customize Classic look-n-feel and get back the Windows 95 shell (in Windows 2000, I could even switch off Active Desktop using TweakUI, I'm sure this'll work for XP as well).
Wish Microsoft bundles both Java and.NET - wasn't the whole reason why.NET does not come bundled yet, Microsoft's apprehension of being forced to bundle Java too?
The Windows Server 2003 release candidates all have the framework installed, along with updates to the framework.
The framework is also a 'recommended download' on WindowsUpdate for Win2k computers (not sure about XP).
> The latest batch of pirated movies... are DVD quality ripoffs from DVDs
Hong Kong copies never cease to amaze:) Are these "DVD-quality" or basically.VOBs burnt onto DVD, i.e., real DVDs?
I wonder if the MPAA'll start looking into watermarking individual DVDs soon (or batches of DVDs). Of course, it'd be interesting to see if any watermarking scheme would survive the DivX rip process.
There's already such a project: The Mozilla control also uses the existing Internet Explorer interfaces meaning that it can be a drop in replacement for the Internet Explorer control in many cases. Unfortunately, Netscape never had much interest in this, so it's not surprising that most third party apps in Windows continue to embed IE.
OT, I've always found it very ironic that the very dialog that's used to change default browser settings is powered by IE.
That's interesting, because speaking from experience, remoted X on Unix (at least, on Solaris) and Remote Desktop on Windows 2000 was *way* faster than plain old AT&T VNC. TightVNC did slightly better than plain old VNC (I tried with hextile as well as JPEG compression), but was worse than the others.
> But yes, Bengal, whose capital is Kolkatta, is maybe the only > INdian state still ruled by commies, so don't expect the phone > company to let lose its orn grip anytime soon.
s/Kolkatta/Kolkata (or just say Calcutta:-))
The entire country suffers from a very weird socialist hangover, so no point blaming the commies here. I mean, name one Indian political party that does not advocate a nanny-state.
Besides which, the phone company (BSNL) is owned by the union (==federal) government, not the state government, faces considerable competition in the market in both basic voice and cellular, and is likely to be privatized soon anyway.
I'd say this was a smart move by BSNL -- there were people who were (or were thinking of) surrendering their fixed line phones in favor of WLL and cellular phones. Offering a data pipe will give folk an incentive to stick on with their fixed lines.
Something more interesting in the western city of Pune (can't find a link for this, more details would be great: the local BSNL office is thinking of offering cable TV + data to customers, all on the same line. Considering how absolutely incompetent private cable operators in India are, a lot of people might just take up this offer.
In the end, I suspect BSNL (like many other telcos) will move into this model (one line offers cable tv+data+voice) because otherwise there's no real reason to have that wire come into your house.
I don't know, to the extent that digital music/video drives hardware sales, Apple may even encourage file-sharing.
Of course, since MS competes head-to-head with Apple in the 'digital lifestyle products' market, if Apple goes through with this, I'd fully expect MS to try to parter/acquire a music label as well.
And considering that the consumer electronic+computer biz is worth much more than the music biz, it's not too far off to speculate that a day may soon come when the 'content brigade' plays second fiddle to the 'connectivity brigade'. Maybe wishful thinking, but I want to see record labels (with their gouging prices and barriers to competition) go the way of the dinosaurs.
Personally, I don't like having the mail client integrated with the browser. I don't want HTML mail support (reading or composition). I certainly don't want any scripting support. I don't want a newsreader built in (I use pan/nget for that). I want smarter filtering capabilities, or no filtering capabilities and lastly I don't want any of the offline reading support. I'm not even sure I want the address book.
Ah, the classic minimalistic vs maximalistic school of design battles. I'm not getting into that, but I'll point out this:
- Bloat of the codebase is irrelevant, as long as the developers can understand the code and tackle it. Disk space is cheap. Working set still matters, but I'm sure Sun would be happy to sell you heftier E15Ks:)
- While I too don't like my mail client integrated with the browser, I don't mind if they share the same toolkit (e.g. IE and Outlook Express share the Win32 toolkit, Windows Common Controls, Common dialogs, common HTML renderers, etc)
- Lots of people like HTML email. In particular, those composing multilingual email. (and HTML email is not bad per se, it's just implemented poorly in many MUAs, leading to web bugs and email viruses)
- Scripting: many commercial organizations would *die* without this; the "big 2" popular corporate email systems (MS' Exchange/Outlook, IBM's Domino/Notes) are both uber-programmable for this one reason. Notes's security model was way better than Outlook's VBA/COM approach, of course.
- Smarter filtering/no filtering: ubergeeks need no steenking filtering in their MUA, they've got procmail. Us mortals need smarter filtering. MailNews 1.3's bayesian spam filter rocks here.
- Offline reading support: Laptop+IMAP warriors will die without this
- Address Book: how will you realistically take care of conveniences like autocompleting addresses in a portable, platform independent way, especially given that on many platforms there is no standard way to store addresses?
> You know when I reboot? When I have to CODE something
Qualify your statement, because your experience is something I have a hard time accepting. As in so many other things, it all boils down to what you're doing. I'm still at a loss how VS.Net "sucks" (for what? developing Gtk+ forms? It sure doesn't suck for writing Win32 apps.)
My own experience has been:
C/C++/C# GUI/non-GUI apps intended for wide distribution to Windows users: all the best tools are on Windows: VS6, VS.NET, (and Delphi5-Delphi7 if you're so inclined). XP GUI programming (e.g. wxWindows, Swing) is just not acceptable unless your audience is very limited and/or your app is very specialized. P.S. VS.Net has a very highly compliant C++ compiler (and you can get it free with the.NET Framework SDK).
Java: Javaworld.com's readers rated NT as *the* most productive Java dev environment (Linux came second). This matches what I see a lot -- prototype/develop on Windows, deploy on Linux/Solaris.
PHP/Perl: Use Linux if you're planning to deploy on Unix/Linux. Sure, you can deploy on Windows, but why bother? (That's not to say you can't do quick-n-dirty Perl stuff on Windows, I do that all the time.)
To conclude: get a real OS (Win2k/XP), get rid of the visual cruft, get some good tools like ActiveState Perl (or Python), cygwin and UnixUtils, and watch your productivity rise.
That hasn't stopped folk who write X apps from ignoring this feature. So for users, the feature may as well not exist.
All you need to do is convince X app authors...
Let's see... write to 33 different -dev mailing lists, get flamed on 24 of them and be called a pathetic loser on 8 of the rest -- no thanks, I'll stick to Windows.
The full quote is usually translated into English as "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you".
It isn't hard to fix, but the typical Open Source model (developers scattered all over) is not conducive to good UI (I believe there was an excellent article at mpt.phrasewise.com about this).
Good UI needs small teams (remember, it took a small team at Apple to take BSD to the masses, in the face of/.-grade groupthink that said BSD is for gurus only). Looking at the number of Gnome vs. KDE flame wars, or even the flames Gnome2 got for "reducing options", I'd say interface consistency will not happen anytime soon -- the OSS crowd is too diverse for that.
My point exactly -- GUI tools on Linux are woefully inconsistent and a pain in the arse, so it's not surprising that both of us stick to the command line, which has changed little in a decade+.
But the average user doesn't care about administrative tools, nor should they.
But I'm not talking the administrative work an average sysadmin at work must do, I'm talking about small scale stuff desktop users must do: format disks, occasionally reconfigure their 'net connection (and their ISP tells 'em "no support because we only support Windows") -- the GUI tools for this are way too inconsistent across environments. By comparison, it's brain-dead easy on the Mac, and very easy on Windows.
(Btw, for remote access on Windows 2000 and above, there's Terminal Services, which works great on dialup and is _free_ for administrative use. Windows Server 2003 (finally!) supports headless operation, you don't need to plug in a monitor.)
Slashdot Mirror
:-) Man, I remember that one! scary. But yes, I like Windows Update because it saves me time looking that the infernal mess called downloads.microsoft.com. Only thing, I read the notes that come with each patch -- no "automatically apply all updates" for me, thankyouverymuch.
> Those text ads were quite tricky to filter out
You're entitled to block them if you wish, of course, but if the ads don't consume too many bits, and bring the site-owner some moolah, and don't interfere with your browsing, how does blocking text ads help?
Knee-jerk ad-blocking will only kill free content on the net, imho.
This way you could still move the 'essential-to-boot' files off to another partition by mounting 1 parition --
My point is simple: the traditional Unix FHS is *not ok* for joe user. The OSX FHS is. Which one a joe-user-targeting-distro should use is a no-brainer. The small mercy here is that symlinks can continue to ensure that compatibility is maintained.
Err, this is common sense, I think. /bin and /sbin contain system-critical applications that belong in the root filesystem. Things that are necessary to boot.
/bin vs /usr/bin as a filesystem layout makes sense, however, beyond the fact that lots of Linux users are used to it.
/boot, /sbin and /bin perform a common function -- they contain the bare essentials that get a system to minimal level.
/bin and /sbin should just go into /boot -- many people allocate a separate partition for /boot anyway, and /boot/bin makes it crystal clear that its contents are needed by the system to run. Keeping only the kernel on a /boot partition is senseless unless you're play with test kernels all day.
Actually, having booted linux boxes off small disks (and subsequently mounting larger ones), I'm aware that splitting must-have files (ls, chmod) and non-must-have files (cc, emacs) makes sense. However, that doesn't mean
By the "things that are necessary to boot" metric,
IMO
But why would you use multiple partitions, you ask? Why not just use one big one?
The problem (well, it's really a feature, not a bug) is that the unix FHS standard comes with a very strong multi-user background. Most *desktop* users (especially those switching from Windows) in fact do just that -- use just one big partition. And these are the people who have the most trouble understanding why the FHS was designed the way it was.
Again,
For consumer-oriented Linux distros, IMHO the OSX FS standard (with symlinks for compatibility) is probably the best. That and a case-insensitive FS.
> I know there are similar things in linux and windows but most of them are just addons.
MS-DOS had RAMDRIVE.SYS bundled with it back in the v3.x days (possibly earlier). Very useful in the days of slow 5.25" disks.
> What would an OS's base services require from a component object model?
An OS wouldn't need a component model if you define 'OS' to be Unix V7. The world has progressed since then (think OSX vs. Darwin).
> Does microsoft use them in the base of their OSes?
Well, insofar as windows shell services is part of the OS (try uprooting explorer.exe from the system, you can't), COM is very much there. (remember, from MS' standpoint, the irreplaceable shell (like Apple's Finder) is a feature, not a bug)
> COM is primarily for GUI and GUI-development
Not necessarily. COM has been used for lots of other things, including remoting and message passing. It's (relatively) hard, I grant you -- which is why both Java/.NET/Mono are the way forward.
> UNIX is not object-oriented
And that is really the root of all this. The services a plain Unix core provides is minimal. IMO Apple did the right thing -- took a core and added some really sweet proprietary stuff around it to make it usable*. Will some company is able to find the courage to do the same under the GPL? I don't know.
*usable to end-users, of course. Unix's bare-metal philosophy actually makes it more usable, not less, to people who actually want to build custom solutions, like Google's cluster or a MASSIVE render farm.
Rupert Goodwins, who said that on ZDNet, got confused -- he was talking about a Viewsonic smart display (basically a dumb terminal), not a Tablet PC.
Actually Windows supports command line, DDE *and* OLE/COM. You also get the shared memory, named pipes etc. And if you don't want to struggle with DCOM, .NET has some very easy to use APIs for remoting.
/standard/ component model today is like an OS without IPC in 1990.
Each has pros and cons, use what's best for your situation.
I hear a lot of sneers about COM in the Unix world, but it (and systems like it) are essential if you want to build sophisticated desktop applications. Mozilla (XPCOM) and Gnome (Bonobo) are examples of projects who rolled their own because Unix had nothing to offer them. Unfortunately, no one spent enough time *designing* Unix clones -- otherwise a XPCOM-like subsystem would be a standard part of every Unix distro.
An OS without a
> but it seems that the further along we get I like their OS's less and less.
:)
Two words: classic `theme'. I use it all the time if I've to use an XP box, and I have a feeling it'll be there even in the final Longhorn builds, if only so that the Windows system team can keep their own sanity
Btw, it's pretty easy to customize Classic look-n-feel and get back the Windows 95 shell (in Windows 2000, I could even switch off Active Desktop using TweakUI, I'm sure this'll work for XP as well).
Wish Microsoft bundles both Java and .NET - wasn't the whole reason why .NET does not come bundled yet, Microsoft's apprehension of being forced to bundle Java too?
The Windows Server 2003 release candidates all have the framework installed, along with updates to the framework.
The framework is also a 'recommended download' on WindowsUpdate for Win2k computers (not sure about XP).
> The latest batch of pirated movies ... are DVD quality ripoffs from DVDs
:) Are these "DVD-quality" or basically .VOBs burnt onto DVD, i.e., real DVDs?
Hong Kong copies never cease to amaze
I wonder if the MPAA'll start looking into watermarking individual DVDs soon (or batches of DVDs). Of course, it'd be interesting to see if any watermarking scheme would survive the DivX rip process.
There's already such a project: The Mozilla control also uses the existing Internet Explorer interfaces meaning that it can be a drop in replacement for the Internet Explorer control in many cases. Unfortunately, Netscape never had much interest in this, so it's not surprising that most third party apps in Windows continue to embed IE.
OT, I've always found it very ironic that the very dialog that's used to change default browser settings is powered by IE.
> VNC is faster
That's interesting, because speaking from experience, remoted X on Unix (at least, on Solaris) and Remote Desktop on Windows 2000 was *way* faster than plain old AT&T VNC. TightVNC did slightly better than plain old VNC (I tried with hextile as well as JPEG compression), but was worse than the others.
> if you believe Scott McNealy, gray goo
Actually, IIRC, it was Bill Joy who said that.
> This link is dead
Try http://64.39.15.171.
> But yes, Bengal, whose capital is Kolkatta, is maybe the only
:-))
> INdian state still ruled by commies, so don't expect the phone
> company to let lose its orn grip anytime soon.
s/Kolkatta/Kolkata (or just say Calcutta
The entire country suffers from a very weird socialist hangover, so no point blaming the commies here. I mean, name one Indian political party that does not advocate a nanny-state.
Besides which, the phone company (BSNL) is owned by the union (==federal) government, not the state government, faces considerable competition in the market in both basic voice and cellular, and is likely to be privatized soon anyway.
I'd say this was a smart move by BSNL -- there were people who were (or were thinking of) surrendering their fixed line phones in favor of WLL and cellular phones. Offering a data pipe will give folk an incentive to stick on with their fixed lines.
Something more interesting in the western city of Pune (can't find a link for this, more details would be great: the local BSNL office is thinking of offering cable TV + data to customers, all on the same line. Considering how absolutely incompetent private cable operators in India are, a lot of people might just take up this offer.
In the end, I suspect BSNL (like many other telcos) will move into this model (one line offers cable tv+data+voice) because otherwise there's no real reason to have that wire come into your house.
I don't know, to the extent that digital music/video drives hardware sales, Apple may even encourage file-sharing.
Of course, since MS competes head-to-head with Apple in the 'digital lifestyle products' market, if Apple goes through with this, I'd fully expect MS to try to parter/acquire a music label as well.
And considering that the consumer electronic+computer biz is worth much more than the music biz, it's not too far off to speculate that a day may soon come when the 'content brigade' plays second fiddle to the 'connectivity brigade'. Maybe wishful thinking, but I want to see record labels (with their gouging prices and barriers to competition) go the way of the dinosaurs.
- Bloat of the codebase is irrelevant, as long as the developers can understand the code and tackle it. Disk space is cheap. Working set still matters, but I'm sure Sun would be happy to sell you heftier E15Ks
- While I too don't like my mail client integrated with the browser, I don't mind if they share the same toolkit (e.g. IE and Outlook Express share the Win32 toolkit, Windows Common Controls, Common dialogs, common HTML renderers, etc)
- Lots of people like HTML email. In particular, those composing multilingual email. (and HTML email is not bad per se, it's just implemented poorly in many MUAs, leading to web bugs and email viruses)
- Scripting: many commercial organizations would *die* without this; the "big 2" popular corporate email systems (MS' Exchange/Outlook, IBM's Domino/Notes) are both uber-programmable for this one reason. Notes's security model was way better than Outlook's VBA/COM approach, of course.
- Smarter filtering/no filtering: ubergeeks need no steenking filtering in their MUA, they've got procmail. Us mortals need smarter filtering. MailNews 1.3's bayesian spam filter rocks here.
- Offline reading support: Laptop+IMAP warriors will die without this
- Address Book: how will you realistically take care of conveniences like autocompleting addresses in a portable, platform independent way, especially given that on many platforms there is no standard way to store addresses?
> You know when I reboot? When I have to CODE something
.NET Framework SDK).
Qualify your statement, because your experience is something I have a hard time accepting. As in so many other things, it all boils down to what you're doing. I'm still at a loss how VS.Net "sucks" (for what? developing Gtk+ forms? It sure doesn't suck for writing Win32 apps.)
My own experience has been:
C/C++/C# GUI/non-GUI apps intended for wide distribution to Windows users: all the best tools are on Windows: VS6, VS.NET, (and Delphi5-Delphi7 if you're so inclined). XP GUI programming (e.g. wxWindows, Swing) is just not acceptable unless your audience is very limited and/or your app is very specialized. P.S. VS.Net has a very highly compliant C++ compiler (and you can get it free with the
Java: Javaworld.com's readers rated NT as *the* most productive Java dev environment (Linux came second). This matches what I see a lot -- prototype/develop on Windows, deploy on Linux/Solaris.
PHP/Perl: Use Linux if you're planning to deploy on Unix/Linux. Sure, you can deploy on Windows, but why bother? (That's not to say you can't do quick-n-dirty Perl stuff on Windows, I do that all the time.)
To conclude: get a real OS (Win2k/XP), get rid of the visual cruft, get some good tools like ActiveState Perl (or Python), cygwin and UnixUtils, and watch your productivity rise.
X has supported this for longer than Windows
That hasn't stopped folk who write X apps from ignoring this feature. So for users, the feature may as well not exist.
All you need to do is convince X app authors...
Let's see... write to 33 different -dev mailing lists, get flamed on 24 of them and be called a pathetic loser on 8 of the rest -- no thanks, I'll stick to Windows.
The full quote is usually translated into English as "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you".
It isn't hard to fix, but the typical Open Source model (developers scattered all over) is not conducive to good UI (I believe there was an excellent article at mpt.phrasewise.com about this).
/.-grade groupthink that said BSD is for gurus only). Looking at the number of Gnome vs. KDE flame wars, or even the flames Gnome2 got for "reducing options", I'd say interface consistency will not happen anytime soon -- the OSS crowd is too diverse for that.
Good UI needs small teams (remember, it took a small team at Apple to take BSD to the masses, in the face of
My point exactly -- GUI tools on Linux are woefully inconsistent and a pain in the arse, so it's not surprising that both of us stick to the command line, which has changed little in a decade+.
But the average user doesn't care about administrative tools, nor should they.
But I'm not talking the administrative work an average sysadmin at work must do, I'm talking about small scale stuff desktop users must do: format disks, occasionally reconfigure their 'net connection (and their ISP tells 'em "no support because we only support Windows") -- the GUI tools for this are way too inconsistent across environments. By comparison, it's brain-dead easy on the Mac, and very easy on Windows.
(Btw, for remote access on Windows 2000 and above, there's Terminal Services, which works great on dialup and is _free_ for administrative use. Windows Server 2003 (finally!) supports headless operation, you don't need to plug in a monitor.)
It's hardly very secret these days :-)