IIS, since version 6, has had fewer vulnerabilities than Apache has, however, neither have been particularly holey.
Are you seriously about the backslash? Microsoft actually WAS following the standard, the standard being CP/M.
As for your DNS problems, i've noticed on some firewalls, the IPv6 implementation seems to interfere with things on occasion. If you disable IPv6, things will work.
As for manually setting them, it works exactly the same way it always has.
What happens if they combine the exploit with a previously unknown local root vulnerability?
Many linux people seem to disregard local root vulnerabilities on machines that are single user (and they are the user) or internet servers where they are the only user that logs into them. They reason that since they don't give anyone else access to the machine, there is no reason to worry about them (i've seen lots of comments like this in the past when local root exploits are discovered).
If an exploit can give someone arbitrary code execution, even if it's in a user context, then one never knows what other things they can do. As such, you really cannot assume you haven't been rooted just because someone got access only as a given user.
Frontpage is old. VERY old. It hasn't been sold for a decade, at least. SourceSafe isn't as bad as it once was, the 2005 version can be client/server and is "good enough" for most people. I prefer other tools, but I've used it in very large (500+ clients) situations.
Visual Studio certainly has it's quirks, and bugs, but it hardly "sucks". It's pretty much THE standard for IDE's, and if you throw in some 3rd party extensions like ReSharper it's freaking amazing.
Zune? Have you actually used one? Everyone that I know who owns a Zune loves it. That's about 30 people that I know personally, and they would never give it up. The Zune has largely fallen prey to the same kind of FUD as Vista.
Yeah, Windows Mobile sucks as a general purpose phone.. it works great in situations like Point of Sale, or handheld field devices, but not so much for a phone.
Wait... so you're supposed to use a FireFox fork? Is there any guarantee that they will stay in sync with the main branch? How quickly will they apply security patches when they are issued?
So, as the submitter, I saw a lot of similarities here. Basically when Microsoft entered the operating system market, they borrowed a lot of ideas and they innovated some as well. Then they patented as much software "methods" as they could. Now you see them demanding everyone to pay protection money who is using Linux.
Have you noticed that Microsoft hasn't sued anyone else?
At the time Microsoft went after TomTom, it was pretty clear that the suit was only because TomTom had threatened them with a lawsuit first. Microsoft took the offensive and filed their suit, to which TomTom responded in a matter of days with their own, clearly indicating they had the suit ready. Not only that, but TomTom had a history of going after others, such as numerous suits between Garmin, Toyota, and others.
The fact that Microsoft hasn't gone after anyone else seems to indicate to me that they were simply defending themselves, not "demanding everyone to pay protection money who i using Linux".
You mean you just want to tell it to start recording at a certain time and stop at another time? TiVo does that already.
The problem is, what if they change the airing schedule, and you didn't notice. And to me, i'd much rather say "Record all showings of Firefly, I don't care when they are" rather than dig around in a schedule looking for the times to enter. The former takes about 10 seconds, the latter takes upwards of 5 minutes per program.
$200 DUAL HD Tuners with CableCard support (something you can't get off the shelf anyways) $75 built-in hardware MPEG decoding (something you won't get in most cheap motherboards with built-in video although might be built-into a tuner)
The software is not "free", TiVo pays a cost to develop the softwrae and this price is included in both the subscription and the price of the unit. Let's set the price at $75 including lifetime updates.
The Limux project was delayed by less than 6 months, not 3.25 years, and that was during the SCO BS.
Where do you get 3.25 years? It's certainly not in the timeline of the wikipedia page. All those things you're seeing as "deciding how" is part of the migration process, and part of the planned timeline, and costed money.
It took them 1 year to do an evaluation and decide to move forward. They were delayed by less than 6 months over legal concerns. Other than that, it was all work on the conversion.
The fact of the matter is, linux migrations of any size are not smooth and uneventful as the OP was suggesting, especially in a government beaurocracy.
The microsoft bid was $23.7 million. Munich chose to go with the Limux option at a cost of (at the time) $35.7 Million. The costs have risen since then, and nobody is sure by exactly how much, but given that the original estimate was more than 1.5x to begin with, it's certain the running tab is well over that 2x mark by now, especially considering the project was supposed to be DONE by 2008. Who do you think is paying all those salaries for the last 2 years of unerestimated work time? Much less the next several years.
License upgrades? it's 14,000 computers. Even if you calculated the cost based on retail prices, that's 14,000 x $199, that's 2.7 million dollars, or less than 1/4th the difference in projected price, and a lot more than actual price difference of the conversion to Linux.
You could pay for new license for 5 or 6 new versions of Windows with the difference. You put way too much concern on the least expensive part of owning a computer. The license fees.
So yes, in 20 years, they might pay back the extra money they're spending. But by then, they will likely have gone through several Linux upgrad cycles as well. And that assumes they didn't skip a windows upgrade cycle (considering that all their computers had been running Windows NT4 then that should tell you something about how often they upgrade).
I'm not sure what private companies you've worked for, but every private company i've worked for of more than 50 people behaves the way you describe for governments. You spend all your budget or you get less next year, and you find ways to get more people and money under you to raise your prestige.
I know of no companies that work the way you describe them. In fact, the money a given departement might save will end up getting "absorbed" by a different departement who's goal is to spend as much as possible.
Besides, we're talking about government switching to open source anyways. Remember the title?
"Australian Senate Hears Open Source Is Too Expensive"
I'm confused. You saying "I have no use for PowerShell" is the same as a Windows admin saying "I have no use for bash". It's your own personal preference, even though PowerShell is as powerful and useful as bash, if not more so. Just because you're not as proficient in it doesn't make it any less powerful. And just because it works on objects doesn't mean you lose "good text processing", since you can use any of the gnu tools with it as well.
You're trying to administer Windows systems as if they were Linux systems, and of course that's not going to work, just as trying to administer Linux systems as if they Windows or MacOS won't work.
Nothing GUI is required these days.. Anything you can do from a GUI can be done from a command line.
And if you really really insist, there's always cygwin with bash, or SFU with bash, and the complete set of tools.
You really failed to answer my question though, you instead chose to answer "The tools to administer Windows without re-learning my Unix knowledge just aren't there".
Regarding the apps themselves, it's true that many require registry settings, but those are the apps, and there are dozens of ways to solve that problem. Just because you don't like push servers doesn't mean they don't work.
And mounting your/usr partition on a network drive is probably one of the stupidest ways to construct your network. If the network is down, nobody can run their apps. If the network is down, or having issues, things crash. If you're going to do that, why not just run everying on a terminal server? It's a lot less work.
And the reason you didn't asnwer my questions? Yeah, right, because you obviously can't.
See, two can play those stupid games. Here's a hint, think of why you didn't answer my question, and then apply it to me. Chances are, it's the same reason.
You seem to have lost the original point, which was that it was so much work to slipstream SATA drivers into a copy of XP, now you're goin on about a whole ton more work...
Yes, you can do all that stuff you're referring to, or they can also slipstream SATA drivers into their existing CD, probably less work.
Wow, what incompetent morons. Seriously, if they found out anything didn't work AFTER the upgrade, they're not doing their job.
I also question the wisdom of upgrading old hardware to Windows 7.
Companies replace hardware on a regular basis because the hardware depreciates over time and they take this as a tax write-off. Once the hardware has lost all it's tax value, they replace it with new hardware to get new tax breaks.
Of course, in a downturn economy when you may not be making as much money, tax breaks are less of an issue if you're not making any profit.
Can you give an example of these tools that aren't there?
By the way, i know a lot of Unix/Linux/BSD admin, I only know one that administers more than 20 servers. I think you'll find your claim that the typical admin adminsters thousands of servers by themselves difficult to support.
if you run an internal email server, and use VPN for remote connections (even for email), then nobody can see your internal emails, unless they get forwarded to someone else not on the server.
In the case of gmail or hotmail or any external email service, then all your email is in the hands of someone else, not just the email that makes it out of your serer.
Having actually replaced proprietary systems with open source alternatives, I can tell you none of the expense talking points that usually get thrown around by people invested in Microsoft products have ever materialized.
Really? Tell that to the city of Munich who, 7 *YEARS* ago began the process of converting 11,000 PC's to Linux, and 7 *YEARS* later, and at a budget that is blown up to 2x the Microsoft bid, they still have less than 20% of computers running Linux, and at the current rate won't have it done until 2020.
And no, we elect politicians with the intent to have someone do the execution of our will.
Incorrect. You have a very flawed understanding of the political process. Politicians are not, and never have been under any requirement to seek out, or do what their constituents want them to do. Of course, if they wish to be re-elected, they need to satisfy them in some way, but this is not, nor has it ever been "the execution of [their] will".
You elect a politician because you agree with his or her beliefs. You elect them in the hope they will make the same choices you would have made if you were in their place. However, that will not always happen, and in fact probably rarely does.
You elect a politician to do what they want, not what YOU want. You just hope those things are the same on important issues.
People that don't upgrade to newer versions of windows don't do so because of the "difficulty" of getting a newer version of Windows. They do so because they have some kind of reason to continue using the old version (even if it's just "I don't like change"). The same would be true of someone wanting to use an old version of Linux. You can't just get a newer version because that goes against the reason you're wanting to use the old version.
As such, the exact same issues exist. In fact, i'd argue it's a lot harder to "slipstream" in the SATA drivers into an old Linux distro as it would be an original XP.
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Ahh yes, the typical "I don't like what he's saying, so i'll nitpick his argument apart then I can pretend it's not true" attack.
I was making two different points, not building upon them. But to satisfy your nit picking, I should have said "In addition" between the two points.
although I have no idea why you would run Apache on a Windows server.
Because you need to run something that requires Tomcat, and all you have is Windows servers.
IIS, since version 6, has had fewer vulnerabilities than Apache has, however, neither have been particularly holey.
Are you seriously about the backslash? Microsoft actually WAS following the standard, the standard being CP/M.
As for your DNS problems, i've noticed on some firewalls, the IPv6 implementation seems to interfere with things on occasion. If you disable IPv6, things will work.
As for manually setting them, it works exactly the same way it always has.
What happens if they combine the exploit with a previously unknown local root vulnerability?
Many linux people seem to disregard local root vulnerabilities on machines that are single user (and they are the user) or internet servers where they are the only user that logs into them. They reason that since they don't give anyone else access to the machine, there is no reason to worry about them (i've seen lots of comments like this in the past when local root exploits are discovered).
If an exploit can give someone arbitrary code execution, even if it's in a user context, then one never knows what other things they can do. As such, you really cannot assume you haven't been rooted just because someone got access only as a given user.
Frontpage is old. VERY old. It hasn't been sold for a decade, at least. SourceSafe isn't as bad as it once was, the 2005 version can be client/server and is "good enough" for most people. I prefer other tools, but I've used it in very large (500+ clients) situations.
Visual Studio certainly has it's quirks, and bugs, but it hardly "sucks". It's pretty much THE standard for IDE's, and if you throw in some 3rd party extensions like ReSharper it's freaking amazing.
Zune? Have you actually used one? Everyone that I know who owns a Zune loves it. That's about 30 people that I know personally, and they would never give it up. The Zune has largely fallen prey to the same kind of FUD as Vista.
Yeah, Windows Mobile sucks as a general purpose phone.. it works great in situations like Point of Sale, or handheld field devices, but not so much for a phone.
Wait... so you're supposed to use a FireFox fork? Is there any guarantee that they will stay in sync with the main branch? How quickly will they apply security patches when they are issued?
So, as the submitter, I saw a lot of similarities here. Basically when Microsoft entered the operating system market, they borrowed a lot of ideas and they innovated some as well. Then they patented as much software "methods" as they could. Now you see them demanding everyone to pay protection money who is using Linux.
Have you noticed that Microsoft hasn't sued anyone else?
At the time Microsoft went after TomTom, it was pretty clear that the suit was only because TomTom had threatened them with a lawsuit first. Microsoft took the offensive and filed their suit, to which TomTom responded in a matter of days with their own, clearly indicating they had the suit ready. Not only that, but TomTom had a history of going after others, such as numerous suits between Garmin, Toyota, and others.
The fact that Microsoft hasn't gone after anyone else seems to indicate to me that they were simply defending themselves, not "demanding everyone to pay protection money who i using Linux".
You mean you just want to tell it to start recording at a certain time and stop at another time? TiVo does that already.
The problem is, what if they change the airing schedule, and you didn't notice. And to me, i'd much rather say "Record all showings of Firefly, I don't care when they are" rather than dig around in a schedule looking for the times to enter. The former takes about 10 seconds, the latter takes upwards of 5 minutes per program.
You're forgetting a number of things.
$200 DUAL HD Tuners with CableCard support (something you can't get off the shelf anyways)
$75 built-in hardware MPEG decoding (something you won't get in most cheap motherboards with built-in video although might be built-into a tuner)
The software is not "free", TiVo pays a cost to develop the softwrae and this price is included in both the subscription and the price of the unit. Let's set the price at $75 including lifetime updates.
Suddenly, it's $600
In 2003, 4GB of memory was pretty expensive. Today, it's less than $100.
The Limux project was delayed by less than 6 months, not 3.25 years, and that was during the SCO BS.
Where do you get 3.25 years? It's certainly not in the timeline of the wikipedia page. All those things you're seeing as "deciding how" is part of the migration process, and part of the planned timeline, and costed money.
It took them 1 year to do an evaluation and decide to move forward. They were delayed by less than 6 months over legal concerns. Other than that, it was all work on the conversion.
The fact of the matter is, linux migrations of any size are not smooth and uneventful as the OP was suggesting, especially in a government beaurocracy.
The microsoft bid was $23.7 million. Munich chose to go with the Limux option at a cost of (at the time) $35.7 Million. The costs have risen since then, and nobody is sure by exactly how much, but given that the original estimate was more than 1.5x to begin with, it's certain the running tab is well over that 2x mark by now, especially considering the project was supposed to be DONE by 2008. Who do you think is paying all those salaries for the last 2 years of unerestimated work time? Much less the next several years.
License upgrades? it's 14,000 computers. Even if you calculated the cost based on retail prices, that's 14,000 x $199, that's 2.7 million dollars, or less than 1/4th the difference in projected price, and a lot more than actual price difference of the conversion to Linux.
You could pay for new license for 5 or 6 new versions of Windows with the difference. You put way too much concern on the least expensive part of owning a computer. The license fees.
So yes, in 20 years, they might pay back the extra money they're spending. But by then, they will likely have gone through several Linux upgrad cycles as well. And that assumes they didn't skip a windows upgrade cycle (considering that all their computers had been running Windows NT4 then that should tell you something about how often they upgrade).
WGA and WAT are not targeted at people who pirate. All it does is tell them their software might not be genuine, which people can largely ignore.
WGA and WAT are targeted at mass scale counterfeiters.. And that market *IS* actually quite large, and combatting it is worth their time.
I'm thinking you're the one that doesn't understand.
DirectX on Windows doesn't seem to stop game developers from developing for, say, the Playstation 3, or Wii. What does DirectX have to do with it?
I'm not sure what private companies you've worked for, but every private company i've worked for of more than 50 people behaves the way you describe for governments. You spend all your budget or you get less next year, and you find ways to get more people and money under you to raise your prestige.
I know of no companies that work the way you describe them. In fact, the money a given departement might save will end up getting "absorbed" by a different departement who's goal is to spend as much as possible.
Besides, we're talking about government switching to open source anyways. Remember the title?
"Australian Senate Hears Open Source Is Too Expensive"
I'm confused. You saying "I have no use for PowerShell" is the same as a Windows admin saying "I have no use for bash". It's your own personal preference, even though PowerShell is as powerful and useful as bash, if not more so. Just because you're not as proficient in it doesn't make it any less powerful. And just because it works on objects doesn't mean you lose "good text processing", since you can use any of the gnu tools with it as well.
You're trying to administer Windows systems as if they were Linux systems, and of course that's not going to work, just as trying to administer Linux systems as if they Windows or MacOS won't work.
Nothing GUI is required these days.. Anything you can do from a GUI can be done from a command line.
And if you really really insist, there's always cygwin with bash, or SFU with bash, and the complete set of tools.
You really failed to answer my question though, you instead chose to answer "The tools to administer Windows without re-learning my Unix knowledge just aren't there".
Regarding the apps themselves, it's true that many require registry settings, but those are the apps, and there are dozens of ways to solve that problem. Just because you don't like push servers doesn't mean they don't work.
And mounting your /usr partition on a network drive is probably one of the stupidest ways to construct your network. If the network is down, nobody can run their apps. If the network is down, or having issues, things crash. If you're going to do that, why not just run everying on a terminal server? It's a lot less work.
And the reason you didn't asnwer my questions? Yeah, right, because you obviously can't.
See, two can play those stupid games. Here's a hint, think of why you didn't answer my question, and then apply it to me. Chances are, it's the same reason.
You seem to have lost the original point, which was that it was so much work to slipstream SATA drivers into a copy of XP, now you're goin on about a whole ton more work...
Yes, you can do all that stuff you're referring to, or they can also slipstream SATA drivers into their existing CD, probably less work.
Wow, what incompetent morons. Seriously, if they found out anything didn't work AFTER the upgrade, they're not doing their job.
I also question the wisdom of upgrading old hardware to Windows 7.
Companies replace hardware on a regular basis because the hardware depreciates over time and they take this as a tax write-off. Once the hardware has lost all it's tax value, they replace it with new hardware to get new tax breaks.
Of course, in a downturn economy when you may not be making as much money, tax breaks are less of an issue if you're not making any profit.
Can you give an example of these tools that aren't there?
By the way, i know a lot of Unix/Linux/BSD admin, I only know one that administers more than 20 servers. I think you'll find your claim that the typical admin adminsters thousands of servers by themselves difficult to support.
if you run an internal email server, and use VPN for remote connections (even for email), then nobody can see your internal emails, unless they get forwarded to someone else not on the server.
In the case of gmail or hotmail or any external email service, then all your email is in the hands of someone else, not just the email that makes it out of your serer.
Having actually replaced proprietary systems with open source alternatives, I can tell you none of the expense talking points that usually get thrown around by people invested in Microsoft products have ever materialized.
Really? Tell that to the city of Munich who, 7 *YEARS* ago began the process of converting 11,000 PC's to Linux, and 7 *YEARS* later, and at a budget that is blown up to 2x the Microsoft bid, they still have less than 20% of computers running Linux, and at the current rate won't have it done until 2020.
http://limuxwatch.blogspot.com/
"never materialize" my rear end.
And no, we elect politicians with the intent to have someone do the execution of our will.
Incorrect. You have a very flawed understanding of the political process. Politicians are not, and never have been under any requirement to seek out, or do what their constituents want them to do. Of course, if they wish to be re-elected, they need to satisfy them in some way, but this is not, nor has it ever been "the execution of [their] will".
You elect a politician because you agree with his or her beliefs. You elect them in the hope they will make the same choices you would have made if you were in their place. However, that will not always happen, and in fact probably rarely does.
You elect a politician to do what they want, not what YOU want. You just hope those things are the same on important issues.
You're making a stupid argument. Really stupid.
People that don't upgrade to newer versions of windows don't do so because of the "difficulty" of getting a newer version of Windows. They do so because they have some kind of reason to continue using the old version (even if it's just "I don't like change"). The same would be true of someone wanting to use an old version of Linux. You can't just get a newer version because that goes against the reason you're wanting to use the old version.
As such, the exact same issues exist. In fact, i'd argue it's a lot harder to "slipstream" in the SATA drivers into an old Linux distro as it would be an original XP.
You have got to be kidding me. I've been on slashdot a lot longer than you have. compare our slashdot ID's, genius.
So how is it that everything you said about newer versions of windows was provably false if you know so much?