"there was a writeup by the nvidia folks about what freebsd would need to do to get up to linux's speed levels"
I thought their writeup was what they needed to do to get their drivers working in X64 version of FreeBSD.
I've never noticed any huge speed difference when it comes to graphics between FreeBSD and Linux, as I benchmarked the linux version America's Army awhile back on FreeBSD 5 and 6 and it was only 8-10% slower (~5 FPS) than on Linux.
The more interesting part the benchmark was that FreeBSD actually ran two of the maps faster than Windows.
Sorry, I don't have the benchmark results..I accidentally deleted em'.
We specifically tell our users never to give us their passwords. If users do blurt out their passwords (trying to helpful, no doubt) we force them to change their passwords immediately.
To expand a bit, it's about privilege separation and auditing. Windows, and every other network OS supports it in some form or another.
With Windows and Exchange, the reset of a password or the change of an ACL on a users mailbox can be set up to trigger an audit event in the security portion of the event log. The exchange administrator can be denied the right to clear (or even view) the security event logs and/or the event logs can be piped out to an external server that only a third party can access. The clearing of the security even log on a system adds an event that says "so and so cleared the event log".
In the past I've enable auditing on policy changes on our Windows DCs - not because someone was hacking - but because someone in the department was changing GPOs without first discussing it with others and causing problems.
Of course, with enough access, someone who is sufficiently bright could probably get around such measures with kernel hacking/root kitting, but if someone has enough access to do those things then, proper privilege separation isn't being practiced in the first place.
"Especially exchange. If you have access to reset a password in exchange then you can read anyones email." There are ways around this but Microsoft didn't feel like it needed to be implemented."
By all means, don't let your ignorance of Exchange and Windows keep you from acting like an authority on how it works.
"There's no argument that proprietary software restricts your freedom."
The premise of this statement is that everyone should have the right to everyone else's thoughts and/or creations. If I cared to argue with you (which I don't), my argument would be that the premise is up to debate.
BTW, you come off as an arrogant prick, and that sig of yours confirms it.
All you have to do is look at the FreeBSD project. According to the FreeBSD foudation page, so far in 2006, they've received a total of just over $60,000 in donations, yet they have hundreds (~300?) committers and thousands of other contributors.
Without volunteers, FreeBSD would die...and you wouldn't need Netcraft to confirm it.
"The author of the article (and slashdot) quote the disk space required for XP, but why wouldn't they use XP embedded on a device like this?" The biggest critics of Windows tend to be the least informed about it.
"Either directly, like Keith Packard who was hired by SuSE and then Hpaq to work on XFree86/Xorg or indirectly like academics or users who "scratch an itch" for their employer's needs and then feed the enhancements back."
Exactly. Open source projects are driven by a combination of....
Charity: (i.e., "product_x" benefits us/me so we/I will donate money to them)
Necessity: (i.e., If we fork "product_x" and lock up the source we'll be shut out from the volunteer community and only increase the burden of maintaining the software for ourselves)
With all the millions big companies like IBM have out into projects like linux, I think people are too quick to downplay the role that volunteers plays in open source projects. Without the volunteer help, maintaining a project becomes much more expensive.
My point was that if a project is worthwhile to enough people, it will stay alive. Expecting billions in profit to come from it is the mistake.
Come to think of it, perhaps I am sort of agreeing with the OP here.
"Relying on the inherent goodness of humans (or corporations) is naive at best."
Yet, history has shown that if the project is good enough, the inherent goodness of humans is enough. Apache, XFree/Xorg and the BSDs may not be raking in mega-millions of dollars, but they keep on keeping on year after year.
"...then use security center to switch on firewall..." XP had a firewall before SP2 came out. You can turn it on before ever plugging in the Ethernet cable.
"Firewall: OSX shipping with enterprise-grade industry standard iptables firewall for well over 5 years" You shouldn't confuse iptables with ipfw. It offends us BSD users.
User-based Security w/o defaulting to Admin user: OS X and Linux win by almost a decade Five years is almost a decade? BTW, Vista still makes users administrators by default. It's just neutered by UAC a bit.
Yes, just today a client of mine called. His POS ('point of sale', not 'piece of shit') "server" which ran XP died. I went over a found that it was only a bad stick of RAM. I removed the single stick of RAM, leaving the other in, booted it up, and Windows decided that it needed to be activated again.
Since the computer had no internet connection I had to phone India. The process wasn't too painful, but I found it amusing that removing a single stick of RAM made it a "whole new computer".
With Vista retail(fuck you in the ass edition), you have to buy a new $300 copy every other upgrade. Actually, you don't. Microsoft removed of this particular licensing change for the Retail versions of Vista after people like you cried foul. Guess you didn't catch that?
XP has quite a few remote management improvements over 2K.
Vista has better support for remote management and much better support for running as a limited user.
Not to say that Vista's improvements make it immediately worthwhile to upgrade, but your assertion that there is no difference between Windows version is just stupid.
"1 you lose the password to the account and your "root" admin gets run over by a bus"
This can already happen with Win2k or WinXP. XP's file encryption if managed improperly can render files unrecoverable.
"2 some random Zero day borks the account"
This is why you back up your keys, and data.
"3 a DDOS on the authentication server burns your block of COA serials"
Call Microsoft and have them fix it. If they don't want to, get the press, or lawyers, or both involved.
"4 Microsoft just one day "decides" that your system is unauthorized (maybe you are in Their way)"
You mean like they already did a few years ago with XPSP1 and certain CD keys?
"You are shall we say "traversing the proverbial polluted tributary without visible means of propulsion" or "afixed via a rotated metal rod with a spiral fin"
Quite the creative way of saying 'up shit creek without a paddle', but it doesn't take away from he fact that your doomsday scenario is very far out. If you truly believe the things you are saying, then I don't think you should use Windows. For the rest of the population who lives in the real world, there are more relevant issues to consider when considering a move to Vista, or Linux for that matter.
"For business XP and Vista are USELESS expenditures that provide nearly ZERO return for the dollar, while increasing operating costs by more than 20%."
I love the smell of made up numbers in the afternoon.
XP > Vista is NOT the equivalent of Win98 > WinME.
"...will flop as badly as ME did because it brings no significant improvements over XP, while it takes away features, and adds bad things like PVP DRM." Examples please? What features were taken away? As for DRM, if you don't want to be affected by DRM, DON'T BUY CONTENT PROTECTED WITH DRM. What does DRM have to do with businesses anyway?
"Hell, just show them some apache logs that are still constantly being hit by things like IIS servers still infected with Sasser, years after it should have been eradicated." What do stupid admins who don't bother to patch their boxes have to do with the security of the OS they use?
I could show them the auth logs on my BSD router that shows owned linux boxes trying to brute force sshd every day, but that would certainly not prove that linux is insecure, would it?
Seriously, if people buy into the "open source less secure because the code is open" bullshit, they probably shouldn't be running any kind of server.
"Theoretically I suppose that would be true. But competent Windows administrators deem to be quite rare compared to decent enough Linux administrators."I work in a mostly Windows environment and consider myself to be a competent Windows administrator (I'm also competent in *NIX though), and I would almost agree with this.
I would say that competant Windows is no more rare than competant Linux help. They both roughly as rare, as in the case of both Windows and Linux, an admin needs to have a clue as to what's going on under the hood to be considered competent. The problem with finding Windows help is that there is a lot more wok involved in separating the wheat from the chaff.
In finding Windows help, I think companies make the mistake of simply not offering enough money, as they base their salary offering on the "average" salary of Windows administrators. The salaries of the incompetent monkeys in the pool of Windows admins bring down that average quite a bit, which leads companies to falsely believe that a competant Windows administrator costs less than a Linux administrator.
Thus companies end up getting what they pay for when they hire Windows help.
"I mean, who would use Linux without a graphical environment? "
LOTS of people use Linux without a graphical environment right now - in fact I would guesstimate that the vast majority of linux installations in the world do not depend on graphical environments, as they are servers.
I just don't see Microsoft being very successful in suing open source apps out of existence. Their is a ton of money behind linux and if you actualyl take a minute to look at some of the patents Microsoft has, you'll see that most of them are silly and unenforceable.
And there is always the fact that most of world doesn't even recognize software patents.
Linux and all the neato apps that run on top of it are not going away.
Slashdot Mirror
"there was a writeup by the nvidia folks about what freebsd would need to do to get up to linux's speed levels"
I thought their writeup was what they needed to do to get their drivers working in X64 version of FreeBSD.
I've never noticed any huge speed difference when it comes to graphics between FreeBSD and Linux, as I benchmarked the linux version America's Army awhile back on FreeBSD 5 and 6 and it was only 8-10% slower (~5 FPS) than on Linux.
The more interesting part the benchmark was that FreeBSD actually ran two of the maps faster than Windows.
Sorry, I don't have the benchmark results..I accidentally deleted em'.
Holy crap, that's bad.
We specifically tell our users never to give us their passwords. If users do blurt out their passwords (trying to helpful, no doubt) we force them to change their passwords immediately.
What the last poster said.
To expand a bit, it's about privilege separation and auditing. Windows, and every other network OS supports it in some form or another.
With Windows and Exchange, the reset of a password or the change of an ACL on a users mailbox can be set up to trigger an audit event in the security portion of the event log. The exchange administrator can be denied the right to clear (or even view) the security event logs and/or the event logs can be piped out to an external server that only a third party can access. The clearing of the security even log on a system adds an event that says "so and so cleared the event log".
In the past I've enable auditing on policy changes on our Windows DCs - not because someone was hacking - but because someone in the department was changing GPOs without first discussing it with others and causing problems.
Of course, with enough access, someone who is sufficiently bright could probably get around such measures with kernel hacking/root kitting, but if someone has enough access to do those things then, proper privilege separation isn't being practiced in the first place.
"Especially exchange. If you have access to reset a password in exchange then you can read anyones email." There are ways around this but Microsoft didn't feel like it needed to be implemented."
By all means, don't let your ignorance of Exchange and Windows keep you from acting like an authority on how it works.
Then you'll know how a person with severe OCD feels.
http://www.neurosaudio.com/
"There's no argument that proprietary software restricts your freedom."
The premise of this statement is that everyone should have the right to everyone else's thoughts and/or creations. If I cared to argue with you (which I don't), my argument would be that the premise is up to debate.
BTW, you come off as an arrogant prick, and that sig of yours confirms it.
Get over yourself.
Not agreeing with your stance on the issue of proprietary software does not make someone "apolitical".
All you have to do is look at the FreeBSD project. According to the FreeBSD foudation page, so far in 2006, they've received a total of just over $60,000 in donations, yet they have hundreds (~300?) committers and thousands of other contributors.
Without volunteers, FreeBSD would die...and you wouldn't need Netcraft to confirm it.
I'm sure other OS projects are similar.
"Either directly, like Keith Packard who was hired by SuSE and then Hpaq to work on XFree86/Xorg or indirectly like academics or users who "scratch an itch" for their employer's needs and then feed the enhancements back."
Exactly. Open source projects are driven by a combination of....
Charity: (i.e., "product_x" benefits us/me so we/I will donate money to them)
Necessity: (i.e., If we fork "product_x" and lock up the source we'll be shut out from the volunteer community and only increase the burden of maintaining the software for ourselves)
With all the millions big companies like IBM have out into projects like linux, I think people are too quick to downplay the role that volunteers plays in open source projects. Without the volunteer help, maintaining a project becomes much more expensive.
My point was that if a project is worthwhile to enough people, it will stay alive. Expecting billions in profit to come from it is the mistake.
Come to think of it, perhaps I am sort of agreeing with the OP here.
"Relying on the inherent goodness of humans (or corporations) is naive at best."
Yet, history has shown that if the project is good enough, the inherent goodness of humans is enough. Apache, XFree/Xorg and the BSDs may not be raking in mega-millions of dollars, but they keep on keeping on year after year.
And sounds they think are there but really aren't.
Since the computer had no internet connection I had to phone India. The process wasn't too painful, but I found it amusing that removing a single stick of RAM made it a "whole new computer". With Vista retail(fuck you in the ass edition), you have to buy a new $300 copy every other upgrade. Actually, you don't. Microsoft removed of this particular licensing change for the Retail versions of Vista after people like you cried foul. Guess you didn't catch that?
XP has quite a few remote management improvements over 2K.
Vista has better support for remote management and much better support for running as a limited user.
Not to say that Vista's improvements make it immediately worthwhile to upgrade, but your assertion that there is no difference between Windows version is just stupid.
Getting a bit tinfoil hattish aren't you?
"1 you lose the password to the account and your "root" admin gets run over by a bus"
This can already happen with Win2k or WinXP. XP's file encryption if managed improperly can render files unrecoverable.
"2 some random Zero day borks the account"
This is why you back up your keys, and data.
"3 a DDOS on the authentication server burns your block of COA serials"
Call Microsoft and have them fix it. If they don't want to, get the press, or lawyers, or both involved.
"4 Microsoft just one day "decides" that your system is unauthorized (maybe you are in Their way)"
You mean like they already did a few years ago with XPSP1 and certain CD keys?
"You are shall we say "traversing the proverbial polluted tributary without visible means of propulsion" or "afixed via a rotated metal rod with a spiral fin"
Quite the creative way of saying 'up shit creek without a paddle', but it doesn't take away from he fact that your doomsday scenario is very far out. If you truly believe the things you are saying, then I don't think you should use Windows. For the rest of the population who lives in the real world, there are more relevant issues to consider when considering a move to Vista, or Linux for that matter.
"For business XP and Vista are USELESS expenditures that provide nearly ZERO return for the dollar, while increasing operating costs by more than 20%."
I love the smell of made up numbers in the afternoon.
I could show them the auth logs on my BSD router that shows owned linux boxes trying to brute force sshd every day, but that would certainly not prove that linux is insecure, would it?
Seriously, if people buy into the "open source less secure because the code is open" bullshit, they probably shouldn't be running any kind of server.
Oh I certainly wouldn't put Thurrott in the same category as Dvorak.
I think Thurrott at least tries to be sincere.
Actually, Thurott is pretty clueless too. Most of his criticisms of Vista have been the result of him not understanding core computing concepts.
"Theoretically I suppose that would be true. But competent Windows administrators deem to be quite rare compared to decent enough Linux administrators."I work in a mostly Windows environment and consider myself to be a competent Windows administrator (I'm also competent in *NIX though), and I would almost agree with this.
I would say that competant Windows is no more rare than competant Linux help. They both roughly as rare, as in the case of both Windows and Linux, an admin needs to have a clue as to what's going on under the hood to be considered competent. The problem with finding Windows help is that there is a lot more wok involved in separating the wheat from the chaff.
In finding Windows help, I think companies make the mistake of simply not offering enough money, as they base their salary offering on the "average" salary of Windows administrators. The salaries of the incompetent monkeys in the pool of Windows admins bring down that average quite a bit, which leads companies to falsely believe that a competant Windows administrator costs less than a Linux administrator.
Thus companies end up getting what they pay for when they hire Windows help.
"I mean, who would use Linux without a graphical environment? "
LOTS of people use Linux without a graphical environment right now - in fact I would guesstimate that the vast majority of linux installations in the world do not depend on graphical environments, as they are servers.
I just don't see Microsoft being very successful in suing open source apps out of existence. Their is a ton of money behind linux and if you actualyl take a minute to look at some of the patents Microsoft has, you'll see that most of them are silly and unenforceable.
And there is always the fact that most of world doesn't even recognize software patents.
Linux and all the neato apps that run on top of it are not going away.