You seem to be confused. I don't want Microsoft Windows.
I don't recall saying you did.
Most other people wouldn't either if they had any clue what they were buying.
Given how trivially simple it is to buy a computer without Windows, I'm afraid harsh reality blows your fantasy out of the water.
My mother (who is computer illiterate) used a Linux box for years to do her stuff on the internet.
Personally, I bought my mum an iMac. Sadly I was unlucky enough to do so only a month or two before Apple switched to x86.
The big lie you and all the other Microsoft fan boys are propagating is that Linux isn't ready for the desktop because no one uses it. If Linux distros were sold like Microsoft is sold, the world wouldn't end and Linux would have a similar market share.
I don't recall ever making those arguments either.
Linux was ready for the desktop in the last millennium. Plain and simple.
The market does not agree.
If people disliked Microsoft or Windows anywhere near as much as zealots like you thought they did, Apple would own the home PC market and Linux on the desktop would be csondiered even more of an oddity than it is now.
I want to run Unix and when I ask for a command line I want zsh, be it Apple OS X, or Linux. Answer me this, Microsoft fan boys, why do I have to buy a computer with an O/S I will never use?
You seem to be confused. Microsoft don't sell laptops. Your complaint is with the PC hardware vendors that won't sell you a laptop without Windows.
Lowering the legal limit from.1 to.08 and further down to.06 or whatever DOES NOT SOLVE ANY PROBLEM.
By this logic, no law solves any problem.
I tell you what, if I KNEW that I was at.09 right before I hopped into my car, I wouldn't drive. I would wait 15 minutes.
If your BAC is at.09, 15 minutes is going to make fuck all difference. As will all the coffee and water you try to drink in that 15 minutes.
Now, wait an hour or two for your body to have metabolised a meaningful amount of alcohol (down to the 0.05 - 0.07 range), and you're getting a bit closer to being responsible.
But how the hell do I know that because there are no consumer devices that accurately tell me and there is nothing at drinking establishments that tell me.
You exercise common sense. If you've averaged much more than a drink an hour, you've had too much to be driving.
Typical nanny state view of life. Why should the state deny your right to move freely throughout the state?
They don't. You can walk where-ever the hell you want, or catch a bus, taxi, plane, boat or whatever.
You're just not allowed to pilot a couple of tons of metal under the influence of a drug well known to seriously impair motor skills, reaction times and the ability to assess risk in public areas. Seems to me this falls well under one of the State's primary roles, which is to protect its citizens from others trying to harm them.
Re:"The silent majority" is uninformed.
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Storm Worm Rising
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· Score: 1
What? Normal user should not install stuff in his home.
A "normal user" shouldn't have access to install stuff anywhere else.
There's/usr where programs should end up. And that's root job to put'em there. This is a feature because I can force some policy over my users.
Firstly, most people don't have any systems administrator - let alone a good one - to run their computers. If they did most of the "security problems" we hear about would never have happened.
Secondly, you offer this argument as if it is something that UNIX can do but Windows cannot - yet Windows can lock down the system just as much if you want it to.
Difference is we didn't saw anything working yet. So while I know it can be done it haven't been done just yet.
Stop moving the goalposts.
OK, if I'll put you in a/home with noexec, will forbid you to bind low ports, push all network access to 25/110/80/whatever by proxy, put you in untrusted group with limited access to apps in/usr/bin and will perform simple backup of your home directory -- would you say I provided better evn. to prevent viruses? Because all this can be done with tools that are shipped by most distros.
All if it can be done in Windows, as well. It's easy to secure a machine when you don't have to worry about giving the ignorant end user the ability to complete arbitrary tasks.
However, that doesn't apply to the majority of machines out there - those that are unmanaged - where the majority of security "problems" originate.
I've run other operating systems in production environments populated with the same suckers that use Windows PCs. In the four years that I've been doing so, the number of successfully exploited Macs and Linux PCs is zero.
So how are your Windows machines being compromised ?
Re:"The silent majority" is uninformed.
on
Storm Worm Rising
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· Score: 1
Mounting/home and/tmp partitions as noexec (you can't run binaries from them) can be helpful here.
So your solution is the nuclear option of not allowing users to run *anything* that isn't preinstalled ?
Microsoft (or anyone, really) could do that with Windows as well, but it's not really a viable option for an unmanaged machine.
Again, nothing, but difference is [...]
No, there is no difference. Most (if not all) UNIX email programs store their configuration in well-known plaintext files that malicious code can read to find out the ISP's upstream mailserver and the malicious software can simply use that.
If your machine can send email, malicious code running on your machine can almost certainly also send email. Whether the machine is running Outlook (or even Windows) is irrelevant.
No machine where ignorant end users have the ability to make critical configuration and runtime decisions can be "secure", which is why OS X and Linux will/would have exactly the same problems Windows does when their market penetration (in the case of OS X) and user demographic (in the case of Linux) reach similar measures. The vast, vast majority of "security problems" Windows has are the result of end users doing something "stupid".
Having seen this screen shot I had to ask, what is a Windows Experience Index? It seems this machine has a score of 5.6. Great, what's that out of Microsoft? 10? That's pretty crappy. Maybe it's out of six?
Not every number is "out of" something. For example, the speed ratings AMD put on their CPUs.
So I googled for a bit and eventually found this page. Which says "The base scores currently range from 1 to 5.9." WTF? So it's out of 4.9 and you just add 1 for fun, is that it? I wonder if it's a linear scale or what.. maybe it's logarithmic.
Have you never seen benchmark scores that are expressed relative to some base score like 100 (or 10, or 1000) ? This is exactly the same thing.
If this is how broken the business rules of their software are, I can only imagine how broken the implementation must be.
If you can't get your head around the concept of a "performance index", which is one of the most popular forms of measuring relative performance in computing, you're swimming in the wrong pool.
Where is the truth? You're living it, please tell us your perspective.
I'm Australian, and have lived in small coastal towns (~10k people), medium-sized capital cities (Brisbane, ~1.4M people) and large capitals (Sydney, ~4M). While I don't visit doctors frequently (maybe once every couple of years), I have never had trouble seeing one either by making an appointment in advance, or simply walking in off the street (although, obviously, with the latter you need to pick the right day and time to not end up in the waiting room for hours). My experiences in getting my eyes tested at optometrists is the same. I have never had any direct out-of-pocket expenses for my these visits (including when things like X-Rays and ultrasounds have been done), although I obviously have to pay for any medications that might be prescribed (most of which are also subsidised/price-fixed by the healthcare system, and thus relatively cheap).
I also have "private" health insurance, which costs me about another AU$1.1k/yr (there are dozens of private health insurers that anyone can purchase this additional cover through and also tax benefits for doing so to higher salary earners - basically, everyone gets public cover, but the "wealthy" are "encouraged" to prefer private care to ease the burden on the public system). The benefits from that are things like choice of doctor/specialist, private hospitals and/or rooms (should I ever need it) and annual rebates for health-related expenses like contact lenses and glasses. To emphasise, anyone who has the $$$ can get additional private health cover, it's not tied to employment or an employer in any way nor, as far as I know, are premiums affected by your employment status.
Fortunately I've never had to try out the more serious side of healthcare. However, a few years ago my wife contracted a urinary tract/kidney infection and was hospitalised for a week or so. She was quickly admitted and treated and was taken care of well enough that she didn't bother utilising her private cover to be moved to a private hospital or change doctors. This was in a city of about 90k people (Toowoomba).
Due to recipricol arrangements, I am also eligible to be treated free-of-charge by the public healthcare systems of some other countries (eg: New Zealand, UK).
I have zero complaints about Australia "Universal Healthcare". From what I've heard/read/experienced, it's one of the best in the world and seems to strike an excellent balance to deliver most of the benefits found in both the mostly-socialised and mostly-privatised systems of other countries. I've not heard about any other country that does it in a way I'd prefer, nor in a way that is more cost-effective (in terms of both individual expenses and overall efficiency).
If you honestly don't know whether you're over the limit... you're over the limit.
Rubbish. If you have a high tolerance for alcohol, it's easy to be over the limit without realising it. Not everyone is tipsy after a couple of beers.
Further, being "legal" is not a guarantee, either. I know many people whose physical and mental abilities are noticably and quickly impacted after relatively tiny amounts of alcohol (a single glass of wine) that would not put them over the legal limit (0.05 in Australia).
It was not so long ago that people used to laugh at why you would need a 200W power supply for a computer. Now it seems that 500 watts are common enough, and some are going significantly higher than this.
They're nowhere near as common as enthusiast sites would have you believe, and even in most machines that have them, they're not using anything close to 500W of juice.
The average PC is a low-end desktop that probably barely even peaks at much over 100W of power draw.
There is no law of physics that demanded this increase in power consumption.
Sure there is. It's the cost of greater computing power, within the limitations of current technology.
Hopefully in a few short years flash drives will overtake hard drives and everyone wins.
Flash drives aren't going to replace hard disks in the near future as they are highly unlikely to be able to come close to the same size/cost ratio of hard disks.
Windows requires to run installers at elevated privilege levels to install things as trivial as a music players and, those, not rarely, intermingle themselves into the operating system in ways it makes impossible to get rid of them after you no longer need them.
Windows, like Linux, "requires" nothing of the sort.
Well, WordPerfect used to be king, and MS Word was "mostly compatible" when it came to loading WP files.
Actually, Word was pretty much 100% compatible with WP, not only in terms of file formats but also things like keyboard shortcuts (you used to be able to run Word in "Wordperfect mode" up until Word 95 IIRC). Microsoft expended an _immense_ amount of effort working with hardcore Wordperfect users at making transitions from Word to Wordperfect not only attractive (through better features) but also nealy transparent. This level of compatibility was probably the single biggest reason Word displaced WP (closely followed by WP's atrocious first Windows versions).
Also, have you SEEN MS Office 2007? Obviously MS doesn't think UI consistency from version to version is very high on the priority list.
Right. ~15 years unchanged, 1 new version, and UI consistency isn't a high priority.
Seriously, you CANNOT argue that the learning curve is flatter to go from "classic" MS Office to Office 2007 than it is to go to OO.o, since OO.o looks and works more like old Office than Office 2007 does..and you can bet that MS is NOT giving them a deal to buy a discontinued version of Office.
Actually you probably could, because Office 2007 and its new UI is a *lot* easier to use.
There are oodles of calendaring systems out there that are quite capable. Some are quite intriguing. For example, Citadel (the Citadel/UX variant) evolved from BBS into a web-based forum/email/collaboration/groupware system that is incredibly efficient with resources, surprisingly easy to install, configure and maintain and includes a perfectly capable calendaring system that works pretty well with clients like Thunderbird and KOrganiser via GroupDAV. Perhaps MS Exchange is the "ultimate in richness" but Citadel could meet the requirements for the vast majority of users and is WAY more scalable than Exchange.
How well does it integrate with Crackberry and various other PDAs/mobiles ?
The Free Software tools are there for the backend--it is the "easy to use" front end part that presents the biggest challenge.
Ie: the most important part.
But for the price MS charges for their stuff? You could hire an ambitios young programmer to MAKE it for you for that price.
No, you couldn't. If it were that easy, there wouldn't be such a dearth of competitive alternatives.
That market share argument is such a tired old saw, repeated endlessly. Who cares WHY Macs are safer in practice. They may be no safer in theory. Who cares WHY nobody wants to burgle my house. The fact is that burglars are not interested in it and hackers are not interested in Macs.
Because while statistics might say it's less likely for the robbers to target your house, they won't actually stop them getting in like a lock will.
Ie: when your number is up, security protects you from harm, "lack of popularity" does not.
If you were comparing two types of cars you were considering purchasing, and one of them had a history (read: vulnurability) of breaking down, and the other had, in the past 5 years, about 3 occasions where someone said "Well, we know how to cause this car to break" but that particular breakdown never occurred on the road, which would you choose? I know which one I would...
Your analogy is flawed, because it conflates actual vulnerabilities with viruses/malware/worm/whatever infections. Here's a better one.
You're picking between two cars. All you know is that:
* One of them has 100,000 examples on the road, 20,000 of which have been involved in accidents.
* The other has 1000 examples on the road, 2 of which have been involved in accidents.
It's standard where MS is concerned. Try it sometime.
Try what ? Multitasking ? I've been multitasking heavily in Windows NT for over a decade now and the occasions that the GUI "grinds to a halt" are few, far between, pretty much always due to some unusual even occurring (eg: hardware failure, network connectivity failure) and occur similarly in other OSes. NT's GUI/interactive responsiveness while multitasking has always been good - certainly, at *worst*, at least as good as Linux, MacOS or OS X, especially when multiple CPUs are involved (better, IMHO, which is the primary reason I use it over any of the alternatives).
It was one of the major points that people were pointing to as failures in NT 4.x onward (when the GDI two other modules were moved into kernel space and all semblance of security and user space/kernel space separation vanished).
Right. Because Windows NT is the only OS in the world that's not a textbook microkernel.
Yes, you can lock up your entire GUI, even today with the latest XP service packs (don't know about Vista - fortunately I don't have to use it). I'm not sure if you can completely lock out network access post SP2, but you certainly could prior to SP2 (VNC would drop, Remote Desktop would drop, and direct calls to ports 135-139 would time out).
So ? You can "completely lock up" just about any OS's GUI if you're being nasty enough, *especially* if you can interact with it locally with elevated privileges. Heck, if you're trying to multitask in OS X on a machine with less than a gig of RAM, it'll do it fr you a few times an hour.
If you want to make statements about "problems", call them typical and relate them to architectural aspects of Windows, more evidence and examples, and less rhetoric, would be helpful.
Re:Uh, I think the summary misses the point of OSS
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openMosix Is Shutting Down
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· Score: 2, Interesting
To put it bluntly, CSS projects that lose their core development teams don't exactly fair any better do they?
Probably they do. How much of the original development team do you think is still left for things like Windows NT(/Vista), Office, Solaris, NeXTSTEP(/OSX), etc ?
OSS projects tend to "die" when they aren't popular or "interesting" anymore - and the OSS world can be fickle. CSS projects, tend only to die when they aren't *profitable* any more.
It's a hell of a lot easier to hire more programmers for your niche-but-highly-profitable CSS product than it is to get OSS programmers working on a codebase that is no longer popular or "interesting".
Sort of like to old story about "Windows is not done until 1-2-3- will not run"?
The "old story" is "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run" (people using "Windows" in the phrase are just betraying their youth and the fact they're working with hearsay). Further, the very idea of an OS vendor sabotaging probably the single most important application on their platform - and hence about the only reason many of their customers were their customers in the first place - is so ludicrous that no sane person would even consider it, except as an example of how stupid OS-zealotry can be.
You just need to make sure that the open source stuff actually has some value and is not a way to leech some free R&D. I.e. it should be be managed by you and hopefully mostly developed on your dime. If it is useful for your customers to be able to tweak the source, or if the software is useful by itself, then developers will work on it.
Software that is "useful by itself" is about the _worst_ thing for commercialising OSS, because it will subsequently be "leeched" by everyone else.
Assuming by "OSS" you mean "GPL", that is. Other OSS licenses are a different matter, but one of the primary objectives of the GPL is to make software as a standalone product "unsellable".
It's irrelevant if Explorer is multi-threaded or not, when it's dependency, GDI in whatever today's incarnation is, is single-threaded and just about everything runs through GDI or one of the incredibly useful shared libraries that are also single-threaded.
What single-threaded libraries ? Windows NT is, largely, multithreaded and re-entrantand has been since it's first release.
Let's say you're downloading a rather large file from an Exchange server with Outlook over a slow connection. Most of your GUI functions just ceased to respond. That's a sign of a badly coded system with single-threaded dependencies.
If your whole GUI grinds to a halt when you're downloading something, it's very atypical behaviour.
When I said "only the rest of the computer is different", I was talking about third-party software, drivers, and hardware.
Your incorrect assumption is that these third-party pieces of software do not modify how "Microsoft's product" behaves (or, more accurately, appears to behave).
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be confused. I don't want Microsoft Windows.
I don't recall saying you did.
Most other people wouldn't either if they had any clue what they were buying.
Given how trivially simple it is to buy a computer without Windows, I'm afraid harsh reality blows your fantasy out of the water.
My mother (who is computer illiterate) used a Linux box for years to do her stuff on the internet.
Personally, I bought my mum an iMac. Sadly I was unlucky enough to do so only a month or two before Apple switched to x86.
The big lie you and all the other Microsoft fan boys are propagating is that Linux isn't ready for the desktop because no one uses it. If Linux distros were sold like Microsoft is sold, the world wouldn't end and Linux would have a similar market share.
I don't recall ever making those arguments either.
Linux was ready for the desktop in the last millennium. Plain and simple.
The market does not agree.
If people disliked Microsoft or Windows anywhere near as much as zealots like you thought they did, Apple would own the home PC market and Linux on the desktop would be csondiered even more of an oddity than it is now.
I want to run Unix and when I ask for a command line I want zsh, be it Apple OS X, or Linux. Answer me this, Microsoft fan boys, why do I have to buy a computer with an O/S I will never use?
You seem to be confused. Microsoft don't sell laptops. Your complaint is with the PC hardware vendors that won't sell you a laptop without Windows.
Lowering the legal limit from .1 to .08 and further down to .06 or whatever DOES NOT SOLVE ANY PROBLEM.
By this logic, no law solves any problem.
I tell you what, if I KNEW that I was at .09 right before I hopped into my car, I wouldn't drive. I would wait 15 minutes.
If your BAC is at .09, 15 minutes is going to make fuck all difference. As will all the coffee and water you try to drink in that 15 minutes.
Now, wait an hour or two for your body to have metabolised a meaningful amount of alcohol (down to the 0.05 - 0.07 range), and you're getting a bit closer to being responsible.
But how the hell do I know that because there are no consumer devices that accurately tell me and there is nothing at drinking establishments that tell me.
You exercise common sense. If you've averaged much more than a drink an hour, you've had too much to be driving.
Typical nanny state view of life. Why should the state deny your right to move freely throughout the state?
They don't. You can walk where-ever the hell you want, or catch a bus, taxi, plane, boat or whatever.
You're just not allowed to pilot a couple of tons of metal under the influence of a drug well known to seriously impair motor skills, reaction times and the ability to assess risk in public areas. Seems to me this falls well under one of the State's primary roles, which is to protect its citizens from others trying to harm them.
What? Normal user should not install stuff in his home.
A "normal user" shouldn't have access to install stuff anywhere else.
There's /usr where programs should end up. And that's root job to put'em there. This is a feature because I can force some policy over my users.
Firstly, most people don't have any systems administrator - let alone a good one - to run their computers. If they did most of the "security problems" we hear about would never have happened.
Secondly, you offer this argument as if it is something that UNIX can do but Windows cannot - yet Windows can lock down the system just as much if you want it to.
Difference is we didn't saw anything working yet. So while I know it can be done it haven't been done just yet.
Stop moving the goalposts.
OK, if I'll put you in a /home with noexec, will forbid you to bind low ports, push all network access to 25/110/80/whatever by proxy, put you in untrusted group with limited access to apps in /usr/bin and will perform simple backup of your home directory -- would you say I provided better evn. to prevent viruses? Because all this can be done with tools that are shipped by most distros.
All if it can be done in Windows, as well. It's easy to secure a machine when you don't have to worry about giving the ignorant end user the ability to complete arbitrary tasks.
However, that doesn't apply to the majority of machines out there - those that are unmanaged - where the majority of security "problems" originate.
I've run other operating systems in production environments populated with the same suckers that use Windows PCs. In the four years that I've been doing so, the number of successfully exploited Macs and Linux PCs is zero.
So how are your Windows machines being compromised ?
Mounting /home and /tmp partitions as noexec (you can't run binaries from them) can be helpful here.
So your solution is the nuclear option of not allowing users to run *anything* that isn't preinstalled ?
Microsoft (or anyone, really) could do that with Windows as well, but it's not really a viable option for an unmanaged machine.
Again, nothing, but difference is [...]
No, there is no difference. Most (if not all) UNIX email programs store their configuration in well-known plaintext files that malicious code can read to find out the ISP's upstream mailserver and the malicious software can simply use that.
If your machine can send email, malicious code running on your machine can almost certainly also send email. Whether the machine is running Outlook (or even Windows) is irrelevant.
No machine where ignorant end users have the ability to make critical configuration and runtime decisions can be "secure", which is why OS X and Linux will/would have exactly the same problems Windows does when their market penetration (in the case of OS X) and user demographic (in the case of Linux) reach similar measures. The vast, vast majority of "security problems" Windows has are the result of end users doing something "stupid".
Having seen this screen shot I had to ask, what is a Windows Experience Index? It seems this machine has a score of 5.6. Great, what's that out of Microsoft? 10? That's pretty crappy. Maybe it's out of six?
Not every number is "out of" something. For example, the speed ratings AMD put on their CPUs.
So I googled for a bit and eventually found this page. Which says "The base scores currently range from 1 to 5.9." WTF? So it's out of 4.9 and you just add 1 for fun, is that it? I wonder if it's a linear scale or what.. maybe it's logarithmic.
Have you never seen benchmark scores that are expressed relative to some base score like 100 (or 10, or 1000) ? This is exactly the same thing.
If this is how broken the business rules of their software are, I can only imagine how broken the implementation must be.
If you can't get your head around the concept of a "performance index", which is one of the most popular forms of measuring relative performance in computing, you're swimming in the wrong pool.
Where is the truth? You're living it, please tell us your perspective.
I'm Australian, and have lived in small coastal towns (~10k people), medium-sized capital cities (Brisbane, ~1.4M people) and large capitals (Sydney, ~4M). While I don't visit doctors frequently (maybe once every couple of years), I have never had trouble seeing one either by making an appointment in advance, or simply walking in off the street (although, obviously, with the latter you need to pick the right day and time to not end up in the waiting room for hours). My experiences in getting my eyes tested at optometrists is the same. I have never had any direct out-of-pocket expenses for my these visits (including when things like X-Rays and ultrasounds have been done), although I obviously have to pay for any medications that might be prescribed (most of which are also subsidised/price-fixed by the healthcare system, and thus relatively cheap).
I also have "private" health insurance, which costs me about another AU$1.1k/yr (there are dozens of private health insurers that anyone can purchase this additional cover through and also tax benefits for doing so to higher salary earners - basically, everyone gets public cover, but the "wealthy" are "encouraged" to prefer private care to ease the burden on the public system). The benefits from that are things like choice of doctor/specialist, private hospitals and/or rooms (should I ever need it) and annual rebates for health-related expenses like contact lenses and glasses. To emphasise, anyone who has the $$$ can get additional private health cover, it's not tied to employment or an employer in any way nor, as far as I know, are premiums affected by your employment status.
Fortunately I've never had to try out the more serious side of healthcare. However, a few years ago my wife contracted a urinary tract/kidney infection and was hospitalised for a week or so. She was quickly admitted and treated and was taken care of well enough that she didn't bother utilising her private cover to be moved to a private hospital or change doctors. This was in a city of about 90k people (Toowoomba).
Due to recipricol arrangements, I am also eligible to be treated free-of-charge by the public healthcare systems of some other countries (eg: New Zealand, UK).
I have zero complaints about Australia "Universal Healthcare". From what I've heard/read/experienced, it's one of the best in the world and seems to strike an excellent balance to deliver most of the benefits found in both the mostly-socialised and mostly-privatised systems of other countries. I've not heard about any other country that does it in a way I'd prefer, nor in a way that is more cost-effective (in terms of both individual expenses and overall efficiency).
They praise M$, insult "competitors", crapflood where they can, and harass genuine conversation.
So, basically, just like you do regarding "free software", Linux and the like ?
This raises an important question. Who's paying you ?
If you honestly don't know whether you're over the limit... you're over the limit.
Rubbish. If you have a high tolerance for alcohol, it's easy to be over the limit without realising it. Not everyone is tipsy after a couple of beers.
Further, being "legal" is not a guarantee, either. I know many people whose physical and mental abilities are noticably and quickly impacted after relatively tiny amounts of alcohol (a single glass of wine) that would not put them over the legal limit (0.05 in Australia).
It was not so long ago that people used to laugh at why you would need a 200W power supply for a computer. Now it seems that 500 watts are common enough, and some are going significantly higher than this.
They're nowhere near as common as enthusiast sites would have you believe, and even in most machines that have them, they're not using anything close to 500W of juice.
The average PC is a low-end desktop that probably barely even peaks at much over 100W of power draw.
There is no law of physics that demanded this increase in power consumption.
Sure there is. It's the cost of greater computing power, within the limitations of current technology.
Hopefully in a few short years flash drives will overtake hard drives and everyone wins.
Flash drives aren't going to replace hard disks in the near future as they are highly unlikely to be able to come close to the same size/cost ratio of hard disks.
That way I can postpone anything that requires me to reboot. (It boggles the mind that nobody at Microsoft realized that this would be an issue!)
They _did_ realise it was an issue, which is why they also created tools for managing automatic updates in corporate environments.
Windows requires to run installers at elevated privilege levels to install things as trivial as a music players and, those, not rarely, intermingle themselves into the operating system in ways it makes impossible to get rid of them after you no longer need them.
Windows, like Linux, "requires" nothing of the sort.
There is a fix for this flaw. It's called 'groups.'
Groups don't fix the flaw of a superuser. Not only are groups the wrong ballpark to do so, they're not even playing the same game.
Well, WordPerfect used to be king, and MS Word was "mostly compatible" when it came to loading WP files.
Actually, Word was pretty much 100% compatible with WP, not only in terms of file formats but also things like keyboard shortcuts (you used to be able to run Word in "Wordperfect mode" up until Word 95 IIRC). Microsoft expended an _immense_ amount of effort working with hardcore Wordperfect users at making transitions from Word to Wordperfect not only attractive (through better features) but also nealy transparent. This level of compatibility was probably the single biggest reason Word displaced WP (closely followed by WP's atrocious first Windows versions).
Also, have you SEEN MS Office 2007? Obviously MS doesn't think UI consistency from version to version is very high on the priority list.
Right. ~15 years unchanged, 1 new version, and UI consistency isn't a high priority.
Seriously, you CANNOT argue that the learning curve is flatter to go from "classic" MS Office to Office 2007 than it is to go to OO.o, since OO.o looks and works more like old Office than Office 2007 does..and you can bet that MS is NOT giving them a deal to buy a discontinued version of Office.
Actually you probably could, because Office 2007 and its new UI is a *lot* easier to use.
There are oodles of calendaring systems out there that are quite capable. Some are quite intriguing. For example, Citadel (the Citadel/UX variant) evolved from BBS into a web-based forum/email/collaboration/groupware system that is incredibly efficient with resources, surprisingly easy to install, configure and maintain and includes a perfectly capable calendaring system that works pretty well with clients like Thunderbird and KOrganiser via GroupDAV. Perhaps MS Exchange is the "ultimate in richness" but Citadel could meet the requirements for the vast majority of users and is WAY more scalable than Exchange.
How well does it integrate with Crackberry and various other PDAs/mobiles ?
The Free Software tools are there for the backend--it is the "easy to use" front end part that presents the biggest challenge.
Ie: the most important part.
But for the price MS charges for their stuff? You could hire an ambitios young programmer to MAKE it for you for that price.
No, you couldn't. If it were that easy, there wouldn't be such a dearth of competitive alternatives.
That market share argument is such a tired old saw, repeated endlessly. Who cares WHY Macs are safer in practice. They may be no safer in theory. Who cares WHY nobody wants to burgle my house. The fact is that burglars are not interested in it and hackers are not interested in Macs.
Because while statistics might say it's less likely for the robbers to target your house, they won't actually stop them getting in like a lock will.
Ie: when your number is up, security protects you from harm, "lack of popularity" does not.
If you were comparing two types of cars you were considering purchasing, and one of them had a history (read: vulnurability) of breaking down, and the other had, in the past 5 years, about 3 occasions where someone said "Well, we know how to cause this car to break" but that particular breakdown never occurred on the road, which would you choose? I know which one I would...
Your analogy is flawed, because it conflates actual vulnerabilities with viruses/malware/worm/whatever infections. Here's a better one.
You're picking between two cars. All you know is that:
* One of them has 100,000 examples on the road, 20,000 of which have been involved in accidents.
* The other has 1000 examples on the road, 2 of which have been involved in accidents.
Which car is safer ?
Yes, exactly. Three proofs of concept vs. thousands, maybe millions, of vulnerabilities in the wild.
Viruses/Worms/Malware != vulnerabilities. The vast majority of these do *not* target "vulnerabilities".
The "vulnerability through popularity" argument just doesn't hold up to this fact.
You clearly have no idea what the so-called "vulnerability through popularity argument" actually argues.
It's standard where MS is concerned. Try it sometime.
Try what ? Multitasking ? I've been multitasking heavily in Windows NT for over a decade now and the occasions that the GUI "grinds to a halt" are few, far between, pretty much always due to some unusual even occurring (eg: hardware failure, network connectivity failure) and occur similarly in other OSes. NT's GUI/interactive responsiveness while multitasking has always been good - certainly, at *worst*, at least as good as Linux, MacOS or OS X, especially when multiple CPUs are involved (better, IMHO, which is the primary reason I use it over any of the alternatives).
It was one of the major points that people were pointing to as failures in NT 4.x onward (when the GDI two other modules were moved into kernel space and all semblance of security and user space/kernel space separation vanished).
Right. Because Windows NT is the only OS in the world that's not a textbook microkernel.
Yes, you can lock up your entire GUI, even today with the latest XP service packs (don't know about Vista - fortunately I don't have to use it). I'm not sure if you can completely lock out network access post SP2, but you certainly could prior to SP2 (VNC would drop, Remote Desktop would drop, and direct calls to ports 135-139 would time out).
So ? You can "completely lock up" just about any OS's GUI if you're being nasty enough, *especially* if you can interact with it locally with elevated privileges. Heck, if you're trying to multitask in OS X on a machine with less than a gig of RAM, it'll do it fr you a few times an hour.
If you want to make statements about "problems", call them typical and relate them to architectural aspects of Windows, more evidence and examples, and less rhetoric, would be helpful.
To put it bluntly, CSS projects that lose their core development teams don't exactly fair any better do they?
Probably they do. How much of the original development team do you think is still left for things like Windows NT(/Vista), Office, Solaris, NeXTSTEP(/OSX), etc ?
OSS projects tend to "die" when they aren't popular or "interesting" anymore - and the OSS world can be fickle. CSS projects, tend only to die when they aren't *profitable* any more.
It's a hell of a lot easier to hire more programmers for your niche-but-highly-profitable CSS product than it is to get OSS programmers working on a codebase that is no longer popular or "interesting".
Sort of like to old story about "Windows is not done until 1-2-3- will not run"?
The "old story" is "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run" (people using "Windows" in the phrase are just betraying their youth and the fact they're working with hearsay). Further, the very idea of an OS vendor sabotaging probably the single most important application on their platform - and hence about the only reason many of their customers were their customers in the first place - is so ludicrous that no sane person would even consider it, except as an example of how stupid OS-zealotry can be.
You just need to make sure that the open source stuff actually has some value and is not a way to leech some free R&D. I.e. it should be be managed by you and hopefully mostly developed on your dime. If it is useful for your customers to be able to tweak the source, or if the software is useful by itself, then developers will work on it.
Software that is "useful by itself" is about the _worst_ thing for commercialising OSS, because it will subsequently be "leeched" by everyone else.
Assuming by "OSS" you mean "GPL", that is. Other OSS licenses are a different matter, but one of the primary objectives of the GPL is to make software as a standalone product "unsellable".
It's irrelevant if Explorer is multi-threaded or not, when it's dependency, GDI in whatever today's incarnation is, is single-threaded and just about everything runs through GDI or one of the incredibly useful shared libraries that are also single-threaded.
What single-threaded libraries ? Windows NT is, largely, multithreaded and re-entrantand has been since it's first release.
Let's say you're downloading a rather large file from an Exchange server with Outlook over a slow connection. Most of your GUI functions just ceased to respond. That's a sign of a badly coded system with single-threaded dependencies.
If your whole GUI grinds to a halt when you're downloading something, it's very atypical behaviour.
When I said "only the rest of the computer is different", I was talking about third-party software, drivers, and hardware.
Your incorrect assumption is that these third-party pieces of software do not modify how "Microsoft's product" behaves (or, more accurately, appears to behave).