A big box with virtual machines was completely hopeless in the competition.
It's hard to see how, unless there are some requirements or location specific features you're not mentioning (eg: free rack space/power/cooling). Even at a pretty generous $750 per box for some no-name POS with a single PSU, one SATA drive and a Core 2 Duo CPU, for 40 machines you're looking at $30k just for the servers. But then you also need at least 40 switchports, 40 power connections and a whole rack to put them in. Prices for that vary from place to place, but they're non-trivial no matter where you go.
Now consider a Dell 1955 BladeCentre with three 8-core, 16G RAM blades, plus an AX150i disk array. Cost would be ca. US$35k (probably less if you bought it all at once) and would handle 40 - 50 VMs of the kind you are talking about. However, it would take up 1/4 the rack space (10U), 2 - 4 switchports, at most 4 power connections and spend the electricity and heat budget far more efficiently. On top of that you get the advantages of a BladeCentre and RAID disk array - remote power management, built-in KVM, advanced system monitoring, redundant power, etc. Finally, there's still room for 7 more blades, more than tripling the original capacity in that same physical footprint - something that would require 2 more entire racks to do with 1U servers.
It's difficult to see why anyone would be buying 1U boxes in quantity for *anything* (although I'm sure there are a few corner cases), but especially for lightly used low-end servers and CPU-intensive computational work. Blades give you 1.5x - 2x the density if you actually need processing power, and virtualisation gives you around an order of magnitude better density, with 15 - 20 low-end "servers" easily doable on a single 8-core 1U machine, perhaps plus a 1U disk array, if all you need is a "bunch of boxes".
Dirt-cheap multicore CPUs and free virtualisation products have damn near obseleted the low-end 1U server market.
At that point, 2 things happened. First, the marketers gained too much power, and pushed the "market metric," clock speed, with the resulting NetBurst architecture of the Pentium4, which has been abandoned.
This argument gets floated regularly, but it is nonsensical. There is nothing wrong, from an engineering perspective, of choosing to pursue performance increases by improving clock speed instead of IPC. Indeed, one of the big promises from RISC was that its simpler design would allow quick and easy ramping of clock speeds at the sake of IPC. I don't seem to recall DEC getting the same criticism for the Alpha, that Intel did with the P4, despite both essentially "playing the Mhz game". Indeed, the Alpha seems to be treated by many as God's gift to CPUs.
Ironic that it took an ostensibly CISC CPU to deliver the benefits of RISC.
Second, Intel pursued the IA-64, which was really a combination of an academic nifty idea with marketers' desires to be clone-proof, but with the consequence of leaving delivering value to the customer a lower priority.
The ia64 eventually delivered fairly good performance, it just didn't feature at the low end. Itanic machines were quite competitive for high-end computing needs.
In other words in the Pentium-4 generation, Intel delivered a marketer-driven (marketer, not market driven) architecture with sub-par engineering, and was distracted by the internal desires for IA-64.
No, they simply chose to pursue an engineering path focusing on clock rate instead of IPC. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, and the subsequent benefits are clear when one reads about Core 2 CPUs being overclocked to 3.5+ GHz.
AMD provide solid competition, and the k8 was unquestionably a great CPU (sadly - like many AMD CPUs - let down by poor supporting hardware) in the x86 arena, but to suggest Intel haven't been the source of solid engineering throughout the lifetime of the platform - more so than AMD -just doesn't stand up to any sort of analysis.
I wouldn't call the P4 a serious increase in capabilities - Netburst was pretty awful.
Untrue. It started off poorly, but quickly ramped up. Despite the arguments of fanbois, P4s were quite competitive in absolute terms, just not on a per-Mhz basis. There was also hyperthreading.
Further, the knowledge gained by Intel with the P4 has allowed them to very quickly take the Core architecture to 3Ghz (and it clearly has a lot of headroom yet), while AMD is languishing at lower clock speeds.
There was a reason they completely dropped Netburst and went back to P6 when they designed the Core architecture. Netburst-based processors were faster than the P3 line, but not quite as capable of delivering performance.
But they were, they just needed high clock speeds. Netburst was "dropped" (not completely accurate) because it hit clock speed ceilings, not because it delivered no value.
How about this metric: Percentage of systems pwned? Or this one: Percentage of systems pwned when not behind a firewall?
Just as bad, for the same reasons.
If you want to compare _security_, then do so. Pick some features and functionality that have a causal relationship with how secure a system is (eg: file permissions) and see if both platforms support those features and functionality. But don't try and pretend that frequency of exploits and security have any inherent causal relationship.
x86 made only incremental gains from the 486 to the Pentium IV. Suddenly, wham! AMD comes out with the 64-bit Opteron and Athlon 64 and they kick the crap out of Intel on price, performance, and power consumption for a year or so.
I think you need to seriously revise your x86 history.
That is not to say that x86_64 wasn't a significant improvement, but to basically suggest the Pentium, Pentium Pro/II/III and Pentium 4 were just faster 486s is ludicrous. Each of those CPU families represents a serious increase in the design and capabilities of the x86 platform and they all came from Intel. Indeed, one of the main reasons x86_64 was so significant was because it repesents one of the few times AMD has been the leader, not the follower, in the last few decades.
Second, we live in a competitive country and world. Paying twice as much as other countries for medical care doesn't surprise me in the least, since we typically pay more than that for just about everything else.
Uh, what ? Have you ever even been to another country ? Just about everything in the US, compared to similar countries, is *dirt cheap*.
Sure, things are cheaper in third-world hellholes, but look at prices for goods and services in Australia, England, France, or just about anywhere in the first world and then try to say people in the US "pay more [...] for just about everything else".
Because being able to dedicate a "machine" to each service rather than trying to run dozens of different services on the same machine vastly simplifies operations.
Pay attention now. This is not how Google runs their datacenter.
How Google runs their datacentre is not relevant to most people, who have vastly different requirements, budgets and capabilities.
Shop around. One can find power-efficient 1U boxes. Sometimes non-rackmount is better, including weird stuff like the Mac Mini. Be willing to look beyond Intel and AMD. VIA makes some low-power chips.
Indeed. Then instead of the 2-4 power connections, ethernet connections, fibre channel connections, the cooling capabilities, electrical capacity, 4RU (or less, with other hardware options) of rack space, etc you need for a single machine running 30 VMs, you need *60* power/ethernet/FC ports, higher cooling and power needs, 30 rack units, 30 KVM/serial/RJ45 ports, etc.
Price those out in a datacentre and suddenly that "expensive, single point of failure" becomes cheap and easy to turn into 3 or 4 machines running VMs.
That's just the basic physical footprints - this is before even getting into the _manageability_ advantages of VMs over physical machines (eg: being able to roll out new servers by running an install script and coming back 20 minutes later, instead of having to get physical hardware specced, ordered and installed).
True, but these are in the works from Red Hat, Novell, XenSource, and various other ends. Already some of them look pretty promising, but if you are a real admin you don't need them in the first place. There is nothing wrong with using the command line tools to manage your Xen virtual guest environment.
It's not just about pretty pictures, it's about usability. For example, Xen is a bitch to setup with any sort of non-trivial networking environment (eg: multiple vlans, bonded interfaces, etc). You frequently have to write your own scripts to make it work in such situations, but this requires a very good - arguably completely unnecessary - understanding of what's going on behind the scenes.
Now, while this might serve to make some people feel like their e-dick is huge, for those of us that actually have to get work done, and have a perspective of a picture bigger than writing some scripts to do the job someone else should have, it's nothing but a pain in the arse and a waste of time. Firstly, because it requires hours(/days/weeks) of research and work to get the initial configuration going, that has to be scheduled with all the others tasks in the pipeline. Secondly, because it makes all those machines "different" in annoying ways from other machines with ostensibly similar configurations, thus (needlessly) increasing sysadmin overhead. Thirdly, because the requisite for in-depth knowledge extends to everyone who might have to play any sort of role in managing the system, meaning your understaffed IT department is less effective.
That's just one example. There are many more (eg: live migration of VMs) where Xen can sort-of, kinda, emulate the features present in something like VMWare ESX, but you have to spend weeks researching and testing the configuration, instead of spending twenty minutes following the step-by-step instructions in the (*gasp*) documentation, then forgetting it ever happened.
I've never understood why some people - OSS unix geeks in particular - consider the quality of software to be inversely related to how easy it is to use. I can only assume it's because they're worried the Priesthood would be threatened if people only realised that a nontrivial proportion of "sysadmins" are little more than helpdesk staff who just happen to know the right incantations.
I'm sure there are many people using Xen in "enterprise" scenarios. We are, but only because the manpower is largely already spent. If I'd known before I started pursuing Xen what I know now, my advice to myself would be the same to my advice to most people looking into enterprise-level virtualisation - get VMWare ESX. You might think it's expensive, but it's almost a certainty you'll spend more money on Xen in wasted manpower trying to get it up to half the functionality and relability. Just give them the money and get on with improving your environment in ways that will boost productivity, rather than pouring manpower into a black hole of effort polishing up someone else's half-finished product.
This has already been analysed at microsoft-watch, and several flaws are pointed out there, the most basic one being that counting flaws is not a good measure of security anyway.
It's a better one than counting frequency and impact of exploited machines without even accounting for market share...
At least that's how I see it. The best way to judge the security of an operating system is by anecdotes of security breaches, what they cost to companies and and how easy it was to recover from them.
No, that's an atrocious way of judging security, because you're not measuring _security_, you're measuring _frequency and impact of exploits_.
An exploit is not necessarily indicative of a security vulnerability. Especially since the most frequently exploited part of the system is the user.
When you hear about teenagers having keyloggers in thousands of Windows XP boxes, then it quickly becomes apparent what kind of security XP offers.
No, it becomes apparent how much it has been exploited. This says nothing conclusive about security. Correlation != causation, remember.
Not advisable to trust your life savings to an OS during its honeymoon period.
No sillier than trusting any other OS whose only measurable, verifiable advantage is that it's been exploited less.
I can say that on my test certified Vista machine, brand new from Dell, I've already seen the network card totally disappear from the system only to reappear again an hour later. The Broadcom diagnostic tool reported no hardware issues. The Explorer shell still crashes/stalls frequently. Files get locked with no way aside from a reboot to unlock them. Wifi fails to reconnect to the same network it was previously connected to when sspi broadcast for that network is disabled. I just tried restoring a hibernated laptop, previously connected to a domain. Black screen & hard reboot.
Have you contacted Dell to tell them their hardware is faulty ? Because it sure as hell isn't the OS.
A good way to reduce the possibility of malware affecting you in Linux is to run your browser as another user. It's easy to set-up, almost pain free, and means that, barring local root exploits, it can't delete/alter your data, modify your login scripts etc.
Instead of messing around xhost, sudo, wrapper-scripts (as one of the comments suggests), etc, and opening up the security holes that entails, just launch Firefox like so:
ssh -X ff@localhost firefox
(You might want to create some keys, change ~ff/.ssh/authorized_keys, etc, to make this a bit easier, but I'm sure you get the idea. You might also need to make sure X forwarding is enabled, but it typically is by default these days.)
I'm sure it's possible to do in Windows - runas firefox.exe - but I haven't tried it.
[...] although I've got to ask: wtf is up with the 'show text' option for password fields? sheer madness....
Not everyone has the motor control necessary to type accurately, be that either due to simple inexperience or something more significant like a medical problem.
Worst case is that they will still be slightly better. How are they going to be anti-competitive? How are they going to force restrictive EULA's down our throats?
The most obvious way is by prioritising (or deprioritising) search results for your company's website and/or advertisements depending on how much you pay, what other search engines you list with, etc.
Google's "customers" aren't the people using them so *search* the web, Google's customers are the people and businesses who depend on website and advertisement hits.
Here's the deal. Microsoft is able to get away with just about anything. If they can force google off the desktop with vista search (or whatever), there won't be any more google.
Right. Because Google are a one-trick pony. Their whole business revolves around desktop search.
Just like there isn't any more netscape.
As long as they don't make the same mistake and let their primary product fall into buggy disrepair while they redirect all their resources into rewriting it from scratch and hiring lawyers, Google won't end up like Netscape.
We use Windows machines mainly for video editing and 3D work, and when I have a task that requires more than a few hours of rendering, I have to plan my jobs around the expectation that a computer running Windows will fail. I'd prefer not to, but my crash logs tell a different story.
Your computers are broken. You should get them fixed.
That's why things like this guy trying and liking SuSE are so important. If we get a bit of competition in the OS market, we might end up with truly stable computers instead of endless spin.
We have a few hundred Windows desktops and servers in our Sydney office, including many running complex and quite hardware intensive tasks like virtualisation. In the two years I've been here, I don't think *any* of them have ever crashed.
Windows already is table. Your hardware, or possibly some third party drivers might not be, but that's not Microsoft's fault.
Using &&, if yum errored out because your internet is down, you dont reboot your system needlessly.
You were floored because by a ~1Ghz P3, 768M RAM and a $30 video card ? A ~6 year old PC you can get basically for free because companies throw them out ? Specs that are basically the same as those for equivalent OSes ?
Using &&, if yum errored out because your internet is down, you dont reboot your system needlessly.
More importantly, if yum crashed and you ended up with a corrupted RPM database or half-installed package that might render the system unbootable, you won't shutdown your system in a potentially unrestartable (or otherwise broken) state.
The correction is not only unnecessary, it is demonstrably a poorer method.
Indeed they are, because an incompetently managed UNIX environment is likely just as dangerous (although its exploits will probably be different due to different user demographics).
When I was IT manager at our school district, that is exactly what I did for almost all computers. We were running NT4 back then. Windows can be made quite secure actually. How many consumer computers are competently managed? Macs are MUCH more secure out of the box.
Like many, you fall into the trap of conflating "less exploited" with "more secure".
Now with VISTA, that aspect of Windows certainly seems to have changed for the better. The price however is a considerable increase in hardware requirements.
Vista runs acceptably on ~6 year old hardware with minor upgrades (RAM and, if you want the flashy visuals, a $30 video card). That's not "steep".
With Windows each succeeding generation has been slower on the same hardware.
Only at the low end. Higher up in the market, once you're over the "hump", the newer versions are faster. A HT P4 or multiprocessor box with a couple of gigs of RAM, for example, is much better off running XP than Windows 2000.
Mac OSX 10.4 still works acceptably well on my old G4 with 512M of memory. It runs faster on that than the 10.1 it shipped with.
If you find OS X 10.4 "acceptable" on old hardware like that, you'll find Vista similarly "acceptable" on similarly old hardware.
I own a few Macs, the slowest is my 1Ghz/768MB RAM iBook. I find OS X on it too slow for anything except very basic web browsing (few tabs at once), email, watching DVDs and pulling photos off my digital camera - and certainly not all at the same time.
It's true that OS X has been getting faster with each release. The flipside, however, is how mind bogglingly slow it started off (and remained, IMHO). Windows does not have this problem. It runs quite well on the contemporary hardware of its day (with the exception of Windows NT 3.1) and acceptably well back to about the 6-7 year old mark, with minor upgrades (typically RAM). This has been true pretty much forever. OS X, for me, needs at least a G5 level Mac for acceptable performance (and even my Mum's G5 iMac becomes frustratingly unresponsive at times).
Vista's hardware requirements, for a similar end user experience, are basically the same as OS X's (somewhat higher end video card because Microsoft didn't bother with a software mode Aero - the reasons for that should be obvious). The whole "but Vista needs so much hardware" argument is pure FUD. The slowest machine I've run Vista on was a 500Mhz, 512MB RAM P3 (which dates from about 1999). It was, indeed, quite slow - but no slower than OS X on an equivalent Mac. The 900Mhz P3 with 768MB RAM and GeForce 5200 that I keep around for playing old DOS games runs it fine - and *much* better than my iBook runs OS X.
If a hacker can mess up the registry, more damage can be done to the whole computer than in *NIX systems where critical information is more distributed.
In both cases, the system can be rendered unusable, or important changes made, relatively trivially (probably easier on the UNIX system, since the configuration files are more frequently manipulated directly, and hence better understood). At most, it's equivalent.
It is not all concentrated in a single file, especially one that many present programs, for no reason, want write access to.
The Registry is not a single file, it is multiple files. Further, it is a fully transactional database [0] with ACL permissions on individual keys. It's _significantly_ more reliable and secure than the UNIX equivalent (textfiles in/etc, et al).
I know of Windows programs which will not run properly unless the user is and administrator. There are NO Mac programs I know of that require the user to have admin privileges. Ordinary users, such as kids in school do not even know the admin password. So exactly what do you mean with: "the inherently less secure design OS X has incorporating a superuser"?
Because on a (traditional) UNIX system, the superuser quite literally can do anything - they circumvent the entire security infrastructure of the OS. In Windows, Administrator is just another user (albeit with one that has significantly privileges out of the box). The concept of a superuser is an inherent feature to (traditional) UNIX's less capable security model.
Further, those broken applications - and it is 100% the fault of the application - that "require" Administrator access, almost certainly only really "require" access to a couple of files and Registry keys, all of which can be individually modified without having to go the whole hog and run as Administrator all the time. In a remotely competently managed Windows environment, this should be exactly what happens - not granting every user Administrator access (which is both unnecessary and stupid).
[0] Strange how I never see people complaining about how much, say, MySQL, PostgreSQL, et al suck and that everyone should be flat text files instead...
Look at Wikipedia's reports of various market share stats for that period. There is no controversy that Netscape's market share plunged in 1997. Now look up the browser MS shipped in 1997. It was not a superior product competing in the market place, because nobody chose IE; they got it by default.
(Using "EWS Web Server at UIUC" figures because they are the most detailed. Relatively simplistic analysis because I'm damned if I'm going to waste too much time arguing with someone trolling for hits on their soapbox website.)
For most of 1997 Microsoft was shipping IE3. IE3 was considered to be - overall - on par with Navigator 3. While it was not as good in some areas, it was better in others.
Navigator's market share dropped from ~75% at the start of 1997, to ~65% in September.
In February 1997 (from memory, could be a month off either way), the first IE4 beta was released (warez copies of it and the cancelled "Nashville" update which would have introduced it had been floating around the 'net since late 1996) . In September 1997, IE4 proper was released, a far superior browser to Navigator 3 or 4. In the remaining 3 months of 1997, Navigator's market share dropped a further 5%, to ~60%.
So, they lost 10% in the first 3/4 of the year, mostly (~7%) to a product that was roughly equivalent, and the rest to a series of betas. However, they lost the final 5% in 3 months, straight after the release of IE4 - and that extra market share went directly to IE4 (IE4's marketshare went from 2% - 3% in September 1997 to ~13% in December 1997).
The first 6 months of 1998 tell a similar story. Navigator drops from ~60% to ~50%. IE4's share grows from ~13% to ~19%. In June 1998, Windows 98 was released (with IE4).
So, over 18 months, Netscape lost ~25% of the market - but it lost the majority of that (~19%) to IE4 (before IE4 was included in any version of Windows). Clearly a case of users _deliberately_ deserting Navigator for the superior IE4 browser.
Moving onto the second half of 1998, we see Navigator's fall slowed, only losing ~5%. IE4 continues to gain, however, stealing significant marketshare especially from IE3 (I'm sure you'll attribute this to bundling with Windows 98, conveniently forgetting Windows 98's relatively slow adoption). IE4 ends 1998 with ~40% of the browser market.
Sure, after MS set up a barrier to Netscape's business plan, it could then invest more into browser development. After 1997, Netscape could do very little, while MS rapidly released three major new versions in 97, 99, and 2001.
In fact, Netscape were doing a great deal, desperately trying to rewrite their browser from the ground up so it could have a chance of competing with Microsoft's largely-from-scratch IE4. It was this majorerror that was the real reason Navigator 4 sucked so much - Netscape were too busy with their other codebase.
What needs to be noted is what happened after AOL/Netscape/Mozilla stopped delivering anything as a competitor. Microsoft, without any further need to take the browser market, froze development of the browser for half a decade. Another version of IE wasn't delivered until 2006, and only because Firefox was starting to compete again.
Microsoft were hardly the only ones. The only significant change to the web browser in the last decade since IE4, is the introduction of tabbed interfaces (which weren't exactly an outrageously obscure idea either).
You can say all you want about what "Steve Jobs" wants or knows, but since you can't understand why anticompetitive behavior and monopoly maintenance are bad for markets, I also have to assume you know nothing about what was going on inside Apple.
A straw man, ad hominem and a non-sequitor all rolled into one. Nicely done.
We also know, because Jobs announced it, that Jobs did try to
It is relevant, to your comment, because you compared it to Vista's built-in search (i.e., current functionality) and said MS was talking about it in 2003 (while they were talking about a comparatively different thing).
No, it's irrelevant, because it's a back-end implementation detail (eg: like whether the 2GB of RAM in a computer is 4*512M sticks or 2*1G stick). What Microsoft were talking about is exactly what GDS (and WDS, and Spotlight) delivered - an indexed, computer-wide search facility.
How this was going to be achieved behind the scenes is, in the context of saying "Vista will have a search facility", not important. The important, and relevant, issue is the end-user-visible functionality of GDS/WDS/Spotlight in Vista (then Longhorn), that Microsoft announced way back in 2003. Hence, the presence of that feature in Vista can not, by definition, have been in response to GDS (or Spotlight).
Obligatory slightly dodgy car analogy: In 2003, Microsoft said their next car would have 300kw of power, and a V8 engine. In 2004, Google release a turbocharger aftermarket modification kit for Microsoft's existing 4 cylinder car, boosting its output to 280kw. In 2006/7, Microsoft actually released their new car, producing 300kw, only doing it with a turbocharged V6 instead of a V8.
Point being: same functionality, different implementations.
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A big box with virtual machines was completely hopeless in the competition.
It's hard to see how, unless there are some requirements or location specific features you're not mentioning (eg: free rack space/power/cooling). Even at a pretty generous $750 per box for some no-name POS with a single PSU, one SATA drive and a Core 2 Duo CPU, for 40 machines you're looking at $30k just for the servers. But then you also need at least 40 switchports, 40 power connections and a whole rack to put them in. Prices for that vary from place to place, but they're non-trivial no matter where you go.
Now consider a Dell 1955 BladeCentre with three 8-core, 16G RAM blades, plus an AX150i disk array. Cost would be ca. US$35k (probably less if you bought it all at once) and would handle 40 - 50 VMs of the kind you are talking about. However, it would take up 1/4 the rack space (10U), 2 - 4 switchports, at most 4 power connections and spend the electricity and heat budget far more efficiently. On top of that you get the advantages of a BladeCentre and RAID disk array - remote power management, built-in KVM, advanced system monitoring, redundant power, etc. Finally, there's still room for 7 more blades, more than tripling the original capacity in that same physical footprint - something that would require 2 more entire racks to do with 1U servers.
It's difficult to see why anyone would be buying 1U boxes in quantity for *anything* (although I'm sure there are a few corner cases), but especially for lightly used low-end servers and CPU-intensive computational work. Blades give you 1.5x - 2x the density if you actually need processing power, and virtualisation gives you around an order of magnitude better density, with 15 - 20 low-end "servers" easily doable on a single 8-core 1U machine, perhaps plus a 1U disk array, if all you need is a "bunch of boxes".
Dirt-cheap multicore CPUs and free virtualisation products have damn near obseleted the low-end 1U server market.
At that point, 2 things happened. First, the marketers gained too much power, and pushed the "market metric," clock speed, with the resulting NetBurst architecture of the Pentium4, which has been abandoned.
This argument gets floated regularly, but it is nonsensical. There is nothing wrong, from an engineering perspective, of choosing to pursue performance increases by improving clock speed instead of IPC. Indeed, one of the big promises from RISC was that its simpler design would allow quick and easy ramping of clock speeds at the sake of IPC. I don't seem to recall DEC getting the same criticism for the Alpha, that Intel did with the P4, despite both essentially "playing the Mhz game". Indeed, the Alpha seems to be treated by many as God's gift to CPUs.
Ironic that it took an ostensibly CISC CPU to deliver the benefits of RISC.
Second, Intel pursued the IA-64, which was really a combination of an academic nifty idea with marketers' desires to be clone-proof, but with the consequence of leaving delivering value to the customer a lower priority.
The ia64 eventually delivered fairly good performance, it just didn't feature at the low end. Itanic machines were quite competitive for high-end computing needs.
In other words in the Pentium-4 generation, Intel delivered a marketer-driven (marketer, not market driven) architecture with sub-par engineering, and was distracted by the internal desires for IA-64.
No, they simply chose to pursue an engineering path focusing on clock rate instead of IPC. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, and the subsequent benefits are clear when one reads about Core 2 CPUs being overclocked to 3.5+ GHz.
AMD provide solid competition, and the k8 was unquestionably a great CPU (sadly - like many AMD CPUs - let down by poor supporting hardware) in the x86 arena, but to suggest Intel haven't been the source of solid engineering throughout the lifetime of the platform - more so than AMD -just doesn't stand up to any sort of analysis.
I wouldn't call the P4 a serious increase in capabilities - Netburst was pretty awful.
Untrue. It started off poorly, but quickly ramped up. Despite the arguments of fanbois, P4s were quite competitive in absolute terms, just not on a per-Mhz basis. There was also hyperthreading.
Further, the knowledge gained by Intel with the P4 has allowed them to very quickly take the Core architecture to 3Ghz (and it clearly has a lot of headroom yet), while AMD is languishing at lower clock speeds.
There was a reason they completely dropped Netburst and went back to P6 when they designed the Core architecture. Netburst-based processors were faster than the P3 line, but not quite as capable of delivering performance.
But they were, they just needed high clock speeds. Netburst was "dropped" (not completely accurate) because it hit clock speed ceilings, not because it delivered no value.
How about this metric: Percentage of systems pwned? Or this one: Percentage of systems pwned when not behind a firewall?
Just as bad, for the same reasons.
If you want to compare _security_, then do so. Pick some features and functionality that have a causal relationship with how secure a system is (eg: file permissions) and see if both platforms support those features and functionality. But don't try and pretend that frequency of exploits and security have any inherent causal relationship.
x86 made only incremental gains from the 486 to the Pentium IV. Suddenly, wham! AMD comes out with the 64-bit Opteron and Athlon 64 and they kick the crap out of Intel on price, performance, and power consumption for a year or so.
I think you need to seriously revise your x86 history.
That is not to say that x86_64 wasn't a significant improvement, but to basically suggest the Pentium, Pentium Pro/II/III and Pentium 4 were just faster 486s is ludicrous. Each of those CPU families represents a serious increase in the design and capabilities of the x86 platform and they all came from Intel. Indeed, one of the main reasons x86_64 was so significant was because it repesents one of the few times AMD has been the leader, not the follower, in the last few decades.
Second, we live in a competitive country and world. Paying twice as much as other countries for medical care doesn't surprise me in the least, since we typically pay more than that for just about everything else.
Uh, what ? Have you ever even been to another country ? Just about everything in the US, compared to similar countries, is *dirt cheap*.
Sure, things are cheaper in third-world hellholes, but look at prices for goods and services in Australia, England, France, or just about anywhere in the first world and then try to say people in the US "pay more [...] for just about everything else".
Indeed, why would they?
Because being able to dedicate a "machine" to each service rather than trying to run dozens of different services on the same machine vastly simplifies operations.
Pay attention now. This is not how Google runs their datacenter.
How Google runs their datacentre is not relevant to most people, who have vastly different requirements, budgets and capabilities.
Shop around. One can find power-efficient 1U boxes. Sometimes non-rackmount is better, including weird stuff like the Mac Mini. Be willing to look beyond Intel and AMD. VIA makes some low-power chips.
Indeed. Then instead of the 2-4 power connections, ethernet connections, fibre channel connections, the cooling capabilities, electrical capacity, 4RU (or less, with other hardware options) of rack space, etc you need for a single machine running 30 VMs, you need *60* power/ethernet/FC ports, higher cooling and power needs, 30 rack units, 30 KVM/serial/RJ45 ports, etc.
Price those out in a datacentre and suddenly that "expensive, single point of failure" becomes cheap and easy to turn into 3 or 4 machines running VMs.
That's just the basic physical footprints - this is before even getting into the _manageability_ advantages of VMs over physical machines (eg: being able to roll out new servers by running an install script and coming back 20 minutes later, instead of having to get physical hardware specced, ordered and installed).
True, but these are in the works from Red Hat, Novell, XenSource, and various other ends. Already some of them look pretty promising, but if you are a real admin you don't need them in the first place. There is nothing wrong with using the command line tools to manage your Xen virtual guest environment.
It's not just about pretty pictures, it's about usability. For example, Xen is a bitch to setup with any sort of non-trivial networking environment (eg: multiple vlans, bonded interfaces, etc). You frequently have to write your own scripts to make it work in such situations, but this requires a very good - arguably completely unnecessary - understanding of what's going on behind the scenes.
Now, while this might serve to make some people feel like their e-dick is huge, for those of us that actually have to get work done, and have a perspective of a picture bigger than writing some scripts to do the job someone else should have, it's nothing but a pain in the arse and a waste of time. Firstly, because it requires hours(/days/weeks) of research and work to get the initial configuration going, that has to be scheduled with all the others tasks in the pipeline. Secondly, because it makes all those machines "different" in annoying ways from other machines with ostensibly similar configurations, thus (needlessly) increasing sysadmin overhead. Thirdly, because the requisite for in-depth knowledge extends to everyone who might have to play any sort of role in managing the system, meaning your understaffed IT department is less effective.
That's just one example. There are many more (eg: live migration of VMs) where Xen can sort-of, kinda, emulate the features present in something like VMWare ESX, but you have to spend weeks researching and testing the configuration, instead of spending twenty minutes following the step-by-step instructions in the (*gasp*) documentation, then forgetting it ever happened.
I've never understood why some people - OSS unix geeks in particular - consider the quality of software to be inversely related to how easy it is to use. I can only assume it's because they're worried the Priesthood would be threatened if people only realised that a nontrivial proportion of "sysadmins" are little more than helpdesk staff who just happen to know the right incantations.
I'm sure there are many people using Xen in "enterprise" scenarios. We are, but only because the manpower is largely already spent. If I'd known before I started pursuing Xen what I know now, my advice to myself would be the same to my advice to most people looking into enterprise-level virtualisation - get VMWare ESX. You might think it's expensive, but it's almost a certainty you'll spend more money on Xen in wasted manpower trying to get it up to half the functionality and relability. Just give them the money and get on with improving your environment in ways that will boost productivity, rather than pouring manpower into a black hole of effort polishing up someone else's half-finished product.
This has already been analysed at microsoft-watch, and several flaws are pointed out there, the most basic one being that counting flaws is not a good measure of security anyway.
It's a better one than counting frequency and impact of exploited machines without even accounting for market share...
Or, heh, counting the number of "viruses".
At least that's how I see it. The best way to judge the security of an operating system is by anecdotes of security breaches, what they cost to companies and and how easy it was to recover from them.
No, that's an atrocious way of judging security, because you're not measuring _security_, you're measuring _frequency and impact of exploits_.
An exploit is not necessarily indicative of a security vulnerability. Especially since the most frequently exploited part of the system is the user.
When you hear about teenagers having keyloggers in thousands of Windows XP boxes, then it quickly becomes apparent what kind of security XP offers.
No, it becomes apparent how much it has been exploited. This says nothing conclusive about security. Correlation != causation, remember.
Not advisable to trust your life savings to an OS during its honeymoon period.
No sillier than trusting any other OS whose only measurable, verifiable advantage is that it's been exploited less.
I can say that on my test certified Vista machine, brand new from Dell, I've already seen the network card totally disappear from the system only to reappear again an hour later. The Broadcom diagnostic tool reported no hardware issues. The Explorer shell still crashes/stalls frequently. Files get locked with no way aside from a reboot to unlock them. Wifi fails to reconnect to the same network it was previously connected to when sspi broadcast for that network is disabled. I just tried restoring a hibernated laptop, previously connected to a domain. Black screen & hard reboot.
Have you contacted Dell to tell them their hardware is faulty ? Because it sure as hell isn't the OS.
A good way to reduce the possibility of malware affecting you in Linux is to run your browser as another user. It's easy to set-up, almost pain free, and means that, barring local root exploits, it can't delete/alter your data, modify your login scripts etc.
Instead of messing around xhost, sudo, wrapper-scripts (as one of the comments suggests), etc, and opening up the security holes that entails, just launch Firefox like so:
ssh -X ff@localhost firefox
(You might want to create some keys, change ~ff/.ssh/authorized_keys, etc, to make this a bit easier, but I'm sure you get the idea. You might also need to make sure X forwarding is enabled, but it typically is by default these days.)
I'm sure it's possible to do in Windows - runas firefox.exe - but I haven't tried it.
Works fine. Easier than it is in Linux as well ;).
[...] although I've got to ask: wtf is up with the 'show text' option for password fields? sheer madness....
Not everyone has the motor control necessary to type accurately, be that either due to simple inexperience or something more significant like a medical problem.
so, Google's customers are fewer and more valuable than Microsoft's?
Depends on whether or not you consider every end user a Microsoft "customer", or just those who buy Windows (the majority of which are OEMs).
Worst case is that they will still be slightly better. How are they going to be anti-competitive? How are they going to force restrictive EULA's down our throats?
The most obvious way is by prioritising (or deprioritising) search results for your company's website and/or advertisements depending on how much you pay, what other search engines you list with, etc.
Google's "customers" aren't the people using them so *search* the web, Google's customers are the people and businesses who depend on website and advertisement hits.
Here's the deal. Microsoft is able to get away with just about anything. If they can force google off the desktop with vista search (or whatever), there won't be any more google.
Right. Because Google are a one-trick pony. Their whole business revolves around desktop search.
Just like there isn't any more netscape.
As long as they don't make the same mistake and let their primary product fall into buggy disrepair while they redirect all their resources into rewriting it from scratch and hiring lawyers, Google won't end up like Netscape.
It's like they threw readability and usability out the window, all in the name of looking "cool".
That's pretty much the story of OS X's life (with the odd exception here and there like Expose and Spotlight).
We use Windows machines mainly for video editing and 3D work, and when I have a task that requires more than a few hours of rendering, I have to plan my jobs around the expectation that a computer running Windows will fail. I'd prefer not to, but my crash logs tell a different story.
Your computers are broken. You should get them fixed.
That's why things like this guy trying and liking SuSE are so important. If we get a bit of competition in the OS market, we might end up with truly stable computers instead of endless spin.
We have a few hundred Windows desktops and servers in our Sydney office, including many running complex and quite hardware intensive tasks like virtualisation. In the two years I've been here, I don't think *any* of them have ever crashed.
Windows already is table. Your hardware, or possibly some third party drivers might not be, but that's not Microsoft's fault.
Using &&, if yum errored out because your internet is down, you dont reboot your system needlessly.
You were floored because by a ~1Ghz P3, 768M RAM and a $30 video card ? A ~6 year old PC you can get basically for free because companies throw them out ? Specs that are basically the same as those for equivalent OSes ?
Using &&, if yum errored out because your internet is down, you dont reboot your system needlessly.
More importantly, if yum crashed and you ended up with a corrupted RPM database or half-installed package that might render the system unbootable, you won't shutdown your system in a potentially unrestartable (or otherwise broken) state.
The correction is not only unnecessary, it is demonstrably a poorer method.
The key words are competently managed.
Indeed they are, because an incompetently managed UNIX environment is likely just as dangerous (although its exploits will probably be different due to different user demographics).
When I was IT manager at our school district, that is exactly what I did for almost all computers. We were running NT4 back then. Windows can be made quite secure actually. How many consumer computers are competently managed? Macs are MUCH more secure out of the box.
Like many, you fall into the trap of conflating "less exploited" with "more secure".
Now with VISTA, that aspect of Windows certainly seems to have changed for the better. The price however is a considerable increase in hardware requirements.
Vista runs acceptably on ~6 year old hardware with minor upgrades (RAM and, if you want the flashy visuals, a $30 video card). That's not "steep".
With Windows each succeeding generation has been slower on the same hardware.
Only at the low end. Higher up in the market, once you're over the "hump", the newer versions are faster. A HT P4 or multiprocessor box with a couple of gigs of RAM, for example, is much better off running XP than Windows 2000.
Mac OSX 10.4 still works acceptably well on my old G4 with 512M of memory. It runs faster on that than the 10.1 it shipped with.
If you find OS X 10.4 "acceptable" on old hardware like that, you'll find Vista similarly "acceptable" on similarly old hardware.
I own a few Macs, the slowest is my 1Ghz/768MB RAM iBook. I find OS X on it too slow for anything except very basic web browsing (few tabs at once), email, watching DVDs and pulling photos off my digital camera - and certainly not all at the same time.
It's true that OS X has been getting faster with each release. The flipside, however, is how mind bogglingly slow it started off (and remained, IMHO). Windows does not have this problem. It runs quite well on the contemporary hardware of its day (with the exception of Windows NT 3.1) and acceptably well back to about the 6-7 year old mark, with minor upgrades (typically RAM). This has been true pretty much forever. OS X, for me, needs at least a G5 level Mac for acceptable performance (and even my Mum's G5 iMac becomes frustratingly unresponsive at times).
Vista's hardware requirements, for a similar end user experience, are basically the same as OS X's (somewhat higher end video card because Microsoft didn't bother with a software mode Aero - the reasons for that should be obvious). The whole "but Vista needs so much hardware" argument is pure FUD. The slowest machine I've run Vista on was a 500Mhz, 512MB RAM P3 (which dates from about 1999). It was, indeed, quite slow - but no slower than OS X on an equivalent Mac. The 900Mhz P3 with 768MB RAM and GeForce 5200 that I keep around for playing old DOS games runs it fine - and *much* better than my iBook runs OS X.
If a hacker can mess up the registry, more damage can be done to the whole computer than in *NIX systems where critical information is more distributed.
In both cases, the system can be rendered unusable, or important changes made, relatively trivially (probably easier on the UNIX system, since the configuration files are more frequently manipulated directly, and hence better understood). At most, it's equivalent.
It is not all concentrated in a single file, especially one that many present programs, for no reason, want write access to.
The Registry is not a single file, it is multiple files. Further, it is a fully transactional database [0] with ACL permissions on individual keys. It's _significantly_ more reliable and secure than the UNIX equivalent (textfiles in /etc, et al).
I know of Windows programs which will not run properly unless the user is and administrator. There are NO Mac programs I know of that require the user to have admin privileges. Ordinary users, such as kids in school do not even know the admin password. So exactly what do you mean with: "the inherently less secure design OS X has incorporating a superuser"?
Because on a (traditional) UNIX system, the superuser quite literally can do anything - they circumvent the entire security infrastructure of the OS. In Windows, Administrator is just another user (albeit with one that has significantly privileges out of the box). The concept of a superuser is an inherent feature to (traditional) UNIX's less capable security model.
Further, those broken applications - and it is 100% the fault of the application - that "require" Administrator access, almost certainly only really "require" access to a couple of files and Registry keys, all of which can be individually modified without having to go the whole hog and run as Administrator all the time. In a remotely competently managed Windows environment, this should be exactly what happens - not granting every user Administrator access (which is both unnecessary and stupid).
[0] Strange how I never see people complaining about how much, say, MySQL, PostgreSQL, et al suck and that everyone should be flat text files instead...
Look at Wikipedia's reports of various market share stats for that period. There is no controversy that Netscape's market share plunged in 1997. Now look up the browser MS shipped in 1997. It was not a superior product competing in the market place, because nobody chose IE; they got it by default.
(Using "EWS Web Server at UIUC" figures because they are the most detailed. Relatively simplistic analysis because I'm damned if I'm going to waste too much time arguing with someone trolling for hits on their soapbox website.)
For most of 1997 Microsoft was shipping IE3. IE3 was considered to be - overall - on par with Navigator 3. While it was not as good in some areas, it was better in others.
Navigator's market share dropped from ~75% at the start of 1997, to ~65% in September.
In February 1997 (from memory, could be a month off either way), the first IE4 beta was released (warez copies of it and the cancelled "Nashville" update which would have introduced it had been floating around the 'net since late 1996) . In September 1997, IE4 proper was released, a far superior browser to Navigator 3 or 4. In the remaining 3 months of 1997, Navigator's market share dropped a further 5%, to ~60%.
So, they lost 10% in the first 3/4 of the year, mostly (~7%) to a product that was roughly equivalent, and the rest to a series of betas. However, they lost the final 5% in 3 months, straight after the release of IE4 - and that extra market share went directly to IE4 (IE4's marketshare went from 2% - 3% in September 1997 to ~13% in December 1997).
The first 6 months of 1998 tell a similar story. Navigator drops from ~60% to ~50%. IE4's share grows from ~13% to ~19%. In June 1998, Windows 98 was released (with IE4).
So, over 18 months, Netscape lost ~25% of the market - but it lost the majority of that (~19%) to IE4 (before IE4 was included in any version of Windows). Clearly a case of users _deliberately_ deserting Navigator for the superior IE4 browser.
Moving onto the second half of 1998, we see Navigator's fall slowed, only losing ~5%. IE4 continues to gain, however, stealing significant marketshare especially from IE3 (I'm sure you'll attribute this to bundling with Windows 98, conveniently forgetting Windows 98's relatively slow adoption). IE4 ends 1998 with ~40% of the browser market.
Sure, after MS set up a barrier to Netscape's business plan, it could then invest more into browser development. After 1997, Netscape could do very little, while MS rapidly released three major new versions in 97, 99, and 2001.
In fact, Netscape were doing a great deal, desperately trying to rewrite their browser from the ground up so it could have a chance of competing with Microsoft's largely-from-scratch IE4. It was this major error that was the real reason Navigator 4 sucked so much - Netscape were too busy with their other codebase.
What needs to be noted is what happened after AOL/Netscape/Mozilla stopped delivering anything as a competitor. Microsoft, without any further need to take the browser market, froze development of the browser for half a decade. Another version of IE wasn't delivered until 2006, and only because Firefox was starting to compete again.
Microsoft were hardly the only ones. The only significant change to the web browser in the last decade since IE4, is the introduction of tabbed interfaces (which weren't exactly an outrageously obscure idea either).
You can say all you want about what "Steve Jobs" wants or knows, but since you can't understand why anticompetitive behavior and monopoly maintenance are bad for markets, I also have to assume you know nothing about what was going on inside Apple.
A straw man, ad hominem and a non-sequitor all rolled into one. Nicely done.
We also know, because Jobs announced it, that Jobs did try to
It is relevant, to your comment, because you compared it to Vista's built-in search (i.e., current functionality) and said MS was talking about it in 2003 (while they were talking about a comparatively different thing).
No, it's irrelevant, because it's a back-end implementation detail (eg: like whether the 2GB of RAM in a computer is 4*512M sticks or 2*1G stick). What Microsoft were talking about is exactly what GDS (and WDS, and Spotlight) delivered - an indexed, computer-wide search facility.
How this was going to be achieved behind the scenes is, in the context of saying "Vista will have a search facility", not important. The important, and relevant, issue is the end-user-visible functionality of GDS/WDS/Spotlight in Vista (then Longhorn), that Microsoft announced way back in 2003. Hence, the presence of that feature in Vista can not, by definition, have been in response to GDS (or Spotlight).
Obligatory slightly dodgy car analogy: In 2003, Microsoft said their next car would have 300kw of power, and a V8 engine. In 2004, Google release a turbocharger aftermarket modification kit for Microsoft's existing 4 cylinder car, boosting its output to 280kw. In 2006/7, Microsoft actually released their new car, producing 300kw, only doing it with a turbocharged V6 instead of a V8.
Point being: same functionality, different implementations.
Windows, because of backward compatibility, is STILL at heart a single user system.
Windows NT was designed and built as a multiuser system from day 1.
*NIX based systems were and are conceived from the ground up as multiuser systems, inherently more secure from day one.
False. UNIX was "designed" as a single user system first, multiuser functionality was added later.
The continued existence of the registry is a weak point that *NIX based systems don't have.
How so ?
There is no reason to assume that a hacked Mac would be more valuable to a criminal wanting to steal your private data than a hacked Windows system.
Technically speaking, there's at least one - the inherently less secure design OS X has incorporating a superuser.