What is it with you people? No matter what the headline, somebody always jumps in with, "I have seen this coming for a long time. Microsoft/U.S.A./Intel/Dell/IBM/Sun is so passe, and they have finally been dethroned. Here are the reasons why they were headed for a fall..." PUH LEEZ! Get a life and stop waiting around for some validation for your "the underground will rule" fantasies.
Having said that, lots of smart people have been saying for a long time that Asia outnumbers us, which means that they have more smart people than we do, and therefore we will have to work very hard to stay ahead. Well, we're not working very hard, and nobody wants to invest in long-money power research. "Let somebody else do that, we need money now. When I'm dead somebody else will get rich on new power and I don't care."
No one seems to have mentioned this, but Debian Etch is using OpenBSD's inetd superserver, for security and clean code. I was as surprised as anyone to see it, but why not use the best?
Well, I don't have a lot of faith in Joe. He is a whiner, and, as Ron White's grandpa would say, "That boy's got a lot of quit in him."
Having said that, I myself had a lot of trouble installing Gentoo, but that was because I was on the PPC platform, and my cd drive wouldn't read cd-r's.
So my install took 10 weeks.
Once I got things bootstrapped, it wasn't bad. And I was able to install the system, configure it, and boot to it in an evening or two. Building X took a couple of days, but my machine wasn't very fast.
So if I can make it work on PPC using hackity badness in a couple months, why is 10 days so bad for a guy who also had to learn a whole new operating system? Package management isn't just a side project for a distribution, it mostly *is* the distribution.
His next install? Would take a few hours.
I'm thinking of trying to put it on my Sun next. That may take much longer. Waaa.
A few folks mentioned Java and NetBeans, but of course the whole J2EE suite runs on OSX.
I enjoy using JEdit. It does syntax highlighting and all the indention things programmers need. I usually find myself going back and forth between vi and JEdit, depending on what I'm doing.
Of course, you can use MySQL with Java these days too, using the connector. But I don't of a better tool than the commandline mysql tool, with which you can write queries and format them to make sure your code is working.
Score:0 more like it. Hey vertinox, if you run RAID5 and you lose two drives that have both copies of one chunk, you have lost that chunk.
2 chunks minus 2 chunks equals zero chunks, get it?
"...in reality Raid5 isn't that useful ore efficient unless you are using enteprise applications that requires 100% uptime and you have way more than 3 hard drives (just in case two of them fail on you at once for no particular reason) and then you should have that server mirrored by another one so if one server fails because of a bad motherboard/powersupply etc, you'll have another server ready to go."
So, what you are saying, is if you lose your data, you should do something better so you won't lose your data? Thank you, John Madden of sysadmins. "If the referee throws a flag, and he didn't make a mistake, there's probably going to be a penalty."
Yeah, so if this is software RAID, what OS are they using? XP I guess?
Why is Intel's hardware bad just because Windows performs poorly on it?
I'm a little surprised that, all the way through BOTH articles and this thread, it took this long for someone to ask if it was a HARDWARE or SOFTWARE issue.
Twelve years ago or so managers started to realize that they could buy a PC and put Novell on it, and hire a 20 year old with no training to run it. Then Windows 95 and NT 4 Server came out, and they realized they could throw away their mainframe and their VAX and their Suns, buy some PCs, run Windows, and replace their entire staff with 20 year olds with no training. They could also pay them small salaries and make them work 70 hours a week, and since they were untrained and inexperienced they could replace them tomorrow. The future is cheap!
Computer service is not going to get better. Geek Squad is like McDonald's, selling PC service instead of McChicken. The service is just as good. If you need the service of either, you are on a bad place in the food chain.
Geek Squad workers, take heart. I have worked tech support, and I have worked fast food. Keep learning and work hard. Go get some student loans and get that degree. You will get the career you want someday if you stay focused. It will probably take longer than the used car salesman at ITT Tech will tell you. I have a job I want today, and it only took me until I was 34. But I'm probably a little slow...
So once everyone gets a laptop with an image that has encryption turned on by default, people will feel secure about hauling their laptop around with sensitive data. They will probably even feel secure enough to leave it on the table in the coffee shop while they get a refill, "it will only take a minute."
We all know that there are user friendly apps out there to retrieve data from encrypted files, though it will raise the bar a little.
Using a hardware security device also could lead to a false sense of security, though it could be done properly. These days I have to log in with the aid of a credit card sized one-time key generator. That certainly would deter casual folks getting into government systems, but may be a deal where they are easy to circumvent (running a fat client for example, or an overly simple hardware connection).
The delete after six months thing sounds impossible, and poorly thought out. But some consultants will make a lot of money failing to implement it! Think of it as FDR building the highways, investing in our economy...
1. OSX was based on the FreeBSD kernel and leveraged a LOT of UNIX structure under the covers. Lift the GUI off of OSX and you essentially have a BSD box. This means, for Apple, a lot of the engineering had already been completed. Mmm, no. It's a MACH microkernel, an objective C framework for drivers, a FreeBSD TCP/IP stack, another objective C framework for video, some stuff to tie the FreeBSD process handling to MACH via message sending, &c. Calling it FreeBSD with a GUI is wrong. Download the Darwin tree and the FreeBSD tree and do a diff if you don't believe me, it's all there. I think that there is a lot of similarity of scope to both projects. Hardware support is an issue, and using third-party drivers on OSX is a bad business. Microsoft is pretty good at handling that these days. I'm not sure what your last point was. I guess I disagree, moving from OS9 to X was like moving to a different planet for Apple. They switched to gcc and Cocoa from Programmer's Workbench and Carbon! From the old toolbox rom stuff to a whole new framework! From the old cooperative multitasking kernel to a new preemptive monolithic/micro hybrid! A total rewrite.
I can see that, but it still seems crazy to me. I know that Apple in the early 80's tried to make their developers hit a "lines of code per week" target. But still, when I was learning Python I wrote a 1000-line game in a week, and in my student job at the university I wrote a 1000-line Java tool in a few days (it worked right after a week or two). I guess that, like other posters said, they are rewriting a lot of things. Still sounds like a stagnated environment to me. I wonder how many lines of code Google developers produce a year?
I, for one, welcome our new Chinese overlords. Luckily I've been building up my tolerance to peppers and curry for years. And I don't have to use a fork. As soon as I figure out where to get Sun Wah Linux to run on my Lenovo, I'm set.
If you communicate and your spouse really understands how much this job means, then she will move. Not sure why you're asking Slashdot instead of discussing this with your wife...
I wish the writers at Newsforge and such places would take some cues from this article. It is clear, concise, and avoids commonly overused slang and metaphors. What a relief from the usual "Linux switcher" articles.
Mark Golden is a smart guy, and though he doesn't say it, he apparently was comfortable reinstalling Windows on his machine. He did something that is very smart, that most Linux reviewers don't seem to have done. He bought a book. Installing six, count them, six, different Linux distributions shows quite a bit of determination and interest on his part. The interoperability testing he did between office software packages showed some depth as well. Judging from the end of the article, he has been bitten by the "if I just can get this other thing to work under Linux" bug. I would ascertain that he will probably be a Linux hobbyist now.
I appreciate that he didn't go into long paragraphs of complaining about Free Software. It's free, so you are not allowed to complain about it. If you don't like it, use something else. He understands this.
I would say that, as a longtime Unix guy, he has come up with an accurate evaluation of the situation. Common things are easy or at least doable under Unix these days, and most everything else is possible, but only if you are willing to do some work yourself. It is this last catch that is the most frustrating part. As someone who spent a good bit of time this past week breaking C code and tweaking linker knobs, only to fail to make things work, I can readily say that this extra work can often be a bottomless pit. I certainly appreciate the efforts of the wizards who have made the rest easy.
Sideways threading is so March 2006. Everyone knows that the Infinite Improbability Threading is the wave of the future. Every instruction passes through every register in the Universe simultaneously, for infinite computational power, without all that tedious mucking about with three dimensional space-time.
What is amazing to me is that the commercial computer business is built on making people think that they are stupid. "Buy Windows. Because you are too stupid to use GNU/Linux. And you can't afford expert help." Is it wrong to assume that, if you are using GNU/Linux, that you don't think that you are stupid? And therefore, that you are self-reliant, and willing to figure out even the toughest problems by yourself?
Having said that, the attitudes on mailing lists, wikis, and IRC channels are the same as they have been on netnews for 20 years. "RTFM lUser", "STFU", "USTFU", "You 5UX0RZ", "With your mouth", &c.
Yeah, it's there. Have you tried to port anything to it though? Getting a Unix app of more than a couple thousand lines of code to build and run under SFU is definitely non-trivial. I had fun playing with it for a while, but it was much easier to just add something else for the Sun server to do instead. By the time you have added several libraries and tried to make everything work together, you have yourself one serious mess. As frustrating as the OS X BSD layer can be to work with, it's worlds ahead of SFU for porting or developing Unix apps.
`We used to cooperate openly with each other and people from other groups, exchanging opinions and ideas, but after few schooling sessions in front of the bigger group, everyone is now quietly doing what they are told.`
If you are unsatisfied, you should continue the discussions that you are used to that were so satisfying. If you get "schooled" in front of the group, you will survive. They will probably get tired of "schooling" you quickly, as in not more than twice. If you don't give in, what can they do? You're not "causing problems", just doing your job in an open way.
This does show signs of serious communication problems, which in relationships or business usually end up with a parting of ways, in my experience. So what? I left a job where I was written up for doing work that had been PRE-APPROVED by management. I took my lumps and had no trouble defending myself, since I had taken care to document everything. But working for folks that do such things is like slamming your hand in the door on purpose. I resigned and went back to school at age 32, and now after two years I have landed a job that I would rather have had all along. You don't HAVE to live the way they want you to, there are choices. Peace dude.
It's interesting that Microsoft is attacking governments now. I think I see a trend. They intimidated all but 9 states, I believe, in the antitrust case. Now the Maryland OpenDocument business. Next the EU. As soon as a bean counter figures out how it will be profitable, they will buy a small country.
Think about it. Apple has gotten so big now that they are similar in size to some large company, I believe Ford Motors? We are talking BIG companies. And Microsoft is still about 20 times bigger. Boggles the mind.
Evram Miller, of Intel Venture Capital, talked in his interview on NerdTV about some of Intel's decisions in the the 90's. He says they could have done a lot of great things, but didn't because of pressure from Microsoft. He said, straight up, Intel is afraid of Microsoft. INTEL.
You can talk about conspiracy theories, but this is the new millennium. There is no such thing as paranoia.
Yeah, yeah. I work at a college, we see dupes sometimes. It shouldn't happen, but it does. So every now and then two people get banned instead of one. Darwinism.
There are a lot of naysayers here, but I am a student network admin. It doesn't matter what's out there, you just have to manage the network. The computers will get bots and worms, and students will plug in wireless routers backwards and take out network segments. No different than any other network. We use vmps, so when a machine is doing bad things, it's MAC gets put in a vlan that can only talk to a Webserver, explaining that they are quarantined, and they can hit Windows Update. Wherever they go, the vlan follows. The school probably already has a tier-1 help desk. The labs already probably had disk images, so they can be up and running again in 15 minutes if broken. Just do this with the laptops. Otherwise, the students own the laptops, so if they are stolen or broken, tough luck. We have some anti-theft plate/decal that leaves some sort of traceable tattoo on our computers. If one turns up we know who it belonged to, even if the plate is removed without breaking the laptop. If someone wants to bad enough, they'll get it off. But stuff gets stolen sometimes. Yes, this will be a lot of work. But that's IT, that's network engineering. Job security, friend.
If you don't check for spyware, and don't run an antivirus, how do you know you don't have them? Popups would probably warn you of spyware, but viruses/worms are much sneakier these days. After leaving a job where I used Linux for everything, I decided to play some mp3's on a Windows box I had set up for some reason. Imagine my surprise when I found that some of my mp3s had virus code in them! I realized that I had never played those songs on a Windows box before. mpg321 didn't care about the virus code, it just played the music. You never know where a baddie could lurk. You are right, Windows is a perfectly usable system and with a little thought it can be secure enough for some folks. But users who don't understand these issues are easy targets, and are the ones whose machines are portscanning 60,000 hosts in two days trying to take down everybody else. Antivirus is painful, but not running it is a bad idea.
"The server will work, regardless." This is a theological projection of a Microsoft server. A dream many people once had, an idea. Do you have a large collection of books with titles like "Microsoft Sodburglar Pro - Made Easy"? With the "Made Easy" part in multicolor italics? You see, this is a branding thing. Ours is better because it's easier. This is the business model of the new millenium. Windows Final Ultimate Extreme Penultimate! Just Point and Click! And the managers believe it. So if it's so easy, why should they pay more than $foo per year? After all, those administrators just click around and figure out how to do stuff. It's easy! I've seen the books! "...not to the point that you don't get data in a way you want it. That's the job of a developer to get the raw data in a format you can use." No, no, no. Let me explain. A server just provides some listeners on some ports. Sometimes they send stuff back out on some ports. Now, those listeners can make files that have stuff in them. Stuff that people that need to know what is happening on those ports need to know. These people that need to know stuff can write a few lines of PHP or something, and then they can see what is happening from somewhere else. Stay with me. Now, sometimes someone says that their machines aren't picking anything up on their listeners. Then the people that need to know stuff look at their abstraction of the files with stuff in them, and can see why they are having listener problems. If worse comes to worse they have to look at the files. Then they write a little PHP to make sure that next time, they don't have to look at the files with stuff. That's all there is. Call us earthlings crazy, but doesn't that sound easy? Not like multicolor italic easy, but simple and easy? There are abstractions from what is really happening, but you can use those if you want to, it's not the only option. You don't have to use screen areas with buttons and text boxes. You don't have to live with what some developer somewhere thought you would need to do. You can just do it yourself. It's there in a file, just look at it.
Slashdot Mirror
What is it with you people? No matter what the headline, somebody always jumps in with, "I have seen this coming for a long time. Microsoft/U.S.A./Intel/Dell/IBM/Sun is so passe, and they have finally been dethroned. Here are the reasons why they were headed for a fall..." PUH LEEZ! Get a life and stop waiting around for some validation for your "the underground will rule" fantasies.
Having said that, lots of smart people have been saying for a long time that Asia outnumbers us, which means that they have more smart people than we do, and therefore we will have to work very hard to stay ahead. Well, we're not working very hard, and nobody wants to invest in long-money power research. "Let somebody else do that, we need money now. When I'm dead somebody else will get rich on new power and I don't care."
No one seems to have mentioned this, but Debian Etch is using OpenBSD's inetd superserver, for security and clean code. I was as surprised as anyone to see it, but why not use the best?
Well, I don't have a lot of faith in Joe. He is a whiner, and, as Ron White's grandpa would say, "That boy's got a lot of quit in him."
Having said that, I myself had a lot of trouble installing Gentoo, but that was because I was on the PPC platform, and my cd drive wouldn't read cd-r's.
So my install took 10 weeks.
Once I got things bootstrapped, it wasn't bad. And I was able to install the system, configure it, and boot to it in an evening or two. Building X took a couple of days, but my machine wasn't very fast.
So if I can make it work on PPC using hackity badness in a couple months, why is 10 days so bad for a guy who also had to learn a whole new operating system? Package management isn't just a side project for a distribution, it mostly *is* the distribution.
His next install? Would take a few hours.
I'm thinking of trying to put it on my Sun next. That may take much longer. Waaa.
A few folks mentioned Java and NetBeans, but of course the whole J2EE suite runs on OSX.
I enjoy using JEdit. It does syntax highlighting and all the indention things programmers need. I usually find myself going back and forth between vi and JEdit, depending on what I'm doing.
Of course, you can use MySQL with Java these days too, using the connector. But I don't of a better tool than the commandline mysql tool, with which you can write queries and format them to make sure your code is working.
Score:0 more like it. Hey vertinox, if you run RAID5 and you lose two drives that have both copies of one chunk, you have lost that chunk.
2 chunks minus 2 chunks equals zero chunks, get it?
"...in reality Raid5 isn't that useful ore efficient unless you are using enteprise applications that requires 100% uptime and you have way more than 3 hard drives (just in case two of them fail on you at once for no particular reason) and then you should have that server mirrored by another one so if one server fails because of a bad motherboard/powersupply etc, you'll have another server ready to go."
So, what you are saying, is if you lose your data, you should do something better so you won't lose your data? Thank you, John Madden of sysadmins. "If the referee throws a flag, and he didn't make a mistake, there's probably going to be a penalty."
Yeah, so if this is software RAID, what OS are they using? XP I guess?
Why is Intel's hardware bad just because Windows performs poorly on it?
I'm a little surprised that, all the way through BOTH articles and this thread, it took this long for someone to ask if it was a HARDWARE or SOFTWARE issue.
As Carlos Mencia would say, "Dee Tuh Dee".
Twelve years ago or so managers started to realize that they could buy a PC and put Novell on it, and hire a 20 year old with no training to run it. Then Windows 95 and NT 4 Server came out, and they realized they could throw away their mainframe and their VAX and their Suns, buy some PCs, run Windows, and replace their entire staff with 20 year olds with no training. They could also pay them small salaries and make them work 70 hours a week, and since they were untrained and inexperienced they could replace them tomorrow. The future is cheap!
Computer service is not going to get better. Geek Squad is like McDonald's, selling PC service instead of McChicken. The service is just as good. If you need the service of either, you are on a bad place in the food chain.
Geek Squad workers, take heart. I have worked tech support, and I have worked fast food. Keep learning and work hard. Go get some student loans and get that degree. You will get the career you want someday if you stay focused. It will probably take longer than the used car salesman at ITT Tech will tell you. I have a job I want today, and it only took me until I was 34. But I'm probably a little slow...
So once everyone gets a laptop with an image that has encryption turned on by default, people will feel secure about hauling their laptop around with sensitive data. They will probably even feel secure enough to leave it on the table in the coffee shop while they get a refill, "it will only take a minute."
We all know that there are user friendly apps out there to retrieve data from encrypted files, though it will raise the bar a little.
Using a hardware security device also could lead to a false sense of security, though it could be done properly. These days I have to log in with the aid of a credit card sized one-time key generator. That certainly would deter casual folks getting into government systems, but may be a deal where they are easy to circumvent (running a fat client for example, or an overly simple hardware connection).
The delete after six months thing sounds impossible, and poorly thought out. But some consultants will make a lot of money failing to implement it! Think of it as FDR building the highways, investing in our economy...
1. OSX was based on the FreeBSD kernel and leveraged a LOT of UNIX structure under the covers. Lift the GUI off of OSX and you essentially have a BSD box. This means, for Apple, a lot of the engineering had already been completed.
Mmm, no. It's a MACH microkernel, an objective C framework for drivers, a FreeBSD TCP/IP stack, another objective C framework for video, some stuff to tie the FreeBSD process handling to MACH via message sending, &c. Calling it FreeBSD with a GUI is wrong. Download the Darwin tree and the FreeBSD tree and do a diff if you don't believe me, it's all there. I think that there is a lot of similarity of scope to both projects.
Hardware support is an issue, and using third-party drivers on OSX is a bad business. Microsoft is pretty good at handling that these days.
I'm not sure what your last point was. I guess I disagree, moving from OS9 to X was like moving to a different planet for Apple. They switched to gcc and Cocoa from Programmer's Workbench and Carbon! From the old toolbox rom stuff to a whole new framework! From the old cooperative multitasking kernel to a new preemptive monolithic/micro hybrid! A total rewrite.
I can see that, but it still seems crazy to me. I know that Apple in the early 80's tried to make their developers hit a "lines of code per week" target. But still, when I was learning Python I wrote a 1000-line game in a week, and in my student job at the university I wrote a 1000-line Java tool in a few days (it worked right after a week or two). I guess that, like other posters said, they are rewriting a lot of things.
Still sounds like a stagnated environment to me. I wonder how many lines of code Google developers produce a year?
I, for one, welcome our new Chinese overlords. Luckily I've been building up my tolerance to peppers and curry for years. And I don't have to use a fork. As soon as I figure out where to get Sun Wah Linux to run on my Lenovo, I'm set.
If you communicate and your spouse really understands how much this job means, then she will move. Not sure why you're asking Slashdot instead of discussing this with your wife...
"...But if you are a software developer, you need to get into group one, where I am."
Who's in group one?
I dunno.
No, he's on second.
Who?
No.
What are we talking about?
I wish the writers at Newsforge and such places would take some cues from this article. It is clear, concise, and avoids commonly overused slang and metaphors. What a relief from the usual "Linux switcher" articles.
Mark Golden is a smart guy, and though he doesn't say it, he apparently was comfortable reinstalling Windows on his machine. He did something that is very smart, that most Linux reviewers don't seem to have done. He bought a book. Installing six, count them, six, different Linux distributions shows quite a bit of determination and interest on his part. The interoperability testing he did between office software packages showed some depth as well. Judging from the end of the article, he has been bitten by the "if I just can get this other thing to work under Linux" bug. I would ascertain that he will probably be a Linux hobbyist now.
I appreciate that he didn't go into long paragraphs of complaining about Free Software. It's free, so you are not allowed to complain about it. If you don't like it, use something else. He understands this.
I would say that, as a longtime Unix guy, he has come up with an accurate evaluation of the situation. Common things are easy or at least doable under Unix these days, and most everything else is possible, but only if you are willing to do some work yourself. It is this last catch that is the most frustrating part. As someone who spent a good bit of time this past week breaking C code and tweaking linker knobs, only to fail to make things work, I can readily say that this extra work can often be a bottomless pit. I certainly appreciate the efforts of the wizards who have made the rest easy.
os.geteuid = 0
Will it let you do an assignment like that? You wanted
os.geteuid == 0
At first I read this code as:
if (geteuid() == 0 || geteuid() != 0)
Now that would have been pointless...
if (true || false)
\\waste time doing a comparison that will always be true
Dee-tuh-dee...
Sideways threading is so March 2006. Everyone knows that the Infinite Improbability Threading is the wave of the future. Every instruction passes through every register in the Universe simultaneously, for infinite computational power, without all that tedious mucking about with three dimensional space-time.
What is amazing to me is that the commercial computer business is built on making people think that they are stupid. "Buy Windows. Because you are too stupid to use GNU/Linux. And you can't afford expert help." Is it wrong to assume that, if you are using GNU/Linux, that you don't think that you are stupid? And therefore, that you are self-reliant, and willing to figure out even the toughest problems by yourself?
Having said that, the attitudes on mailing lists, wikis, and IRC channels are the same as they have been on netnews for 20 years. "RTFM lUser", "STFU", "USTFU", "You 5UX0RZ", "With your mouth", &c.
Ok. So where's fork() ?
Right there under SFU:
Yeah, it's there. Have you tried to port anything to it though? Getting a Unix app of more than a couple thousand lines of code to build and run under SFU is definitely non-trivial. I had fun playing with it for a while, but it was much easier to just add something else for the Sun server to do instead.
By the time you have added several libraries and tried to make everything work together, you have yourself one serious mess. As frustrating as the OS X BSD layer can be to work with, it's worlds ahead of SFU for porting or developing Unix apps.
`We used to cooperate openly with each other and people from other groups, exchanging opinions and ideas, but after few schooling sessions in front of the bigger group, everyone is now quietly doing what they are told.`
If you are unsatisfied, you should continue the discussions that you are used to that were so satisfying. If you get "schooled" in front of the group, you will survive. They will probably get tired of "schooling" you quickly, as in not more than twice. If you don't give in, what can they do? You're not "causing problems", just doing your job in an open way.
This does show signs of serious communication problems, which in relationships or business usually end up with a parting of ways, in my experience. So what? I left a job where I was written up for doing work that had been PRE-APPROVED by management. I took my lumps and had no trouble defending myself, since I had taken care to document everything. But working for folks that do such things is like slamming your hand in the door on purpose. I resigned and went back to school at age 32, and now after two years I have landed a job that I would rather have had all along. You don't HAVE to live the way they want you to, there are choices.
Peace dude.
It's interesting that Microsoft is attacking governments now. I think I see a trend. They intimidated all but 9 states, I believe, in the antitrust case. Now the Maryland OpenDocument business. Next the EU. As soon as a bean counter figures out how it will be profitable, they will buy a small country.
Think about it. Apple has gotten so big now that they are similar in size to some large company, I believe Ford Motors? We are talking BIG companies. And Microsoft is still about 20 times bigger. Boggles the mind.
Evram Miller, of Intel Venture Capital, talked in his interview on NerdTV about some of Intel's decisions in the the 90's. He says they could have done a lot of great things, but didn't because of pressure from Microsoft. He said, straight up, Intel is afraid of Microsoft. INTEL.
You can talk about conspiracy theories, but this is the new millennium. There is no such thing as paranoia.
Yeah, yeah. I work at a college, we see dupes sometimes. It shouldn't happen, but it does. So every now and then two people get banned instead of one. Darwinism.
There are a lot of naysayers here, but I am a student network admin. It doesn't matter what's out there, you just have to manage the network.
The computers will get bots and worms, and students will plug in wireless routers backwards and take out network segments. No different than any other network. We use vmps, so when a machine is doing bad things, it's MAC gets put in a vlan that can only talk to a Webserver, explaining that they are quarantined, and they can hit Windows Update. Wherever they go, the vlan follows.
The school probably already has a tier-1 help desk. The labs already probably had disk images, so they can be up and running again in 15 minutes if broken. Just do this with the laptops.
Otherwise, the students own the laptops, so if they are stolen or broken, tough luck. We have some anti-theft plate/decal that leaves some sort of traceable tattoo on our computers. If one turns up we know who it belonged to, even if the plate is removed without breaking the laptop. If someone wants to bad enough, they'll get it off. But stuff gets stolen sometimes.
Yes, this will be a lot of work. But that's IT, that's network engineering. Job security, friend.
If you don't check for spyware, and don't run an antivirus, how do you know you don't have them? Popups would probably warn you of spyware, but viruses/worms are much sneakier these days.
After leaving a job where I used Linux for everything, I decided to play some mp3's on a Windows box I had set up for some reason. Imagine my surprise when I found that some of my mp3s had virus code in them! I realized that I had never played those songs on a Windows box before. mpg321 didn't care about the virus code, it just played the music. You never know where a baddie could lurk.
You are right, Windows is a perfectly usable system and with a little thought it can be secure enough for some folks. But users who don't understand these issues are easy targets, and are the ones whose machines are portscanning 60,000 hosts in two days trying to take down everybody else.
Antivirus is painful, but not running it is a bad idea.
"The server will work, regardless."
This is a theological projection of a Microsoft server. A dream many people once had, an idea. Do you have a large collection of books with titles like "Microsoft Sodburglar Pro - Made Easy"? With the "Made Easy" part in multicolor italics? You see, this is a branding thing. Ours is better because it's easier. This is the business model of the new millenium. Windows Final Ultimate Extreme Penultimate! Just Point and Click! And the managers believe it. So if it's so easy, why should they pay more than $foo per year? After all, those administrators just click around and figure out how to do stuff. It's easy! I've seen the books!
"...not to the point that you don't get data in a way you want it. That's the job of a developer to get the raw data in a format you can use."
No, no, no. Let me explain. A server just provides some listeners on some ports. Sometimes they send stuff back out on some ports. Now, those listeners can make files that have stuff in them. Stuff that people that need to know what is happening on those ports need to know. These people that need to know stuff can write a few lines of PHP or something, and then they can see what is happening from somewhere else. Stay with me. Now, sometimes someone says that their machines aren't picking anything up on their listeners. Then the people that need to know stuff look at their abstraction of the files with stuff in them, and can see why they are having listener problems. If worse comes to worse they have to look at the files. Then they write a little PHP to make sure that next time, they don't have to look at the files with stuff.
That's all there is. Call us earthlings crazy, but doesn't that sound easy? Not like multicolor italic easy, but simple and easy?
There are abstractions from what is really happening, but you can use those if you want to, it's not the only option. You don't have to use screen areas with buttons and text boxes. You don't have to live with what some developer somewhere thought you would need to do. You can just do it yourself. It's there in a file, just look at it.