I have to take exception to this - in my fairly extensive experience running desktop and server security for major corporations I have found WIndows much more of a pain in the neck when trying to do anything non standard. And non standard includes securing anything.
(I will caveat that by saying that Windows 2003 actually looks pretty secure when configured correctly and it isn't as bad as earlier versions)
Under Linux you require pretty much the same effort to set up anything, whether it be normal or esoteric. And it works the same way every time so you can automate the process. I have not met a version of Windows which would be consistent. From one image, I can install on 5000 identical PCs using one script and get 15 or 20 different configs. WTF???
But it is all down to education. If Linux becomes the monopoly then all the grannies, computer illiterates and numptys will still do a default install and depend on whatever security is built in 'cos they won't know how to do anything else. Potentially we could be safer, as it should be easier to segregate users from machine space, but we need to enforce it.
Yup, the number of times I have touched 240 volts is fairly high. Not generally through stupidity, but just because it isn't that dangerous if you take sensible precautions. Like never wear a tie, always keep left hand in pocket etc. It stings, and your arm twitches for a while, but it isn't that bad.
Touching wires in the back of a colour monitor or TV is much more exciting. Serious air time is likely. Best not to do it:-)
Erm, Zed2k? A month is an exceedingly short space of time to test a Microsoft patch and roll out to 50,000 or 100,000 machines. Typically any MS patch breaks a number of applications, so exceptions will have to be made for those machines which can't be patched - and extra controls placed around them.
Can you imagine rolling out a patch quickly and finding 20,000 staff can't work in the morning? If you fancy that job, well fair enough - but really you should think a little longer before posting and realise that quick patches are an option for the home user and small offices, not enterprise scale organisations.
As the earlier poster said - just chill out and realise that some things may be different to your experience.
Bit puzzled by your uninstall comments - any app that is "installed" on Windows will not be uninstalled by deleting it or the partition it is on. There will be registry entries, links and shortcuts. Over time (a very short period) these cause instability. Back in the 3.1 days it was athe case that a simple delete would work, but not within the last 7 years.
Under Linux (especially Debian) uninstall is very easy. Deleting the directory will work, but may leave links/PATH, but uninstallation clears out the entire app. Which would have been installed in easily predictable places, not everywhere!
I am intrigued that you haven't had issues with one of the main problems Windows has - uninstalling. Oh well, each to their own.
The average home consumer wants easy email, pr0n surfing, music, vids and games. There are obviously exceptions, but that is pretty much it.
Home users 'know' from marketing that Windows will do all this. They also 'know' that Macs are better at graphics but difficult to use, and that Linux is only for techy geeks.
It's marketing nonsense. Linux boxes and Macs are possibly more capable for all those purposes except games playing, which is a kind of chicken/egg situation as the games developers put most of their effort into supplying the largest installed platform.
Unfortunately nobody can put up as much marketing budget as MS, so they'll keep winning.
Admittedly, Windows 2003 is actually looking pretty good - not for games, but in the corporate environment - which is nice.
I think for your uses, Microsoft XP may well be the best OS. I am not a Linux zealot, but I can't think of anything worse for my uses -
XP fails to recognise any of my hardware
it never does anything the same way twice - so it knackers my network settings on a regular basis
Microsoft Office is still not WYSIWYG! Why??
the ports of applications I use have very bad bugs under MS
the boot time is just stupidly long - there is literally no need for it
changing network settings on the fly still doesn't work correctly
all the games I like are available under Linux or other Unixes
Installing and uninstalling is still hit and miss, requiring regular cruft clearance (or reinstalling the OS as we call it)
I could go on for ages. Put it this way - the only reason MS still has the desktop market is not because it is inherently better than anything else, but because it has the desktop market. Linux really has to prove it is significantly better in a corporate environment, and can play nice with the MS hacked up standards (Kerberos, anyone???) before they will shift.
A conversion? What like you were an atheist, but some smooth talking religious fundamentalist called you up out of the blue and wheedled and cajoled the $1000 from you to prove your love for Jesus?
Oh sorry, I guess it was just a spelin mistook.
Re:You've a long wait for IP6
on
VRRP
·
· Score: 2
Well, we can't do it all at a higher level. I mean, most folks think SSL with 128bit encryption is secure, but it takes 4 keypresses to hijack almost any SSL session. I agree that encryption at hardware level is ideal for connections that require a high level of security, and from my perspective, placing security fuctionality at as low a layer as possible is the best way forwards.
You don't want to have to rely on an application for security when the underlying layers may have been subverted. In fact the best solution is to have security functionality at all levels - keep non-repudiation at a high layer and the rest at each layer lower down.
Okay, I see what you're saying, and I agree, mostly. A good story should still be good on a 14" black and white TV (remember them, kids?) but the fact is that the LOTR stories have had to wait this long to be filmed properly because they would have been pretty pale without the masses of monsters and effects.
Would Star Wars have been as good without the cutting edge effects? Would Dune have been good even with cutting edge effects:-)?
But yeah - we all know the storyline, so there won't be any suspense.
Re:You've a long wait for IP6
on
VRRP
·
· Score: 2
Sorry to disagree, but the way the world is means that IP just can't be about transferring packets - as we can't do that unless we securely manage the connection - Confidentiality, Integrity, Authenticity, Non-Repudiation: all these are required by business, and no matter how much we all want the Internet to be free (in all senses) in reality, commercial business funds development.
Anyway, IPv6 ain't that bad. You very quickly become able to memorise the portions of the address relevant to your connectivity and just ignore the rest (or more accurately, drop it:-))
Re:Exactly how are routers going to run this ???
on
VRRP
·
· Score: 2
It isn't just a unix service! Many routers run this very simply - Cisco IOS has it in all current versions (not sure about Juniper) and it's a piece of cake to enable and configure
I don't think any of my clients would ever think of not using it - sometimes for firewall resiliency, sometimes to help with web farm clustering, but for large scale enterprise organisations it is invaluable.
>>>The consensus seems to be, however, that Windows XP is Microsoft's best OS. The only other candidate is Windows 2000. Any comments?
Not to start a flamewar or anything, but W2k - not bad; can be easily secured but XP - a sysadmin's nightmare; network connections and security cannot be reliably configured by script, as on identical machines, the same procedure can result in different priorities!!!
The interface to everything has been so 'dumbed down' that functionality suffers. Even my non-techy friends preferred the 'old way' then at least they could see what they had broken.
Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein - definitely. For all the reasons described above.
Gibson, Hamilton, Marshall-Smith, Card - nice rounding out of ideas, stories which make you think long after you finish reading.
Herbert - not for Dune, which I liked, but rate along with Gormenghast for amusingly overblown shallowness, but for his wierd stuff, and short stories.
Niven, Pournelle, Bear - scientifically/technically plausible universes. On an epic scale.
I know you should never respond to a troll, but what a glaring mistake: Ouzo and Ricard could, I guess, be mistaken for each other and are aniseed flavoured, clear and strong. And they do turn milky white when water is added.
But Absinthe is green and doesn't taste like any other drink!!!
You can get it in most specialist alcohol shops in the UK and it is an interesting addition to a night out as various bars stock it too.
Although it is gaining popularity in cocktails, the classic way to drink it is this:
dip a spoonful of sugar in the Absinthe
set fire to the Absinthe soaked sugar
once it has melted, stir into the glass of Absinthe
Allow the mix to burn a little longer
Enjoy!
Or my all time favourite - the 6809. I remember when I used to write so much assembly code for the 6809 I ended up thinking and writing my apps directly in Hex. The only bugger being the calculation of offsets for branch instructions:-)
I wonder if that filled my brain up? I need some excuse for being as thick as mince now.
>>>US citizens, generally, like paying $100 or less (actually, most like the phones to be free) for handsets, because again it really doesn't matter to most of us: I don't want a colour screen on my phone, I just want something that I can talk to people on.
All my phones have been free - I live in the UK and upgrade my mobile every 6 or 12 months at no cost to myself. It's standard here. Finland and Japan have even better commercial tech than us.
I know it may sound silly, but to the rest of the developed world, the US does quite often seem insular and not interested in advances in technology from outside, so doesn't use the huge resources at it's disposal.
You should consider reading the article, or maybe even some of the more intelligent comments posted above. None of what Apple has done in this case deserves this sort of moronic knee-jerk reaction.
Think - you develop Cool Gubbins(tm) to sell at $200 and to market it you develop the Cool Gubbins(tm) App which you give away free just to raise interest. If another vendor develops a Handy Widget(tm) which does the same job, they are just benefiting from the first companies efforts if the App is ported. Let them write their own, or do your own at home.
This is a theft issue, even if some morons see it as a "They're evil 'cos they won't give us stuff for free" issue. If you like what Apple does, don't try and put them out of business.
At the risk of sounding like a troll, there are some issues here:
1000lb is a bit more than 11lb, and in fact can be already done. That is why the military have radar, guns and missiles. The clever bit here is that this is very small. Very impressive if it makes it all that way.
What would happen to the US if a bomb did go off at the Oscars? Very little. Yes it would be a disaster/massacre of innocents, but it won't affect the economy like the twin towers attack.
This is not a useful model for any type of private cruise missile. Spy plane, maybe. Secret courier, yep. Heavy weapon, erm...nope.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be very impressed if you could make a lathe with a lathe.
Show me how, pleeeese:-)
I have to take exception to this - in my fairly extensive experience running desktop and server security for major corporations I have found WIndows much more of a pain in the neck when trying to do anything non standard. And non standard includes securing anything.
(I will caveat that by saying that Windows 2003 actually looks pretty secure when configured correctly and it isn't as bad as earlier versions)
Under Linux you require pretty much the same effort to set up anything, whether it be normal or esoteric. And it works the same way every time so you can automate the process. I have not met a version of Windows which would be consistent. From one image, I can install on 5000 identical PCs using one script and get 15 or 20 different configs. WTF???
But it is all down to education. If Linux becomes the monopoly then all the grannies, computer illiterates and numptys will still do a default install and depend on whatever security is built in 'cos they won't know how to do anything else. Potentially we could be safer, as it should be easier to segregate users from machine space, but we need to enforce it.
I'm blethering - I'll stop now.
Yup, the number of times I have touched 240 volts is fairly high. Not generally through stupidity, but just because it isn't that dangerous if you take sensible precautions. Like never wear a tie, always keep left hand in pocket etc. It stings, and your arm twitches for a while, but it isn't that bad.
Touching wires in the back of a colour monitor or TV is much more exciting. Serious air time is likely. Best not to do it:-)
Erm, Zed2k? A month is an exceedingly short space of time to test a Microsoft patch and roll out to 50,000 or 100,000 machines. Typically any MS patch breaks a number of applications, so exceptions will have to be made for those machines which can't be patched - and extra controls placed around them.
Can you imagine rolling out a patch quickly and finding 20,000 staff can't work in the morning? If you fancy that job, well fair enough - but really you should think a little longer before posting and realise that quick patches are an option for the home user and small offices, not enterprise scale organisations.
As the earlier poster said - just chill out and realise that some things may be different to your experience.
Aye - Barry the Time Sprout rules, in a non confrontational kinda way.
Tried it on computers made this month - still blows horribly! If it wasn't my job to do stuff like this I would never touch it with a bargepole.
Bit puzzled by your uninstall comments - any app that is "installed" on Windows will not be uninstalled by deleting it or the partition it is on. There will be registry entries, links and shortcuts. Over time (a very short period) these cause instability. Back in the 3.1 days it was athe case that a simple delete would work, but not within the last 7 years.
Under Linux (especially Debian) uninstall is very easy. Deleting the directory will work, but may leave links/PATH, but uninstallation clears out the entire app. Which would have been installed in easily predictable places, not everywhere!
I am intrigued that you haven't had issues with one of the main problems Windows has - uninstalling. Oh well, each to their own.
The average home consumer wants easy email, pr0n surfing, music, vids and games. There are obviously exceptions, but that is pretty much it.
Home users 'know' from marketing that Windows will do all this. They also 'know' that Macs are better at graphics but difficult to use, and that Linux is only for techy geeks.
It's marketing nonsense. Linux boxes and Macs are possibly more capable for all those purposes except games playing, which is a kind of chicken/egg situation as the games developers put most of their effort into supplying the largest installed platform.
Unfortunately nobody can put up as much marketing budget as MS, so they'll keep winning.
Admittedly, Windows 2003 is actually looking pretty good - not for games, but in the corporate environment - which is nice.
XP fails to recognise any of my hardware
it never does anything the same way twice - so it knackers my network settings on a regular basis
Microsoft Office is still not WYSIWYG! Why??
the ports of applications I use have very bad bugs under MS
the boot time is just stupidly long - there is literally no need for it
changing network settings on the fly still doesn't work correctly
all the games I like are available under Linux or other Unixes
Installing and uninstalling is still hit and miss, requiring regular cruft clearance (or reinstalling the OS as we call it) I could go on for ages. Put it this way - the only reason MS still has the desktop market is not because it is inherently better than anything else, but because it has the desktop market. Linux really has to prove it is significantly better in a corporate environment, and can play nice with the MS hacked up standards (Kerberos, anyone???) before they will shift.
A conversion? What like you were an atheist, but some smooth talking religious fundamentalist called you up out of the blue and wheedled and cajoled the $1000 from you to prove your love for Jesus?
Oh sorry, I guess it was just a spelin mistook.
Well, we can't do it all at a higher level. I mean, most folks think SSL with 128bit encryption is secure, but it takes 4 keypresses to hijack almost any SSL session. I agree that encryption at hardware level is ideal for connections that require a high level of security, and from my perspective, placing security fuctionality at as low a layer as possible is the best way forwards.
You don't want to have to rely on an application for security when the underlying layers may have been subverted. In fact the best solution is to have security functionality at all levels - keep non-repudiation at a high layer and the rest at each layer lower down.
Okay, I see what you're saying, and I agree, mostly. A good story should still be good on a 14" black and white TV (remember them, kids?) but the fact is that the LOTR stories have had to wait this long to be filmed properly because they would have been pretty pale without the masses of monsters and effects.
Would Star Wars have been as good without the cutting edge effects? Would Dune have been good even with cutting edge effects:-)?
But yeah - we all know the storyline, so there won't be any suspense.
Sorry to disagree, but the way the world is means that IP just can't be about transferring packets - as we can't do that unless we securely manage the connection - Confidentiality, Integrity, Authenticity, Non-Repudiation: all these are required by business, and no matter how much we all want the Internet to be free (in all senses) in reality, commercial business funds development.
Anyway, IPv6 ain't that bad. You very quickly become able to memorise the portions of the address relevant to your connectivity and just ignore the rest (or more accurately, drop it:-))
It isn't just a unix service! Many routers run this very simply - Cisco IOS has it in all current versions (not sure about Juniper) and it's a piece of cake to enable and configure
I don't think any of my clients would ever think of not using it - sometimes for firewall resiliency, sometimes to help with web farm clustering, but for large scale enterprise organisations it is invaluable.
>>>The consensus seems to be, however, that Windows XP is Microsoft's best OS. The only other candidate is Windows 2000. Any comments?
Not to start a flamewar or anything, but W2k - not bad; can be easily secured but XP - a sysadmin's nightmare; network connections and security cannot be reliably configured by script, as on identical machines, the same procedure can result in different priorities!!!
The interface to everything has been so 'dumbed down' that functionality suffers. Even my non-techy friends preferred the 'old way' then at least they could see what they had broken.
Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein - definitely. For all the reasons described above.
Gibson, Hamilton, Marshall-Smith, Card - nice rounding out of ideas, stories which make you think long after you finish reading.
Herbert - not for Dune, which I liked, but rate along with Gormenghast for amusingly overblown shallowness, but for his wierd stuff, and short stories.
Niven, Pournelle, Bear - scientifically/technically plausible universes. On an epic scale.
I know you should never respond to a troll, but what a glaring mistake: Ouzo and Ricard could, I guess, be mistaken for each other and are aniseed flavoured, clear and strong. And they do turn milky white when water is added.
But Absinthe is green and doesn't taste like any other drink!!!
You can get it in most specialist alcohol shops in the UK and it is an interesting addition to a night out as various bars stock it too.
Although it is gaining popularity in cocktails, the classic way to drink it is this:
dip a spoonful of sugar in the Absinthe
set fire to the Absinthe soaked sugar
once it has melted, stir into the glass of Absinthe
Allow the mix to burn a little longer
Enjoy!
No, Mel is very very clever. I just had a lot of time on my hands.
Or my all time favourite - the 6809. I remember when I used to write so much assembly code for the 6809 I ended up thinking and writing my apps directly in Hex. The only bugger being the calculation of offsets for branch instructions:-)
I wonder if that filled my brain up? I need some excuse for being as thick as mince now.
See earlier post and use the latest chkrootkit. It's that easy to check.
>>>US citizens, generally, like paying $100 or less (actually, most like the phones to be free) for handsets, because again it really doesn't matter to most of us: I don't want a colour screen on my phone, I just want something that I can talk to people on.
All my phones have been free - I live in the UK and upgrade my mobile every 6 or 12 months at no cost to myself. It's standard here. Finland and Japan have even better commercial tech than us.
I know it may sound silly, but to the rest of the developed world, the US does quite often seem insular and not interested in advances in technology from outside, so doesn't use the huge resources at it's disposal.
>>"You ***ing Americans are all the ***ing same..." "...It's `let me tell you' this and `listen to me' that..."
One of my all time favourite quotes! "Well you're dead now..."
I haven't either, but children keep injuring or killing themselves because of it!
You should consider reading the article, or maybe even some of the more intelligent comments posted above. None of what Apple has done in this case deserves this sort of moronic knee-jerk reaction.
Think - you develop Cool Gubbins(tm) to sell at $200 and to market it you develop the Cool Gubbins(tm) App which you give away free just to raise interest. If another vendor develops a Handy Widget(tm) which does the same job, they are just benefiting from the first companies efforts if the App is ported. Let them write their own, or do your own at home.
This is a theft issue, even if some morons see it as a "They're evil 'cos they won't give us stuff for free" issue. If you like what Apple does, don't try and put them out of business.
At the risk of sounding like a troll, there are some issues here:
1000lb is a bit more than 11lb, and in fact can be already done. That is why the military have radar, guns and missiles. The clever bit here is that this is very small. Very impressive if it makes it all that way.
What would happen to the US if a bomb did go off at the Oscars? Very little. Yes it would be a disaster/massacre of innocents, but it won't affect the economy like the twin towers attack.
This is not a useful model for any type of private cruise missile. Spy plane, maybe. Secret courier, yep. Heavy weapon, erm...nope.