A big problem is marketing, MS has always marketed windows as "easy to use" and "does not require expensive admin staff", however the end result is an extremely poorly maintained system full of security holes...
Conversely, a linux system maintained by incompetent staff is likely to still be more secure than a windows system maintained by similarly incompetent staff, its just that those staff don't have any marketing material giving them the confidence to try.
If you do hire competent admins, those admins will cost the same for either system and both will provide you with a reasonably secure setup, but for windows you will need more admins for a similar number of systems, more systems (or more powerful hardware) to do a similar amount of work, and lots of third party software most of which won't be available for free.
Windows has a reasonably well designed (VMS based) kernel, with a lot of legacy cruft on top of it... Most of this stuff MS have added on top of the original vms-derived kernel have significantly weakened the intended security model... things like the networking protocols (google for the windows auth model is broken), the password hashing algorithms, the presence of multiple versions of various apis...
Some of the security features are implemented in userland and are trivial to bypass, one example being the function to "disable" the command prompt.
It also has an extremely complicated security model which is very much overkill for the vast majority of cases, and results in people simply ignoring it.
Not to mention all the additional complexity designed to work around the design flaws without breaking compatibility, like the transparent path/registry redirection thats designed to allow poorly written apps to think theyre able to write to arbitrary locations without actually letting them do so... The first principle of security is KEEP IT SIMPLE... The more complicated you make things, the harder it is to keep it secure. On the other hand, windows has always been extremely complex, and this seems to be by design to make it difficult to clone - after all, ms were not at all happy that dos got cloned.
Linux is and always has been a very attractive target for hackers... Years ago, linux/unix is all people would target because the only windows machines online were typically end user systems connected to dialup lines, while servers connected to faster lines were typically unix of some kind.
Also unix has a usable CLI by default, whereas the windows cli is pretty poor... When you're breaking into a machine on the internet, and are relaying your connection through machines in multiple countries in order to cover your tracks, cli is really the only option as any form of gui would be unusably slow by this point.
However, the days of redhat 4 with buggy ftpd, imap, pop3, bind etc services running as root by default are gone... Modern unix systems are much harder to attack, run a lot less by default, and what does run has less privileges. People these days target buggy webapps and insecure passwords in order to get into unix machines.
Actually, a lot of the larger accounts packages (such that a company the size of google would need) tend to run on unix or vms systems, it's only the lowend "small business" stuff that typically requires windows...
The same way other companies do it... We have no production windows systems, no windows systems which are used for day to day tasks... What we do have, is a small handful of windows systems (mostly virtual machines) sitting in an isolated test network which are used purely for testing purposes and windows-specific development.
An iphone can indeed run two programs at once, and usually runs about 20 processes by default... What it can't do is run more than one non apple supplied application at once without modifications (jailbreaking)...
Those iphone_jailbreak_xxx.exe files are actually windows viruses using social engineering (masquerading as iphone jailbreak programs) to get users to run them, they do not infect the iphone itself...
The only iphone virus that i'm aware of, is the one that scanned jailbroken iphones for the default ssh password, the iphone has a default password because you're not supposed to be able to connect to it that way... So they relied on users performing an action known to be insecure to their phones, no iphone was ever vulnerable to this out of the box.
It all depends on what you're used to... I've not used pages/numbers very much, i used wordperfect in school and find OO tolerable while i find the MS tools pretty clunky and unusable.
Once users have been using something long enough to get used to it, they will be pretty comfortable with it..
You could consider upgrading your mac pro to snow leopard, you spent so much on the hardware so the extra $30 isn't really much...
You don't have to use google chrome, you already listed several other browsers you could run and each of them has good and bad points, or you could even run the open source chromium and ensure that no unwanted big brother features are enabled. Chrome is no different to any other browser, it has its bad points namely how it sends data to google..
You don't need to use any google technology, there are alternatives to their search engine, alternatives to their mail service etc. On the other hand, do you really think any of the other free search engines or mail services don't mine your personal data just the same? These free services cost money to operate, servers cost money, bandwidth costs money, power costs money, they have to pay for the servers somehow. If you want an email service for instance which will not harvest your data, you can run your own server or pay for a service from someone and ensure the contract you have with them ensures they won't look at your data and just store it.
Software and services are entirely different in this context...
Once you have some free software the copy you have doesn't change unless you choose to change it, thus if it was working it will continue working the same. A service on the other hand, is entirely under the control of a third party and can change at their whim.
This article is entirely about a service that started off working, and then the company providing it stopped providing it to the one particular user with no explanation as to why.
Vendor certs are typically worthless and extremely easy... Microsoft, Cisco, RedHat etc are not educational institutions. The primary goals of their certifications are not to educate people, they are designed to sell more products... The more people "certified" to use your products out there, the more likely companies are to buy your products.
They know nothing about the subject themselves (and may not generally need to), which is why they have to rely on something they can understand. Unfortunately people take advantage of things like this, and will get in with bogus certs and no real knowledge.
People are in it for the money, the industry is flooded with people who have no real interest in the subject and learn the absolute minimum they need in order to get a decent paying job... Couple that with a severe shortage of people who really know what they're doing, and management who knows very little about the subject, you end up with thousands of extremely low skilled people finding themselves in a job.
You also have, at least in the IT field a lot of people who are somewhat socially inept but very good when it comes to technical matters. These people often lose out to people who while better able to present and sell themselves, really don't have a clue when it comes to the job at hand.
I have to deal with this every day, completely incompetent people who have managed to convince non technical management that they're gods gift.
All DRM schemes are proprietary by their very nature... Apple don't want DRM, they are forced to use it by the content providers or they won't supply any content. Their DRM scheme for music is gone now, and was always very easy to bypass.
Chrome seems to support all 3... Theora is likely to die out now that webm is replacing it, leaving only 2 competitors... One free, and one patent encumbered...
Flash doesn't work in any 64bit windows browsers, you have to run a 32bit browser to get flash on windows..
Nothing is stopping you from porting an existing javascript engine to a new device, or writing one from scratch for that device.. Adobe's licensing of the flash spec prohibits doing this..
MobileSafari (iPhone) Mobile Chrome (Android) The Nokia Maemo browser Windows Mobile IE Opera Mobile Any open source javascript interpreter when compiled for an ARM processor And a lot more...
If flash had open sourced flash from the beginning, it would likely have been integrated into webkit/mozilla at least by now, and might even form part of html5.
What are you using to view the google pacman? It works fine on my machines just fine, doesn't even stutter on either of my phones (although it is unplayable on the iphone due to lack of controls).
Flash does not provide a consistent experience across platforms, it merely provides a single platform..
Running the same version of Firefox on every system would also provide a consistent experience (and firefox runs on more platforms than flash does)... Adobe are just as bad as MS for trying to tie everyone in to their platform, remember when IE had macos and unix versions?
Flash has 64bit linux support, and got it before any other 64bit platform... It just sucks quite badly.. I don't believe flash has any 64bit windows support, and relies on running in 32bit mode (most browsers run in 32bit mode on 64bit windows anyway). Flash also has no 64bit osx support, at least on my osx box safari is running as 64bit and seems to have a translation layer to support a 32bit flash plugin... I believe such a translation layer is also available for linux.
Does it really matter what iphone os runs on? You are not forced to run iphone os, any of the sites you visit from an iphone work equally well from any other device with a similarly capable browser... There is nothing to stop me compiling webkit or mozilla on any exotic system i wish and viewing sites with it.
I can still use my old SGI workstation running IRIX to view websites using a recent version of firefox compiled for it, i cannot view any flash content from this machine.
Flash on the other hand, can *only* be viewed on devices which adobe provide explicit support for. You are at the absolute mercy of a single company, who decide what platforms they will let you view flash content on, and how good that experience will be.
Having a single flash player installed on 98% of systems is terrible, that's an even worse monoculture than the one pushed by microsoft and means that a single security hole in flash can be used to exploit users of multiple platforms and multiple browsers... That makes it a pretty attractive target for hackers.
Monoculture is bad, flash should be made more like PDF (another format from adobe), a documented standard where you have the choice between using adobe's rather lacklustre tools or many many third party alternatives.. Although admittedly, most people don't realise there are superior PDF readers out there.
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A big problem is marketing, MS has always marketed windows as "easy to use" and "does not require expensive admin staff", however the end result is an extremely poorly maintained system full of security holes...
Conversely, a linux system maintained by incompetent staff is likely to still be more secure than a windows system maintained by similarly incompetent staff, its just that those staff don't have any marketing material giving them the confidence to try.
If you do hire competent admins, those admins will cost the same for either system and both will provide you with a reasonably secure setup, but for windows you will need more admins for a similar number of systems, more systems (or more powerful hardware) to do a similar amount of work, and lots of third party software most of which won't be available for free.
Windows has a reasonably well designed (VMS based) kernel, with a lot of legacy cruft on top of it... Most of this stuff MS have added on top of the original vms-derived kernel have significantly weakened the intended security model... things like the networking protocols (google for the windows auth model is broken), the password hashing algorithms, the presence of multiple versions of various apis...
Some of the security features are implemented in userland and are trivial to bypass, one example being the function to "disable" the command prompt.
It also has an extremely complicated security model which is very much overkill for the vast majority of cases, and results in people simply ignoring it.
Not to mention all the additional complexity designed to work around the design flaws without breaking compatibility, like the transparent path/registry redirection thats designed to allow poorly written apps to think theyre able to write to arbitrary locations without actually letting them do so... The first principle of security is KEEP IT SIMPLE... The more complicated you make things, the harder it is to keep it secure. On the other hand, windows has always been extremely complex, and this seems to be by design to make it difficult to clone - after all, ms were not at all happy that dos got cloned.
Linux is and always has been a very attractive target for hackers... Years ago, linux/unix is all people would target because the only windows machines online were typically end user systems connected to dialup lines, while servers connected to faster lines were typically unix of some kind.
Also unix has a usable CLI by default, whereas the windows cli is pretty poor... When you're breaking into a machine on the internet, and are relaying your connection through machines in multiple countries in order to cover your tracks, cli is really the only option as any form of gui would be unusably slow by this point.
However, the days of redhat 4 with buggy ftpd, imap, pop3, bind etc services running as root by default are gone... Modern unix systems are much harder to attack, run a lot less by default, and what does run has less privileges. People these days target buggy webapps and insecure passwords in order to get into unix machines.
Linux also has such tools, many of which are included as standard and not costly add-ons, especially around software management and updates etc.
Actually, a lot of the larger accounts packages (such that a company the size of google would need) tend to run on unix or vms systems, it's only the lowend "small business" stuff that typically requires windows...
The same way other companies do it...
We have no production windows systems, no windows systems which are used for day to day tasks...
What we do have, is a small handful of windows systems (mostly virtual machines) sitting in an isolated test network which are used purely for testing purposes and windows-specific development.
An iphone can indeed run two programs at once, and usually runs about 20 processes by default... What it can't do is run more than one non apple supplied application at once without modifications (jailbreaking)...
Those iphone_jailbreak_xxx.exe files are actually windows viruses using social engineering (masquerading as iphone jailbreak programs) to get users to run them, they do not infect the iphone itself...
The only iphone virus that i'm aware of, is the one that scanned jailbroken iphones for the default ssh password, the iphone has a default password because you're not supposed to be able to connect to it that way... So they relied on users performing an action known to be insecure to their phones, no iphone was ever vulnerable to this out of the box.
Test machines should really be isolated away from anything important, and shouldn't be used for anything other than testing.
It all depends on what you're used to...
I've not used pages/numbers very much, i used wordperfect in school and find OO tolerable while i find the MS tools pretty clunky and unusable.
Once users have been using something long enough to get used to it, they will be pretty comfortable with it..
You could consider upgrading your mac pro to snow leopard, you spent so much on the hardware so the extra $30 isn't really much...
You don't have to use google chrome, you already listed several other browsers you could run and each of them has good and bad points, or you could even run the open source chromium and ensure that no unwanted big brother features are enabled.
Chrome is no different to any other browser, it has its bad points namely how it sends data to google..
You don't need to use any google technology, there are alternatives to their search engine, alternatives to their mail service etc. On the other hand, do you really think any of the other free search engines or mail services don't mine your personal data just the same? These free services cost money to operate, servers cost money, bandwidth costs money, power costs money, they have to pay for the servers somehow. If you want an email service for instance which will not harvest your data, you can run your own server or pay for a service from someone and ensure the contract you have with them ensures they won't look at your data and just store it.
Software and services are entirely different in this context...
Once you have some free software the copy you have doesn't change unless you choose to change it, thus if it was working it will continue working the same.
A service on the other hand, is entirely under the control of a third party and can change at their whim.
This article is entirely about a service that started off working, and then the company providing it stopped providing it to the one particular user with no explanation as to why.
Vendor certs are typically worthless and extremely easy... Microsoft, Cisco, RedHat etc are not educational institutions. The primary goals of their certifications are not to educate people, they are designed to sell more products... The more people "certified" to use your products out there, the more likely companies are to buy your products.
They know nothing about the subject themselves (and may not generally need to), which is why they have to rely on something they can understand. Unfortunately people take advantage of things like this, and will get in with bogus certs and no real knowledge.
People are in it for the money, the industry is flooded with people who have no real interest in the subject and learn the absolute minimum they need in order to get a decent paying job... Couple that with a severe shortage of people who really know what they're doing, and management who knows very little about the subject, you end up with thousands of extremely low skilled people finding themselves in a job.
You also have, at least in the IT field a lot of people who are somewhat socially inept but very good when it comes to technical matters. These people often lose out to people who while better able to present and sell themselves, really don't have a clue when it comes to the job at hand.
I have to deal with this every day, completely incompetent people who have managed to convince non technical management that they're gods gift.
From the gnash site:
Gnash is based on GameSWF, and supports most SWF v7 features and some SWF v8 and v9.
flash is currently up to version 10, and many sites require features not implemented by gnash...
All DRM schemes are proprietary by their very nature... Apple don't want DRM, they are forced to use it by the content providers or they won't supply any content. Their DRM scheme for music is gone now, and was always very easy to bypass.
Chrome seems to support all 3...
Theora is likely to die out now that webm is replacing it, leaving only 2 competitors... One free, and one patent encumbered...
Flash doesn't work in any 64bit windows browsers, you have to run a 32bit browser to get flash on windows..
Nothing is stopping you from porting an existing javascript engine to a new device, or writing one from scratch for that device..
Adobe's licensing of the flash spec prohibits doing this..
MobileSafari (iPhone)
Mobile Chrome (Android)
The Nokia Maemo browser
Windows Mobile IE
Opera Mobile
Any open source javascript interpreter when compiled for an ARM processor
And a lot more...
If flash had open sourced flash from the beginning, it would likely have been integrated into webkit/mozilla at least by now, and might even form part of html5.
What are you using to view the google pacman? It works fine on my machines just fine, doesn't even stutter on either of my phones (although it is unplayable on the iphone due to lack of controls).
Flash does not provide a consistent experience across platforms, it merely provides a single platform..
Running the same version of Firefox on every system would also provide a consistent experience (and firefox runs on more platforms than flash does)... Adobe are just as bad as MS for trying to tie everyone in to their platform, remember when IE had macos and unix versions?
Flash has 64bit linux support, and got it before any other 64bit platform... It just sucks quite badly..
I don't believe flash has any 64bit windows support, and relies on running in 32bit mode (most browsers run in 32bit mode on 64bit windows anyway).
Flash also has no 64bit osx support, at least on my osx box safari is running as 64bit and seems to have a translation layer to support a 32bit flash plugin... I believe such a translation layer is also available for linux.
Does it really matter what iphone os runs on? You are not forced to run iphone os, any of the sites you visit from an iphone work equally well from any other device with a similarly capable browser... There is nothing to stop me compiling webkit or mozilla on any exotic system i wish and viewing sites with it.
I can still use my old SGI workstation running IRIX to view websites using a recent version of firefox compiled for it, i cannot view any flash content from this machine.
Flash on the other hand, can *only* be viewed on devices which adobe provide explicit support for. You are at the absolute mercy of a single company, who decide what platforms they will let you view flash content on, and how good that experience will be.
Having a single flash player installed on 98% of systems is terrible, that's an even worse monoculture than the one pushed by microsoft and means that a single security hole in flash can be used to exploit users of multiple platforms and multiple browsers... That makes it a pretty attractive target for hackers.
Monoculture is bad, flash should be made more like PDF (another format from adobe), a documented standard where you have the choice between using adobe's rather lacklustre tools or many many third party alternatives.. Although admittedly, most people don't realise there are superior PDF readers out there.