There are quantifiable differences between a Lexus and a Toyota, the Lexus will have more standard equipment etc.. The difference with wine is far more subjective, and what tastes like dishwater to me might taste very good to you.
A 1960s roadster is not meant to compete with todays cars on any technical level... Compare it to the 1960s equivalent of a honda accord and it will compare favorably, people don't buy these kind of cars to race them, they buy them for how they look. And most people who buy hondas wouldnt buy the 2.4 liter accord, they tend to buy the much smaller 1.x liter versions... Why? because on todays roads, performance and handling doesn't really matter, there is too much traffic, too many speed limits and too many speed cameras. The 1960s roadsters will happily cruise along at the highest speed limits in the country just as easily as the accord, and will quite happily sit in stationary traffic just as well, but they will also turn far more heads than a honda.
Incidentally, these cars are over 40 years old, how many hondas will still be on the road (relative to the numbers produced) in 40+ years?
Based on using different devices the javascript benchmarks lose some credibility too, how fast is the hardware on the devices tested, and how much overhead does the os bring that might affect the browser performance. It's only really on the windows mobile device that you can fairly compare the browsers, since they are running on the same os and same hardware.
They also mention that it was an alpha version, whereas all the other browsers tested were full production releases. If Fennec still crashes frequently when it hits a release version then it will deserve an unfavorable review.
I have such a printer/scanner too, it worked with XP and OSX Tiger (PPC), it doesn't have drivers for vista/win7, or any intel version of osx. Ubuntu supports it out of the box with no hassle whatsoever, it is automatically detected the first time you plug it in and just works.
Incidentally, we too can still print from newer windows/osx systems but not scan anything.
More expensive in the short term perhaps, assuming that the people involved are already proficient with using windows... However...
Many teachers, especially in less affluent areas of countries like russia are not proficient with any kind of computer system and would need instruction on anything they acquire, having 10 linux systems vs 5 windows systems would be a huge benefit, and they would need to learn something new either way.
Also don't forget that the whole purpose of a school is to educate (not train - thats what you do with animals) people...
The purpose is to educate kids, some of whom will be very interested in the subject and rapidly learn a lot more than the teachers.
Linux is setup to make it easy for people to learn, windows is setup to keep people ignorant, remember when computers booted to a basic prompt and shipped with manuals encouraging you to write programs? not anymore, windows does everything it can to discourage users from learning anything like that, it is designed to keep users ignorant and build a dependency.
In the long term, using linux will be much cheaper for the schools, and significantly beneficial for the students...
Linux also makes it easier for students to use it at home, by lowering the cost of acquiring a working machine... They can use older hardware, and don't need to pay for any software. Many families in places like russia would not be able to spend a lot of money on a computer.
And also using Linux means the school system and its students are not dependent on a single foreign corporation. I'm sure there are russian companies that produce hardware too.
As pro-windows posters on slashdot like yourself frequently point out, competent linux admins are a lot more expensive and less widely available than windows admins... Personally i'd want my kids learning linux so that they can earn more by working in a less saturated market.
That assumes you're perfectly happy running the same version that came with the hardware, and content to run the oem supplied version which may or may not include lots of other crap you don't want which is often difficult to remove.
Windows often has drivers which don't exist (especially when trying to use older hardware with 64bit windows), which don't work with a given version (many drivers for older hardware were never updated for vista) or may not be fully functional.
Finding the correct drivers is a significant pain... How does grandma know what type of hardware she has? She might know who made the machine based on the logo on the front of the box, and may even know the model if that's also printed there, but how about internal components? It's unlikely she has any idea what wireless chipset, what ethernet chipset, what video card, what sata controller etc is present... In that respect linux is also much easier, because the information is more readily available (windows just shows the basic device type, eg unknown ethernet controller and the numeric pci ids, if you don't have drivers installed).
As for getting to the hardware manufacturer's site, you or i might have another computer we can use to access that site, but grandma won't if her network drivers don't work.
Also if you install multiple drivers without cleanly removing the old ones, you can have all kinds of problems....
"As long as you buy decent hardware" - also applies to linux, buy decent hardware and you will have more luck and less hassle regardless of what os you use.
Yes, virtually everything these days can be done from a graphical frontend if you so desire, unix has the (false) reputation that you need to use the cli because often the cli is better, and when a clueless user asks an experienced user for help, the experienced user will naturally use the cli.
One of the biggest problems these days however, is clueless users running systems... They have no real experience, no in depth knowledge, have no idea whats going on underneath and only have a surface understanding of the functionality presented by some gui app. These people result in extremely insecure setups which quickly get compromised....
And to make matters worse, these people are extremely plentiful and cheap, so short sighted businesses employ such people who are able to get "easy to use and often expensive" graphically managed systems limping along. Long term they could save a lot of money by employing more expensive skilled staff (higher paid but fewer staff, less costly downtime, cheaper software, more efficient use of cheaper hardware), but most businesses aren't thinking long term.
For a server you don't want a gui running because it will waste a significant amount of resources, even microsoft have realised (and poorly implemented) this in windows 2008...
As you pointed out, a full featured flexible server os like ubuntu comes with cli by default because that's the best way to manage it... There are also hundreds of appliances available with simple web based interfaces, which is far more sensible than having a local gui, and these appliances cover most of the situations non technical people would require anyway.
Most likely the hail mary bots will have successfully compromised a few iphones with default passwords, tho their intrusion will be less obvious than a picture of rick astley.
It's not worth the effort for them to do so... Users could be using any port, meaning the attackers would now need to do 65534 times as much scanning to cover the same number of potential targets while only finding a handful more ssh services. Also, the people who use non default ports will have explicitly done so and are therefore more likely to be aware of security issues and have stronger passwords, or other forms of authentication.
One of the biggest issues is extremely weak enforcement of passwords... Many devices come with default passwords, and do not force users to change them at all. In corporate networks even when a password policy is implemented, it's usually extremely weak... Typically requiring one number, one uppercase letter and 8 characters or more. Password1 is a perfectly valid password in this scenario, and when forced to change it Password2 is equally valid.
And of course the unavoidable issue - people have too many passwords these days, and nothing stopping them from all being the same... And these passwords are stored, used and recovered in various ways...
Some places will store the password unencrypted (or reversibly encrypted) and happily email it to you in the clear, while others will do a proper one way hash and the only recovery procedure possible will set a new password. Some places will ask security questions like "mothers maiden name" or "your first school" - which is easily available information...
There are a million and one ways to get users to disclose a password, the traditional attacks with a fake paypal/bank/ebay/etc website might be easy to detect, but how about a site that offers you something legitimate looking and free, which just requires you to give an email address and set a password so you can adjust your settings in future... How many people would use the same password/email here as they do elsewhere?
You have to spend hours getting windows to work with hardware too unless you get an oem disc which is specifically tailored for the machine you're using... Sometimes that involves registry tweaks by hand (which is even worse than editing commented config files).. On windows you also have to spend hours installing applications, whereas a modern linux distro will automate that process too.
Whenever i've been setting up machines at work, i've been able to get a linux install to a usable state much quicker than people have got windows machines to a usable state for similar purposes.. And on all the machines i've tried in the last few years (various hp/dell workstations and laptops, plus a few home built boxes) there has been a lot less screwing around required on linux.
No, open sourcing windows would be extremely bad... Being open wouldn't fix all the issues it has very quickly, many of which are basic design flaws that cannot be fixed without breaking existing code or adding more layers of cruft... But what it would do, is significantly dilute the pool of developers working on other open systems.
Old versions may not stop working, but they will never have security holes fixed either... Also you won't be able to get them running on newer hardware due to lack of drivers and usually no way to backport the drivers.
Also, once the newer versions stop being supported in a few years time they *will* stop working, because newer versions require online activation and once support ends, those activation servers are likely to be turned off.
If someone sneaked Windows code into another proprietary product, then the vendors of that product would be forced to abide by microsoft's terms or face legal action (and you don't know what kind of terms they might impose)... You use someone else's copyrighted code and you have to abide by their terms, and the terms for using GPL code are quite clearly stated up front. The only difference is that GPL code is easier to get hold of.
The worst part of this tho.. Games used to allow local lan play, most don't anymore... It basically killed the idea of a LAN party. You have to connect to live, just to play a game with someone sat next to you.
You can't port Linux to XNA... What it lets you do is actually quite limited. I had a first gen xbox running XBMC, and aside from the lack of HD support (cpu is too slow to decode hd resolution video) it's one of the best media player boxes around... The 360 would be an HD capable version.
If i buy a device, i want to be able to do what i want and get the most out of it.
Modding an xbox to play copied games is trivial, i know lots of people who performed the hack themselves... You just need to flash the firmware on the dvd drive, and there are tons of tutorials on the subject. Modding it to run homebrew is much harder, and would probably require most people to pay someone else for doing it.
They bought a particular version of vmware, and paid vmware to support the setup they had bought and paid for... VMware's method of providing support was to tell them to buy new expensive products... They failed to provide adequate support for the version they were actually being supported for... If their product fails, then an upgrade to a working version should be free at the very least.
DRM is broken by design, the user has to have a way of decrypting the content in order to view it, so the keys have to be given out... All DRM will do is stop "casual piracy", that is people making copies for their friends, or recording to view later etc... The serious piracy groups who produce copies and sell them will quickly work out ways to bypass any protection being used. Go on thepiratebay, there is a lot of content available there which has been ripped from DRM encumbered sources, and the pirate versions are better because they have consumer-hostile things removed.
Perhaps plugins that are important for security reasons can just automatically and non-interactively update themselves when they periodically poll for a new version and find that one is available to reduce this issue on Windows.
TERRIBLE idea... Having loads of individual applications running a background updater service is ridiculous, and results in your machine slowing to a crawl once you've installed too many programs...
And updating automatically can often results in things breaking, as many vendors like to include additional or changed features instead of just security updates.
If you don't want links, then use postscript... why have 2 formats to serve the same purpose?
PDF provides useful functionality that makes a document easier to navigate while it's still in a digital form, the fact this functionality is lost by printing is a drawback of the printed medium and not the fault of PDF. I personally hate receiving PDF files without proper indexes, that eliminates some of the benefits inherent in having a digital file.
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There are quantifiable differences between a Lexus and a Toyota, the Lexus will have more standard equipment etc.. The difference with wine is far more subjective, and what tastes like dishwater to me might taste very good to you.
A 1960s roadster is not meant to compete with todays cars on any technical level...
Compare it to the 1960s equivalent of a honda accord and it will compare favorably, people don't buy these kind of cars to race them, they buy them for how they look. And most people who buy hondas wouldnt buy the 2.4 liter accord, they tend to buy the much smaller 1.x liter versions... Why? because on todays roads, performance and handling doesn't really matter, there is too much traffic, too many speed limits and too many speed cameras.
The 1960s roadsters will happily cruise along at the highest speed limits in the country just as easily as the accord, and will quite happily sit in stationary traffic just as well, but they will also turn far more heads than a honda.
Incidentally, these cars are over 40 years old, how many hondas will still be on the road (relative to the numbers produced) in 40+ years?
Based on using different devices the javascript benchmarks lose some credibility too, how fast is the hardware on the devices tested, and how much overhead does the os bring that might affect the browser performance. It's only really on the windows mobile device that you can fairly compare the browsers, since they are running on the same os and same hardware.
They also mention that it was an alpha version, whereas all the other browsers tested were full production releases. If Fennec still crashes frequently when it hits a release version then it will deserve an unfavorable review.
I have the same issue, i need to import certs not just for safari but also for the mail client... nothing i tried has worked
I have such a printer/scanner too, it worked with XP and OSX Tiger (PPC), it doesn't have drivers for vista/win7, or any intel version of osx. Ubuntu supports it out of the box with no hassle whatsoever, it is automatically detected the first time you plug it in and just works.
Incidentally, we too can still print from newer windows/osx systems but not scan anything.
More expensive in the short term perhaps, assuming that the people involved are already proficient with using windows...
However...
Many teachers, especially in less affluent areas of countries like russia are not proficient with any kind of computer system and would need instruction on anything they acquire, having 10 linux systems vs 5 windows systems would be a huge benefit, and they would need to learn something new either way.
Also don't forget that the whole purpose of a school is to educate (not train - thats what you do with animals) people...
The purpose is to educate kids, some of whom will be very interested in the subject and rapidly learn a lot more than the teachers.
Linux is setup to make it easy for people to learn, windows is setup to keep people ignorant, remember when computers booted to a basic prompt and shipped with manuals encouraging you to write programs? not anymore, windows does everything it can to discourage users from learning anything like that, it is designed to keep users ignorant and build a dependency.
In the long term, using linux will be much cheaper for the schools, and significantly beneficial for the students...
Linux also makes it easier for students to use it at home, by lowering the cost of acquiring a working machine... They can use older hardware, and don't need to pay for any software. Many families in places like russia would not be able to spend a lot of money on a computer.
And also using Linux means the school system and its students are not dependent on a single foreign corporation. I'm sure there are russian companies that produce hardware too.
As pro-windows posters on slashdot like yourself frequently point out, competent linux admins are a lot more expensive and less widely available than windows admins... Personally i'd want my kids learning linux so that they can earn more by working in a less saturated market.
That assumes you're perfectly happy running the same version that came with the hardware, and content to run the oem supplied version which may or may not include lots of other crap you don't want which is often difficult to remove.
Windows often has drivers which don't exist (especially when trying to use older hardware with 64bit windows), which don't work with a given version (many drivers for older hardware were never updated for vista) or may not be fully functional.
Finding the correct drivers is a significant pain...
How does grandma know what type of hardware she has? She might know who made the machine based on the logo on the front of the box, and may even know the model if that's also printed there, but how about internal components? It's unlikely she has any idea what wireless chipset, what ethernet chipset, what video card, what sata controller etc is present... In that respect linux is also much easier, because the information is more readily available (windows just shows the basic device type, eg unknown ethernet controller and the numeric pci ids, if you don't have drivers installed).
As for getting to the hardware manufacturer's site, you or i might have another computer we can use to access that site, but grandma won't if her network drivers don't work.
Also if you install multiple drivers without cleanly removing the old ones, you can have all kinds of problems....
"As long as you buy decent hardware" - also applies to linux, buy decent hardware and you will have more luck and less hassle regardless of what os you use.
Yes, virtually everything these days can be done from a graphical frontend if you so desire, unix has the (false) reputation that you need to use the cli because often the cli is better, and when a clueless user asks an experienced user for help, the experienced user will naturally use the cli.
One of the biggest problems these days however, is clueless users running systems... They have no real experience, no in depth knowledge, have no idea whats going on underneath and only have a surface understanding of the functionality presented by some gui app. These people result in extremely insecure setups which quickly get compromised....
And to make matters worse, these people are extremely plentiful and cheap, so short sighted businesses employ such people who are able to get "easy to use and often expensive" graphically managed systems limping along. Long term they could save a lot of money by employing more expensive skilled staff (higher paid but fewer staff, less costly downtime, cheaper software, more efficient use of cheaper hardware), but most businesses aren't thinking long term.
For a server you don't want a gui running because it will waste a significant amount of resources, even microsoft have realised (and poorly implemented) this in windows 2008...
As you pointed out, a full featured flexible server os like ubuntu comes with cli by default because that's the best way to manage it...
There are also hundreds of appliances available with simple web based interfaces, which is far more sensible than having a local gui, and these appliances cover most of the situations non technical people would require anyway.
Most likely the hail mary bots will have successfully compromised a few iphones with default passwords, tho their intrusion will be less obvious than a picture of rick astley.
It's not worth the effort for them to do so...
Users could be using any port, meaning the attackers would now need to do 65534 times as much scanning to cover the same number of potential targets while only finding a handful more ssh services.
Also, the people who use non default ports will have explicitly done so and are therefore more likely to be aware of security issues and have stronger passwords, or other forms of authentication.
One of the biggest issues is extremely weak enforcement of passwords...
Many devices come with default passwords, and do not force users to change them at all.
In corporate networks even when a password policy is implemented, it's usually extremely weak... Typically requiring one number, one uppercase letter and 8 characters or more. Password1 is a perfectly valid password in this scenario, and when forced to change it Password2 is equally valid.
And of course the unavoidable issue - people have too many passwords these days, and nothing stopping them from all being the same... And these passwords are stored, used and recovered in various ways...
Some places will store the password unencrypted (or reversibly encrypted) and happily email it to you in the clear, while others will do a proper one way hash and the only recovery procedure possible will set a new password.
Some places will ask security questions like "mothers maiden name" or "your first school" - which is easily available information...
There are a million and one ways to get users to disclose a password, the traditional attacks with a fake paypal/bank/ebay/etc website might be easy to detect, but how about a site that offers you something legitimate looking and free, which just requires you to give an email address and set a password so you can adjust your settings in future... How many people would use the same password/email here as they do elsewhere?
You have to spend hours getting windows to work with hardware too unless you get an oem disc which is specifically tailored for the machine you're using... Sometimes that involves registry tweaks by hand (which is even worse than editing commented config files)..
On windows you also have to spend hours installing applications, whereas a modern linux distro will automate that process too.
Whenever i've been setting up machines at work, i've been able to get a linux install to a usable state much quicker than people have got windows machines to a usable state for similar purposes.. And on all the machines i've tried in the last few years (various hp/dell workstations and laptops, plus a few home built boxes) there has been a lot less screwing around required on linux.
No, open sourcing windows would be extremely bad...
Being open wouldn't fix all the issues it has very quickly, many of which are basic design flaws that cannot be fixed without breaking existing code or adding more layers of cruft... But what it would do, is significantly dilute the pool of developers working on other open systems.
Old versions may not stop working, but they will never have security holes fixed either... Also you won't be able to get them running on newer hardware due to lack of drivers and usually no way to backport the drivers.
Also, once the newer versions stop being supported in a few years time they *will* stop working, because newer versions require online activation and once support ends, those activation servers are likely to be turned off.
If someone sneaked Windows code into another proprietary product, then the vendors of that product would be forced to abide by microsoft's terms or face legal action (and you don't know what kind of terms they might impose)... You use someone else's copyrighted code and you have to abide by their terms, and the terms for using GPL code are quite clearly stated up front.
The only difference is that GPL code is easier to get hold of.
The worst part of this tho..
Games used to allow local lan play, most don't anymore... It basically killed the idea of a LAN party. You have to connect to live, just to play a game with someone sat next to you.
You can't port Linux to XNA... What it lets you do is actually quite limited.
I had a first gen xbox running XBMC, and aside from the lack of HD support (cpu is too slow to decode hd resolution video) it's one of the best media player boxes around...
The 360 would be an HD capable version.
If i buy a device, i want to be able to do what i want and get the most out of it.
Modding an xbox to play copied games is trivial, i know lots of people who performed the hack themselves... You just need to flash the firmware on the dvd drive, and there are tons of tutorials on the subject.
Modding it to run homebrew is much harder, and would probably require most people to pay someone else for doing it.
They bought a particular version of vmware, and paid vmware to support the setup they had bought and paid for...
VMware's method of providing support was to tell them to buy new expensive products... They failed to provide adequate support for the version they were actually being supported for...
If their product fails, then an upgrade to a working version should be free at the very least.
DRM is broken by design, the user has to have a way of decrypting the content in order to view it, so the keys have to be given out...
All DRM will do is stop "casual piracy", that is people making copies for their friends, or recording to view later etc... The serious piracy groups who produce copies and sell them will quickly work out ways to bypass any protection being used. Go on thepiratebay, there is a lot of content available there which has been ripped from DRM encumbered sources, and the pirate versions are better because they have consumer-hostile things removed.
Perhaps plugins that are important for security reasons can just automatically and non-interactively update themselves when they periodically poll for a new version and find that one is available to reduce this issue on Windows.
TERRIBLE idea...
Having loads of individual applications running a background updater service is ridiculous, and results in your machine slowing to a crawl once you've installed too many programs...
And updating automatically can often results in things breaking, as many vendors like to include additional or changed features instead of just security updates.
If you don't want links, then use postscript... why have 2 formats to serve the same purpose?
PDF provides useful functionality that makes a document easier to navigate while it's still in a digital form, the fact this functionality is lost by printing is a drawback of the printed medium and not the fault of PDF.
I personally hate receiving PDF files without proper indexes, that eliminates some of the benefits inherent in having a digital file.