No current releases of OS's come with old versions of sendmail or bind, Checkpoint no longer sell the older versions. The CURRENT version of windows would get compromised within 20 minutes, it is still being sold in stores and preinstalled on machines, this is the difference.
Samba supports passing login scripts to windows clients perfectly well. Unix as a client has always been able to handle login scripts which can be user-specific, user modifiable or enforced system wide. The shell will read/etc/profile when you start it, and then ~/.profile, and shell-specific scripts like bashrc exist too.. Theres also.xinitrc which will be executed when X starts up.. All of these things can be specified system wide or user-specific. In a corporate environment, you dont need a full desktop environment for the users, you could do with a simple window manager and a menu which lists the apps they need, dont give them file browsing access where they might execute random files.. If necessary you can even restrict execution of unauthorised binaries at the kernel level.
Which is exactly why i said commercial, putty is the only useable ssh client for windows (has decent terminal emulation) but it's still more hassle than "ssh ip" is on a unix machine, and doesnt have the flexibility unix ssh does like piping (ssh user@host cat/home/mp3/somefile | mpg123 -) and just executing a command without logging in etc.. Putty also didnt have a full screen (without window borders) mode.
Which means you need to pay them to access the content. That's assuming they agree to sell the necessary tools to you, which they could easily refuse to do, thats hardly freely available to everyone now is it. Basically, if you cant afford it or they dont like you, you dont get it.
That`s strange, i have a 400mhz g4 with 256mb and it runs very well, and thats with all the eyecandy still turned on. compared to a friends xp machine with 256mb that grinds the disk and runs really slow.. Mind you, the g4 has a displaycard that's supported by quartz extreme. As for your game/chat programs, im sure it cuts both ways.. theres plenty of things which are mac only or unix only. You should instead look for programs which support standards, for chat that would be something like IRC, a well defined standard.. As for overloading a system, on my linux laptop where i'm typing this, which also has 256mb ram, i have 22 firefox tabs open, a compile running in the background, over 20 xterms open ssh'd to other machines, 8 bittorrent downloads, 3 irc clients, gaim, and a divx playing, plus X11, window manager etc... No memory issues atall
Wouldnt it be ironic to port WiX to linux.. You can bet microsoft made it windows only for a reason, and porting it to linux would be amusing at the very least.
The "neck pain" he refers to is the installation and keeping up to date of your firewall and antivirus software, not to mention the tweaking of the firewall when apps need to access things being blocked by the firewall, aswell as the keeping up to date of the base os. None of these things are necessary on a mac. A base install of OSX will not become worm fodder, doesnt require a firewall (although a very capable one comes by default) and even without updates will not get remote rooted under default settings.
Funny you mention an SSH client. OSX comes with an ssh client (and server) by default which is far better than any of the commercial ones available for windows.
I believe mozilla does this automatically when you print something anyway, atleast if you try to print something that has white text on a black background it inverts it... I watched some IE users messing around for hours trying to do that, when firefox printed it straight out.
Just stop paying, they cancel you quick enough once you stop sending them money.. And if they dont, well what do you care? its not costing you anything.
http://secunia.com/product/11/ A page showing security vulnerabilities in IE6, theres also a section on older versions and on other products... To quote tho:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 with all vendor patches installed and all vendor workarounds applied, is currently affected by one or more Secunia advisories rated Extremely critical
And:
Currently, 19 out of 60 Secunia advisories, is marked as "Unpatched" in the Secunia database.
The section "is marked as unpatched" suggests secunia never expected there to be more than 1 unpatched vulnerability in a product at any one time, as there shouldn't be if the developers are responsible.
The difference is, with open source there is ALWAYS an option available to you immediately.. If noone makes a patch available, you can write one yourself or pay someone to do it for you.. In the closed source world you are absoloutely at the mercy of the vendor, if they choose not to make a patch you don't get one atall
Apps being run through browsers was MS`s biggest fear with netscape, which is why they created their own non cross platform browser, forced it down peoples throats and intentionally made it incompatible with other browsers. Now we have a situation that even web apps require windows to function correctly, although this is changing.. When IE loses significant enough market share that it is no longer feasible to develop apps for IE only, and develop them for standards, then migrations to non windows platforms will accelerate massively. When all your doing is accessing standard webapps windows offers NO advantages whatsoever over linux. All you need is a browser, and running firefox on linux can be done at less cost and far less system requirements than windows.
No, they dont care about the cost because they will pirate whatever they use.. What we need are lightweight free systems that work well on the old hardware they can afford.. People need to work on making opensource apps which are lightweight and fast, and work on old hardware.. That is what will win over the users in poor countries, when the free system runs an order of magnitude faster on their old hardware, and results in them having more hardware available to them.
Unfortunately debian packages require custom tools to install them... What would be easier is tar/gzip archives which contain the debian metadata as a file inside the archive. This would make it much easier to create packages, and easier for people to manually troubleshoot packages... Example: i recently installed familiar (a debian based distro) on an ipaq, and the package management tool would crash on every package i installed... The problem was a corrupt lib used by the package manager, i couldnt reinstall the lib because the package manager doesnt work, and i cant manually replace the lib because the package is in a nonstandard format.
But atleast you have the choice. microsoft would rather you dont have any choice, if microsoft decided their programs would support tabs and only tabs then you'd be screwed.
Well then, dual boot... relegate windows to being a troublesome games console, and use linux for everything network related. Would massively reduce the spyware, and without using the machine for other crap, you would have less chance of things screwing up games, reducing system performance and necessitating a system reinstall.. I have come across many systems which needed reinstalling because all the crap running in the background was reducing the speed of games to an unplayable level.
Macs come with USB mice, you can plug any usb mouse into it, your not limited to 1 button... i use a 3 button scrollwheel mouse with my OSX machine and it works perfectly.
Internet explorer also goes against your "accessing content" idea... Microsoft actively encourages design of non-degrading sites, whereas the standards dictate sites which will degrade gracefully in browsers not supporting the feature sets.. Standards compliant sites display just fine in lynx for instance. Now consider this... IE is no longer being developed for mac or unix, and versions for older releases of windows are not being updated.... So if a site your trying to view depends on a feature only present in the latest version of IE you have no choice but to buy a newer version of windows, which may also require you to buy newer hardware aswell... This destroys the idea of the web being accessible to all, those who cannot afford the latest hardware or software are left out in the cold.. Do you bill your client for the purchase of client software required to view the websites you need to get something from? How do you explain to your client that due to your use of IE your machine became infected with a virus and their project is delayed/lost because of this, or even stolen by a competitor!
Old or semi broken laptops are cheaper than 1U servers, and you can put 2 of them back to back in a rack.. Colocation space is charged by the unit so if you can fit 2 cheapass machines in 1u of space... Many server duties don't require much power atall, and could easily be served by a laptop, especially if the data set will fit into memory. Also, if the screen/keyboard still works, you don't need to hunt around for monitor and keyboard when you visit the server center for any maintenence which can`t be done remotely. If the battery works you even get an inbuilt UPS, even if it only lasts a few minutes it can help you survive a short outage.
Are there any wifi drivers for win3.11? Setting up tcp/ip is easy enough, terminal server has an option to create driver disks for 3.11 which come with the tcp stack.. Theres also the option of video drivers, without the correct video drivers the display will be incredibly slow.
So, your content with the web to remain exactly as it is now (and has been for the past 4 or so years)? Or would you rather it remained as it was in the early 90's when it was first invented, remember the days of HTML 1.0 when we didn't even have forms, no frames, no background images... Had MS been the dominant player in those days, you can bet the web would have stagnated at that level instead.. People wouldnt be any the wiser because they wouldnt realise that newer technologies exist, just like they dont now.. How do you know we wouldn't have a lot of new technologies were it not for IE holding us back... Besides, innovations on the webs are not only ways to access content, but ways to sort and search content, and make content more accessible to those with disabilities or limited finances (slow connection, old computers) or new technologies like mobile links.. Look at things like flash, this wouldnt have been needed as a plugin had a standard been implemented, there are several standards for doing similar things, and yet theyre not implemented in IE... other browsers may implement them, but theyre not widely used because most browsers cant display them.. Look at things like MNG or SVG.. Consider this, flash files cannot be searched by search engines, do not work with text to speech tools and display at fixed sizes and don't scale/zoom, making them inaccessible to those with poor eyesight and others.. Many of what flash is used for can be accomplished with CSS, there were some nice examples of butterflies which can be dragged around the screen done entirely with CSS for instance.. Published standards can be easily implemented by search engines and appliance vendors etc... One of the biggest reasons the web appliances didn't take off, was because of the difficulty of writing a browser, the appliance vendor didn't have a clearly defined standard to follow, they had to work out the bugs and quirks of IE in order to display many common websites. This was difficult and time consuming to do, which made it cost and time prohibitive to do it properly, resulting in half assed attempts which still took too much to implement and left users thinking the appliances were crap.. In reality the vendors worked very hard but didn't have the resources to reverse engineer IE enough to work out its many bugs.
Which encourages use of IE and holds the web back.. Aside from the security risks, consider this: IE has not seen any major feature updates for years, the support for modern standards like CSS is the worst of any browser in use today and shows no signs of improving. The widespread use of IE is stifling innovation on the web, a few years ago new and innovative advancements were coming out regularly, now we've not seen anything new for several years, all because of IE.
What we need is an organised site which lists sites which fail in various browsers and organises contact with the webmasters to fix these problems.. On another note, my personal website excludes IE users because it cannot display the CSS properly... The problem is not that it cant, but the fact that it tries and screws up... Lynx for instance doesnt try to render the css, and just displays the text quite nicely. If anyone is interested in setting up a site to catalog IE-only sites and pressure developers to support standard browsers, mail me - bert64 AT browsers DOT firenzee DOT com
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How did you get NT4 installed on an indy? I have a spare indy floating around, that might be a fun project to try...
No current releases of OS's come with old versions of sendmail or bind, Checkpoint no longer sell the older versions. The CURRENT version of windows would get compromised within 20 minutes, it is still being sold in stores and preinstalled on machines, this is the difference.
Samba supports passing login scripts to windows clients perfectly well. /etc/profile when you start it, and then ~/.profile, and shell-specific scripts like bashrc exist too.. Theres also .xinitrc which will be executed when X starts up.. All of these things can be specified system wide or user-specific.
Unix as a client has always been able to handle login scripts which can be user-specific, user modifiable or enforced system wide. The shell will read
In a corporate environment, you dont need a full desktop environment for the users, you could do with a simple window manager and a menu which lists the apps they need, dont give them file browsing access where they might execute random files.. If necessary you can even restrict execution of unauthorised binaries at the kernel level.
Which is exactly why i said commercial, putty is the only useable ssh client for windows (has decent terminal emulation) but it's still more hassle than "ssh ip" is on a unix machine, and doesnt have the flexibility unix ssh does like piping (ssh user@host cat /home/mp3/somefile | mpg123 -) and just executing a command without logging in etc..
Putty also didnt have a full screen (without window borders) mode.
Which means you need to pay them to access the content. That's assuming they agree to sell the necessary tools to you, which they could easily refuse to do, thats hardly freely available to everyone now is it.
Basically, if you cant afford it or they dont like you, you dont get it.
That`s strange, i have a 400mhz g4 with 256mb and it runs very well, and thats with all the eyecandy still turned on. compared to a friends xp machine with 256mb that grinds the disk and runs really slow.. Mind you, the g4 has a displaycard that's supported by quartz extreme.
As for your game/chat programs, im sure it cuts both ways.. theres plenty of things which are mac only or unix only. You should instead look for programs which support standards, for chat that would be something like IRC, a well defined standard..
As for overloading a system, on my linux laptop where i'm typing this, which also has 256mb ram, i have 22 firefox tabs open, a compile running in the background, over 20 xterms open ssh'd to other machines, 8 bittorrent downloads, 3 irc clients, gaim, and a divx playing, plus X11, window manager etc... No memory issues atall
Wouldnt it be ironic to port WiX to linux.. You can bet microsoft made it windows only for a reason, and porting it to linux would be amusing at the very least.
The "neck pain" he refers to is the installation and keeping up to date of your firewall and antivirus software, not to mention the tweaking of the firewall when apps need to access things being blocked by the firewall, aswell as the keeping up to date of the base os. None of these things are necessary on a mac. A base install of OSX will not become worm fodder, doesnt require a firewall (although a very capable one comes by default) and even without updates will not get remote rooted under default settings.
Funny you mention an SSH client. OSX comes with an ssh client (and server) by default which is far better than any of the commercial ones available for windows.
I believe mozilla does this automatically when you print something anyway, atleast if you try to print something that has white text on a black background it inverts it... I watched some IE users messing around for hours trying to do that, when firefox printed it straight out.
Just stop paying, they cancel you quick enough once you stop sending them money.. And if they dont, well what do you care? its not costing you anything.
http://secunia.com/product/11/
A page showing security vulnerabilities in IE6, theres also a section on older versions and on other products... To quote tho:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 with all vendor patches installed and all vendor workarounds applied, is currently affected by one or more Secunia advisories rated Extremely critical
And:
Currently, 19 out of 60 Secunia advisories, is marked as "Unpatched" in the Secunia database.
The section "is marked as unpatched" suggests secunia never expected there to be more than 1 unpatched vulnerability in a product at any one time, as there shouldn't be if the developers are responsible.
The difference is, with open source there is ALWAYS an option available to you immediately..
If noone makes a patch available, you can write one yourself or pay someone to do it for you..
In the closed source world you are absoloutely at the mercy of the vendor, if they choose not to make a patch you don't get one atall
Apps being run through browsers was MS`s biggest fear with netscape, which is why they created their own non cross platform browser, forced it down peoples throats and intentionally made it incompatible with other browsers.
Now we have a situation that even web apps require windows to function correctly, although this is changing.. When IE loses significant enough market share that it is no longer feasible to develop apps for IE only, and develop them for standards, then migrations to non windows platforms will accelerate massively. When all your doing is accessing standard webapps windows offers NO advantages whatsoever over linux. All you need is a browser, and running firefox on linux can be done at less cost and far less system requirements than windows.
No, they dont care about the cost because they will pirate whatever they use..
What we need are lightweight free systems that work well on the old hardware they can afford.. People need to work on making opensource apps which are lightweight and fast, and work on old hardware.. That is what will win over the users in poor countries, when the free system runs an order of magnitude faster on their old hardware, and results in them having more hardware available to them.
Unfortunately debian packages require custom tools to install them... What would be easier is tar/gzip archives which contain the debian metadata as a file inside the archive. This would make it much easier to create packages, and easier for people to manually troubleshoot packages...
Example: i recently installed familiar (a debian based distro) on an ipaq, and the package management tool would crash on every package i installed... The problem was a corrupt lib used by the package manager, i couldnt reinstall the lib because the package manager doesnt work, and i cant manually replace the lib because the package is in a nonstandard format.
But atleast you have the choice. microsoft would rather you dont have any choice, if microsoft decided their programs would support tabs and only tabs then you'd be screwed.
Well then, dual boot...
relegate windows to being a troublesome games console, and use linux for everything network related. Would massively reduce the spyware, and without using the machine for other crap, you would have less chance of things screwing up games, reducing system performance and necessitating a system reinstall.. I have come across many systems which needed reinstalling because all the crap running in the background was reducing the speed of games to an unplayable level.
Macs come with USB mice, you can plug any usb mouse into it, your not limited to 1 button... i use a 3 button scrollwheel mouse with my OSX machine and it works perfectly.
Internet explorer also goes against your "accessing content" idea...
Microsoft actively encourages design of non-degrading sites, whereas the standards dictate sites which will degrade gracefully in browsers not supporting the feature sets.. Standards compliant sites display just fine in lynx for instance.
Now consider this... IE is no longer being developed for mac or unix, and versions for older releases of windows are not being updated.... So if a site your trying to view depends on a feature only present in the latest version of IE you have no choice but to buy a newer version of windows, which may also require you to buy newer hardware aswell... This destroys the idea of the web being accessible to all, those who cannot afford the latest hardware or software are left out in the cold..
Do you bill your client for the purchase of client software required to view the websites you need to get something from?
How do you explain to your client that due to your use of IE your machine became infected with a virus and their project is delayed/lost because of this, or even stolen by a competitor!
Old or semi broken laptops are cheaper than 1U servers, and you can put 2 of them back to back in a rack.. Colocation space is charged by the unit so if you can fit 2 cheapass machines in 1u of space... Many server duties don't require much power atall, and could easily be served by a laptop, especially if the data set will fit into memory.
Also, if the screen/keyboard still works, you don't need to hunt around for monitor and keyboard when you visit the server center for any maintenence which can`t be done remotely.
If the battery works you even get an inbuilt UPS, even if it only lasts a few minutes it can help you survive a short outage.
Are there any wifi drivers for win3.11?
Setting up tcp/ip is easy enough, terminal server has an option to create driver disks for 3.11 which come with the tcp stack..
Theres also the option of video drivers, without the correct video drivers the display will be incredibly slow.
So, your content with the web to remain exactly as it is now (and has been for the past 4 or so years)?
Or would you rather it remained as it was in the early 90's when it was first invented, remember the days of HTML 1.0 when we didn't even have forms, no frames, no background images...
Had MS been the dominant player in those days, you can bet the web would have stagnated at that level instead.. People wouldnt be any the wiser because they wouldnt realise that newer technologies exist, just like they dont now.. How do you know we wouldn't have a lot of new technologies were it not for IE holding us back...
Besides, innovations on the webs are not only ways to access content, but ways to sort and search content, and make content more accessible to those with disabilities or limited finances (slow connection, old computers) or new technologies like mobile links..
Look at things like flash, this wouldnt have been needed as a plugin had a standard been implemented, there are several standards for doing similar things, and yet theyre not implemented in IE... other browsers may implement them, but theyre not widely used because most browsers cant display them.. Look at things like MNG or SVG..
Consider this, flash files cannot be searched by search engines, do not work with text to speech tools and display at fixed sizes and don't scale/zoom, making them inaccessible to those with poor eyesight and others.. Many of what flash is used for can be accomplished with CSS, there were some nice examples of butterflies which can be dragged around the screen done entirely with CSS for instance.. Published standards can be easily implemented by search engines and appliance vendors etc...
One of the biggest reasons the web appliances didn't take off, was because of the difficulty of writing a browser, the appliance vendor didn't have a clearly defined standard to follow, they had to work out the bugs and quirks of IE in order to display many common websites. This was difficult and time consuming to do, which made it cost and time prohibitive to do it properly, resulting in half assed attempts which still took too much to implement and left users thinking the appliances were crap.. In reality the vendors worked very hard but didn't have the resources to reverse engineer IE enough to work out its many bugs.
Which encourages use of IE and holds the web back..
Aside from the security risks, consider this:
IE has not seen any major feature updates for years, the support for modern standards like CSS is the worst of any browser in use today and shows no signs of improving. The widespread use of IE is stifling innovation on the web, a few years ago new and innovative advancements were coming out regularly, now we've not seen anything new for several years, all because of IE.
What we need is an organised site which lists sites which fail in various browsers and organises contact with the webmasters to fix these problems..
On another note, my personal website excludes IE users because it cannot display the CSS properly... The problem is not that it cant, but the fact that it tries and screws up... Lynx for instance doesnt try to render the css, and just displays the text quite nicely.
If anyone is interested in setting up a site to catalog IE-only sites and pressure developers to support standard browsers, mail me - bert64 AT browsers DOT firenzee DOT com