Thats called tweaking, the grandparent states he uses windows because it just works for him and he doesnt need to tweak it.. Aside from that, no os can be everything for everyone.. you will always customize things, hence the multiple distributions of linux... With linux you may get lucky and find a distro you like, with windows you have a much lower chance of this..Most modern linux distro's are useable tho not perfect (for me) in their default setup, in many ways more useable than windows.. As for tweaking to stop spyware, that shows that windows is NOT useable for intenet browsing in it's default setup.
What type of wireless card? Also, are you trying to compile the drivers and link them to a distro-supplied kernel? (most drivers are targetted at vanilla kernels and most distro kernels include lots and lots of hacks and patches) I find wireless to work better under linux, provided you have a supported card.. orinoco and prism2 chipsets work well.. Kismet is also a really nice tool to play with
Actually linux is much easier to support over the phone. Why? Because the error messages are descriptive, when you know what's wrong its much easier to fix it.. You don't need to spend an hour doing trial and error to work out what the problem is before you can even attempt to fix it. I have done phone support for family members on linux, windows, irix and macos and found windows and macos to be the hardest to phone support due to the uninformative error messages and in the case of windows, the illogical locations of things (shutdown under a menu called start?)
So you actually sit infront of your computer staring at the writing progress during the 30 minutes it takes to write a DVD? Don't you go away and do something else? Or don't you leave the writing process in the background and get on with something else? Theres no reason you cant continue doing other things while a dvd is burning.. the world doesn't stop!
With an IDE disk you would need it on a different controller to the writer, and with other processes using it you would get nowhere near your peak rate.. Also even when running nothing else, most OS's will try to access the disk for various reasons, and ide disks don't handle multiple processes reading from them at once very well. I burn DVD's at 8x quite happily from my old 18gig scsi drive made in 1999 or 2000 i believe, while doing other things in the background, such as reading slashdot and watching movies.
Well, since a single sided dvd is 4.4GB or so, and a double sided is twice that.. and you'd need some overhead for the OS.. You would _NEED_ a 64bit machine to do this properly.. and people said there was no need for 64bit machines!
Well, mplayer has supported video overlay for years now, directx 9 has only just caught up? As for codecs, theyre a pain in the ass.. You have to search out and install different codecs for every different type of file you want to play, often jumping through hoops going through irritating download systems to find them... AC3 is one of the most annoying ones i found, you could *play* ac3 audio, but you couldn't import it into other directshow apps like tmpegenc. As for performance, you won't notice it on a modern machine... but try playing a divx or xvid file on an old (200-400mhz) machine and compare the performance.. As an example, my workstation still runs the same cpu it had in 1996 and plays xvid and divx movies just fine.. Aside from the fact that directshow is an abstraction layer, and so will always be slower than a hard coded app like mplayer.. This ffdshow filter you talk of, is the same ffmpeg-derived code mplayer uses, but can you guarantee that your ffdhshow has been compiled to use the features available in your cpu? did you download a version specific to your cpu or did you download a generic one? There's no point intel and amd including new features like sse3 and such in chips if everyone runs precompiled binaries that must remain compatible with older chips.. Also, is there a 64bit version of ffdshow? mplayer on linux is by far and away the best video player i've encountered, it enables me to use an old machine with a tvout card as a remote-controlled video player, i can pipe video streams over the network not just with http but over netcat or ssh if necessary, i can play downloaded vcd/svcd/dvd images (bin/cue and iso files) without writing them to cd or installing any additional software.. many things which windows cannot do and definately couldn't do on this hardware.
Games your right about.. but videos no.. Mplayer on linux plays virtually everything you can throw at it, performs better than video players on windows, doesnt nag you like windows media player and other programs do.. You don't even need to compile it, precompiled versions are available and installed with a single command.. However many of the problems with mplayer are because of political rather than technical issues.. for instance DeCSS, and the inclusion of windows dll files for some formats. These problems are caused by companies like microsoft and the movie industry and aren't the fault of linux/mplayer developers. One reason for compiling mplayer is to optimize it for your cpu to achieve better performance, especially important on slower machines which can barely play the files. These machines most likely wouldnt play the same files at a useable speed on windows.
Aside from the fact that people buy games consoles specifically to play games, computers often aren't bought for playing games.. Think how many lowend cpus and graphics cards are sold which are unable to play modern games.
SP6 for Alpha and x86.. NT4 was originally released on PPC and MIPS too, what happened to the service packs for these? Also, after nt4.. support for the alpha was discontinued too
Because the -z flag to tar is nonstandard, and won't work on almost any commercial unix, besides.. if you become dependant on these nonstandard flags you will have trouble using commercial unixes or older systems etc
Who said anything about a server? Obviously a server needs to have listening ports for whatever service it provides, but nothing else - linux lets you close everything except the service you REQUIRE.. it also lets you close everything, which is a perfectly valid thing to do on a workstation.
More code is left over from the dos-based kernels than you think, a lot of the gui code was carried across among other things, although the nt kernel is fairly solid in terms of security, all the other crap tacked on to it isn't
Also under windows it's possible to change the icon of an executeable to make it look like something more harmless (such as a picture) and hide the extension.. so someone may try to view a picture, blissfully unaware that it's really a binary
Well in those days, there were no windows systems on the internet, windows didn't even support tcp/ip at the time and the internet was very small and non critical. Also there were comparatively few different types of unix systems, just like there are very few different types of windows systems and theres always a lowest common denominator which your worms can be written to execute on. A unix worm nowadays would need to be written in shellscript, since no other executeable/script will run on any flavor of unix. How many unix worms have become widespread since then?
Because: In a large organization there are often THOUSANDS of systems that would need patching and not enough staff to patch them, remember ms marketting is targetted towards "you will save money by not having to employ so many people to run our product and you can pay them less" Also ms patches often come in bundles that add new features or make other changes, and can often break things.. Thus patches need to be thoroughly tested before they get deployed on remotely critical systems. What is far worse however, is the fact windows forces you to have things installed/enabled (ie, rpc, outlook express etc) which you may not need, you wouldn't need to patch something if it wasnt installed, and if you dont need it then you shouldnt have it installed.
Because linux was designed from the ground up with security in mind, and is a far more modular system... Windows was not originally designed with networking or security in mind, a lot of the code was written on the assumption it would never be connected to a network, and then hacked in to networked apps. Windows runs many services listening on the network which cannot be disabled (such as RPC), on linux everything is optional, you don't need to have ANY services listening on the network.. A system which isn't listening on any ports is not gonna get remotely exploited..
Actually, a lot of the consultants know better.. The people employing them demand windows, OR.. and far more commonly, the consultants use windows on purpose.. think of it this way: If you setup a BSD system that never goes down and never fucks up.. the consultant will never get any more work, if you setup a windows machine that needs patching regularly and gets infected with viruses and other malware then the consultant has a lot more work to do. Aside from that, even behind a firewall windows machines often get infected with malware, look at the recent worms that target ie, not to mention email bourne viruses and social engineering attacks. The key is not only to protect windows machines behind a firewall, but also to patch them regularly, install software firewalls on the machines themselves, disable ie and outlook, disallow users to run executeables etc.. or better yet in a business environment where users only have limited tasks to do, give them a highly restricted environment which doesn't allow them to do anything else, and preferably not using windows. The reason this doesn't get done, is because it takes longer to setup... companies won't pay for someone skilled (and therefore more costly) to come and spend weeks setting up machines when they can employ someone to sloppily setup a bunch of windows machines, by the time they realise that they've had to pay more money and waste more time it's too late and theyre locked into a kludged together network that they have to keep paying through the nose to maintain... Call it a honey trap, offer a "cheap" solution to draw them in, then keep em trapped.
Economies of scale... If more people are paying, then it will get cheaper, and with such a large number of local users on fast connections programs like bittorrent will work very efficiently.
Ghost is also INCREDIBLY buggy... some things include.. When restoring to an identical disk, it sometimes tries to resize partitions, even when restoring to the SAME DISK.. this resulted in my swap partition being shortened by 7mb (ghost couldnt understand any of the other partitions, using reiserfs) and the 7mb of unpartitioned space being left at the end of the drive.. Due to the partition table being different, the bootloader (LILO) no longer works and has to be reinstalled. If ghost encounters partitions using filesystems it doesnt recognise, it does the same as dd, but on a partition by partition basis.. if it has no partitions that it can resize then you will LOSE DATA. ghost IGNORES any partitions with type 82 (linux swap) if you set your partition id to this type linux still works perfectly but ghost will completely ignore the partitions. Ghost operates on top of dos, and therefore uses very slow dos-based disk and/or network drivers. And all these problems manifested themselves when trying to backup a linux machine, ghost *CLAIMS* to support linux.. i would hate to try this with an unsupported os like freebsd or beos.
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Thats called tweaking, the grandparent states he uses windows because it just works for him and he doesnt need to tweak it..
Aside from that, no os can be everything for everyone.. you will always customize things, hence the multiple distributions of linux... With linux you may get lucky and find a distro you like, with windows you have a much lower chance of this..Most modern linux distro's are useable tho not perfect (for me) in their default setup, in many ways more useable than windows..
As for tweaking to stop spyware, that shows that windows is NOT useable for intenet browsing in it's default setup.
What type of wireless card? Also, are you trying to compile the drivers and link them to a distro-supplied kernel? (most drivers are targetted at vanilla kernels and most distro kernels include lots and lots of hacks and patches)
I find wireless to work better under linux, provided you have a supported card.. orinoco and prism2 chipsets work well.. Kismet is also a really nice tool to play with
Actually linux is much easier to support over the phone. Why? Because the error messages are descriptive, when you know what's wrong its much easier to fix it.. You don't need to spend an hour doing trial and error to work out what the problem is before you can even attempt to fix it.
I have done phone support for family members on linux, windows, irix and macos and found windows and macos to be the hardest to phone support due to the uninformative error messages and in the case of windows, the illogical locations of things (shutdown under a menu called start?)
So you actually sit infront of your computer staring at the writing progress during the 30 minutes it takes to write a DVD? Don't you go away and do something else? Or don't you leave the writing process in the background and get on with something else? Theres no reason you cant continue doing other things while a dvd is burning.. the world doesn't stop!
With an IDE disk you would need it on a different controller to the writer, and with other processes using it you would get nowhere near your peak rate.. Also even when running nothing else, most OS's will try to access the disk for various reasons, and ide disks don't handle multiple processes reading from them at once very well.
I burn DVD's at 8x quite happily from my old 18gig scsi drive made in 1999 or 2000 i believe, while doing other things in the background, such as reading slashdot and watching movies.
Well, since a single sided dvd is 4.4GB or so, and a double sided is twice that.. and you'd need some overhead for the OS.. You would _NEED_ a 64bit machine to do this properly.. and people said there was no need for 64bit machines!
Well, mplayer has supported video overlay for years now, directx 9 has only just caught up?
As for codecs, theyre a pain in the ass.. You have to search out and install different codecs for every different type of file you want to play, often jumping through hoops going through irritating download systems to find them... AC3 is one of the most annoying ones i found, you could *play* ac3 audio, but you couldn't import it into other directshow apps like tmpegenc. As for performance, you won't notice it on a modern machine... but try playing a divx or xvid file on an old (200-400mhz) machine and compare the performance..
As an example, my workstation still runs the same cpu it had in 1996 and plays xvid and divx movies just fine..
Aside from the fact that directshow is an abstraction layer, and so will always be slower than a hard coded app like mplayer..
This ffdshow filter you talk of, is the same ffmpeg-derived code mplayer uses, but can you guarantee that your ffdhshow has been compiled to use the features available in your cpu? did you download a version specific to your cpu or did you download a generic one? There's no point intel and amd including new features like sse3 and such in chips if everyone runs precompiled binaries that must remain compatible with older chips..
Also, is there a 64bit version of ffdshow?
mplayer on linux is by far and away the best video player i've encountered, it enables me to use an old machine with a tvout card as a remote-controlled video player, i can pipe video streams over the network not just with http but over netcat or ssh if necessary, i can play downloaded vcd/svcd/dvd images (bin/cue and iso files) without writing them to cd or installing any additional software.. many things which windows cannot do and definately couldn't do on this hardware.
Then you would need to write your virus in shellscript or perl.. and thats assuming that the interpreters were installed in the location you expected
Games your right about.. but videos no..
Mplayer on linux plays virtually everything you can throw at it, performs better than video players on windows, doesnt nag you like windows media player and other programs do.. You don't even need to compile it, precompiled versions are available and installed with a single command.. However many of the problems with mplayer are because of political rather than technical issues.. for instance DeCSS, and the inclusion of windows dll files for some formats. These problems are caused by companies like microsoft and the movie industry and aren't the fault of linux/mplayer developers. One reason for compiling mplayer is to optimize it for your cpu to achieve better performance, especially important on slower machines which can barely play the files. These machines most likely wouldnt play the same files at a useable speed on windows.
Aside from the fact that people buy games consoles specifically to play games, computers often aren't bought for playing games.. Think how many lowend cpus and graphics cards are sold which are unable to play modern games.
SP6 for Alpha and x86.. NT4 was originally released on PPC and MIPS too, what happened to the service packs for these?
Also, after nt4.. support for the alpha was discontinued too
Because the -z flag to tar is nonstandard, and won't work on almost any commercial unix, besides.. if you become dependant on these nonstandard flags you will have trouble using commercial unixes or older systems etc
Who said anything about a server?
Obviously a server needs to have listening ports for whatever service it provides, but nothing else - linux lets you close everything except the service you REQUIRE.. it also lets you close everything, which is a perfectly valid thing to do on a workstation.
More code is left over from the dos-based kernels than you think, a lot of the gui code was carried across among other things, although the nt kernel is fairly solid in terms of security, all the other crap tacked on to it isn't
Also under windows it's possible to change the icon of an executeable to make it look like something more harmless (such as a picture) and hide the extension.. so someone may try to view a picture, blissfully unaware that it's really a binary
I'm afraid that doesn't work on my solaris box, says something about not being able to find a C compiler
Well in those days, there were no windows systems on the internet, windows didn't even support tcp/ip at the time and the internet was very small and non critical. Also there were comparatively few different types of unix systems, just like there are very few different types of windows systems and theres always a lowest common denominator which your worms can be written to execute on. A unix worm nowadays would need to be written in shellscript, since no other executeable/script will run on any flavor of unix.
How many unix worms have become widespread since then?
Because:
In a large organization there are often THOUSANDS of systems that would need patching and not enough staff to patch them, remember ms marketting is targetted towards "you will save money by not having to employ so many people to run our product and you can pay them less"
Also ms patches often come in bundles that add new features or make other changes, and can often break things.. Thus patches need to be thoroughly tested before they get deployed on remotely critical systems.
What is far worse however, is the fact windows forces you to have things installed/enabled (ie, rpc, outlook express etc) which you may not need, you wouldn't need to patch something if it wasnt installed, and if you dont need it then you shouldnt have it installed.
Because linux was designed from the ground up with security in mind, and is a far more modular system...
Windows was not originally designed with networking or security in mind, a lot of the code was written on the assumption it would never be connected to a network, and then hacked in to networked apps.
Windows runs many services listening on the network which cannot be disabled (such as RPC), on linux everything is optional, you don't need to have ANY services listening on the network.. A system which isn't listening on any ports is not gonna get remotely exploited..
Actually, a lot of the consultants know better.. The people employing them demand windows, OR.. and far more commonly, the consultants use windows on purpose.. think of it this way:
If you setup a BSD system that never goes down and never fucks up.. the consultant will never get any more work, if you setup a windows machine that needs patching regularly and gets infected with viruses and other malware then the consultant has a lot more work to do.
Aside from that, even behind a firewall windows machines often get infected with malware, look at the recent worms that target ie, not to mention email bourne viruses and social engineering attacks.
The key is not only to protect windows machines behind a firewall, but also to patch them regularly, install software firewalls on the machines themselves, disable ie and outlook, disallow users to run executeables etc.. or better yet in a business environment where users only have limited tasks to do, give them a highly restricted environment which doesn't allow them to do anything else, and preferably not using windows.
The reason this doesn't get done, is because it takes longer to setup... companies won't pay for someone skilled (and therefore more costly) to come and spend weeks setting up machines when they can employ someone to sloppily setup a bunch of windows machines, by the time they realise that they've had to pay more money and waste more time it's too late and theyre locked into a kludged together network that they have to keep paying through the nose to maintain...
Call it a honey trap, offer a "cheap" solution to draw them in, then keep em trapped.
Atleast here (UK) DVD's have a lower cost per megabyte than blank CD's
Economies of scale...
If more people are paying, then it will get cheaper, and with such a large number of local users on fast connections programs like bittorrent will work very efficiently.
Well, if you lost yours then how do you know the one you found was identical to the one you lost?
True, ghost is more comparable to tar than dd.
Ghost is also INCREDIBLY buggy... some things include..
When restoring to an identical disk, it sometimes tries to resize partitions, even when restoring to the SAME DISK.. this resulted in my swap partition being shortened by 7mb (ghost couldnt understand any of the other partitions, using reiserfs) and the 7mb of unpartitioned space being left at the end of the drive..
Due to the partition table being different, the bootloader (LILO) no longer works and has to be reinstalled.
If ghost encounters partitions using filesystems it doesnt recognise, it does the same as dd, but on a partition by partition basis.. if it has no partitions that it can resize then you will LOSE DATA.
ghost IGNORES any partitions with type 82 (linux swap) if you set your partition id to this type linux still works perfectly but ghost will completely ignore the partitions.
Ghost operates on top of dos, and therefore uses very slow dos-based disk and/or network drivers.
And all these problems manifested themselves when trying to backup a linux machine, ghost *CLAIMS* to support linux.. i would hate to try this with an unsupported os like freebsd or beos.