Active directory? how about ldap, nis, nis+, radius, not to mention such things as ibm`s tivoli, and i believe hp had something similar. In terms of centralized administration, unix has always been ahead, you can do full remote booting, or booting of a local os and storing/running all the apps from a server, and aside from these solutions you can always change unix systems manually using telnet/ssh, or use automated scripts to login to each machine via rsh/ssh and execute a sequence of commands and then logout again. The beauty of unix is that all the tools required for centralized administration are already included, and are compatible and standard between different unix vendors. You dont need any additional (costly) apps atall, but you still have that option available to you.
Exactly! Atleast in terms of window managers, we already have this.. I run WindowMaker, and yet I use a lot of gnome apps, and one or two kde apps. The apps dont complain about their native windowmanager not running, they run quite happily under wm, i can manipulate them in the windowmaker way, which i find familiar and comfortable, and they happily run alongside other gnome/kde and other X11 apps without hassle. Choice is exactly what we need, and make it modular, just like hardware is.. Nothing wrong with providing defaults for new users, just like dell will make you a pre-packaged set of hardware, but don't take away my freedom of choice. Corporate desktops on the other hand, are there to serve a single purpose, allowing the employees to complete their assigned work. They often don't need flexibility or the ability to install their own software.
Unix has always had the ability to share emails between apps, the mbox and maildir formats are standard and well supported, i use maildir and my emails are equally readable via pine, mutt, or via my webmail server that uses imapd as a back-end. Modern apps break this, and that should be corrected, on a unix machine there is no reason to not store email in the system-standard mailformat.
The web was a much cleaner place in the early days, when everyone was using Mosaic or Lynx, These browsers adhered strictly to the published standards, and were very cross platform. The widespread use of lynx and slow connections meant that sites were not graphics heavy unless they had to be, and whenever there were graphics there were text links aswell (as per the published standards) First Netscape, and later Microsoft, Sun and Macromedia, maybe others too.. are responsible for making parts of the web propriatory and restricting users of platforms which they chose not to support. The more widespread these propriatory technologies become, the more power these companies have to restrict what platforms can browse websites. Furthurmore, a commercial company won`t develop for a system unless theyre either paid to do so, or there is sufficient established userbase that they feel it will be profitable to do so. This prevents new platforms from emerging, and likely has a lot to do with the failure of all the set top box solutions. New platforms will never get marketshare, and thus wont be supported by propriatory vendors, and thus will never get marketshare because propriatory vendors dont support them - a never ending circle to keep the little man down.
What your proposing is a monoculture. A linux monoculture would be little better than the current windows monoculture in terms of security, perhaps the system is better designed.. but nothing is flawless, and if everyone is running the same thing then everyone is vulnerable to the same flaws. What we really need, are open standards to operate to, and leave people free to choose which standards-compliant tool they use for the job, wether they download a free one, buy one or write their own. Look at roads, cars all run on the same types of fuel, theres not different types of fuel for different brands of car. Many components are standard and interchangeable between brands, tires, window wipers, sound systems etc. And while some cars may have slightly different layouts of controls, different numbers of doors or seats, different space for luggage, different levels of performance or economy, different luxury features, they are all share enough similarity that when it comes time to buy a new car, your not forced to choose the same brand. The same can be said of many other things, television sets, VCR`s, DVD players, all because of standards. And because there is competition in the market, the individual companies have to compete based on product quality and price, there is no way to coerce buyers into buying your product, since they can and will go elsewhere. The computer hardware industry works like this too, look at all the recent advancements, hardware today is far more powerfull than it was even a few months ago. And look how far behind the propriatory architectures have fallen, Amiga is dead despite having a huge technological lead at one point, Atari is dead, most of the high end unix systems are on their way out, despite still having performance advantages in many ways, Apple dont have the same marketshare they used to. Open standards and co-operation between multiple vendors is what created the internet, and lack of open standards and co-operation is whats gradually destroying it. Software should work in the same way, but it doesnt and that's something that needs to be fixed, the end user and the industry as a whole can only benefit in the long run. The only people who stand to lose out are the propriatory vendors who seek to keep their userbase by preventing competition rather than beating it with a superior product.
Exactly, people complain all the time about linux being hard to install, and not supporting all hardware etc, but windows has this problem too.. often to a much greater extent. Often windows won't support a piece of hardware by default, or will support it very poorly by default, and you have to go out and find proper drivers for it, if it doesnt support your winmodem by default and you cant find the cd, your screwed. The perceived problem with linux is because it doesnt come preinstalled on machines. If vendors sold machines with linux preinstalled and/or a simple to use rescue cd (which is a trivial matter to create, just a bzipped image on the cd and a simple script to unpack it back to disk) then it would eliminate the problems of unsupported hardware, since the linux computers would have hardware selected based on compatibility, and it would eliminate the need for the end user to install.
As for tech support, while the verbose error messages given by linux applications often put people off, its far better to have the information even if you dont know what to do with it.. If you have someone you can call for support, and you can show or read out the error to them, the more info it gives the better, and its often possible to find out exactly what is at fault and fix it quickly. Compare this to the vague or over-simplified errors windows give, which usually result in lots of wasted time playing trial-and-error to fix it.
And windows requires no additional setup beyond installing the software? Not only do you require additional setup, but you actually require additional software in order to have a functional system. If you place a default configuration of windows onto the internet YOU WILL GET INFECTED BY A WORM... no two ways about it, you MUST take extra steps to prevent this happening. Is this not similarly broken design?
Was your father already familiar with windows or macos? most people who have trouble learning a given os, do so because its *different*. place a mac, or to a lesser extent, a unix user infront of a windows machine and they will have exactly the same problems.. I have been using multiple unixes, amigaos and macos for __YEARS__ i still have my sunos 4.1.2 machine here, and yet i still have difficulty using windows simply because it is unfamiliar to me, just like i have problems using vms or plan9.
If the attachment is a media file, a picture or such.. it should display inline, if it's something else, then the extra steps required to open it provide a buffer to prevent the most clueless people from being able to execute viruses, this is A GOOD THING.. if people have to learn how to open attachments, then they can be taught the dangers of them at the same time, leave them to work it out for themselves and they'l never give a rats ass about security.
In many ways windows is not ready for the home market either, MacOS is a much better choice in virtually all areas except for third party support. Just because something isn't suitable, doesnt mean people won't use it. Or be forced into using it by others.
Amiga's were never a dominant platform, and yet there were a lot of viruses existing for that platform.. why? ease of propogation.
The system allowed for programs to remain resident during a reboot, thus a virus could get loaded into memory and stay there over multiple soft resets, and since most games were booted directly, as like on a games console, if a game disk were infected with a virus, then you would make it resident when you loaded the game. Now lets assume you play a virus infected game, and then reboot to play another game, hey presto your new game becomes infected too. the fact that a lot of amiga users had large amounts of pirated game disks obtained from dubious sources often contributed to the spread of viruses.
windows similarly, in an attempt to make things easy to use and accessible to the technically illiterate, has removed many of the barriers that would have prevented someone executing a virus, and attracted users not knowlegeable enough to deal with viruses, and thus need protecting from themselves, windows does not protect users from their own lack of knowlege.
Unix on the other hand, still provides a decent level of protection to non root users, altho in theory user incompetence could still overcome the protections unix puts in place, there are still more hurdles for a virus writer to overcome, so while it`s not impossible for a virus on unix to social engineer the user into giving up his rootpass or such, its far more difficult.
However, on a corporate desktop, the systems should be totally locked down to prevent individual users from acquiring any administrative priveleges. Only the (presumeably trained and qualified) technical staff at a company should have administrative access to any of the computing equipment.
No.. Microsoft wouldn`t offer win95 to IBM for several months after release because they were also offering computers with OS/2 installed, IBM lost a large chunk of the desktop pc market. They could have pushed OS/2 harder, at the time it was a clearly superior product to windows, and offered very good compatibility with existing windows/dos applications, but unfortunately they didn`t.
Many people do not want windows, and simply have it because they dont see any other choice, or they require it to interoperate with others. Theres a big difference between actually wanting something. People cant want something they dont know about, if theyre not exposed to beos then they wont want it. Many people who use their computers just for simple web browsing and email, maybe typing the occasional letter, would have been much happier with beos than windows, but these people never got the chance.
While BeOS had its flaws, in many ways it was far superior to the alternatives available at the time. The flaws being limited hardware and third party application support. The hardware support can be worked around, by simply only using hardware you know is supported.. generally the better quality brand-name devices are supported, and support is only really lacking for some of the cheaper and not widely used brands, or support is slightly lagging for the latest devices. As for third party applications, you need a userbase first, otherwise its not viable to develop commercial software for an os with little or no users. Bundling with preassembled computers would have built userbase, and given people exposure to beos. Considering the limited usage most computers get, beos would have been more than sufficient for a lot of people, and would likely have been used in preference to windows on a dual boot system. If beos and netscape were such inferior products, then why did microsoft have to compete in such ways to undermine them... surely if their products were so inferior, microsoft could have beaten them on a level playing field and wouldn`t have needed to blackmail oem`s into not installing them.
And if its free, who pays for it`s development? IE is only free if your running it on a mac, solaris or hpux.. so then windows users are effectively contributing towards the development of this too. Also, look how development of ie has stagnated lately, css is still broken as hell... translucent png`s still dont work, aswell as thousands of other rendering and security bugs. And i believe all the non windows versions have stopped being developed, or are in the process of being stopped.. why? because they dont generate any revenue. Giving ie away for free wasnt the issue, when they tried that.. not many people used it.. its only when they started bundling it that usage really took off, why? because it was already there and was "good enough". Why do you think many people use the mediocre sound systems that came with their car, instead of installing something really decent? Aside from the issue of cost, theres the inconvenience and the fact most people wouldnt know how to install it themselves.
I believe 4DWm, as used on IRIX workstations.. has supported vector icons for years, atleast my indy running irix 5.3 did, and thats over 10 years old afaik.
*still* 64bit clean? windows was never 64bit clean, the alpha ports of nt3/nt4 were hacked to use a 32bit compatibility mode of the alpha cpu, and none of the other supported cpu`s were 64bit at the time.. Around the time of 2000, i believe a 64bit version was being developed on the alpha, and development has since switched to the itanic
Motorola always hoped the PPC would achieve the same widespread support that m68k had, unfortunately for them.. it never did, and support gradually faded away.
Apache is not really a monoculture atall, not compared to IIS... If you encounter a machine running IIS you can pretty much guarantee it`s running on an x86 machine running windows, it might, but this is a 1/1000000 chance or something, be running on windows on an alpha, mips or ppc... but this isnt possible for any version above 5.0 However, with Apache, it could be running on any one of many OS`s, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, HPUX, AIX for instance, and on many different hardware architectures. This is a good reason for promoting systems such as FreeBSD, OSX, and the other risc systems... If the entire world standardises on x86/linux for their webservers, especially a single distribution, then it would be no better than a windows monoculture.
Movies? i still play movies on my 6 year old (going on 7) alphastation, i have yet to find a video file (divx, xvid etc) that taxes the cpu, but i could do with a 64bit pci displaycard... altho the current 32bit pci card has a dedicated bus to itself.
But making a stable OS removes many people`s motives for upgrading from previous releases, so they will need to find something new. Most likely this will involve no longer selling XP/2003/2000, no longer issuing bugfixes (or issuing them very slowly) and no longer writing apps. Also, i imagine there will be incompatibilities introduced that prevent users of the older software from interacting with files generated by the newer versions, thus anyone buying a new computer will be inadvertently putting pressure on his friends colleagues and business associates to upgrade.
If windows came with a single firewall or anti virus program, then that would extend the monoculture vulnerability... Trojans would simply disable the default firewall/antivirus programs, and thus successfully defeat the vast majority of users, who will have been given a false sense of security by these programs. Similarly, flaws found in the default firewall/av could easily be exploited. There are already viruses and trojans which attempt to disable a few of the more popular antivirus tools.
Sendmail, X11, RPC, NFS, NIS, OpenSSL/SSH, apache, etc... are all optional apps that do not ship with all implementations of unix, and if it does, can always be removed. Contrast with the software which ships with EVERY installation of windows (msie, rpc, dcom, outlook express) and which cannot be removed... You can only fault the os for something which comes by default, anything else is the fault of whichever third party supplied the app. So your comparison against unix only applies to some distributions, and still doesnt take into account that most of the applications you describe are not developed by the os vendors themselves, and are simply bundled third-party applications, whereas most publicised windows flaws are with microsoft`s own apps, some of which are considered integral components of the os. It is far less common that people talk about flaws in third party non microsoft apps for windows, and noone blames microsoft for these, take the recent bugs in mirc for instance.
Various versions of unix support such features aswell, there are numerous patches for linux, and then theres things like trusted solaris, and i`m sure openbsd has some kind of acl implementation too..
You can only access files on remote fileservers if those servers are setup to allow you to, this is true of both windows and unix. Unix supports such options as root_squash, which on most modern unix systems is enabled by default.. windows makes it easier to setup an insecure configuration.
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Only the borg strive for perfection, whereas microsoft simply want perfect profits.
Active directory? how about ldap, nis, nis+, radius, not to mention such things as ibm`s tivoli, and i believe hp had something similar.
In terms of centralized administration, unix has always been ahead, you can do full remote booting, or booting of a local os and storing/running all the apps from a server, and aside from these solutions you can always change unix systems manually using telnet/ssh, or use automated scripts to login to each machine via rsh/ssh and execute a sequence of commands and then logout again. The beauty of unix is that all the tools required for centralized administration are already included, and are compatible and standard between different unix vendors. You dont need any additional (costly) apps atall, but you still have that option available to you.
Exactly!
Atleast in terms of window managers, we already have this.. I run WindowMaker, and yet I use a lot of gnome apps, and one or two kde apps. The apps dont complain about their native windowmanager not running, they run quite happily under wm, i can manipulate them in the windowmaker way, which i find familiar and comfortable, and they happily run alongside other gnome/kde and other X11 apps without hassle.
Choice is exactly what we need, and make it modular, just like hardware is.. Nothing wrong with providing defaults for new users, just like dell will make you a pre-packaged set of hardware, but don't take away my freedom of choice.
Corporate desktops on the other hand, are there to serve a single purpose, allowing the employees to complete their assigned work. They often don't need flexibility or the ability to install their own software.
Unix has always had the ability to share emails between apps, the mbox and maildir formats are standard and well supported, i use maildir and my emails are equally readable via pine, mutt, or via my webmail server that uses imapd as a back-end.
Modern apps break this, and that should be corrected, on a unix machine there is no reason to not store email in the system-standard mailformat.
The web was a much cleaner place in the early days, when everyone was using Mosaic or Lynx, These browsers adhered strictly to the published standards, and were very cross platform. The widespread use of lynx and slow connections meant that sites were not graphics heavy unless they had to be, and whenever there were graphics there were text links aswell (as per the published standards)
First Netscape, and later Microsoft, Sun and Macromedia, maybe others too.. are responsible for making parts of the web propriatory and restricting users of platforms which they chose not to support. The more widespread these propriatory technologies become, the more power these companies have to restrict what platforms can browse websites. Furthurmore, a commercial company won`t develop for a system unless theyre either paid to do so, or there is sufficient established userbase that they feel it will be profitable to do so. This prevents new platforms from emerging, and likely has a lot to do with the failure of all the set top box solutions.
New platforms will never get marketshare, and thus wont be supported by propriatory vendors, and thus will never get marketshare because propriatory vendors dont support them - a never ending circle to keep the little man down.
What your proposing is a monoculture. A linux monoculture would be little better than the current windows monoculture in terms of security, perhaps the system is better designed.. but nothing is flawless, and if everyone is running the same thing then everyone is vulnerable to the same flaws.
What we really need, are open standards to operate to, and leave people free to choose which standards-compliant tool they use for the job, wether they download a free one, buy one or write their own.
Look at roads, cars all run on the same types of fuel, theres not different types of fuel for different brands of car. Many components are standard and interchangeable between brands, tires, window wipers, sound systems etc. And while some cars may have slightly different layouts of controls, different numbers of doors or seats, different space for luggage, different levels of performance or economy, different luxury features, they are all share enough similarity that when it comes time to buy a new car, your not forced to choose the same brand. The same can be said of many other things, television sets, VCR`s, DVD players, all because of standards. And because there is competition in the market, the individual companies have to compete based on product quality and price, there is no way to coerce buyers into buying your product, since they can and will go elsewhere. The computer hardware industry works like this too, look at all the recent advancements, hardware today is far more powerfull than it was even a few months ago. And look how far behind the propriatory architectures have fallen, Amiga is dead despite having a huge technological lead at one point, Atari is dead, most of the high end unix systems are on their way out, despite still having performance advantages in many ways, Apple dont have the same marketshare they used to.
Open standards and co-operation between multiple vendors is what created the internet, and lack of open standards and co-operation is whats gradually destroying it.
Software should work in the same way, but it doesnt and that's something that needs to be fixed, the end user and the industry as a whole can only benefit in the long run.
The only people who stand to lose out are the propriatory vendors who seek to keep their userbase by preventing competition rather than beating it with a superior product.
Exactly, people complain all the time about linux being hard to install, and not supporting all hardware etc, but windows has this problem too.. often to a much greater extent. Often windows won't support a piece of hardware by default, or will support it very poorly by default, and you have to go out and find proper drivers for it, if it doesnt support your winmodem by default and you cant find the cd, your screwed. The perceived problem with linux is because it doesnt come preinstalled on machines. If vendors sold machines with linux preinstalled and/or a simple to use rescue cd (which is a trivial matter to create, just a bzipped image on the cd and a simple script to unpack it back to disk) then it would eliminate the problems of unsupported hardware, since the linux computers would have hardware selected based on compatibility, and it would eliminate the need for the end user to install.
As for tech support, while the verbose error messages given by linux applications often put people off, its far better to have the information even if you dont know what to do with it.. If you have someone you can call for support, and you can show or read out the error to them, the more info it gives the better, and its often possible to find out exactly what is at fault and fix it quickly. Compare this to the vague or over-simplified errors windows give, which usually result in lots of wasted time playing trial-and-error to fix it.
And windows requires no additional setup beyond installing the software? Not only do you require additional setup, but you actually require additional software in order to have a functional system. If you place a default configuration of windows onto the internet YOU WILL GET INFECTED BY A WORM... no two ways about it, you MUST take extra steps to prevent this happening. Is this not similarly broken design?
Was your father already familiar with windows or macos? most people who have trouble learning a given os, do so because its *different*. place a mac, or to a lesser extent, a unix user infront of a windows machine and they will have exactly the same problems.. I have been using multiple unixes, amigaos and macos for __YEARS__ i still have my sunos 4.1.2 machine here, and yet i still have difficulty using windows simply because it is unfamiliar to me, just like i have problems using vms or plan9.
If the attachment is a media file, a picture or such.. it should display inline, if it's something else, then the extra steps required to open it provide a buffer to prevent the most clueless people from being able to execute viruses, this is A GOOD THING.. if people have to learn how to open attachments, then they can be taught the dangers of them at the same time, leave them to work it out for themselves and they'l never give a rats ass about security.
In many ways windows is not ready for the home market either, MacOS is a much better choice in virtually all areas except for third party support.
Just because something isn't suitable, doesnt mean people won't use it. Or be forced into using it by others.
Amiga's were never a dominant platform, and yet there were a lot of viruses existing for that platform.. why? ease of propogation. The system allowed for programs to remain resident during a reboot, thus a virus could get loaded into memory and stay there over multiple soft resets, and since most games were booted directly, as like on a games console, if a game disk were infected with a virus, then you would make it resident when you loaded the game. Now lets assume you play a virus infected game, and then reboot to play another game, hey presto your new game becomes infected too. the fact that a lot of amiga users had large amounts of pirated game disks obtained from dubious sources often contributed to the spread of viruses. windows similarly, in an attempt to make things easy to use and accessible to the technically illiterate, has removed many of the barriers that would have prevented someone executing a virus, and attracted users not knowlegeable enough to deal with viruses, and thus need protecting from themselves, windows does not protect users from their own lack of knowlege. Unix on the other hand, still provides a decent level of protection to non root users, altho in theory user incompetence could still overcome the protections unix puts in place, there are still more hurdles for a virus writer to overcome, so while it`s not impossible for a virus on unix to social engineer the user into giving up his rootpass or such, its far more difficult. However, on a corporate desktop, the systems should be totally locked down to prevent individual users from acquiring any administrative priveleges. Only the (presumeably trained and qualified) technical staff at a company should have administrative access to any of the computing equipment.
No..
Microsoft wouldn`t offer win95 to IBM for several months after release because they were also offering computers with OS/2 installed, IBM lost a large chunk of the desktop pc market. They could have pushed OS/2 harder, at the time it was a clearly superior product to windows, and offered very good compatibility with existing windows/dos applications, but unfortunately they didn`t.
Many people do not want windows, and simply have it because they dont see any other choice, or they require it to interoperate with others. Theres a big difference between actually wanting something.
People cant want something they dont know about, if theyre not exposed to beos then they wont want it.
Many people who use their computers just for simple web browsing and email, maybe typing the occasional letter, would have been much happier with beos than windows, but these people never got the chance.
While BeOS had its flaws, in many ways it was far superior to the alternatives available at the time.
The flaws being limited hardware and third party application support. The hardware support can be worked around, by simply only using hardware you know is supported.. generally the better quality brand-name devices are supported, and support is only really lacking for some of the cheaper and not widely used brands, or support is slightly lagging for the latest devices. As for third party applications, you need a userbase first, otherwise its not viable to develop commercial software for an os with little or no users. Bundling with preassembled computers would have built userbase, and given people exposure to beos. Considering the limited usage most computers get, beos would have been more than sufficient for a lot of people, and would likely have been used in preference to windows on a dual boot system.
If beos and netscape were such inferior products, then why did microsoft have to compete in such ways to undermine them... surely if their products were so inferior, microsoft could have beaten them on a level playing field and wouldn`t have needed to blackmail oem`s into not installing them.
And if its free, who pays for it`s development?
IE is only free if your running it on a mac, solaris or hpux.. so then windows users are effectively contributing towards the development of this too.
Also, look how development of ie has stagnated lately, css is still broken as hell... translucent png`s still dont work, aswell as thousands of other rendering and security bugs. And i believe all the non windows versions have stopped being developed, or are in the process of being stopped.. why? because they dont generate any revenue.
Giving ie away for free wasnt the issue, when they tried that.. not many people used it.. its only when they started bundling it that usage really took off, why? because it was already there and was "good enough".
Why do you think many people use the mediocre sound systems that came with their car, instead of installing something really decent? Aside from the issue of cost, theres the inconvenience and the fact most people wouldnt know how to install it themselves.
I believe 4DWm, as used on IRIX workstations.. has supported vector icons for years, atleast my indy running irix 5.3 did, and thats over 10 years old afaik.
*still* 64bit clean?
windows was never 64bit clean, the alpha ports of nt3/nt4 were hacked to use a 32bit compatibility mode of the alpha cpu, and none of the other supported cpu`s were 64bit at the time..
Around the time of 2000, i believe a 64bit version was being developed on the alpha, and development has since switched to the itanic
Motorola always hoped the PPC would achieve the same widespread support that m68k had, unfortunately for them.. it never did, and support gradually faded away.
Apache is not really a monoculture atall, not compared to IIS... If you encounter a machine running IIS you can pretty much guarantee it`s running on an x86 machine running windows, it might, but this is a 1/1000000 chance or something, be running on windows on an alpha, mips or ppc... but this isnt possible for any version above 5.0
However, with Apache, it could be running on any one of many OS`s, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, HPUX, AIX for instance, and on many different hardware architectures.
This is a good reason for promoting systems such as FreeBSD, OSX, and the other risc systems... If the entire world standardises on x86/linux for their webservers, especially a single distribution, then it would be no better than a windows monoculture.
Movies? i still play movies on my 6 year old (going on 7) alphastation, i have yet to find a video file (divx, xvid etc) that taxes the cpu, but i could do with a 64bit pci displaycard... altho the current 32bit pci card has a dedicated bus to itself.
But making a stable OS removes many people`s motives for upgrading from previous releases, so they will need to find something new. Most likely this will involve no longer selling XP/2003/2000, no longer issuing bugfixes (or issuing them very slowly) and no longer writing apps.
Also, i imagine there will be incompatibilities introduced that prevent users of the older software from interacting with files generated by the newer versions, thus anyone buying a new computer will be inadvertently putting pressure on his friends colleagues and business associates to upgrade.
If windows came with a single firewall or anti virus program, then that would extend the monoculture vulnerability...
Trojans would simply disable the default firewall/antivirus programs, and thus successfully defeat the vast majority of users, who will have been given a false sense of security by these programs.
Similarly, flaws found in the default firewall/av could easily be exploited.
There are already viruses and trojans which attempt to disable a few of the more popular antivirus tools.
Sendmail, X11, RPC, NFS, NIS, OpenSSL/SSH, apache, etc... are all optional apps that do not ship with all implementations of unix, and if it does, can always be removed. Contrast with the software which ships with EVERY installation of windows (msie, rpc, dcom, outlook express) and which cannot be removed...
You can only fault the os for something which comes by default, anything else is the fault of whichever third party supplied the app.
So your comparison against unix only applies to some distributions, and still doesnt take into account that most of the applications you describe are not developed by the os vendors themselves, and are simply bundled third-party applications, whereas most publicised windows flaws are with microsoft`s own apps, some of which are considered integral components of the os.
It is far less common that people talk about flaws in third party non microsoft apps for windows, and noone blames microsoft for these, take the recent bugs in mirc for instance.
Various versions of unix support such features aswell, there are numerous patches for linux, and then theres things like trusted solaris, and i`m sure openbsd has some kind of acl implementation too..
You can only access files on remote fileservers if those servers are setup to allow you to, this is true of both windows and unix. Unix supports such options as root_squash, which on most modern unix systems is enabled by default.. windows makes it easier to setup an insecure configuration.