What does your post have to do with the sentence you quoted? I see no relevance.
The sentence you quoted says that the majority of PHP developers develop on a windows workstation, and then the sentence after the one you quoted says that most of these then deploy to a unix or linux.
Given that, what does your response: "I do not know many people using Windows Server as a workstation..." have to do with anything?
I know this is slashdot and all... but you could always consider reading a couple sentences after the one you quoted completely out of context.
Previously, PHP "didn't run as well as it should on Windows," said Gutmans, despite the fact that 75% to 80% of PHP users were developing on Windows workstations. When they deployed their Windows-based applications to production, their performance was disappointing and they tended to develop on Windows and deploy under Unix or Linux. Now the three platforms should be available on a more equal footing, he said. The article SPECIFICALLY states that most develop on windows workstations and deploy on a unix or equiv.
How exactly did my parent get marked insightful? By re-stating a sentence from the article in a hostile, anti-microsoft tone?
and compatibility issues are tales from ages ago Not quite.
Mac's are nice, but there are lots of things that wont run or wont run right there.
Outlook (and no, the Mac Office version doesnt count, its garbage) Eclipse/Java... this works if you're okay working with an older JVM, but not if not.NET programming Good IM clients HUGE numbers of line of business admin apps are windows only... though that wont affect many devs
Have you seen slashdot lately? Note that the link you mention isnt relevant in this conversation, it requires direct physical access to the machine. This is fundamentally no different than having access to the machine, rebooting it onto a usb key or bootable cdr which goes in and resets the local admin password for windows.
For those that care, there are several ways to stop these sorts of direct-access attacks, but they cause some real pain in easy of usability.
How many home PCs have a router/firewall between them and the internet? Nowadays? I'd say the vast majority. At least in the US. Every ISP that I've seen includes a router/firewall by default, and many also offer a security-tools CD that includes anti-virus, personal firewall, etc.
Having a firewall does not stop your machine being owned. What it stops is unsolicited inbound ownage.
But if they do webmail with IE, or dont patch, or run as local admin, then there are still many ways to get owned, even with 16 linux based firewalls between you and the internet.
Even were I to trust a patched copy of Windows, it takes longer to patch than a cracker can find the machine and add it to his botnet. That's utter nonsense.
The only way this would happen is if:
1. You were connecting the computer directly to the internet, with no router/firewall between you and it. 2. You somehow managed to turn off the firewall that ships on by default with XP.
Or if you had a bunch of other compromised machines on the network and #2 was true.
When Microsoft has opened up its protocols and file formats, has released some significant software under the GPL or a BSD license, and has established a couple years of cooperating with open source, maybe throws in a bunch of patents, then people will start to believe that Microsoft is going to walk the walk. For now, they still look to most people like they're just talking the talk, and they'll have to be understanding if most people don't believe them, trust them, or want much to do with them. Especially since the situation on the ground is that FOSS can defeat Microsoft and the broader world of proprietary software *without* Microsoft's help, and it might even be counter-productive to cooperate with them. Put another way, Microsoft wouldn't be waving these olive branches around if they didn't think it was not only in their own self-interest, but more in their interest than FOSS's interest to try and play nice with FOSS. Who cares whether a very tiny percentage of the population thinks MS is 'walking the walk'? Your viewpoint as described here has very little relevance to what is going on.
MS is a business, they're adapting their business to a changing marketplace where there is a lot more open source. They are doing what they need to do to survive and prosper. Thats their job.
Only an idiot would suggest that Microsoft give up many billions of dollars per year of income in exchange for.... nothing except the goodwill of a tiny population that doesnt like it anyway. Why would anyone do that? You'd put huge amounts of people out of business and work.
I used to work there until not all that long ago, and Microsoft employees are forbidden to even look at GPLed code, on the clock or off. The level of hostility to open-source in general and the GPL in particular is very high. Having been in that environment, I most especially don't believe Microsoft has turned over a new leaf, and so quickly. I'm certain they believe appearing to make nice with FOSS is better for them than it is for FOSS. Thats not hostility towards open source, thats pragmatic self-protection. They're doing everything they can to make sure that they have zero liability for copyright infringement on GPL code. That is the correct thing to do. Calling that hostile is just silly.
Why is this behavior 'stealing' and 'theft' when done by Microsoft, but nothing when done by an open source developer/project.
I've got some reality-check news for you. Information wants to be free. This is a much more fundamental tenet than any FOSS stuff. So if you dont want people to duplicate your work, dont show it to them before you start selling it.
But once its out there, and you show anybody, then unless NDAs were signed and enforceable, then anyone and everyone can take your ideas and make their own attempt at implementation.
This is just reality.
And this is beneficial to society as a whole. We wouldnt be anywhere if we didnt stand on the shoulders of everyone that has gone before us. And thats true of ideas, just as much as it is for source code.
And whats this nonsense about pen computing being dead? Pen computing is huge in certain industries. The tablet features of Vista are terrific, and I'm not sure I've seen better on anything bigger than a handheld (though there may be other good implementations I'm not familiar with).
In fact, things like Pen computing is a great example of where community drive open source fails. It's hard to get people interested in doing work like that, because a tablet user is often the most hard core cubicle-dwelling corporate road warrior. Or a doctor, or a manufacturing concern. There arent enough people willing to volunteer to do anything with it.
So the only way you'll see good FOSS tablet functionality in a unix is if some corp does it and contributes it back for various reasons of its own.
There is no FREAKING way Microsoft can do any of those 8 things if they want to stay in business. You do realize that in the second part of TFA, they list how they've done all 8 of those things, with specific examples on each, right?
I have never, never been able to get wireless to work on a laptop running any version of linux. And I've tried on pretty much every new laptop I've gotten over the past few years. Kubuntu and OpenSUSE. In no cases was I ever able to get wifi working, and in many cases, the video didnt even work without some serious heroics.
In fact, in the last 10 years, I have never, not once, had a linux install happen where I could ever get all the hardware working. Not once. And this is all mainstream high end corporate developer kit.
I lost my ability to use PDF creator which is a negative for me. Just FYI, I'm using PDF Creator 0.9.5 right now on my Vista Business x64 machine. It works great.
There is a known issue with it in that it has to be always running unlike XP, but the installer will put it in the startup so it starts up when you login, and works great.
Which is unrealistic given how much software out there REQUIRES you to run as an admin.... Sure we have been able to run as a non-admin user for years, as long we didn't do much with our computers. Alot of people say this, and I know in some specific industries this is true for many of their software packages. But literally every shop that I've run since we had Win2000 pro on the desktop we've been running as non-admin for most users. Thats the best part of a decade I've been doing that successfully.
Part of it is that the vast majority of software that seems like it requires admin access can be trivially fixed with an hour of sleuthing with ProcessMonitor/Regmon/Filemon and some group policy registry or ntfs acl changes. Some that use low level drive software for their normal processing this wont work for. But it will for most. Thats how we've always dealt with it over the years.
So it definitely is possible, where it isnt is if you are just in a business/industry that requires piece of software X, and that software is only made by one company, and they dont care about non-admin.
All that being said, I really do like Vista and its UAC. It's not as elegantly done as sudo and the gui equivalent in the unices and osx, but its soooooo much better than XP was, that I find it a breath of fresh air.
Yeah, it probably is. Thats probably a P4 3.0GHz box. Which means 2+ years old at a quick guess. Thats a processor that you dont really see anymore, and completely predates the switchover to the Core2Duos.
I assume you thnk that AV, firewall and all the other software VistaMEII locks out are not required because of this great security. Who in their right mind would trust MS AV products lol. The MS anti malware software at one point allowed one contentious malware because MS has a stake in the company. Not sure if it still does but I don't hold my breath. What the hell is VistaMell?
And why are you conflating A/V products and OS security?
Go read up on wikipedia about the changes made to the underlying core system in Vista. It's quite a significant change of the underpinnings compared to XPsp2.
A/V software has nothing to do with the OS being much more secure by default (both in design and configuration) than XP or prior windows.
So you're taking a machine thats right against the bottom of the bare minimum system reqs for vista, and you're surprised that the prior version of windows runs faster?
What in your experience would give you the expectation that new windows OS's would be faster on bare minimum hardware?
Microsoft's server OS's get faster on the same hardware for server tasks, but their desktops never have. Especially when you're gaming the hardware so low end for vista.
We, the computing public absolutely do NOT want Vista. We want our XP back. This confuses me. Who is this person holding the gun to your head forcing you to use Vista? Can you call the police? Restraining order? Short of someone with a gun, I'm confused why you feel 'forced' to use Vista.
If you dont like it, dont use it. XP will be supported through 2014.
If its a 6-month old laptop, the Dell should have a 64-bit CPU as well (Core 2 Duo). I dont see anything but C2D's from dell nowadays, not even sure if they sell anything else now on desktops and laptops.
And as a counterpoint, I'm on a new HP Compaq 8710w, 2.4GHz C2D, 4GB ram, 120GB 7200rpm HDD (laptop).
Running Vista Business x64 off a vanilla HP oem build. No crapware on this class of machine, other than google toolbar garbage which is removed.
This thing is very fast (much faster than my old xp boxes under heavy I/O load), and rock solid stable. UAC is such a HUGE improvement over having to pre-emptively use RunAs all the time in XP. The desktop presenting is fast, smooth, doesnt hang, and doesnt tear.
If I turn off on-access scanning on Sophos, the desktop comes up very fast after reboot or standby. I usually do leave this off anyway, as I havent tripped over anything that Sophos caught in like 5 years.
It survives longer than XP ever did with my usage (5-10 standys, change of networks, and vpns up/down each day), before needing a reboot.
Given other's anecdotal stories, I'm not sure how much of it is the x64 part, or how much of it is that this is just a very high end HP box targeted at engineers, so the drivers and hardware are top-notch. But this machine is fast, stable, and quite impressive.
I got it with Vista so that I could be the guinea pig on our software for Vista and x64, and learn all the little foibles. It's been pretty good to me so far, once I figured out two big problems (many old routers dont like adaptive MTU and tcp/ip management, these just needed their firmwares updated; and the issue about file shareing not working correctly over a VPN: KB 933468).
I'm not the original author, but...
Is that a long winded way of saying the simplicity of file permissions in/dev/* on Linux/UNIX is superior, easy and not so complex? No. Its not saying anything even remotely resembling that.
It's saying that in the name of usability, Windows has forever allowed alot of 'bad behavior' by applications. With Vista, and particularly with Vista x64, this has been stopped. And it broke alot of crap software that was doing bad things.
The exception are drive-by installs of spyware on IE.
Windows boxen are pretty much immune to spyware if:
1. Machines are set to auto-patch. 2. User does not have admin rights. 3. IE is walled off and not used.
1 and 2 are the biggies. But some stuff will still slip in via IE if you dont wall it off.
Thats one of the other nice things about Vista, once it stabilizes. IE7 in sandboxed mode is superbly safe. And then you get all the free auto-patching of it, and dont have to fight FireFox's archaic way of asking the user to auto-update.
Because if Vista can get good enough that self-replicating viruses, malware, and root kits, can only be installed / propogated by affirmative user action then its about as good as OSX or Linux, and that would be excellent progress. We're already there. And have been with XP for years.
All it takes is: the systems are patched promptly, the users run as non-admin, and dont use IE. Good corporate shops have been doing things this way in windows for a long time now.
You do run into some challenges with things like quickly getting patched versions of FireFox out via group policy (since auto-update wont work if you're running as non-admin), and other similar software. But its better for that to be your management cost rather than reactive running around rebuilding machines because they've been pwned.
At that point, the only exposure is zero-day exploits in the core system, and users with admin credentials who make bad choices.
Also... a note on this comment:
Isn't it? So where are the equivalents to SELinux or AppArmor in Vista? Most of the pieces of what you get with SELinux and AppArmor are present in Vista.
There isnt a good policy management tool however, so its all done with low level tools.
For example, Vista includes a flavor of MAC for services called Windows Service Hardening. It's basically MAC (Mandatory Access Control) for services.
Now mind you, you could always do this before by creating a different service account for each service, and giving that service account the most bare minimum ACLs on the file systems possible.
What SELinux and AppArmor give you is nicer tools to do this at a higher level.
But the MAC approach to services and processes running in the system is something that good admins in the windows world have been doing for the best part of a decade.
Something that IS mostly missing is MAC for user/desktop processes that all must run under the same user account. For example, you might want FireFox to run in a super locked down mode, so even if someone pwned it, they didnt have write or ready access to anything not absolutely required for functionality of FireFox.
The basics of this DO exist in Windows though, see IE7 running in 'sandboxed mode'. In fact, the underlying technical aspects needed for this are built into the core process security tokens and DACLs of windows, and have been there for a long time.
So, perhaps Vista is more secure: until you actually install applications to make the system useful. Thats not true at all. In every business I've been in, we've been doing non-admin for all users for almost a decade (windows 2000 days).
The vast, vast majority of typical software works fine.
What doesnt work fine is the 'comet cursors' and stupid crap like that downloaded from shareware sites.
Now in some industries they have some verticals that are really poorly done and require some tweaking.
And yes, I'm sure you're going to come back with some piece of software that you use that doesnt work, and thats great. But literally... almost 10 years every shop I've run has been doing it as non-admin on windows. And its worked great. Did the secretaries bitch when they couldnt install their 'email stationary w/ included spyware'? Of course. Who cares.
I'm fairly convinced that some SATA or chipset drivers have real problems with high levels of disk I/O, and the way they do their DMA and interrupt scheduling.
I've noticed that even on similarly 'powerful' machines, some of them are just killed (ie, very unresponsive desktop) by lots of I/O, and some of them remain responsive under high I/O load.
And yet a windows server with a hardware raid controller can just be getting buried in I/O, but the system remains completely responsive. Is that the card offloading interrupts and other work off the main system? Is that better drivers?
Something I long for is a windows desktop that has its scheduler (and I/O scheduler) tuned such that the desktop always remains completely responsive. If that slows down disk I/O, so be it.
Most unix based systems deal with this better, but even there its not perfect.
Slashdot Mirror
What does your post have to do with the sentence you quoted? I see no relevance.
The sentence you quoted says that the majority of PHP developers develop on a windows workstation, and then the sentence after the one you quoted says that most of these then deploy to a unix or linux.
Given that, what does your response: "I do not know many people using Windows Server as a workstation..." have to do with anything?
How exactly did my parent get marked insightful? By re-stating a sentence from the article in a hostile, anti-microsoft tone?
Mac's are nice, but there are lots of things that wont run or wont run right there.
Outlook (and no, the Mac Office version doesnt count, its garbage)
Eclipse/Java
Good IM clients
HUGE numbers of line of business admin apps are windows only
For those that care, there are several ways to stop these sorts of direct-access attacks, but they cause some real pain in easy of usability. How many home PCs have a router/firewall between them and the internet? Nowadays? I'd say the vast majority. At least in the US. Every ISP that I've seen includes a router/firewall by default, and many also offer a security-tools CD that includes anti-virus, personal firewall, etc.
What does one thing have to do with another?
Having a firewall does not stop your machine being owned. What it stops is unsolicited inbound ownage.
But if they do webmail with IE, or dont patch, or run as local admin, then there are still many ways to get owned, even with 16 linux based firewalls between you and the internet.
The only way this would happen is if:
1. You were connecting the computer directly to the internet, with no router/firewall between you and it.
2. You somehow managed to turn off the firewall that ships on by default with XP.
Or if you had a bunch of other compromised machines on the network and #2 was true.
MS is a business, they're adapting their business to a changing marketplace where there is a lot more open source. They are doing what they need to do to survive and prosper. Thats their job.
Only an idiot would suggest that Microsoft give up many billions of dollars per year of income in exchange for
I'm confused.
Why is this behavior 'stealing' and 'theft' when done by Microsoft, but nothing when done by an open source developer/project.
I've got some reality-check news for you. Information wants to be free. This is a much more fundamental tenet than any FOSS stuff. So if you dont want people to duplicate your work, dont show it to them before you start selling it.
But once its out there, and you show anybody, then unless NDAs were signed and enforceable, then anyone and everyone can take your ideas and make their own attempt at implementation.
This is just reality.
And this is beneficial to society as a whole. We wouldnt be anywhere if we didnt stand on the shoulders of everyone that has gone before us. And thats true of ideas, just as much as it is for source code.
And whats this nonsense about pen computing being dead? Pen computing is huge in certain industries. The tablet features of Vista are terrific, and I'm not sure I've seen better on anything bigger than a handheld (though there may be other good implementations I'm not familiar with).
In fact, things like Pen computing is a great example of where community drive open source fails. It's hard to get people interested in doing work like that, because a tablet user is often the most hard core cubicle-dwelling corporate road warrior. Or a doctor, or a manufacturing concern. There arent enough people willing to volunteer to do anything with it.
So the only way you'll see good FOSS tablet functionality in a unix is if some corp does it and contributes it back for various reasons of its own.
While I do agree that was a crappy install experience for you, you do realize that what you describe means that your hard drive was dying, right?
It's not possible for the O/S to make a hard drive 'screech and die' unless the drive is failing.
Thats not trolling. Thats reality.
I have never, never been able to get wireless to work on a laptop running any version of linux. And I've tried on pretty much every new laptop I've gotten over the past few years. Kubuntu and OpenSUSE. In no cases was I ever able to get wifi working, and in many cases, the video didnt even work without some serious heroics.
In fact, in the last 10 years, I have never, not once, had a linux install happen where I could ever get all the hardware working. Not once. And this is all mainstream high end corporate developer kit.
There is a known issue with it in that it has to be always running unlike XP, but the installer will put it in the startup so it starts up when you login, and works great.
Sure we have been able to run as a non-admin user for years, as long we didn't do much with our computers. Alot of people say this, and I know in some specific industries this is true for many of their software packages. But literally every shop that I've run since we had Win2000 pro on the desktop we've been running as non-admin for most users. Thats the best part of a decade I've been doing that successfully.
Part of it is that the vast majority of software that seems like it requires admin access can be trivially fixed with an hour of sleuthing with ProcessMonitor/Regmon/Filemon and some group policy registry or ntfs acl changes. Some that use low level drive software for their normal processing this wont work for. But it will for most. Thats how we've always dealt with it over the years.
So it definitely is possible, where it isnt is if you are just in a business/industry that requires piece of software X, and that software is only made by one company, and they dont care about non-admin.
All that being said, I really do like Vista and its UAC. It's not as elegantly done as sudo and the gui equivalent in the unices and osx, but its soooooo much better than XP was, that I find it a breath of fresh air.
Yeah, it probably is. Thats probably a P4 3.0GHz box. Which means 2+ years old at a quick guess. Thats a processor that you dont really see anymore, and completely predates the switchover to the Core2Duos.
Be aware that given the Dell model number he mentioned, they're not equivalent processors.
The 3GHz is probably a P4. The 1.6 you're referring to is almost certainly an ULV C2D, or possibly the core2 version of the celeron.
Your 1.6 is probably as fast or faster than his 3.0. And it'll run 5x as long on a battery.
And why are you conflating A/V products and OS security?
Go read up on wikipedia about the changes made to the underlying core system in Vista. It's quite a significant change of the underpinnings compared to XPsp2.
A/V software has nothing to do with the OS being much more secure by default (both in design and configuration) than XP or prior windows.
What in your experience would give you the expectation that new windows OS's would be faster on bare minimum hardware?
Microsoft's server OS's get faster on the same hardware for server tasks, but their desktops never have. Especially when you're gaming the hardware so low end for vista. We, the computing public absolutely do NOT want Vista. We want our XP back. This confuses me. Who is this person holding the gun to your head forcing you to use Vista? Can you call the police? Restraining order? Short of someone with a gun, I'm confused why you feel 'forced' to use Vista.
If you dont like it, dont use it. XP will be supported through 2014.
If its a 6-month old laptop, the Dell should have a 64-bit CPU as well (Core 2 Duo). I dont see anything but C2D's from dell nowadays, not even sure if they sell anything else now on desktops and laptops.
And as a counterpoint, I'm on a new HP Compaq 8710w, 2.4GHz C2D, 4GB ram, 120GB 7200rpm HDD (laptop).
Running Vista Business x64 off a vanilla HP oem build. No crapware on this class of machine, other than google toolbar garbage which is removed.
This thing is very fast (much faster than my old xp boxes under heavy I/O load), and rock solid stable. UAC is such a HUGE improvement over having to pre-emptively use RunAs all the time in XP. The desktop presenting is fast, smooth, doesnt hang, and doesnt tear.
If I turn off on-access scanning on Sophos, the desktop comes up very fast after reboot or standby. I usually do leave this off anyway, as I havent tripped over anything that Sophos caught in like 5 years.
It survives longer than XP ever did with my usage (5-10 standys, change of networks, and vpns up/down each day), before needing a reboot.
Given other's anecdotal stories, I'm not sure how much of it is the x64 part, or how much of it is that this is just a very high end HP box targeted at engineers, so the drivers and hardware are top-notch. But this machine is fast, stable, and quite impressive.
I got it with Vista so that I could be the guinea pig on our software for Vista and x64, and learn all the little foibles. It's been pretty good to me so far, once I figured out two big problems (many old routers dont like adaptive MTU and tcp/ip management, these just needed their firmwares updated; and the issue about file shareing not working correctly over a VPN: KB 933468).
It's saying that in the name of usability, Windows has forever allowed alot of 'bad behavior' by applications. With Vista, and particularly with Vista x64, this has been stopped. And it broke alot of crap software that was doing bad things.
And its about damn time.
The exception are drive-by installs of spyware on IE.
Windows boxen are pretty much immune to spyware if:
1. Machines are set to auto-patch.
2. User does not have admin rights.
3. IE is walled off and not used.
1 and 2 are the biggies. But some stuff will still slip in via IE if you dont wall it off.
Thats one of the other nice things about Vista, once it stabilizes. IE7 in sandboxed mode is superbly safe. And then you get all the free auto-patching of it, and dont have to fight FireFox's archaic way of asking the user to auto-update.
All it takes is: the systems are patched promptly, the users run as non-admin, and dont use IE. Good corporate shops have been doing things this way in windows for a long time now.
You do run into some challenges with things like quickly getting patched versions of FireFox out via group policy (since auto-update wont work if you're running as non-admin), and other similar software. But its better for that to be your management cost rather than reactive running around rebuilding machines because they've been pwned.
At that point, the only exposure is zero-day exploits in the core system, and users with admin credentials who make bad choices.
There isnt a good policy management tool however, so its all done with low level tools.
For example, Vista includes a flavor of MAC for services called Windows Service Hardening. It's basically MAC (Mandatory Access Control) for services.
Now mind you, you could always do this before by creating a different service account for each service, and giving that service account the most bare minimum ACLs on the file systems possible.
What SELinux and AppArmor give you is nicer tools to do this at a higher level.
But the MAC approach to services and processes running in the system is something that good admins in the windows world have been doing for the best part of a decade.
Something that IS mostly missing is MAC for user/desktop processes that all must run under the same user account. For example, you might want FireFox to run in a super locked down mode, so even if someone pwned it, they didnt have write or ready access to anything not absolutely required for functionality of FireFox.
The basics of this DO exist in Windows though, see IE7 running in 'sandboxed mode'. In fact, the underlying technical aspects needed for this are built into the core process security tokens and DACLs of windows, and have been there for a long time.
The vast, vast majority of typical software works fine.
What doesnt work fine is the 'comet cursors' and stupid crap like that downloaded from shareware sites.
Now in some industries they have some verticals that are really poorly done and require some tweaking.
And yes, I'm sure you're going to come back with some piece of software that you use that doesnt work, and thats great. But literally
I'm fairly convinced that some SATA or chipset drivers have real problems with high levels of disk I/O, and the way they do their DMA and interrupt scheduling.
I've noticed that even on similarly 'powerful' machines, some of them are just killed (ie, very unresponsive desktop) by lots of I/O, and some of them remain responsive under high I/O load.
And yet a windows server with a hardware raid controller can just be getting buried in I/O, but the system remains completely responsive. Is that the card offloading interrupts and other work off the main system? Is that better drivers?
Something I long for is a windows desktop that has its scheduler (and I/O scheduler) tuned such that the desktop always remains completely responsive. If that slows down disk I/O, so be it.
Most unix based systems deal with this better, but even there its not perfect.