And the whole point of a server is to provide....services to other computers, not to provide pretty eye candy for some newbie admin.
And the OS release commonly reffered to in media as "Longhorn" is a client OS release, where eye-candy is appropriate and in some sense needed to catch-up/differentiate from OS X.
Longhorn server is a different story. I've heard rumors of Microsoft moving towards a componentized approach to OS install. Something similar to building Windows Embedded images, where you've got about 10,000 various modules which comprise the OS and a package manager making sure dependencies are satisfied. If that's true, system builders will have far greater flexibility in purposing their servers. Monad shell seems to be the solution Microsoft is banking on to provide robusts CLI. That being said, GUI still has its place on the server for newbie admins. Even Linux distributions are putting more and more work into adding GUI tools to configure various services. Like it or not, newbie admins make up a large population of small business place and these people will buy/use whatever makes their lives easier. GUI is a crutch very much needed in that space and there's too much money at stake to not provide that crutch.
Only two CPUs will show up, due to WinXP Pro having a 2 CPU hard license level. You need a server type Windows install to use the 4 CPUs that HT capable systems present to the OS.
My Precision 530 and its two P4 Xeon chips disagree with you. Windows XP Pro SP1 sees 4 cpus. It takes full advantage of HT. Google for a technical article Microsoft issued on the subject.
Here's an article confirming Sendmail's collaboration with Microsoft:
"Authenticated sender technologies like Microsoft's caller ID are essential to help address fraud and spam in Internet e-mail," said Eric Allman, CTO at Sendmail. "The key to ensuring that these types of technologies are successful is widespread adoption. Sendmail's millions of users -- including more than 70 percent of the Fortune 1000 -- substantially increase the deployment of such technologies. We are excited to work with Microsoft in promoting the acceptance of caller ID as an open standard on the Internet."
MS Outlook 2003's spam filter reverse engineered -- and it's crap! See the link to the article in my journal.
I was going to reply to the post in your journal but it's already been archived.
Outlook's filter is trained by e-mail traffic going through Hotmail. Since office 2003 shipped, there have already been 2 updates to the client-side filtering based on new heuristics obtained from Hotmail. Microsoft's setup is not as dumb as some may believe it is.
FYI Microsoft did not develop it's terminal server technology. They bought it (shocker) from Citrix.
What are the chances that Terminal Services code has remained exactly the same architecturaly since 1997 when Microsoft licenced technology from Citrix? Lots of things that Microsoft purchases become entirely re-written within one or two version after the purchase. SQL Server originates from Sybase code, yet version 6.5 was a complete rewrite because the SQL team found Sybase code to be an unmaintainable nightmare they couldn't continue building on.
I work for 55,000 plus employee company. Our headquaters site has over 36,000 employees. Corporate IT sent out e-mails with links to the patch on July 17th. On July 21st they began running network scans and terminating network connection to unpatched machines, even the ones set up for dual-boot if the inactive partitions weren't patched. There was no interruption of service this week.
There is no excuse for shoddy administration on corporate networks. Perhaps your wife's company should look into hiring IT staff who a.) firewalls the network, b.) proactively enforces the health of their network
Dell is perfectly happy to ship a business OS-less PC's if the business tells them they have a volume license deal with Microsoft. Just because the website makes you buy OS/Software for one PC doesn't mean a volume order for 1000's of PCs would work the same.
The main point is fairly, which means that even though those features are now decent (especially compared with, say, Win98/95) I still find them lacking compared to what's possible compared to other OSes. The very existance of superior products by companies with a far smaller budget or made by groups of people with NO budget (OSS) proves to me that Microsoft's software is still not worth the ridiculous price they're asking for it.
So why are you using a pirated version on Windows XP if, by your own admission, superior products for your requirements are available from other vendors? Your actions seem to contradict the point you're making. You mention OS X as being superior, yet you're not running it, which makes it seem as if it doesn't satisfy one of your requirements of "stable, secure, fast".
>Why should anything short of a kernel upgrade require a reboot?
Because 3rd party (and Microsoft, for that matter) developers are too lazy, or ignorant, to write robust installers. With Windows 2000 and up, one only needs to reboot if a kernel mode driver is being installed the installer is running under Terminal Services, where some rules of engagement are different than if running under console.
If I were to take a guess, based on the installer project I worked on, 90% of reboots were requested because some file was locked. Nevermind the fact that OS provides good ways for handling such cases without needed to reboot, if you're not messing with contents of System32, which is a bad place to drop your libs in the first place.
I think Windows XP was released in 64-bit flavor shortly after 32-bit version was launched. So that's late 2001/early 2002. Last month, Microsoft released 64-bit ports of Windows Server 2003 and SQL 2000. Now I'm not aware how much 64-bit Intel and AMD machines are used in the real world at the moment, but I would argue that Linux isn't the *first* OS available on x86-64.
As of 6:30AM 5/8/2003 password reset ability works on passport.com.
For non-Hotmail e-mail addresses there exists an option to receive change instructions by e-mail. The URL that's generated on those pages is similar to the one in the exploit, yet entering "attacker" address other than "victim" address doesn't result in an e-mail sent. If the two addresses in the URL match that on the account the e-mail appears to be sent.
Looks like they indeed patched, although there should't be two addresses in the URL or even better, they shouldn't be passing them in URL at all.
If it runs in Windows, despite the fact that it's not a Win32 native app, why bother porting it? The Linux port exists because people could previously play the game on Linux. The Win32 native port doesn't exist because there's no functional need for it, other than for the sake of programming exercise. There's no irony in that.
If the app installer cannot replace a DLL that is bound to a currently running process, then it is a badly written installer.
a.) The installer can find out which processes are using a DLL and ask the user to stop them if possible.
b.) The DLLs are rarely hard locked. Most of the time, the installer can rename the DLL which is currently in use, queue the temp file to delete on the next reboot, place new DLL version into its intended place. The apps will continue using the temp file DLL until they are restarted, at which point they will pick up the updated DLL.
The above holds true on Windows 2000/XP/2003. I can't speak for Win9x series, as I don't play with those. I agree though, old vs new version compatibility issues still exist.
Windows XP requires activation with an optional registration. Activation does not transmit any personally identifiable information, just a hash based on some hardware components.
Learn something about the product before you spout on/. Oh wait, nevermind....
Overall Exchange is not a crappy solution, although it is a bit of overkill for simple mail and antiquated client machines. You (the student body) need to communicate to your sysadmins to keep IMAP/POP open for people who do not require advanced functions of Exchange/Outlook. They also need to configure an front-end OWA server for folks off campus. Outlook (at least until Outlook 11/Exchange 2003 and RPC/HTPP proxying) cannot cross firewals due to RPC, and yes its a dog over VPN connections.
It just sounds like your admins aren't thinking about deployment from the ease of use angle:(
Interesting thing to note on the subject. Ximian's Exchange Connector mimics HTTP traffic generated by a browser when its talking to an Exchange web-client. They could be talking WebDAV to the server, but nooo... Oh, the best part it, Exchange connector is closed source and not free.
How else do you expect Windows Update to determine which drivers you need? Would you rather pulldown the entire known devices database down and check local hardware against it on the client machine, or would you rather send a small manifest of local hardware to the server and few seconds later start getting patch summaries?
How many home users use revision tracking, embedded notes, and a lot of the other features included in Office? What percentage of Office sales goes to home users as opposed to corporate Knowledge Workers? The was a basic alternative to Office from Microsoft, it was called MS Works. Except no one used it because they had Office at work and couldn't fathom anything else. When Win95 shipped, all OEMs included Works. These days it's Office, even though Works is still available. Why is that?
Exchange supports IMAP, POP and SMTP. I presume you were downgra^H^H^H^H^H^H^H converted from one of those standards??? Which version of the Exchange are you on that you say OWA is cumbersome and takes forever to load? Exchange 2000 web-client was orders of magnitude better than Exchange 5.5, and the upcoming Exchange 2003 webclient is essentially Outlook in javascript.
How long will it be before Microsoft charges developers royalties for every copy of a program that runs on Windows? Think it can't happen? Think Palladium and Trusted Computing.
This been happening for almost 20 years in the console industry. Game developers pay licensce fees to the platform owner. No one thinks of it and no one cares.
You do "A", because in order to check in you had to have done tested changes yourself, done a full clean build, hand the binaries to a tester(s) who more thouroughly verify that your intended changes do a.) what they're supposed to do, b.) don't immediately break anything else. Once your "buddy" testers sign off, you do another clean build of your subcomponent and THEN you check in. That is that process that many other groups follow at Microsoft and I would certainly hope Windows does.
Slashdot Mirror
And the whole point of a server is to provide....services to other computers, not to provide pretty eye candy for some newbie admin.
And the OS release commonly reffered to in media as "Longhorn" is a client OS release, where eye-candy is appropriate and in some sense needed to catch-up/differentiate from OS X.
Longhorn server is a different story. I've heard rumors of Microsoft moving towards a componentized approach to OS install. Something similar to building Windows Embedded images, where you've got about 10,000 various modules which comprise the OS and a package manager making sure dependencies are satisfied. If that's true, system builders will have far greater flexibility in purposing their servers. Monad shell seems to be the solution Microsoft is banking on to provide robusts CLI. That being said, GUI still has its place on the server for newbie admins. Even Linux distributions are putting more and more work into adding GUI tools to configure various services. Like it or not, newbie admins make up a large population of small business place and these people will buy/use whatever makes their lives easier. GUI is a crutch very much needed in that space and there's too much money at stake to not provide that crutch.
Only two CPUs will show up, due to WinXP Pro having a 2 CPU hard license level. You need a server type Windows install to use the 4 CPUs that HT capable systems present to the OS.
My Precision 530 and its two P4 Xeon chips disagree with you. Windows XP Pro SP1 sees 4 cpus. It takes full advantage of HT. Google for a technical article Microsoft issued on the subject.
Here's an article confirming Sendmail's collaboration with Microsoft:
"Authenticated sender technologies like Microsoft's caller ID are essential to help address fraud and spam in Internet e-mail," said Eric Allman, CTO at Sendmail. "The key to ensuring that these types of technologies are successful is widespread adoption. Sendmail's millions of users -- including more than 70 percent of the Fortune 1000 -- substantially increase the deployment of such technologies. We are excited to work with Microsoft in promoting the acceptance of caller ID as an open standard on the Internet."
MS Outlook 2003's spam filter reverse engineered -- and it's crap! See the link to the article in my journal.
I was going to reply to the post in your journal but it's already been archived.
Outlook's filter is trained by e-mail traffic going through Hotmail. Since office 2003 shipped, there have already been 2 updates to the client-side filtering based on new heuristics obtained from Hotmail. Microsoft's setup is not as dumb as some may believe it is.
FYI Microsoft did not develop it's terminal server technology. They bought it (shocker) from Citrix.
What are the chances that Terminal Services code has remained exactly the same architecturaly since 1997 when Microsoft licenced technology from Citrix? Lots of things that Microsoft purchases become entirely re-written within one or two version after the purchase. SQL Server originates from Sybase code, yet version 6.5 was a complete rewrite because the SQL team found Sybase code to be an unmaintainable nightmare they couldn't continue building on.
I work for 55,000 plus employee company. Our headquaters site has over 36,000 employees. Corporate IT sent out e-mails with links to the patch on July 17th. On July 21st they began running network scans and terminating network connection to unpatched machines, even the ones set up for dual-boot if the inactive partitions weren't patched. There was no interruption of service this week.
There is no excuse for shoddy administration on corporate networks. Perhaps your wife's company should look into hiring IT staff who a.) firewalls the network, b.) proactively enforces the health of their network
hell, if you really needed Group Calendaring, use Groupwise, or Domino. im even sure there is an open source equivalent...
Jumping into clutches of Novell or IBM hardly seems like a smart thing to do after escaping those of Microsoft.
As for open source alternatives to Exchange there were numerous articles in the past:
Can we finally ditch Exchange?
SuSe OpenExchange
Dell is perfectly happy to ship a business OS-less PC's if the business tells them they have a volume license deal with Microsoft. Just because the website makes you buy OS/Software for one PC doesn't mean a volume order for 1000's of PCs would work the same.
The main point is fairly, which means that even though those features are now decent (especially compared with, say, Win98/95) I still find them lacking compared to what's possible compared to other OSes. The very existance of superior products by companies with a far smaller budget or made by groups of people with NO budget (OSS) proves to me that Microsoft's software is still not worth the ridiculous price they're asking for it.
So why are you using a pirated version on Windows XP if, by your own admission, superior products for your requirements are available from other vendors? Your actions seem to contradict the point you're making. You mention OS X as being superior, yet you're not running it, which makes it seem as if it doesn't satisfy one of your requirements of "stable, secure, fast".
>Why should anything short of a kernel upgrade require a reboot?
Because 3rd party (and Microsoft, for that matter) developers are too lazy, or ignorant, to write robust installers. With Windows 2000 and up, one only needs to reboot if a kernel mode driver is being installed the installer is running under Terminal Services, where some rules of engagement are different than if running under console.
If I were to take a guess, based on the installer project I worked on, 90% of reboots were requested because some file was locked. Nevermind the fact that OS provides good ways for handling such cases without needed to reboot, if you're not messing with contents of System32, which is a bad place to drop your libs in the first place.
At least they have a P/E ratio, as opposed to SUNW or RHAT. :)
I think Windows XP was released in 64-bit flavor shortly after 32-bit version was launched. So that's late 2001/early 2002. Last month, Microsoft released 64-bit ports of Windows Server 2003 and SQL 2000. Now I'm not aware how much 64-bit Intel and AMD machines are used in the real world at the moment, but I would argue that Linux isn't the *first* OS available on x86-64.
As of 6:30AM 5/8/2003 password reset ability works on passport.com.
For non-Hotmail e-mail addresses there exists an option to receive change instructions by e-mail. The URL that's generated on those pages is similar to the one in the exploit, yet entering "attacker" address other than "victim" address doesn't result in an e-mail sent. If the two addresses in the URL match that on the account the e-mail appears to be sent.
Looks like they indeed patched, although there should't be two addresses in the URL or even better, they shouldn't be passing them in URL at all.
If it runs in Windows, despite the fact that it's not a Win32 native app, why bother porting it? The Linux port exists because people could previously play the game on Linux. The Win32 native port doesn't exist because there's no functional need for it, other than for the sake of programming exercise. There's no irony in that.
Any local account without a password in Windows XP is prohibited from remotely connecting to that machine.
If the app installer cannot replace a DLL that is bound to a currently running process, then it is a badly written installer.
a.) The installer can find out which processes are using a DLL and ask the user to stop them if possible.
b.) The DLLs are rarely hard locked. Most of the time, the installer can rename the DLL which is currently in use, queue the temp file to delete on the next reboot, place new DLL version into its intended place. The apps will continue using the temp file DLL until they are restarted, at which point they will pick up the updated DLL.
The above holds true on Windows 2000/XP/2003. I can't speak for Win9x series, as I don't play with those. I agree though, old vs new version compatibility issues still exist.
The PC version is still a Quicktime in a ZIP file. 90% of us don't run Mac.
Windows XP requires activation with an optional registration. Activation does not transmit any personally identifiable information, just a hash based on some hardware components.
/. Oh wait, nevermind....
Learn something about the product before you spout on
Overall Exchange is not a crappy solution, although it is a bit of overkill for simple mail and antiquated client machines. You (the student body) need to communicate to your sysadmins to keep IMAP/POP open for people who do not require advanced functions of Exchange/Outlook. They also need to configure an front-end OWA server for folks off campus. Outlook (at least until Outlook 11/Exchange 2003 and RPC/HTPP proxying) cannot cross firewals due to RPC, and yes its a dog over VPN connections.
:(
It just sounds like your admins aren't thinking about deployment from the ease of use angle
Interesting thing to note on the subject. Ximian's Exchange Connector mimics HTTP traffic generated by a browser when its talking to an Exchange web-client. They could be talking WebDAV to the server, but nooo... Oh, the best part it, Exchange connector is closed source and not free.
How else do you expect Windows Update to determine which drivers you need? Would you rather pulldown the entire known devices database down and check local hardware against it on the client machine, or would you rather send a small manifest of local hardware to the server and few seconds later start getting patch summaries?
How many home users use revision tracking, embedded notes, and a lot of the other features included in Office? What percentage of Office sales goes to home users as opposed to corporate Knowledge Workers? The was a basic alternative to Office from Microsoft, it was called MS Works. Except no one used it because they had Office at work and couldn't fathom anything else. When Win95 shipped, all OEMs included Works. These days it's Office, even though Works is still available. Why is that?
Exchange supports IMAP, POP and SMTP. I presume you were downgra^H^H^H^H^H^H^H converted from one of those standards??? Which version of the Exchange are you on that you say OWA is cumbersome and takes forever to load? Exchange 2000 web-client was orders of magnitude better than Exchange 5.5, and the upcoming Exchange 2003 webclient is essentially Outlook in javascript.
How long will it be before Microsoft charges developers royalties for every copy of a program that runs on Windows? Think it can't happen? Think Palladium and Trusted Computing.
This been happening for almost 20 years in the console industry. Game developers pay licensce fees to the platform owner. No one thinks of it and no one cares.
You do "A", because in order to check in you had to have done tested changes yourself, done a full clean build, hand the binaries to a tester(s) who more thouroughly verify that your intended changes do a.) what they're supposed to do, b.) don't immediately break anything else. Once your "buddy" testers sign off, you do another clean build of your subcomponent and THEN you check in. That is that process that many other groups follow at Microsoft and I would certainly hope Windows does.