first, most linux distros DO include Apache, and given that the openssh package which comes on these distros includes sftp and scp, they do include this.
Yeah, but when I installed Mandrake 10.1 it did not install Apache. When I decided I wanted to play around with it, I went into the Xwindows GUI frontend to urpmi (don't remember what it's called, Mandrake Panel or something) and asked it to install Apache. And it asked me for my installation CD. Imagine that.
Granted, many distros would just fetch it off the web. That's probably what my Debian box would do. But I can't think of any major Linux distro that just installs Apache without you telling it to.
Second, the "mess" we'd be in has nothing to do with those tools, rather the inherent insecurity of Windows: consider that every mac ships with these tools "out of the box" today, and you don't hear about widespread virus/trojan problems on macs, do you?
Just because Mac OS does not have a trojan/virus problem now doesn't mean it never will. A lot of Windows boxes get compromised by social engineering. If some program asks for the administrator password, the typical Mac user would just type it in.
so the complaint about wasting disk space is a red herring.
SSH is small. Apache is pretty big. Especially with the documentation. But these are the days of the lowest end machines shipping with atleast 40GB. So each to their own, I suppose.
Finally, as to your point about not having people poking around in their OS, well, having services easy to enable and disable will make it easier for people enable only what they need right then, because it's not a tremendous amount of effort to disable/reenable the services.
It's only [very mildly] difficult to install IIS. Once it's on the computer, enabling/disabling it is as easy as going into Services and switching it on and off. Easy.
Not going to be a big hassle to install Apache32 indeed! why not just include it out of the box like all of the other OS vendors do?
Windows does ship with a web server. I don't get your point.
I'm looking forward to President Bush's explanation when it turns out that Tempel 1 did not, after all, have any WMDs.
I'm not quite sure what he'll say, but it will certainly include words like "liberation", "democracy", and "freedom". Meanwhile, the poor people on that comet will have no idea what just hit them.
My basic point is not that all of these things are impossible on Windows, rather that they require effort to set them up.
And that's my point. For someone knowledgable and wants to run those services, it's not going to be a big hassle, or hard to figure out how to install those and get them running (or download Apache for Win32, whatever).
What it does prevent is people poking around in their OS and starting unnessecary services because they sound cool, despite them not having any idea what they are doing. Or for that matter, having the software sitting around wasting disk space on every computer just waiting for some trojan or virus to turn it on. Can you imagine the mess we would be in if every Windows computer came with IIS and some SSH equilivant ready to go with the default install? Even most Linux distros don't install a web server and ftp server by default (though most do install SSH and some start the service by default).
If you think you're going to need ad-hoc webservers, ftp, etc. install it and disable it. Windows does have built in firesharing.
The problem is that Mac users have been annoying the hell out of everyone else for so long now, that whenever someone sees an Apple on your desk they think to themselves "Oh, it's one of those people." The fact that Apple's case designs are rather unique looking doesn't help things either.
That's the big difference between Microsoft and Apple. On the Microsoft side of things, people are generally annoyed at Microsoft's products. While on the Apple side of things, people are generally annoyed at Apple's users.
And perhaps why Windows has changed so little since 1995 is because Microsoft basically got it right 10 years ago, and in the meantime has only had to make a few tweaks and changes? If you ask me, the start menu + quicklaunch + taskbar is superior to the dock. Windows explorer is superior to the finder. Windows task manager (granted, came out in 2000 not 1995) is better than the utilities scattered about OSX. Windows file sharing is better than OSX's (though complicated in 2000/XP). In 10.4 Apple has finally came out with something equilivant to the system tray, which has been around since 1995.
And besides, get used to XP then go use an old Windows 95 system. Like you said, the changes aren't big, but being able to do things like drag and drop on the start menu are handy, and I certainly miss them whenever I have to use an old Windows system.
That's like complaining that the Federation ships in Star Trek are oppressively minimalistic in interior design. These are things which people actually prefer. There's nothing Orwellian about it.
Well obviously some people do like the default OSX look. Some people also like the default Windows XP look. But what if you don't like them? In windows, you can do something about it. You can change the colors, change back to classic, change the fonts, change the sizes of things, turn the effects on and off, download TweakUI and mess with things like menu speeds and response times. With OSX... you're just stuck.
Also the case for Orwellian design seems kind of weak to me. If you don't like it then don't buy it.
Why? That's about the best description I have heard. You can barely customize OSX, as far as Apple is concerned it's the Apple way or the highway. In comparison, you can tweak and configure all kinds of things in Windows. More if you install Microsoft's TweakUI (which should be a default part of Windows), and just about anything is possible with 3rd party tools and the Themes service.
well, maybe my ignorance of the subject comes from only using corporate windows builds, rather than owning the darn thing myself; however, don't you think that's a bit more rigamarole to have to go through than just checking a box on an obvious settings tab?
I don't think it's a bad idea. Anyone who isn't clever enough to install IIS off of the Windows install CD probably shouldn't be running a web server/ftp server anyway.
At first I thought you were kidding. In any case all you need to figure out why OS X outshines XP is to use OS X.
You know, lots of people have used both Windows XP and OS X (along with KDE and Gnome). I have, and I consider Windows the windows GUI to be superior to OS X. There, I said it. Granted, OS X does have some really nice things about it, but some things just annoy the hell out of me. Like the Finder, which is a big pile of crap. Windows Explorer may not be the best, but it's way better than the finder. Explorer is also better than KDE and Gnome in this regard, mostly because it's way faster. KDE is powerful but slow, Gnome is slow and tries too much to be like MacOS Classic. And I can't count the number of times I've had to force quit the finder, because it's locked up once again. Navigating the file system is such an integral part of any OS, why can't Apple get this right?
The dock sucks. There is a reason both Gnome and KDE mimic Windows and not OS X. The dock is awful. Windows keeps things seperate. You have quicklaunch for launching applications, you have the taskbar for running applications, you have the start menu for lesser used applications, and you have the system tray for applications that need to notify you or allow you to quickly interact with them. Granted, the system tray is heavily abused by developers of Windows applications, I nuke 90% of the things put in the system tray because they are totally unneeded. In OSX, the dock tries to do all of this, and it sucks.
Finally, you can't maximize a window in OSX. I mean, come on, WTF Apple?
What is a link farm? is that one of those sites, no matter what obscure search term you put in, it's always the first site that comes up on google?
Then you visit that site, and find out there is absolutely nothing related to what you are searching for, but just ads for shitty domain hosting, links to links to other links for shopping, etc?
So what Sophos is saying is that buying a new PC and connecting it to the internet to access Windows Update is too dangerous. By the time the average PC/Windows users connects to Windows Update, they have a 50% chance of being compromised. It might be time for Microsoft to instruct Windows XP to firewall itself to Windows Update only until it has fully patched itself.
I would imagine that almost any new Windows PC now ships with Windows XPSP2 which means the Windows Firewall is turned on by default. So you can connect a new Windows PC to the internet without having to worry about it being owned by some worm in a matter of minutes.
Because that wouldn't look suspicious at all if they ever found it. Also, you'd be doing drywall and paint work every time the stupid thing ate a disk.
I would just do one of those crazy case mods. Something like a mini-ITX board with wireless in a clock radio or something like that. That way, it would be easily accessible and he could leave it in plain sight and it would likely be passed right over. If they do happen to find it, he could claim he's into case modding on the side.
So if you're talking 5.1 vs. 7.1 vs. 13.1, who really cares after a point. If it was easy to set up and I had the space for it, sure, that'd be neat, but in reality, it doesn't much matter.
Actually, I have found that if someone is willing to spend a certain amount on speakers (say, around $500), 2 $250 speakers is going to blow away a surround set up with 6 $85 speakers any day. And this is pretty much true at every price point. For that reason, I don't see myself getting any more than a 2.1 set up.
The biggest issue I have seen with AMD Athlon XP based systems is not the chip self, but the lousy chipsets that support them. VIA based boards are flakey and don't seem to work very well at all if you try to upgrade them (that is, run more than 1 stick of ram and more than 1 PCI card). Even AMD's own chipset never seemed to work quite right either. Though nVidia might have saved the day with their nForce chipset, the only AMD Athlon XP chipset that I have found that isn't garbage.
And before you say that I must be using cheap motherboards, my experience is based off of brands like Gigabyte, Asus, Biostar, Chaintek (sp?), and MSI.
This seems to be a more recent development. Systems I built back around 1998 with VIA based Super 7 boards and AMD K6-2/K6-3 chips are still going strong with very few or no problems over the years. And I can echo what you have said about Intel based systems. Even the Celeron based boxes (built with a decent motherboard) just keep running and running.
My suggestion would be to burn the DSL.iso file to a CD, then boot the Windows computer into Damn Small Linux. From there, you should be able to "install" DSL onto the CF card (check the menu options), and it will take care of making it bootable. As an advantage, you'll be able to customize it a some, like make it start the SSH server automatically.
After that, it's just a matter of convincing the laptop to boot off a CF card (good luck).
I thought the circle thing was more like the D-pad on a controller. Sure the cursor jumped around erratically when I was trying to make it move. It just that "move finger in a circle" to move up and down in the menu is not intuitive at all. I don't know any other device out there that works like that. Of course, once I knew how it worked, I could use it. Not the best interface, but it works.
iRiver, Rio, Archos, Samsung, RCA, Sony, and many others I'm forgetting all offer competing music players that offer most if not all of what you want, often at a cheaper price. So I don't get what you mean by a lack of competition.
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So what should I have done with that CPU power?
Waited until no one was looking and tossed a few into the trunk of your car.
huh?
first, most linux distros DO include Apache, and given that the openssh package which comes on these distros includes sftp and scp, they do include this.
Yeah, but when I installed Mandrake 10.1 it did not install Apache. When I decided I wanted to play around with it, I went into the Xwindows GUI frontend to urpmi (don't remember what it's called, Mandrake Panel or something) and asked it to install Apache. And it asked me for my installation CD. Imagine that.
Granted, many distros would just fetch it off the web. That's probably what my Debian box would do. But I can't think of any major Linux distro that just installs Apache without you telling it to.
Second, the "mess" we'd be in has nothing to do with those tools, rather the inherent insecurity of Windows: consider that every mac ships with these tools "out of the box" today, and you don't hear about widespread virus/trojan problems on macs, do you?
Just because Mac OS does not have a trojan/virus problem now doesn't mean it never will. A lot of Windows boxes get compromised by social engineering. If some program asks for the administrator password, the typical Mac user would just type it in.
so the complaint about wasting disk space is a red herring.
SSH is small. Apache is pretty big. Especially with the documentation. But these are the days of the lowest end machines shipping with atleast 40GB. So each to their own, I suppose.
Finally, as to your point about not having people poking around in their OS, well, having services easy to enable and disable will make it easier for people enable only what they need right then, because it's not a tremendous amount of effort to disable/reenable the services.
It's only [very mildly] difficult to install IIS. Once it's on the computer, enabling/disabling it is as easy as going into Services and switching it on and off. Easy.
Not going to be a big hassle to install Apache32 indeed! why not just include it out of the box like all of the other OS vendors do?
Windows does ship with a web server. I don't get your point.
I'm looking forward to President Bush's explanation when it turns out that Tempel 1 did not, after all, have any WMDs.
I'm not quite sure what he'll say, but it will certainly include words like "liberation", "democracy", and "freedom". Meanwhile, the poor people on that comet will have no idea what just hit them.
My basic point is not that all of these things are impossible on Windows, rather that they require effort to set them up.
And that's my point. For someone knowledgable and wants to run those services, it's not going to be a big hassle, or hard to figure out how to install those and get them running (or download Apache for Win32, whatever).
What it does prevent is people poking around in their OS and starting unnessecary services because they sound cool, despite them not having any idea what they are doing. Or for that matter, having the software sitting around wasting disk space on every computer just waiting for some trojan or virus to turn it on. Can you imagine the mess we would be in if every Windows computer came with IIS and some SSH equilivant ready to go with the default install? Even most Linux distros don't install a web server and ftp server by default (though most do install SSH and some start the service by default).
If you think you're going to need ad-hoc webservers, ftp, etc. install it and disable it. Windows does have built in firesharing.
The problem is that Mac users have been annoying the hell out of everyone else for so long now, that whenever someone sees an Apple on your desk they think to themselves "Oh, it's one of those people." The fact that Apple's case designs are rather unique looking doesn't help things either.
That's the big difference between Microsoft and Apple. On the Microsoft side of things, people are generally annoyed at Microsoft's products. While on the Apple side of things, people are generally annoyed at Apple's users.
And perhaps why Windows has changed so little since 1995 is because Microsoft basically got it right 10 years ago, and in the meantime has only had to make a few tweaks and changes? If you ask me, the start menu + quicklaunch + taskbar is superior to the dock. Windows explorer is superior to the finder. Windows task manager (granted, came out in 2000 not 1995) is better than the utilities scattered about OSX. Windows file sharing is better than OSX's (though complicated in 2000/XP). In 10.4 Apple has finally came out with something equilivant to the system tray, which has been around since 1995.
And besides, get used to XP then go use an old Windows 95 system. Like you said, the changes aren't big, but being able to do things like drag and drop on the start menu are handy, and I certainly miss them whenever I have to use an old Windows system.
That's like complaining that the Federation ships in Star Trek are oppressively minimalistic in interior design. These are things which people actually prefer. There's nothing Orwellian about it.
Well obviously some people do like the default OSX look. Some people also like the default Windows XP look. But what if you don't like them? In windows, you can do something about it. You can change the colors, change back to classic, change the fonts, change the sizes of things, turn the effects on and off, download TweakUI and mess with things like menu speeds and response times. With OSX... you're just stuck.
Also the case for Orwellian design seems kind of weak to me. If you don't like it then don't buy it.
Why? That's about the best description I have heard. You can barely customize OSX, as far as Apple is concerned it's the Apple way or the highway. In comparison, you can tweak and configure all kinds of things in Windows. More if you install Microsoft's TweakUI (which should be a default part of Windows), and just about anything is possible with 3rd party tools and the Themes service.
well, maybe my ignorance of the subject comes from only using corporate windows builds, rather than owning the darn thing myself; however, don't you think that's a bit more rigamarole to have to go through than just checking a box on an obvious settings tab?
I don't think it's a bad idea. Anyone who isn't clever enough to install IIS off of the Windows install CD probably shouldn't be running a web server/ftp server anyway.
At first I thought you were kidding. In any case all you need to figure out why OS X outshines XP is to use OS X.
You know, lots of people have used both Windows XP and OS X (along with KDE and Gnome). I have, and I consider Windows the windows GUI to be superior to OS X. There, I said it. Granted, OS X does have some really nice things about it, but some things just annoy the hell out of me. Like the Finder, which is a big pile of crap. Windows Explorer may not be the best, but it's way better than the finder. Explorer is also better than KDE and Gnome in this regard, mostly because it's way faster. KDE is powerful but slow, Gnome is slow and tries too much to be like MacOS Classic. And I can't count the number of times I've had to force quit the finder, because it's locked up once again. Navigating the file system is such an integral part of any OS, why can't Apple get this right?
The dock sucks. There is a reason both Gnome and KDE mimic Windows and not OS X. The dock is awful. Windows keeps things seperate. You have quicklaunch for launching applications, you have the taskbar for running applications, you have the start menu for lesser used applications, and you have the system tray for applications that need to notify you or allow you to quickly interact with them. Granted, the system tray is heavily abused by developers of Windows applications, I nuke 90% of the things put in the system tray because they are totally unneeded. In OSX, the dock tries to do all of this, and it sucks.
Finally, you can't maximize a window in OSX. I mean, come on, WTF Apple?
What is a link farm? is that one of those sites, no matter what obscure search term you put in, it's always the first site that comes up on google?
Then you visit that site, and find out there is absolutely nothing related to what you are searching for, but just ads for shitty domain hosting, links to links to other links for shopping, etc?
You got it.
I can't think of any reason to own an untraceable gun
What if you don't trust the people doing the tracing?
So what Sophos is saying is that buying a new PC and connecting it to the internet to access Windows Update is too dangerous. By the time the average PC/Windows users connects to Windows Update, they have a 50% chance of being compromised. It might be time for Microsoft to instruct Windows XP to firewall itself to Windows Update only until it has fully patched itself.
I would imagine that almost any new Windows PC now ships with Windows XPSP2 which means the Windows Firewall is turned on by default. So you can connect a new Windows PC to the internet without having to worry about it being owned by some worm in a matter of minutes.
Because that wouldn't look suspicious at all if they ever found it. Also, you'd be doing drywall and paint work every time the stupid thing ate a disk.
I would just do one of those crazy case mods. Something like a mini-ITX board with wireless in a clock radio or something like that. That way, it would be easily accessible and he could leave it in plain sight and it would likely be passed right over. If they do happen to find it, he could claim he's into case modding on the side.
I bet they would of gone with more than one mouse button for sure.
IIS already kicks the crap out of Apache in terms of performance. So do most other web servers. Apache still leads in popularity due to its momentum.
The fact that you can run Apache on virtually every OS out there doesn't hurt things either.
I would a couple of the Taurus's actually race, then have a 199 car demolition derby with the other 198 Taurus's and 1 Ferrari.
In order achive the goal, you must look beyond Iraq.
Exactly. So why are we in Iraq again?
So if you're talking 5.1 vs. 7.1 vs. 13.1, who really cares after a point. If it was easy to set up and I had the space for it, sure, that'd be neat, but in reality, it doesn't much matter.
Actually, I have found that if someone is willing to spend a certain amount on speakers (say, around $500), 2 $250 speakers is going to blow away a surround set up with 6 $85 speakers any day. And this is pretty much true at every price point. For that reason, I don't see myself getting any more than a 2.1 set up.
The biggest issue I have seen with AMD Athlon XP based systems is not the chip self, but the lousy chipsets that support them. VIA based boards are flakey and don't seem to work very well at all if you try to upgrade them (that is, run more than 1 stick of ram and more than 1 PCI card). Even AMD's own chipset never seemed to work quite right either. Though nVidia might have saved the day with their nForce chipset, the only AMD Athlon XP chipset that I have found that isn't garbage.
And before you say that I must be using cheap motherboards, my experience is based off of brands like Gigabyte, Asus, Biostar, Chaintek (sp?), and MSI.
This seems to be a more recent development. Systems I built back around 1998 with VIA based Super 7 boards and AMD K6-2/K6-3 chips are still going strong with very few or no problems over the years. And I can echo what you have said about Intel based systems. Even the Celeron based boxes (built with a decent motherboard) just keep running and running.
My suggestion would be to burn the DSL .iso file to a CD, then boot the Windows computer into Damn Small Linux. From there, you should be able to "install" DSL onto the CF card (check the menu options), and it will take care of making it bootable. As an advantage, you'll be able to customize it a some, like make it start the SSH server automatically.
After that, it's just a matter of convincing the laptop to boot off a CF card (good luck).
If you're already willing to buy the top of the line processor, you can certainly afford 2x 1GB Dimms.
Did you see the power requirements? 104W for a single core? I really can't imagine Apple preferring this to a Pentium-M derivative.
Have you seen the power requirements for the G5?
I don't see why Apple can't go both ways. Pentium M/Celeron M for the laptops/Mini, AMD64 for the high end towers, and who knows for the iMac/eMac.
I thought the circle thing was more like the D-pad on a controller. Sure the cursor jumped around erratically when I was trying to make it move. It just that "move finger in a circle" to move up and down in the menu is not intuitive at all. I don't know any other device out there that works like that. Of course, once I knew how it worked, I could use it. Not the best interface, but it works.
iRiver, Rio, Archos, Samsung, RCA, Sony, and many others I'm forgetting all offer competing music players that offer most if not all of what you want, often at a cheaper price. So I don't get what you mean by a lack of competition.