It always amuses me to see company after company get cozy with MSFT only to watch in disbelief when they are squashed like a little bug. Think Sybase (squashed by SQL Server) and Siebel (soon to be squashed, maybe) and many others. Perhaps at this point Miquel will walk away and say, we'll this was only an intellectual exercise anyway. I wish I had time to waste like that.
In addition to being naive, I agree that there seems to be a little bit of MSFT adulation to blame from what I've read by Miquel. It seems he is entirely unaware of other competitive solutions such as, most obviously, Java.
MSFT uses it's monopoly to brilliant advantage against various adversaries. Had not Linus written Linux, I believe MSFT would own the server market in addition to desktop, having wiped out each overpriced, proprietary Unix one-by-one. Why those folks don't spend their valuable time working against MSFT instead of in their favor is beyond me.
It's sort of like Ralph Nader running for office and wondering why Republicans are supporting him. Suckers! They know the more successful Nader is the more votes taken away from the Dems!
Finally, here's what Sosnoski thinks, he's a rather sharp programmer living "in the Shadow of Redmond" so I think he knows what he's talking about, and he too points out that, while the Mono team is nowhere close to anything competitive to.NET, *even* if they do eventually get close, they will be talking to the lawyers.
My thoughts are, from past history, they won't even need to bother with lawyers. MSFT will just use it's old tricks they used against Borland and all the others, i.e. poorly documented or unpublished APIs, secret hooks, etc.
What! You mean all that Star Wars stuff was a sham?? The shield that was supposed to protect us all?
Steinbeck (in Sea of Cortez?) had some very interesting thoughts about those who spend enormous effort building walls around themselves, spending such incredible amounts on defense, and that eventually the walls come tumbling down. Rome comes to mind.
And guess what the W. Bush government and CIA did? four years ago, the whole of the Netherlands were like: "What the fuck? Why did Americans vote for Bush instead of Gore?" I guess we're missing American news media.
You'd be surprised actually. I recall being out of the country during the Gulf War, out of the zone of what 'reality distortion', and remember wondering what's gotten into the folks back home? All of a sudden Kuwait? When we happily supported Iraq vs. Iran? Reagan with the axis of evil of Grenada and Noriega, the marines blasting speakers at Noriega, almost comical, a farce.
What's happened here is the mainstream media is entirely pro-Bush, from the NYTimes to Fox News, in an almost ridiculous sort of way. There was recently a series called "Homeland Security", usual schlock, but one part was almost like a Bush campaign ad, as a couple snuggled on the couch, holding hands, watching the television reverently as they showed one of Bush's speeches about catching terrorists in Afghanistan. Time used to have big, fawning articles on Bush & Cheney, camera shot from a low angle, Bush striding imperially forward, chin jutting out, on the opposite page a story about Roosevelt or Eisenhower. You get the picture.
Besides, nobody had a clue about Bush. Baseball coach from Texas? Huh? Gore & Lieberman - why is it so hard to come up with good candidates? Anyway, it was the old bait and switch - vote for this simple, genial feller, and he brings in his slew of Mafioso: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Karl Rove, Goebels - now that was the real problem.
Republican revenge for 8 years of Clinton. My how they hated that guy. Still hate 'im.
Anyway, too bad Simpson's not here in the good 'ol U.S. of A. He'd be locked up pronto, what a nutcase. Sure, we're almost a police state here (woe to the tourist who mistakenly photographs a dam or a bridge), but sometimes that's a good thing.
One other advantage of a real modem, in addition to easily supporting Linux, is that you run in hardware what the winmodem does in software, so you offload some processing from the CPU.
BINGO! We have a winner! Evil country A develops software for a fraction of the cost it would normally take in the closed-source land, sells it to Good Countries B through T and V through Z, and makes more money than they would have been able to otherwise.
I think it is bad translation. "To sell" ("vendre" in french) could also mean "to convience" or "to promote", it does not mean necessary that money is involved.
I'd tend to agree, especially from working with State governments here in the U.S., where software written for one state, can actually be used for free by other states, although obviously the installation, training etc is not free, and there may be other restrictions. So I'd imagine federal governments would work in a similar way.
If this is true, it's a mark against JBoss for sure. Funny, I've installed the product, was impressed that it ran with little configuration, but that's about all I've used it for.
There is a very nice open-source webserver called Enhydra that really is impressive, however it sort of fell by the way side in the stampede to EJB-compliancy, too bad, although there are a bunch of commercial sites using the software.
As for JBoss, it seems the news is always a bit muddled, i.e. what's with the "fork" and all that? If it's so great, why do they have to have their employees write in at TSS? I'd be much more impressed, if they just wrote in as employees - show yourself, fools!
For that matter, I've always wondered about Slashdot - seems whenever there's an MSFT post, there are hordes of folks writing in vehemently defensive of MSFT - very suspicious in a tell-tale heart sort of way.
Or take the reviews on Amazon that come of so polished. As soon as I read something like "In chapter 12 the book really shines at...", I skip to the next review. Or like the recent voting on one of those music reality tv shows, star search or what not, where the whole state of Hawaii was busily dialing in to vote for the home-town girl.
Whatever. I think we'll see a movement towards blogs, where I only want to see what James Duncan Davidson has to say (those pictures are great!), the heck with everyone else.
Heh heh. I remember the joke at my school, which had a very tough engineering and computer science (*not* "Comp Sci"!) program, was that all the folks in Law were the ones who couldn't pass Calculus (the first weed-out course, there were many others if you got past that one).
Then there was the joke of what the English majors would do after graduating? Study law of course!
Kidding aside, certainly there are smart folks in law. One former programmer I know is now studying law, patent law to be specific. Might have something there..
Hey, see my other post [slashdot.org]. If this is going to save the industry so much money when is the price of my games going to drop?
Maybe when the price of your shoes drops, i.e. never. I read an interesting article in WSJ about LogiTech, and the cost of a $40 retail mouse. Very interesting that very little actually made it back to China (although, given our deficit, it ain't bad). My interpretation was that the differential gets slurped up by middlemen like Wal-Mart.
I kinda see a future of U.S. companies as shells, distribution channels (think Dell), handle the marketing, get the product out, but all the real work is done elsewhere. Eventually the American consumer will be tapped out, hopefully by then the Indian and Chinese economies will drive the world. Maybe they already are.
I use WSAD, which is built on Eclipse. It's pretty darn impressive. The main goal was to provide a great development environment and I'd say they achieved that. Certainly there are other great IDEs (IntelliJ?). It's SWT, not Swing, and you can see the difference in apps that do use swing such as JEdit, Sun's NetBeans and Togethersoft's TogetherJ. Yes they are good, but when you use a product every day every little bit of speed, ease of use is important.
Hmm. I've got some prior art then, as I've been adding SQL "scripts" to XML for over a year. So they need to qualify their patent a little and restrict it to VBScript - I could care less about that.
If you avoid platform, compiler, and processor specific features, C++ is even more portable than Java.
Problem is, when given one of those constraints, i.e. "if you just ", well, that never happens and you get platform specific code. Certainly C and C++ were more portable than their predecessors, but Java is an even further improvement. Thus some rather cool stuff, like I can build on NT and deploy to Solaris, OS/390 (and now zOS, or AIX. Same exact jar. These are not trivial apps either, thousands of custom classes with a 100 or so supporting jars, all running on an application server (WebSphere).
Pretty cool, and it works so well, you sometimes forget what a tremendous feat it is.
The.NET requirement is probably why it's restricted to 2k and xp, seemingly an odd choice, until you see that founder worked at MSFT. Old habits die hard? Other than that it's hard to think of _some_ good reason to use.NET for the client, as you've pointed out one major flaw, and especially when so many better choices are available ( mainly samba as others have posted). The choice of Linux for the server is good however.
For one thing, it's an IE add-on (similar to a GoogleBar and others), not a patch. So it's a messy solution to begin with.
There's a saying for this: crap built upon crap.
There they allocate a string of 256 bytes, but never even bother to clean it up!
I'm not even sure if that memory is going to be cleaned up when you close all the IE windows, since it's really a Windows system component...[more scary windows stuff]
Seems like a combination of the lousy design of the Windows components coupled with using C. Long, long time since I've worried about destroy and the like, what with the availability of better languages like Java, etc. Granted once buffer overflows are a thing of the past, there will be new holes, but at least we will be moving forward.
But even that's not the worst thing. Their code actually contains a buffer overflow, allowing the attacker to execute code on your machine with the privileges of the IE process just by crafting an invalid URL link and getting you to click on it!
Good catch. So one security flaw fixed, opening up another flaw - a little embarrasing, except MSFT did the same thing a few weeks ago in their flurry of untested patches. But it does show the inherent advantage of open source in that *anyone* can review the code, and fix it, without resorting to messy hacks such as this.
Granted, not your average programmer can do this, and yes you're right, it does take detailed knowledge, and a little familiarity with assembly.
Microsoft, in it's efforts to steer people away from FoxPro to Access, many years ago, decided to not bother patching some serious issues with FoxPro. What happened was there was a very poor piece of code that tried to figure out how fast your processor was when FoxPro started up, I forget exactly what it was for, but the programmer(s) made a small bug where if the processor was extremely fast, the value would be set to -1, and FoxPro would promptly crash. Worked fine for years until some of the new processors came out.
Anyway, Microsoft stalled on fixing this timing issue bug, so some smart fellow tweaked the exe file to fix it. Yeah, not even assembler, we're talking hex. Pretty damn cool.
Our company ran a Retail system on an IBM PS/2 with 16MB with SCO Xenix. There were only a couple times it crashed
1. when there was a kernel panic: memory parity,
The IBM support person replaced the memory and said that since DOS didn't stress the memory as much as Unix/Xenix, even though it passed the memory test when you boot up, that didn't necessarily mean there wasn't a problem with the memory.
2. Uploading data via a tricoder to a serial port crashed the machine - the port settings were incorrect. This was a real bug, obviously this shouldn't happen.
Overall, this machine happily supported 14 users with 16mb (granted no fancy gui) and ran for days weeks months with no reboots. In fact we hardly shut it off at all - not altogether a good thing as when we did take it down for maintenance, there was way too much dust inside.
The company later decided to ditch the system and install a fancy new OS and Retail system, all requiring new hardware and more money. They finally made the conversion, got everything working, and a few years later they went bankrupt. Oh well.
Once Microsoft Office is a.NET application, they would only have one codebase to maintain. (Bye bye Mac Office, No need for Win64 Office)
Well... it would be a stretch to say MSFT doesn't already use (mostly) one codebase for their apps. You can read an interesting account of this, specifically about Excel in Steve Maguire's excellent book Writing Solid Code. Maguire was initially hired to work on MSFT's Mac apps, and subsequently was a big proponent for moving to cross-platform code, and spent much effort in improving shared libraries. So the statement was correct years ago but not now, although perhaps they have taken a step back since Maguire wrote the book. Especially seeing how quickly they got the Mac Office versions out there, it seems doubtful that would've been possible had there been separate codebases.
.NET will definitely make it even easier, but the real benefit won't be for Linux/MONO users, it'll be for the variety of Windows users - cross platform meaning Win16, Win32, Win64 etc. I agree with the other posters in that MONO will suffer from the same problems as WINE, MSFT will make sure things don't work just quite right unless it's 100%.NET inside, and MONO will always be behind the curve - software does not stand still, and MSFT won't be waiting for MONO to catch up. That's some pipe dream.
The entire article is a joke, and a very poorly written one to. At least, I hope it's a joke because if it isn't then it has to be one of the worst articles I've ever read, and I've read some Jon Katz articles before.
Gotta agree - and judging by the vehement defense of XP and IE by Slashdotters, it's was very successful, so it's actually pretty funny. I admit it took me a while to get it (little early for April Fools Day), but having read some of Roblimo's other articles, I'm guessing this is a tongue-in-cheek poke at the somewhat-techy PC magazine "when I grow up I wanna be a geek" author (Katz, Dvorak come to mind) writing about their inane, clumsy, clueless attempts at trying to figure out what all the fuss is about this "Linux thing".
Few comments though - this does show how far Linux has come, as it's real strength is server side, not desktop pc. That he can switch to XP and not be too different is impressive. Also the fact that lots of familiar free software is still available. It illustrates that the Linux phenomenon has put the pressure on MSFT to improve Windows greatly (Win2k ain't bad, XP good too).
This is a good thing. Look at IE, MSFT seems to be letting it languish, not even attempting to fix certain bugs, and the no tab pages is a legit gripe. Come on, how hard is it to add a tab page? It seems the only workaround, is to download a Windows only Google thingamajig -huh? - dunno, out of the box with Opera/Mozilla/etc.
Or maybe they are finding the old codebase of IE too hard to make changes to, which was the reasoning behind the Mozilla rewrite, which set them back a little - perhaps that's now paying off with the ability to easily add new features.
Very generous of the Slashdot crowd to defend MSFT, but seriously, since when has "fair" been part of MSFT's vocabulary? A better approach would be to take this wonderful improvement with a little scepticism.
unless it was deliberately implemented
I wonder if MSFT deliberately implemented the "feature" of not recognizing any non-MSFT OS on your harddrive, so that in order to dual-boot you need to make sure you install Windows _before_ you install Linux, etc.
I think the problem here is MSFT is the 800lb gorilla, whether it was deliberate or not, it works in their favor to not work well with other OSes, so from a historical standpoint, it's likely there will be little glitches in the BIOS, that make it difficult to use non-Windows OSes.
Another great example is the Winmodem. To the happy consumer, looks like great idea - save money, put all the hardware of a modem in software, vendor sells a cheaper modem.. but customer gets a slow, cheap modem that only works on Windows.
Actually Mass has done quite a bit as far as taxes go and now ranks 37th or so, with Wisconsin 2nd highest interestingly. Sources? Check Money magazine, and pick "best place for retirement" or something like that.
Maybe they have been able to lower their budgets through the use of open source (and open standards), now that's a nice idea, as far as this taxpayer is concerned.
The result is that simple hybridity does very little for security.There are already examples of viruses that have been designed to exploit multiple vulnerabilities on different platforms - the Moriss worm itself was intended to exploit multiple vulnerabilities on the same platform.
The latter sentence contradicts the first, so the point is lost, and instead supports what the @stake authors are saying, that, like 'mono' agriculture, when there is an environment in which one company has a monopoly, it makes it very easy for a virus to cause alot of damage.
If you think that Unix is such a great security architecture take a look at the C language
Certainly OSs could be written in other languages, but C is the language of choice for many reasons. Perhaps Java? VB? Ever wonder what NT is written in? Yep - a few versions of DOS were in assembler, then they went to C.
I don't see much evidence of defensive programming or security engineering methodology when looking at UNIX code.
Perhaps to the untrained eye, but not to any CS student taking an operating system class since it would probably cover the details of the Unix security system. The Unix security system is actually quite sophisticated, and probably has its roots in Multics (since the authors also worked on Multics), which goes even farther back.
The flaw in the biological analogy that he uses is that biological viruses evolve through Darwinian processes, survival of the fittests. Viruses evolve through a Lamarkian process, their creators do analyse the environmental challenges they face and adapt in direct and planned responses to those changes.
Exactly. And that's why Unix security keeps getting better and better.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition to being naive, I agree that there seems to be a little bit of MSFT adulation to blame from what I've read by Miquel. It seems he is entirely unaware of other competitive solutions such as, most obviously, Java.
MSFT uses it's monopoly to brilliant advantage against various adversaries. Had not Linus written Linux, I believe MSFT would own the server market in addition to desktop, having wiped out each overpriced, proprietary Unix one-by-one. Why those folks don't spend their valuable time working against MSFT instead of in their favor is beyond me.
It's sort of like Ralph Nader running for office and wondering why Republicans are supporting him. Suckers! They know the more successful Nader is the more votes taken away from the Dems!
Finally, here's what Sosnoski thinks, he's a rather sharp programmer living "in the Shadow of Redmond" so I think he knows what he's talking about, and he too points out that, while the Mono team is nowhere close to anything competitive to .NET, *even* if they do eventually get close, they will be talking to the lawyers.
My thoughts are, from past history, they won't even need to bother with lawyers. MSFT will just use it's old tricks they used against Borland and all the others, i.e. poorly documented or unpublished APIs, secret hooks, etc.
Steinbeck (in Sea of Cortez?) had some very interesting thoughts about those who spend enormous effort building walls around themselves, spending such incredible amounts on defense, and that eventually the walls come tumbling down. Rome comes to mind.
You'd be surprised actually. I recall being out of the country during the Gulf War, out of the zone of what 'reality distortion', and remember wondering what's gotten into the folks back home? All of a sudden Kuwait? When we happily supported Iraq vs. Iran? Reagan with the axis of evil of Grenada and Noriega, the marines blasting speakers at Noriega, almost comical, a farce.
What's happened here is the mainstream media is entirely pro-Bush, from the NYTimes to Fox News, in an almost ridiculous sort of way. There was recently a series called "Homeland Security", usual schlock, but one part was almost like a Bush campaign ad, as a couple snuggled on the couch, holding hands, watching the television reverently as they showed one of Bush's speeches about catching terrorists in Afghanistan. Time used to have big, fawning articles on Bush & Cheney, camera shot from a low angle, Bush striding imperially forward, chin jutting out, on the opposite page a story about Roosevelt or Eisenhower. You get the picture.
Besides, nobody had a clue about Bush. Baseball coach from Texas? Huh? Gore & Lieberman - why is it so hard to come up with good candidates? Anyway, it was the old bait and switch - vote for this simple, genial feller, and he brings in his slew of Mafioso: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Karl Rove, Goebels - now that was the real problem.
Republican revenge for 8 years of Clinton. My how they hated that guy. Still hate 'im.
Anyway, too bad Simpson's not here in the good 'ol U.S. of A. He'd be locked up pronto, what a nutcase. Sure, we're almost a police state here (woe to the tourist who mistakenly photographs a dam or a bridge), but sometimes that's a good thing.
I believe it was from Stalin. And I think it's referenced in one of Orwell's books.
One other advantage of a real modem, in addition to easily supporting Linux, is that you run in hardware what the winmodem does in software, so you offload some processing from the CPU.
I think it is bad translation. "To sell" ("vendre" in french) could also mean "to convience" or "to promote", it does not mean necessary that money is involved.
I'd tend to agree, especially from working with State governments here in the U.S., where software written for one state, can actually be used for free by other states, although obviously the installation, training etc is not free, and there may be other restrictions. So I'd imagine federal governments would work in a similar way.
There is a very nice open-source webserver called Enhydra that really is impressive, however it sort of fell by the way side in the stampede to EJB-compliancy, too bad, although there are a bunch of commercial sites using the software.
As for JBoss, it seems the news is always a bit muddled, i.e. what's with the "fork" and all that? If it's so great, why do they have to have their employees write in at TSS? I'd be much more impressed, if they just wrote in as employees - show yourself, fools!
For that matter, I've always wondered about Slashdot - seems whenever there's an MSFT post, there are hordes of folks writing in vehemently defensive of MSFT - very suspicious in a tell-tale heart sort of way.
Or take the reviews on Amazon that come of so polished. As soon as I read something like "In chapter 12 the book really shines at ...", I skip to the next review. Or like the recent voting on one of those music reality tv shows, star search or what not, where the whole state of Hawaii was busily dialing in to vote for the home-town girl.
Whatever. I think we'll see a movement towards blogs, where I only want to see what James Duncan Davidson has to say (those pictures are great!), the heck with everyone else.
Heh heh. I remember the joke at my school, which had a very tough engineering and computer science (*not* "Comp Sci"!) program, was that all the folks in Law were the ones who couldn't pass Calculus (the first weed-out course, there were many others if you got past that one).
Then there was the joke of what the English majors would do after graduating? Study law of course!
Kidding aside, certainly there are smart folks in law. One former programmer I know is now studying law, patent law to be specific. Might have something there..
Maybe when the price of your shoes drops, i.e. never. I read an interesting article in WSJ about LogiTech, and the cost of a $40 retail mouse. Very interesting that very little actually made it back to China (although, given our deficit, it ain't bad). My interpretation was that the differential gets slurped up by middlemen like Wal-Mart.
I kinda see a future of U.S. companies as shells, distribution channels (think Dell), handle the marketing, get the product out, but all the real work is done elsewhere. Eventually the American consumer will be tapped out, hopefully by then the Indian and Chinese economies will drive the world. Maybe they already are.
Also here's a good article on SWT and GCJ.
See the following link for the mwave modem in IBM thinkpads. Also for the T23
Hmm. I've got some prior art then, as I've been adding SQL "scripts" to XML for over a year. So they need to qualify their patent a little and restrict it to VBScript - I could care less about that.
Problem is, when given one of those constraints, i.e. "if you just ", well, that never happens and you get platform specific code. Certainly C and C++ were more portable than their predecessors, but Java is an even further improvement. Thus some rather cool stuff, like I can build on NT and deploy to Solaris, OS/390 (and now zOS, or AIX. Same exact jar. These are not trivial apps either, thousands of custom classes with a 100 or so supporting jars, all running on an application server (WebSphere).
Pretty cool, and it works so well, you sometimes forget what a tremendous feat it is.
The .NET requirement is probably why it's restricted to 2k and xp, seemingly an odd choice, until you see that founder worked at MSFT. Old habits die hard? Other than that it's hard to think of _some_ good reason to use .NET for the client, as you've pointed out one major flaw, and especially when so many better choices are available ( mainly samba as others have posted). The choice of Linux for the server is good however.
There's a saying for this: crap built upon crap.
There they allocate a string of 256 bytes, but never even bother to clean it up! I'm not even sure if that memory is going to be cleaned up when you close all the IE windows, since it's really a Windows system component ...[more scary windows stuff]
Seems like a combination of the lousy design of the Windows components coupled with using C. Long, long time since I've worried about destroy and the like, what with the availability of better languages like Java, etc. Granted once buffer overflows are a thing of the past, there will be new holes, but at least we will be moving forward.
But even that's not the worst thing. Their code actually contains a buffer overflow, allowing the attacker to execute code on your machine with the privileges of the IE process just by crafting an invalid URL link and getting you to click on it!
Good catch. So one security flaw fixed, opening up another flaw - a little embarrasing, except MSFT did the same thing a few weeks ago in their flurry of untested patches. But it does show the inherent advantage of open source in that *anyone* can review the code, and fix it, without resorting to messy hacks such as this.
Microsoft, in it's efforts to steer people away from FoxPro to Access, many years ago, decided to not bother patching some serious issues with FoxPro. What happened was there was a very poor piece of code that tried to figure out how fast your processor was when FoxPro started up, I forget exactly what it was for, but the programmer(s) made a small bug where if the processor was extremely fast, the value would be set to -1, and FoxPro would promptly crash. Worked fine for years until some of the new processors came out.
Anyway, Microsoft stalled on fixing this timing issue bug, so some smart fellow tweaked the exe file to fix it. Yeah, not even assembler, we're talking hex. Pretty damn cool.
That reminds me of, a while back, a company selling high quality Sony betamaxes for storage. Seemed like a nifty idea.
1. when there was a kernel panic: memory parity, The IBM support person replaced the memory and said that since DOS didn't stress the memory as much as Unix/Xenix, even though it passed the memory test when you boot up, that didn't necessarily mean there wasn't a problem with the memory.
2. Uploading data via a tricoder to a serial port crashed the machine - the port settings were incorrect. This was a real bug, obviously this shouldn't happen.
Overall, this machine happily supported 14 users with 16mb (granted no fancy gui) and ran for days weeks months with no reboots. In fact we hardly shut it off at all - not altogether a good thing as when we did take it down for maintenance, there was way too much dust inside.
The company later decided to ditch the system and install a fancy new OS and Retail system, all requiring new hardware and more money. They finally made the conversion, got everything working, and a few years later they went bankrupt. Oh well.
Well ... it would be a stretch to say MSFT doesn't already use (mostly) one codebase for their apps. You can read an interesting account of this, specifically about Excel in Steve Maguire's excellent book Writing Solid Code . Maguire was initially hired to work on MSFT's Mac apps, and subsequently was a big proponent for moving to cross-platform code, and spent much effort in improving shared libraries. So the statement was correct years ago but not now, although perhaps they have taken a step back since Maguire wrote the book. Especially seeing how quickly they got the Mac Office versions out there, it seems doubtful that would've been possible had there been separate codebases.
.NET will definitely make it even easier, but the real benefit won't be for Linux/MONO users, it'll be for the variety of Windows users - cross platform meaning Win16, Win32, Win64 etc. I agree with the other posters in that MONO will suffer from the same problems as WINE, MSFT will make sure things don't work just quite right unless it's 100% .NET inside, and MONO will always be behind the curve - software does not stand still, and MSFT won't be waiting for MONO to catch up. That's some pipe dream.
Gotta agree - and judging by the vehement defense of XP and IE by Slashdotters, it's was very successful, so it's actually pretty funny. I admit it took me a while to get it (little early for April Fools Day), but having read some of Roblimo's other articles, I'm guessing this is a tongue-in-cheek poke at the somewhat-techy PC magazine "when I grow up I wanna be a geek" author (Katz, Dvorak come to mind) writing about their inane, clumsy, clueless attempts at trying to figure out what all the fuss is about this "Linux thing".
Few comments though - this does show how far Linux has come, as it's real strength is server side, not desktop pc. That he can switch to XP and not be too different is impressive. Also the fact that lots of familiar free software is still available. It illustrates that the Linux phenomenon has put the pressure on MSFT to improve Windows greatly (Win2k ain't bad, XP good too).
This is a good thing. Look at IE, MSFT seems to be letting it languish, not even attempting to fix certain bugs, and the no tab pages is a legit gripe. Come on, how hard is it to add a tab page? It seems the only workaround, is to download a Windows only Google thingamajig -huh? - dunno, out of the box with Opera/Mozilla/etc.
Or maybe they are finding the old codebase of IE too hard to make changes to, which was the reasoning behind the Mozilla rewrite, which set them back a little - perhaps that's now paying off with the ability to easily add new features.
unless it was deliberately implemented
I wonder if MSFT deliberately implemented the "feature" of not recognizing any non-MSFT OS on your harddrive, so that in order to dual-boot you need to make sure you install Windows _before_ you install Linux, etc.I think the problem here is MSFT is the 800lb gorilla, whether it was deliberate or not, it works in their favor to not work well with other OSes, so from a historical standpoint, it's likely there will be little glitches in the BIOS, that make it difficult to use non-Windows OSes.
Another great example is the Winmodem. To the happy consumer, looks like great idea - save money, put all the hardware of a modem in software, vendor sells a cheaper modem .. but customer gets a slow, cheap modem that only works on Windows.
If you thought Microsoft licensing was prohibitively expensive, try it with a 300 % devaluation of your currency. Peru, Argentina, Brazil
Maybe they have been able to lower their budgets through the use of open source (and open standards), now that's a nice idea, as far as this taxpayer is concerned.
The result is that simple hybridity does very little for security.There are already examples of viruses that have been designed to exploit multiple vulnerabilities on different platforms - the Moriss worm itself was intended to exploit multiple vulnerabilities on the same platform.
The latter sentence contradicts the first, so the point is lost, and instead supports what the @stake authors are saying, that, like 'mono' agriculture, when there is an environment in which one company has a monopoly, it makes it very easy for a virus to cause alot of damage.
If you think that Unix is such a great security architecture take a look at the C language Certainly OSs could be written in other languages, but C is the language of choice for many reasons. Perhaps Java? VB? Ever wonder what NT is written in? Yep - a few versions of DOS were in assembler, then they went to C.
I don't see much evidence of defensive programming or security engineering methodology when looking at UNIX code.
Perhaps to the untrained eye, but not to any CS student taking an operating system class since it would probably cover the details of the Unix security system. The Unix security system is actually quite sophisticated, and probably has its roots in Multics (since the authors also worked on Multics), which goes even farther back.
The flaw in the biological analogy that he uses is that biological viruses evolve through Darwinian processes, survival of the fittests. Viruses evolve through a Lamarkian process, their creators do analyse the environmental challenges they face and adapt in direct and planned responses to those changes.
Exactly. And that's why Unix security keeps getting better and better.
Kemenywas a Hungarian by birth, mathematician and co-inventor (with Thomas Kurz) of the BASIC language.