Just personal experience here. I have a Windows 2003 server where the drive was something like 83% fragmented after only about 3 months of use. I ran defrag on friday and was surprised to see just a tiny blip of red, with the entire rest of the drive being unused. The drive was only about 10% full, but most of it was data files which grow constantly. Most large data files all had thousands of fragments each. Windows could not have done a worse job at avoiding fragmentation. It's not slow yet, as the database pretty much fits in ram, but what it's doing is generally very bad. This was exactly the problem with FAT32, and I've seen nothing to suggest that NTFS is any better in terms of avoiding fragmentation, despite Microsoft's promises. Luckily NTFS can be defragged without taking it offline, making it acceptable so long as you don't need good performance 24/7.
No errors in 200 days is normal with most filesystems I think. All our servers and my home desktop use ext3, which I've had no problems with. I've used JFS, but only recently. Short of other posts in this thread, I've heard only good things about JFS though.
I did see a Red Hat bug report a while back about very large file write performance issues on ext3: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi? id=156437. I don't know if the fix is in the official kernel yet, or if it was just a RHEL specific bug. The bug report's status is still "ON_QA". A successful workaround for now was to mount the partition with the noreservation option.
That's pretty much why I like Linux. Linux, and other open source, may have faults and snags, but there's always a surefire way to get to the bottom of every problem, with the source. Microsoft error messages are often vague, and hard to debug without the source code or even a good way to audit what's going on behind the scenes. A little bit of me dies every time I run out of easy options and have to run System Restore, or worse yet, reinstall. Luckily this is rare, but it's something that shouldn't have to happen, ever, for certain, unless there's been a hardware failure or serious user error. Every program has bugs. What can make a bug a showstopper is when the power to fix it is not in your hands (within reason).
If I send a bug report to Microsoft, I can predict with 100% certainty (after rounding) that I'll be ignored, or they'll misinterpret my "just FYI" bug report as a support request. And problems almost never go away. New features are simply added around them, and if the problem is widespread (and isn't embarrasing to Microsoft), an often unacceptable workaround is posted in their knowledgebase.
If I submit a bug report to an open source project, no matter how popular the project is, or how minor the bug, within hours I'll get replies from half the developers, including the well known ones. And bugs get fixed.
Now everyone will hear about their products. They don't care about public opinion. Imagine what the users infected with their adware think of them. That's the exposure they wanted, and now they'll get it on a larger scale.
Atroturfing in action. It looks like I'm underrated flamebait. Even in the worst case, you can bet that Microsoft will spend 100x more marketing their indemnification than they will spend on the indemnification itself.
Maybe XP has nothing he wants enough to purchase an upgrade or a new PC. Like many users, I have window themes and cleartype turned off in XP. I can't stand the softness of cleartype. With those disabled it looks and works like 2000 (mine looks more like '95), but a little heavier, with the need to reactivate if I make any substantial hardware replacements. XP is like a Windows 2000 PlaySkool edition.
is the Kama Sutra remover that's no longer of any use now that they've waited so long to release it. Now they're just kicking those 3 infected users while their down. They're basically saying "Now that it's deleted all your documents, here's that removal tool we decided not to release a couple weeks ago, so you wouldn't be bothered with an unscheduled patch release."
I meant plaintiff. Microsoft software in the enterprise is a ticking legal timebomb, and the primary threat comes from Microsoft itself, even if you're careful about licensing. http://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+%2Bbsa
Not patent suits. They (or the BSA on their behalf) have sued and threatened to sue a lot of customers over accidental infringement, sometimes amounting to less than a percent of the customer's total licenses. A couple mistakes (couple hundred $ worth) among thousands of legitimate installs can easily cost a company $100,000 to settle. Most settle rather than risk it in court. In the past, they've even let companies get away without a fine if the company replaced all their competing products with Microsoft software.
If you don't purchase and install MS software in your enterprise, there's no risk of getting sued by MS for purchasing and installing their software. Otherwise, the risk grows as your company grows.
Their indemnification is a worthless gesture until I see a company sued for using Microsoft software, and Microsoft indemnifies themm, as opposed to Microsoft being the plaintiff.
Your company will find stuff people will pay a lot for. Do something to get some of that money. Work hard. Work effectively. Spend wisely. Not be sued. Not compete (as in don't do what others are doing). You'll stop spending all day on slashdot. And you'll forget all you learned about right and wrong, and accept that moral_value=personal_benefit-risk*personal_consequ ence, as the market intended (though replace "personal" with "shareholder" when explaining to the investors).
Don't enable the "search across computers" option. I doubt Google would enable it by default, as that would suck up a terrible amount of bandwidth and server storage, unless they're confident that they have the resources to burn on a feature that nobody will use (to search computers they own [bad pun]).
Microsoft always has to leave some room for improvement, so that people will buy future releases. I'm sure they still regret the whole year 2000 "lets make good software" fiasco. Companies are going to keep running those 2k products until their hardware fails. That why they decided to delay Longhorn/Vista so many years.
It's just a red cross. You can draw it in a 3x3 pixel grid. That's 9 bits in monochrome. Every game that has health powerups has red crosses. And the use of the symbol is ancient. When I see a red cross, I don't always associate it with "The Red Cross". There's a sort of protect it or lose it standard for trademarks, and they haven't protected it. Now it's too late. Eveyone uses it. The cat's out of the bag.
There's more to security than just using Linux. Did they see an example of something that was configured insecurely? Or are they truly just quoting stuff they read in magazines and on the internet? If showing them how they're mistaken doesn't work, maybe they'll shut up if you start tossing some FreeBSD servers into the mix. Or maybe you can just boldly state that Linux has given you far less trouble than Windows as far as security, flexibility, performance, scalability, and reliability are concerned.
If someone adds a DRM to a product, it becomes illegal in the United States (DMCA) and many other countries to take it out. Because of this, by clause 7 of the GPL version 2, it seems that it's already illegal to implement a law-enforced DRM into existing GPL'd code in many countries, and distribute that program. Without that clause, for example, Microsoft could make a DRM'd Microsoft Linux that is legally protected from modification by anyone besides Microsoft. You wouldn't be sued for violating their license terms, because it'd still be under the GPL. Instead they'd sue your for breaking their DRM. Instead of them violating the GPL, the law would be violating the GPL on their behalf, and clause 7 of the GPL 2 protects against this by revoking their right to redistribute if this happens. The GPL3 just makes this more clear by saying that DRM is incompatible with the GPL.
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That was a terrible problem, but I haven't seen it outside of the Win9x line.
I like filesystems that are generally ok to use without a UPS, but on top of that I use a UPS anyway, and disable write caching.
Just personal experience here. I have a Windows 2003 server where the drive was something like 83% fragmented after only about 3 months of use. I ran defrag on friday and was surprised to see just a tiny blip of red, with the entire rest of the drive being unused. The drive was only about 10% full, but most of it was data files which grow constantly. Most large data files all had thousands of fragments each. Windows could not have done a worse job at avoiding fragmentation. It's not slow yet, as the database pretty much fits in ram, but what it's doing is generally very bad. This was exactly the problem with FAT32, and I've seen nothing to suggest that NTFS is any better in terms of avoiding fragmentation, despite Microsoft's promises. Luckily NTFS can be defragged without taking it offline, making it acceptable so long as you don't need good performance 24/7.
No errors in 200 days is normal with most filesystems I think. All our servers and my home desktop use ext3, which I've had no problems with. I've used JFS, but only recently. Short of other posts in this thread, I've heard only good things about JFS though.
? id=156437. I don't know if the fix is in the official kernel yet, or if it was just a RHEL specific bug. The bug report's status is still "ON_QA". A successful workaround for now was to mount the partition with the noreservation option.
I did see a Red Hat bug report a while back about very large file write performance issues on ext3: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi
Not everyone needs the same reasons to like or dislike something.
That's pretty much why I like Linux. Linux, and other open source, may have faults and snags, but there's always a surefire way to get to the bottom of every problem, with the source. Microsoft error messages are often vague, and hard to debug without the source code or even a good way to audit what's going on behind the scenes. A little bit of me dies every time I run out of easy options and have to run System Restore, or worse yet, reinstall. Luckily this is rare, but it's something that shouldn't have to happen, ever, for certain, unless there's been a hardware failure or serious user error. Every program has bugs. What can make a bug a showstopper is when the power to fix it is not in your hands (within reason).
If I send a bug report to Microsoft, I can predict with 100% certainty (after rounding) that I'll be ignored, or they'll misinterpret my "just FYI" bug report as a support request. And problems almost never go away. New features are simply added around them, and if the problem is widespread (and isn't embarrasing to Microsoft), an often unacceptable workaround is posted in their knowledgebase.
If I submit a bug report to an open source project, no matter how popular the project is, or how minor the bug, within hours I'll get replies from half the developers, including the well known ones. And bugs get fixed.
Work all night. Sleep during the day.
That or invent time travel.
Now everyone will hear about their products. They don't care about public opinion. Imagine what the users infected with their adware think of them. That's the exposure they wanted, and now they'll get it on a larger scale.
Not a single user running Konqueror on FreeBSD has been infected by malware through their web browser.
I'll probably be alright using Firefox on Linux though.
Atroturfing in action. It looks like I'm underrated flamebait. Even in the worst case, you can bet that Microsoft will spend 100x more marketing their indemnification than they will spend on the indemnification itself.
Maybe XP has nothing he wants enough to purchase an upgrade or a new PC. Like many users, I have window themes and cleartype turned off in XP. I can't stand the softness of cleartype. With those disabled it looks and works like 2000 (mine looks more like '95), but a little heavier, with the need to reactivate if I make any substantial hardware replacements. XP is like a Windows 2000 PlaySkool edition.
is the Kama Sutra remover that's no longer of any use now that they've waited so long to release it. Now they're just kicking those 3 infected users while their down. They're basically saying "Now that it's deleted all your documents, here's that removal tool we decided not to release a couple weeks ago, so you wouldn't be bothered with an unscheduled patch release."
I meant plaintiff. Microsoft software in the enterprise is a ticking legal timebomb, and the primary threat comes from Microsoft itself, even if you're careful about licensing. http://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+%2Bbsa
Not patent suits. They (or the BSA on their behalf) have sued and threatened to sue a lot of customers over accidental infringement, sometimes amounting to less than a percent of the customer's total licenses. A couple mistakes (couple hundred $ worth) among thousands of legitimate installs can easily cost a company $100,000 to settle. Most settle rather than risk it in court. In the past, they've even let companies get away without a fine if the company replaced all their competing products with Microsoft software.
If you don't purchase and install MS software in your enterprise, there's no risk of getting sued by MS for purchasing and installing their software. Otherwise, the risk grows as your company grows.
Their indemnification is a worthless gesture until I see a company sued for using Microsoft software, and Microsoft indemnifies themm, as opposed to Microsoft being the plaintiff.
Anyone who says the average computer has more than 2 pieces of spyware is counting cookies.
Your company will find stuff people will pay a lot for. Do something to get some of that money. Work hard. Work effectively. Spend wisely. Not be sued. Not compete (as in don't do what others are doing). You'll stop spending all day on slashdot. And you'll forget all you learned about right and wrong, and accept that moral_value=personal_benefit-risk*personal_consequ ence, as the market intended (though replace "personal" with "shareholder" when explaining to the investors).
Disclaimer: I may be full of **it.
Don't enable the "search across computers" option. I doubt Google would enable it by default, as that would suck up a terrible amount of bandwidth and server storage, unless they're confident that they have the resources to burn on a feature that nobody will use (to search computers they own [bad pun]).
Microsoft always has to leave some room for improvement, so that people will buy future releases. I'm sure they still regret the whole year 2000 "lets make good software" fiasco. Companies are going to keep running those 2k products until their hardware fails. That why they decided to delay Longhorn/Vista so many years.
It's just a red cross. You can draw it in a 3x3 pixel grid. That's 9 bits in monochrome. Every game that has health powerups has red crosses. And the use of the symbol is ancient. When I see a red cross, I don't always associate it with "The Red Cross". There's a sort of protect it or lose it standard for trademarks, and they haven't protected it. Now it's too late. Eveyone uses it. The cat's out of the bag.
There's more to security than just using Linux. Did they see an example of something that was configured insecurely? Or are they truly just quoting stuff they read in magazines and on the internet? If showing them how they're mistaken doesn't work, maybe they'll shut up if you start tossing some FreeBSD servers into the mix. Or maybe you can just boldly state that Linux has given you far less trouble than Windows as far as security, flexibility, performance, scalability, and reliability are concerned.
I recently saw Terminator III DVD's for $5.50 at WalMart.
Going forward is easy. The hard part is not dying.
I wouldn't want to standardize myself on one single language. I can't imagine an entire company doing it.
If someone adds a DRM to a product, it becomes illegal in the United States (DMCA) and many other countries to take it out. Because of this, by clause 7 of the GPL version 2, it seems that it's already illegal to implement a law-enforced DRM into existing GPL'd code in many countries, and distribute that program. Without that clause, for example, Microsoft could make a DRM'd Microsoft Linux that is legally protected from modification by anyone besides Microsoft. You wouldn't be sued for violating their license terms, because it'd still be under the GPL. Instead they'd sue your for breaking their DRM. Instead of them violating the GPL, the law would be violating the GPL on their behalf, and clause 7 of the GPL 2 protects against this by revoking their right to redistribute if this happens. The GPL3 just makes this more clear by saying that DRM is incompatible with the GPL.