I've tried various operating systems in VPC including Windows 3.11, 95, 98, NT4, 2000 and XP.
Though I can't say absolutely conclusively since I have only one Mac, and didn't do measurements (and only a fool would trust a benchmarking program in an emulator). I found NT4 to be the most responsive.
There seems to be a problem with running DOS programs in VPC (yes, with DOS VPC additions) that causes VPC to eat 100% CPU even when the emulated CPU is doing very little. I guess it's hard to tell when DOS applications (and windows 3.1) are idle.
The problem is improved slightly in 95/98, but it still seems to use lots of native CPU when the emulated CPU is doing nothing.
With the NT kernel the performance of the emulated OS seems to be more in line with what I'd expect, in other words when the CPU is idle, it uses almost no CPU time at all. So as you would expect (from MS anyway) performance is inversely proportional to how modern the OS is.
In terms of performance NT4 seems to be the best, and it's what I use since I only need to use it for Access and some IE only websites. If there isn't some special feature that is only available in 2000 or XP. Best of all if you work in a large organization, there's probably a legitimate and licensed copy of NT4 lying around gathering dust somewhere.
I was going to mod you into oblivion, but I just HAD to reply.
If the entire Microsoft organisation (which undoubtedly employs some of the world's finest software engineers and quality assurance experts) can't make Windows run stably, what makes you think that a bunch of geeks on Slashdot with no access to the source code, and bound by a license that makes reverse-engineering and patching of Windows illegal are going to be able to?
Because that wasn't (and isn't) where they want to compete. They are aimed at the professional high-end desktop market. They've never had a cheap entry-level option--they still don't.
Actually a cheap entry level machine is exactly what the Apple II was for a long time, and it was quite successful at it, surviving in the form of the Apple IIe until 1993.
Sadly for Apple, their souped-up 8 bit offerings aimed at business failed miserably because they were overpriced and underpowered in comparison to IBM's PC, which entered the market at about $1500USD while the Apple III cost about $3500 the time.
Apple continued to sell the Apple II in the home computer market, but missed the small business market entirely in their price lineup with the Mac costing nearly twice as much as an entry-level PC at the time of introduction.
I'm pretty sure that Apple would love to sell computers into the low-end of the market if they could do so without cannibalising the profit margins on their current range.
At the moment, they are eating away at the advantages of the PC by using the same expansion busses as the PC, and slowly bringing down the price of their whole range.
They couldn't simply introduce a Mac that cost half the price of their current range and expect anyone reasonable to buy their high end machines, but I'm convinced that they want a slice of the low end of the market just as much as Dell or HP do.
For the record; in case I sound like I'm bagging Apple, I'm writing this post on a nice aluminium PowerBook, also I've deliberately avoided mentioning operating systems because I consider that a matter of personal preference, but it should be clear which side of the fence I'm on.
"Now imagine what a phenomenal product GIMP would be in the eyes of graphic artists who now use photoshop if only the people who had complained about it could be bothered to FIX what they see as problems. A few small years worth of effort in total, very little from each person who has seen something wrong, and the free tool would have surpassed the proprietary one years ago. Instead, all we get are more complaints."
This is of course exactly the kind of idiocy the author of the article was complaining about. Imagine if, on the other hand the GIMP programmers weren't just working to scratch their own itch.
They'd accept user's complaints as a legitimate roadmap to the areas in which they are failing to satisfy their user base, and do something about it, and respond positively by addressing the complaint personally, or as a team by attempting to entice someone with the neccessary skills to do the fixing.
Imagine what a phenomenal product GIMP would be if the authors were prepared to attempt to resolve all complaints by managing users complaints as they would a technical issue.
Just a few years of attempting to address all complaints, not just scratching the itch of the core programming team, and the free tool would surpass the proprietary one, by being responsive to the user rather than bound by cost/benefit analysis like commercial software vendors.
Of course, this assumes that the users complaints are actually legitimate and substantive complaints and not just assinine and meaningless twaddle, which to me is no better or worse than you seemingly assuming that all users are coders whose work is of a suitable standard that it would be accepted by a mature open source project.:)
"Yes, it looks like Apple is trying to purposefully confuse people by prepending "Open" to this product, but maybe this will prove once and for all that any term like this can be hijacked, just like the Open Source people believe that the term Free Software is easily misunderstood."
What are you talking about?
Firstly the "Open" in the OpenTalk name is probably referring to the fact that this product is considerably more open than for instance AppleTalk, or LocalTalk which are both entirely proprietary.
Also, the OpenTalk standard is simply Apple's name for their version of the IETF "Zero Configuration Networking" (zeroconf) standard, which in turn is a combination of other IETF standards.
If it's still not sounding open enough for you, Apple also make source code for Unix and Windows versions of OpenTalk available on their website.
But like anything that's truely standards-based, if that's still not open enough, then you or anyone else can make their own version under any license they want and test it against the reference code available from Apple.
Perhaps the guy thought that Spymac would cover up the fact that a lot of private information has possibly been available to malicious hackers for who knows how long. He was probably unhappy that the system administrator was planning to quietly gloss over the fact that his/her incompetence meant that someone was able to get a huge database of email addresses and other personal information.
It's the sort of thing that spymac's users definitely deserve to know, and the guy is demonstrating that he's telling the truth. Personally I'd thank him for notifying me about the breach of privacy, even if he did it in a slightly melodramatic way.
At least he didn't decide to demonstrate by publishing a list of all of the email addresses he claims he has.
Many computers come bundled with either Microsoft Office or Microsoft Works, OEMs are given very special prices when they bundle software that way. Not to mention the fact that Office is standard equipment on virtually every business PC in the world.
An uneducated user could be excused for thinking that there was no other office suite in the world, or that there is something special (other than deliberately obfuscated closed formats) special about Microsoft Office because of it's prevalence.
I don't believe I said that Microsoft are giving away free spreadsheets or word processors anywhere. I will humbly eat your dunce cap if you can show me where I said that.
Also, before you go touting Windows Media Player as an example of a "nice" application, perhaps you could explain to me where the uninstaller is located, because it's certainly not in the Add/Remove Software control panel. As for it hijacking file associations, it doesn't need to since it's the default for every type of media after installing windows or logging into a newly created user account.
I welcome your descriptions of how to install all the "nice" microsoft applications bundled with windows XP like Windows Messenger, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. Then I'll stop the "constant bashing"
Incidentally, given the choice I don't have a problem with applications like WM9, MSN Messenger, MS Office or Internet Explorer, all of which are installed on my PowerBook. My complaint is that it's not possible to uninstall these applications in Windows because Microsoft have chosen to bestow them with special powers.
I'd be equally annoyed if Apple chose to "integrate" Safari and Finder, or if iChat or Apple's Quicktime Player was impossible to uninstall. I have lodged repeated bug reports about Apple's bundling of a nag-ware version of Quicktime Player with their OS. Are you against my Apple bashing as well, or is that not "constant" enough?
I was talking about things like spreadsheets, word processors, media players etc. The sort of things that ordinary people use every day.
The average person should care about these kind of things, the only reason most people don't appear to care is because they think there is only one web browser, one word processor, one instant message program etc.
With Linux you have the option to either uninstall or not install programs you don't like or don't want to use. Something that you don't get with Internet Explorer, Outlook Express or MSN Messenger in Windows.
Bollocks, the problem people have with Microsoft's bundling practices is that they do the opposite of what Linux distributors do.
Linux distributions come with several competing tools to do the same thing, this maximises choice for consumers.
Microsoft bundle pieces of software made by Microsoft designed to be integrated with the system in a way that unrelated functions depend on said bundled app, making it impossible to remove. Consumers then run said bundled app because it is the only one supplied with the OS, and don't bother to look at competing products, minimising consumer choice.
It's no secret that Linux (like most other operating systems) is moving closer to Windows in many respects, but the article seems to ignore the fact that Windows has been steadily moving closer to UNIX as well.
Since it's introduction, NT has grown POSIX compliance, terminal services, adopted parts of the BSD TCP/IP stack, and now even has a free UNIX emulation layer available directly from Microsoft in the form of Services for UNIX.
It's great to see that Operating Systems are adopting things that work from each other, but there's certainly no grounds to say that either Windows or Linux is clearly superior in every respect and the other is playing catch-up, which is what this guy seems to be implying.
They certainly dont treat them as essential items.
I have to confess that I've never used the PC card slot on my powerbook for anything except reading flash cards from digital cameras that don't have OS X drivers.:)
As a long time UNIX/Linux/BSD (and now OS X) user who spends most of his waking time getting intimate with *nix boxes, I take great issue with your insinuation that I don't know how to use different keyboard layouts.
How do you cope with the re-arranged keys on normal laptop keyboards? Most of them have double-mapped keys which serve the function of more than one key at a time.
Codetek Virtual Desktop provides the focus-follows-mouse feature. I believe the free demo version on their site allows you to use that feature without paying anything. It only gives two virtual desktops, but that doesn't sound like too much of a problem for you.
most worms target some sort of linux server and so on.
Bullshit. In fact, Apache accounts for more than half of all websites, but is still targetted less by worms, but the number of worms targetting Apache is still somewhere around the 2 or 3 mark, as opposed to well over a dozen for IIS.
That kinda puts paid to your whole argument about market share having anything to do with viruses.
Maybe the reason windows is targetted so much by virus writers is because it's security actually does suck big sloppy donkey dick rather than just because it's so k3wL that everyone uses it.
And people accuse Apple users of blindly accepting anything.
Note that they have done much the same on their iBooks and PowerBooks - Go find a PC card slot on them - because firewire and USB2.0 provide sufficient bandwidth to replace the PC card slot need. Plus all the above comments about integrated sound/video/ethernet/modem and so on.
Only the 12" PowerBook is missing a PC Card slot, and that's probably because there wasn't room for one. Every other PowerBook in the last 10 years has PC Slots, including the latest 15" and 17" models.
1) Is it *really* more stable? How often can you *really* get the BSOD to come up in XP? I haven't managed yet. Can you get the uptime I've experienced with Windows on Linux? Probably. Can you get the same uptime and still have sound support? Maybe. Can you do it with the grand total of around 2 hours of configuration necessary?
Back in 2001, the last time I used windows, it was on an old Compaq Armada 1592dt, a fairly run-of-the-mill PC laptop with APM and no ACPI, I would switch IPs regularly, and sometimes frequently, as well as switching between a Xircom Realport and Cisco 802.11b wireless card several times a day. This was all part of my job, the computer was used for troubleshooting and configuring high end networking equipment.
Windows 2000 would frequently lock-up completely when inserting a new PC card, and/or get confused about networking settings until I rebooted.
Sometimes the problem was so bad I had to remove the drivers and all related registry settings before I could get the cards to work again.
I switched to Debian Linux, and after setting up the drivers the problems were gone. It was very difficult and sometimes impossible to do my job with Win2k, and easily possible with Linux.
2) Is it *really* more secure, or does it just invite fewer attacks? Yes, I know Outlook is terrible, but that's not the actual Windows OS, nor does it need to be installed.
Windows ships with a bunch of services installed and listening for connections by default, Debian installed with ports open at all. I'd rank that as being infinitely more secure.
3) Is all the extra aggravation *really* worth it? Yeah, you're extra cool for running Linux and you're sticking it to the man, but why?
In my case, it had nothing to do with being "cool" and everything to do with getting my job done. It's supremely arrogant of you to assume that you know anyone else's motivations for choosing software. In my line of work, it is certainly not strange to find people who prefer, or even need to use some kind of UNIX for their workstation OS, and it has nothing to do with being 31337 like you seem suggest is everyone's motivation. You need to get out more if you think Windows can do it all.
In my case, as I said earlier I was unhappy with Windows 2000 because of it's apparent problems with changing hardware and networking settings. Secondly, having installed all the relevant drivers from Compaq, I also wasn't happy with the amount of time the computer took to wake-up and sleep using the APM BIOS (about 30 seconds to sleep and 30-40 to wake in Win2k). In Linux, I was able to tweak the settings and move much of the APM subsystem into a RAM disk to streamline the process, and prevent having to wait for the disk to spin up, I was able to shorten the sleep time to around 10 seconds and wake-up time to less than 5 in Linux - that would not be possible in Windows. Stability problems I had experienced in Windows related to APM sleep/wake-up also disappeared when I switched to Linux. I was able to use tools in Linux that were not available in Windows that worked at the ethernet rather than TCP/IP level and I was able to change my MAC address without needing to use promiscuous mode, these were both very valuable features.
Finally, having been UNIX obsessed since a young age, I was familiar with many UNIX type operating systems including Debian Linux prior to installing it on the laptop. So it was a departure from normality for me to be using windows at all, but I decided to do so because it was pre-installed on the laptop, and I was not convinced that Linux would be better for portable hardware.
Incidentally, setting up sound on the laptop (as with most systems) was a matter of typing one command.
"seems like it's the usual heatpipe deal. you could say it's been used in stock pc's for a while now(it has, in the sff form factor computers especially as stock)."
I doubt that they're just standard heatpipes, my G4 PowerBook has heatpipes all over the place and I didn't see Apple making a song and dance about that, like I'm sure they would have if they thought that was real liquid cooling.
"But you should quit downplaying the fact that it is a security problem."
Oh come on, you're also exaggerating just how much of a security problem it is given that there has never been an exploit that uses APE.
I'm not trying to downplay the fact that it's a possible security problem. I'm saying it is not a security problem at present, and in fact is working to actively increase security for me at the moment.
What I am saying is that if someone can get malicious software onto my machine, that is all that's required for me to regard it as completely compromised and that APE is not going to make a bit of difference to that.
If someone can install malicious software in my user account, they will have already circumvented my machine's security to such a level that I would not feel comfortable until I had wiped the hard drive and reinstalled the operating system and changed passwords on the websites I visit as well as replacing my public keys on the many machines I have to SSH to.
A local compromise of any type would allow the attacker to retreive my cookies, the serial numbers to all my registered applications, and various documents related to my employment that contain trade secrets and other potentially valuable information. Simply accessing that information is damaging enough, regular rsync backups ensure that deleting all my files or doing other things requiring root privilege would pale in comparison to the damage that can be done without root access.
Slashdot Mirror
I've tried various operating systems in VPC including Windows 3.11, 95, 98, NT4, 2000 and XP.
Though I can't say absolutely conclusively since I have only one Mac, and didn't do measurements (and only a fool would trust a benchmarking program in an emulator). I found NT4 to be the most responsive.
There seems to be a problem with running DOS programs in VPC (yes, with DOS VPC additions) that causes VPC to eat 100% CPU even when the emulated CPU is doing very little. I guess it's hard to tell when DOS applications (and windows 3.1) are idle.
The problem is improved slightly in 95/98, but it still seems to use lots of native CPU when the emulated CPU is doing nothing.
With the NT kernel the performance of the emulated OS seems to be more in line with what I'd expect, in other words when the CPU is idle, it uses almost no CPU time at all. So as you would expect (from MS anyway) performance is inversely proportional to how modern the OS is.
In terms of performance NT4 seems to be the best, and it's what I use since I only need to use it for Access and some IE only websites. If there isn't some special feature that is only available in 2000 or XP. Best of all if you work in a large organization, there's probably a legitimate and licensed copy of NT4 lying around gathering dust somewhere.
"To everyone else: why don't we ever talk about CP/M anymore these days?"
:D
Because it was superceded by the GEM Desktop
I was going to mod you into oblivion, but I just HAD to reply.
If the entire Microsoft organisation (which undoubtedly employs some of the world's finest software engineers and quality assurance experts) can't make Windows run stably, what makes you think that a bunch of geeks on Slashdot with no access to the source code, and bound by a license that makes reverse-engineering and patching of Windows illegal are going to be able to?
go to a terminal prompt and type
/etc /usr/etc
/usr/etc instead /etc for it's config.
sudo ln -s
As someone pointed out above, Apple mucked up the ftpd compile and made the ftp daemon look in
Damnit, I'm a Mac user and I just can't seem to find any skunky buds anywhere.
Maybe I need to get myself to one of those 'user group' meetings.
I think I understand the double entendre now.
Because that wasn't (and isn't) where they want to compete. They are aimed at the professional high-end desktop market. They've never had a cheap entry-level option--they still don't.
Actually a cheap entry level machine is exactly what the Apple II was for a long time, and it was quite successful at it, surviving in the form of the Apple IIe until 1993.
Sadly for Apple, their souped-up 8 bit offerings aimed at business failed miserably because they were overpriced and underpowered in comparison to IBM's PC, which entered the market at about $1500USD while the Apple III cost about $3500 the time.
Apple continued to sell the Apple II in the home computer market, but missed the small business market entirely in their price lineup with the Mac costing nearly twice as much as an entry-level PC at the time of introduction.
I'm pretty sure that Apple would love to sell computers into the low-end of the market if they could do so without cannibalising the profit margins on their current range.
At the moment, they are eating away at the advantages of the PC by using the same expansion busses as the PC, and slowly bringing down the price of their whole range.
They couldn't simply introduce a Mac that cost half the price of their current range and expect anyone reasonable to buy their high end machines, but I'm convinced that they want a slice of the low end of the market just as much as Dell or HP do.
For the record; in case I sound like I'm bagging Apple, I'm writing this post on a nice aluminium PowerBook, also I've deliberately avoided mentioning operating systems because I consider that a matter of personal preference, but it should be clear which side of the fence I'm on.
"Now imagine what a phenomenal product GIMP would be in the eyes of graphic artists who now use photoshop if only the people who had complained about it could be bothered to FIX what they see as problems. A few small years worth of effort in total, very little from each person who has seen something wrong, and the free tool would have surpassed the proprietary one years ago. Instead, all we get are more complaints."
:)
This is of course exactly the kind of idiocy the author of the article was complaining about. Imagine if, on the other hand the GIMP programmers weren't just working to scratch their own itch.
They'd accept user's complaints as a legitimate roadmap to the areas in which they are failing to satisfy their user base, and do something about it, and respond positively by addressing the complaint personally, or as a team by attempting to entice someone with the neccessary skills to do the fixing.
Imagine what a phenomenal product GIMP would be if the authors were prepared to attempt to resolve all complaints by managing users complaints as they would a technical issue.
Just a few years of attempting to address all complaints, not just scratching the itch of the core programming team, and the free tool would surpass the proprietary one, by being responsive to the user rather than bound by cost/benefit analysis like commercial software vendors.
Of course, this assumes that the users complaints are actually legitimate and substantive complaints and not just assinine and meaningless twaddle, which to me is no better or worse than you seemingly assuming that all users are coders whose work is of a suitable standard that it would be accepted by a mature open source project.
"Yes, it looks like Apple is trying to purposefully confuse people by prepending "Open" to this product, but maybe this will prove once and for all that any term like this can be hijacked, just like the Open Source people believe that the term Free Software is easily misunderstood."
What are you talking about?
Firstly the "Open" in the OpenTalk name is probably referring to the fact that this product is considerably more open than for instance AppleTalk, or LocalTalk which are both entirely proprietary.
Also, the OpenTalk standard is simply Apple's name for their version of the IETF "Zero Configuration Networking" (zeroconf) standard, which in turn is a combination of other IETF standards.
If it's still not sounding open enough for you, Apple also make source code for Unix and Windows versions of OpenTalk available on their website.
But like anything that's truely standards-based, if that's still not open enough, then you or anyone else can make their own version under any license they want and test it against the reference code available from Apple.
That's open enough for me.
Perhaps the guy thought that Spymac would cover up the fact that a lot of private information has possibly been available to malicious hackers for who knows how long. He was probably unhappy that the system administrator was planning to quietly gloss over the fact that his/her incompetence meant that someone was able to get a huge database of email addresses and other personal information.
It's the sort of thing that spymac's users definitely deserve to know, and the guy is demonstrating that he's telling the truth. Personally I'd thank him for notifying me about the breach of privacy, even if he did it in a slightly melodramatic way.
At least he didn't decide to demonstrate by publishing a list of all of the email addresses he claims he has.
Many computers come bundled with either Microsoft Office or Microsoft Works, OEMs are given very special prices when they bundle software that way. Not to mention the fact that Office is standard equipment on virtually every business PC in the world.
An uneducated user could be excused for thinking that there was no other office suite in the world, or that there is something special (other than deliberately obfuscated closed formats) special about Microsoft Office because of it's prevalence.
I don't believe I said that Microsoft are giving away free spreadsheets or word processors anywhere. I will humbly eat your dunce cap if you can show me where I said that.
Also, before you go touting Windows Media Player as an example of a "nice" application, perhaps you could explain to me where the uninstaller is located, because it's certainly not in the Add/Remove Software control panel. As for it hijacking file associations, it doesn't need to since it's the default for every type of media after installing windows or logging into a newly created user account.
I welcome your descriptions of how to install all the "nice" microsoft applications bundled with windows XP like Windows Messenger, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. Then I'll stop the "constant bashing"
Incidentally, given the choice I don't have a problem with applications like WM9, MSN Messenger, MS Office or Internet Explorer, all of which are installed on my PowerBook. My complaint is that it's not possible to uninstall these applications in Windows because Microsoft have chosen to bestow them with special powers.
I'd be equally annoyed if Apple chose to "integrate" Safari and Finder, or if iChat or Apple's Quicktime Player was impossible to uninstall. I have lodged repeated bug reports about Apple's bundling of a nag-ware version of Quicktime Player with their OS. Are you against my Apple bashing as well, or is that not "constant" enough?
Did I mention compilers?
I was talking about things like spreadsheets, word processors, media players etc. The sort of things that ordinary people use every day.
The average person should care about these kind of things, the only reason most people don't appear to care is because they think there is only one web browser, one word processor, one instant message program etc.
So, you fail to see how being forced to install applications that you don't want, and can't uninstall limits your choice?
I give up. You're obviously perfectly reasonable and sane. You win.
With Linux you have the option to either uninstall or not install programs you don't like or don't want to use. Something that you don't get with Internet Explorer, Outlook Express or MSN Messenger in Windows.
Bollocks, the problem people have with Microsoft's bundling practices is that they do the opposite of what Linux distributors do.
Linux distributions come with several competing tools to do the same thing, this maximises choice for consumers.
Microsoft bundle pieces of software made by Microsoft designed to be integrated with the system in a way that unrelated functions depend on said bundled app, making it impossible to remove. Consumers then run said bundled app because it is the only one supplied with the OS, and don't bother to look at competing products, minimising consumer choice.
It's no secret that Linux (like most other operating systems) is moving closer to Windows in many respects, but the article seems to ignore the fact that Windows has been steadily moving closer to UNIX as well.
Since it's introduction, NT has grown POSIX compliance, terminal services, adopted parts of the BSD TCP/IP stack, and now even has a free UNIX emulation layer available directly from Microsoft in the form of Services for UNIX.
It's great to see that Operating Systems are adopting things that work from each other, but there's certainly no grounds to say that either Windows or Linux is clearly superior in every respect and the other is playing catch-up, which is what this guy seems to be implying.
You dork, that's for mDNS browsing, not zeroconf.
They certainly dont treat them as essential items.
:)
I have to confess that I've never used the PC card slot on my powerbook for anything except reading flash cards from digital cameras that don't have OS X drivers.
As a long time UNIX/Linux/BSD (and now OS X) user who spends most of his waking time getting intimate with *nix boxes, I take great issue with your insinuation that I don't know how to use different keyboard layouts.
How do you cope with the re-arranged keys on normal laptop keyboards? Most of them have double-mapped keys which serve the function of more than one key at a time.
Codetek Virtual Desktop provides the focus-follows-mouse feature. I believe the free demo version on their site allows you to use that feature without paying anything. It only gives two virtual desktops, but that doesn't sound like too much of a problem for you.
most worms target some sort of linux server and so on.
Bullshit. In fact, Apache accounts for more than half of all websites, but is still targetted less by worms, but the number of worms targetting Apache is still somewhere around the 2 or 3 mark, as opposed to well over a dozen for IIS.
That kinda puts paid to your whole argument about market share having anything to do with viruses.
Maybe the reason windows is targetted so much by virus writers is because it's security actually does suck big sloppy donkey dick rather than just because it's so k3wL that everyone uses it.
And people accuse Apple users of blindly accepting anything.
Note that they have done much the same on their iBooks and PowerBooks - Go find a PC card slot on them - because firewire and USB2.0 provide sufficient bandwidth to replace the PC card slot need. Plus all the above comments about integrated sound/video/ethernet/modem and so on.
Only the 12" PowerBook is missing a PC Card slot, and that's probably because there wasn't room for one. Every other PowerBook in the last 10 years has PC Slots, including the latest 15" and 17" models.
No, not heat-pipes - Liquid-cooling; That's when you have a pump and a radiator and (usually) a coolant that's liquid at normal pressure/temperature.
Apple have been using heat pipes for years as well, but their latest desktop enclosures have water cooling built in.
1) Is it *really* more stable? How often can you *really* get the BSOD to come up in XP? I haven't managed yet. Can you get the uptime I've experienced with Windows on Linux? Probably. Can you get the same uptime and still have sound support? Maybe. Can you do it with the grand total of around 2 hours of configuration necessary?
/etc/modules
Back in 2001, the last time I used windows, it was on an old Compaq Armada 1592dt, a fairly run-of-the-mill PC laptop with APM and no ACPI, I would switch IPs regularly, and sometimes frequently, as well as switching between a Xircom Realport and Cisco 802.11b wireless card several times a day. This was all part of my job, the computer was used for troubleshooting and configuring high end networking equipment.
Windows 2000 would frequently lock-up completely when inserting a new PC card, and/or get confused about networking settings until I rebooted.
Sometimes the problem was so bad I had to remove the drivers and all related registry settings before I could get the cards to work again.
I switched to Debian Linux, and after setting up the drivers the problems were gone. It was very difficult and sometimes impossible to do my job with Win2k, and easily possible with Linux.
2) Is it *really* more secure, or does it just invite fewer attacks? Yes, I know Outlook is terrible, but that's not the actual Windows OS, nor does it need to be installed.
Windows ships with a bunch of services installed and listening for connections by default, Debian installed with ports open at all. I'd rank that as being infinitely more secure.
3) Is all the extra aggravation *really* worth it? Yeah, you're extra cool for running Linux and you're sticking it to the man, but why?
In my case, it had nothing to do with being "cool" and everything to do with getting my job done. It's supremely arrogant of you to assume that you know anyone else's motivations for choosing software. In my line of work, it is certainly not strange to find people who prefer, or even need to use some kind of UNIX for their workstation OS, and it has nothing to do with being 31337 like you seem suggest is everyone's motivation. You need to get out more if you think Windows can do it all.
In my case, as I said earlier I was unhappy with Windows 2000 because of it's apparent problems with changing hardware and networking settings. Secondly, having installed all the relevant drivers from Compaq, I also wasn't happy with the amount of time the computer took to wake-up and sleep using the APM BIOS (about 30 seconds to sleep and 30-40 to wake in Win2k). In Linux, I was able to tweak the settings and move much of the APM subsystem into a RAM disk to streamline the process, and prevent having to wait for the disk to spin up, I was able to shorten the sleep time to around 10 seconds and wake-up time to less than 5 in Linux - that would not be possible in Windows. Stability problems I had experienced in Windows related to APM sleep/wake-up also disappeared when I switched to Linux. I was able to use tools in Linux that were not available in Windows that worked at the ethernet rather than TCP/IP level and I was able to change my MAC address without needing to use promiscuous mode, these were both very valuable features.
Finally, having been UNIX obsessed since a young age, I was familiar with many UNIX type operating systems including Debian Linux prior to installing it on the laptop. So it was a departure from normality for me to be using windows at all, but I decided to do so because it was pre-installed on the laptop, and I was not convinced that Linux would be better for portable hardware.
Incidentally, setting up sound on the laptop (as with most systems) was a matter of typing one command.
echo "sb" >
"seems like it's the usual heatpipe deal. you could say it's been used in stock pc's for a while now(it has, in the sff form factor computers especially as stock)."
I doubt that they're just standard heatpipes, my G4 PowerBook has heatpipes all over the place and I didn't see Apple making a song and dance about that, like I'm sure they would have if they thought that was real liquid cooling.
"But you should quit downplaying the fact that it is a security problem."
Oh come on, you're also exaggerating just how much of a security problem it is given that there has never been an exploit that uses APE.
I'm not trying to downplay the fact that it's a possible security problem. I'm saying it is not a security problem at present, and in fact is working to actively increase security for me at the moment.
What I am saying is that if someone can get malicious software onto my machine, that is all that's required for me to regard it as completely compromised and that APE is not going to make a bit of difference to that.
If someone can install malicious software in my user account, they will have already circumvented my machine's security to such a level that I would not feel comfortable until I had wiped the hard drive and reinstalled the operating system and changed passwords on the websites I visit as well as replacing my public keys on the many machines I have to SSH to.
A local compromise of any type would allow the attacker to retreive my cookies, the serial numbers to all my registered applications, and various documents related to my employment that contain trade secrets and other potentially valuable information. Simply accessing that information is damaging enough, regular rsync backups ensure that deleting all my files or doing other things requiring root privilege would pale in comparison to the damage that can be done without root access.