That is a symptom of the underlying problem I was alluding to in my last post. Factory farming will always result in this end-game. Every-time you put a lot of one species close together they will spread disease. Giving them a little more space and proper conditions and remove the antibiotics and stop poisoning the country or make a little extra money. As long as money is the driving force behind our food supply we'll have to deal with people taking money over our health.
It's capitalism at its finest, 1000 small farms eventually consolidate to 4 large farms because its more cost effective. Of course the quality of the product diminishes along with the diversity we see on our shelves. Fortunately alternatives still exist with organic farming.
It has been shown repeatedly that if you take away the antibiotic from the environment the resistance does not get passed on as it is no longer useful. After one generation with zero exposure to the antibiotic they will not pass on the necessary genes. It's a simple concept. The problem is that you could stop using an antibiotic today but it will take quite some time before it will be removed from the surrounding environment so the bacteria will remain resistant until the environment is cleansed. This is why I suggest an interval of a year or perhaps even longer.
Of course I alluded to the bigger issue of using any antibiotics at all for your food which is the real problem, bacterial resistance is remarkably easy to manage.
The thing that confuses me is why the hell they don't use one antibiotic one year and switch to another the next, then another, then back to the first one again. After one generation bacteria no longer hold their resistance so it's just a matter of rotating your antibiotics. It would mean we don't have to keep developing new antibiotics to keep up. Of course the bigger question still holds since factory farming doesn't work to the benefit of anyone's health.
That's fine, that's a legitimate complaint but the parent wasn't complaining about the difficulty of learning scripting on two platforms; the parent simply stated it didn't exist on Windows when it clearly does.
If you actually read the manual SNMP support is just for system information and basic status like you would see on the led in front of it. SNMP is mentioned twice in the entire manual. It is new and not very mature, get over it. You still can't integrate it with monitoring suites like MOM even though you can with Linux solutions which cost a whole lot less. There is absolutely no draw for using Apple as anything more than a basic SAN currently.
I admitted to being a little out of date although from what I'm seeing the tools are still lacking, no snmp support for instance meaning you can't integrate RAID health with total health of a system. So you know your individual XRAID is doing by you have to go to each of them to make sure they're all good. Still, it's improving, competition is only a good thing in this case.
No it doesn't, it gives you the original address you typed in the search field so you can just correct it and hit search or copy and paste it back into your address bar. The Try Again approach is nicer in my opinion but it doesn't make it harder to see what address you entered to begin with.
A records are all that is required for mail. Most mail servers I've seen will use the A host record for the domain without a hostname assuming that the destination server would route the mail accordingly. I ran a domain that way for a short period of time and it mostly worked. There were a few issues but it works in a surprising number of cases. The MX record is only required if the destination mail server is different from that of a root server which hopefully is most cases.
I could have been smoking crack and dreamed the whole thing up but I'm pretty sure even modern mail servers support this. In either case its up to the mail server on how to handle domains without MX records. Sitefinder is still evil and wastes bandwidth and time. I don't like Microsoft doing their less invasive approach but I didn't like the generic page all versions of IE would direct you too, if I got my site wrong I want an error damn it. Of course for most people I imagine this is helpful.
All the limitations I've seen were related to monitoring capabilities and not knowing a hdd was failing or worse yet, spewing bad data every so often. This may have improved since I last saw which was admittedly a couple years ago.
The beautiful part about my SANs both Unix and Windows based is that I know about SMART failures on SATA arrays and fiber CRC errors. The reporting is rich so much to the point where I can email myself if the internal temperature gets too high. None of it is technically impossible on OS X but its not included and the tools are scattered. There may be a comprehensive solution available these days although I haven't heard anything about it.
Management has improved dramatically from the Apple camp over the last couple of years but desktop deployment is still a big issue as well along with monitoring of individual workstations. The last I checked the only product which actually monitored what an end-user was doing on OS X was Spector's software which to say the least is sorely lacking.
You could install a key logger, a screen grabber, and a thousand other small tools and achieve the same result although good luck integrating all the reports. I hate the big-brother crap but there is more and more demand for it these days.
I didn't know the repair was a problem as I thought Apple Enterprise support was better than what you suggest but I've never dealt with it as the few OS X boxes we do have are nothing short of crap although two replacement hdds later it does seem to be more stable now. The G5 towers are quite unimpressive but perhaps the Intel ones are more so. It's hard to keep up with multiple platforms but I have very few issues with my linux/Windows hybrid network. I have the luxury of working for a small company these days though so my issues are usually easier to solve.
Now if only I didn't have to patch Java VM for DST. Ugh, that's pissing me off on multiple platforms especially if you run a few different versions. Feel sorry for those that can't use the latest version.
Short term Apple history shows you they aren't afraid to switch platforms even on platforms that are relatively new. I don't believe Apple will switch again as I think they finally realized its better to be with the pack than trying to support your own but this is a fear as Apple often releases products which break previous products. Look at the drivers for printers between OS 10.1 - 10.4 for evidence of this.
There is also all the false advertising Apple has been doing. It may not necessarily be false but its too over the top to be taken seriously. I don't know how many iPod owners I've come across in the last couple weeks which are ready to change computers but are concerned about what will happen with iTunes and their music collection. Not an enterprise issue but these little issues influence what corporate entities will see when they think of Apple.
The picture will change as things progress, Apple has a product they can actually expand so I don't see a need for them to throw the whole thing out again so perhaps the picture will change in another couple of years.
You have some points but Xserves still aren't as capable as modern solutions from Sun, HP, and hell, even Dell. Think SAN management, it's not impossible but its quite a bit more difficult on the Mac side of the fence. Maybe in a few more years they'll gear it up but monitoring and management have always been the weak side for Apple as they generally prefer to give the power to the user. This is great for home users but very bad for corporate users.
The support you mention is probably the biggest stumbling block for Apple at the current time however.
How the hell did that get mod'ed interesting in a day and age when you have powershell on both XP and Vista available for use which is just as robust as bash. Furthermore, there is nothing in Vista you can't script with hooks provided. The only tool you need is powershell. The comment makes no sense whatsoever.
I use powershell to script changes to my Exchange server and I could use it exclusively if I were so inclined but I don't need to do anything to my servers often enough where it would matter.
You're right about one thing though, someone should do a comparison of efficiency in administration using a GUI vs a CLI and compare it across platforms. This is the single biggest leap in Vista that would make it attractive to corporate America. Now everything can be scripted and a group policy can govern anything the machine does. That level of control in quite difficult to attain with OS X as I don't see too many management tools for Apple products. Unix, Linux, and Windows all have very powerful native management tools, hell, the BSDs do too, I can't imagine it would be too difficult to extend them to control the GUI interface on OS X.
There would be nothing random about pushing it out. Firewalls can be managed, your inventory tool will tell you when you have a product which interferes with your install. If the inventory tool fails then you know the machine has an issue. Combine this with some other remote management tools and you can probably fix the problem yourself.
I'm not arguing for local admin access for everybody but if they want a little music I don't see any harm in it. In fact, they are usually more alert and getting more work done when they have something to listen to. Of course that is just my personal experience so mileage varies I'm sure.
From an IT perspective everything would work and stay working if we had complete control but at what cost would that be? Delays for a person to have a new port opened on their box cost money as well. Security getting in the way of actual work costs a ton of money. I'm not entirely sure which costs more but I've found security issues usually take longer to troubleshoot than figuring out which app is interfering.
I've been on both sides of this coin at one time in my life or another. Sometimes the control freak in me wants everything to be perfect, then the realist kicks back in and says that no one expects it to be perfect and the reason you're here is to make sure downtime is minimal. It would be so easy to admin a network if the users could only go to the company Intranet but I'm in the business of giving them their cake so they can eat it too.
What kind of largish organization doesn't employ MOM or some other inventory tool? That is all you need, then script all your installs with SMS or whatever push mechanism you like. It's really not that difficult to give users the element of control over their machines while maintaining everything. Another option is regular imaging wiping the machine which could indeed be automated as well making it seamless to the end user and making IT not the bad guy.
Of course education is the best and most effective method for fighting problems with security. The more people that write off the problem as unsolvable the longer it will take the rest of us to come up with a workable option. Fortunately for me I work for a small company these days so this kind of stuff is fine and easy but I know at least my methods can and do scale wonderfully so I imagine there are a number of other techniques as well.
Virtual Server much like Virtual PC always sucked ass compared to Microsoft. They only bought it semi recently which is the real scary part. Hardware solutions are great but are inherently not as flexible as software solution, of course they perform better so there are trade-offs. I believe there is room for both although in my view EMC made a wise move going after VMWare as their products are solid compared to anything else in the market.
Thanks heavens I haven't heard any ads on XM since I subscribed 3 years ago. Of course I mainly listen to channels like XM Chill which is one hell of a great station. Guess maybe they were required to put ads in the pop stations? That would make sense since the songs themselves can often be considered ads.
Re:Because things should work. iTunes = Vista kill
on
Vista - iPod Killer?
·
· Score: 1
You're right, you can upgrade a kernel without destroying drivers. This is my my NT4 drivers for my old ATI cards still work in XP and why my TWAIN drivers for my old arsed scanner also still work. When manufacturers take the time to develop proper drivers they almost never run into problems unless they want to utilize new features of the OS in which case this can be done with a driver update.
This isn't detrimental to MS in the least, Vista has been out for quite a while now and Apple has had ample time to correct whatever is wrong with iTunes. Considering what I've seen of iTunes on Windows this is completely not surprising since it is crap on XP so naturally it's going to be crap on Vista. Probably one of the reasons I refuse to own an iPod despite finding an iPod Video in some jacket some guy left behind at our site. The pron on it was nice but after that I just passed it on to someone that would appreciate the device itself. Personally I can't stand it, every iPod user I know has lost their music at least once and had to either restore from backup or call up Apple so they could re-download their music. It's great that Apple allows them to do it but they shouldn't have had to do it in the first place.
Influential buyers will just see this as another example of Apple dropping the ball on iTunes for Windows. Think of all the installation problems with version 6 on Windows. I ended up having to modify the local security policy of machines to allow the installer to complete. No other software has ever required this so I'm curious why iTunes does. Fortunately The newer versions I believe fixed the installer but there is still a whole range of funkiness with iTunes.
Vista is all kinds of pain but the majority of it is simple education.
Tapes would be practical if they were inexpensive. My PX502 library with SDLT-4 tape drives is quite efficient at backing up large amounts of data but the thing cost over 10 grand. The tapes are 800gigs native though so that's not too shabby. Unfortunately the tapes themselves are $70 and the drive is over a grand as well. People want to back up their stuff, they don't necessarily care about sequential access since they are only using it during a restore.
You are right that they certainly weren't sitting around doing nothing. They found their market and they've stuck to it. For that market they have kept up just fine and dandy.
Your example is flawed as Apache is more targeted and more successfully hacked specifically because it is far more popular even though it can be much more secure.
Link for your reading
I know you want your opinion to be right but the logic and the math works. Accept it and move on.
No one was suggesting a replacement of well written code. Firewalls are but an additional layer of security and provide you a buffer between your mistakes and disaster. I can't imagine how anyone could see that as anything but a good thing.
My firewall will also protect me from vulnerabilities in my code however, if my firewall won't allow SMTP from that server then no exploit code on that server is going to result in my server sending out email. It's plain and simple. Yes, not all exploits are averted but the mere fact that there are some is enough to make it worth it.
The firewall as I said is an additional layer of security. I can see when I'm being probed and I can see the spoofs and other attacks on my server. Without the firewall I have no way of monitoring and reactively banning known offenders. Furthermore it adds a layer of redundancy as I have multiple servers servicing that port and IP address, something I couldn't do as effectively if the machine was directly on the Internet.
Of course firewalls do prevent mistakes from causing disaster and that has merit too. Now it doesn't matter if I accidentally install SMTP services on the webserver the firewall will guarantee that it works internally and ensure it doesn't work externally.
XP Home does have a ridiculous number of ports open by default and so does SuSE if you enable all the services that are typically needed for windows file sharing and printing but that doesn't really mean a whole lot these days. Let's face it, Windows 98 was more secure remotely because the thing just didn't do that much compared to the new kernel that exists today and compared to any version of linux after kernel 1.0. None of it is perfect, firewalls aren't perfect either for that matter, that is why you layer your security so a single vulnerability doesn't lead to disaster.
Umm... where did you pull that out of? Everything I've ever read says exactly the opposite of this. In fact, there are more security incidents with Apache every year than with IIS strictly because it is so much more popular. We can all agree Apache is more secure but only if you know what you're doing.
I would say that the logical thought process does indeed hold true. It makes a lot of sense for people to target Apache since that's where the majority is. Setting up Apache servers that do anything beyond basic static web serving is indeed difficult, like configuring PHP and getting the whole thing to talk to Oracle when you can do the whole thing with IIS is half the time and assuming IIS6 or IIS7 you have yourself a reasonably secure site out of the box.
Sorry, but the primary function of a firewall is indeed to add security. My website is protected by a firewall but it still receives millions of hits and several hundred thousand pageviews. It's safe to say its quite visible and I wish it to remain so. You're right that a firewall is an additional layer of protection and is by no means the only layer. Sometimes you are forced to run an insecure app though and in those times you thank your lucky stars you have proper firewalls and routers and VLANs and RADIUS to help protect your services.
I'll concede your point is valid about Exchange and that there are a lot of people that don't currently use a lot of the integration although the company I work for and at least a few dozen companies I've consulted for do use it but the mere fact that the options exists only helps Exchange adoption. The power of Microsoft has always been, learn one tool, know them all. If I know how to configure DNS on Windows I am quite capable of setting up DHCP, manage Active Directory and monitor Exchange. I can do all this from my management console PC with little or no effort in setup.
The problem with FOSS is usually one of integration, like getting spamassassin working with your mail server without losing important email. Consider how much effort goes into a proper spamassassin setup and then consider the one minute setup time for IMF on Exchange which I can easily argue is just as good at filtering spam albeit, overtime spam assassin does improve. Considering the difference in effort I can easily see why a lot of organizations would go the MS route especially now that SP2 for 2003 came out expanding the database limit to 72gigs. 16gig was way too low and I think MS got the picture on that. Of course Exchange 2007 looks to be a marked improvement as well with site mirroring and replication in-house so no more expensive third party tools for better or for worse on that one.
Methinks you completely miss the idea of why Exchange is so popular. If all it did was email then it would never have become a dominant player. It is precisely because it offers a unified provider that it has become popular. The server integrates tightly with voice communications as well as forms of instant messaging. In addition to this there is the identity management integration, teleconferencing, remote assistance, the list really goes on and on.
The desktop OS created Microsoft but all the services provided under one roof are what solidified it in the corporate world. In large organizations they like to exercise strict control and if something goes wrong they want a single person to go to fix the problem.
Most everyone in the world realizes the shortsightedness of this philosophy but it is indeed the reality. The only way to compete with Microsoft is to first become compatible, then expand your feature-set beyond what Microsoft can provide. It is a steep challenge to say the least despite problems with the software that MS produces it is mostly functional otherwise it would never have been accepted. Convergence is the future, it is why SIP is the dominant protocol and why TCP/IP overtook IPX/SPX. The medium that can do the most will win despite IPX/SPX being superior TCP/IP still won so keep that in mind. Of course Novell can squander pretty much anything so that might not be the best example.
From what I've seen of Lotus Notes it's a huge pain in the ass and doesn't even come close to offering the same features as Exchange. Much like DB/2 against SQL 2005 or Oracle.
I think in short a small tools philosophy has proven to work well but it goes against how we think in the real world. We don't setup millions of tiny warehouses for everything we need to store, we setup large facilities where all the resources can be centralized, managed, and monitored. We're like ants that way. It's risky and causes problems; a single bomb and we're screwed.
With that said maybe this year we can devote to changing the way people think about their tools. My leatherman sure it handy with all the tools it has in it but sometimes you just need a proper screw driver to get the job done. Perhaps there is a place for both, granted I use my leatherman for 90% of the tasks I perform that require a tool.
Slashdot Mirror
That is a symptom of the underlying problem I was alluding to in my last post. Factory farming will always result in this end-game. Every-time you put a lot of one species close together they will spread disease. Giving them a little more space and proper conditions and remove the antibiotics and stop poisoning the country or make a little extra money. As long as money is the driving force behind our food supply we'll have to deal with people taking money over our health.
It's capitalism at its finest, 1000 small farms eventually consolidate to 4 large farms because its more cost effective. Of course the quality of the product diminishes along with the diversity we see on our shelves. Fortunately alternatives still exist with organic farming.
It has been shown repeatedly that if you take away the antibiotic from the environment the resistance does not get passed on as it is no longer useful. After one generation with zero exposure to the antibiotic they will not pass on the necessary genes. It's a simple concept. The problem is that you could stop using an antibiotic today but it will take quite some time before it will be removed from the surrounding environment so the bacteria will remain resistant until the environment is cleansed. This is why I suggest an interval of a year or perhaps even longer.
Of course I alluded to the bigger issue of using any antibiotics at all for your food which is the real problem, bacterial resistance is remarkably easy to manage.
The thing that confuses me is why the hell they don't use one antibiotic one year and switch to another the next, then another, then back to the first one again. After one generation bacteria no longer hold their resistance so it's just a matter of rotating your antibiotics. It would mean we don't have to keep developing new antibiotics to keep up. Of course the bigger question still holds since factory farming doesn't work to the benefit of anyone's health.
That's fine, that's a legitimate complaint but the parent wasn't complaining about the difficulty of learning scripting on two platforms; the parent simply stated it didn't exist on Windows when it clearly does.
If you actually read the manual SNMP support is just for system information and basic status like you would see on the led in front of it. SNMP is mentioned twice in the entire manual. It is new and not very mature, get over it. You still can't integrate it with monitoring suites like MOM even though you can with Linux solutions which cost a whole lot less. There is absolutely no draw for using Apple as anything more than a basic SAN currently.
I admitted to being a little out of date although from what I'm seeing the tools are still lacking, no snmp support for instance meaning you can't integrate RAID health with total health of a system. So you know your individual XRAID is doing by you have to go to each of them to make sure they're all good. Still, it's improving, competition is only a good thing in this case.
No it doesn't, it gives you the original address you typed in the search field so you can just correct it and hit search or copy and paste it back into your address bar. The Try Again approach is nicer in my opinion but it doesn't make it harder to see what address you entered to begin with.
A records are all that is required for mail. Most mail servers I've seen will use the A host record for the domain without a hostname assuming that the destination server would route the mail accordingly. I ran a domain that way for a short period of time and it mostly worked. There were a few issues but it works in a surprising number of cases. The MX record is only required if the destination mail server is different from that of a root server which hopefully is most cases.
I could have been smoking crack and dreamed the whole thing up but I'm pretty sure even modern mail servers support this. In either case its up to the mail server on how to handle domains without MX records. Sitefinder is still evil and wastes bandwidth and time. I don't like Microsoft doing their less invasive approach but I didn't like the generic page all versions of IE would direct you too, if I got my site wrong I want an error damn it. Of course for most people I imagine this is helpful.
All the limitations I've seen were related to monitoring capabilities and not knowing a hdd was failing or worse yet, spewing bad data every so often. This may have improved since I last saw which was admittedly a couple years ago.
The beautiful part about my SANs both Unix and Windows based is that I know about SMART failures on SATA arrays and fiber CRC errors. The reporting is rich so much to the point where I can email myself if the internal temperature gets too high. None of it is technically impossible on OS X but its not included and the tools are scattered. There may be a comprehensive solution available these days although I haven't heard anything about it.
Management has improved dramatically from the Apple camp over the last couple of years but desktop deployment is still a big issue as well along with monitoring of individual workstations. The last I checked the only product which actually monitored what an end-user was doing on OS X was Spector's software which to say the least is sorely lacking.
You could install a key logger, a screen grabber, and a thousand other small tools and achieve the same result although good luck integrating all the reports. I hate the big-brother crap but there is more and more demand for it these days.
I didn't know the repair was a problem as I thought Apple Enterprise support was better than what you suggest but I've never dealt with it as the few OS X boxes we do have are nothing short of crap although two replacement hdds later it does seem to be more stable now. The G5 towers are quite unimpressive but perhaps the Intel ones are more so. It's hard to keep up with multiple platforms but I have very few issues with my linux/Windows hybrid network. I have the luxury of working for a small company these days though so my issues are usually easier to solve.
Now if only I didn't have to patch Java VM for DST. Ugh, that's pissing me off on multiple platforms especially if you run a few different versions. Feel sorry for those that can't use the latest version.
Short term Apple history shows you they aren't afraid to switch platforms even on platforms that are relatively new. I don't believe Apple will switch again as I think they finally realized its better to be with the pack than trying to support your own but this is a fear as Apple often releases products which break previous products. Look at the drivers for printers between OS 10.1 - 10.4 for evidence of this.
There is also all the false advertising Apple has been doing. It may not necessarily be false but its too over the top to be taken seriously. I don't know how many iPod owners I've come across in the last couple weeks which are ready to change computers but are concerned about what will happen with iTunes and their music collection. Not an enterprise issue but these little issues influence what corporate entities will see when they think of Apple.
The picture will change as things progress, Apple has a product they can actually expand so I don't see a need for them to throw the whole thing out again so perhaps the picture will change in another couple of years.
You have some points but Xserves still aren't as capable as modern solutions from Sun, HP, and hell, even Dell. Think SAN management, it's not impossible but its quite a bit more difficult on the Mac side of the fence. Maybe in a few more years they'll gear it up but monitoring and management have always been the weak side for Apple as they generally prefer to give the power to the user. This is great for home users but very bad for corporate users.
The support you mention is probably the biggest stumbling block for Apple at the current time however.
How the hell did that get mod'ed interesting in a day and age when you have powershell on both XP and Vista available for use which is just as robust as bash. Furthermore, there is nothing in Vista you can't script with hooks provided. The only tool you need is powershell. The comment makes no sense whatsoever.
I use powershell to script changes to my Exchange server and I could use it exclusively if I were so inclined but I don't need to do anything to my servers often enough where it would matter.
You're right about one thing though, someone should do a comparison of efficiency in administration using a GUI vs a CLI and compare it across platforms. This is the single biggest leap in Vista that would make it attractive to corporate America. Now everything can be scripted and a group policy can govern anything the machine does. That level of control in quite difficult to attain with OS X as I don't see too many management tools for Apple products. Unix, Linux, and Windows all have very powerful native management tools, hell, the BSDs do too, I can't imagine it would be too difficult to extend them to control the GUI interface on OS X.
There would be nothing random about pushing it out. Firewalls can be managed, your inventory tool will tell you when you have a product which interferes with your install. If the inventory tool fails then you know the machine has an issue. Combine this with some other remote management tools and you can probably fix the problem yourself.
I'm not arguing for local admin access for everybody but if they want a little music I don't see any harm in it. In fact, they are usually more alert and getting more work done when they have something to listen to. Of course that is just my personal experience so mileage varies I'm sure.
From an IT perspective everything would work and stay working if we had complete control but at what cost would that be? Delays for a person to have a new port opened on their box cost money as well. Security getting in the way of actual work costs a ton of money. I'm not entirely sure which costs more but I've found security issues usually take longer to troubleshoot than figuring out which app is interfering.
I've been on both sides of this coin at one time in my life or another. Sometimes the control freak in me wants everything to be perfect, then the realist kicks back in and says that no one expects it to be perfect and the reason you're here is to make sure downtime is minimal. It would be so easy to admin a network if the users could only go to the company Intranet but I'm in the business of giving them their cake so they can eat it too.
What kind of largish organization doesn't employ MOM or some other inventory tool? That is all you need, then script all your installs with SMS or whatever push mechanism you like. It's really not that difficult to give users the element of control over their machines while maintaining everything. Another option is regular imaging wiping the machine which could indeed be automated as well making it seamless to the end user and making IT not the bad guy.
Of course education is the best and most effective method for fighting problems with security. The more people that write off the problem as unsolvable the longer it will take the rest of us to come up with a workable option. Fortunately for me I work for a small company these days so this kind of stuff is fine and easy but I know at least my methods can and do scale wonderfully so I imagine there are a number of other techniques as well.
Virtual Server much like Virtual PC always sucked ass compared to Microsoft. They only bought it semi recently which is the real scary part. Hardware solutions are great but are inherently not as flexible as software solution, of course they perform better so there are trade-offs. I believe there is room for both although in my view EMC made a wise move going after VMWare as their products are solid compared to anything else in the market.
Thanks heavens I haven't heard any ads on XM since I subscribed 3 years ago. Of course I mainly listen to channels like XM Chill which is one hell of a great station. Guess maybe they were required to put ads in the pop stations? That would make sense since the songs themselves can often be considered ads.
You're right, you can upgrade a kernel without destroying drivers. This is my my NT4 drivers for my old ATI cards still work in XP and why my TWAIN drivers for my old arsed scanner also still work. When manufacturers take the time to develop proper drivers they almost never run into problems unless they want to utilize new features of the OS in which case this can be done with a driver update.
This isn't detrimental to MS in the least, Vista has been out for quite a while now and Apple has had ample time to correct whatever is wrong with iTunes. Considering what I've seen of iTunes on Windows this is completely not surprising since it is crap on XP so naturally it's going to be crap on Vista. Probably one of the reasons I refuse to own an iPod despite finding an iPod Video in some jacket some guy left behind at our site. The pron on it was nice but after that I just passed it on to someone that would appreciate the device itself. Personally I can't stand it, every iPod user I know has lost their music at least once and had to either restore from backup or call up Apple so they could re-download their music. It's great that Apple allows them to do it but they shouldn't have had to do it in the first place.
Influential buyers will just see this as another example of Apple dropping the ball on iTunes for Windows. Think of all the installation problems with version 6 on Windows. I ended up having to modify the local security policy of machines to allow the installer to complete. No other software has ever required this so I'm curious why iTunes does. Fortunately The newer versions I believe fixed the installer but there is still a whole range of funkiness with iTunes.
Vista is all kinds of pain but the majority of it is simple education.
Tapes would be practical if they were inexpensive. My PX502 library with SDLT-4 tape drives is quite efficient at backing up large amounts of data but the thing cost over 10 grand. The tapes are 800gigs native though so that's not too shabby. Unfortunately the tapes themselves are $70 and the drive is over a grand as well. People want to back up their stuff, they don't necessarily care about sequential access since they are only using it during a restore.
You are right that they certainly weren't sitting around doing nothing. They found their market and they've stuck to it. For that market they have kept up just fine and dandy.
Your example is flawed as Apache is more targeted and more successfully hacked specifically because it is far more popular even though it can be much more secure. Link for your reading
I know you want your opinion to be right but the logic and the math works. Accept it and move on.
No one was suggesting a replacement of well written code. Firewalls are but an additional layer of security and provide you a buffer between your mistakes and disaster. I can't imagine how anyone could see that as anything but a good thing.
My firewall will also protect me from vulnerabilities in my code however, if my firewall won't allow SMTP from that server then no exploit code on that server is going to result in my server sending out email. It's plain and simple. Yes, not all exploits are averted but the mere fact that there are some is enough to make it worth it.
The firewall as I said is an additional layer of security. I can see when I'm being probed and I can see the spoofs and other attacks on my server. Without the firewall I have no way of monitoring and reactively banning known offenders. Furthermore it adds a layer of redundancy as I have multiple servers servicing that port and IP address, something I couldn't do as effectively if the machine was directly on the Internet.
Of course firewalls do prevent mistakes from causing disaster and that has merit too. Now it doesn't matter if I accidentally install SMTP services on the webserver the firewall will guarantee that it works internally and ensure it doesn't work externally.
XP Home does have a ridiculous number of ports open by default and so does SuSE if you enable all the services that are typically needed for windows file sharing and printing but that doesn't really mean a whole lot these days. Let's face it, Windows 98 was more secure remotely because the thing just didn't do that much compared to the new kernel that exists today and compared to any version of linux after kernel 1.0. None of it is perfect, firewalls aren't perfect either for that matter, that is why you layer your security so a single vulnerability doesn't lead to disaster.
Umm... where did you pull that out of? Everything I've ever read says exactly the opposite of this. In fact, there are more security incidents with Apache every year than with IIS strictly because it is so much more popular. We can all agree Apache is more secure but only if you know what you're doing.
Here's a link
I would say that the logical thought process does indeed hold true. It makes a lot of sense for people to target Apache since that's where the majority is. Setting up Apache servers that do anything beyond basic static web serving is indeed difficult, like configuring PHP and getting the whole thing to talk to Oracle when you can do the whole thing with IIS is half the time and assuming IIS6 or IIS7 you have yourself a reasonably secure site out of the box.
Sorry, but the primary function of a firewall is indeed to add security. My website is protected by a firewall but it still receives millions of hits and several hundred thousand pageviews. It's safe to say its quite visible and I wish it to remain so. You're right that a firewall is an additional layer of protection and is by no means the only layer. Sometimes you are forced to run an insecure app though and in those times you thank your lucky stars you have proper firewalls and routers and VLANs and RADIUS to help protect your services.
I'll concede your point is valid about Exchange and that there are a lot of people that don't currently use a lot of the integration although the company I work for and at least a few dozen companies I've consulted for do use it but the mere fact that the options exists only helps Exchange adoption. The power of Microsoft has always been, learn one tool, know them all. If I know how to configure DNS on Windows I am quite capable of setting up DHCP, manage Active Directory and monitor Exchange. I can do all this from my management console PC with little or no effort in setup.
The problem with FOSS is usually one of integration, like getting spamassassin working with your mail server without losing important email. Consider how much effort goes into a proper spamassassin setup and then consider the one minute setup time for IMF on Exchange which I can easily argue is just as good at filtering spam albeit, overtime spam assassin does improve. Considering the difference in effort I can easily see why a lot of organizations would go the MS route especially now that SP2 for 2003 came out expanding the database limit to 72gigs. 16gig was way too low and I think MS got the picture on that. Of course Exchange 2007 looks to be a marked improvement as well with site mirroring and replication in-house so no more expensive third party tools for better or for worse on that one.
Methinks you completely miss the idea of why Exchange is so popular. If all it did was email then it would never have become a dominant player. It is precisely because it offers a unified provider that it has become popular. The server integrates tightly with voice communications as well as forms of instant messaging. In addition to this there is the identity management integration, teleconferencing, remote assistance, the list really goes on and on.
The desktop OS created Microsoft but all the services provided under one roof are what solidified it in the corporate world. In large organizations they like to exercise strict control and if something goes wrong they want a single person to go to fix the problem.
Most everyone in the world realizes the shortsightedness of this philosophy but it is indeed the reality. The only way to compete with Microsoft is to first become compatible, then expand your feature-set beyond what Microsoft can provide. It is a steep challenge to say the least despite problems with the software that MS produces it is mostly functional otherwise it would never have been accepted. Convergence is the future, it is why SIP is the dominant protocol and why TCP/IP overtook IPX/SPX. The medium that can do the most will win despite IPX/SPX being superior TCP/IP still won so keep that in mind. Of course Novell can squander pretty much anything so that might not be the best example.
From what I've seen of Lotus Notes it's a huge pain in the ass and doesn't even come close to offering the same features as Exchange. Much like DB/2 against SQL 2005 or Oracle.
I think in short a small tools philosophy has proven to work well but it goes against how we think in the real world. We don't setup millions of tiny warehouses for everything we need to store, we setup large facilities where all the resources can be centralized, managed, and monitored. We're like ants that way. It's risky and causes problems; a single bomb and we're screwed.
With that said maybe this year we can devote to changing the way people think about their tools. My leatherman sure it handy with all the tools it has in it but sometimes you just need a proper screw driver to get the job done. Perhaps there is a place for both, granted I use my leatherman for 90% of the tasks I perform that require a tool.