First off, I agree with you that this isn't a good application of a VM considering the number of alternative options that exist already. The one area I will disagree with is the licensing since you're in no way required to run Windows as your host OS. Just run a linux-based host OS and problem solved. VMWare runs just as well on both. I'm not sure about other options like Virtual PC or Qemu but last I checked Qemu only worked on Linux so you're still in a good position not to have to throw more money at Windows licensing.
Side topic, licensing has really gotten out of hand with pretty much every piece of commercial software. I think that's the real reason a lot of people are moving towards Linux. The learning curve required to administer linux effectively is outweighed by the complicated licensing schemes of various companies Microsoft especially. It is quite a challenge staying in compliance these days.
Back on topic, you could have a file server or three dedicated to the task using a DFS root to link them logically and to keep them sychronized. Then you wouldn't have to worry about pushing images killing server performance. Combined with network load balancing you could scale out as needed.
You don't need to "carefully" do anything. Folder Redirection in Windows was created just for the task. It's a feature that was introduced with Windows 2000. Beyond that you can use SMS and custom office installs to have everything configured properly everytime someone logs in. Mandatory profiles ensure that everything stays clean and spyware free. Which weaknesses are you referring to?
Beyond that I'll go and say that this approach is bomb proof and by redirecting files on to the servers which requires surprisingly little overhead you ensure that when users float from machine to machine they have all their application preferences and data. Settings can very from machine to machine with different version of software and whatnot but again, SMS will fix that.
I think we can all agree this is not a good use of virtualization. It would be very resource intensive and a simpler PXE solution already exists. With PXE you don't even have to have all the same hardware, just the proper drivers. SMS will take it from there installing the rest of the third party apps whatever they may be. Can be done from start to finish in under 30 minutes which is about how long it takes to fully restore an image. Of course over a gigabit link the time might be reduced but Windows will take a good 10 - 15 minutes to install over the network so it wouldn't be unreasonable for everything else to take another 15 minutes depending on how much there is. I know in my basic setup with Windows and Office its about 20 minutes give or take depending on processing speed and quality of hardware.
Joe sixpack doesn't install software period. IT does that in the corporate world so that issue is moot.
I assume you're talking about home users now. In this scenario it's all about education. Most users don't know there is a safer login for them to use. That is not the fault of Microsoft. I taught my parents to use the Install user to put software on their computer. Then they login as themselves to run it. They've been doing it properly ever since and that was three years ago when I setup the machine for them. I initially had to give them instructions on how to do it. Right clicking on the program that wish to install and selecting runas is not terribly difficult. An argument can be made it's not very intuitive but the feature is there and is readily accessible.
IE security is largely moot if the user is running under limited privileges and even more so in corporate environments with a mandatory profile. The options exist currently. No, none of it is perfect but there has been a marked improvement over the past. With that said I don't use IE but that is largely because Firefox has the functionality I desire and has better CSS support. Security plays very little part in this. It certainly used to but as I said, as long as the user is running with limited privileges very little ever installs properly. I tried that experiment with my parents. They are running IE just fine even though Firefox is on their machines.
With all that said, I'll add one more thing. You don't have to be an admin to install anything. You just need admin credentials so you never need to logoff. I agree with you in the regards to the biggest problem being between the keyboard and chair.
I'm sure more boards will be out with it now that the driver support is there. I wouldn't throw a rig like that out of my room although I might need to upgrade my air conditioner. Coindentally I already need to upgrade the AC in my office. Amazing what passes for a datacenter these days.
The point is rather moot though since most of the UI enhancements to Vista make it easier for people to run with limited access accounts. As I said, I did this without an issue. Of course my parents do it right now with XP. Windows will never be 100% secure until all of it's services have been stripped out and one by one added back in with 100% perfect code. I don't see that being very likely and I consider it irrelevent since that is not expected from any software in this capacity. Most Linux distros are exactly the same way. Sure the kernel is for all intents and purposes "safe" but the services connecting to it are not nor will be.
This is the whole reason you have multiple layers of security, none of them need to be perfect to be effective. Obviously we want to move in the direction of higher quality code and Linux distros have matured we've seen it happen and we've seen it going from Windows 2000 to XP/2003 as well. Ignoring progress doesn't help anyone.
Back to the original issue. Limited accounts aren't too restrictive for the OS. The problem here is purely 3rd party developing standards that don't work. There's a reason Office runs just fine without being an Admin. If developers wouldn't put keys in sensitive locations for no reason then the issue wouldn't even exist. As a result of this MS had to take up the role of fixing 3rd party mistakes by reimplementing the registry for Vista which has portions required and secure for the OS and user registry keys which can be ACL'd to whatever purpose the administrator or installer wishes. It is a much more robust system. Much like the web forms I develop that work if you put correct data in them but fail to perform properly if something unexpected is entered. As a result I have to perform validation of the data before I attempt to do with it. It's a common practice because 3rd parties never behave as you expect them to.
Wonder if they were having technical difficulties while you were there. Did you experience that at Defcon? I know I didn't. I crossed the country with my Sprint phone and there was exactly 10 minutes on the 2800 mile journey where I did not have signal. Quite ironically it was while I was 10 minutes from home. I have noticed I get a dropped call about once a week lately and that is quite odd. Haven't had a dropped call in 4 years then all of a sudden... Maybe you're right that Spring is going to hell
That's very weird considering my Sprint phone worked all over Vegas just last weekend. Also the cellular modems work great with much faster connectivity than all the other providers seem to be offering. I'd be curious about the quality and/or condition of your phone as that plays a very large role. My Samsung A900 for instance get's far better reception than my old phone. Of course that phone was 4 years old so I guess it served its purpose. It was an LG phone which I've so far been horribly unimpressed with in regards to reception.
You know, 100 years ago the automobile had a lot of problems too. Let's call all modern cars crap because the transmission still goes bad despite the fact that it goes bad 100,000 miles later than it did initially.
Are you seriously reading what you're writing? Sorry, but 90% of corporate America does not nor even needs to run as admin. For those that do, think home PCs they have the runas option which is just like sudo so what's the problem? Maybe because all those lazy developers made programs for Windows that require administrative access? Okay fine, let's give them a portion of the registry that users can read normally and move important system keys into a different location which can be secured. Problem solved.
It sounds to me like you don't know what you're talking about or at the very least you don't seem to understand Vista's new features or even features that have existed since NT4. That's fine, you're not required to but don't expect everyone to sit back and let you make false statements since that doesn't help anyone.
If you want to bash Vista bash something relavent like the user pop-ups asking you to authorize actions or the wizard you have to run when you access system files which grants you access to said files. It's not a default behavior for even Administrator to have access to certain files. Of course nothing stops Administrator from granting access since they indeed the Administrator.
That said, even if you do run as Admin on Vista things are a lot safer (read not safe, but safer), think OS X style prompts. There's another legitimate gripe with Vista. As I said, there are plenty of real reasons, there's no need to make one up.
I ran Vista for a month before wiping it and throwing Gentoo on it and I can honestly say I did not need to run as Administrator at all. Of course I know my way around a Windows system and I understand how to use Runas, of course I taught my computer illiterate parents how to use it too so I really don't think it's that complicated although it's intuitiveness is up for debate.
talk about a terrible way to do business. Those "working" papers could save your neck as well as hang it depending on the lawsuit in question. Course the company I work for will always make an attempt to make it right before proceeding with any kind of litigation. In situations like these should a suit come to discovery we'll need every piece of information we can get our hands on. With todays patent minefield I don't think this is a bad stance to take at all.
Apache is one of the most hacked services right under Sendmail I believe. As for OS X security let's see how much we can learn by sniffing the traffic coming from the unit. By default Samba on OS X doesn't support session signing or encryption. Both features fully support under practically ever modern linux distro. Apache is by far the dominant web server and because of that it is more prone to attack. It's simple math. Its major progress over the past is that it is getting easier to configure and secure properly so it will become less prone to attack. Why does this sound familiar? hmmmm.....
At any rate, every platform has its vulnerabilities; OS X has its patches just like every other OS out there. I'm not sure what you mean about innate security since I believe both OS's can and more importantly are often secured.
As for viruses, I honestly haven't seen one do any damage to any of my end-users in years. Of course they run with limited access just like I do. The mechanism has been there for quite some time, on the order of 10-12 years so it's mighty confusing how people are still mentioning it.
Thank you for defending what I believe to be a horribly distorted view of this country. A lot of people come from areas that aren't well off and assume the whole country is that way. Quite obviously the situation is not near as bleak as a lot of people say. The only part I disagree with is the average American is making less money now. The American economy even while depressed still outperforms every other economy on earth. That's not to say that it couldn't change of course.
I'll leave you with the following link to illustrate what I am saying in regard to average income. Link here:
The decline in salary is also coupled with higher gas and electric prices as well as increased prices on the cost of food. There is a serious problem here but nothing we can't solve with the natural selection process which has successfully guided this country for more than 200 years now.
I'd like to add that I too am starting up a business of my own as my current work environment leaves a lot to be desired.
I too am a big fan of the Marble FX, the logos and all writing are long gone but the mouse is still going strong. Periodic cleaning is the only thing it needed. Probably one of the better investments I made.
Seems to me a simpler solution is to just make sure you never upload more than 70% of a copyrighted work. Since a 30% change is enough to void the copyright. I imagine that would be easy to implement in a torrent application. Of course that would remove legitimacy I think since it would make it easier to download and distribute works. If you never send the entire contents or say only 10% of the contents to another person then how could that be copyright infringement?
Of course on moral grounds this obviously wouldn't be a good idea but it would end this pointless battling back and forth I think. The app would still have to support real uses like distributing ermm... home videos,linux distros, or game patches. Of course in this scenario I imagine it would be more difficult to use the service transperently like a VOD service but still not impossible.
I'll argue that for the majority of users the current system works fine and for those that need more control the mechanisms are available to allow this control through changing of a single registry entry or a single policy setting either of which could be controlled and managed remotely in a large corporate or a small home setting.
I guess I don't see it as retarded, of course its not perfect but considering the flexibility involved in implementation it sure seems like a good solution to me. Consider mandatory/roaming/static profiles. Now add in folder redirection and you have a lot of features working towards a single entity which provides the flexibility for millions of users to function in a very large number of scenarios.
I'd agree with you that it would be nice if things worked properly by default but who get's to define properly? I can tell you Microsoft doesn't and their large corporate users have a very large amount of pull in what happens here. If Microsoft were more like Apple they probably could accomplish a more elegant solution by throwing out past stail ideas like Apple does every so often. Of course it breaks backwards compatibility so now there are more tricks to keep that going and it all just balloons out from there until the company says stop.
In either case I don't think its fair to fault a product which can do exactly what you want it to do just because MS doesn't give you a pretty button to click on to make it do it. This is the same reason I don't have a problem with Linux. When you have a lot of flexibility you tend to lose a little useability but if you know your platform you can usually find a high quality balance on any of the platforms.
Kind of a moot point, just perform folder redirection for the machine and use your own icon population method if you hate Microsoft's so much. The options are there, they even exist for Windows 2000 through Vista. Not sure if NT4 could do it, in fact, I think I am sure it couldn't.
Not sure about the spyware regard since there is a lot more real-time monitoring of Vista going on which of course is a major performance hit. I haven't seen any gaping design flaws in the security around Vista as of yet, I am curious if there are some already discovered in newer builds. Viruses will probably exist for it but with the ability to run with the least amount of privileges will help reduce this risk. So then it's a matter of focusing on privilege escalation which is more a problem with applications than with operating systems.
Remotely I worry about Vista the most, it's new firewall is quite robust and hosts a great number of features not previously seen. How bulletproof this firewall is however remains to be seen. What about the underlying services? RPC is authenticated, how about thresholds to terminate connections with clients repeatedly failing logins and provide this service per port? I believe such a policy exists with Vista although I am admittedly unsure.
Don't get me wrong here though; I'm nervous about deploying Vista. Anytime you deploy something new there is inherent risk and a learning curve. This was the case when I moved from Netware 3.1 to Netware 4 and yes, even Netware 5. Windows NT to 2000? Same boat, Linux has been fairly consistent in that most of the stuff I learned to do in the mid-90s is still applicable now and by most I mean the vast majority.
So it sounds like we're mostly in agreement anyhow, that is quite excellent and without any name calling as well.
Seems to me proper precautions like various methods of security have decreased the pressures this causes. Why do I care if a machine on the network can send out mass mail when the machine isn't allowed outbound 25? Yes its bad security to let things run around but that means the crash result doesn't happen. Instead of the whole network going down you have one machine which has its software stripped and restored in less than 20 minutes all 100% remote site.
Security is very important and should remain in the spotlight for Vista but when was the last time a mass mailing worm took out networks that were properly protected with only basic appliances? I don't put a Linux box directly on the Internet just like I don't put a Windows box on without a firewall in between. It's just good practice, I've screwed up configurations on just about every platform at some point in my life and the additional layer of security helps to make sure that my little oops doesn't turn into a major catastrophe.
So yes, we agree security is one of the most important parts of running a network but I'm still left wondering since another poster planted the seed. What else has people in cold sweats over deploying Vista?
Out of curiosity who is suggesting that Vista will be a logistical nightmare? Plenty of speculation about the security which is just due diligence. Last I checked thought MS added a ton of features to Vista that corporate America has been dreaming about. Network managers and Systems Engineers should have a much easier time administerring a larger number of machines. Policy control is vastly improved combined with central storage options and other dynamic configuration tools and Vista looks great on paper.
Lot of Ifs in there still being a beta and all. I know from personal experience a lot of the features will make a lot of lives a lot easier. The popups to grant access need to be dealt with but I'm told newer versions of Vista have made this easier. I only worked with Beta 2 and I will revisit the OS when it has a release candidate. I can't say right now how many problems bugs will cause since I honestly don't know. Most of the issues I saw with beta 2 have already been addressed so it doesn't look half bad.
So yeah, back to my original question because I really do want to know. Who else is suggesting Vista is a nightmare to deploy? Just uninformed people shooting in the dark? Or people that have done a proper analysis on it?
Fine point, except the founding fathers made their intentions clearly known and offered alternatives to the british empire before going to war. The decision was not taken lightly and fighting on both sides was pretty damned brutal.
The problem right now is that you have politicians in the states here saying the terrorists hate our freedoms and in another country you see terrorists stating they just want us out of the region. Of course by providing no alternative they leave little recourse but fighting. Sadly the middle east region has not know peace in how many years?
Of course the mere thought that the U.S. as powerful as it is could stabilize the region is a joke and will only lead to more terrorist outbursts. I think the real question is whether or not what we call terrorist attacks right now in say Iraq should be considered as such considering such actions are directly towards their goals. When they attacked U.S. soil they became something more. That is the chief difference from the founding fathers. We never crossed the ocean to attack London. We watched to govern our own land so we took actions in support of this.
Actually I've been actually running Vista and Aero will indeed run on slow machines with negligable impact. It's really easy to find out for yourself. Just install it, its readily available. I in no way equated Media Center to iPhoto as media center is far more featureful. I work with OS X on a daily basis and I already stated a lot of the features bring Vista into competition and then some. It's typical, OS X came out after XP and people complain XP lacks features?
The bottom line is that I have actually run Vista and there are indeed a hell of a lot of changes behind the scenes. The age of the codebase is irrelevent, Microsoft has had plenty of time to get all the parts working and a lot of the parts are independent of Vista development. Parts like the 3.0 framework which is a major extension of the 2.0 framework. Yeah its not completely different but yeah, it is very different and brings a lot of new features to the table.
I have no need to buy anything, its right there in front of everyone right now, this very minute.
trust isn't required, what comes to and from a machine is easily monitored. The firewall is very feature-rich. Any holes remain to be seen but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Just keep in mind that it is not in Microsoft's interests to alienate corporate clients and corporate clients care very much about where their data goes. This is why WSUS doesn't require WGA, same with SMS.
Last I checked its been quite a long while since there was a worm that shutdown large networks all over the world. Sounds to me like there has been progress made. Nothing is perfect and it never will be. Feel free to continue with your pseudo-logic. I'm sure it will take you far.
OS X NFS and SMB support is broken, it works from Mac to Mac but has serious issues going from Mac to Linux, Mac to Windows. Need only google to find thousands of examples of frustrated admins myself included. Ultimately I just created an Appleshare since that does seem to work reliably.
I don't have a top end machine and I've even tried it on a 750mhz P3 and yep, Aero has negligable performance impact. Maybe a couple megs of ram difference but its really not nearly as bad as you seem to think.
As for self-healing your illustrating your ignorance of Vista. Windows File Protection was only the beginning, Vista has taken it a lot further and if you actually ran Vista you would see just how much further it goes.
You're right about one thing, I've been around long enough to see the transition from 3.1 to 95 and you are probably right that 9x to XP was a greater change for consumers. Vista is a lot more than just new APIs, its a new driver model, its a new security model, its a new way to interact with built-in speech recognition that actually works. There are hundreds and thousands of changes. The new modular system makes patch work a hell of a lot easier and the performance and reporting with Vista makes OS X look pail out of the box. I've never seen a distro come with proper reporting tools but there are some great ones available for Linux. Media Center is quite useful for home users and has nothing to do with plugging the computer into a TV. It sounds like you've never used the product if you think one of its many functions is its only function. That product is currently available as well. Of course the 3.0 framework version is a lot faster.
Now argue away about Windows being unusable. There is too large of an install base for your statement to have any meaning or merit. Yes Vista is missing promised features but corporate America likes the features that are included and everyone really does serve to benefit from this upgrade. I won't actually upgrade any of my computers to Vista but new machines that come with it will fit in nicely and be trouble free. LUA is fixed in Vista and works beautifully.
Try it, deploy it, tweak it, customize it, you'll see just how much more flexibility it adds. If you don't want to go through the hassle of learning it then don't spout off about it. It doesn't put you in good light as it accomplishes nothing. As I said, there is too large of an install base to actually believe you and that now includes Vista.
You should actually read what is being said before making statements which clearly illustrate that you have no idea what you're talking about. The concept wasn't about comparing Vista to other platforms, it was about comparing Vista to previous versions of Windows. Everything an OS X user could brag about is wiped away and now Vista has a lot that OS X doesn't. Big surprise, OS X came out after XP and the next major OS update from Apple may very well change it back.
Yes I do have an exact idea of how much functionality most Linux distros fit on 3.4gigs, the point is irrelevent because you completely missed what the sentence was saying. There are six operating systems on that disc and I'm sorry, but even Debian is 2 cds these days. It matters not anyhow, pretty much all of that 3.4gig DVD is optional just like a linux distro so you don't have to install the stuff you don't want and/or need.
As for me being cute, well, guilty as charged. Your point falls so flat on its ass its amazing you don't hit your head more. OS X doesn't come with the reporting tools that Vista comes with. It won't fix a printer driver that doesn't work and a bitlocker-like equivalent has no GUI on OS X as shipped. As for indexing you're probably right but it is progress no matter how much you don't want it to be.
Bad management only goes so far but if you've ever actually met people that work on these projects you would probably change your mind. I had the good fortune of meeting a lot of them in San Diego last April. Microsoft of today is quite a bit different than the Microsoft of 10 years ago. Surprise surprise, now if only you would come into this new reality and actually try something before you condemn it as defective. Vista won't work for everyone but thats not news, its not perfect, not news either. Of course OS X, all the BSDs and all the Linuxs out there aren't either. The important part is that they are all moving forward even with you covering your eyes.
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First off, I agree with you that this isn't a good application of a VM considering the number of alternative options that exist already. The one area I will disagree with is the licensing since you're in no way required to run Windows as your host OS. Just run a linux-based host OS and problem solved. VMWare runs just as well on both. I'm not sure about other options like Virtual PC or Qemu but last I checked Qemu only worked on Linux so you're still in a good position not to have to throw more money at Windows licensing.
Side topic, licensing has really gotten out of hand with pretty much every piece of commercial software. I think that's the real reason a lot of people are moving towards Linux. The learning curve required to administer linux effectively is outweighed by the complicated licensing schemes of various companies Microsoft especially. It is quite a challenge staying in compliance these days.
Back on topic, you could have a file server or three dedicated to the task using a DFS root to link them logically and to keep them sychronized. Then you wouldn't have to worry about pushing images killing server performance. Combined with network load balancing you could scale out as needed.
You don't need to "carefully" do anything. Folder Redirection in Windows was created just for the task. It's a feature that was introduced with Windows 2000. Beyond that you can use SMS and custom office installs to have everything configured properly everytime someone logs in. Mandatory profiles ensure that everything stays clean and spyware free. Which weaknesses are you referring to?
Beyond that I'll go and say that this approach is bomb proof and by redirecting files on to the servers which requires surprisingly little overhead you ensure that when users float from machine to machine they have all their application preferences and data. Settings can very from machine to machine with different version of software and whatnot but again, SMS will fix that.
I think we can all agree this is not a good use of virtualization. It would be very resource intensive and a simpler PXE solution already exists. With PXE you don't even have to have all the same hardware, just the proper drivers. SMS will take it from there installing the rest of the third party apps whatever they may be. Can be done from start to finish in under 30 minutes which is about how long it takes to fully restore an image. Of course over a gigabit link the time might be reduced but Windows will take a good 10 - 15 minutes to install over the network so it wouldn't be unreasonable for everything else to take another 15 minutes depending on how much there is. I know in my basic setup with Windows and Office its about 20 minutes give or take depending on processing speed and quality of hardware.
Haha, well true, but it does exist! Of course six slots is fairly standard for a motherboard unless you move to a passive backplane scenario.
Joe sixpack doesn't install software period. IT does that in the corporate world so that issue is moot.
I assume you're talking about home users now. In this scenario it's all about education. Most users don't know there is a safer login for them to use. That is not the fault of Microsoft. I taught my parents to use the Install user to put software on their computer. Then they login as themselves to run it. They've been doing it properly ever since and that was three years ago when I setup the machine for them. I initially had to give them instructions on how to do it. Right clicking on the program that wish to install and selecting runas is not terribly difficult. An argument can be made it's not very intuitive but the feature is there and is readily accessible.
IE security is largely moot if the user is running under limited privileges and even more so in corporate environments with a mandatory profile. The options exist currently. No, none of it is perfect but there has been a marked improvement over the past. With that said I don't use IE but that is largely because Firefox has the functionality I desire and has better CSS support. Security plays very little part in this. It certainly used to but as I said, as long as the user is running with limited privileges very little ever installs properly. I tried that experiment with my parents. They are running IE just fine even though Firefox is on their machines.
With all that said, I'll add one more thing. You don't have to be an admin to install anything. You just need admin credentials so you never need to logoff. I agree with you in the regards to the biggest problem being between the keyboard and chair.
Board with 4 PCI-E
I'm sure more boards will be out with it now that the driver support is there. I wouldn't throw a rig like that out of my room although I might need to upgrade my air conditioner. Coindentally I already need to upgrade the AC in my office. Amazing what passes for a datacenter these days.
Administrator != root
The point is rather moot though since most of the UI enhancements to Vista make it easier for people to run with limited access accounts. As I said, I did this without an issue. Of course my parents do it right now with XP. Windows will never be 100% secure until all of it's services have been stripped out and one by one added back in with 100% perfect code. I don't see that being very likely and I consider it irrelevent since that is not expected from any software in this capacity. Most Linux distros are exactly the same way. Sure the kernel is for all intents and purposes "safe" but the services connecting to it are not nor will be.
This is the whole reason you have multiple layers of security, none of them need to be perfect to be effective. Obviously we want to move in the direction of higher quality code and Linux distros have matured we've seen it happen and we've seen it going from Windows 2000 to XP/2003 as well. Ignoring progress doesn't help anyone.
Back to the original issue. Limited accounts aren't too restrictive for the OS. The problem here is purely 3rd party developing standards that don't work. There's a reason Office runs just fine without being an Admin. If developers wouldn't put keys in sensitive locations for no reason then the issue wouldn't even exist. As a result of this MS had to take up the role of fixing 3rd party mistakes by reimplementing the registry for Vista which has portions required and secure for the OS and user registry keys which can be ACL'd to whatever purpose the administrator or installer wishes. It is a much more robust system. Much like the web forms I develop that work if you put correct data in them but fail to perform properly if something unexpected is entered. As a result I have to perform validation of the data before I attempt to do with it. It's a common practice because 3rd parties never behave as you expect them to.
Wonder if they were having technical difficulties while you were there. Did you experience that at Defcon? I know I didn't. I crossed the country with my Sprint phone and there was exactly 10 minutes on the 2800 mile journey where I did not have signal. Quite ironically it was while I was 10 minutes from home. I have noticed I get a dropped call about once a week lately and that is quite odd. Haven't had a dropped call in 4 years then all of a sudden... Maybe you're right that Spring is going to hell
That's very weird considering my Sprint phone worked all over Vegas just last weekend. Also the cellular modems work great with much faster connectivity than all the other providers seem to be offering. I'd be curious about the quality and/or condition of your phone as that plays a very large role. My Samsung A900 for instance get's far better reception than my old phone. Of course that phone was 4 years old so I guess it served its purpose. It was an LG phone which I've so far been horribly unimpressed with in regards to reception.
You know, 100 years ago the automobile had a lot of problems too. Let's call all modern cars crap because the transmission still goes bad despite the fact that it goes bad 100,000 miles later than it did initially.
Are you seriously reading what you're writing? Sorry, but 90% of corporate America does not nor even needs to run as admin. For those that do, think home PCs they have the runas option which is just like sudo so what's the problem? Maybe because all those lazy developers made programs for Windows that require administrative access? Okay fine, let's give them a portion of the registry that users can read normally and move important system keys into a different location which can be secured. Problem solved.
It sounds to me like you don't know what you're talking about or at the very least you don't seem to understand Vista's new features or even features that have existed since NT4. That's fine, you're not required to but don't expect everyone to sit back and let you make false statements since that doesn't help anyone.
If you want to bash Vista bash something relavent like the user pop-ups asking you to authorize actions or the wizard you have to run when you access system files which grants you access to said files. It's not a default behavior for even Administrator to have access to certain files. Of course nothing stops Administrator from granting access since they indeed the Administrator.
That said, even if you do run as Admin on Vista things are a lot safer (read not safe, but safer), think OS X style prompts. There's another legitimate gripe with Vista. As I said, there are plenty of real reasons, there's no need to make one up.
I ran Vista for a month before wiping it and throwing Gentoo on it and I can honestly say I did not need to run as Administrator at all. Of course I know my way around a Windows system and I understand how to use Runas, of course I taught my computer illiterate parents how to use it too so I really don't think it's that complicated although it's intuitiveness is up for debate.
talk about a terrible way to do business. Those "working" papers could save your neck as well as hang it depending on the lawsuit in question. Course the company I work for will always make an attempt to make it right before proceeding with any kind of litigation. In situations like these should a suit come to discovery we'll need every piece of information we can get our hands on. With todays patent minefield I don't think this is a bad stance to take at all.
I'll put out two links for you since you're either lying or just misinformed. Link 1
Link 2
Apache is one of the most hacked services right under Sendmail I believe. As for OS X security let's see how much we can learn by sniffing the traffic coming from the unit. By default Samba on OS X doesn't support session signing or encryption. Both features fully support under practically ever modern linux distro. Apache is by far the dominant web server and because of that it is more prone to attack. It's simple math. Its major progress over the past is that it is getting easier to configure and secure properly so it will become less prone to attack. Why does this sound familiar? hmmmm.....
At any rate, every platform has its vulnerabilities; OS X has its patches just like every other OS out there. I'm not sure what you mean about innate security since I believe both OS's can and more importantly are often secured.
As for viruses, I honestly haven't seen one do any damage to any of my end-users in years. Of course they run with limited access just like I do. The mechanism has been there for quite some time, on the order of 10-12 years so it's mighty confusing how people are still mentioning it.
I'll leave you with one more link Shows both sides fairly
Both platforms have their faults but spreading mis-information does no one any good.
Thank you for defending what I believe to be a horribly distorted view of this country. A lot of people come from areas that aren't well off and assume the whole country is that way. Quite obviously the situation is not near as bleak as a lot of people say. The only part I disagree with is the average American is making less money now. The American economy even while depressed still outperforms every other economy on earth. That's not to say that it couldn't change of course.
I'll leave you with the following link to illustrate what I am saying in regard to average income. Link here:
The decline in salary is also coupled with higher gas and electric prices as well as increased prices on the cost of food. There is a serious problem here but nothing we can't solve with the natural selection process which has successfully guided this country for more than 200 years now.
I'd like to add that I too am starting up a business of my own as my current work environment leaves a lot to be desired.
I too am a big fan of the Marble FX, the logos and all writing are long gone but the mouse is still going strong. Periodic cleaning is the only thing it needed. Probably one of the better investments I made.
Seems to me a simpler solution is to just make sure you never upload more than 70% of a copyrighted work. Since a 30% change is enough to void the copyright. I imagine that would be easy to implement in a torrent application. Of course that would remove legitimacy I think since it would make it easier to download and distribute works. If you never send the entire contents or say only 10% of the contents to another person then how could that be copyright infringement?
Of course on moral grounds this obviously wouldn't be a good idea but it would end this pointless battling back and forth I think. The app would still have to support real uses like distributing ermm... home videos,linux distros, or game patches. Of course in this scenario I imagine it would be more difficult to use the service transperently like a VOD service but still not impossible.
Out of curiosity what doesn't it do that requires extra help desk people to maintain?
I'll argue that for the majority of users the current system works fine and for those that need more control the mechanisms are available to allow this control through changing of a single registry entry or a single policy setting either of which could be controlled and managed remotely in a large corporate or a small home setting.
I guess I don't see it as retarded, of course its not perfect but considering the flexibility involved in implementation it sure seems like a good solution to me. Consider mandatory/roaming/static profiles. Now add in folder redirection and you have a lot of features working towards a single entity which provides the flexibility for millions of users to function in a very large number of scenarios.
I'd agree with you that it would be nice if things worked properly by default but who get's to define properly? I can tell you Microsoft doesn't and their large corporate users have a very large amount of pull in what happens here. If Microsoft were more like Apple they probably could accomplish a more elegant solution by throwing out past stail ideas like Apple does every so often. Of course it breaks backwards compatibility so now there are more tricks to keep that going and it all just balloons out from there until the company says stop.
In either case I don't think its fair to fault a product which can do exactly what you want it to do just because MS doesn't give you a pretty button to click on to make it do it. This is the same reason I don't have a problem with Linux. When you have a lot of flexibility you tend to lose a little useability but if you know your platform you can usually find a high quality balance on any of the platforms.
Kind of a moot point, just perform folder redirection for the machine and use your own icon population method if you hate Microsoft's so much. The options are there, they even exist for Windows 2000 through Vista. Not sure if NT4 could do it, in fact, I think I am sure it couldn't.
Not sure about the spyware regard since there is a lot more real-time monitoring of Vista going on which of course is a major performance hit. I haven't seen any gaping design flaws in the security around Vista as of yet, I am curious if there are some already discovered in newer builds. Viruses will probably exist for it but with the ability to run with the least amount of privileges will help reduce this risk. So then it's a matter of focusing on privilege escalation which is more a problem with applications than with operating systems.
Remotely I worry about Vista the most, it's new firewall is quite robust and hosts a great number of features not previously seen. How bulletproof this firewall is however remains to be seen. What about the underlying services? RPC is authenticated, how about thresholds to terminate connections with clients repeatedly failing logins and provide this service per port? I believe such a policy exists with Vista although I am admittedly unsure.
Don't get me wrong here though; I'm nervous about deploying Vista. Anytime you deploy something new there is inherent risk and a learning curve. This was the case when I moved from Netware 3.1 to Netware 4 and yes, even Netware 5. Windows NT to 2000? Same boat, Linux has been fairly consistent in that most of the stuff I learned to do in the mid-90s is still applicable now and by most I mean the vast majority.
So it sounds like we're mostly in agreement anyhow, that is quite excellent and without any name calling as well.
Seems to me proper precautions like various methods of security have decreased the pressures this causes. Why do I care if a machine on the network can send out mass mail when the machine isn't allowed outbound 25? Yes its bad security to let things run around but that means the crash result doesn't happen. Instead of the whole network going down you have one machine which has its software stripped and restored in less than 20 minutes all 100% remote site.
Security is very important and should remain in the spotlight for Vista but when was the last time a mass mailing worm took out networks that were properly protected with only basic appliances? I don't put a Linux box directly on the Internet just like I don't put a Windows box on without a firewall in between. It's just good practice, I've screwed up configurations on just about every platform at some point in my life and the additional layer of security helps to make sure that my little oops doesn't turn into a major catastrophe.
So yes, we agree security is one of the most important parts of running a network but I'm still left wondering since another poster planted the seed. What else has people in cold sweats over deploying Vista?
Out of curiosity who is suggesting that Vista will be a logistical nightmare? Plenty of speculation about the security which is just due diligence. Last I checked thought MS added a ton of features to Vista that corporate America has been dreaming about. Network managers and Systems Engineers should have a much easier time administerring a larger number of machines. Policy control is vastly improved combined with central storage options and other dynamic configuration tools and Vista looks great on paper.
Lot of Ifs in there still being a beta and all. I know from personal experience a lot of the features will make a lot of lives a lot easier. The popups to grant access need to be dealt with but I'm told newer versions of Vista have made this easier. I only worked with Beta 2 and I will revisit the OS when it has a release candidate. I can't say right now how many problems bugs will cause since I honestly don't know. Most of the issues I saw with beta 2 have already been addressed so it doesn't look half bad.
So yeah, back to my original question because I really do want to know. Who else is suggesting Vista is a nightmare to deploy? Just uninformed people shooting in the dark? Or people that have done a proper analysis on it?
Fine point, except the founding fathers made their intentions clearly known and offered alternatives to the british empire before going to war. The decision was not taken lightly and fighting on both sides was pretty damned brutal.
The problem right now is that you have politicians in the states here saying the terrorists hate our freedoms and in another country you see terrorists stating they just want us out of the region. Of course by providing no alternative they leave little recourse but fighting. Sadly the middle east region has not know peace in how many years?
Of course the mere thought that the U.S. as powerful as it is could stabilize the region is a joke and will only lead to more terrorist outbursts. I think the real question is whether or not what we call terrorist attacks right now in say Iraq should be considered as such considering such actions are directly towards their goals. When they attacked U.S. soil they became something more. That is the chief difference from the founding fathers. We never crossed the ocean to attack London. We watched to govern our own land so we took actions in support of this.
Actually I've been actually running Vista and Aero will indeed run on slow machines with negligable impact. It's really easy to find out for yourself. Just install it, its readily available. I in no way equated Media Center to iPhoto as media center is far more featureful. I work with OS X on a daily basis and I already stated a lot of the features bring Vista into competition and then some. It's typical, OS X came out after XP and people complain XP lacks features?
The bottom line is that I have actually run Vista and there are indeed a hell of a lot of changes behind the scenes. The age of the codebase is irrelevent, Microsoft has had plenty of time to get all the parts working and a lot of the parts are independent of Vista development. Parts like the 3.0 framework which is a major extension of the 2.0 framework. Yeah its not completely different but yeah, it is very different and brings a lot of new features to the table.
I have no need to buy anything, its right there in front of everyone right now, this very minute.
trust isn't required, what comes to and from a machine is easily monitored. The firewall is very feature-rich. Any holes remain to be seen but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Just keep in mind that it is not in Microsoft's interests to alienate corporate clients and corporate clients care very much about where their data goes. This is why WSUS doesn't require WGA, same with SMS.
haha, you're hopeless, utterly hopeless.
Last I checked its been quite a long while since there was a worm that shutdown large networks all over the world. Sounds to me like there has been progress made. Nothing is perfect and it never will be. Feel free to continue with your pseudo-logic. I'm sure it will take you far.
OS X NFS and SMB support is broken, it works from Mac to Mac but has serious issues going from Mac to Linux, Mac to Windows. Need only google to find thousands of examples of frustrated admins myself included. Ultimately I just created an Appleshare since that does seem to work reliably.
I don't have a top end machine and I've even tried it on a 750mhz P3 and yep, Aero has negligable performance impact. Maybe a couple megs of ram difference but its really not nearly as bad as you seem to think.
As for self-healing your illustrating your ignorance of Vista. Windows File Protection was only the beginning, Vista has taken it a lot further and if you actually ran Vista you would see just how much further it goes.
You're right about one thing, I've been around long enough to see the transition from 3.1 to 95 and you are probably right that 9x to XP was a greater change for consumers. Vista is a lot more than just new APIs, its a new driver model, its a new security model, its a new way to interact with built-in speech recognition that actually works. There are hundreds and thousands of changes. The new modular system makes patch work a hell of a lot easier and the performance and reporting with Vista makes OS X look pail out of the box. I've never seen a distro come with proper reporting tools but there are some great ones available for Linux. Media Center is quite useful for home users and has nothing to do with plugging the computer into a TV. It sounds like you've never used the product if you think one of its many functions is its only function. That product is currently available as well. Of course the 3.0 framework version is a lot faster.
Now argue away about Windows being unusable. There is too large of an install base for your statement to have any meaning or merit. Yes Vista is missing promised features but corporate America likes the features that are included and everyone really does serve to benefit from this upgrade. I won't actually upgrade any of my computers to Vista but new machines that come with it will fit in nicely and be trouble free. LUA is fixed in Vista and works beautifully.
Try it, deploy it, tweak it, customize it, you'll see just how much more flexibility it adds. If you don't want to go through the hassle of learning it then don't spout off about it. It doesn't put you in good light as it accomplishes nothing. As I said, there is too large of an install base to actually believe you and that now includes Vista.
You should actually read what is being said before making statements which clearly illustrate that you have no idea what you're talking about. The concept wasn't about comparing Vista to other platforms, it was about comparing Vista to previous versions of Windows. Everything an OS X user could brag about is wiped away and now Vista has a lot that OS X doesn't. Big surprise, OS X came out after XP and the next major OS update from Apple may very well change it back.
Yes I do have an exact idea of how much functionality most Linux distros fit on 3.4gigs, the point is irrelevent because you completely missed what the sentence was saying. There are six operating systems on that disc and I'm sorry, but even Debian is 2 cds these days. It matters not anyhow, pretty much all of that 3.4gig DVD is optional just like a linux distro so you don't have to install the stuff you don't want and/or need.
As for me being cute, well, guilty as charged. Your point falls so flat on its ass its amazing you don't hit your head more. OS X doesn't come with the reporting tools that Vista comes with. It won't fix a printer driver that doesn't work and a bitlocker-like equivalent has no GUI on OS X as shipped. As for indexing you're probably right but it is progress no matter how much you don't want it to be.
Bad management only goes so far but if you've ever actually met people that work on these projects you would probably change your mind. I had the good fortune of meeting a lot of them in San Diego last April. Microsoft of today is quite a bit different than the Microsoft of 10 years ago. Surprise surprise, now if only you would come into this new reality and actually try something before you condemn it as defective. Vista won't work for everyone but thats not news, its not perfect, not news either. Of course OS X, all the BSDs and all the Linuxs out there aren't either. The important part is that they are all moving forward even with you covering your eyes.