This feature already exists and its even in XP. It's called "End Process Tree" which closes any and all processes that interoperate with each other. It's fairly common for me to use it while cleaning up machines or when I screw up some coding and launch multiple processes by accident. Of course this exclused system services and can only close what it has launched. Gives more control to individual users.
It happened with Cisco, except they all went down to $1 including the CEO. All to save jobs of people actually doing the work, and now of course Cisco is back on track and all seems to be well for them again. Seems like an easy way to temporarily boost resources, of course thats assuming they had a shot at making additional funds so that the management had some idea on when they would start getting paid again.
LTO3 is far and away the better deal. Looking at library system to backup about 20tb and you can do it for about 10k from Quantum. Combine that with an additional drive for performance and you've got yourself a good way to backup data. At $70 per 400/800 gig tape thats a pretty good price point. So build your array of 12 of these 750gig joys and then all is well. Of course my new arrays have 38 drives in them so this will get even more important.
I'm liking this trend, this is a bigger step than previous tries although my concern is over reliability still much like how drives over 160gigs failed more often that larger 250gig and later 300 gig drives. Now reliability is up on them and you can have 400gig drives in your array without sweating too much. Not sure about the 500s yet. Still this 250gig leap might make it worth while to sweat it out a bit as long as the library keeps churning away.
Except that they indeed found one who could have led them to 18 others. Why wasn't the information passed on to law enforement? Didn't the FAA notice the planes weren't exactly on course? Knowing that info wouldn't that have given them enough evidence to order an evacuation? Shooting the planes down would have probably been very unlikely for reasons I imagine are obvious.
Seems to me like there is already too much fragmentation going on. They need to be able to pass info to the people that can make a difference. As long as they can't do that then they've no business collecting even more information which will be mishandled even further.
I know what you saying, break the info apart but what if a seedy character had my phone number before me? Does that mean I'm under surveillance and instantly labeled a terrorist? This doesn't work because the information obtained is ineffective. If they suspect someone in particular then they can tap that individual line. If they suspect 20 people surrounding it are involved then yes indeed they can be tapped as well, that is reasonable and probable cause. Doing this to every phone is pointless and a huge waste of resources which could be devoted to analyzing the data they already have and then notifying the people that will make a difference. If you're going to change the law for the NSA make it so they can legally pass the info on to the FBI and local law enforcement. That is all that is required and far less invasive.
My point was the Katrina disaster was completely preventable by preparing now for what might be around the corner. This can be done without a tremendous impact on any's lifestyle so there was no excuse.
You do bring up a good point and a common misconception that energy conservation has to harm an admittedly great lifestyle which I do enjoy. The U.S. consumes so much power because they can and this in no way means that we have to. Hydrogen and electric cars have been around a while and could be given broad support. There are many technologies out there that are expensive now because they can't mass produce anything due to insufficient demand.
This same issue applies to the kyoto treaty. Without U.S. support backing all of the technology behind making power plants cleaner the prices remain higher although I'm sure there was a noticeable price drop with the EU attempting everything. If the U.S. had been a part of it the whole thing would have been less expensive and you create a new industry devoted to providing clean solutions for other industries not just the energy sector. That can create jobs and perhaps more importantly push us ahead instead of our current standstill with modern oil and coal.
With more jobs more people are making money, naturally this will only work if the price point is low enough to not kill whatever industry is being regulated. We definitely need to invest in cleaner power generation. That potentially even has the ability of generating power for less money especially after the initial build. So I don't think it has to hurt our lifestyles. I don't think we have to shoot out all the emissions our cars do to maintain our lifestyle.
You're right with energy storage though, that could be a shortcut method so you don't have to invest in a new distribution system for a new fuel. That would probably be a great solution, the whole issue is getting around the fact that the people currently researching said technology are the same people that have at contributed to higher fuel prices for us right now. Oil and refinerary companies have all the money and somehow are still getting additional government funding for alternative energy. It's a crazy thought process. You'd think they'd have a lot to gain by using a lot of the technologies they've produced but instead they just sit there. Guess the energy industry is kinda like the music industry. Why change when you can get the government to protect your way of life. At some point we're going to have to change things.
But no mechanism to do anything about it. There were several people in several intelligence agencies that knew something was coming. They notified people who notified people and somehow nothing managed to happen. That is the problem. As far as I'm concerned they shouldn't have access to domestic info. If they find something internationally they should pass the info on to a domestic agency like the FBI or the local police depending on severity. That is why they exist is it not?
By your words we should wait until the water has already risen to obvious levels before we take action. That sounds to me like a Katrina style disaster. People predicted a terrible hurricane would come but in the end they weren't prepared because there was no "hard" evidence.
It's the same deal with global warming. It is happening, that has never been questioned. The question is simply how much of a role humans play, no one factor plays a sole role in it but humans certainly do have the power to affect it.
You're right about environmentalists focusing on quality of life though. It speaks to more people readily but it would still involve energy regulations since an unregulated industry led to the lake michigan disaster. How can a lake catch on fire? Honestly thats insane and it was an obvious problem but in the name of progress it was allowed to continue until finally a very public disaster occurred which woke everyone else up. At what point do we stop waiting for disaster to happen and start pro-actively taking measures to prevent them?
With all that said, I'll add one more thing, climate is indeed a complex system so why are we pumping crap into the air making it even more so?
No amount of information gathering would have affected the outcome. There was already enough data to determine that the event was going to happen. There weren't enough resources to process that data and give the right information to the right people. Nothing about this system would change that, only provide yet more information probably causing even more confusion and missing still more events.
Information gathering is only useful when you can act on the information you obtain. So let's figure out how to act on the information we have before we expand information gathering abilities. This is all regardless of the constitution of course since this whole thing flies in its face.
Webtrends, haha, NetIQs package gives lots of great info in regards to trends although it is quite expensive. It's amazing the parent completely missed the whole idea of web log analysis like that.
When the only tool you have is a hammer all problems look like a nail.
Basically the one thing I see over and over is that when you combine disciplines you fall into a role that uses those multiple disciplines. I see all this mixing and matching which is great since the CS world I think is too big to study generically. So match your disciplines and you'll most likely find a job using all of them. Kinda like a Windows admin that doesn't know Linux will never deploy it. If that same admin knows both he/she will probably find a way to work both into their lives. Small examples but I think it illustrates my point.
Actually you're jumping to conclusions based on a picture. The mere fact that such items were logged tells you the system was functioning. If parts of it don't work well, its a beta, regardless the core stayed up and running along with the monitoring tools so it sounds like the user probably didn't even notice.
Again, that is me jumping to a conclusion based on a picture so I can be wrong as well but I do know if the memory got logged then the system wasn't that bad off. The scenarios surrounding it are completely unknown. The OS stopped working error could have occurred by running software that writes to protected memory and the resulting denial appears as the error. Lots of possiblities.
Proving XP instability is quite difficult not because the tools aren't there to mine it but because most people don't have stability problems unless they have hardware problems. Same with 2003. Let's move on please and concentrate on security and performance which is where Vista has yet to prove itself. Although in reality Vista performs better on equipped machines than XP does. When you get towards the lower end of the requirements XP becomes a better option. That will always happen though, kinda like running SUSE 10 on a 386. Granted not as dramatic.
I have seen all of the same things you mention as problems with Windows and I've also seen them with Linux. A quad processor pentium pro proliant server I had which I mentioned in another post here. I had to use special boot params to modify default driver behavior with every linux distro I tried. I went through Slackware, Debian, RH9, SUSE, and finally Gentoo. I don't blame any linux developers for that problem because Compaq did something funky with its hardware. Also, I too have a widescreen LCD with XP and it worked just fine out of the box. Sounds to me like the Philips version is doing something not supported for Windows not to be able to autoadjust it. Hardware probing in linux does seem to be vastly superior these days although I do remember a time not too long ago when a probe at the wrong time would cause a reboot.
Now that you're talking about Linux driver support let me go to the store and buy a webcam and hook it up and see if it works. It won't and I don't expect it too. Are there drivers for it? Probably, Windows won't have them either. I don't think its the OS makers fault, that is why most hardware comes with a cd which contains drivers.
So Linux doesn't work with old hardware, and it doesn't work with new hardware. How is its hardware support better than Windows? Obviously I'm not being serious here. The number of drivers support under kernel 2.4 is astounding compared to Windows. Kernel 2.6 is playing fast catch up. It may have surpassed 2.4 finally but even up until about 6 months ago the Viewcast Osprey drivers were for kernel 2.4.
Anyways, I say driver support is for vendors, OS makers can put however much effort into the release as they want but there will always be unsupported hardware for any number of reasons. Microsoft doesn't put the same amount of resources into it and you can definitely argue they should put more effort it. The simple fact is Microsoft is trying to clean up the muddy water and ignoring the progress helps no one. Hard to find a piece of software causing a BSOD these days. It's almost always a hardware problem now and thats improvement.
Linux distros have come a long way as well and I could definitely see them making more progress since they release often they have plenty of opportunities to add more drivers to the latest distro. Microsoft does not have that luxury since corporate customers do not want the install base changing. They release once with as many drivers as they have knowing full well the vendors will provide drivers for their own products. In the end who wants to use a Microsoft driver for their new wizbang Nvidia video card? People that don't know better. Let the vendors do the driver work.
Yep, because most all cards support it. Remember when most network cards supported NE2000 drivers? I could be mistaken but I don't think there is anything even close to a universal network driver at this point, probably for a lot of different reasons.
Microsoft has never shipped Windows with all drivers in the world. Just enough to cover the majority of people installing it. The drivers are available for the OS people are just too lazy to go and get them for some reason.
I've had this happen with Linux too involving Osprey 230 cards. 64bit drivers still aren't available. Should I blame Novell for this? I don't think so since that is the vendors fault. Microsoft pretty clearly makes an effort to give you as many drivers needed to get your system up and running at the time of release but there is a limit to the time and money they will spend on it especially when we all know that you don't run Microsoft drivers with Nvidia video cards. Same goes with Qlogic fiber channel HBAs. Yes Microsoft has drivers for both but you wouldn't reasonably expect them to keep up with changing systems.
There is no question Linux has more driver support. Practically every distro includes more drivers than any Windows release. How many times has that driver been buggy? How many times did you have to go an get the binary from ATI or Nvidia? It's not Red Hat's fault that vendors hide things and make it difficult to develop drivers for so why blame them? It doesn't make sense. I remember installing Linux on my quad processor pentium pro server and I tell you it was no picnic. I had to use special boot params to get the kernel to see all the ram because the default drivers didn't see everything properly. I don't blame any distro for that, Compaq chose to do something screwy with their hardware.
That's because people blasted them for doing that with Windows 9x. They generic drivers screwed up the computers causing BSODs. Now people are bitching because they only include certified drivers with the OS. Am I the only one that thinks this is insane? Is it really that hard to keep custom install CDs with all your in-house drivers on the same media? I use nLite with every new hardware purchase. That is when its a new model with different hardware. My install cd puts all the certified and more importantly latest drivers on the cd so when the install is finished there are no system instabilities from outdated drivers. SATA RAID controllers are the worst for this. I've had firmware upgraded on them and then old drivers don't work and if they work they really don't work well.
My SUSE installs really aren't all that different, I load up the install CD, since the installer has to be able to connect to the Internet to update itself they've included every network card driver they could find. The update then ensures that all the latest drivers and system packages are installed and the end experience is a stable and fast OS experience.
SP2 is not a new release of XP. It does contain a few new drivers but the base is still the same. That is the big difference between how Microsoft releases software and how most Linux distros do. Microsoft keeps it consistent only adding necessities like drive support beyond 160gigs. They have to for their business customers who really don't handle change very well.
So yes, XP was released 5 years ago, it has great hardware support. Dell seems to always put in strange network cards that require additional drivers but they give you a cd with them on it so no big deal. Most everytime I install it the NIC at least is least given a driver that will work. Nforce boards are an exception as they are completely new since the release of XP. Vista hardware support is interest since it appears that the drivers for XP check for XP as the version of the OS rather than specifying it as a minimum. XP drivers should work just fine. Older drivers will not as they need to be signed for the OS to let them in unless you open up the default hardware policy which is fairly easy to do if you know where to look for Windows policy settings.
I think I've said enough, there is a lot of crap floating around, last I checked XP even in safe mode had 256colors and 800x600 res with practically any video card. I'd call that some pretty amazing generic driver support. Now that people can see what they are doing they may shift their focus to making sure people can connect. I don't know but I do know if enough people complain to Microsoft about it then it will happen. That is exactly what happened with the group policy changes to Vista. A lot of changes to SMS and MOM are driven the same way.
That's funny, you can definitely hear the difference with my turtle beach Montego DDL. Aside from that I haven't seen a graphics card yet come with an HD-TV Tuner. Currently in my comp I've got my vid card, capture card, sound card. So really all you'd need I say is 3 slots. Of course room for a slot cooler would be nice with the heat output of most vid cards today. I was shocked when my new vid card ran hotter than my processor. Oh well, there are plenty of manufacturers out there. SLI isn't a huge issue but multiple vid cards would be nice for multiple monitor setups. Of course the 7900 Nvidia I think lets you do 2 monitors in sli which is still a shame considering you've got yourself 4 dvi connectors and I happen to have 4 monitors. ATI seems to do multiple monitors better these days which is quite ironic considering Nvidia has the better management tools for it.
As for the rest, I agree, just get a USB hub and plugin wifi if you really need it in your desktop machine. Same goes for a PC Card reader. Haven't had use for anything PCMCIA in many years but I can see use for a PC Card.
Most humorous post. Thank you for illustrating what life was like in the 90s. Who was comparing Windows to *nix?
Also, you seem incredibly naive thinking that an unprivileged user on a linux box can do no harm to a system. Obviously you've never seen someone use a privilege escalation exploit which are commonplace among rootkits. Linux isn't perfect and thus needs additional layers of protection. It's a simple concept. A lot of people call the use of a firewall a cop-out for insecure software when the reality is the additional layer of security is more than worth it. Every network OS out there has had vulnerabilities associated with it so you add an additional layer of security to make everything that much harder to exploit. This means keeping up with software updates as well as maintaining the firewall since as I said, the firewall is no replacement for properly secured and updated equipment. I've even got switches with new firmware that needs to be updated from time to time.
Windows obviously isn't perfect either as there is already a large number of antivirus and other protection mechanisms available for it.
Please figure out what you're talking about here. Windows of today has nothing of the old dos in it. It's a whole new kernel, yes, the commandline is still there but as anyone using applications that ran on dos has probably found out, not everything works in it because its emulated, not platform native.
I'll keep system state protections like tripwire running on my linux servers. My desktops get more protection since they deal with files on a day to day basis. They'll get a virus scanner, it won't be resident since I haven't found it necessary to catch anything but they will be on each machine.
How do you think those machines get infected? They just magically get them? They are spreading in the wild otherwise they wouldn't have been noted on any of the sites. The discussion also wasn't about which was an easier target. I was refuting the fact that other platforms don't need protection when they clearly do.
There aren't many in the wild but they definitely exist and they all perform some function you wouldn't want them to perform on your computer.
No matter what platform you have you need system state protection. Various platforms have implemented it in various different ways. Look at Tripwire for instance. It is always a good idea to make sure nothing is being changed without your knowledge.
Yes, hundreds of times, from dynamically generating graphing data for Webtrends or realtime monitoring of firewall utilization. It's also used for Exchange OWA to give the user advanced functionality over the web like they would have with Outlook. I've seen many online AV scanner using ActiveX as well a lot of security camera monitoring software. The streaming video world seems to love ActiveX. We capture about 32 video feeds for our auctions for example. They are recorded and then streamed out using an ActiveX plugin so people on the block can review what has happened instantly when they need it.
Yes, all of it can be done with Java these days but there is plenty of Java malware out there too and ActiveX performs much faster than I've ever seen any Java applet. It might be possible to optimize an applet to do it faster but I haven't seen it happen yet for whatever that is worth.
In the end the whole issue is a user education issue combined with a software developer issue. Developers got lazy writing software for the Win9x platform. When the model changed their production methods didn't and so a lot of software requires administrative privileges to run which is completely unnecessary as a whole. Look at privilege granualarity of NTFS? It has many more options than even SELinux. It seems to be to be a straight copy of permissions from the Netware days. At any rate, get developers to store their stuff in one place and make the installer set permissions properly and a good chunk of the problem goes away. Then educate your users not to just click on anything that might popup. Get them to read it and that means reducing the number of items that pop up which I believe is what MS tried to do with those crappy balloons that piss me off to the point I had to disable them at my domain policy.
Abuse.net was just an example, you'd probably have to do all the testing on an alternate port, then when the test results passed they would be allowed to switch to port 25 and send email. This would obviously be combined with standard authentication. This would end the days of anonymous email but it would also end spam.
The answer is Yes Linux machines are often turned into zombies.
As the parent poster stated "if you run malicious software, then your computer is a zombie." I won't hazard to state the proportions but last I checked the number of Apache servers hacked in a given year outnumber IIS hacks. Of course there are far more Apache servers out there so that's really not saying that much.
As for email, I don't think it is near as broken as people seem to think. It's amazing how people just want to throw the whole thing out when something as simple as DKIM and SPF can stop it all pretty much cold. Of course both are depending on DNS so that will need to be secured before the email issue can be put to rest. A further move towards secure updates needs to be pushed for DNS and amplifications attacks need to be stopped. It seems as though we need a DNS server registration process much like that of domain names with the exception that you actually do need to verify your identity before your server it declared a valid DNS server. That seems a lot more likely than replacing DNS with something completely new.
That's it? Of the hundreds of million machines out there that's pretty good! If thats the case then its all about the last little bit with not even 1% of Windows machines being infected and used for such tasks things don't look so bad. Can't forget the broad scope that is Windows.
Seems to me like ISPs should just ban port 25 everywhere. If you are a business hosting your own email then pass abuse.net certification and then the ISP will turn it on for you. Same could go for home users. Can't really do this with DNS for obvious reasons though.
That is significantly better than any experience you'd have on a Pentium 90 which is what we were discussing. A P3 450 is quite a bit faster especially with the much faster ram that it employs.
That's pretty much what I said in my post. Windows is more than just an OS so calling it a bloated OS doesn't accomplish anything. Strip it all down to its bare essentials and I honestly don't know how bloated Windows is. As I said, I don't think its near as bad as people are making it out to be.
So you see, there was no mistake on my part in that particular post. I've certainly been wrong before but I'm not mixing up what an OS is and what Windows is. I completely agree with the rest of your post. Its the applications job to the do the mixing, its the applications job to do the rendering.
Windows is designed to serve the largest number of people possible. Linux is capable of doing the same but you won't find one distro that can service as many people. Pack in all the features of Windows and Linux gets pretty crowded too. Yeah, kernel 2.6 is a little bloated these days but I wouldn't say its out of control. Pretty much feel the same way about Windows. I won't even compare OS X because it doesn't compare with Windows let alone Linux in terms of hardware compatiblity. Windows just provides a common platform that practically anyone can use to do their job as well as entertain themselves. Of course they can also play all their media and all the countless other features included. All stuff that can be done on Linux but never all in one distro so the user/admin has to put all the pieces together and try to get them to seemlessly work as one. This is one area where Windows has been successful. It's been at the cost of complexity and of course security but both elements are seriously being changed at this point. Vista despite all its new features is actually quite a bit simpler to manage for instance. Security remains to be seen, will have to wait and see the track record although it looks promising.
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This feature already exists and its even in XP. It's called "End Process Tree" which closes any and all processes that interoperate with each other. It's fairly common for me to use it while cleaning up machines or when I screw up some coding and launch multiple processes by accident. Of course this exclused system services and can only close what it has launched. Gives more control to individual users.
In SUN's situation I'm not sure of their future.
I'm liking this trend, this is a bigger step than previous tries although my concern is over reliability still much like how drives over 160gigs failed more often that larger 250gig and later 300 gig drives. Now reliability is up on them and you can have 400gig drives in your array without sweating too much. Not sure about the 500s yet. Still this 250gig leap might make it worth while to sweat it out a bit as long as the library keeps churning away.
Seems to me like there is already too much fragmentation going on. They need to be able to pass info to the people that can make a difference. As long as they can't do that then they've no business collecting even more information which will be mishandled even further.
I know what you saying, break the info apart but what if a seedy character had my phone number before me? Does that mean I'm under surveillance and instantly labeled a terrorist? This doesn't work because the information obtained is ineffective. If they suspect someone in particular then they can tap that individual line. If they suspect 20 people surrounding it are involved then yes indeed they can be tapped as well, that is reasonable and probable cause. Doing this to every phone is pointless and a huge waste of resources which could be devoted to analyzing the data they already have and then notifying the people that will make a difference. If you're going to change the law for the NSA make it so they can legally pass the info on to the FBI and local law enforcement. That is all that is required and far less invasive.You do bring up a good point and a common misconception that energy conservation has to harm an admittedly great lifestyle which I do enjoy. The U.S. consumes so much power because they can and this in no way means that we have to. Hydrogen and electric cars have been around a while and could be given broad support. There are many technologies out there that are expensive now because they can't mass produce anything due to insufficient demand.
This same issue applies to the kyoto treaty. Without U.S. support backing all of the technology behind making power plants cleaner the prices remain higher although I'm sure there was a noticeable price drop with the EU attempting everything. If the U.S. had been a part of it the whole thing would have been less expensive and you create a new industry devoted to providing clean solutions for other industries not just the energy sector. That can create jobs and perhaps more importantly push us ahead instead of our current standstill with modern oil and coal.With more jobs more people are making money, naturally this will only work if the price point is low enough to not kill whatever industry is being regulated. We definitely need to invest in cleaner power generation. That potentially even has the ability of generating power for less money especially after the initial build. So I don't think it has to hurt our lifestyles. I don't think we have to shoot out all the emissions our cars do to maintain our lifestyle.
You're right with energy storage though, that could be a shortcut method so you don't have to invest in a new distribution system for a new fuel. That would probably be a great solution, the whole issue is getting around the fact that the people currently researching said technology are the same people that have at contributed to higher fuel prices for us right now. Oil and refinerary companies have all the money and somehow are still getting additional government funding for alternative energy. It's a crazy thought process. You'd think they'd have a lot to gain by using a lot of the technologies they've produced but instead they just sit there. Guess the energy industry is kinda like the music industry. Why change when you can get the government to protect your way of life. At some point we're going to have to change things.But no mechanism to do anything about it. There were several people in several intelligence agencies that knew something was coming. They notified people who notified people and somehow nothing managed to happen. That is the problem. As far as I'm concerned they shouldn't have access to domestic info. If they find something internationally they should pass the info on to a domestic agency like the FBI or the local police depending on severity. That is why they exist is it not?
It's the same deal with global warming. It is happening, that has never been questioned. The question is simply how much of a role humans play, no one factor plays a sole role in it but humans certainly do have the power to affect it.
You're right about environmentalists focusing on quality of life though. It speaks to more people readily but it would still involve energy regulations since an unregulated industry led to the lake michigan disaster. How can a lake catch on fire? Honestly thats insane and it was an obvious problem but in the name of progress it was allowed to continue until finally a very public disaster occurred which woke everyone else up. At what point do we stop waiting for disaster to happen and start pro-actively taking measures to prevent them?With all that said, I'll add one more thing, climate is indeed a complex system so why are we pumping crap into the air making it even more so?
Information gathering is only useful when you can act on the information you obtain. So let's figure out how to act on the information we have before we expand information gathering abilities. This is all regardless of the constitution of course since this whole thing flies in its face.
Webtrends, haha, NetIQs package gives lots of great info in regards to trends although it is quite expensive. It's amazing the parent completely missed the whole idea of web log analysis like that.
When the only tool you have is a hammer all problems look like a nail. Basically the one thing I see over and over is that when you combine disciplines you fall into a role that uses those multiple disciplines. I see all this mixing and matching which is great since the CS world I think is too big to study generically. So match your disciplines and you'll most likely find a job using all of them. Kinda like a Windows admin that doesn't know Linux will never deploy it. If that same admin knows both he/she will probably find a way to work both into their lives. Small examples but I think it illustrates my point.
Again, that is me jumping to a conclusion based on a picture so I can be wrong as well but I do know if the memory got logged then the system wasn't that bad off. The scenarios surrounding it are completely unknown. The OS stopped working error could have occurred by running software that writes to protected memory and the resulting denial appears as the error. Lots of possiblities.
Proving XP instability is quite difficult not because the tools aren't there to mine it but because most people don't have stability problems unless they have hardware problems. Same with 2003. Let's move on please and concentrate on security and performance which is where Vista has yet to prove itself. Although in reality Vista performs better on equipped machines than XP does. When you get towards the lower end of the requirements XP becomes a better option. That will always happen though, kinda like running SUSE 10 on a 386. Granted not as dramatic.Now that you're talking about Linux driver support let me go to the store and buy a webcam and hook it up and see if it works. It won't and I don't expect it too. Are there drivers for it? Probably, Windows won't have them either. I don't think its the OS makers fault, that is why most hardware comes with a cd which contains drivers.
So Linux doesn't work with old hardware, and it doesn't work with new hardware. How is its hardware support better than Windows? Obviously I'm not being serious here. The number of drivers support under kernel 2.4 is astounding compared to Windows. Kernel 2.6 is playing fast catch up. It may have surpassed 2.4 finally but even up until about 6 months ago the Viewcast Osprey drivers were for kernel 2.4.Anyways, I say driver support is for vendors, OS makers can put however much effort into the release as they want but there will always be unsupported hardware for any number of reasons. Microsoft doesn't put the same amount of resources into it and you can definitely argue they should put more effort it. The simple fact is Microsoft is trying to clean up the muddy water and ignoring the progress helps no one. Hard to find a piece of software causing a BSOD these days. It's almost always a hardware problem now and thats improvement.
Linux distros have come a long way as well and I could definitely see them making more progress since they release often they have plenty of opportunities to add more drivers to the latest distro. Microsoft does not have that luxury since corporate customers do not want the install base changing. They release once with as many drivers as they have knowing full well the vendors will provide drivers for their own products. In the end who wants to use a Microsoft driver for their new wizbang Nvidia video card? People that don't know better. Let the vendors do the driver work.Yep, because most all cards support it. Remember when most network cards supported NE2000 drivers? I could be mistaken but I don't think there is anything even close to a universal network driver at this point, probably for a lot of different reasons.
I've had this happen with Linux too involving Osprey 230 cards. 64bit drivers still aren't available. Should I blame Novell for this? I don't think so since that is the vendors fault. Microsoft pretty clearly makes an effort to give you as many drivers needed to get your system up and running at the time of release but there is a limit to the time and money they will spend on it especially when we all know that you don't run Microsoft drivers with Nvidia video cards. Same goes with Qlogic fiber channel HBAs. Yes Microsoft has drivers for both but you wouldn't reasonably expect them to keep up with changing systems.
There is no question Linux has more driver support. Practically every distro includes more drivers than any Windows release. How many times has that driver been buggy? How many times did you have to go an get the binary from ATI or Nvidia? It's not Red Hat's fault that vendors hide things and make it difficult to develop drivers for so why blame them? It doesn't make sense. I remember installing Linux on my quad processor pentium pro server and I tell you it was no picnic. I had to use special boot params to get the kernel to see all the ram because the default drivers didn't see everything properly. I don't blame any distro for that, Compaq chose to do something screwy with their hardware.My SUSE installs really aren't all that different, I load up the install CD, since the installer has to be able to connect to the Internet to update itself they've included every network card driver they could find. The update then ensures that all the latest drivers and system packages are installed and the end experience is a stable and fast OS experience.
SP2 is not a new release of XP. It does contain a few new drivers but the base is still the same. That is the big difference between how Microsoft releases software and how most Linux distros do. Microsoft keeps it consistent only adding necessities like drive support beyond 160gigs. They have to for their business customers who really don't handle change very well.So yes, XP was released 5 years ago, it has great hardware support. Dell seems to always put in strange network cards that require additional drivers but they give you a cd with them on it so no big deal. Most everytime I install it the NIC at least is least given a driver that will work. Nforce boards are an exception as they are completely new since the release of XP. Vista hardware support is interest since it appears that the drivers for XP check for XP as the version of the OS rather than specifying it as a minimum. XP drivers should work just fine. Older drivers will not as they need to be signed for the OS to let them in unless you open up the default hardware policy which is fairly easy to do if you know where to look for Windows policy settings.
I think I've said enough, there is a lot of crap floating around, last I checked XP even in safe mode had 256colors and 800x600 res with practically any video card. I'd call that some pretty amazing generic driver support. Now that people can see what they are doing they may shift their focus to making sure people can connect. I don't know but I do know if enough people complain to Microsoft about it then it will happen. That is exactly what happened with the group policy changes to Vista. A lot of changes to SMS and MOM are driven the same way.As for the rest, I agree, just get a USB hub and plugin wifi if you really need it in your desktop machine. Same goes for a PC Card reader. Haven't had use for anything PCMCIA in many years but I can see use for a PC Card.
Also, you seem incredibly naive thinking that an unprivileged user on a linux box can do no harm to a system. Obviously you've never seen someone use a privilege escalation exploit which are commonplace among rootkits. Linux isn't perfect and thus needs additional layers of protection. It's a simple concept. A lot of people call the use of a firewall a cop-out for insecure software when the reality is the additional layer of security is more than worth it. Every network OS out there has had vulnerabilities associated with it so you add an additional layer of security to make everything that much harder to exploit. This means keeping up with software updates as well as maintaining the firewall since as I said, the firewall is no replacement for properly secured and updated equipment. I've even got switches with new firmware that needs to be updated from time to time.
Windows obviously isn't perfect either as there is already a large number of antivirus and other protection mechanisms available for it.Please figure out what you're talking about here. Windows of today has nothing of the old dos in it. It's a whole new kernel, yes, the commandline is still there but as anyone using applications that ran on dos has probably found out, not everything works in it because its emulated, not platform native.
I'll keep system state protections like tripwire running on my linux servers. My desktops get more protection since they deal with files on a day to day basis. They'll get a virus scanner, it won't be resident since I haven't found it necessary to catch anything but they will be on each machine.How do you think those machines get infected? They just magically get them? They are spreading in the wild otherwise they wouldn't have been noted on any of the sites. The discussion also wasn't about which was an easier target. I was refuting the fact that other platforms don't need protection when they clearly do.
There aren't many in the wild but they definitely exist and they all perform some function you wouldn't want them to perform on your computer.
No matter what platform you have you need system state protection. Various platforms have implemented it in various different ways. Look at Tripwire for instance. It is always a good idea to make sure nothing is being changed without your knowledge.Yes, all of it can be done with Java these days but there is plenty of Java malware out there too and ActiveX performs much faster than I've ever seen any Java applet. It might be possible to optimize an applet to do it faster but I haven't seen it happen yet for whatever that is worth.
In the end the whole issue is a user education issue combined with a software developer issue. Developers got lazy writing software for the Win9x platform. When the model changed their production methods didn't and so a lot of software requires administrative privileges to run which is completely unnecessary as a whole. Look at privilege granualarity of NTFS? It has many more options than even SELinux. It seems to be to be a straight copy of permissions from the Netware days. At any rate, get developers to store their stuff in one place and make the installer set permissions properly and a good chunk of the problem goes away. Then educate your users not to just click on anything that might popup. Get them to read it and that means reducing the number of items that pop up which I believe is what MS tried to do with those crappy balloons that piss me off to the point I had to disable them at my domain policy.Abuse.net was just an example, you'd probably have to do all the testing on an alternate port, then when the test results passed they would be allowed to switch to port 25 and send email. This would obviously be combined with standard authentication. This would end the days of anonymous email but it would also end spam.
As the parent poster stated "if you run malicious software, then your computer is a zombie." I won't hazard to state the proportions but last I checked the number of Apache servers hacked in a given year outnumber IIS hacks. Of course there are far more Apache servers out there so that's really not saying that much.
As for email, I don't think it is near as broken as people seem to think. It's amazing how people just want to throw the whole thing out when something as simple as DKIM and SPF can stop it all pretty much cold. Of course both are depending on DNS so that will need to be secured before the email issue can be put to rest. A further move towards secure updates needs to be pushed for DNS and amplifications attacks need to be stopped. It seems as though we need a DNS server registration process much like that of domain names with the exception that you actually do need to verify your identity before your server it declared a valid DNS server. That seems a lot more likely than replacing DNS with something completely new.Seems to me like ISPs should just ban port 25 everywhere. If you are a business hosting your own email then pass abuse.net certification and then the ISP will turn it on for you. Same could go for home users. Can't really do this with DNS for obvious reasons though.
That is significantly better than any experience you'd have on a Pentium 90 which is what we were discussing. A P3 450 is quite a bit faster especially with the much faster ram that it employs.
So you see, there was no mistake on my part in that particular post. I've certainly been wrong before but I'm not mixing up what an OS is and what Windows is. I completely agree with the rest of your post. Its the applications job to the do the mixing, its the applications job to do the rendering.
Windows is designed to serve the largest number of people possible. Linux is capable of doing the same but you won't find one distro that can service as many people. Pack in all the features of Windows and Linux gets pretty crowded too. Yeah, kernel 2.6 is a little bloated these days but I wouldn't say its out of control. Pretty much feel the same way about Windows. I won't even compare OS X because it doesn't compare with Windows let alone Linux in terms of hardware compatiblity. Windows just provides a common platform that practically anyone can use to do their job as well as entertain themselves. Of course they can also play all their media and all the countless other features included. All stuff that can be done on Linux but never all in one distro so the user/admin has to put all the pieces together and try to get them to seemlessly work as one. This is one area where Windows has been successful. It's been at the cost of complexity and of course security but both elements are seriously being changed at this point. Vista despite all its new features is actually quite a bit simpler to manage for instance. Security remains to be seen, will have to wait and see the track record although it looks promising.