It's really normal to notice a huge increase in attacks this time of year. With the passing of defcon and black hat this month, a lot of new security vunerabilities have been released, and all of the 'script kiddies' are eager to try them out. The best thing to do is make sure all your software is up to date, and get familiar with the new vunerabilities that are out so you can protect yourself.
As far as reporting them, you could try all day and not be able to report all of them, and even if you did, they're most likely attacking from someone else's vunerable machine. The only thing you can really do is watch out for anyone who's aggressivly attacking you (i.e. one person who's running lots of attacks on you trying desperately to break into your machine at any cost), and report those ones, or if you can find a way to contact that person, tell them to stop before you report them to their isp and/or authorities, this will usually scare most people off.
Once you do start paying some decent attention to security releases, a lot of these stupid things people try won't surprise you, like the ssh root attempt is because some tool came out recently that just scans netblocks for anyone running ssh and try's logging in as two different users with no password, root being one of them. If your not familiar with where to find security releases, here's some good places to start:
I bet if those companies that were hiring people with their H1B visa's hired a citizen's instead, there would be plenty of well experienced engineer's your looking for now, plus quite a few engineer that were were training under someone else who could now be lead engineers. But, as usual capitalism fails the majority, and small business's right now who need these engineers are out of luck.
Just out of curiosity, what type of engineer's are so hard to find now?
Well to start off I was busy at work earlier when I posted the last message, but felt the need for a quick response, so I'll try my best to formulate a good argument this time so that I don't dissapoint you.
WinNT kernel was made right our of a UNIX kernel.
The NT kernel did not originate from unix, it originated from OS/2 and even before that, VMS which was another non portable OS that was developed for VAX machines. The only link I can possible link I can find from unix to NT is that NT's chief architect, David Cutler, originally designed OS's for PDP-11's, which is what UNIX's first release was designed on. David designed the RSX-11M OS on the PDP-11 which would later be incorperated into the NT kernel. From there David went on to become one of the initial developers for VMS which was the OS for VAX machines. From there he went on to be the cheif architect for the NT project at microsoft. You can read the full origins of the NT kernel here. Now as you can see that in no way makes NT any sort of decendent of UNIX.
It was (The original one, WinNT 3.51) almost POSIX
Calling it almost POSIX is a far stretch, the initial idea of NT was to support for portions of the DOS, OS/2, and POSIX API's, which you can also see in that posted article.
Memory allocation you are describing is the stuff a 5 years old would write.
This proves my point, the MS kernels don't keep good enough track of memory to avoid this problem, which can lead to escalated privilege exploits, not to mention programs just flat out crashing, or the entire system crashes (BSOD?). To say its only in code a 5 year old would right is just stupid. Any programmer knows that it's easy to make mistakes, and granted it's harder to make this mistake than most others, it still does happen, especially when you've been working on some code for 16 hours straight. The linux kernel on the other hand seems to have a much more advanced paging system that won't allow this to happen.
"so often after a crash, windows wont free up all the memory that it as using" which is so irrelevant (Because even if it happenned, and it does because of Shared Memory
I won't try and argue this point as I don't have any facts other than my experience with windows to back it up, the only reason I mentioned it in the first place was because as I was typing my comment, my mail client in linux started going nuts, taking up a bunch of memory and cpu utilization; closing it fixed it, and I was just thinking that if that had of happened in windows, my system would still probally be all lagged, which is actually probally more of a case of defunct windows system process's such as rundll.
ok, well I don't have time to argue every point you made so I'll just sum it up, in a perfect world, everyone who writes programs for windows would code it perfectly so that windows doesn't have to deal with any memory issues, but unfortianatly ( i know thats spelt wrong somehow...) 90% of people who make applications don't write them perfectly. Now by perfectly I mean a program is started and is assigned as many bits as it's requested when it initialized, now when you have process's within that application that need to dynamically allocate more memory after the program has started you run into issues. The windows kernel (the dos based one especially, but the NT kernel has similar issues, just not as severe), has to manage what section of memory it will allocate for this dynamic memory, but it doesn't do that good at picking a spot as it will sometimes chose memory that's being used by another program. Now this doesn't happen all that much, but it does happen. Now when the program that originally had that memory tries to access that memory you have a problem. Another issue is that windows isn't that great at keeping track of what memory was used by a program that crashed, so often after a crash, windows wont free up all the memory that it as using. Of course I can't argue with facts as obviously windows is closed source and if it wasn't i'm sure these issues would be fixed, so it's somewhat pointless to even talk about it.
You know that is completely untrue, right? NULL pointers access kills the process under Windows as surely as it does under Linux. You can override memory that you allocated only, and shared memory of course.
ok, well I'm not talking about NULL pointers, I'm talking about more memory being assigned to a program than it was originally allocated. Now I know this has been improving over time, but still not perfect. Every once in a while one the kernel will assign some memory that its already allocated to something else, then when the program that was running in that spot tries to access its memory again which has been reasigned, it gets a little confused and crashes. now when you say You can override do you mean as the user? or as the program. I believe there is user seperation w/ memory on windows, but as I was saying the memory management of applications leaves a lot to be desired.
If the process is killed, Windows will free all ressources used by it. Same as for any UNIX OS.
I just flat out dont believe this and have proven it to myself many times in the past.
WinNT, 2k, XP are based on a kernel that is much closer to a UNIX kernel than MS-DOS (Which is what Win31&9x are based upon)
Just because microsoft realized they needed to add user seperation and networking support to their original kernel doesn't mean that it should be comparible to a UNIX kernel. Adding these 2 things as an after thought means that all the basic technologies had to be re-written in order to accomidate the newer ones, and knowing microsoft, probally only replaced the ones that were obviously flawed with the new stuff.
One thing that frustrates me about the articles I've seen on this subject is that they don't explain why formation of big, close-in gas giants precludes formation of Earth-like planets farther out. Accretion disks are really, really big; surely parts of them can clump into gas giants while others slowly form smaller, rocky planets?
These large gas giants have very eliptical orbits around their sun. Imagine a planet at least as large as jupiter getting as close to the sun as mercury for part of the year, then going back as far as pluto. Now imagine how much disturbance that would cause to any planets in between, I'm sure that would send any planets spiraling off either into the sun or out of the solar system, if not just crash into the planet. Plus from what I've seen, most of these large gas giants dont have that long of a life span, because they're constantly sling-shotting themselves off the sun, they usually end up either crashing into the sun or sending themselves out of the suns orbit relativily quick.
did you miss the part of the comment where I said I used to have a windows 2K server
I've had many windows machines actually seeing as I've been the systems administrator of many smaller (50 node) windows networks so, I have a pretty good understanding of them and am completly done 'giving them a try'.
As far as screwing up the system from the load, yes that is totally what its about, whether its a desktop machine or a server they all need to run great no matter what the load. The problem windows has is it has flat memory access, so one bad program is allowed to overwrite virtually any data on the system it wants, including any memory the operating system itself needs. Now I know windows has gotten better with XP, but still no where near where it should be as far as memory management, and since we are comparing linux and windows, the memory management is no where near as secure and stable as on linux. As far as securing windows as a desktop, you can read my views on windows security here.
As for your uptime, thats great, it's my fault for bringing up servers, but windows can be used without having to reboot constantly if you know how to use it correctly, but as for the topic of desktop computing, most users don't have any clue how to use it without having to reboot all the time. In contrast, a user who has managed to install linux on their own which doesn't take a tech saavy person any more as the article proved, will have a basic understanding of how to use their system correctly (logging in as a user instead of root), and therefor won't need to reboot due to their system slowing down. Now I'm not saying their computer will never go slow for some reason, just before I started posting this comment evolution started acting goofy and was taking up about 75% of my cpu, at which time I just restarted evolution. If this was windows, I probally would have had to close the program, my system would have ran noticibally slower after that than before I had opened the program in the first place, then I would have restarted the program and gone a little slower yet again.
Anyways I guess thats enough incoherent ranting for today.
What if I'm not using a window manager that has icons or a 'start menu'? Thats most likely going to add a bunch of files to my system that I don't want. I think the only way to solve the issue of an easy to install program (compiling from source at least which is what everyone seem's to complain about) is if theres a Standard config file method for programs you want to install, then have there be window manager specific tools that you can use to install these programs (similar to install shield for windows), and then even let the installer have its own configuration so you can set the default prefix you want to use for your programs, and default sysconfdir, etc.
The reason I say the GNU/Linux community needs this is because lots of people who are actually familiar with linux already don't want some installer thats going to be based on a distro like RH if they're using Slackware (this is where the installer configuration comes in), and they don't want an installer to set up an installed program as if you were using KDE when your actually using Enlightenment (hence the different installer for each window manager and the standard configuration file so each installer will read from it correctly).
If some software can't get the backing of the people who are 'experts' with linux, then its not going to catch on with the rest of the users and become the default, and w/ the current ideas that are thrown around for a standard installer I don't think any of them will ever become the standard.
So whats the alternative when you buy a new ATI card? to run it using windows default VGA driver which is capabale of something like max resolution of 640x480 and a color depth of 256 colors? Damn I dont see why people haven't been using this argument all along...
my linux workstation has a 27 day uptime right now, and its only that low because I've had so many power outages lately. If it wasn't for the power going out the last time i needed to reboot was lets see I believe it was about 6 months when I felt like upgrading my kernel.
Besides since when is just accessing DNS queries a simple process? depending on what kind of dns server your running, it's got to load all the domains into memory, reload them when they've been updated, write logs to disk which can be very frequent, I'm getting around 2,000 requests per minutes on one of my DNS servers, plus handle all of those connections (well I guess they aren't usually connections since most dns is done via udp). Sure the load could be a LOT worse, but hey, I used to have a windows 2K server that pretty much just sat there, no one would ever connect to it, and it would usually hang about every 100 days.
thats got to be sarcasim right? the few times I do have to install some windows software on a clients machine, theres a 1 in 4 chance its going to error usually due to the MS TCP Stack becoming corrupt, or some invalid registry entry. I swear you would have a harder time of corrupting the US government than you would the MS TCP stack.
practically everyone who uses Windows logs on as Administrator,
I think this is going to be a huge problem once (if) microsoft makes a version of windows that is actually secure. Microsoft trained millions (even billions?) of people that once you can type at a keyboard, you can use anything on the system that you want, which isn't a secure method. Now when microsoft first released DOS in `81, multi user systems had already been around for around 10 years, networking had been around for about 5 years (i think TCP/IP came out in `75 could be wrong though). So computer experts (which microsoft claimed to have) knew in `81 that systems needed multi-user acces in order to preserve one users files from anothers. Now microsoft chose to ignore this fact completly for 14 years, and even windows 95/nt 3.5 were HORRIBLE examples of implementing this and until windows 2000 came out, it really didn't matter what user someone logged into, they could easily access other users files. Then 2000 came out and it was actually possible to secure your files from someone else, but by default, anyone could still access anyone else's files so we still don't really have any access control for the normal user. Now XP comes out, about 20 years after their first release of DOS release and obviously people don't understand why an admin user is different than a regular user, they just know they have limitations with a regular user, so of course everyone chooses to make their user the admin, which, at least as of the latest version of xp that i've seen, is the default when you create your first user, to make that user the admin user.
So obviously you can't blame users for not understanding multi-user access when for the past 23 years a company is telling them theres only one user, then all of the sudden the company tries to say that it's the users fault for not understanding what this new admin user does. Back before DOS came out, microsoft had another OS called Xenix which was a unix platform, and I'm pretty sure that that was a multi-user system, so you can't say microsoft was unaware of security pitfalls of only having one user. Microsoft just went and tried to market a single user os, knowing full well from the beggining that it was insecure, then 20 years later after it's been blowing up in their face for the past 10, they try to act as if until recenetly no one needed multi-users, but now that "hackers" are here, they're trying to prevent them by turning their system into a multi-user system, which they should have done in the first place.
wizards are bad because they rely on other libraries in order to work which is one of the major problems windows has. Even the most basic stuff with windows and with these wizards in other distro's requires some other libraries to be correct. Now if those libraries are bad you cant install your new . So now you need to go reinstall those libraries, but wait, the wizard to install those libraries are broken, so now you have to go and install those libraries without a wizard, but you have no idea how to do that because you've never had to learn that, oh well better call someone to come fix it and pay them $200. Hey I thought linux was supposed to be free (thats what 50% of the people would say at that point), I might as well go back to windows or try out a new operating system.
Thing is though, if the user had of been taught the basics of installing programs in linux (./configure, make, make install, or even through a slackware, rh, or suse), then they could have easily fixed the problem at any step of the way.
Actually it does get easier, with XFree86 (haven't tried with x.org yet) all you have to do is type X -configure (or is that captial C i always forget) as root and it will configure your XF86Config file for you. Then all you have to do is mv ~/X86Config.new/etc/X11/XF86Config. This is much easier than running the outdated xf86config script.
Extra's arent just people off the street (even the ones who just walk accross the screen 100 feet in the background). They're all a bunch of aspiring actors and most of them are totally nuts. Non-union extras get payed $10/hr usually for 10 - 14 hour days, plus the benifit of some really good food. Like I was saying, it's mostly a bunch of crazy people who come from other states wanting to be famous. Well its those kind of people and ex-cons who can't get a regular job. To be an extra you need to sign up with a casting agency which usually costs about $20, central casting being the largest agency. Then once signed up you call their automated line which has a bunch of casting director's giving a description of the type of extra's they're looking for for tommorows shoot.
The only reason I could see any government benifit for stopping the outage reports is so that they can cut communications when they are raiding some place. It's easy enough for them to cut the phone lines to a house, or block, or city even so that the "terrorists" couldn't inform other members they were being raided. But with cell phones you would have to cut service to a lot larger region than you could do with a land line, so the government wouldn't want to have to take the heat that they killed cell phone service to that entire region causing death's because people can't call 911 on their cell phone.
Don't forget though that you could never set foot on US soil again without gettings arressted like that russian guy w/ the ebook viewer (to lazy to look up names).
RISC processors are generally much more expensive than CISC (x86) processors so its not very feasable that eveyone has their own personal risc based computer. At least thats the way I remember the marketing when the term was coined.
Well your never going to be able to switch to linux and learn to be an expert or even decent with it in 2 days. To think you could be is obsured, i can guarantee that it took you and just about everyone else who uses windows more than 2 days to learn windows. Back around the windows 3.1 days it took people much longer to get comfortable with windows than it takes today not just because it was less intuitive, but because there weren't as many people around to show you how to do things and different shortcuts to doing things. As more people use linux the easier it'll be for new users to learn, and with more and more offices converting the workstations to linux with someone there to do the administrative tasks, the more comfortable the people who are using those workstations will be and will consider running linux on their home computer. Then they'll recommend it to friends and be able to help their friends out when they need it.
Plus you say people aren't willing to spend more than 2 days to learn it, but how many days each year are people spending repairing their windows machine due to virus and other problems with windows. Hell lots of people have to reinstall windows more than once a year simply because of OS decay.
I've got more to say and wish you the best of luck with linux, but I haven't ate all day and have a feeling my post has been a bit incoherrent, so I'll stop now.
Yes, but Joe Sixpack probally asks his friend for help much less than John Sixpack calls for support. Plus most of Joe's questions are probally on issues regarding some application that runs on linux, not questions like "how come I can't connect to the internet any more?"
Actually the PC term was coined back in the 80's as an x86 machine no matter what OS it runs, though DOS was originally about the only OS that ran on x86's. Macs of course aren't pc's though since they're RISC based instead of the x86's CISC based cpu's. Of course as I believe someone said before, it's just nitpicking, and I really dont' care whether someone calls their machine a pc, mac, box, or whatever. What gets me is when people through around the word server like it should mean something other than a PC.
It's the OS all your Windows applications and games won't run on...
As far as the applications go, there is a linux replacement for 90% of windows applications, some better than the windows equivilant, some not, but most have the functionality that 95% of users need, and they tend to not crash as much since the underlying OS is stable.
For the Games, in my experience, most people over 25 who don't work in the computer field don't play computer games much, they usually focus more on music, movies, porn and work related applications which, there are a wide variaty of these for linux. And if they do want to play games, wine has a decent selection of games made for windows it'll run, not to mention the ever increasing amount of games that are being port'd to linux by the developers. It's not that easy to just tell someone, "Well, IE had a security exploit so it's time to switch to Linux!" The Linux desktop has usability and infrastructure issues. I don't expect them to remain forever, but it is sure taking a long time, and by then Apple's next version of MacOS will be out along with Windows Longhorn, and it will be another decade of playing catch-up with their new technologies.
I've got quite a few people to who really aren't familiar with computers at all to switch to linux and don't have much trouble. I actually find that people who havent used a computer at all or at least not in the past 10 years have a MUCH easier time running linux rather than those who are converting from windows to linux. I think right now the biggest thing I see keeping away commercial developers is the lack of a single binary installation/uninstallation API integrated into the desktop environment. You just can't be sure your app will still run in 5 years. Can you still run a Red Hat RPM you got in 1997? Windows can still run apps from 1991. In addition, a unified API akin to.NET or Cocoa, instead of these 20 or so different APIs which require that I install all of them since everybody likes to code for different ones instead of coding to a standard.
What about RPM's, Slackware packages, Debian packages, not to mention all the apt-get style applications that will download it for you? Plus developers can easily write an installation application for their software with an installation 'wizard' identical to windows installation app's if they wanted. The average user really doesn't have a very difficult time adjusting to how to install linux applications. It only seems to be the windows zealots who com plain about it. As for the unified api... *cough* glibc *cough* I guess that's it, really--you can't expect the Linux desktop to become standard if it doesn't embrace any standards itself. Now, I know a lot of people like that facet of Linux, and that's cool. I'm just saying, don't be surprised if it never takes off in the mainstream as a result. It has a long, long way to go, most of it internal infrastructure issues (the fact we're still using X11 is embarrassing).
Whats wrong with X11? is it embarassing that it's more stable than a windows desktop? or is it the fact that its designed from a networking standpoint? no? maybe its all the other applications that can be designed to interact with X11 yet be completely independent of it.
Oh yah, about that can linux still run applications from 5 years ago... First of all an RPM isn't really an app, but im guessing you meant any binary since rpm's weren't even around in `97 (could be wrong). Yes linux usually can, I've never seen any old binaries not work because of 'age'. On the other hand though, I've never seen a windows application from `91 still work, it almost always needs some sort of of dos, or win 3.1, or even win95/98 dependency that isn't still distributed with current versions of windows.
Slashdot Mirror
It's really normal to notice a huge increase in attacks this time of year. With the passing of defcon and black hat this month, a lot of new security vunerabilities have been released, and all of the 'script kiddies' are eager to try them out. The best thing to do is make sure all your software is up to date, and get familiar with the new vunerabilities that are out so you can protect yourself.
As far as reporting them, you could try all day and not be able to report all of them, and even if you did, they're most likely attacking from someone else's vunerable machine. The only thing you can really do is watch out for anyone who's aggressivly attacking you (i.e. one person who's running lots of attacks on you trying desperately to break into your machine at any cost), and report those ones, or if you can find a way to contact that person, tell them to stop before you report them to their isp and/or authorities, this will usually scare most people off.
Once you do start paying some decent attention to security releases, a lot of these stupid things people try won't surprise you, like the ssh root attempt is because some tool came out recently that just scans netblocks for anyone running ssh and try's logging in as two different users with no password, root being one of them. If your not familiar with where to find security releases, here's some good places to start:
packetstorm security
Security Focus
Open source is built for fun mostly, not profit.
That's a really bad way of putting it. Open source projects are done by people who need a product and who enjoy doing it.
I bet if those companies that were hiring people with their H1B visa's hired a citizen's instead, there would be plenty of well experienced engineer's your looking for now, plus quite a few engineer that were were training under someone else who could now be lead engineers. But, as usual capitalism fails the majority, and small business's right now who need these engineers are out of luck.
Just out of curiosity, what type of engineer's are so hard to find now?
Well to start off I was busy at work earlier when I posted the last message, but felt the need for a quick response, so I'll try my best to formulate a good argument this time so that I don't dissapoint you.
WinNT kernel was made right our of a UNIX kernel.
The NT kernel did not originate from unix, it originated from OS/2 and even before that, VMS which was another non portable OS that was developed for VAX machines. The only link I can possible link I can find from unix to NT is that NT's chief architect, David Cutler, originally designed OS's for PDP-11's, which is what UNIX's first release was designed on. David designed the RSX-11M OS on the PDP-11 which would later be incorperated into the NT kernel. From there David went on to become one of the initial developers for VMS which was the OS for VAX machines. From there he went on to be the cheif architect for the NT project at microsoft. You can read the full origins of the NT kernel here. Now as you can see that in no way makes NT any sort of decendent of UNIX.
It was (The original one, WinNT 3.51) almost POSIX
Calling it almost POSIX is a far stretch, the initial idea of NT was to support for portions of the DOS, OS/2, and POSIX API's, which you can also see in that posted article.
Memory allocation you are describing is the stuff a 5 years old would write.
This proves my point, the MS kernels don't keep good enough track of memory to avoid this problem, which can lead to escalated privilege exploits, not to mention programs just flat out crashing, or the entire system crashes (BSOD?). To say its only in code a 5 year old would right is just stupid. Any programmer knows that it's easy to make mistakes, and granted it's harder to make this mistake than most others, it still does happen, especially when you've been working on some code for 16 hours straight. The linux kernel on the other hand seems to have a much more advanced paging system that won't allow this to happen.
"so often after a crash, windows wont free up all the memory that it as using" which is so irrelevant (Because even if it happenned, and it does because of Shared Memory
I won't try and argue this point as I don't have any facts other than my experience with windows to back it up, the only reason I mentioned it in the first place was because as I was typing my comment, my mail client in linux started going nuts, taking up a bunch of memory and cpu utilization; closing it fixed it, and I was just thinking that if that had of happened in windows, my system would still probally be all lagged, which is actually probally more of a case of defunct windows system process's such as rundll.
ok, well I don't have time to argue every point you made so I'll just sum it up, in a perfect world, everyone who writes programs for windows would code it perfectly so that windows doesn't have to deal with any memory issues, but unfortianatly ( i know thats spelt wrong somehow...) 90% of people who make applications don't write them perfectly. Now by perfectly I mean a program is started and is assigned as many bits as it's requested when it initialized, now when you have process's within that application that need to dynamically allocate more memory after the program has started you run into issues. The windows kernel (the dos based one especially, but the NT kernel has similar issues, just not as severe), has to manage what section of memory it will allocate for this dynamic memory, but it doesn't do that good at picking a spot as it will sometimes chose memory that's being used by another program. Now this doesn't happen all that much, but it does happen. Now when the program that originally had that memory tries to access that memory you have a problem. Another issue is that windows isn't that great at keeping track of what memory was used by a program that crashed, so often after a crash, windows wont free up all the memory that it as using. Of course I can't argue with facts as obviously windows is closed source and if it wasn't i'm sure these issues would be fixed, so it's somewhat pointless to even talk about it.
You know that is completely untrue, right? NULL pointers access kills the process under Windows as surely as it does under Linux. You can override memory that you allocated only, and shared memory of course.
ok, well I'm not talking about NULL pointers, I'm talking about more memory being assigned to a program than it was originally allocated. Now I know this has been improving over time, but still not perfect. Every once in a while one the kernel will assign some memory that its already allocated to something else, then when the program that was running in that spot tries to access its memory again which has been reasigned, it gets a little confused and crashes. now when you say You can override do you mean as the user? or as the program. I believe there is user seperation w/ memory on windows, but as I was saying the memory management of applications leaves a lot to be desired.
If the process is killed, Windows will free all ressources used by it. Same as for any UNIX OS.
I just flat out dont believe this and have proven it to myself many times in the past.
WinNT, 2k, XP are based on a kernel that is much closer to a UNIX kernel than MS-DOS (Which is what Win31&9x are based upon)
Just because microsoft realized they needed to add user seperation and networking support to their original kernel doesn't mean that it should be comparible to a UNIX kernel. Adding these 2 things as an after thought means that all the basic technologies had to be re-written in order to accomidate the newer ones, and knowing microsoft, probally only replaced the ones that were obviously flawed with the new stuff.
One thing that frustrates me about the articles I've seen on this subject is that they don't explain why formation of big, close-in gas giants precludes formation of Earth-like planets farther out. Accretion disks are really, really big; surely parts of them can clump into gas giants while others slowly form smaller, rocky planets?
These large gas giants have very eliptical orbits around their sun. Imagine a planet at least as large as jupiter getting as close to the sun as mercury for part of the year, then going back as far as pluto. Now imagine how much disturbance that would cause to any planets in between, I'm sure that would send any planets spiraling off either into the sun or out of the solar system, if not just crash into the planet. Plus from what I've seen, most of these large gas giants dont have that long of a life span, because they're constantly sling-shotting themselves off the sun, they usually end up either crashing into the sun or sending themselves out of the suns orbit relativily quick.
did you miss the part of the comment where I said
I used to have a windows 2K server
I've had many windows machines actually seeing as I've been the systems administrator of many smaller (50 node) windows networks so, I have a pretty good understanding of them and am completly done 'giving them a try'.
As far as screwing up the system from the load, yes that is totally what its about, whether its a desktop machine or a server they all need to run great no matter what the load. The problem windows has is it has flat memory access, so one bad program is allowed to overwrite virtually any data on the system it wants, including any memory the operating system itself needs. Now I know windows has gotten better with XP, but still no where near where it should be as far as memory management, and since we are comparing linux and windows, the memory management is no where near as secure and stable as on linux. As far as securing windows as a desktop, you can read my views on windows security here.
As for your uptime, thats great, it's my fault for bringing up servers, but windows can be used without having to reboot constantly if you know how to use it correctly, but as for the topic of desktop computing, most users don't have any clue how to use it without having to reboot all the time. In contrast, a user who has managed to install linux on their own which doesn't take a tech saavy person any more as the article proved, will have a basic understanding of how to use their system correctly (logging in as a user instead of root), and therefor won't need to reboot due to their system slowing down. Now I'm not saying their computer will never go slow for some reason, just before I started posting this comment evolution started acting goofy and was taking up about 75% of my cpu, at which time I just restarted evolution. If this was windows, I probally would have had to close the program, my system would have ran noticibally slower after that than before I had opened the program in the first place, then I would have restarted the program and gone a little slower yet again.
Anyways I guess thats enough incoherent ranting for today.
What if I'm not using a window manager that has icons or a 'start menu'? Thats most likely going to add a bunch of files to my system that I don't want. I think the only way to solve the issue of an easy to install program (compiling from source at least which is what everyone seem's to complain about) is if theres a Standard config file method for programs you want to install, then have there be window manager specific tools that you can use to install these programs (similar to install shield for windows), and then even let the installer have its own configuration so you can set the default prefix you want to use for your programs, and default sysconfdir, etc.
The reason I say the GNU/Linux community needs this is because lots of people who are actually familiar with linux already don't want some installer thats going to be based on a distro like RH if they're using Slackware (this is where the installer configuration comes in), and they don't want an installer to set up an installed program as if you were using KDE when your actually using Enlightenment (hence the different installer for each window manager and the standard configuration file so each installer will read from it correctly).
If some software can't get the backing of the people who are 'experts' with linux, then its not going to catch on with the rest of the users and become the default, and w/ the current ideas that are thrown around for a standard installer I don't think any of them will ever become the standard.
So whats the alternative when you buy a new ATI card? to run it using windows default VGA driver which is capabale of something like max resolution of 640x480 and a color depth of 256 colors? Damn I dont see why people haven't been using this argument all along...
my linux workstation has a 27 day uptime right now, and its only that low because I've had so many power outages lately. If it wasn't for the power going out the last time i needed to reboot was lets see I believe it was about 6 months when I felt like upgrading my kernel.
Besides since when is just accessing DNS queries a simple process? depending on what kind of dns server your running, it's got to load all the domains into memory, reload them when they've been updated, write logs to disk which can be very frequent, I'm getting around 2,000 requests per minutes on one of my DNS servers, plus handle all of those connections (well I guess they aren't usually connections since most dns is done via udp). Sure the load could be a LOT worse, but hey, I used to have a windows 2K server that pretty much just sat there, no one would ever connect to it, and it would usually hang about every 100 days.
thats got to be sarcasim right? the few times I do have to install some windows software on a clients machine, theres a 1 in 4 chance its going to error usually due to the MS TCP Stack becoming corrupt, or some invalid registry entry. I swear you would have a harder time of corrupting the US government than you would the MS TCP stack.
practically everyone who uses Windows logs on as Administrator,
I think this is going to be a huge problem once (if) microsoft makes a version of windows that is actually secure. Microsoft trained millions (even billions?) of people that once you can type at a keyboard, you can use anything on the system that you want, which isn't a secure method. Now when microsoft first released DOS in `81, multi user systems had already been around for around 10 years, networking had been around for about 5 years (i think TCP/IP came out in `75 could be wrong though). So computer experts (which microsoft claimed to have) knew in `81 that systems needed multi-user acces in order to preserve one users files from anothers. Now microsoft chose to ignore this fact completly for 14 years, and even windows 95/nt 3.5 were HORRIBLE examples of implementing this and until windows 2000 came out, it really didn't matter what user someone logged into, they could easily access other users files. Then 2000 came out and it was actually possible to secure your files from someone else, but by default, anyone could still access anyone else's files so we still don't really have any access control for the normal user. Now XP comes out, about 20 years after their first release of DOS release and obviously people don't understand why an admin user is different than a regular user, they just know they have limitations with a regular user, so of course everyone chooses to make their user the admin, which, at least as of the latest version of xp that i've seen, is the default when you create your first user, to make that user the admin user.
So obviously you can't blame users for not understanding multi-user access when for the past 23 years a company is telling them theres only one user, then all of the sudden the company tries to say that it's the users fault for not understanding what this new admin user does. Back before DOS came out, microsoft had another OS called Xenix which was a unix platform, and I'm pretty sure that that was a multi-user system, so you can't say microsoft was unaware of security pitfalls of only having one user. Microsoft just went and tried to market a single user os, knowing full well from the beggining that it was insecure, then 20 years later after it's been blowing up in their face for the past 10, they try to act as if until recenetly no one needed multi-users, but now that "hackers" are here, they're trying to prevent them by turning their system into a multi-user system, which they should have done in the first place.
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wizards are bad because they rely on other libraries in order to work which is one of the major problems windows has. Even the most basic stuff with windows and with these wizards in other distro's requires some other libraries to be correct. Now if those libraries are bad you cant install your new . So now you need to go reinstall those libraries, but wait, the wizard to install those libraries are broken, so now you have to go and install those libraries without a wizard, but you have no idea how to do that because you've never had to learn that, oh well better call someone to come fix it and pay them $200. Hey I thought linux was supposed to be free (thats what 50% of the people would say at that point), I might as well go back to windows or try out a new operating system.
Thing is though, if the user had of been taught the basics of installing programs in linux (./configure, make, make install, or even through a slackware, rh, or suse), then they could have easily fixed the problem at any step of the way.
Actually it does get easier, with XFree86 (haven't tried with x.org yet) all you have to do is type X -configure (or is that captial C i always forget) as root and it will configure your XF86Config file for you. Then all you have to do is mv ~/X86Config.new /etc/X11/XF86Config. This is much easier than running the outdated xf86config script.
and that 2 hours only gets you like 10 miles.
Extra's arent just people off the street (even the ones who just walk accross the screen 100 feet in the background). They're all a bunch of aspiring actors and most of them are totally nuts. Non-union extras get payed $10/hr usually for 10 - 14 hour days, plus the benifit of some really good food. Like I was saying, it's mostly a bunch of crazy people who come from other states wanting to be famous. Well its those kind of people and ex-cons who can't get a regular job. To be an extra you need to sign up with a casting agency which usually costs about $20, central casting being the largest agency. Then once signed up you call their automated line which has a bunch of casting director's giving a description of the type of extra's they're looking for for tommorows shoot.
The only reason I could see any government benifit for stopping the outage reports is so that they can cut communications when they are raiding some place. It's easy enough for them to cut the phone lines to a house, or block, or city even so that the "terrorists" couldn't inform other members they were being raided. But with cell phones you would have to cut service to a lot larger region than you could do with a land line, so the government wouldn't want to have to take the heat that they killed cell phone service to that entire region causing death's because people can't call 911 on their cell phone.
Don't forget though that you could never set foot on US soil again without gettings arressted like that russian guy w/ the ebook viewer (to lazy to look up names).
RISC processors are generally much more expensive than CISC (x86) processors so its not very feasable that eveyone has their own personal risc based computer. At least thats the way I remember the marketing when the term was coined.
Well your never going to be able to switch to linux and learn to be an expert or even decent with it in 2 days. To think you could be is obsured, i can guarantee that it took you and just about everyone else who uses windows more than 2 days to learn windows. Back around the windows 3.1 days it took people much longer to get comfortable with windows than it takes today not just because it was less intuitive, but because there weren't as many people around to show you how to do things and different shortcuts to doing things. As more people use linux the easier it'll be for new users to learn, and with more and more offices converting the workstations to linux with someone there to do the administrative tasks, the more comfortable the people who are using those workstations will be and will consider running linux on their home computer. Then they'll recommend it to friends and be able to help their friends out when they need it.
Plus you say people aren't willing to spend more than 2 days to learn it, but how many days each year are people spending repairing their windows machine due to virus and other problems with windows. Hell lots of people have to reinstall windows more than once a year simply because of OS decay.
I've got more to say and wish you the best of luck with linux, but I haven't ate all day and have a feeling my post has been a bit incoherrent, so I'll stop now.
Yes, but Joe Sixpack probally asks his friend for help much less than John Sixpack calls for support. Plus most of Joe's questions are probally on issues regarding some application that runs on linux, not questions like "how come I can't connect to the internet any more?"
I totally agree with you, a better description though of how unix users tend to think is, how can I get the computer to do this.
Actually the PC term was coined back in the 80's as an x86 machine no matter what OS it runs, though DOS was originally about the only OS that ran on x86's. Macs of course aren't pc's though since they're RISC based instead of the x86's CISC based cpu's. Of course as I believe someone said before, it's just nitpicking, and I really dont' care whether someone calls their machine a pc, mac, box, or whatever. What gets me is when people through around the word server like it should mean something other than a PC.
It's the OS all your Windows applications and games won't run on... .NET or Cocoa, instead of these 20 or so different APIs which require that I install all of them since everybody likes to code for different ones instead of coding to a standard.
As far as the applications go, there is a linux replacement for 90% of windows applications, some better than the windows equivilant, some not, but most have the functionality that 95% of users need, and they tend to not crash as much since the underlying OS is stable.
For the Games, in my experience, most people over 25 who don't work in the computer field don't play computer games much, they usually focus more on music, movies, porn and work related applications which, there are a wide variaty of these for linux. And if they do want to play games, wine has a decent selection of games made for windows it'll run, not to mention the ever increasing amount of games that are being port'd to linux by the developers.
It's not that easy to just tell someone, "Well, IE had a security exploit so it's time to switch to Linux!" The Linux desktop has usability and infrastructure issues. I don't expect them to remain forever, but it is sure taking a long time, and by then Apple's next version of MacOS will be out along with Windows Longhorn, and it will be another decade of playing catch-up with their new technologies.
I've got quite a few people to who really aren't familiar with computers at all to switch to linux and don't have much trouble. I actually find that people who havent used a computer at all or at least not in the past 10 years have a MUCH easier time running linux rather than those who are converting from windows to linux.
I think right now the biggest thing I see keeping away commercial developers is the lack of a single binary installation/uninstallation API integrated into the desktop environment. You just can't be sure your app will still run in 5 years. Can you still run a Red Hat RPM you got in 1997? Windows can still run apps from 1991. In addition, a unified API akin to
What about RPM's, Slackware packages, Debian packages, not to mention all the apt-get style applications that will download it for you? Plus developers can easily write an installation application for their software with an installation 'wizard' identical to windows installation app's if they wanted. The average user really doesn't have a very difficult time adjusting to how to install linux applications. It only seems to be the windows zealots who com plain about it. As for the unified api... *cough* glibc *cough*
I guess that's it, really--you can't expect the Linux desktop to become standard if it doesn't embrace any standards itself. Now, I know a lot of people like that facet of Linux, and that's cool. I'm just saying, don't be surprised if it never takes off in the mainstream as a result. It has a long, long way to go, most of it internal infrastructure issues (the fact we're still using X11 is embarrassing).
Whats wrong with X11? is it embarassing that it's more stable than a windows desktop? or is it the fact that its designed from a networking standpoint? no? maybe its all the other applications that can be designed to interact with X11 yet be completely independent of it.
Oh yah, about that can linux still run applications from 5 years ago... First of all an RPM isn't really an app, but im guessing you meant any binary since rpm's weren't even around in `97 (could be wrong). Yes linux usually can, I've never seen any old binaries not work because of 'age'. On the other hand though, I've never seen a windows application from `91 still work, it almost always needs some sort of of dos, or win 3.1, or even win95/98 dependency that isn't still distributed with current versions of windows.