Can't use it, the drivers are built for a VERY limited amount of hardware, more like a Hackentosh than a windows replacement, and its still almost completely focused around online which means your laptop is a brick if you lose your net connection. There are plenty of places here with no free WiFi so the users HAVE to be able to have 100% functionality when out of a hotspot and Chromium doesn't allow that.
Sorry i don't have the complete list written down but so far I've given my challenge to Ubuntu, mint, Fedora (I know but some guy kept insisting Fedora could pass), PCLOS, Knoppix, close to a dozen all told and so far NONE of passed the challenge. And its not like I'm asking for miracles here, just that the system have the same hardware working after patching that it did before patching and so far no dice, the QA and testing must be really piss poor.
Again you see what I mean? No real discussion allowed because St Torvalds says its verbotten so he MUST be right, they won't even entertain the idea that he could POSSIBLY be wrong on ANYTHING.
But one important thing you missed about servers Crosshair is they don't have to deal with a LOT of shit that is 100% REQUIRED to have a functional desktop. I know several Linux server admins...think they have sound on a server? a full DE? WiFi? Multimedia support? Hell most are running headless and just using CLI to run the show. That is about as opposite as you can possibly get from a desktop yet the FOSSie faction thinks this is somehow "proof" that Torvalds is right? That would be like saying "gas trucks use too much fuel, we should be using more diesel" and some numbnuts chimes in with "My moped gets 60MPG!"...WTF does THAT have to do with anything? Its two completely different use cases, has little to nothing in common other than both have wheels and a motor yet that would be considered "proof" that gas is better than diesel?
at the end of the day that is why I've blocked all Linux articles because common sense and logic need not apply, you go to any Linux article and its a total circle jerk and ignores reality completely. I've been selling systems since the days of the 486, have used and serviced just about every OS out there, from System 7- OS/2 and LINUX IS BROKEN when it comes to the desktop. It can't update without breaking shit, drivers that work in foo don't work in foo+1, hardware is a game of roulette, its a bad joke and blaming us retailers for their shitty numbers is just passing the buck.
I'd say the problem is that BOTH sides have turned what SHOULD be a scientific debate into a political one because the leeches on BOTH sides have nice scams set up to benefit by bleeding money from the economy. You have oil and gas subsidies on one side and on the other the crap and trade scam which allows parasites like Al Gore to give money to his own company (which then gives it back as tax free capital gains) so he can claim his Lear jet and fleet of SUVs are "carbon neutral". Yeah and I grow wings out my ass and fly south for the winter.
The bitch is if it weren't for the parasites on BOTH sides we could actually make this country better off while cutting down on pollution, for example a "people's car/truck" that runs on diesel and gets a minimum of 45MPG for the car and 35MPG for the truck is VERY doable and then you could use clash for clunkers or other incentives to get the poor folks out of the gas guzzlers. Since our current MPG in this country is a lousy 14MPG thanks to all the poor driving older hogs because they can't afford anything else you could cut our gas usage in half without crippling our economy and in fact creating more work to be built around this new vehicle.
But as long as we allow BOTH sides to be run by parasites with agendas that are NOT in the best interests of this country nothing will ever be done. the "solutions" both side have proposed will work about as well as throwing all your garbage into your closet, sure it'll look better to anybody who just glances in but that didn't make the garbage go away,just moved it.
What pisses ME off is it has become a religious thing to the FOSSie faction, you even dare speak the word "ABI" and they instantly shut down, no discussion allowed, St Torvalds has said its verbotten so no thought shall be given and you are a dirty shill for daring to break the silence with your filthy ABI idea.
Do they think ALL those other OS designers were making ABIs just to be douchebags? that Torvalds is REALLY smarter than ALL OF THEM combined? As you said better than i ever could everybody uses ABIs for a REASON, so you don't end up with a house of cards when you change something.....which is exactly what happens in Linux. Change ALSA for Pulse? KDE 3 for KDE 4? Enjoy your broken mess.
I mean for fuck's sake Crosshair I'm a little shop owner in the middle of nowhere Arkansas...you think ANY exotic hardware is coming through here? Hell no, we are talking about the same damned hardware you have seen a billion times before, intel, realtek,via, nvidia, amd, sigmatel....this shit is as common as the damned dirt and they STILL break the damned drivers on update? WTF?
I mean if me, with the most boring hardware on the planet is seeing all this breakage...what is grandma and little Johnny gonna see? Think they would EVER buy from me again if I sold them a laptop that went black screen of death the first time they let it update? Or if their desktop lost sound and their WiFi card just from updating? They can dress it up any way they want but when you are breaking hardware as bog standard as the stuff in my shop then you are a hobbyist OS, you don't deserve to be considered a contender when you can't even keep the boring stuff working.
With an ABI they wouldn't have this problem but as long as Torvalds is in charge it'll never be, and so Linux will never be shit on the desktop.
Thank you...is that really so damned much to ask for? i'm not asking to run in the RAM of a watch, drive 6 monitors, all I want it to do is be just as functional when the patches are over as when they began...is that REALLY too damned much to ask for? Because the way some of them are acting here I just beat their mothers for DARING to ask that the damned thing keeps working after patching!
After 3 years of using Linux the only conclusion I could take away from it is...Linux IS Windows 98. its buggy, patches break as much as they fix, things that worked today may not work tomorrow, all that shit was what I dealt with with Windows 98...it ain't 1998 anymore guys, things HAVE gotten better. I can take XP/XP X64, Vista, or Win 7 and go from RTM to current and gasp! all the drivers work! The software I installed still runs!
Nobody is asking for miracles here guys, just that the devs can get their shit together and stop breaking as much as they fix, give us the ability to go from RTM to EOL and not end up having to wipe the system and start over...is that REALLY so damned much to ask for in 2013?
And this is what piss me off about the FOSSies, they act like anybody that isn't slurping the GNUkoolaid HAS to be some dirty shill.
You know how many damned years I been trying the Hairyfeet challenge just trying to find ONE, just one, that would pass? Going on 6 years. How many years did I use Linux as my personal OS? 3 and a half, trying over a dozen in that time as one would break shit and I'd move to another, just a glutton for punishment. Know how much Windows licenses eats into my bottom line? Sometimes as bad as 35% of a sale will be the cost of Windows licenses...now does anybody REALLY think I wouldn't fucking jump at the chance to keep that money for myself?
But after years of seeing what frankly should be the simplest things to do in Linux land, since they all have the source, things like updating the OS, updating the software, adding some new USB device...fucking bog standard shit that ANY USER should be reasonably expected to do....breakage. Mickey Mouse amateur hour breakage. Think that made me cheer, knowing after wasting hours I ended up with a broken mess? That builds are still gonna be having serious license costs? No it did NOT make me happy, I WANTED Linux to work, but it don't, not on the desktop, not with the same Plain Jane bog standard hardware...I mean for the love of God, we ain't talking exotic hardware here, Via and Realtek sound, Intel, AMD, and Nvidia IGPs and cards, SiS and Realtek networking, broadcom and Intel wireless....for fuck's sake, this hardware is in like 80%+ of the PCs out there! Is nobody doing any testing? How in the hell could updates get out the door that break hardware that is so damned bog standard?
So I'm sick of it, I'm sick of FOSSies telling us retailers its OUR FAULT that nobody sells their OS on systems when they are breaking shit and being a fricking joke. Seriously how are we supposed to sell Linux desktops and laptops when you can't even keep the most common drivers going? Hell you don't even provide a system restore or roll back drivers button so that users that get in trouble can roll back the system quickly and easily....that shit has been in Windows since fricking 2000! And you are gonna blame US that nobody wants your OS when its a mess? Sorry but its your fault for putting up with that broken mess and then expecting grandma and Sally secretary deal with pages of CLI, googling for fixes, and forum hunts. No, sorry, unacceptable.
Well I just came back from trying out a new drummer, he's tight, kicking, and oh yeah his little brother owns a kick ass studio....SCORE!
With any luck I can get my tunes recorded, get back on the road, and just breathe the sweet air of freedom. Freedom from dumbasses infecting their PCs, freedom from FOSSies who think they are hot shit but come off like a 14 year old fangirl, just get back on stage, let the music and the crowd work its way deep into my blood, and let the music flow through me and wash all my problems away. Nothing like it, better than any drug, just bliss in a bottle.
So I don't blame ya a bit for getting back into music as I'm sitting here typing with 2 fingers because i took the tips off the rest tearing into my beautiful red 5 string and loving the hell out of it. While I have multiple basses now, from fender to Washburn, this baby is my "go to" and if you haven't seen it here isone like it. Squire only had that series for 2 years, 95-97 and the rumor was they yanked it because these Pro Tones were outselling the regular Fenders. The tone is just juicy, that swamp ash is heavy as hell but gives it a nice dark tone and the low B will shake your guts out, too awesome.
Anyway don't sweat the morons, just point out when they are spreading FUD and bullshit so those that don't know better have the facts and then walk away. Hell it doesn't matter how many facts you rub their noses in the FOSSie won't listen anyway, they'll just keep spouting the same bullshit with zero evidence to back it up, so why waste time dealing with morons? Life is too short, just enjoy it and suffer no fools.
To steal a line from Tron Legacy "I stand for THE USERS" and I don't give a shit WHO broke it, what matters is its BROKEN. And Torvalds is very much to blame for a good chunk because if there was a stable ABI then drivers could bypass a LOT of the bullshit. Hell here it is 2013 and Linux STILL doesn't have a "roll back drivers" or "system restore" for when shit goes wrong and those were introduced in Windows in 2000!
The simple fact is EVERY MAJOR OS has stable ABIs except ONE. BSD, Solaris, OS/2, Windows, iOS, OSX, hell I wouldn't be surprised if Android and ChromeOS have one too, the ONLY hold out is Linus fucking Torvalds. Does anybody HONESTLY think Torvalds is smarter than ALL of those devs put together?
We all know what the definition of insanity is and that is Linux in a nutshell, they keep bad dev practices yet think they will get a different outcome. Well if their driver design was gonna work it would have done so by now and it hasn't. hell even the "let the kernel devs handle drivers" premise doesn't hold up to basic logic! You have MAYBE 3000 devs ON THE PLANET truly qualified to write low level system drivers and you have a good 50,000 devices MINIMUM coming out each year that need drivers! And that isn't counting all the stuff that has been released up to this point, which means if you took those 3000 devs and pumping them full of coke and had them working 24/7/365 the math would STILL not work!
So I'm sorry but as a retailer i'm tired of being blamed because nobody will carry your shitty product. I tried carrying your shitty product and no matter what hardware I chose the amount of breakage on update caused my after sale support costs to shoot through the roof and even though I have spoken and even written articles explaining EXACTLY what we retailers need to have happen to sell your product we get told "Do it our way or fuck off". Well with an attitude like that you honestly shouldn't be surprised you are in last place and even when MSFT puts out shit like Vista and 8 you gain nothing, its because your product is BROKEN and nobody will do what it takes to change the situation, no sale.
Challenge accepted! I HAVE done the same with Windows, taking Vista with MS Office 2K7 (which would give the same 5 years the Linux fails at) and updated to current and guess what? ALL of the drivers worked, not some, not most ALL of the drivers worked. And the fucking programs that came with it worked too! I have even done this with XP, that is TWELVE YEARS worth of SPs and updates, fired up the MS Office 2K at the end? tada! It all fucking WORKS.
Again pick your poison, PCLOS, Ubuntu, you name it it will NOT work on this simple test because Linux is NOT AN OS, its a shitload of spoiled rotten devs doing their own thing with a "fuck it its free" attitude. this is why DEs that are finally getting stable are just shitcanned, why audio that was finally getting functional is tossed for a broken mess, its because the devs DON'T GIVE A SHIT if it works for YOU, all they care about is if with enough CLI horseshit and fiddling it works for THEM.
That kind of attitude is fine on a hobbyst OS but NOT on a desktop you expect tens of millions to use. Oh and for the AC that screamed "Android!" I already explained how embedded works, VERY limited hardware and a top down control by Google. even with all that they are looking at one MILLION infected Android units by summer and you also can't take say an Android 1.0 system and upgrade to 4.0, in fact most systems won't be able to update for more than a year thus again failing the Hairyfeet challenge. if you want to claim Linux works on disposable devices? Sure it does, but laptops and desktops aren't generally considered disposable like that smartphone is.
Just the opposite, the little shops like mine sell the custom rigs while the big chains all sell "store brand" Dell and HP units. the reason i put store brand in quotes is often you can't go by model numbers as Best Buy and Walmart will often have "special" models built just for them that are frankly crippled all to hell to save every cent, for example I have pulled the side off a Best Buy Dell and found the PCIe slot to be missing, just the solder points sitting on the board, and other very basic features removed so they can squeeze every cent out of every sale.
On the upside it only takes most customers getting fucked like that once before they start coming to guys like me exclusively and while we can't sell systems quite as low as a "Best Buy special" our systems last past the warranty and can actually be upgraded, most of the big chain OEMs are so crippled what you see is what you get. This is why I wasn't shocked at Intel talking about going to soldered on CPUs (although I will stay with AMD where I can change chips) because for the big chains that would fit, that would be one more place they can save a couple cents per system and maximize profits.
Tried it, don't work, why? Because what is stable NOW may NOT be stable 7 months or a year from now, see how Atheros was the "go to" for wireless then suddenly their drivers were broken for either one rev or two revs, can't off the top of my head remember which. Doesn't really matter because if I had sold Linux all my customers with Atheros would have had worthless laptops until it was fixed which is simply unacceptable.
Until you show me a Linux that 1.- Cost less than Windows, 2.- Can be installed NOW and have full functionality WITHOUT jumping through CLI hoops, Googling for fixes, or playing forum hunts 8 years from now? we retailers just can't use Linux. Any retailer will tell you after sale support eats into the bottom line and the more likely the system is to need after sale support the more likely you end up losing money. Home users WILL NOT buy support contracts so don't even start, look at how many scream bloody murder at Best Buy trying to push extended warranties, so that system you sell them better "just work" until/unless they screw it up by installing a virus.
So I'm sorry but your product just doesn't work on a desktop. it works on servers, on smartphones, and in embedded applications, but its frankly a piss poor desktop and always has been. Most of us can't afford to run our own repo like Dell does just to keep our systems from breaking and without doing something THAT radical they WILL break. Why they will break is obvious, Linux is NOT an OS, its a bunch of little programs written by guys that "do their own thing" and ignore what everybody else is doing. Imagine if Windows had a kernel by Oracle, graphics subsystem by AMD, Audio by creative, and another 300 or so companies making all the other parts and none of them sat down and worked up a plan saying exactly what each was going to do? Think it would be stable and solid? of course not yet you expect that same situation in Linux only with no budget added to the mix to magically work...it don't. The places it DOES work is where its stripped down (server) or where it will rarely if ever be updated (embedded) and has EXTREMELY limited hardware to support (smartphones) so the problems can be routed around.....that just isn't the case with desktops guys.
Sorry about that when I "talk turkey" I forget sometimes to break it down. Win 7 SP1 does have "extras" if you want to call them that but many of those "extras" are security related, such as making Windows Firewall harder by putting in rules that cover corner cases users have run into since RTM was released. If you only apply the individual patches? You don't get these security enhancements so you are worse off than if you just used SP1.
And as you know with WSUS Offline even the smallest of SMBs can have all the advantages of WSUS without need for a WinServer so there really is no excuse not to have done testing in the 2 years MSFT has given and have SP1 rolled out by now. There really is a lot more security fixes in SP1 than in the single patches and if one were to have to hunt down all the KB articles to get all the fixes that aren't included in the single patches frankly they have just wasted more time than they would have testing and deploying SP1, so honestly it just don't make any sense not to. This isn't like XP SP2 and SP3 where there was risks of hang ups and software not playing nice afterwards, I have deployed more SP1 installs than I can count and haven't seen a single issue arise from deploying SP1. in fact checking the forums when it first came out i noticed the only ones having issues with deployment turned out to either be infected or even rooted and the malware was trying to actively stop deployment. But on a clean system SP1 is painless,there really isn't a point in staying on RTM.
Hell for shits and giggles when it came out I ran speed tests on both RTM and SP1 and I have to say that all the tests fell with margin for error, there really wasn't any difference worth noting so the guy saying "I don't need teh bloat!" is full of shit because there isn't any.
finally as for script kiddies? You are forgetting the "smart cow" dilemma in that all it takes is one guy to do the work and then the web spreads it like wildfire. So it doesn't take EVERY script kiddie doing this, it only takes ONE script kiddie having enough skills to do VERY basic reverse engineering and with all the tutorials online honestly it doesn't take a super genius to pull this off. Once the ONE GUY has done the work it will quickly spread through the boards and IRCs and suddenly they ALL have this attack vector in their toolkit. A good analogy is piracy, think little Johnny knows how to crack the latest SecuROM or TAGES? Nope but he knows where to get a crack by the guys that DO know how to crack those, so you end up with somebody with almost no skill able to do the same task as those that have skill thanks to the way things spread on the web. this is why DRM will never work, it only takes 1 out of 7 billion to figure it out before little Johnny can read an NFO and perform the same task.
Oh please i know EXACTLY who the patches is for, I support SMBs and they are some of my best customers so I've been there, done that. That doesn't change my point that its going on 2 YEARS, if they haven't come out with a migration plan after testing it on a test bed by now? Then they aren't going to, no point in MSFT wasting time supporting them. After all how many businesses are still running XP which has several security weaknesses like its desire to always be run as admin that just can't be fixed? is MSFT supposed to support that OS for another decade because some corps are too lazy to do testing in a reasonable amount of time?
If you haven't moved by now I'm sorry, you deserve what you get. hell if a little shop like mine could test SP1 on all my SMBs and get it rolled out over a year ago there really is no excuse for a fortune 500 company with a million times more resources than I'll ever have not getting it done by now, no excuse at all. If they want to run without patches? that is their business but MSFT doesn't have to support lazy and giving 2 years of support is more than enough to make a migration plan and do testing, i don't care how big a business you have. Now if they have screwed IT's budget so damned badly they can't even get it done on a TWO YEAR timetable? Frankly that company has bigger problems than patches, like all the gaping security holes they have because their overworked and underpaid IT dept simply can't keep up with the threats of 6 months ago, much less now.
But nothing you said invalidates anything i posted, everybody had 2 years to test and deploy and if they haven't done it after 2 years time? Sorry but they deserve what they get as even the slowest corp should have been able to pull it off given the huge amount of time they had.
Actually between all the new GUI tools and the exploit kits it really don't take much skill to learn how to do a basic tear down of a binary anymore. Its the classic "smart cow" problem in that it only takes one person to figure out the hard stuff, like how to write a GUI that does the task, and then the rest can simply use the smart ones tools to do the job.
But anybody that actually has to clean infected systems will tell you that after every patch Tuesday a count down starts and between 2 weeks and 2 months after it comes out there WILL be exploits targeting what those patches fixed, just because they know there will be a decent number who won't have applied the patch and its easy pickings.
Cool song and since you like stuff off the beaten path right back at ya..kickin tunes. This guy is good enough I bought a lot of his singles and now listen to them in my truck, be sure to check out "life in bullet time" "breaking down the borders" "Binary divide" and "The dead don't shuffle (they run)". Hell most of his stuff is completely different from each other and kickin!
Anyway glad I was able to help get the MSFT server thing straightened out, I was lucky enough to have a teacher that loved demonstrations and one of his first was a little "Why won't this PC hook to the Internet" test where it turned out he had simply unplugged the router. So many started tearing into Windows that nobody thought to ask such a basic question but that was the point, we geeks are so used to dealing with the big problems we rarely think about the little things that can cause just as many headaches.
Uhhh...Win 7 is one of the LEAST bloated OSes MSFT ever put out and looking at SP1 honestly there wasn't hardly anything that couldn't be considered security related in it, such as adding some more firewall rules for corner cases MSFT had encountered through user reports.
The ONLY ones I've seen claim Win 7 is bloated frankly doesn't understand how caching and the new memory model works and then are shocked when Win 7 shows through task manager that they have no RAM when they actually do. in fact if you put an XP and a Win 7 system side by side and looked at how much INCLUDING swap that they use? I have no doubt Win 7 would come out ahead because XP just lies and says "You got a ton of memory!" while pimpslapping the shit out of swap. This is understandable as the average system when it came out was a 400MHz single core with 128Mb of RAM but with 4GB-8GB of RAM being the norm now there is no point in ever hitting swap for most systems and Win 7 don't.
Actually the pirated versions are virus free, I know it shocked the hell out of me too but I was handed a couple of copies of Win 7 (all version X86 and X64) by a friend who wanted to know how many bugs they had, the answer? None, unless they are the most brilliant bug writers that have ever lived and can fool over a half a dozen scanners which I have yet to see any bug pull off. Hell even Comodo gave it a clean bill of health and that is one of the most "err on the side of caution" scanners I've ever seen, to this day it'll still complain about weird start ups like Via karaoke but the Win 7 discs? Nothing.
But if anybody wants to know why MSFT went secure boot? There ya go. The new pirated versions use a bootloader hack that fools the OS into thinking its on an OEM system, the SP1 version even scans your board and gives you the correct OEM for your board manufacturer, be it Dell or HP or even Asrock or Asus and even gives you a little wallpaper themed correctly for your OEM. since the ONLY way they could blacklist these systems is to blacklist all the OEMs this time MSFT couldn't just block it, in fact just to see what happened on one of the test boxes I launched Windows Update and damned if the WGA patches weren't greyed out by the pirates while all the other patches worked fine. Smart little suckers, gotta give 'em credit.
of course the bitch is if you put ME in the big chair instead of the sweaty monkey i could wipe out piracy in less than a year, how? Win 7 Starter upgrade $35, Win 7 Home $50...BAM! you just killed piracy in the west. Starter works great on old systems and Home takes care of the home users which nearly all pirate versions are aimed at, after all you don't find too many office buildings running Win 7 Ultimate Razr1911 Edition so this would take the biggest market, those with older system and home users, out of the equation. I'm a firm believer in piracy being the market saying your price is too high anyway and at those price points very few would bother with pirate versions, just wouldn't be worth the hassle.
Riiiight, that is why every retailer from Best Buy to Walmart, and nearly all the OEMs from Dell to MSI have tried offering Linux and now avoid it like the black death. You see as a retailer there is one little bitty thing the "FOSSies" as i call them seem to forget...if you don't stand behind your products you are dead in retail.
What does that have to do with Linux? Simple your drivers are deep fried shit (thus showing that yes you DO need a stable ABI, if you didn't then your drivers wouldn't be getting crapped on so damned often) and your updates remind of Win9X in that they break more than they fix. Don't believe me? Step right up and take the Hairyfeet Challenge!
You take ANY user friendly distro, PCLOS, any of the *Buntus that has what a Linux users considers to be a normal release schedule which seems to be anywhere from 6 months to a year and a half, take the one from 5 years ago (because as a retailer I can tell you the typical lifespan of a PC now is 5 years) and update it to current using ONLY the GUI, just as the customer who has bought Linux for the first time would be expected to do.
Know what you'll find? Linux IS BROKEN, I don't give a shit what Use Distro X! you name, I have tried it on a dozen so far and its ALWAYS the same, you have multiple drivers BROKEN and a system that is just a mess, in fact many times if you actually just update the thing as you would expect a normal user to do what you end up with is less stable than Win95. Talk about amateur hour, dead WiFi, graphics drivers shat upon, again doesn't really matter which vendor as they all ended up shat upon, from Intel and Nvidia IGP to Nvidia and AMD discrete, all were crapped on by the updates,sound? Bwa ha ha ha, if you think Pulse is gonna survive I have a bridge to nowhere for sale, and even something as simple as basic wired networking can be hit or miss.
So I'm sorry but until you get somebody with a brain to be the head of a distro, one who'll flip the bird to Torvalds and just fork the whole damned thing and make a Linux distro where you can update the damned thing without shit breaking? We retailers would rather try to sell Vista than take that POS because it drives our after sale support costs through the roof. This is why the ONLY place you see Linux systems sold is online, because "all sales are final now fuck off" is pretty much the norm when it comes to online sales. this is the opposite of retail where if I told a customer whose PC wasn't even 2 months old "Go Google for a fix" I'd be closing my doors in under 6 months.
I really wish it wasn't true, that the state of desktop Linux wasn't so piss poor, but it is. why do you think I tried over a dozen "user friendly" distros with that test? Because I WANTED it not to be true, as MSFT gouges us system builders and having a free OS that actually ran well and could be put on all those XP boxes that come through the store? would have been great...too bad the product IS BROKEN.
Linux works in servers because not only do you have guys getting paid a high 5 figures to deal with broken shit and because frankly a LOT of the problem components just aren't there. You don't see servers running WiFi or even sound and most don't have full GUIs, same thing goes for embedded where you get the added bonus of most stuff is never updated.
And I apologize for the length but I am fucking sick of FOSSies trying to blame us retailers for Windows while they keep pushing a piss poor broken product that ignores what we retailers have to have to actually put your product on shelves. hell now Ubuntu is killing LTS and going rolling release, so it can break constantly! I swear Linux devs must like in the bizarro world, its like "Quick things am stable! This not good, our users won't feel leet if they not got broken shit to fix! We must throw out all the stable stuff, break the drivers, toss the DEs for alpha quality crap, then users feel am leet!"...sigh. I said a million times here what we retailers
But you and everyone else is ignoring the elephant in the room, the same one that causes me to this very day to have infected system cross my desk that are still running XP SP2, and that is piracy.
The reason why so many unpatched Windows systems exists is because the pirates kill Windows Updates for fear that their pirated system will get flagged for WGA. Now this is a case where I can't blame MSFT, you can buy an OEM copy of Win 7 Home for around $100 which equals just $14 a year for the life of the OS, so there really is no excuse but being a little shop owner you'd be surprised how many systems you find in yard sales or being sold on CL has Windows Ultimate with updates turned off. Its kinda sad how obvious these pirates are, when you see a system with some old cheap hardware like a Pentium D running an OS that costs 4 times what the system did? Yeah you can be pretty sure its the "Razr1911 Edition" they are using.
But considering the only systems I don't see patched after SP1 was released nearly 3 years ago is pirate systems I just can't blame MSFT for dropping support as pretty much all that is left without SP1 is the pirates it seems.
Nope it only downloads them ONCE and that is it, you can do a thousand installs from that one WSUS Offline install. I keep it on a shared drive with every SP and update from XP-Win 7 and thanks to WSUS this includes the MS Office SPs and updates,.NET installs and patches, WMP and IE patches, all in one simple shared folder. I can even tell it to say "just make me an installer with all the Win 7 patches along with MS Office 2K7 and all the extras and put it on this flash stick" and it'll do so, great little tool to have. And when you run it its all unattended, no having to click each update, and if you turn off UAC while it runs it'll even reboot and do a double check just to make sure there aren't any later patches you need that have to be installed after the SP1 reboot, just handy as hell if you need to install Windows clean.
Of course since I have every version of Windows I see in the shop plus every version of MS Office I see plus all the goodies that shared folder is now 11.3GB but considering I can have it copy just the patches I need for what I'm working on and drive space is cheap i honestly don't care, all that bandwidth used for updating a clean install of Windows is saved so its well worth a lousy 11.3GB on a 500GB shared drive to me.
But IIRC not every patch that is in a Windows SP gets released as a separate patch in Windows Update, there are some that can only be found by hunting through the KBs which frankly is a bigger pain in the ass than just installing the SP. Honestly I've installed a shitload of Windows 7 systems since SP1 and I haven't run into a single problem with it yet, granted I use WSUS Offline so I don't have to reboot a dozen times but at the end of the day all that matters is if the system is 100% after the SP and so far knock on plastic every one has been which is more than I could say for XP SP3.
And speaking of XP at least it made a little sense why some would wait on those SPs and some software took awhile to be updated to the tighter security of SP2 and SP3 so you had more of a risk of software failing not to mention the SP itself could go wrong and take a dump on the OS. So far I just haven't seen that with win 7 SP1, the few people I saw online with trouble had already infected systems which naturally tried to screw up patching but on a clean system SP1 works quite well.
Finally if you want to have Win 7 fully supported until 2020 you just have to accept you'll have to apply the SP as MSFT has always only provided 2 years past the SP before killing support for pre-SP and that goes all the way back to Win2K IIRC. Considering what a crapfest Win 8 has turned out to be I have a feeling a LOT of folks are gonna skip it and maybe even 9 as well if ballmer still has a stiffie for the ipad so you might as well accept that if you don't want an unpatched system you're just gonna have to do it. Now if we can only get MSFT to release an SP2 so we don't have to have WSUS Offline throw dozens of patches at the system after applying SP1 I'd be a happy camper.
Why is this flamebait? Do you know how many security patches are in the average Windows SP? I'm sorry but anybody who has waited this long and not applied SP1 is indeed an idiot because every script kiddie on the planet uses those patches and SPs to reverse engineer new exploits specifically targeting fools that don't update the thing.
That said just because you need to apply an SP or a shitload of patches doesn't mean you have to do it the stupid way, not when there is WSUS Offline which will let you download and unattended install the service pack AND all the patches AND all the.NET updates AND any MS Office SPs and updates from 2K3-2K10 AND update DirectX AND Silverlight AND Windows media player AND Ineternet explorer, all at once and unattended. Granted if you are doing a clean install of RTM you'll probably have to run it twice of be sure to turn off UAC until you are done as it can't reboot and re-run itself with UAC on but for all the benefits of having everything done automatically while you go have lunch its well worth that tiny bit of effort.
So there really is no excuse as between WSUS and Ninite for all your third party stuff unattended, like flash, hulu, your choice of several browsers and AVs, etc you can take a bare drive and have a fully loaded fully patched Win 7 system in less than an hour and a half with you only being required for maybe 5 clicks all told, everything is taken care of.
So I'm sorry but the parent is right, anybody that doesn't install SP1 is an idiot, they might as well turn off their firewall and take their unpatched IE and start surfing dodgy websites because they are frankly asking for it.
Why not? I'm not a space guy so maybe I'm missing something but doesn't radar work in space? Again if i'm missing something my bad, a guy can't know everything, but it seems to me if we can use radio telescopes to look so deeply into space then we ought to be able to build something that uses less power in space to watch our solar system for nasties.
You never heard of "upward failure" which sadly is all too common in big orgs, be they public or private? Sure the companies getting the contracts are probably playing run out the clock but they are able to get away with it because too few in actual positions of power understand jack shit when it comes to tech. Remember "a series of tubes"?
Sadly while part of your post does deserve the +5 you got there is a flaw in you logic in that its not just the cost of the hardware/software but you also have to look into how hard its gonna be to keep maintaining some ancient POS where all the guys that used to work on those are dead or retired and that cost can rise pretty damned sharply.
So its not just the software and hardware, its how much its gonna take to keep that old shit running. If you aren't careful you end up with some giant mess that will only run on DOS 3 or a PDP11, takes ISA cards to communicate with other systems, and takes an act of God to get the data out into a format that new systems can understand as nobody has supported that shit in 25+ years.
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Can't use it, the drivers are built for a VERY limited amount of hardware, more like a Hackentosh than a windows replacement, and its still almost completely focused around online which means your laptop is a brick if you lose your net connection. There are plenty of places here with no free WiFi so the users HAVE to be able to have 100% functionality when out of a hotspot and Chromium doesn't allow that.
Sorry i don't have the complete list written down but so far I've given my challenge to Ubuntu, mint, Fedora (I know but some guy kept insisting Fedora could pass), PCLOS, Knoppix, close to a dozen all told and so far NONE of passed the challenge. And its not like I'm asking for miracles here, just that the system have the same hardware working after patching that it did before patching and so far no dice, the QA and testing must be really piss poor.
Again you see what I mean? No real discussion allowed because St Torvalds says its verbotten so he MUST be right, they won't even entertain the idea that he could POSSIBLY be wrong on ANYTHING.
But one important thing you missed about servers Crosshair is they don't have to deal with a LOT of shit that is 100% REQUIRED to have a functional desktop. I know several Linux server admins...think they have sound on a server? a full DE? WiFi? Multimedia support? Hell most are running headless and just using CLI to run the show. That is about as opposite as you can possibly get from a desktop yet the FOSSie faction thinks this is somehow "proof" that Torvalds is right? That would be like saying "gas trucks use too much fuel, we should be using more diesel" and some numbnuts chimes in with "My moped gets 60MPG!"...WTF does THAT have to do with anything? Its two completely different use cases, has little to nothing in common other than both have wheels and a motor yet that would be considered "proof" that gas is better than diesel?
at the end of the day that is why I've blocked all Linux articles because common sense and logic need not apply, you go to any Linux article and its a total circle jerk and ignores reality completely. I've been selling systems since the days of the 486, have used and serviced just about every OS out there, from System 7- OS/2 and LINUX IS BROKEN when it comes to the desktop. It can't update without breaking shit, drivers that work in foo don't work in foo+1, hardware is a game of roulette, its a bad joke and blaming us retailers for their shitty numbers is just passing the buck.
I'd say the problem is that BOTH sides have turned what SHOULD be a scientific debate into a political one because the leeches on BOTH sides have nice scams set up to benefit by bleeding money from the economy. You have oil and gas subsidies on one side and on the other the crap and trade scam which allows parasites like Al Gore to give money to his own company (which then gives it back as tax free capital gains) so he can claim his Lear jet and fleet of SUVs are "carbon neutral". Yeah and I grow wings out my ass and fly south for the winter.
The bitch is if it weren't for the parasites on BOTH sides we could actually make this country better off while cutting down on pollution, for example a "people's car/truck" that runs on diesel and gets a minimum of 45MPG for the car and 35MPG for the truck is VERY doable and then you could use clash for clunkers or other incentives to get the poor folks out of the gas guzzlers. Since our current MPG in this country is a lousy 14MPG thanks to all the poor driving older hogs because they can't afford anything else you could cut our gas usage in half without crippling our economy and in fact creating more work to be built around this new vehicle.
But as long as we allow BOTH sides to be run by parasites with agendas that are NOT in the best interests of this country nothing will ever be done. the "solutions" both side have proposed will work about as well as throwing all your garbage into your closet, sure it'll look better to anybody who just glances in but that didn't make the garbage go away,just moved it.
What pisses ME off is it has become a religious thing to the FOSSie faction, you even dare speak the word "ABI" and they instantly shut down, no discussion allowed, St Torvalds has said its verbotten so no thought shall be given and you are a dirty shill for daring to break the silence with your filthy ABI idea.
Do they think ALL those other OS designers were making ABIs just to be douchebags? that Torvalds is REALLY smarter than ALL OF THEM combined? As you said better than i ever could everybody uses ABIs for a REASON, so you don't end up with a house of cards when you change something.....which is exactly what happens in Linux. Change ALSA for Pulse? KDE 3 for KDE 4? Enjoy your broken mess.
I mean for fuck's sake Crosshair I'm a little shop owner in the middle of nowhere Arkansas...you think ANY exotic hardware is coming through here? Hell no, we are talking about the same damned hardware you have seen a billion times before, intel, realtek,via, nvidia, amd, sigmatel....this shit is as common as the damned dirt and they STILL break the damned drivers on update? WTF?
I mean if me, with the most boring hardware on the planet is seeing all this breakage...what is grandma and little Johnny gonna see? Think they would EVER buy from me again if I sold them a laptop that went black screen of death the first time they let it update? Or if their desktop lost sound and their WiFi card just from updating? They can dress it up any way they want but when you are breaking hardware as bog standard as the stuff in my shop then you are a hobbyist OS, you don't deserve to be considered a contender when you can't even keep the boring stuff working.
With an ABI they wouldn't have this problem but as long as Torvalds is in charge it'll never be, and so Linux will never be shit on the desktop.
Thank you...is that really so damned much to ask for? i'm not asking to run in the RAM of a watch, drive 6 monitors, all I want it to do is be just as functional when the patches are over as when they began...is that REALLY too damned much to ask for? Because the way some of them are acting here I just beat their mothers for DARING to ask that the damned thing keeps working after patching!
After 3 years of using Linux the only conclusion I could take away from it is...Linux IS Windows 98. its buggy, patches break as much as they fix, things that worked today may not work tomorrow, all that shit was what I dealt with with Windows 98...it ain't 1998 anymore guys, things HAVE gotten better. I can take XP/XP X64, Vista, or Win 7 and go from RTM to current and gasp! all the drivers work! The software I installed still runs!
Nobody is asking for miracles here guys, just that the devs can get their shit together and stop breaking as much as they fix, give us the ability to go from RTM to EOL and not end up having to wipe the system and start over...is that REALLY so damned much to ask for in 2013?
And this is what piss me off about the FOSSies, they act like anybody that isn't slurping the GNUkoolaid HAS to be some dirty shill.
You know how many damned years I been trying the Hairyfeet challenge just trying to find ONE, just one, that would pass? Going on 6 years. How many years did I use Linux as my personal OS? 3 and a half, trying over a dozen in that time as one would break shit and I'd move to another, just a glutton for punishment. Know how much Windows licenses eats into my bottom line? Sometimes as bad as 35% of a sale will be the cost of Windows licenses...now does anybody REALLY think I wouldn't fucking jump at the chance to keep that money for myself?
But after years of seeing what frankly should be the simplest things to do in Linux land, since they all have the source, things like updating the OS, updating the software, adding some new USB device...fucking bog standard shit that ANY USER should be reasonably expected to do....breakage. Mickey Mouse amateur hour breakage. Think that made me cheer, knowing after wasting hours I ended up with a broken mess? That builds are still gonna be having serious license costs? No it did NOT make me happy, I WANTED Linux to work, but it don't, not on the desktop, not with the same Plain Jane bog standard hardware...I mean for the love of God, we ain't talking exotic hardware here, Via and Realtek sound, Intel, AMD, and Nvidia IGPs and cards, SiS and Realtek networking, broadcom and Intel wireless....for fuck's sake, this hardware is in like 80%+ of the PCs out there! Is nobody doing any testing? How in the hell could updates get out the door that break hardware that is so damned bog standard?
So I'm sick of it, I'm sick of FOSSies telling us retailers its OUR FAULT that nobody sells their OS on systems when they are breaking shit and being a fricking joke. Seriously how are we supposed to sell Linux desktops and laptops when you can't even keep the most common drivers going? Hell you don't even provide a system restore or roll back drivers button so that users that get in trouble can roll back the system quickly and easily....that shit has been in Windows since fricking 2000! And you are gonna blame US that nobody wants your OS when its a mess? Sorry but its your fault for putting up with that broken mess and then expecting grandma and Sally secretary deal with pages of CLI, googling for fixes, and forum hunts. No, sorry, unacceptable.
Well I just came back from trying out a new drummer, he's tight, kicking, and oh yeah his little brother owns a kick ass studio....SCORE!
With any luck I can get my tunes recorded, get back on the road, and just breathe the sweet air of freedom. Freedom from dumbasses infecting their PCs, freedom from FOSSies who think they are hot shit but come off like a 14 year old fangirl, just get back on stage, let the music and the crowd work its way deep into my blood, and let the music flow through me and wash all my problems away. Nothing like it, better than any drug, just bliss in a bottle.
So I don't blame ya a bit for getting back into music as I'm sitting here typing with 2 fingers because i took the tips off the rest tearing into my beautiful red 5 string and loving the hell out of it. While I have multiple basses now, from fender to Washburn, this baby is my "go to" and if you haven't seen it here is one like it. Squire only had that series for 2 years, 95-97 and the rumor was they yanked it because these Pro Tones were outselling the regular Fenders. The tone is just juicy, that swamp ash is heavy as hell but gives it a nice dark tone and the low B will shake your guts out, too awesome.
Anyway don't sweat the morons, just point out when they are spreading FUD and bullshit so those that don't know better have the facts and then walk away. Hell it doesn't matter how many facts you rub their noses in the FOSSie won't listen anyway, they'll just keep spouting the same bullshit with zero evidence to back it up, so why waste time dealing with morons? Life is too short, just enjoy it and suffer no fools.
To steal a line from Tron Legacy "I stand for THE USERS" and I don't give a shit WHO broke it, what matters is its BROKEN. And Torvalds is very much to blame for a good chunk because if there was a stable ABI then drivers could bypass a LOT of the bullshit. Hell here it is 2013 and Linux STILL doesn't have a "roll back drivers" or "system restore" for when shit goes wrong and those were introduced in Windows in 2000!
The simple fact is EVERY MAJOR OS has stable ABIs except ONE. BSD, Solaris, OS/2, Windows, iOS, OSX, hell I wouldn't be surprised if Android and ChromeOS have one too, the ONLY hold out is Linus fucking Torvalds. Does anybody HONESTLY think Torvalds is smarter than ALL of those devs put together?
We all know what the definition of insanity is and that is Linux in a nutshell, they keep bad dev practices yet think they will get a different outcome. Well if their driver design was gonna work it would have done so by now and it hasn't. hell even the "let the kernel devs handle drivers" premise doesn't hold up to basic logic! You have MAYBE 3000 devs ON THE PLANET truly qualified to write low level system drivers and you have a good 50,000 devices MINIMUM coming out each year that need drivers! And that isn't counting all the stuff that has been released up to this point, which means if you took those 3000 devs and pumping them full of coke and had them working 24/7/365 the math would STILL not work!
So I'm sorry but as a retailer i'm tired of being blamed because nobody will carry your shitty product. I tried carrying your shitty product and no matter what hardware I chose the amount of breakage on update caused my after sale support costs to shoot through the roof and even though I have spoken and even written articles explaining EXACTLY what we retailers need to have happen to sell your product we get told "Do it our way or fuck off". Well with an attitude like that you honestly shouldn't be surprised you are in last place and even when MSFT puts out shit like Vista and 8 you gain nothing, its because your product is BROKEN and nobody will do what it takes to change the situation, no sale.
Challenge accepted! I HAVE done the same with Windows, taking Vista with MS Office 2K7 (which would give the same 5 years the Linux fails at) and updated to current and guess what? ALL of the drivers worked, not some, not most ALL of the drivers worked. And the fucking programs that came with it worked too! I have even done this with XP, that is TWELVE YEARS worth of SPs and updates, fired up the MS Office 2K at the end? tada! It all fucking WORKS.
Again pick your poison, PCLOS, Ubuntu, you name it it will NOT work on this simple test because Linux is NOT AN OS, its a shitload of spoiled rotten devs doing their own thing with a "fuck it its free" attitude. this is why DEs that are finally getting stable are just shitcanned, why audio that was finally getting functional is tossed for a broken mess, its because the devs DON'T GIVE A SHIT if it works for YOU, all they care about is if with enough CLI horseshit and fiddling it works for THEM.
That kind of attitude is fine on a hobbyst OS but NOT on a desktop you expect tens of millions to use. Oh and for the AC that screamed "Android!" I already explained how embedded works, VERY limited hardware and a top down control by Google. even with all that they are looking at one MILLION infected Android units by summer and you also can't take say an Android 1.0 system and upgrade to 4.0, in fact most systems won't be able to update for more than a year thus again failing the Hairyfeet challenge. if you want to claim Linux works on disposable devices? Sure it does, but laptops and desktops aren't generally considered disposable like that smartphone is.
Just the opposite, the little shops like mine sell the custom rigs while the big chains all sell "store brand" Dell and HP units. the reason i put store brand in quotes is often you can't go by model numbers as Best Buy and Walmart will often have "special" models built just for them that are frankly crippled all to hell to save every cent, for example I have pulled the side off a Best Buy Dell and found the PCIe slot to be missing, just the solder points sitting on the board, and other very basic features removed so they can squeeze every cent out of every sale.
On the upside it only takes most customers getting fucked like that once before they start coming to guys like me exclusively and while we can't sell systems quite as low as a "Best Buy special" our systems last past the warranty and can actually be upgraded, most of the big chain OEMs are so crippled what you see is what you get. This is why I wasn't shocked at Intel talking about going to soldered on CPUs (although I will stay with AMD where I can change chips) because for the big chains that would fit, that would be one more place they can save a couple cents per system and maximize profits.
Tried it, don't work, why? Because what is stable NOW may NOT be stable 7 months or a year from now, see how Atheros was the "go to" for wireless then suddenly their drivers were broken for either one rev or two revs, can't off the top of my head remember which. Doesn't really matter because if I had sold Linux all my customers with Atheros would have had worthless laptops until it was fixed which is simply unacceptable.
Until you show me a Linux that 1.- Cost less than Windows, 2.- Can be installed NOW and have full functionality WITHOUT jumping through CLI hoops, Googling for fixes, or playing forum hunts 8 years from now? we retailers just can't use Linux. Any retailer will tell you after sale support eats into the bottom line and the more likely the system is to need after sale support the more likely you end up losing money. Home users WILL NOT buy support contracts so don't even start, look at how many scream bloody murder at Best Buy trying to push extended warranties, so that system you sell them better "just work" until/unless they screw it up by installing a virus.
So I'm sorry but your product just doesn't work on a desktop. it works on servers, on smartphones, and in embedded applications, but its frankly a piss poor desktop and always has been. Most of us can't afford to run our own repo like Dell does just to keep our systems from breaking and without doing something THAT radical they WILL break. Why they will break is obvious, Linux is NOT an OS, its a bunch of little programs written by guys that "do their own thing" and ignore what everybody else is doing. Imagine if Windows had a kernel by Oracle, graphics subsystem by AMD, Audio by creative, and another 300 or so companies making all the other parts and none of them sat down and worked up a plan saying exactly what each was going to do? Think it would be stable and solid? of course not yet you expect that same situation in Linux only with no budget added to the mix to magically work...it don't. The places it DOES work is where its stripped down (server) or where it will rarely if ever be updated (embedded) and has EXTREMELY limited hardware to support (smartphones) so the problems can be routed around.....that just isn't the case with desktops guys.
Sorry about that when I "talk turkey" I forget sometimes to break it down. Win 7 SP1 does have "extras" if you want to call them that but many of those "extras" are security related, such as making Windows Firewall harder by putting in rules that cover corner cases users have run into since RTM was released. If you only apply the individual patches? You don't get these security enhancements so you are worse off than if you just used SP1.
And as you know with WSUS Offline even the smallest of SMBs can have all the advantages of WSUS without need for a WinServer so there really is no excuse not to have done testing in the 2 years MSFT has given and have SP1 rolled out by now. There really is a lot more security fixes in SP1 than in the single patches and if one were to have to hunt down all the KB articles to get all the fixes that aren't included in the single patches frankly they have just wasted more time than they would have testing and deploying SP1, so honestly it just don't make any sense not to. This isn't like XP SP2 and SP3 where there was risks of hang ups and software not playing nice afterwards, I have deployed more SP1 installs than I can count and haven't seen a single issue arise from deploying SP1. in fact checking the forums when it first came out i noticed the only ones having issues with deployment turned out to either be infected or even rooted and the malware was trying to actively stop deployment. But on a clean system SP1 is painless,there really isn't a point in staying on RTM.
Hell for shits and giggles when it came out I ran speed tests on both RTM and SP1 and I have to say that all the tests fell with margin for error, there really wasn't any difference worth noting so the guy saying "I don't need teh bloat!" is full of shit because there isn't any.
finally as for script kiddies? You are forgetting the "smart cow" dilemma in that all it takes is one guy to do the work and then the web spreads it like wildfire. So it doesn't take EVERY script kiddie doing this, it only takes ONE script kiddie having enough skills to do VERY basic reverse engineering and with all the tutorials online honestly it doesn't take a super genius to pull this off. Once the ONE GUY has done the work it will quickly spread through the boards and IRCs and suddenly they ALL have this attack vector in their toolkit. A good analogy is piracy, think little Johnny knows how to crack the latest SecuROM or TAGES? Nope but he knows where to get a crack by the guys that DO know how to crack those, so you end up with somebody with almost no skill able to do the same task as those that have skill thanks to the way things spread on the web. this is why DRM will never work, it only takes 1 out of 7 billion to figure it out before little Johnny can read an NFO and perform the same task.
Oh please i know EXACTLY who the patches is for, I support SMBs and they are some of my best customers so I've been there, done that. That doesn't change my point that its going on 2 YEARS, if they haven't come out with a migration plan after testing it on a test bed by now? Then they aren't going to, no point in MSFT wasting time supporting them. After all how many businesses are still running XP which has several security weaknesses like its desire to always be run as admin that just can't be fixed? is MSFT supposed to support that OS for another decade because some corps are too lazy to do testing in a reasonable amount of time?
If you haven't moved by now I'm sorry, you deserve what you get. hell if a little shop like mine could test SP1 on all my SMBs and get it rolled out over a year ago there really is no excuse for a fortune 500 company with a million times more resources than I'll ever have not getting it done by now, no excuse at all. If they want to run without patches? that is their business but MSFT doesn't have to support lazy and giving 2 years of support is more than enough to make a migration plan and do testing, i don't care how big a business you have. Now if they have screwed IT's budget so damned badly they can't even get it done on a TWO YEAR timetable? Frankly that company has bigger problems than patches, like all the gaping security holes they have because their overworked and underpaid IT dept simply can't keep up with the threats of 6 months ago, much less now.
But nothing you said invalidates anything i posted, everybody had 2 years to test and deploy and if they haven't done it after 2 years time? Sorry but they deserve what they get as even the slowest corp should have been able to pull it off given the huge amount of time they had.
Actually between all the new GUI tools and the exploit kits it really don't take much skill to learn how to do a basic tear down of a binary anymore. Its the classic "smart cow" problem in that it only takes one person to figure out the hard stuff, like how to write a GUI that does the task, and then the rest can simply use the smart ones tools to do the job.
But anybody that actually has to clean infected systems will tell you that after every patch Tuesday a count down starts and between 2 weeks and 2 months after it comes out there WILL be exploits targeting what those patches fixed, just because they know there will be a decent number who won't have applied the patch and its easy pickings.
Cool song and since you like stuff off the beaten path right back at ya..kickin tunes. This guy is good enough I bought a lot of his singles and now listen to them in my truck, be sure to check out "life in bullet time" "breaking down the borders" "Binary divide" and "The dead don't shuffle (they run)". Hell most of his stuff is completely different from each other and kickin!
Anyway glad I was able to help get the MSFT server thing straightened out, I was lucky enough to have a teacher that loved demonstrations and one of his first was a little "Why won't this PC hook to the Internet" test where it turned out he had simply unplugged the router. So many started tearing into Windows that nobody thought to ask such a basic question but that was the point, we geeks are so used to dealing with the big problems we rarely think about the little things that can cause just as many headaches.
Uhhh...Win 7 is one of the LEAST bloated OSes MSFT ever put out and looking at SP1 honestly there wasn't hardly anything that couldn't be considered security related in it, such as adding some more firewall rules for corner cases MSFT had encountered through user reports.
The ONLY ones I've seen claim Win 7 is bloated frankly doesn't understand how caching and the new memory model works and then are shocked when Win 7 shows through task manager that they have no RAM when they actually do. in fact if you put an XP and a Win 7 system side by side and looked at how much INCLUDING swap that they use? I have no doubt Win 7 would come out ahead because XP just lies and says "You got a ton of memory!" while pimpslapping the shit out of swap. This is understandable as the average system when it came out was a 400MHz single core with 128Mb of RAM but with 4GB-8GB of RAM being the norm now there is no point in ever hitting swap for most systems and Win 7 don't.
Actually the pirated versions are virus free, I know it shocked the hell out of me too but I was handed a couple of copies of Win 7 (all version X86 and X64) by a friend who wanted to know how many bugs they had, the answer? None, unless they are the most brilliant bug writers that have ever lived and can fool over a half a dozen scanners which I have yet to see any bug pull off. Hell even Comodo gave it a clean bill of health and that is one of the most "err on the side of caution" scanners I've ever seen, to this day it'll still complain about weird start ups like Via karaoke but the Win 7 discs? Nothing.
But if anybody wants to know why MSFT went secure boot? There ya go. The new pirated versions use a bootloader hack that fools the OS into thinking its on an OEM system, the SP1 version even scans your board and gives you the correct OEM for your board manufacturer, be it Dell or HP or even Asrock or Asus and even gives you a little wallpaper themed correctly for your OEM. since the ONLY way they could blacklist these systems is to blacklist all the OEMs this time MSFT couldn't just block it, in fact just to see what happened on one of the test boxes I launched Windows Update and damned if the WGA patches weren't greyed out by the pirates while all the other patches worked fine. Smart little suckers, gotta give 'em credit.
of course the bitch is if you put ME in the big chair instead of the sweaty monkey i could wipe out piracy in less than a year, how? Win 7 Starter upgrade $35, Win 7 Home $50...BAM! you just killed piracy in the west. Starter works great on old systems and Home takes care of the home users which nearly all pirate versions are aimed at, after all you don't find too many office buildings running Win 7 Ultimate Razr1911 Edition so this would take the biggest market, those with older system and home users, out of the equation. I'm a firm believer in piracy being the market saying your price is too high anyway and at those price points very few would bother with pirate versions, just wouldn't be worth the hassle.
Riiiight, that is why every retailer from Best Buy to Walmart, and nearly all the OEMs from Dell to MSI have tried offering Linux and now avoid it like the black death. You see as a retailer there is one little bitty thing the "FOSSies" as i call them seem to forget...if you don't stand behind your products you are dead in retail.
What does that have to do with Linux? Simple your drivers are deep fried shit (thus showing that yes you DO need a stable ABI, if you didn't then your drivers wouldn't be getting crapped on so damned often) and your updates remind of Win9X in that they break more than they fix. Don't believe me? Step right up and take the Hairyfeet Challenge!
You take ANY user friendly distro, PCLOS, any of the *Buntus that has what a Linux users considers to be a normal release schedule which seems to be anywhere from 6 months to a year and a half, take the one from 5 years ago (because as a retailer I can tell you the typical lifespan of a PC now is 5 years) and update it to current using ONLY the GUI, just as the customer who has bought Linux for the first time would be expected to do.
Know what you'll find? Linux IS BROKEN, I don't give a shit what Use Distro X! you name, I have tried it on a dozen so far and its ALWAYS the same, you have multiple drivers BROKEN and a system that is just a mess, in fact many times if you actually just update the thing as you would expect a normal user to do what you end up with is less stable than Win95. Talk about amateur hour, dead WiFi, graphics drivers shat upon, again doesn't really matter which vendor as they all ended up shat upon, from Intel and Nvidia IGP to Nvidia and AMD discrete, all were crapped on by the updates,sound? Bwa ha ha ha, if you think Pulse is gonna survive I have a bridge to nowhere for sale, and even something as simple as basic wired networking can be hit or miss.
So I'm sorry but until you get somebody with a brain to be the head of a distro, one who'll flip the bird to Torvalds and just fork the whole damned thing and make a Linux distro where you can update the damned thing without shit breaking? We retailers would rather try to sell Vista than take that POS because it drives our after sale support costs through the roof. This is why the ONLY place you see Linux systems sold is online, because "all sales are final now fuck off" is pretty much the norm when it comes to online sales. this is the opposite of retail where if I told a customer whose PC wasn't even 2 months old "Go Google for a fix" I'd be closing my doors in under 6 months.
I really wish it wasn't true, that the state of desktop Linux wasn't so piss poor, but it is. why do you think I tried over a dozen "user friendly" distros with that test? Because I WANTED it not to be true, as MSFT gouges us system builders and having a free OS that actually ran well and could be put on all those XP boxes that come through the store? would have been great...too bad the product IS BROKEN.
Linux works in servers because not only do you have guys getting paid a high 5 figures to deal with broken shit and because frankly a LOT of the problem components just aren't there. You don't see servers running WiFi or even sound and most don't have full GUIs, same thing goes for embedded where you get the added bonus of most stuff is never updated.
And I apologize for the length but I am fucking sick of FOSSies trying to blame us retailers for Windows while they keep pushing a piss poor broken product that ignores what we retailers have to have to actually put your product on shelves. hell now Ubuntu is killing LTS and going rolling release, so it can break constantly! I swear Linux devs must like in the bizarro world, its like "Quick things am stable! This not good, our users won't feel leet if they not got broken shit to fix! We must throw out all the stable stuff, break the drivers, toss the DEs for alpha quality crap, then users feel am leet!"...sigh. I said a million times here what we retailers
But you and everyone else is ignoring the elephant in the room, the same one that causes me to this very day to have infected system cross my desk that are still running XP SP2, and that is piracy.
The reason why so many unpatched Windows systems exists is because the pirates kill Windows Updates for fear that their pirated system will get flagged for WGA. Now this is a case where I can't blame MSFT, you can buy an OEM copy of Win 7 Home for around $100 which equals just $14 a year for the life of the OS, so there really is no excuse but being a little shop owner you'd be surprised how many systems you find in yard sales or being sold on CL has Windows Ultimate with updates turned off. Its kinda sad how obvious these pirates are, when you see a system with some old cheap hardware like a Pentium D running an OS that costs 4 times what the system did? Yeah you can be pretty sure its the "Razr1911 Edition" they are using.
But considering the only systems I don't see patched after SP1 was released nearly 3 years ago is pirate systems I just can't blame MSFT for dropping support as pretty much all that is left without SP1 is the pirates it seems.
Nope it only downloads them ONCE and that is it, you can do a thousand installs from that one WSUS Offline install. I keep it on a shared drive with every SP and update from XP-Win 7 and thanks to WSUS this includes the MS Office SPs and updates, .NET installs and patches, WMP and IE patches, all in one simple shared folder. I can even tell it to say "just make me an installer with all the Win 7 patches along with MS Office 2K7 and all the extras and put it on this flash stick" and it'll do so, great little tool to have. And when you run it its all unattended, no having to click each update, and if you turn off UAC while it runs it'll even reboot and do a double check just to make sure there aren't any later patches you need that have to be installed after the SP1 reboot, just handy as hell if you need to install Windows clean.
Of course since I have every version of Windows I see in the shop plus every version of MS Office I see plus all the goodies that shared folder is now 11.3GB but considering I can have it copy just the patches I need for what I'm working on and drive space is cheap i honestly don't care, all that bandwidth used for updating a clean install of Windows is saved so its well worth a lousy 11.3GB on a 500GB shared drive to me.
But IIRC not every patch that is in a Windows SP gets released as a separate patch in Windows Update, there are some that can only be found by hunting through the KBs which frankly is a bigger pain in the ass than just installing the SP. Honestly I've installed a shitload of Windows 7 systems since SP1 and I haven't run into a single problem with it yet, granted I use WSUS Offline so I don't have to reboot a dozen times but at the end of the day all that matters is if the system is 100% after the SP and so far knock on plastic every one has been which is more than I could say for XP SP3.
And speaking of XP at least it made a little sense why some would wait on those SPs and some software took awhile to be updated to the tighter security of SP2 and SP3 so you had more of a risk of software failing not to mention the SP itself could go wrong and take a dump on the OS. So far I just haven't seen that with win 7 SP1, the few people I saw online with trouble had already infected systems which naturally tried to screw up patching but on a clean system SP1 works quite well.
Finally if you want to have Win 7 fully supported until 2020 you just have to accept you'll have to apply the SP as MSFT has always only provided 2 years past the SP before killing support for pre-SP and that goes all the way back to Win2K IIRC. Considering what a crapfest Win 8 has turned out to be I have a feeling a LOT of folks are gonna skip it and maybe even 9 as well if ballmer still has a stiffie for the ipad so you might as well accept that if you don't want an unpatched system you're just gonna have to do it. Now if we can only get MSFT to release an SP2 so we don't have to have WSUS Offline throw dozens of patches at the system after applying SP1 I'd be a happy camper.
Why is this flamebait? Do you know how many security patches are in the average Windows SP? I'm sorry but anybody who has waited this long and not applied SP1 is indeed an idiot because every script kiddie on the planet uses those patches and SPs to reverse engineer new exploits specifically targeting fools that don't update the thing.
That said just because you need to apply an SP or a shitload of patches doesn't mean you have to do it the stupid way, not when there is WSUS Offline which will let you download and unattended install the service pack AND all the patches AND all the .NET updates AND any MS Office SPs and updates from 2K3-2K10 AND update DirectX AND Silverlight AND Windows media player AND Ineternet explorer, all at once and unattended. Granted if you are doing a clean install of RTM you'll probably have to run it twice of be sure to turn off UAC until you are done as it can't reboot and re-run itself with UAC on but for all the benefits of having everything done automatically while you go have lunch its well worth that tiny bit of effort.
So there really is no excuse as between WSUS and Ninite for all your third party stuff unattended, like flash, hulu, your choice of several browsers and AVs, etc you can take a bare drive and have a fully loaded fully patched Win 7 system in less than an hour and a half with you only being required for maybe 5 clicks all told, everything is taken care of.
So I'm sorry but the parent is right, anybody that doesn't install SP1 is an idiot, they might as well turn off their firewall and take their unpatched IE and start surfing dodgy websites because they are frankly asking for it.
Why not? I'm not a space guy so maybe I'm missing something but doesn't radar work in space? Again if i'm missing something my bad, a guy can't know everything, but it seems to me if we can use radio telescopes to look so deeply into space then we ought to be able to build something that uses less power in space to watch our solar system for nasties.
You never heard of "upward failure" which sadly is all too common in big orgs, be they public or private? Sure the companies getting the contracts are probably playing run out the clock but they are able to get away with it because too few in actual positions of power understand jack shit when it comes to tech. Remember "a series of tubes"?
Sadly while part of your post does deserve the +5 you got there is a flaw in you logic in that its not just the cost of the hardware/software but you also have to look into how hard its gonna be to keep maintaining some ancient POS where all the guys that used to work on those are dead or retired and that cost can rise pretty damned sharply.
So its not just the software and hardware, its how much its gonna take to keep that old shit running. If you aren't careful you end up with some giant mess that will only run on DOS 3 or a PDP11, takes ISA cards to communicate with other systems, and takes an act of God to get the data out into a format that new systems can understand as nobody has supported that shit in 25+ years.