First of all, Linux distros support every package on the system, not just the core files like MS update. That means perl, MySQL, apache, even the modules for apache. Everything. With that in mind, compare the Secunia security reports for Mandrake 10.0 and Windows XP Pro 10.0, which hit the market at about the same time. Have a look at the amount of unpatched vulnerabilities in both and see if you can still come to the same conclusions. Sheesh!
Would it make you feel any better if I had said "Our Windows infrastructure has 12x more downtime on current record than that of our Linux infrastructre"? It's true, 1200% just looks like a bigger number, so I used it. It's no less true the other way.
Your attitude goes to show the average level of gnosis when it comes to open source software in general. What you're talking about is an old stereotype of OSS that is false more often than not. Many OSS solutions are actually easier to use than their proprietary counterparts (take Jive messenger for example), and most are easier to manage in the long run. Besides this, I find that our particular mixture of OSS 'just works', where much of our proprietary software requires a lot more attention. From personal experience, I've spent about 1% of the time maintaining my company's Linux infrastructure than our Windows systems, and we've clocked about (No B.S.) 1200% less downtime on our Linux boxen to reflect this. A good IT professional will know or be able to quickly learn the OSS equivalents of status-quo software, negating most of the deployment costs everybody's always talking about. Write me off as a foaming OSS zealot if it makes things easier for you, but Linux/OSS has already saved my company hundreds of thousands. to OSS in general.
...I would have busted out the mod points for you. This may sound cliche, especially on./, but I'm so sick and tired of mainstream media and its lack of creativity. It seems like Hollywood is allergic to originality lately.
There's no need to be defensive, I like and respect Australia very much. My intention was to cantrast this particular incident, not the practices of Australia in general, with the practices of the city I worked for. To clarify what I meant by 'low-level format', I was referring to a multi-layer random hashing by some NSA-approved software. The data would not be impossible to recover, given unlimited resources, but it wouldn't be a cakewalk either. The really "important" stuff was carted off and destroyed at some special shredding facility. Anyway, like I said, none of the information on those systems was particularly sensitive anyway.
I used to work for city government here in SoCal, USA. In contrast to our Aussie friends, they were super paranoid about data leakage. When there was actually a situation where the red tape was momentarily pierced and we were authorized to give away outdated equipment to schools, they made us do a multiple-pass low-level format on each and every HDD that left the building. A royal pain-in-the-ass more than a security consideration -- none of those machines had anything which would be of much interest to anybody. If you ask me, the most damning piece of information one could gleam from those systems wasn't in the HDD at all. Rather, it's the glaring question of why there were gaming-class video and sound cards in all of the upper-management's old PCs, and nothing but cheap Trident cards in the CAD workstations of the time...
Thanks for the support. I knew that since Mandriva is fairly unpopular with the majority of/.'s I'd be blackballed, but that's life. All in all though, the moderation of my post just serves to prove my point: underrated.
Mandriva (formerly Mandrake Linux) is one of the most underrated Linux distros I know of. Mandrakesoft did get off to a bumpy start, and early versions of the distro had their caveats. But the company is well in the black now, and the URPMI tool is equivilent to or (dare I say it) superior to apt. It runs well on the desktop or the server, has a myriad of useful GUI tools along with the standard set of GNU admin tools, and a *huge* repository of contributed software available. Also, unlike Red Hat or Fedora Core it's compiled out-of-the-box for i586, so it's substantially faster than either. Best of all, Mandrakesoft has made a covenant with the community to always have a 100% open-source version that is actually backed by Mandrakesoft (as opposed to Fedora), to maintain the spirit of the GPL. The mid-sized corp I work for has mostly Mandriva on our servers, and we have about 99.9% uptime, including the time our infrastructure was down due to our recent move. All in all Mandriva is a good representative of GNU/Linux in general. I am exited to see what the fruits of the Mandrake/Connectiva merger have in store for us.
My little sister is a very special girl, despite her learning disability. She enjoys writing books, short stories, and keeping track of the who's-who of current Hollywood fame. Now that you understand the context, here's my point. My sister's store bought PC came with Windows XP preinstalled, not at all an uncommon occurance. As a courtesy, I set up an aggressive hardware firewall for her, locked down P's security (at least as much as this is possible), and installed the defacto antivirus and antispyware tools on her box. I automated everything which could be automated on XP, such as updates and common maintenance (again,at least as much as this is possible). After about a week, my parents called me and asked me to take a look at her PC, as it wasn't working very well. If you guessed that her systems was crawling with every type of malware imaginable, you're absolutely right. In fact, the system was in an unrecoverable state, rooted by a very aggressive trojan. I used a live Linux distro to make a CD backup of her stories, and reinstalled Windows XP from scratch. This process reoccurred about 4 or 5 times. On the last occasion, I asked my sister if she would be interested in trying Linux, since it would be a lot like what she was used to and we wouldn't have to go through the reformat/reinstall process ad infinitum. If she didn't like it, I could always reinstall Windows for her once again. So, I installed Mandriva Linux (then known as Mandrake), tweaked it to look and feel pretty much how she was used to, installed all the software she would need, and wrote some automation scripts to keep her system clean and up to date. It's been about 2 years, and she's still running. In fact, she hasn't had any problems or downtime. Oops, allow me correct myself. There was an occasion when she wanted to watch a video in an exotic file format, so she called me and asked for assistance. I SSH'ed into her machine from home, installed the necessary codec with a single command line (urpmi package_name), and she was good to go. My sister is not by any means the only case of Linux working perfectly for your average (or below average) PC user. In fact, in my experiences I've had success with about 9 out of 10 home Linux deployments I've done. Only one user (a family, actually) ended up going back to Windows, and that because they wanted to run some proprietary software with no obvious GNU/Linux equivalent. Fair enough. My point is that I'm downright sick of hearing "Linux isn't ready for the desktop", when the primary use of Windows for most people is Internet access, and Windows is arguably not ready for the Internet, as evidenced by spyware, malware, virii, etc.
...as applied to evolution, brings things into an interesting light. We're a bit off topic here, but basically things left to their own devices tend to wind down, they don't build up. Software virii or worms in the wild will become corrupted if anything and cease to function as well, or perhaps not at all. Case in point: If you leave a tin can out in the wilderness exposed to the elements, will it somehow become something more noble given enough time? Doubtful, unless you consider a pile of rust a step up in the life cycle of the can. My point here is that it takes effort to maintain, let alone improve. If there's no incentive for virus/worm writers to improve, since MS's security is lax enough to let them breeze through, then small is beautiful. Why make things more complicated than they need to be?
Roblimo previously wrote an article about XP Pro:
http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/10/09/05 52252&tid=11
Besides, this isn't a serious review so much as pointing to the obvious silliness in the tired, "Linux isn't ready for the desktop" argument.
What about data pertaining to spam and hack attempts? Wouldn't IP data be crucial for those purposes in addition to file sharing? Now don't get me wrong, I have zero respect for the RIAA/MPAA. But I'd have a great deal more admiration if they had simply put their collective foot down about the file-sharing privacy issue and left it at that.
Apparently quite a few, as they seem to have taken down their contact links, and their website seems to be either suffering from a rather large DoS or the/. effect (synonymous terms, I know). Their fax numbers are still posted, although I have no idea how congested their lines are at this point (very, one would hope). I think I'll go ahead and fax them an indignant letter on my company's letterhead myself, assuming I can even get through.
...so much as just reboot at random. It's one of XP's 'improvements' over NT5. I guess they figured it'd be easier to blame it on the hardware that way. In a way, I prefer that method, because you get a lot less calls at 2:00 am, "Are you my system administrator?" On the other hand, it sometimes makes it a lot harder to troubleshoot real hardware problems when they occur.
...At least in California, withholding of the last paycheck is not legal, IIRC, IANAL, etc. An employer must provide the check within three days of the employee's departure, or a full day's wage is tacked onto the sum for every day the check is tardy. Now, I could be wrong, and this could only apply to the termination of employment by the employer and wouldn't apply in the case of the employee quitting. However, I'm not completely convinced of this either. Are there any experts in legal labor disputes in the house which could shed some light on this one?
I'm surprised you take this stance. "Better CSS support" and support for PNG alpha doesn't exactly mean "full W3C compliance", now does it? How difficult would it be for a company with the resources of Microsoft to make a fully standards-compliant browser if they wanted to?
Ahh, but this is also addressed by my original point. Standards compliant browsers, standards compliant web pages. If they wanted to do something a bit out of the norm, why not JAVA?
If there was no other way to go about it, I might consider going the WINE/Xover route. However, my wife has just been faxing the orders in instead.
I didn't intend for my original post to come across as, "I'm mad because somebody wrote a page my browser can't render properly (wah!)" What I was trying to convey is that a large portion of MS's renewability of revenue comes from the fact that they have most people locked into propeitary (and often inferior) technology. This includes the way their browser renders, and from what I understand they don't plan on going 100% W3C compliant with IE7 either, for obvious reasons. This attitude only serves to hurt us as users of such technology, so I am all for the advancement of any technology that will support open and transparent standards. In this case, it means the well-wishing of Firefox.
At least you're not posting anonymously, so I'll give you that much credit. Actually, we've tried just about every browser besides IE. Obviously, that's not an option in Linux, unless I wanted to WINE it or some such nonsense.
I'm glad Mozilla.org is keeping the pressure on the Redmond-based behemoth. The fact that IE7 will continue to ignore established web standard makes me sick at the very thought of it.
My wife is an exclusively Linux user, and she does business with Candle-Lite. Unfortunately, their site is rife with IE-only garbage which makes it impossible for her to submit her orders online. If more people were using standards-compliant browsers, we really wouldn't have situations like this to begin with.
That's a 120mm fan, which is pretty standard fare. I use them quite a bit in the workstations at work, since they move a lot of BTUs without sounding like a blowdryer in the process.
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First of all, Linux distros support every package on the system, not just the core files like MS update. That means perl, MySQL, apache, even the modules for apache. Everything. With that in mind, compare the Secunia security reports for Mandrake 10.0 and Windows XP Pro 10.0, which hit the market at about the same time. Have a look at the amount of unpatched vulnerabilities in both and see if you can still come to the same conclusions. Sheesh!
Would it make you feel any better if I had said "Our Windows infrastructure has 12x more downtime on current record than that of our Linux infrastructre"? It's true, 1200% just looks like a bigger number, so I used it. It's no less true the other way.
-AT
-AT
-AT
-AT
Peace,
-AT
-AT
I'm just picturing bandwidth of that caliber getting into the hands of the unwashed (read: unpatched) Windows-using masses. *shudders*
Think about what you're saying... you're worried that ham radio will not work in a blackout due to data over _power lines_...
-AT
-AT
Just put lots of important information on it and forget to make backups. Always worked for me in the past!
-AT
What about data pertaining to spam and hack attempts? Wouldn't IP data be crucial for those purposes in addition to file sharing? Now don't get me wrong, I have zero respect for the RIAA/MPAA. But I'd have a great deal more admiration if they had simply put their collective foot down about the file-sharing privacy issue and left it at that.
Thanks for clearing that up, I've emailed them directly (in addition to many of their advertisers). Best regards, -AT
Apparently quite a few, as they seem to have taken down their contact links, and their website seems to be either suffering from a rather large DoS or the
-AT
-AT
...At least in California, withholding of the last paycheck is not legal, IIRC, IANAL, etc. An employer must provide the check within three days of the employee's departure, or a full day's wage is tacked onto the sum for every day the check is tardy. Now, I could be wrong, and this could only apply to the termination of employment by the employer and wouldn't apply in the case of the employee quitting. However, I'm not completely convinced of this either. Are there any experts in legal labor disputes in the house which could shed some light on this one?
-AT
-AT
Ahh, but this is also addressed by my original point. Standards compliant browsers, standards compliant web pages. If they wanted to do something a bit out of the norm, why not JAVA?
I didn't intend for my original post to come across as, "I'm mad because somebody wrote a page my browser can't render properly (wah!)" What I was trying to convey is that a large portion of MS's renewability of revenue comes from the fact that they have most people locked into propeitary (and often inferior) technology. This includes the way their browser renders, and from what I understand they don't plan on going 100% W3C compliant with IE7 either, for obvious reasons. This attitude only serves to hurt us as users of such technology, so I am all for the advancement of any technology that will support open and transparent standards. In this case, it means the well-wishing of Firefox.
-AT
At least you're not posting anonymously, so I'll give you that much credit. Actually, we've tried just about every browser besides IE. Obviously, that's not an option in Linux, unless I wanted to WINE it or some such nonsense.
My wife is an exclusively Linux user, and she does business with Candle-Lite. Unfortunately, their site is rife with IE-only garbage which makes it impossible for her to submit her orders online. If more people were using standards-compliant browsers, we really wouldn't have situations like this to begin with.
-AT
That's a 120mm fan, which is pretty standard fare. I use them quite a bit in the workstations at work, since they move a lot of BTUs without sounding like a blowdryer in the process.
-AT