I've been using Windows back to 3.1 with DOS 6 and straight on through 95, 98, NT4, ME, to XP Home and Pro and throughout that time, I've gotten MAYBE all of ten BSODs.
Windows is, and there is NO arguing this point in my book, leaps and bounds easier to use and configure than any version of Linux. Installshield and its competitors are mature and make installation of all sorts of apps easy. More and more, Windows coders are starting to code properly as Windows changes its architecture to "strongly encourage" it.
The primary reasons for instability on Windows boxes are willy-nilly isntallation of software of unknown origin, inane web usage without regard to security and contractions of viralware, incompetent driver installation by amatures and by techs who should definitely know better (rule of thumb for USB related installs has been since Windows 95B to install the driver software first, THEN connect the device, I see this basic rule violated by A+ and MS certified people constantly), farking with the registry when there is no concrete reason to be in there, and installation of system software such as anti-spyware and anti-virus without paying heed to KNOWN conflicts (such as installing McAfee on top of Norton or vice versa, saw this on Windows 95 ten years ago, STILL seeing this today). On that rgistry point, I still see people installing spyware that is advertised as a "registry cleaner".
I find it amazing that so many people who think they know Windows complain endlessly about it yet in nearly every case I personally look into, USER ERROR was the singular culprit. NOT Microsoft, NOT Bill Gates, NOT closed source, but USER IDIOCY.
Linux and other Unix variants are so difficult to use they rule out MOST user error by way of shutting out the most incompetent people but in no way, shape, or form does it stop it. The help forums for Fedora, Suse, etc. all bear testament to this. Easily, Linux is reloaded in a nuke and pave by the average Linux user maybe five to ten times more often than Windows.
I've had the same Windows XP install running nicely without a nuke and pave for four years now. Any problems that crop up, I fix. I also don't reload my Linux boxes very often either and have become pretty good at scrubbing failed builds and fixing problems. And I do it without complaining, without blaming Linus or anyone else... I take responsibility for my own boxes. So should all these supposedly "experienced Windows users".
The biggest cause of prices being what they are is that we who support these services don't work for free. Have the government do them and you can multiply corruption times ten and watch your taxes climb to cover it. Either way, you WILL pay.
And right now, YOU the Internet using public are one of the faster growing costs of the Internet: stupidity. It is the common users who infect their machines with viruses, it is idiot spammers abusing the net, it is script kiddies and amature hackers spreading trojans and so on. And we who support it, have to spend part of our busy time dealing with that. And did I mention, we don't work for free.
It is not a matter of Comcast profiteering or having some supposed monopoly. It is not about local or state governments not giving out municipal wireless (yes, let's trust our pipe to the net to the same people we otherwise wouldn't trust as far as we could throw them on any other subject). It's about the fact that building out miles and miles of fiber and copper costs. It's about the fact that thousands and thousands of industrial-duty routers and switches costs. It's about the fact that facilities to house the aforementioned items costs. It's about the fact that the people who KEEP it working despite the (l}users doing their level best to level the network, disrupt their own connections, and otherwise fark up their service and the service of others costs.
Just as with coding, I don't work for free. What I write isn't coming to you for free, the service I support in my day job isn't coming to you for free. But I don't expect too many to care. I see every day fellow support techs carp about the McDonald's wages they are now being offered to do jobs which used to pay $35K/year but then complaining that their high speed Internet costs. All I can do is shake my head as I give them a penalty line bounce lart.
You may not like it, but if you think about the facts of the modern world, neutered greasemonkeys will cut down on overpopulation and homeless and unwanted greasemonkeys. By spaying and neutering greasemonkeys, we're helping to humanely control the population.
or maybe the techno-organic one. Or some combination. Human brains aren't binary. Light doesn't need to be binary. We need to start getting places with processors that work on base 10 like we do or even more. What if they worked natively on base 16? Or 7? Or could use variable number bases as best fit the problem?
I think this is where we should be going. I have little faith in the industry to use this advance to cut down heat and waste. I expect we'll be getting the Intel HotCake VI processors out of this more than anything else. Mmmm... a stack of superheated inefficient goodness for your gaming and pr0n vid pleasure...
I get anime-on-demand on cable now so I can watch a good deal of stuff and I found Madlax a little lacking in keeping my attention. Not something I'd want to keep a copy of and if I did, my box has DVI and Firewire outputs and I could just record a decent copy on my PC and watch it later because at present VoD doesn't allow saving to hard drive, which would be nice, but it doesn't bother me.
I suppose if I wanted to save a copy through this method it would be nice, but many torrent users know zip about configuring their broadband routers to forward ports to allow full bidirectional sharing and most upstream consumer lines are very asymetric so my bandwidth down is never remotely approached these days.
"This is President Castor. You know, they guy who pays your check. We have a problem with these new keyboards."
"Yeah, one of the secretaries downloaded some game application and it was loaded with a viral worm. It's killed three servers and remapped all the keyboards. We'll get up there and clear your system in a minute."
"I was wondering why it was opening browser windows to tubgirl and goatse."
Oh yeah, lots of fun. Let's not forget the adware slimeballs putting Viagra logos on keys...
Instant/.ing of almost any site. At first it was thought to be just dinosaurs running System V derivatives, badly tuned boxes, and of course anything running Windows. Now/. can even take down its own favorite, Apache on Linux. Got multiprocessors and a DS-3? Piffle. We can melt that down no problem.
Too bad, because I wanted to see what the news was about. The more I use FC the more I like Gnome and dislike KDE. KDE is going to have to offer some amazingness before I think about switching my default desktop. I don't see why so many authors aim their apps at KDE. It's only slightly easier and more polished than Gnome. Not enough to make a change for me and most KDE-centric apps actually run fine under Gnome even if they're calling up KDE code within it.
CLUSTERING
By now, you'd figure the Linux would might have gotten this down and perfected or at least out of the distro useable. We need mirroring failover, load-balancing, load-distributing, and task-distributing clustering all in one package. Some machines become on boot failover mirrors opertaing in synch with the others. Some machines on boot become drones for the first group balancing out loads without mirroring everything. Some more will become auxillary drones for overall load spreading to keep the core stable. And the last group will take various code to execute as needed by the first three layers.
THIN CLIENTS
There's no reason to stick insanely powered PCs in every corner of my house and inside every piece of audio-visual equipment, complicating heat disposal, electricity distribution, and network connectivity. Still all the guts in one place and put interfaces elsewhere. The Enterprise didn't run on thick clients with computers everywhere, it had a giant multiprocessing core and every lesser powered computational device around the ship was essentially an interface and some sensors and tools. We'll never see this future if we doggedly insist on sticking something comparable to a Cray of ten years ago in every little box. Our houses will go into electrical meltdown and our electric bills will become comparable to mortgages.
ENERGY EFFICIENCY
Sometimes around the end of the 1982 recession the world seems to have forgotten the lessons of the nonexistant phony baloney energy crisis: it is possible to do things that we need and like with less energy and without inane politically motivated changes in our lifestyle. It would be far better to have lower power processors and support chips, with multiple cores and each core hyperthreading on board and the chips working together if we needed the horsepower and the ability to turn those processors down when we weren't using them. We could also use lower powered graphics processors. We could use more efficient power supplies. The list goes on. With true hot plugging, we could in the OS software tell the mobo to turn down slots that had cards without any task at the time like a dial up modem only being used as an occasional fax. Tell the USB or Firewire drives to turn off until needed. As opposed to the current power saving systems that don't actually tend to work consistantly and without farking hard drives and the data stored there.
MODULARITY
I don't call USB and Firewire everything modularity. I still have most everything jammed onto a single mobo and whatever isn't gets stuck in a PCI slot or one of the above mentioned busses. I would like to be able to power down, pull something like an Atari 2600 cartdrige out, and pop in another with a different processor. I'd like to be able to pop in more boards with no excess things I don't need. Like, say... a blade server. But it shouldn't cost fifty thousand dollars. We've had modularity, slots, etc. for a very long time now. Why is it that it costs insane amounts and is positioned in a way that discourages its use? Why must we be so monolithic? If my car was made that way, I'd not be able to stick a different air filter in without buying a new engine.
INTERFACE
How hard is it to understand that only somewhat accurate voice recognition, crappy voice synthesis, 3D and multi-monitor displays only for the well-heeled isn't cutting it? Instead we get convoluted eye candy keyboards, shiny mice and trackballs, we get geek candy. I want a speech recognition system that is speaker independent and given the Internet and sheer numbers of users, a wide range data base synthesizing the results together of millions of users should have by now come about. Nope. I was doing software based speech synthesis on a frigging 6502 with 64K RAM more than twenty years ago. Best we get is that voice of the MS Office assistants. Big deal we've had multi-monitor displays for years. No sign of them becoming the standard. So much
and no matter how scientific or literary you make it, it comes down to one group of people forcing their opinions down the throats of the rest of the population, that population before forced to live under and according to the designing and ruling group's theories.
Somehow, the masses are always being hurt by and dying for someone else's ideas of what is right. This fact of life is harped on endlessly by socialistic twits all the time, yet they are the first to live up to it with a vengeance when these sorts of things come up. Yes, it may "sustainable" (whatever that actually means at the moment, from moment to moment, and in the end). Yes, it may be "environmentally friendly" (whatever that actually means at the moment, from moment to moment, and in the end), and yes it may be "better" (whatever that actually means at the moment, from moment to moment, and in the end).
That's a lot of may-bes and unknowns. Who says these people are fit to make that decision for everyone else?
The only way that the environment will be better off and the human race free to keep on growing is technology. Humans of today are way past being able to turn back the technological clock and go back to pre-industrial civilization. A sizable portion of the exploding third-world population is now inextricably tied to the first-world's economy and technology whether anyone likes or accepts it or not. We turn back the clock, we can write off three quarters of the planet's population. Who makes that decision? It wasn't okay to risk it with the cold war and threat of nuclear global holocaust, why is it okay in the name of "the environment" (whatever that actually means at the moment, from moment to moment, and in the end)?
No amount of arrogant "we're better and smarter and know more" is going to turn this into a perfect cutsey world ala Demolition Man. No Raymond Cocteau, no "be well", no "joy joy" boredom and lack of conflict. The nature of man rules it out.
The only thing that will help the environment and humanity both is technology. Sure, there's a lot of unneeded trash, not nearly enough composting with trash being dumped heedless of basic biology and chemistry as applies to rotting matierals. With thick clay and sand caps every so many feet, we're guaranteeing that should present trends continue we will see a day when our cities will be built on top of trash and tunneled through mountains of it.
But present trends never continue unabated. Things change. Anyone remember the recent decade of the seventies when we were by now supposed to be variously fried and frozen by global warming, barbecued by a no longer existant ozone layer, over-populated to the tune of more then forty billion people and feeding on each other ala Soylent Green or starving due to lack of food if we didn't resort to cannibalism however high tech?
To borrow from Steven Wright, if present trends continued from my second birthday, by the time I was ten I'd be five hundred and twelve.
Space travel, terraforming, space settlement in the long run. In the short run, inventing better packaging, less power hungry and more efficient devices (anyone looking over their Pentium or Athlon hot plates at the moment, hmmm?), better recycling to go with better manufacturing, better ways of sewage and water treatment, alternative energy sources where it makes sense, but most of all to recapture waste energy and feed it back into manufacturing (thermionics and thermoelectrics don't ever seem to be used in the hot gas exhausts of cars to oil furnaces, so why not and why not design cheap flexible solar panels that can be nailed down doubling as roofing shingles) and other sources of the waste in the first place.
Top down utopian clap-trap sustainable plans are bogus and always will be. Human nature defies it. But you give me an electric or hybrid car that outperforms an all gas model and costs less? You got my business and you do something for the environment. Oh look, s
...this is the same/. that is generally leery of statist anything and so pro-personal rights, right?
But as soon as municipal broadband is broached, people who'd usually don a tinfoil hat with regard to any government involvement start drooling like idiots if they think they're going to get higher speeds at lower costs, and screw it if the big bad government is doing it. Suddenly they aren't so bad.
The point about the government not being there to make cars, just the roads is applicable. Heck, they can't even maintain the roads under the cars. Some places are under perpetual construction. And mostly, it is because of incompetence and venal attitude. Hey, we can draw it out as a permanent taxation reason.
It's far from paranoia to suggest that government would do the same with this. Nor is it paranoia to suggest that once they had total coverage that they'd abuse their power to force private companies to sell their services at a dead loss until they went out of business or at least stopped serving those places.
Do you want the same US government that has given us interstate fights over segregation, womens' rights, gay marriage, the Meese Porn Report, etc., etc., ad nauseum, to be controlling your information pipe?
Since George W. Bush took office the first time, we've heard nothing but paranoid anti-American ravings of vitriol aimed at him and his admin. Yes, let's suddenly forget our stance about government taking our Internet away and censoring everything and lying to us and suddenly act as though we never said any of that. As long as you get gigabit pr0n and sub 5ms ping times to frag your friends, right? As long as you get to thumb your nose at the cable company, right?
Wake up and smell the contradictions here people. The same government that can't keep a shuttle from blowing up every few years and launch the remaining one it has without turning into nervous piles of drool... The same government that drops trousers and bends over for the MPAA/RIAA and nods like a bunch of doofuses at the mention of requiring DRM... The same governments that can't manage their cities, can't get along with their suburbs, can't respect the freedom of their citizens nor understand that the government manages at the leisure of the citizenry and that the citizenry aren't free at the leisure of the government... These are the people you want running your Internet and tv entertainment pipes.
At one insurance company I worked for, it was no urban legend. Some remodelling was done and the access to a basement room where some test servers were set up was blocked by renovation materials and the renovation completed but the excess materials left stacked. Several years later of employees walking past the stacked supplies every day, a network check got some people curious and after nowhere else could be found with anything unaccounted for, a building map showed a room where most had forgotten there was a door...
What is needed now in PCs/servers AFAIC is someone to drive down the costs of thin-clients, clustering, and modular computing. Given HP's history, this will likely be missed by a full light-year as they retrench in more of the same that got them where they are now.
What exactly is the cost of HP-UX compared to Linux and what are the comparitive support prices compared to say, Red Hat or SuSE? Or BSD for that matter if you want to put it closer to the System V side? What exactly do they have to offer there?
What are they going to give me that I can't get cheaper by leaps and bounds from Dell or for that matter Systemax?
What are they going to offer me for my ongoing needs and is their (*gag*) "vision" going to fit with what I'm doing? Or are they going to follow Redmond's lead not to mention the various hardware standards groups rather than innovating?
I don't see HP (*cough*) "getting it".
My wish list is simple, btw. Given I can get fully packed desktops for under $500, I want a blade server where the backplane and hot swap power supplies with one master board costs no more than a standard whitebox server and each blade is under $500 given that it is stripped of unneeded sound, graphics, and other tchotchkes as well as case and power supply. Why should I be paying over $1000 for a blade when I can get a whitebox with a comparable processor for under $750 and that comes with all sorts of things left out of the blade?
One of the few areas you pay a premium for them to leave something out that you don't need. You're bribing them not to put it in.
I want a *nix to do load-balancing, failover and load-sharing clustering with remote network boot thin client serving much like I could get for free with a few spare days of recompiling various distributions and project sources. I'm willing to pay but if it is going to cost an arm and a leg and get me less support than asking a couple questions on various web forums does, no dice.
Given what I am looking for and knowing what I do of HP, I am not holding my breath. This is just one of many many areas HP could have tried to get into where no one else is bothering. Instead we got the Compaq merger, we got Carly Fiorina and the saga of her removal, anything but a forward looking company doing anything to compete. We got craptastic personal PCs that Dell or even the average local whitebox maker could beat. We got Vectras that weren't offering anything that other business box builders couldn't offer and for less. We got a company living on their printer division's glory days while a host of competitors ate away at them, nibbling like carpenter ants.
We got the HP name and that was it, but we also got the decline in value of the HP name at the same time. So... what was the point? I'm sure that's on the minds of those being laid off as they recount their time at HP. What was the point?
I hate to reply to myself, but I meant I'd not use the current DRM with any format. If they had fair-use compatible DRM where I could put the electronic file(s) on any device I could plug my key into and give my password without having carte blanche to revoke my rights, then I'd try it.
...or does fair use still exist? If they haven't, then ANY CD or DVD I buy I reserve the right to rip to another format for more easy use, keeping the original copy safe and secure. That simple. If they don't like it, petition the SCotUS to reverse itself. Otherwise, they can fark off.
No way, no how, will I use WMV or any other format w/DRM. Not now, not ever.
Am I surprised by any of this? Nope. They fought the VCR, the cassette tape, the eight-track, private ownership of film cameras, etc. Even after repeated court rulings setting down that the people had the right to make archival back-ups of media such as floppies, the software companies still tried to use copy protection that made it impossible to make such an archival or fair-use copy.
Here's fair-use compatible DRM: I get a file of information as usual such as name, address, phone, e-mail, secret questions I know the answer to, etc. I also pay them X$ for whatever. Public key encryption is used to ensure only the key holder can access it. I can copy the encrypted file to whatever device I like that can read and act on my key. Without my key, it won't work.
Want more security? A simple USB device with a unique hardware key adds an extra layer insuring that only the person with that dongle and password for both hardware and stored software keys can play it. If I lose it for good, I revoke my software key on the server and inform them and prove who I am and get a new copy issued when I get a new USB key. They don't give a new copy until I permanently revoke my software key and prove my identity and that I bought a copy previously attached to that key.
If I gave my USB dongle away with the previous copy, then when the system connects in and asks the server about my software key it finds it revoked, it won't play the file and suspends the old key on the USB fob.
An open community such as that operating the various PGP/GPG key servers would handle the software key side, the hardware keys would be made to adhere to an open standard using well documented public key encryption standards and algorithms, and the IP owners handing out encrypted copies would have no control over either. They'd not be able to unilaterally revoke your right to usage of the copy you paid for and you'd not get that encrypted copy until you paid.
Go ahead and P2P the encrypted files all you want. Unless you can break PGP encrypted files trivially, it won't help. They'd be useless without both the hardware and software keys that matched the file.
If they used this, and the content was what I wanted, I'd pay and get my personal copy.
It is about time the critical mass of absurd patents was hit and battle between these patent whores began. Let them fight, let them drag each other down publicly in spectacle, let them drag the condition of their making into the light and let them be seen by the public for what they are and what they're doing.
Perhaps if it gets absurd enough, congress will finally step in and do some reform however half-assed if only to cover their complicity in it all via the back door of campaign contributions and looking the other way.
Whatever happens, I'm rooting against Amazon until the day they go Chapter 13.
My ancestors hail from a lot of different places. Some were Native Americans. I've read of "the old country" and why they came here and left there. I know my neighborhood is full of even more colorful people with wider ethnic backgrounds than me. I know why they came here as well as their ancestors. You know what that has taught me? That the US is quite possibly the last best hope for the human race and that "the old country" was left behind for good reason.
I, and I rather think my neighbors, would sooner trust the vagrants hanging out downtown to run the Internet than the United Nations. The USA is the truly united of nations. My neighborhood are the united of nations. I trust people who risked death to become citizens here, I trust people whose forebearers risked death to settle here, I trust individual people who came here, fought and died for here, fought and died for their childrens' future here.
I sure as Hell do not trust the various corrupt and murderous regimes still left governing so much of the rest of the planet. Bastards who are still in power only because the more enlightened members of their species haven't gotten around to removing them yet. Don't tell me every point of view is equal and so on and so forth and all the overused trite and haughty b.s.. They're equally human and equally deserving of being judged on the same basis as we'd judge conduct here. We'd not put up with the government of Nebraska acting like North Korea, we'd not put up with ethnic cleansing in Calgary as was done in Sarajevo, and we'd not stand for the corruption and endless bloodshed in half of Africa if it were going on across Western Europe.
Why should we put up with it where it does go on and why should we let any of these places have the slightest say in something that was essentially birthed in the USA, where so many of these places' victims fled to build a new life. It's like putting a rapist in charge of a rape victims' center. The UN should be disbanded, never mind given control of so much as a piece of toast, and the Internet is right out.
First, it IS THEIR park, THEY OWN it, THEY DECIDE who gets in and HOW.
Secondly, they are not collecting fingerprints, they are checking something personally identifiable, that is the geometery of the hand, of the owner of the passes and tickets. No different than using a hand scanner at a business to control access to a sensitive area as far as I'm concerned. Don't like it, don't go there.
Why is it so hard to understand that this has NOTHING to do with your freedoms? Unless Disney suddenly was handed power without someone telling me, they can do with and control their property and services as they see fit. My choice to spend my money on business with them as I see fit. Why is this such a hard thing to grasp?
...and it isn't a troll. I used to support OS/2 and it sucked like an Electrolux. 2.1 and Warp 3. Some of the worst time of my professional life.
Firstly, it had an interface that was bass ackward on a level that no sadist Motif nutcase in Hell could have conceived and which made that of the Amiga look almost sane. It set out to not be Unix, DOS, Windows, or anything else that you could use without training and regular doses of crazy pills never mind headache meds. Those of my family working the insurance companies with massive IBM entrenchment agreed.
You want paradigm shifting without popping the clutch? I know of several companies which took people and gave them massive training just to make basic use of OS/2, threw them onto Windows 95 or NT without training, then put them back onto OS/2 until they could, in essence, deprogram their OS/2 users.
Secondly, it was supposed to be compatible with DOS and FAT16. In practice, it could write things to a FAT16 partition across a LAN on a DOS/Win machine that could not be read by DOS/Win and caused automated back-ups to fail and require someone to spend sixteen hours watching the machine to hit buttons and tell the backup software to ignore the problem. It behaved like an infertile virus that happened to double as an OS.
Thirdly, the ONLY place it excelled was stable multitasking of DOS windows and even it was like dealing with Dirty Harry. Was it stable with seven or eight windows before another one crashed it? Well, do you feel luck, punk?
Like Token Ring it was stillborn and it would have been better had its authors been using intellectual protection and not conceived it in the first place, requiring this after the fact abortion. Strong wording I know, but I sacrificed sixty hours a week to that horrific demon spawn and would rather have never had to.
Thankfully, many IBM shops saw past the folly of single-sourcing everything to IBM, saw that IBM was rapidly becoming a corporation dedicated to whatever it was no matter the amount of idiocy involved, and that IBM could not do for them on the desktop what Windows could.
First, as others have noted, games still tend to suck overall so who cares how beautiful the graphics are? Beautiful crap is still crap.
Second, now that GPUs are competitive with CPUs for heat generation and electrical energy waste, are we giving up altogether on efficiency and just consigning ourselves to needing ever better coolers, paying more electrical costs, etc., just to play some beautiful crap?
Not me. Gone are the days of being able to stick all these game machines, DVD players, media PCs, etc. in a small enclosed space of an entertainment center. Now I'll have to place my TV near to a window and buy a standalone air conditioner so I can pipe the hot air flow out and cool all my stuff to keep it from immolating my living room.
I don't think so. If we're going to use up so much horsepower for this, we might as well at least get someone to use it as the power source for a lava lamp. That might be more fun to watch than Doom 3.
Where Linux could really do some good is turning every workstation, thin or fat, into a node of a the cluster it is logging into. Every person who logs on to the lan adds to the power of it. If they ain't using all their power, some can be used by other users who need it.
Linux is far more open to this low level inventive chicanery than Windows which is something that could make it be a much better choice than it currently is. The more machines on the net, the more powerful the overall virtual machine.
Why not? We already have talking heads on all the major news programs. We only need to make them electronic and be done with it. Max would at least be amusing, but I suspect we'd get at least twelve "what's the frequency Kenneth" lines a day.
and what use might a windtunnel in my apartment be? It's not like I'm designing fighter-jets or the new Ford here.
You'd use a wind tunnel to carry away heat from the latest AMD and Intel chipsets as well as GPUs from nVidia and ATI.
You'd use a wind turbine to gather up the air at the other end and turn some of that wind back into electricity at the other end.
Or just chop local birds into salsa while you generate green energy. You can't save the environment in one way without farking it up some other way, it seems.
Nice project btw, but a little behind the times. I thought Mother Earth News beat this dead horse into glue and snorted the entire production run when it came to alternative energy.
All op-fluff without even coherent editorial never mind subject matter. If/. cannot stop dupes because no one is reading them, it should follow that the articles being linked to aren't being read either.
I wonder how long till someone writes a three paragraph submission linking to goatse and tubgirl and it gets through.
In the meantime, Windows has point and click administration and the only people who find it difficult are beginners and people from other platforms. Exprienced Win admins don't tend to have a lot of problems.
Thankfully, Linux has more and more GUI apps and there's some for administering it. Just as hard to use as Windows domain controllers ever were, which means equally easy once you know what Unix systems expect and hardcore Windows admins, especially the security conscious, have more than a bit of passing familiarity with finer grain permissions and so forth.
I am not seeing the news or stuff that matters here.
Slashdot Mirror
they who complain about Windows crashes...
Bah.
I've been using Windows back to 3.1 with DOS 6 and straight on through 95, 98, NT4, ME, to XP Home and Pro and throughout that time, I've gotten MAYBE all of ten BSODs.
Windows is, and there is NO arguing this point in my book, leaps and bounds easier to use and configure than any version of Linux. Installshield and its competitors are mature and make installation of all sorts of apps easy. More and more, Windows coders are starting to code properly as Windows changes its architecture to "strongly encourage" it.
The primary reasons for instability on Windows boxes are willy-nilly isntallation of software of unknown origin, inane web usage without regard to security and contractions of viralware, incompetent driver installation by amatures and by techs who should definitely know better (rule of thumb for USB related installs has been since Windows 95B to install the driver software first, THEN connect the device, I see this basic rule violated by A+ and MS certified people constantly), farking with the registry when there is no concrete reason to be in there, and installation of system software such as anti-spyware and anti-virus without paying heed to KNOWN conflicts (such as installing McAfee on top of Norton or vice versa, saw this on Windows 95 ten years ago, STILL seeing this today). On that rgistry point, I still see people installing spyware that is advertised as a "registry cleaner".
I find it amazing that so many people who think they know Windows complain endlessly about it yet in nearly every case I personally look into, USER ERROR was the singular culprit. NOT Microsoft, NOT Bill Gates, NOT closed source, but USER IDIOCY.
Linux and other Unix variants are so difficult to use they rule out MOST user error by way of shutting out the most incompetent people but in no way, shape, or form does it stop it. The help forums for Fedora, Suse, etc. all bear testament to this. Easily, Linux is reloaded in a nuke and pave by the average Linux user maybe five to ten times more often than Windows.
I've had the same Windows XP install running nicely without a nuke and pave for four years now. Any problems that crop up, I fix. I also don't reload my Linux boxes very often either and have become pretty good at scrubbing failed builds and fixing problems. And I do it without complaining, without blaming Linus or anyone else... I take responsibility for my own boxes. So should all these supposedly "experienced Windows users".
As if BSD wasn't proof enough, now people want to open source and user support... OS/2
The computer world is thick with masochists.
The biggest cause of prices being what they are is that we who support these services don't work for free. Have the government do them and you can multiply corruption times ten and watch your taxes climb to cover it. Either way, you WILL pay.
And right now, YOU the Internet using public are one of the faster growing costs of the Internet: stupidity. It is the common users who infect their machines with viruses, it is idiot spammers abusing the net, it is script kiddies and amature hackers spreading trojans and so on. And we who support it, have to spend part of our busy time dealing with that. And did I mention, we don't work for free.
It is not a matter of Comcast profiteering or having some supposed monopoly. It is not about local or state governments not giving out municipal wireless (yes, let's trust our pipe to the net to the same people we otherwise wouldn't trust as far as we could throw them on any other subject). It's about the fact that building out miles and miles of fiber and copper costs. It's about the fact that thousands and thousands of industrial-duty routers and switches costs. It's about the fact that facilities to house the aforementioned items costs. It's about the fact that the people who KEEP it working despite the (l}users doing their level best to level the network, disrupt their own connections, and otherwise fark up their service and the service of others costs.
Just as with coding, I don't work for free. What I write isn't coming to you for free, the service I support in my day job isn't coming to you for free. But I don't expect too many to care. I see every day fellow support techs carp about the McDonald's wages they are now being offered to do jobs which used to pay $35K/year but then complaining that their high speed Internet costs. All I can do is shake my head as I give them a penalty line bounce lart.
You may not like it, but if you think about the facts of the modern world, neutered greasemonkeys will cut down on overpopulation and homeless and unwanted greasemonkeys. By spaying and neutering greasemonkeys, we're helping to humanely control the population.
... Oh. Nevermind...
What?
or maybe the techno-organic one. Or some combination. Human brains aren't binary. Light doesn't need to be binary. We need to start getting places with processors that work on base 10 like we do or even more. What if they worked natively on base 16? Or 7? Or could use variable number bases as best fit the problem?
I think this is where we should be going. I have little faith in the industry to use this advance to cut down heat and waste. I expect we'll be getting the Intel HotCake VI processors out of this more than anything else. Mmmm... a stack of superheated inefficient goodness for your gaming and pr0n vid pleasure...
I get anime-on-demand on cable now so I can watch a good deal of stuff and I found Madlax a little lacking in keeping my attention. Not something I'd want to keep a copy of and if I did, my box has DVI and Firewire outputs and I could just record a decent copy on my PC and watch it later because at present VoD doesn't allow saving to hard drive, which would be nice, but it doesn't bother me.
I suppose if I wanted to save a copy through this method it would be nice, but many torrent users know zip about configuring their broadband routers to forward ports to allow full bidirectional sharing and most upstream consumer lines are very asymetric so my bandwidth down is never remotely approached these days.
I give this a big "eh..."
"Uh, IT support?"
"Yo."
"This is President Castor. You know, they guy who pays your check. We have a problem with these new keyboards."
"Yeah, one of the secretaries downloaded some game application and it was loaded with a viral worm. It's killed three servers and remapped all the keyboards. We'll get up there and clear your system in a minute."
"I was wondering why it was opening browser windows to tubgirl and goatse."
Oh yeah, lots of fun. Let's not forget the adware slimeballs putting Viagra logos on keys...
Instant /.ing of almost any site. At first it was thought to be just dinosaurs running System V derivatives, badly tuned boxes, and of course anything running Windows. Now /. can even take down its own favorite, Apache on Linux. Got multiprocessors and a DS-3? Piffle. We can melt that down no problem.
Too bad, because I wanted to see what the news was about. The more I use FC the more I like Gnome and dislike KDE. KDE is going to have to offer some amazingness before I think about switching my default desktop. I don't see why so many authors aim their apps at KDE. It's only slightly easier and more polished than Gnome. Not enough to make a change for me and most KDE-centric apps actually run fine under Gnome even if they're calling up KDE code within it.
Why are so many obviously comedic posts getting modded insightful instead of funny lately?
CLUSTERING
By now, you'd figure the Linux would might have gotten this down and perfected or at least out of the distro useable. We need mirroring failover, load-balancing, load-distributing, and task-distributing clustering all in one package. Some machines become on boot failover mirrors opertaing in synch with the others. Some machines on boot become drones for the first group balancing out loads without mirroring everything. Some more will become auxillary drones for overall load spreading to keep the core stable. And the last group will take various code to execute as needed by the first three layers.
THIN CLIENTS
There's no reason to stick insanely powered PCs in every corner of my house and inside every piece of audio-visual equipment, complicating heat disposal, electricity distribution, and network connectivity. Still all the guts in one place and put interfaces elsewhere. The Enterprise didn't run on thick clients with computers everywhere, it had a giant multiprocessing core and every lesser powered computational device around the ship was essentially an interface and some sensors and tools. We'll never see this future if we doggedly insist on sticking something comparable to a Cray of ten years ago in every little box. Our houses will go into electrical meltdown and our electric bills will become comparable to mortgages.
ENERGY EFFICIENCY
Sometimes around the end of the 1982 recession the world seems to have forgotten the lessons of the nonexistant phony baloney energy crisis: it is possible to do things that we need and like with less energy and without inane politically motivated changes in our lifestyle. It would be far better to have lower power processors and support chips, with multiple cores and each core hyperthreading on board and the chips working together if we needed the horsepower and the ability to turn those processors down when we weren't using them. We could also use lower powered graphics processors. We could use more efficient power supplies. The list goes on. With true hot plugging, we could in the OS software tell the mobo to turn down slots that had cards without any task at the time like a dial up modem only being used as an occasional fax. Tell the USB or Firewire drives to turn off until needed. As opposed to the current power saving systems that don't actually tend to work consistantly and without farking hard drives and the data stored there.
MODULARITY I don't call USB and Firewire everything modularity. I still have most everything jammed onto a single mobo and whatever isn't gets stuck in a PCI slot or one of the above mentioned busses. I would like to be able to power down, pull something like an Atari 2600 cartdrige out, and pop in another with a different processor. I'd like to be able to pop in more boards with no excess things I don't need. Like, say... a blade server. But it shouldn't cost fifty thousand dollars. We've had modularity, slots, etc. for a very long time now. Why is it that it costs insane amounts and is positioned in a way that discourages its use? Why must we be so monolithic? If my car was made that way, I'd not be able to stick a different air filter in without buying a new engine.
INTERFACE
How hard is it to understand that only somewhat accurate voice recognition, crappy voice synthesis, 3D and multi-monitor displays only for the well-heeled isn't cutting it? Instead we get convoluted eye candy keyboards, shiny mice and trackballs, we get geek candy. I want a speech recognition system that is speaker independent and given the Internet and sheer numbers of users, a wide range data base synthesizing the results together of millions of users should have by now come about. Nope. I was doing software based speech synthesis on a frigging 6502 with 64K RAM more than twenty years ago. Best we get is that voice of the MS Office assistants. Big deal we've had multi-monitor displays for years. No sign of them becoming the standard. So much
and no matter how scientific or literary you make it, it comes down to one group of people forcing their opinions down the throats of the rest of the population, that population before forced to live under and according to the designing and ruling group's theories.
Somehow, the masses are always being hurt by and dying for someone else's ideas of what is right. This fact of life is harped on endlessly by socialistic twits all the time, yet they are the first to live up to it with a vengeance when these sorts of things come up. Yes, it may "sustainable" (whatever that actually means at the moment, from moment to moment, and in the end). Yes, it may be "environmentally friendly" (whatever that actually means at the moment, from moment to moment, and in the end), and yes it may be "better" (whatever that actually means at the moment, from moment to moment, and in the end).
That's a lot of may-bes and unknowns. Who says these people are fit to make that decision for everyone else?
The only way that the environment will be better off and the human race free to keep on growing is technology. Humans of today are way past being able to turn back the technological clock and go back to pre-industrial civilization. A sizable portion of the exploding third-world population is now inextricably tied to the first-world's economy and technology whether anyone likes or accepts it or not. We turn back the clock, we can write off three quarters of the planet's population. Who makes that decision? It wasn't okay to risk it with the cold war and threat of nuclear global holocaust, why is it okay in the name of "the environment" (whatever that actually means at the moment, from moment to moment, and in the end)?
No amount of arrogant "we're better and smarter and know more" is going to turn this into a perfect cutsey world ala Demolition Man. No Raymond Cocteau, no "be well", no "joy joy" boredom and lack of conflict. The nature of man rules it out.
The only thing that will help the environment and humanity both is technology. Sure, there's a lot of unneeded trash, not nearly enough composting with trash being dumped heedless of basic biology and chemistry as applies to rotting matierals. With thick clay and sand caps every so many feet, we're guaranteeing that should present trends continue we will see a day when our cities will be built on top of trash and tunneled through mountains of it.
But present trends never continue unabated. Things change. Anyone remember the recent decade of the seventies when we were by now supposed to be variously fried and frozen by global warming, barbecued by a no longer existant ozone layer, over-populated to the tune of more then forty billion people and feeding on each other ala Soylent Green or starving due to lack of food if we didn't resort to cannibalism however high tech?
To borrow from Steven Wright, if present trends continued from my second birthday, by the time I was ten I'd be five hundred and twelve.
Space travel, terraforming, space settlement in the long run. In the short run, inventing better packaging, less power hungry and more efficient devices (anyone looking over their Pentium or Athlon hot plates at the moment, hmmm?), better recycling to go with better manufacturing, better ways of sewage and water treatment, alternative energy sources where it makes sense, but most of all to recapture waste energy and feed it back into manufacturing (thermionics and thermoelectrics don't ever seem to be used in the hot gas exhausts of cars to oil furnaces, so why not and why not design cheap flexible solar panels that can be nailed down doubling as roofing shingles) and other sources of the waste in the first place.
Top down utopian clap-trap sustainable plans are bogus and always will be. Human nature defies it. But you give me an electric or hybrid car that outperforms an all gas model and costs less? You got my business and you do something for the environment. Oh look, s
...this is the same /. that is generally leery of statist anything and so pro-personal rights, right?
But as soon as municipal broadband is broached, people who'd usually don a tinfoil hat with regard to any government involvement start drooling like idiots if they think they're going to get higher speeds at lower costs, and screw it if the big bad government is doing it. Suddenly they aren't so bad.
The point about the government not being there to make cars, just the roads is applicable. Heck, they can't even maintain the roads under the cars. Some places are under perpetual construction. And mostly, it is because of incompetence and venal attitude. Hey, we can draw it out as a permanent taxation reason.
It's far from paranoia to suggest that government would do the same with this. Nor is it paranoia to suggest that once they had total coverage that they'd abuse their power to force private companies to sell their services at a dead loss until they went out of business or at least stopped serving those places.
Do you want the same US government that has given us interstate fights over segregation, womens' rights, gay marriage, the Meese Porn Report, etc., etc., ad nauseum, to be controlling your information pipe?
Since George W. Bush took office the first time, we've heard nothing but paranoid anti-American ravings of vitriol aimed at him and his admin. Yes, let's suddenly forget our stance about government taking our Internet away and censoring everything and lying to us and suddenly act as though we never said any of that. As long as you get gigabit pr0n and sub 5ms ping times to frag your friends, right? As long as you get to thumb your nose at the cable company, right?
Wake up and smell the contradictions here people. The same government that can't keep a shuttle from blowing up every few years and launch the remaining one it has without turning into nervous piles of drool... The same government that drops trousers and bends over for the MPAA/RIAA and nods like a bunch of doofuses at the mention of requiring DRM... The same governments that can't manage their cities, can't get along with their suburbs, can't respect the freedom of their citizens nor understand that the government manages at the leisure of the citizenry and that the citizenry aren't free at the leisure of the government... These are the people you want running your Internet and tv entertainment pipes.
I don't think so.
At one insurance company I worked for, it was no urban legend. Some remodelling was done and the access to a basement room where some test servers were set up was blocked by renovation materials and the renovation completed but the excess materials left stacked. Several years later of employees walking past the stacked supplies every day, a network check got some people curious and after nowhere else could be found with anything unaccounted for, a building map showed a room where most had forgotten there was a door...
for HP.
What is needed now in PCs/servers AFAIC is someone to drive down the costs of thin-clients, clustering, and modular computing. Given HP's history, this will likely be missed by a full light-year as they retrench in more of the same that got them where they are now.
What exactly is the cost of HP-UX compared to Linux and what are the comparitive support prices compared to say, Red Hat or SuSE? Or BSD for that matter if you want to put it closer to the System V side? What exactly do they have to offer there?
What are they going to give me that I can't get cheaper by leaps and bounds from Dell or for that matter Systemax?
What are they going to offer me for my ongoing needs and is their (*gag*) "vision" going to fit with what I'm doing? Or are they going to follow Redmond's lead not to mention the various hardware standards groups rather than innovating?
I don't see HP (*cough*) "getting it".
My wish list is simple, btw. Given I can get fully packed desktops for under $500, I want a blade server where the backplane and hot swap power supplies with one master board costs no more than a standard whitebox server and each blade is under $500 given that it is stripped of unneeded sound, graphics, and other tchotchkes as well as case and power supply. Why should I be paying over $1000 for a blade when I can get a whitebox with a comparable processor for under $750 and that comes with all sorts of things left out of the blade?
One of the few areas you pay a premium for them to leave something out that you don't need. You're bribing them not to put it in.
I want a *nix to do load-balancing, failover and load-sharing clustering with remote network boot thin client serving much like I could get for free with a few spare days of recompiling various distributions and project sources. I'm willing to pay but if it is going to cost an arm and a leg and get me less support than asking a couple questions on various web forums does, no dice.
Given what I am looking for and knowing what I do of HP, I am not holding my breath. This is just one of many many areas HP could have tried to get into where no one else is bothering. Instead we got the Compaq merger, we got Carly Fiorina and the saga of her removal, anything but a forward looking company doing anything to compete. We got craptastic personal PCs that Dell or even the average local whitebox maker could beat. We got Vectras that weren't offering anything that other business box builders couldn't offer and for less. We got a company living on their printer division's glory days while a host of competitors ate away at them, nibbling like carpenter ants.
We got the HP name and that was it, but we also got the decline in value of the HP name at the same time. So... what was the point? I'm sure that's on the minds of those being laid off as they recount their time at HP. What was the point?
I hate to reply to myself, but I meant I'd not use the current DRM with any format. If they had fair-use compatible DRM where I could put the electronic file(s) on any device I could plug my key into and give my password without having carte blanche to revoke my rights, then I'd try it.
...or does fair use still exist? If they haven't, then ANY CD or DVD I buy I reserve the right to rip to another format for more easy use, keeping the original copy safe and secure. That simple. If they don't like it, petition the SCotUS to reverse itself. Otherwise, they can fark off.
No way, no how, will I use WMV or any other format w/DRM. Not now, not ever.
Am I surprised by any of this? Nope. They fought the VCR, the cassette tape, the eight-track, private ownership of film cameras, etc. Even after repeated court rulings setting down that the people had the right to make archival back-ups of media such as floppies, the software companies still tried to use copy protection that made it impossible to make such an archival or fair-use copy.
Here's fair-use compatible DRM: I get a file of information as usual such as name, address, phone, e-mail, secret questions I know the answer to, etc. I also pay them X$ for whatever. Public key encryption is used to ensure only the key holder can access it. I can copy the encrypted file to whatever device I like that can read and act on my key. Without my key, it won't work.
Want more security? A simple USB device with a unique hardware key adds an extra layer insuring that only the person with that dongle and password for both hardware and stored software keys can play it. If I lose it for good, I revoke my software key on the server and inform them and prove who I am and get a new copy issued when I get a new USB key. They don't give a new copy until I permanently revoke my software key and prove my identity and that I bought a copy previously attached to that key.
If I gave my USB dongle away with the previous copy, then when the system connects in and asks the server about my software key it finds it revoked, it won't play the file and suspends the old key on the USB fob.
An open community such as that operating the various PGP/GPG key servers would handle the software key side, the hardware keys would be made to adhere to an open standard using well documented public key encryption standards and algorithms, and the IP owners handing out encrypted copies would have no control over either. They'd not be able to unilaterally revoke your right to usage of the copy you paid for and you'd not get that encrypted copy until you paid.
Go ahead and P2P the encrypted files all you want. Unless you can break PGP encrypted files trivially, it won't help. They'd be useless without both the hardware and software keys that matched the file.
If they used this, and the content was what I wanted, I'd pay and get my personal copy.
Yeah, I know. I can dream though...
It is about time the critical mass of absurd patents was hit and battle between these patent whores began. Let them fight, let them drag each other down publicly in spectacle, let them drag the condition of their making into the light and let them be seen by the public for what they are and what they're doing.
Perhaps if it gets absurd enough, congress will finally step in and do some reform however half-assed if only to cover their complicity in it all via the back door of campaign contributions and looking the other way.
Whatever happens, I'm rooting against Amazon until the day they go Chapter 13.
My ancestors hail from a lot of different places. Some were Native Americans. I've read of "the old country" and why they came here and left there. I know my neighborhood is full of even more colorful people with wider ethnic backgrounds than me. I know why they came here as well as their ancestors. You know what that has taught me? That the US is quite possibly the last best hope for the human race and that "the old country" was left behind for good reason.
I, and I rather think my neighbors, would sooner trust the vagrants hanging out downtown to run the Internet than the United Nations. The USA is the truly united of nations. My neighborhood are the united of nations. I trust people who risked death to become citizens here, I trust people whose forebearers risked death to settle here, I trust individual people who came here, fought and died for here, fought and died for their childrens' future here.
I sure as Hell do not trust the various corrupt and murderous regimes still left governing so much of the rest of the planet. Bastards who are still in power only because the more enlightened members of their species haven't gotten around to removing them yet. Don't tell me every point of view is equal and so on and so forth and all the overused trite and haughty b.s.. They're equally human and equally deserving of being judged on the same basis as we'd judge conduct here. We'd not put up with the government of Nebraska acting like North Korea, we'd not put up with ethnic cleansing in Calgary as was done in Sarajevo, and we'd not stand for the corruption and endless bloodshed in half of Africa if it were going on across Western Europe.
Why should we put up with it where it does go on and why should we let any of these places have the slightest say in something that was essentially birthed in the USA, where so many of these places' victims fled to build a new life. It's like putting a rapist in charge of a rape victims' center. The UN should be disbanded, never mind given control of so much as a piece of toast, and the Internet is right out.
First, it IS THEIR park, THEY OWN it, THEY DECIDE who gets in and HOW.
Secondly, they are not collecting fingerprints, they are checking something personally identifiable, that is the geometery of the hand, of the owner of the passes and tickets. No different than using a hand scanner at a business to control access to a sensitive area as far as I'm concerned. Don't like it, don't go there.
Why is it so hard to understand that this has NOTHING to do with your freedoms? Unless Disney suddenly was handed power without someone telling me, they can do with and control their property and services as they see fit. My choice to spend my money on business with them as I see fit. Why is this such a hard thing to grasp?
...and it isn't a troll. I used to support OS/2 and it sucked like an Electrolux. 2.1 and Warp 3. Some of the worst time of my professional life.
Firstly, it had an interface that was bass ackward on a level that no sadist Motif nutcase in Hell could have conceived and which made that of the Amiga look almost sane. It set out to not be Unix, DOS, Windows, or anything else that you could use without training and regular doses of crazy pills never mind headache meds. Those of my family working the insurance companies with massive IBM entrenchment agreed.
You want paradigm shifting without popping the clutch? I know of several companies which took people and gave them massive training just to make basic use of OS/2, threw them onto Windows 95 or NT without training, then put them back onto OS/2 until they could, in essence, deprogram their OS/2 users.
Secondly, it was supposed to be compatible with DOS and FAT16. In practice, it could write things to a FAT16 partition across a LAN on a DOS/Win machine that could not be read by DOS/Win and caused automated back-ups to fail and require someone to spend sixteen hours watching the machine to hit buttons and tell the backup software to ignore the problem. It behaved like an infertile virus that happened to double as an OS.
Thirdly, the ONLY place it excelled was stable multitasking of DOS windows and even it was like dealing with Dirty Harry. Was it stable with seven or eight windows before another one crashed it? Well, do you feel luck, punk?
Like Token Ring it was stillborn and it would have been better had its authors been using intellectual protection and not conceived it in the first place, requiring this after the fact abortion. Strong wording I know, but I sacrificed sixty hours a week to that horrific demon spawn and would rather have never had to.
Thankfully, many IBM shops saw past the folly of single-sourcing everything to IBM, saw that IBM was rapidly becoming a corporation dedicated to whatever it was no matter the amount of idiocy involved, and that IBM could not do for them on the desktop what Windows could.
Rest In Deletion, OS/2.
First, as others have noted, games still tend to suck overall so who cares how beautiful the graphics are? Beautiful crap is still crap.
Second, now that GPUs are competitive with CPUs for heat generation and electrical energy waste, are we giving up altogether on efficiency and just consigning ourselves to needing ever better coolers, paying more electrical costs, etc., just to play some beautiful crap?
Not me. Gone are the days of being able to stick all these game machines, DVD players, media PCs, etc. in a small enclosed space of an entertainment center. Now I'll have to place my TV near to a window and buy a standalone air conditioner so I can pipe the hot air flow out and cool all my stuff to keep it from immolating my living room.
I don't think so. If we're going to use up so much horsepower for this, we might as well at least get someone to use it as the power source for a lava lamp. That might be more fun to watch than Doom 3.
Where Linux could really do some good is turning every workstation, thin or fat, into a node of a the cluster it is logging into. Every person who logs on to the lan adds to the power of it. If they ain't using all their power, some can be used by other users who need it.
Linux is far more open to this low level inventive chicanery than Windows which is something that could make it be a much better choice than it currently is. The more machines on the net, the more powerful the overall virtual machine.
That's where I'd be looking to.
Why not? We already have talking heads on all the major news programs. We only need to make them electronic and be done with it. Max would at least be amusing, but I suspect we'd get at least twelve "what's the frequency Kenneth" lines a day.
and what use might a windtunnel in my apartment be? It's not like I'm designing fighter-jets or the new Ford here.
You'd use a wind tunnel to carry away heat from the latest AMD and Intel chipsets as well as GPUs from nVidia and ATI.
You'd use a wind turbine to gather up the air at the other end and turn some of that wind back into electricity at the other end.
Or just chop local birds into salsa while you generate green energy. You can't save the environment in one way without farking it up some other way, it seems.
Nice project btw, but a little behind the times. I thought Mother Earth News beat this dead horse into glue and snorted the entire production run when it came to alternative energy.
All op-fluff without even coherent editorial never mind subject matter. If /. cannot stop dupes because no one is reading them, it should follow that the articles being linked to aren't being read either.
I wonder how long till someone writes a three paragraph submission linking to goatse and tubgirl and it gets through.
In the meantime, Windows has point and click administration and the only people who find it difficult are beginners and people from other platforms. Exprienced Win admins don't tend to have a lot of problems.
Thankfully, Linux has more and more GUI apps and there's some for administering it. Just as hard to use as Windows domain controllers ever were, which means equally easy once you know what Unix systems expect and hardcore Windows admins, especially the security conscious, have more than a bit of passing familiarity with finer grain permissions and so forth.
I am not seeing the news or stuff that matters here.