Hydro's been around for over a century now - the problem with it is that, at least locally, it does just as much harm to the environment as anything else (flooding of everything behind the dam, disruption of fish migration patterns, etc.). That's why some dams are starting to get decommissioned in the United States. Geothermal is a decent power source, but it's limited to the location of hotspots that are rarely in places that can easily support power plants (i.e. very rural), which can lead to some fun environmental problems, too.
Unfortunately, every power source will have an effect on the environment. Heck, everything we do has an impact on the environment. The fun part is figuring out where the line is between our comfort and our respect for an environment that, frankly, is indifferent to our existence.
(Not disagreeing with the parent - just tossing my two cents in support.)
As a former employee of Radio Shack, I can tell you with certainty that, at least when I was working there (2000-2002), they were, in fact, commission driven, with incentives if you bought certain items (cell phones, DirecTV, their credit cards, etc.). However, the compensation was geared such that, unless you were an amazing salesperson in a very friendly market, you were never making over $10/hour unless you were the manager or something. Consequently, "desperate" was far more often than not, which did, indeed, lead to the phenomenon you described.
The range of "85 MB > Limit > 460 MB" was determined from actual examples today. It never mentioned WordPad, for which I'm thankful. This, of course, leaves me curious as to where the limit is, so let's have some fun...
108 MB: Tries to open. Notepad suddenly uses over 200 MB of RAM. Neat! Let's kill that and try a bigger file...
160 MB: Tries to open. Notepad is now using 342 MB of RAM and increasing. CPU is pegged. It seems Notepad's RAM usage is roughly double the size of the file, at least initially. Whenever I close Notepad using Task Manager, it asks if I want to send an error report to Microsoft. Of course I do!
380 MB: Having troubles finding files in the range I'd like. Thank goodness the work terminal server has access to all kinds of ISOs... and Notepad is trying to open this! Notepad is, predictably, using over 750 MB of RAM, which is jarring.
I'm thinking the limit has to do with RAM usage - as long as you have RAM to feed Notepad, I think it'll open it, or at least try to. The terminal server probably didn't have a free Gig of RAM available to open up the Windows 2000 Professional ISO I tried to feed it. Good to know!
Hmm... now you make me look. Tried an 85 MB ISO with Notepad 5.2 (Win 2003) - yep, it's taking a while, but it's trying. Tried a 400 MB ISO and it didn't hang at all - it said "The %path of file% file is too large for Notepad. Use another editor to edit the file." So, the limit must be somewhere between the two.
(Note: Yes, I'm abusing my work's terminal server.)
I can't wait to hear about all the noobs out there that don't realize that Notepad checks file size before opening anything and, if the file size is over a certain limit (64 kB, I think), will refuse to open the file.
Flu vaccines are created by examining what flu strains are present in bird populations (usually in South-East Asia), figuring out which strain is most likely to jump to humans that year, and injecting other birds with the virus and using the antibodies as the vaccine. That's why you shouldn't get a flu vaccination if you have egg allergies. It's also why they're able to vaccinate for flu strains before the flu strain is present in the general population and why flu vaccinations work in the first place.
Coincidentally, yes, all strains of flu are technically an "avian bird flu", which is redundant on so many levels, though influenza will also sometimes make the jump from human to pig and back again. Fun virus, that one.
You're probably right - most of the places I've had problems with.NET 3.0 are places running Sage software, which tends to be picky anyways. I have seen some successful.NET 3.0 installations without issue, but I've yet to see any compelling reason to really jump on top of it, especially since none of my customers have applications that call for it.
To quote Secunia:
PLEASE NOTE: The statistics provided should NOT be used to compare the overall security of products against one another. It is IMPORTANT to understand what the below comments mean when using the statistics, especially when using the statistics to compare the vulnerability aspects of different products.
Secunia advisories often cover multiple vulnerabilities. Consequently, the number of advisories issued for a product does not always reflect the number of security issues that have been disclosed. For instance, in 2006 Secunia issued more than 5,000 advisories covering more than 9,000 vulnerabilities. This is counted AFTER removing duplicates generated by Linux distributions, issues in beta software, and what Secunia considers non-issues and fake issues that our competitors and other security vendors often write about.
It should also be noted that some operating systems (e.g. certain Linux distributions) bundle together a large number of software packages, and are therefore affected by vulnerabilities, which do not affect other operating systems (e.g. Microsoft Windows) that don't bundle together a similar amount of software packages.
Additionally, the number of Unpatched vulnerabilities for a product may be affected by the fact that certain products (product bundles) consist mostly or solely of third party software (such as Linux distributions). Secunia tracks the number of issues fixed by the product vendor and not the issues reported in the third party software; this affects the statistics looking at Unpatched issues A direct and fair comparison of Unpatched issues for e.g. Microsoft Windows and Linux distributions is therefore NOT possible using the aggregated Secunia statistics. Such a comparison can only be made by tracking the upstream third party software included in Linux distributions and combining this with Linux distributions' own patches before comparing this with the aggregated statistics for Microsoft Windows operating systems. Translation: You can't compare Secunia's Linux vulnerability counts with Secunia's Windows vulnerability counts. Secunia itself says so.
That sounds neat on paper. There is, however, one big problem with your approach:
All of the above assumes you only want things to run on Windows, however. That's a BIG assumption, and is going to be a deal breaker for a lot of people. Furthermore, you're not just limiting yourself to Windows - you're limiting yourself to people with Windows and an installation of.NET 3.5. Heck, I'm only starting to install.NET 2.0 on some machines, and that's because people are finally writing applications for that. Every time I've tried to install.NET 3.0 on the same box as one that runs any older version of.NET tends to hose whatever application required the older versions of.NET, so you can understand if my enthusiasm for installing.NET 3.5 is somewhat muted, especially for "reflections, halos and transparency out the wazoo". Meanwhile, you're also throwing in a terrible amount of vendor lock-in - what happens to all those lovely interfaces if/when Microsoft decides it's time to change their APIs again?
PS: If you're being sarcastic (please tell me you are), I apologize if I didn't get the joke.:-)
That's true, which is why, as has been noted previously, the US frequently supports non-democratic regimes in places where we're certain the people would elect someone that would happily screw us or our interests over. Unfortunately, it doesn't help that a lot of regimes use us as a very useful scapegoat (see: Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il), sometimes telling their citizens that we're devils that will eat their babies or something. Other times, it doesn't help when we're supporting despots instead of those with similar governmental philosophies to our own.
Look, I'm not saying US or Western European domination is great and good. What I am saying is that, especially as a US citizen, I'd rather have that than any of the other alternatives... and that, compared to having China run things, the world is probably a better place than it would be if it were run by a country that openly supported and loved imperialism and the like. Put another way, ask China who they would rather have run their country - us or 1930's Japan. Yeah, they wouldn't want us in charge of China, either, but I guarantee you they'd hate us slightly less than a government that openly raped and enslaved their women, y'know?
That's absolutely true. What people seem to miss, however, is the following:
1. If the US and Western Europe aren't making the rules, somebody else is. After all, for rules to exist, somebody has to make them, right? So, of the alternatives, who do we want making the rules for us? China? Russia? Saudi Arabia? Fiji? (I kid about the last one.)
2. It's easy to forget here in the US and in other similarly run countries (Canada, Australia, Western Europe, etc.), but, contrary to what Thomas Paine thought, not all governments derive their power by the consent of their people. You think the North Koreans are happy about their government? How about Iran, which actually has an open dissident movement and numerous student demonstrations? It's true that some Western countries have governments that aren't representing the majority of their citizens' interests - the difference, though, is that, in a relatively short amount of time (usually within ten years), mechanisms put into place many years ago go into play that do something about that. The same cannot be said for, say, Iran or North Korea. Consequently, when other governments make objections or make declarations about the treatment of Canada's indigenous people, many of those other governments do not do so with the interests of their own people in mind (or even the veneer of such interests) - they're doing so blatantly for the purposes of the group in power of that country.
1. We as a company don't use ISA, though it has little to do with its security - it's because it's damn near unusable. However, we have some customers that have "inherited" it and like it. For better or worse, if you're in a straight-up MS infrastructure and you want to manage user access to the Internet (i.e. X user should be able to go to Y sites, Z user should be able to go to A sites, etc.) without them knowing you're doing it, ISA is, on the surface, the easiest way to do it. That doesn't make it right. That doesn't make it good. But, for some customers, "right" and "good" take a back seat to "easy" and "transparent". Personally, I can't stand server-based firewalls - I like mine to be dedicated hardware boxes that do one thing and one thing well, and when customers ask me what to get, I point them in the direction of something in that vein. The only time I touch ISA is if a customer comes up to me and says, "Please install ISA," at which point there are going to be some questions and I'm going to try and talk them out of it. But, it's THEIR network, not ours.
2. I know nobody needs Vista, at least not yet. My point was that I don't dictate what my customers get - their needs dictate what they get, which seems to be inline with what you're talking about. Your customer doesn't need more than Windows 95 for a certain task. I have a customer running OS/2 Warp 3 on a dedicated box to manage an alarm system and it works fine. Neither of us are going to push Vista (or anything else) into those tasks.
3. Regarding branding, I'm not saying that MS is the end all and be all to the world. You don't need Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition for a file server in a four person office when any Linux distro and Samba working together will got the job done for a lot less money. Heck, in that environment, a Windows XP Home machine from Costco will get the job done, though I wouldn't recommend it. Like you said, it's all about the right tool for the job. For our customers (yours and mine), the applications drive the workstations. With my customers, our environment drives the workstations, too - I'm in a city of 300,000 that doesn't have a bunch of Sun techs lying around. Consequently, our customers would greatly appreciate it if we didn't put them on systems that only we can maintain. It's not that our customers don't like us; they just don't want to be locked into us. So, though it would be more secure to throw in a Terminal Server or use some other method that allows non-Windows workstations to use Windows apps (virtual machines, WINE, whatever), it's not going to matter if, whenever something goes wrong, they can ONLY call us because we're the only ones in town that know how to use or configure what they're running.
4. Just for clarification, we don't call MS at the drop of a hat. We have called them in the past, however - sometimes, the gap between knowing what the problem is and being able to determine a solution is a little farther if you're flying solo. My point was that sometimes there is a time and a place to call them; it's not often, but it does exist, and their phone support really isn't that bad.
It would seem that you and I are trying to solve the same problems, only we have different solutions that may be driven by different environmental factors and different priorities. You're apparently in a location where your customers don't mind (or don't care) how you get them running, so long as they're running. Our customers are a little more inquisitive and don't appreciate it when we come up with solutions that make us "irreplaceable", which, sadly, almost anything outside of the MS world would in this town, at least in their eyes. That's not to say we aren't looking for better solutions - for example, we recently found a backup solution for Windows 2003 that reliably gets our customers up and running in under four hours on dissimilar hardware, and we're recommending that to anybody that listens because it beats the 12+ hours that we
And it's because of people like you that companies like the one I work for will get all of your customers. Here's why:
1. We call Microsoft when something goes wrong that we don't understand instead of wasting hours on Google randomly changing registry settings. This way, when ISA decides to randomly no longer accept FTP connections, or when domain controllers decide to no longer replicate, or when servers decide they aren't going to restore from backup, we have something to tell our customers other than, "Well, we don't know why it's doing this, but, hey, give us a few hours with a phone list and a search engine and we'll figure something out."
2. Glad to hear you support Windows 95 but you don't support Vista. I mean, everyone knows that there are far more well paying customers running a 12 year old operating system than what's being sold in just about every store in the country. Good luck with that. By the way, in case you were wondering, we even have staff that can handle BeOS, OS/2, and NetWare, so it's not like we can't handle the old stuff.
3. What operating system our customer uses is guided by the software they use. Simply put, if our customer relies on software from Sage (many of 'em do - I'd be lying if I said I was thrilled) and they don't support Vista, many of our customers don't get Vista. If Sage doesn't support Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Plan 9, or Amiga OS 4, guess what we're not recommending? In the end, it's not our call - we make our recommendations based on what fits the needs of our customers, not based on our personal preferences.
In the end, our customers' needs drive what we do, not the other way around. If they need their server to come up and we're running short on ideas, we swallow our pride and make a phone call. If our customers come in with something we don't like, we swallow our pride and keep it running because that's what we're paid to do. We also let our customers' needs drive what they run on - if that happens to mean they need to run Microsoft, fine. If it means they run something else, we work with that, too... and that's why our customers leave companies like yours to work with companies like ours. If they wanted some propellerhead telling them that they're doing everything wrong, they'd bring their know-it-all 15 year old nephew to work and let him make a mess of their network.
One nice feature is that it appears to support NTLMv2 now - I say that because Leopard can actually connect to shares hosted on Vista PCs, whereas Tiger couldn't without neutering certain security settings on the Vista side.
They're working on backing up our brains? Great! In the meantime, let me know when they actually get a backup solution for Windows Server that doesn't make me want to compulsively attempt to kill myself from alcohol poisoning after using it.
P.S. Whose idea was it to include Active Directory with System State and not let you restore one without the other, hmm? Maybe I don't WANT to restore the rest of my registry.
I know you're self-branding as a Ubunutu user, but I will say you have an unfairly (IMO) apologetic opinion of Microsoft in these regards.
I use Ubuntu because it meets my needs at a price I'm happy with. Windows, either XP or Vista, really don't at this point for me. Ubuntu has plenty of free software that I can acquire with minimal hassle. You can usually get the same software for Windows, but you have to search for it, which means knowing what you want beforehand. Furthermore, I deal with Windows every day at work and, well, I'm tired of looking at it and dealing with its quirks. As for Vista... don't get me started. I'm learning it because I have to, but I'm certainly not enjoying it. Long story short, I don't really care about Microsoft's or Canonical's business ethics or philosophies - they're both in the business to make money. If they sell good products at reasonable prices, they'll do just fine. If they fail to sell good products or price unreasonably, they won't, at least eventually. Now that Linux is beginning to not only match Windows feature-for-feature (if not exceed it) but is actually becoming approachable to the common man, people's perception of the reasonableness of Windows pricing and Microsoft's increasingly draconian licensing schemes is becoming more negative.
I'm not aware of Microsoft's solutions ever being regarded as inexpensive, except by those who've historically acquired their Microsoft wares by way of sneakery. You know what I mean!!;-) (Not accusing you - I'm talking about every old school Windows "user" I've known.)
It depends on what you're comparing against. MS-DOS vs DR-DOS/Novell DOS didn't look terribly favorable in MS's direction - that said, when most everyone is bundling your version of DOS and not the other guy's, well, you're going to win this one by default, as far as home consumers are concerned. Windows NT vs. most flavors of Unix at the time, however, is a very different story - compared to anything SCO or Sun were cranking out, Windows NT was not only affordable but actually ran on commodity hardware. Compared to NetWare, it was priced at about the same level but at least LOOKED like any old shmuck could administer it, which meant that businesses could start commoditizing IT workers. Even better than that, though, was that, with Windows NT, you could buy a truckload of machines from your neighborhood computer store and, without buying any additional software, get them to talk with your NT server - no Novell clients for you. Did it work as well? Who cares - it's cheap!
(Ironically, this is precisely the mindset that's starting to drive Linux's popularity - now that it looks like anyone can administer a Linux box, thanks to GNOME and KDE, I think you'll find a lot of people are going to start setting up cheap Linux servers in their offices.)
Just a few things:
Their dominance came wholy on the coat tails of IBM's monopoly (by virtue of IBM's brainwashed userbase) pure and simple.
The userbase keeping their hardware for those reasons was surely misguided given the relative quality of what else was available -- if it was bad enough to need Microsoft, then replacement could have been as good an option. (No, keep that hardware at any price!)
I wholeheartedly agree. If it weren't for the whole "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" mantra, we'd probably all be running Macs or Amigas or some other system. Then again, what workstations would companies have initially used if not IBMs? For better or worse, IBM brought desktop computing to the business masses, which, in turn, drove home computing past the "neat toy" stage. I'm not sure any other brand at the time would've been as successful at doing that, nor that they would've done so as quickly. That's not to say that we wouldn't be here eventually, just that IBM may have accelerated things a few years. The best part is that IBM and IBM clones really weren't that affordable compared to the compet
Y'know, I repeatedly read stuff like this, and it really makes me wonder about the logic behind it. Let's take 30 years ago - that'd be 1977. Over-processed food? Well, they didn't have Whole Foods back then, that's for sure. Organic food only existed in Height-Ashbury. Canned food was still cheaper than fresh. Doesn't get much more processed than that. Right to buy automatic weapons? Heh - Americans haven't had that... well, probably ever. Iraq? How about Vietnam? Casualties were a bit higher in that one, to put it mildly. Patriot Act? How about Watergate? Heck, if you go back another 20 years, you can even throw McCarthyism into the mix, which makes the Patriot Act look like a summer picnic. As for the obesity epidemic, it only exists because we actually have an agriculture infrastructure that is so efficient that we have to pay people not to grow food. DMCA only exists because we actually have the technology now to render copyright moot and the copyright holders don't like that much. Religious intolerance... oh yeah, 'cause we all know that religious tolerance was absolutely top notch in the past. Columbine... yeah, kind of hard to beat kids shooting each other, though I seem to remember guns being a perennial problem in school back in the '80s. Worst race relations in generations, though... oh my. Sorry, but you don't get to claim "worst in generations" unless people start writing songs about strange fruit growing on their trees. I honestly don't remember the last time my neighbors have organized a "lynch the darkies fer sleepin' wit da white womens" session - that's probably because they never have.
But, hey, you and everyone else like you is absolutely right - things were totally better in the good ol' days...
As I'm sure you're already aware, OEM pricing is very different from full retail, plus it's not like he's going to need Office Professional (the one that would cost $460) just to get Powerpoint. Looking at MS's product matrix, he could get away with "Home & Student" and still get Powerpoint - that can be had from Newegg for $129, and includes Word, Office, Powerpoint, and OneNote. Compare to StarOffice, which is $70 - yes, you get most of the same functionality, but it's still not quite the same; the point, however, is that this is less than a third of the price you quoted.
Windows licensing, meanwhile, is not $210 for OEM licensing. A NewEgg search reveals that you can get OEM licensing in packs of three for roughly $410; that works out to under $140 per license. Obviously, mass-manufacturers of PCs get much more favorable licensing pricing than that, but, for the sake of argument, we'll say that the customer is paying $140. This is still $70 less than the number you pulled out.
So, at this point, we've spent no more than $270 in software. Is this $270 you don't have to spend if you get the WalMart Linux PC? Of course, but if the WalMart Linux PC doesn't fit your needs, $270 is a reasonable number, and certainly much more reasonable than the hyperbole-screaming $2500 you came up with on a whim.
DISCLAIMER: I run Ubuntu Linux on everything I have because it meets my needs and does so at a price point that I am quite content with (free!). I do think that, as far as Linux distros go, it's easily the most user-friendly one that I've ever run across, and would happily recommend it to anyone that has some basic technical acumen. That said, I do not run Ubuntu because of it's philosophy, nor do I do it because of any particular dislike of Microsoft's "monopoly practices". From where I'm sitting, Microsoft did precisely what Ubuntu is doing now - they offered a lower priced (compared to the competition of the time), mostly fully featured set of applications that met the needs of a vast majority of people. Think back to the late '80s - if you wanted a GUI, the only way it was going to happen was if you bought new hardware that was incompatible with your existing IBM hardware or if you paid through the nose for OS/2... until Windows 3.0 came out. Need a server operating system? No problem - your choices were Unix (required expensive hardware, had severe vendor lock-in at the time, licensing was atrociously expensive), Netware (a little better on all counts, but still pricey), or Windows NT (same interface as all your workstations and a little cheaper). If you're a 10 person operation, guess which one you're picking? Hey, it's 1994 and you need a small database. Microsoft Access costs $100. How much does everything else cost? Oh... I see. Access it is! How about an Internet browser? Remember when those weren't free-as-in-beer? How did they get free? That's right - Internet Explorer. Were any of those products perfect? Heck no. All of their products were functionally inferior to the competition - but they met the needs of 99% of the world and cost less than their competition. Sound familiar? What people seem to forget in their haste to hate Microsoft is that, for better or worse, they were better behaved than their competition of the time. Now, their time is passing, and look who's sneaking up on them...
I actually experienced that once. I had a really bad case of the flu when I was a teenager, with a rather nasty fever attached. Initially, I was dreaming about how I had these zits that had worms growing out of them, which scared me enough to wake me up... or so I thought. While "awake", I dreamed that someone was approaching me with a knife, only I couldn't move. What I could do, though, was scream, which is what woke me up.
If there is anything quite as "enjoyable" as waking up to your own scream, I can't imagine it.
Depends on how it's shaped. Wind resistance tends to muck things up a bit. If it's literally parachute-shaped, there could be very significant differences.
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Hydro's been around for over a century now - the problem with it is that, at least locally, it does just as much harm to the environment as anything else (flooding of everything behind the dam, disruption of fish migration patterns, etc.). That's why some dams are starting to get decommissioned in the United States. Geothermal is a decent power source, but it's limited to the location of hotspots that are rarely in places that can easily support power plants (i.e. very rural), which can lead to some fun environmental problems, too.
Unfortunately, every power source will have an effect on the environment. Heck, everything we do has an impact on the environment. The fun part is figuring out where the line is between our comfort and our respect for an environment that, frankly, is indifferent to our existence.
(Not disagreeing with the parent - just tossing my two cents in support.)
As a former employee of Radio Shack, I can tell you with certainty that, at least when I was working there (2000-2002), they were, in fact, commission driven, with incentives if you bought certain items (cell phones, DirecTV, their credit cards, etc.). However, the compensation was geared such that, unless you were an amazing salesperson in a very friendly market, you were never making over $10/hour unless you were the manager or something. Consequently, "desperate" was far more often than not, which did, indeed, lead to the phenomenon you described.
The range of "85 MB > Limit > 460 MB" was determined from actual examples today. It never mentioned WordPad, for which I'm thankful. This, of course, leaves me curious as to where the limit is, so let's have some fun...
108 MB: Tries to open. Notepad suddenly uses over 200 MB of RAM. Neat! Let's kill that and try a bigger file...
160 MB: Tries to open. Notepad is now using 342 MB of RAM and increasing. CPU is pegged. It seems Notepad's RAM usage is roughly double the size of the file, at least initially. Whenever I close Notepad using Task Manager, it asks if I want to send an error report to Microsoft. Of course I do!
380 MB: Having troubles finding files in the range I'd like. Thank goodness the work terminal server has access to all kinds of ISOs... and Notepad is trying to open this! Notepad is, predictably, using over 750 MB of RAM, which is jarring.
I'm thinking the limit has to do with RAM usage - as long as you have RAM to feed Notepad, I think it'll open it, or at least try to. The terminal server probably didn't have a free Gig of RAM available to open up the Windows 2000 Professional ISO I tried to feed it. Good to know!
Hmm... now you make me look. Tried an 85 MB ISO with Notepad 5.2 (Win 2003) - yep, it's taking a while, but it's trying. Tried a 400 MB ISO and it didn't hang at all - it said "The %path of file% file is too large for Notepad. Use another editor to edit the file." So, the limit must be somewhere between the two.
(Note: Yes, I'm abusing my work's terminal server.)
I can't wait to hear about all the noobs out there that don't realize that Notepad checks file size before opening anything and, if the file size is over a certain limit (64 kB, I think), will refuse to open the file.
(Yes, I'm being snarky.)
Three things that were defense projects that have benefited our lives:
1. GPS
2. The Internet
3. Doppler Radar
Not all defense projects blow up. Just sayin'.
Flu vaccines are created by examining what flu strains are present in bird populations (usually in South-East Asia), figuring out which strain is most likely to jump to humans that year, and injecting other birds with the virus and using the antibodies as the vaccine. That's why you shouldn't get a flu vaccination if you have egg allergies. It's also why they're able to vaccinate for flu strains before the flu strain is present in the general population and why flu vaccinations work in the first place.
Coincidentally, yes, all strains of flu are technically an "avian bird flu", which is redundant on so many levels, though influenza will also sometimes make the jump from human to pig and back again. Fun virus, that one.
You're probably right - most of the places I've had problems with .NET 3.0 are places running Sage software, which tends to be picky anyways. I have seen some successful .NET 3.0 installations without issue, but I've yet to see any compelling reason to really jump on top of it, especially since none of my customers have applications that call for it.
As always, your mileage may vary.
PLEASE NOTE: The statistics provided should NOT be used to compare the overall security of products against one another. It is IMPORTANT to understand what the below comments mean when using the statistics, especially when using the statistics to compare the vulnerability aspects of different products.
Secunia advisories often cover multiple vulnerabilities. Consequently, the number of advisories issued for a product does not always reflect the number of security issues that have been disclosed. For instance, in 2006 Secunia issued more than 5,000 advisories covering more than 9,000 vulnerabilities. This is counted AFTER removing duplicates generated by Linux distributions, issues in beta software, and what Secunia considers non-issues and fake issues that our competitors and other security vendors often write about.
It should also be noted that some operating systems (e.g. certain Linux distributions) bundle together a large number of software packages, and are therefore affected by vulnerabilities, which do not affect other operating systems (e.g. Microsoft Windows) that don't bundle together a similar amount of software packages.
Additionally, the number of Unpatched vulnerabilities for a product may be affected by the fact that certain products (product bundles) consist mostly or solely of third party software (such as Linux distributions). Secunia tracks the number of issues fixed by the product vendor and not the issues reported in the third party software; this affects the statistics looking at Unpatched issues A direct and fair comparison of Unpatched issues for e.g. Microsoft Windows and Linux distributions is therefore NOT possible using the aggregated Secunia statistics. Such a comparison can only be made by tracking the upstream third party software included in Linux distributions and combining this with Linux distributions' own patches before comparing this with the aggregated statistics for Microsoft Windows operating systems. Translation: You can't compare Secunia's Linux vulnerability counts with Secunia's Windows vulnerability counts. Secunia itself says so.
All of the above assumes you only want things to run on Windows, however. That's a BIG assumption, and is going to be a deal breaker for a lot of people. Furthermore, you're not just limiting yourself to Windows - you're limiting yourself to people with Windows and an installation of
PS: If you're being sarcastic (please tell me you are), I apologize if I didn't get the joke.
Antarctica does have some propaganda of its own. Seriously. I'm not talking about Tux pics, either.
That's true, which is why, as has been noted previously, the US frequently supports non-democratic regimes in places where we're certain the people would elect someone that would happily screw us or our interests over. Unfortunately, it doesn't help that a lot of regimes use us as a very useful scapegoat (see: Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il), sometimes telling their citizens that we're devils that will eat their babies or something. Other times, it doesn't help when we're supporting despots instead of those with similar governmental philosophies to our own.
Look, I'm not saying US or Western European domination is great and good. What I am saying is that, especially as a US citizen, I'd rather have that than any of the other alternatives... and that, compared to having China run things, the world is probably a better place than it would be if it were run by a country that openly supported and loved imperialism and the like. Put another way, ask China who they would rather have run their country - us or 1930's Japan. Yeah, they wouldn't want us in charge of China, either, but I guarantee you they'd hate us slightly less than a government that openly raped and enslaved their women, y'know?
That's absolutely true. What people seem to miss, however, is the following:
1. If the US and Western Europe aren't making the rules, somebody else is. After all, for rules to exist, somebody has to make them, right? So, of the alternatives, who do we want making the rules for us? China? Russia? Saudi Arabia? Fiji? (I kid about the last one.)
2. It's easy to forget here in the US and in other similarly run countries (Canada, Australia, Western Europe, etc.), but, contrary to what Thomas Paine thought, not all governments derive their power by the consent of their people. You think the North Koreans are happy about their government? How about Iran, which actually has an open dissident movement and numerous student demonstrations? It's true that some Western countries have governments that aren't representing the majority of their citizens' interests - the difference, though, is that, in a relatively short amount of time (usually within ten years), mechanisms put into place many years ago go into play that do something about that. The same cannot be said for, say, Iran or North Korea. Consequently, when other governments make objections or make declarations about the treatment of Canada's indigenous people, many of those other governments do not do so with the interests of their own people in mind (or even the veneer of such interests) - they're doing so blatantly for the purposes of the group in power of that country.
Quick points:
1. We as a company don't use ISA, though it has little to do with its security - it's because it's damn near unusable. However, we have some customers that have "inherited" it and like it. For better or worse, if you're in a straight-up MS infrastructure and you want to manage user access to the Internet (i.e. X user should be able to go to Y sites, Z user should be able to go to A sites, etc.) without them knowing you're doing it, ISA is, on the surface, the easiest way to do it. That doesn't make it right. That doesn't make it good. But, for some customers, "right" and "good" take a back seat to "easy" and "transparent". Personally, I can't stand server-based firewalls - I like mine to be dedicated hardware boxes that do one thing and one thing well, and when customers ask me what to get, I point them in the direction of something in that vein. The only time I touch ISA is if a customer comes up to me and says, "Please install ISA," at which point there are going to be some questions and I'm going to try and talk them out of it. But, it's THEIR network, not ours.
2. I know nobody needs Vista, at least not yet. My point was that I don't dictate what my customers get - their needs dictate what they get, which seems to be inline with what you're talking about. Your customer doesn't need more than Windows 95 for a certain task. I have a customer running OS/2 Warp 3 on a dedicated box to manage an alarm system and it works fine. Neither of us are going to push Vista (or anything else) into those tasks.
3. Regarding branding, I'm not saying that MS is the end all and be all to the world. You don't need Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition for a file server in a four person office when any Linux distro and Samba working together will got the job done for a lot less money. Heck, in that environment, a Windows XP Home machine from Costco will get the job done, though I wouldn't recommend it. Like you said, it's all about the right tool for the job. For our customers (yours and mine), the applications drive the workstations. With my customers, our environment drives the workstations, too - I'm in a city of 300,000 that doesn't have a bunch of Sun techs lying around. Consequently, our customers would greatly appreciate it if we didn't put them on systems that only we can maintain. It's not that our customers don't like us; they just don't want to be locked into us. So, though it would be more secure to throw in a Terminal Server or use some other method that allows non-Windows workstations to use Windows apps (virtual machines, WINE, whatever), it's not going to matter if, whenever something goes wrong, they can ONLY call us because we're the only ones in town that know how to use or configure what they're running.
4. Just for clarification, we don't call MS at the drop of a hat. We have called them in the past, however - sometimes, the gap between knowing what the problem is and being able to determine a solution is a little farther if you're flying solo. My point was that sometimes there is a time and a place to call them; it's not often, but it does exist, and their phone support really isn't that bad.
It would seem that you and I are trying to solve the same problems, only we have different solutions that may be driven by different environmental factors and different priorities. You're apparently in a location where your customers don't mind (or don't care) how you get them running, so long as they're running. Our customers are a little more inquisitive and don't appreciate it when we come up with solutions that make us "irreplaceable", which, sadly, almost anything outside of the MS world would in this town, at least in their eyes. That's not to say we aren't looking for better solutions - for example, we recently found a backup solution for Windows 2003 that reliably gets our customers up and running in under four hours on dissimilar hardware, and we're recommending that to anybody that listens because it beats the 12+ hours that we
And it's because of people like you that companies like the one I work for will get all of your customers. Here's why:
1. We call Microsoft when something goes wrong that we don't understand instead of wasting hours on Google randomly changing registry settings. This way, when ISA decides to randomly no longer accept FTP connections, or when domain controllers decide to no longer replicate, or when servers decide they aren't going to restore from backup, we have something to tell our customers other than, "Well, we don't know why it's doing this, but, hey, give us a few hours with a phone list and a search engine and we'll figure something out."
2. Glad to hear you support Windows 95 but you don't support Vista. I mean, everyone knows that there are far more well paying customers running a 12 year old operating system than what's being sold in just about every store in the country. Good luck with that. By the way, in case you were wondering, we even have staff that can handle BeOS, OS/2, and NetWare, so it's not like we can't handle the old stuff.
3. What operating system our customer uses is guided by the software they use. Simply put, if our customer relies on software from Sage (many of 'em do - I'd be lying if I said I was thrilled) and they don't support Vista, many of our customers don't get Vista. If Sage doesn't support Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Plan 9, or Amiga OS 4, guess what we're not recommending? In the end, it's not our call - we make our recommendations based on what fits the needs of our customers, not based on our personal preferences.
In the end, our customers' needs drive what we do, not the other way around. If they need their server to come up and we're running short on ideas, we swallow our pride and make a phone call. If our customers come in with something we don't like, we swallow our pride and keep it running because that's what we're paid to do. We also let our customers' needs drive what they run on - if that happens to mean they need to run Microsoft, fine. If it means they run something else, we work with that, too... and that's why our customers leave companies like yours to work with companies like ours. If they wanted some propellerhead telling them that they're doing everything wrong, they'd bring their know-it-all 15 year old nephew to work and let him make a mess of their network.
One nice feature is that it appears to support NTLMv2 now - I say that because Leopard can actually connect to shares hosted on Vista PCs, whereas Tiger couldn't without neutering certain security settings on the Vista side.
They're working on backing up our brains? Great! In the meantime, let me know when they actually get a backup solution for Windows Server that doesn't make me want to compulsively attempt to kill myself from alcohol poisoning after using it.
P.S. Whose idea was it to include Active Directory with System State and not let you restore one without the other, hmm? Maybe I don't WANT to restore the rest of my registry.
In other words, the time when we seemed like an underdog against the Russians.
It's not much fun rooting for the house.
Right after someone invents the mod "-1, can't spell douche"
Thank you, thank you - I'm here every night. Be sure to tip your cocktail waitress.
I know you're self-branding as a Ubunutu user, but I will say you have an unfairly (IMO) apologetic opinion of Microsoft in these regards.
I use Ubuntu because it meets my needs at a price I'm happy with. Windows, either XP or Vista, really don't at this point for me. Ubuntu has plenty of free software that I can acquire with minimal hassle. You can usually get the same software for Windows, but you have to search for it, which means knowing what you want beforehand. Furthermore, I deal with Windows every day at work and, well, I'm tired of looking at it and dealing with its quirks. As for Vista... don't get me started. I'm learning it because I have to, but I'm certainly not enjoying it. Long story short, I don't really care about Microsoft's or Canonical's business ethics or philosophies - they're both in the business to make money. If they sell good products at reasonable prices, they'll do just fine. If they fail to sell good products or price unreasonably, they won't, at least eventually. Now that Linux is beginning to not only match Windows feature-for-feature (if not exceed it) but is actually becoming approachable to the common man, people's perception of the reasonableness of Windows pricing and Microsoft's increasingly draconian licensing schemes is becoming more negative.
I'm not aware of Microsoft's solutions ever being regarded as inexpensive, except by those who've historically acquired their Microsoft wares by way of sneakery. You know what I mean!! ;-) (Not accusing you - I'm talking about every old school Windows "user" I've known.)
It depends on what you're comparing against. MS-DOS vs DR-DOS/Novell DOS didn't look terribly favorable in MS's direction - that said, when most everyone is bundling your version of DOS and not the other guy's, well, you're going to win this one by default, as far as home consumers are concerned. Windows NT vs. most flavors of Unix at the time, however, is a very different story - compared to anything SCO or Sun were cranking out, Windows NT was not only affordable but actually ran on commodity hardware. Compared to NetWare, it was priced at about the same level but at least LOOKED like any old shmuck could administer it, which meant that businesses could start commoditizing IT workers. Even better than that, though, was that, with Windows NT, you could buy a truckload of machines from your neighborhood computer store and, without buying any additional software, get them to talk with your NT server - no Novell clients for you. Did it work as well? Who cares - it's cheap!
(Ironically, this is precisely the mindset that's starting to drive Linux's popularity - now that it looks like anyone can administer a Linux box, thanks to GNOME and KDE, I think you'll find a lot of people are going to start setting up cheap Linux servers in their offices.)
Just a few things: Their dominance came wholy on the coat tails of IBM's monopoly (by virtue of IBM's brainwashed userbase) pure and simple. The userbase keeping their hardware for those reasons was surely misguided given the relative quality of what else was available -- if it was bad enough to need Microsoft, then replacement could have been as good an option. (No, keep that hardware at any price!)
I wholeheartedly agree. If it weren't for the whole "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" mantra, we'd probably all be running Macs or Amigas or some other system. Then again, what workstations would companies have initially used if not IBMs? For better or worse, IBM brought desktop computing to the business masses, which, in turn, drove home computing past the "neat toy" stage. I'm not sure any other brand at the time would've been as successful at doing that, nor that they would've done so as quickly. That's not to say that we wouldn't be here eventually, just that IBM may have accelerated things a few years. The best part is that IBM and IBM clones really weren't that affordable compared to the compet
Y'know, I repeatedly read stuff like this, and it really makes me wonder about the logic behind it. Let's take 30 years ago - that'd be 1977. Over-processed food? Well, they didn't have Whole Foods back then, that's for sure. Organic food only existed in Height-Ashbury. Canned food was still cheaper than fresh. Doesn't get much more processed than that. Right to buy automatic weapons? Heh - Americans haven't had that... well, probably ever. Iraq? How about Vietnam? Casualties were a bit higher in that one, to put it mildly. Patriot Act? How about Watergate? Heck, if you go back another 20 years, you can even throw McCarthyism into the mix, which makes the Patriot Act look like a summer picnic. As for the obesity epidemic, it only exists because we actually have an agriculture infrastructure that is so efficient that we have to pay people not to grow food. DMCA only exists because we actually have the technology now to render copyright moot and the copyright holders don't like that much. Religious intolerance... oh yeah, 'cause we all know that religious tolerance was absolutely top notch in the past. Columbine... yeah, kind of hard to beat kids shooting each other, though I seem to remember guns being a perennial problem in school back in the '80s. Worst race relations in generations, though... oh my. Sorry, but you don't get to claim "worst in generations" unless people start writing songs about strange fruit growing on their trees. I honestly don't remember the last time my neighbors have organized a "lynch the darkies fer sleepin' wit da white womens" session - that's probably because they never have.
But, hey, you and everyone else like you is absolutely right - things were totally better in the good ol' days...
As I'm sure you're already aware, OEM pricing is very different from full retail, plus it's not like he's going to need Office Professional (the one that would cost $460) just to get Powerpoint. Looking at MS's product matrix, he could get away with "Home & Student" and still get Powerpoint - that can be had from Newegg for $129, and includes Word, Office, Powerpoint, and OneNote. Compare to StarOffice, which is $70 - yes, you get most of the same functionality, but it's still not quite the same; the point, however, is that this is less than a third of the price you quoted.
Windows licensing, meanwhile, is not $210 for OEM licensing. A NewEgg search reveals that you can get OEM licensing in packs of three for roughly $410; that works out to under $140 per license. Obviously, mass-manufacturers of PCs get much more favorable licensing pricing than that, but, for the sake of argument, we'll say that the customer is paying $140. This is still $70 less than the number you pulled out.
So, at this point, we've spent no more than $270 in software. Is this $270 you don't have to spend if you get the WalMart Linux PC? Of course, but if the WalMart Linux PC doesn't fit your needs, $270 is a reasonable number, and certainly much more reasonable than the hyperbole-screaming $2500 you came up with on a whim.
DISCLAIMER: I run Ubuntu Linux on everything I have because it meets my needs and does so at a price point that I am quite content with (free!). I do think that, as far as Linux distros go, it's easily the most user-friendly one that I've ever run across, and would happily recommend it to anyone that has some basic technical acumen. That said, I do not run Ubuntu because of it's philosophy, nor do I do it because of any particular dislike of Microsoft's "monopoly practices". From where I'm sitting, Microsoft did precisely what Ubuntu is doing now - they offered a lower priced (compared to the competition of the time), mostly fully featured set of applications that met the needs of a vast majority of people. Think back to the late '80s - if you wanted a GUI, the only way it was going to happen was if you bought new hardware that was incompatible with your existing IBM hardware or if you paid through the nose for OS/2... until Windows 3.0 came out. Need a server operating system? No problem - your choices were Unix (required expensive hardware, had severe vendor lock-in at the time, licensing was atrociously expensive), Netware (a little better on all counts, but still pricey), or Windows NT (same interface as all your workstations and a little cheaper). If you're a 10 person operation, guess which one you're picking? Hey, it's 1994 and you need a small database. Microsoft Access costs $100. How much does everything else cost? Oh... I see. Access it is! How about an Internet browser? Remember when those weren't free-as-in-beer? How did they get free? That's right - Internet Explorer. Were any of those products perfect? Heck no. All of their products were functionally inferior to the competition - but they met the needs of 99% of the world and cost less than their competition. Sound familiar? What people seem to forget in their haste to hate Microsoft is that, for better or worse, they were better behaved than their competition of the time. Now, their time is passing, and look who's sneaking up on them...
I actually experienced that once. I had a really bad case of the flu when I was a teenager, with a rather nasty fever attached. Initially, I was dreaming about how I had these zits that had worms growing out of them, which scared me enough to wake me up... or so I thought. While "awake", I dreamed that someone was approaching me with a knife, only I couldn't move. What I could do, though, was scream, which is what woke me up.
If there is anything quite as "enjoyable" as waking up to your own scream, I can't imagine it.
Neither - join NAFTA!
(Ducks)
Depends on how it's shaped. Wind resistance tends to muck things up a bit. If it's literally parachute-shaped, there could be very significant differences.