Jimmy Carter was a wonderful President if your only criterion was to have ethical perfection to balance everyone's disappointment in Richard Nixon.
Unfortunately, despite all of that, his biggest fault was micromanaging. Tales were told of the 16 hour days Jimmy would put in, but spent his time resolving staff disputes by scheduling use of the White House tennis courts himself.
Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan just delegated everything out and worked many less hours and, by those measures was a much more effective manager. [For the record, I didn't think much of Ronald's appointees. And, GHB was right, it wasvoodoo economics.]
But the quote I remember, that Slashdot should remember, is that:
Jimmy Carter has been the only President that knew what a Bessel function was.
You are better off with a Linux or even a *BSD server.
Well, certainly. But I had the impression that the question was about using a CVS client from the Windows box - not running the repository on a Windows box.
I'm not real familiar with ssh on Windows, but I know that in the Unix world, the -v option has really helped me to find out where things break with greater precision.
Over the past few years I've cut n saved some of the Slashdot signatures. One, in particular, applies to this situation. I don't recall the specific Slashdot poster whose signature said:
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
As a staunch proponent of free software and public, open standards, I am as heartened to see this development, just as I was glad to see the recent story of the German government deploying Linux on a larger scale through IBM and SuSE.
In this development, however, I see an additional possibility. Despite all their differences, the pursuit of a software strategy independent of large U.S. corporations is something shared between Taiwan and the PRC.
I think it would be an excellent testimony to the free software development model if Chinese language software is jointly developed both in *.cn and in *.tw and widely used on both sides of the strait of Taiwan as well.
Here's to a hope: maybe that level of cooperation in a common pursuit could set a positive and conciliatory example for citizens and politicians that don't know much about software and, in the past, have shown they know too little about sharing, cooperation and accomodation.
Do you see Mosix becoming so easy to use, so powerful and so fault-tolerant that cheap clusters of commodity boxes will soon displace big proprietary SMP machines?
And, just to be totally random, have you found that your Talmudic studies have made you, as a person interfacing with other people, more easy to use, powerful, and fault-tolerant?
They were way ahead of their time with that little slogan.
Of course, back in the 1980s, when my NFS mounts from down the hall failed because the network was down for some reason, I'd recite that slogan with glee to anyone who'd listen to my gripes.
dislike GM foods or GM anything else (there's too much unknown about biochemical interaction in our ecosystem),
dislike livestock loaded with hormones and antibiotics, etc.
But.
I have to wonder about how sustainable the non-use of pesticides can be.
Think about human vaccinations against childhood diseases. Overall, it's a great idea. On an individual basis, if everyone else's child has been vaccinated, then you can forego the risks of vaccination, secure in knowing that your child will probably play only with other vaccinated children that will not subject your child to those diseases. Also, by not vaccinating your child, you don't suffer the one in several hundred thousand risk that your child will actually get sick. Great.
Great, until more and more other parents also decide that they don't like the risks of vaccination on their children, either. Then you end up with a sufficient pool of unvaccinated children, where there is increased risk that the diseases will take hold and be communicated in that group.
Is it not similar to an organic farmer sitting in the middle of California's Central Valley, with all his neighbors using all manner of ugly pesticides to effectively sterilize their fields? The small organic farmer has little to worry about: he's not going to catch any pests from his neighbors.
You see my point. At some critical level of non-use of pesticides, the pests will start to propagate much more than they do now.
I used to be pretty excited about developments like Ethernet over powered electrical wiring in houses, etc.
But lately I have to wonder about the economic viability of any communications technology that makes use of fixed lines.
It seems to me that wireless communications is constantly getting better and cheaper, while anything over land lines has to contend with the cost of installing and maintaining those lines. In the case of lines that already exist, they're mostly copper and too limited in bandwidth.
Unless you've got something where the high speed of fiber optic links is critical, then it seems like small, low power, wireless cells linking into a few fixed access points to optical land lines is the way to do things.
In this day and age of information overload, I could not help but notice how the article sometimes let drop the "copyright" modifier describing the downloaded works.
Dropped.
As if there were no such thing as genuinely free software that was copylefted. Software that was free and legal to download without paying anyone any money.
I wonder if the BSA will succeed in giving the word download a bad connotation, or whether they'll have to invent a new term.
The word pirate has such a nice strong ring to it, while duplicator of copyrighted material just doesn't seem to get people's dander up.
I could get flamed for endorsing a commercial establishment - and, no, I don't work for them - but I've found some of the tutorial articles that IBM posts at their developerWorks website to be quite nice.
If you want to serve some OSS projects, then all you need is a handful of Athlons and Linux. But if you want to serve a large enterprise system, you're going to need some big iron and big iron software.
My shop has got Linux clusters, Sun E10ks as well as desktops Solaris and Linux.
Linux works great and is economical like nothing else, and it's lately becoming a favorite choice on the desktop.
Meanwhile, though, for ultra-reliable, high-throughput, convenient, easy-to-manage systems connected to SANs, the big 64-way Suns are absolutely the way to go.
Dunno if that will still be true in 5 years, but it certainly is the case now.
When you need that kind of service, the kinds of prices we're talking about here are not at all unusual. While everyone should constantly evaluate their options (i.e., will a MOSIX cluster do the job?), the right answer is still Sun in certain cases.
Better: a diligent roommate that's willing to go to those early classes in the rain, turn in your homework, get the new assignment, and let you see their legible classnotes after you finish sleeping in.
One of the big problems, and I agree that it is a big problem, is that "lying news" is not defined anywhere, effectively making all Turkish media providers subject to the whims of any authority that considers their content to fall under such a definition.
A similar vague kind of ambiguous catch-all phrase exists in the PRC.
There, what the Turkish government calls "lying news" is referred to as a "state secret" by the government of the PRC.
I'm presuming that the various ethnic (Kurds) and religious factions comprising Turkey are regarded as unstable and requiring a harsh authoritarian government to remain cohesive [Yugoslavia]. Maybe they're right - that otherwise partisan demagogues would fan the flames of hatred to build their own local power bases.
But, the USA, Russia and the PRC show the world that local politicians can continue to play nationalistic games (with nuclear weapons no less) for decades without blowing each other up. Why not let Turkey have the same chance?
I'm really glad to hear that the smaller vendors are pushing towards standardization, something that benefits not only consumers like me, but software vendors that would be frustrated by the fragmentation in the Linux marketplace.
Anyone worried about loss of diversity should not be so worried. These vendors still make money by distinguishing themselves from their competitors. So despite the standardization efforts, you'll inevitably see quirks and spins on the various flavors, eg., we bundle StarOffice 6.0 for free, we have db2, etc.
I've really like SuSE for its massive size. It comes with more stuff than RedHat out of the box. I've seen novice sysadmins install versions of RedHat for coworkers that lack some key tools like gcc or TeX (probably just picked some default "consumer" option).
If read the story, you'll see that, much to the chagrin of myself and others who decry Microsoft's behavior in many other venues, Microsoft deserved to win this one.
They are merely permitting users to post. Like Slashdot.
The principle here is exactly the same one that would apply if Slashdot were sued because someone posted links to sites critical of the Church of Scientology, or to places where they could download DeCSS.
I think the best thing here would be if the public provider only agreed to investigate allegations of slander if they are submitted in writing, with no obligation to remove any postings if they are not found to be libelous of
individuals.
Postings are expressions of their respective authors only!
AFAICT, it was the other ingredients besides the story line that has made one movie better than another.
I'd like to believe that public choices in which movie to see reflect a fundamental groundswell of enlightenment and rejection of crass commercial values for more enduring qualities. It would be convenient if every video game and movie represents a strong tie to meta myths that Joseph Campbell outlined: they'd sure be a whole lot easier to analyze if they fell into those nice large deep and meaningful categories. But, many moviegoers don't live epic lives: they're just out for a good time.
It's as simple as the fact that AOTC was not as well made a movie as Spiderman. That's it.
could be used as a weapon in the 'negotiations' with Bill Gates and Co. over IE.
I don't think so.
I can just see Steve on the phone with Bill now:
"Bill, we'd like to dissolve our "strategic partnership" that places IE exclusively front and center on the desktops of Mac users and be able to customize our users' experience without being restrained in any way."
"I'm really sorry to hear that, Steve. I had thought that our strategic partnership meant more than that to you. Much more. Beyond placing IE on Mac user's desktops, I thought that Microsoft went the extra mile in putting Office on the Mac. Am I mistaken in valuing this relationship?"
"No, Bill. I think I understand better the great value of our special relationship now that you've made it clear. You've done your part keeping new versions of Office on Mac - we'll hold up our end doing whatever it takes. By the way, do you have another spare $150M to invest in "advanced projects"?"
I'd sure like it if a couple of species would return to existence that were obliterated earlier.
Two examples from the last several hundred years include the great auk and the passenger pigeon.
Two examples of species that humankind hunted to extinction (since they were such wonderful food sources) include the woolly mammoth and the giant sloth.
I recall an historical account of the last great auk being killed so that it could be stuffed and placed in the British museum. The collectors also took pains to destroy the last eggs in the nest at the same time. Gives you some idea of how much our views of what is fitting and proper for us to do in the world can change over a few hundred years.
Now that there are so many of us humans in a finite sized world, and our technological means of changing the world are more influential, it behoves us to give more and more thought to the consequences of our actions.
It's really only our capability for reasoning and thought that gives us a chance of beating the other animals for long term survival of our species.
Last time I was at Heathrow I bumbled in on a redeye from JFK, where I did the standby thing for 12+ hours in the comfort of an airport waiting lounge.
I counted it a great success to lug heavy luggage on the underground to King's Cross.
Selective Incompetence, Bureaucracy Profitable
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2
No surprise.
I'm reminded of when I was a 12 year old stamp collector and got caught up in "approval" buying.
They'd send you a bunch of stamps for $0.01 which would simultaneously get you subscribed to an approval buying service where you had to send things back quickly in order not to buy something.
It was hell to get out of. Granted, a lot of the success of the scheme relates to making it much easier for a customer to buy than for a customer to either notbuy or, worse, antibuy (get a refund.)
The hassles of getting an RMA for a web based order, dialing into a trickle of phone lines, manned 3 hours a day, charged calls that dump you into a voicemail system that either drops you into messages that no one answers, a busy signal, or a dialtone.
Since then, I've noticed that bureaucratic procedures and, yes, incompetence, can be selectively and artfully applied in all kinds of business situations to help profits.
Any business student can tell you that you want to hound your acccounts receivable into a short time scale, while letting your accounts payable drift unpaid as long as possible.
My all time favorite, of course, are health insurance approvals. The footdragging and hassles of dealing with managed health care have absolutely convinced me that bureaucracy and incompetence can be honed into a tool.
What I fear, however, is that it will be difficult to enlist established artists that have been accustomed to feeding at the trough that RIAA has created. No matter that the signed artist only gets a small fraction of what the recording label collects, the total price of a CD tells you in no uncertain terms that the old distribution network was raping the consumer for profit margins far beyond what the media itself cost. (I know, I know, they'll tell me that advertisements aren't cheap, but I won't buy that line all the way to the bank.)
I think there's a good analogy to be made with alcohol and tobacco distribution. Those products command premiums due to taxes and various other restrictions on their sale and distribution. But, if you've noticed, if those extra costs get to a certain point above what they can be made for, then people will seek to circumvent the distribution network, buy cigarettes on a reservation or in North Carolina, etc.
By virtue of the Internet, the cost of making and distributing music has decreased drastically below the CD model. Old artists, accustomed to getting several million dollars from the recording labels, won't want to participate in the new scheme unless the old scheme dries up.
What really needs to be done is for new artists to be enlisted in an Internet distribution scheme that actually makes them some money. That's all.
But the auto-patching that Windows XP does is great. We need it for Linux, both desktop and server.
I don't run XP (though my bro-in-law does, hates it, is going back to Win2K, a good move IMHO), but some feature like what you describe would be nice if they're properly balanced and thought out.
I'd like the ability to assess what the patches are needed, what they are supposed to do, and ideally be able to see the source code before I patch my servers.
The last thing I want my server to do is to "figure out for itself" that it needs to download some worm and then automatically go do it.
Rather, let me decide and then it's my fault if I download a worm.
One of the nice things about Linux in general is that it exposes its guts to you and lets you make as many decisions as you want about what to do with it and how to modify it. If you want to shoot yourself in the foot or shoot for the moon in a new way that works for you, then by all means go for it. Linux distributions won't be so arrogant as to presume that "they know better what's good for you".
You can see where it's difficult to judge the proper tradeoffs between ease and convenience on one hand, and security on the other hand. All those Outlook attachments have been more than sufficient evidence of how easily such judgement can be in error.
Slashdot Mirror
Jimmy Carter was a wonderful President if your only criterion was to have ethical perfection to balance everyone's disappointment in Richard Nixon.
Unfortunately, despite all of that, his biggest fault was micromanaging. Tales were told of the 16 hour days Jimmy would put in, but spent his time resolving staff disputes by scheduling use of the White House tennis courts himself.
Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan just delegated everything out and worked many less hours and, by those measures was a much more effective manager. [For the record, I didn't think much of Ronald's appointees. And, GHB was right, it was voodoo economics.]
But the quote I remember, that Slashdot should remember, is that:
HDTV comes in three flavors: 480p, 1080i and 720p.
I've seen those numbers bantered about.
I presume the "i" is the bad old interlace, just like NTSC and that the "p" is for the harder but better-looking progressive scan.
So there's no plans for a "1080p" then?
You are better off with a Linux or even a *BSD server.
Well, certainly. But I had the impression that the question was about using a CVS client from the Windows box - not running the repository on a Windows box.
I'm not real familiar with ssh on Windows, but I know that in the Unix world, the -v option has really helped me to find out where things break with greater precision.
Over the past few years I've cut n saved some of the Slashdot signatures. One, in particular, applies to this situation. I don't recall the specific Slashdot poster whose signature said:
and I don't know who said first, either.As a staunch proponent of free software and public, open standards, I am as heartened to see this development, just as I was glad to see the recent story of the German government deploying Linux on a larger scale through IBM and SuSE.
In this development, however, I see an additional possibility. Despite all their differences, the pursuit of a software strategy independent of large U.S. corporations is something shared between Taiwan and the PRC.
I think it would be an excellent testimony to the free software development model if Chinese language software is jointly developed both in *.cn and in *.tw and widely used on both sides of the strait of Taiwan as well.
Here's to a hope: maybe that level of cooperation in a common pursuit could set a positive and conciliatory example for citizens and politicians that don't know much about software and, in the past, have shown they know too little about sharing, cooperation and accomodation.
Do you see Mosix becoming so easy to use, so powerful and so fault-tolerant that cheap clusters of commodity boxes will soon displace big proprietary SMP machines?
And, just to be totally random, have you found that your Talmudic studies have made you, as a person interfacing with other people, more easy to use, powerful, and fault-tolerant?
The Network Is The Computer
They were way ahead of their time with that little slogan.
Of course, back in the 1980s, when my NFS mounts from down the hall failed because the network was down for some reason, I'd recite that slogan with glee to anyone who'd listen to my gripes.
pesticide use by 97%,
For the record, I
But.
I have to wonder about how sustainable the non-use of pesticides can be.
Think about human vaccinations against childhood diseases. Overall, it's a great idea. On an individual basis, if everyone else's child has been vaccinated, then you can forego the risks of vaccination, secure in knowing that your child will probably play only with other vaccinated children that will not subject your child to those diseases. Also, by not vaccinating your child, you don't suffer the one in several hundred thousand risk that your child will actually get sick. Great.
Great, until more and more other parents also decide that they don't like the risks of vaccination on their children, either. Then you end up with a sufficient pool of unvaccinated children, where there is increased risk that the diseases will take hold and be communicated in that group.
Is it not similar to an organic farmer sitting in the middle of California's Central Valley, with all his neighbors using all manner of ugly pesticides to effectively sterilize their fields? The small organic farmer has little to worry about: he's not going to catch any pests from his neighbors.
You see my point. At some critical level of non-use of pesticides, the pests will start to propagate much more than they do now.
I used to be pretty excited about developments like Ethernet over powered electrical wiring in houses, etc.
But lately I have to wonder about the economic viability of any communications technology that makes use of fixed lines.
It seems to me that wireless communications is constantly getting better and cheaper, while anything over land lines has to contend with the cost of installing and maintaining those lines. In the case of lines that already exist, they're mostly copper and too limited in bandwidth.
Unless you've got something where the high speed of fiber optic links is critical, then it seems like small, low power, wireless cells linking into a few fixed access points to optical land lines is the way to do things.
Your apartment looks like the one in "Pi", doesn't it?
Such an apartment would be incomplete without stimulant pills in the bathroom medicine cabinet to replace food in the refrigerator.
Oh, and don't forget the electric drill!
In this day and age of information overload, I could not help but notice how the article sometimes let drop the "copyright" modifier describing the downloaded works.
Dropped.
As if there were no such thing as genuinely free software that was copylefted. Software that was free and legal to download without paying anyone any money.
I wonder if the BSA will succeed in giving the word download a bad connotation, or whether they'll have to invent a new term.
The word pirate has such a nice strong ring to it, while duplicator of copyrighted material just doesn't seem to get people's dander up.
I could get flamed for endorsing a commercial establishment - and, no, I don't work for them - but I've found some of the tutorial articles that IBM posts at their developerWorks website to be quite nice.
If you want to serve some OSS projects, then all you need is a handful of Athlons and Linux. But if you want to serve a large enterprise system, you're going to need some big iron and big iron software.
My shop has got Linux clusters, Sun E10ks as well as desktops Solaris and Linux.
Linux works great and is economical like nothing else, and it's lately becoming a favorite choice on the desktop.
Meanwhile, though, for ultra-reliable, high-throughput, convenient, easy-to-manage systems connected to SANs, the big 64-way Suns are absolutely the way to go.
Dunno if that will still be true in 5 years, but it certainly is the case now.
When you need that kind of service, the kinds of prices we're talking about here are not at all unusual. While everyone should constantly evaluate their options (i.e., will a MOSIX cluster do the job?), the right answer is still Sun in certain cases.
Better: a diligent roommate that's willing to go to those early classes in the rain, turn in your homework, get the new assignment, and let you see their legible classnotes after you finish sleeping in.
One of the big problems, and I agree that it is a big problem, is that "lying news" is not defined anywhere, effectively making all Turkish media providers subject to the whims of any authority that considers their content to fall under such a definition.
A similar vague kind of ambiguous catch-all phrase exists in the PRC.
There, what the Turkish government calls "lying news" is referred to as a "state secret" by the government of the PRC.
I'm presuming that the various ethnic (Kurds) and religious factions comprising Turkey are regarded as unstable and requiring a harsh authoritarian government to remain cohesive [Yugoslavia]. Maybe they're right - that otherwise partisan demagogues would fan the flames of hatred to build their own local power bases.
But, the USA, Russia and the PRC show the world that local politicians can continue to play nationalistic games (with nuclear weapons no less) for decades without blowing each other up. Why not let Turkey have the same chance?
I'm really glad to hear that the smaller vendors are pushing towards standardization, something that benefits not only consumers like me, but software vendors that would be frustrated by the fragmentation in the Linux marketplace.
Anyone worried about loss of diversity should not be so worried. These vendors still make money by distinguishing themselves from their competitors. So despite the standardization efforts, you'll inevitably see quirks and spins on the various flavors, eg., we bundle StarOffice 6.0 for free, we have db2, etc.
I've really like SuSE for its massive size. It comes with more stuff than RedHat out of the box. I've seen novice sysadmins install versions of RedHat for coworkers that lack some key tools like gcc or TeX (probably just picked some default "consumer" option).
If read the story, you'll see that, much to the chagrin of myself and others who decry Microsoft's behavior in many other venues, Microsoft deserved to win this one.
They are merely permitting users to post. Like Slashdot.
The principle here is exactly the same one that would apply if Slashdot were sued because someone posted links to sites critical of the Church of Scientology, or to places where they could download DeCSS.
I think the best thing here would be if the public provider only agreed to investigate allegations of slander if they are submitted in writing, with no obligation to remove any postings if they are not found to be libelous of individuals.
Postings are expressions of their respective authors only!
AFAICT, it was the other ingredients besides the story line that has made one movie better than another.
I'd like to believe that public choices in which movie to see reflect a fundamental groundswell of enlightenment and rejection of crass commercial values for more enduring qualities. It would be convenient if every video game and movie represents a strong tie to meta myths that Joseph Campbell outlined: they'd sure be a whole lot easier to analyze if they fell into those nice large deep and meaningful categories. But, many moviegoers don't live epic lives: they're just out for a good time.
It's as simple as the fact that AOTC was not as well made a movie as Spiderman. That's it.
could be used as a weapon in the 'negotiations' with Bill Gates and Co. over IE
I don't think so.
I can just see Steve on the phone with Bill now:
"Bill, we'd like to dissolve our "strategic partnership" that places IE exclusively front and center on the desktops of Mac users and be able to customize our users' experience without being restrained in any way."
"I'm really sorry to hear that, Steve. I had thought that our strategic partnership meant more than that to you. Much more. Beyond placing IE on Mac user's desktops, I thought that Microsoft went the extra mile in putting Office on the Mac. Am I mistaken in valuing this relationship?"
"No, Bill. I think I understand better the great value of our special relationship now that you've made it clear. You've done your part keeping new versions of Office on Mac - we'll hold up our end doing whatever it takes. By the way, do you have another spare $150M to invest in "advanced projects"?"
I'd sure like it if a couple of species would return to existence that were obliterated earlier.
Two examples from the last several hundred years include the great auk and the passenger pigeon.
Two examples of species that humankind hunted to extinction (since they were such wonderful food sources) include the woolly mammoth and the giant sloth.
I recall an historical account of the last great auk being killed so that it could be stuffed and placed in the British museum. The collectors also took pains to destroy the last eggs in the nest at the same time. Gives you some idea of how much our views of what is fitting and proper for us to do in the world can change over a few hundred years.
Now that there are so many of us humans in a finite sized world, and our technological means of changing the world are more influential, it behoves us to give more and more thought to the consequences of our actions.
It's really only our capability for reasoning and thought that gives us a chance of beating the other animals for long term survival of our species.
Drive past heathrow airport at night
I won't take you up on that dare:)
Last time I was at Heathrow I bumbled in on a redeye from JFK, where I did the standby thing for 12+ hours in the comfort of an airport waiting lounge.
I counted it a great success to lug heavy luggage on the underground to King's Cross.
No surprise.
I'm reminded of when I was a 12 year old stamp collector and got caught up in "approval" buying.
They'd send you a bunch of stamps for $0.01 which would simultaneously get you subscribed to an approval buying service where you had to send things back quickly in order not to buy something.
It was hell to get out of. Granted, a lot of the success of the scheme relates to making it much easier for a customer to buy than for a customer to either notbuy or, worse, antibuy (get a refund.)
The hassles of getting an RMA for a web based order, dialing into a trickle of phone lines, manned 3 hours a day, charged calls that dump you into a voicemail system that either drops you into messages that no one answers, a busy signal, or a dialtone.
Since then, I've noticed that bureaucratic procedures and, yes, incompetence, can be selectively and artfully applied in all kinds of business situations to help profits.
Any business student can tell you that you want to hound your acccounts receivable into a short time scale, while letting your accounts payable drift unpaid as long as possible.
My all time favorite, of course, are health insurance approvals. The footdragging and hassles of dealing with managed health care have absolutely convinced me that bureaucracy and incompetence can be honed into a tool.
This is one news story that's worth looking at.
I really like the little photo captioned "Skies in UK Becoming Increasingly Crowded" that shows about five jets at the same time!
I can't believe that's a real picture. If its, they're begging for some collisions RSN.
You have very good points and I agree with them.
What I fear, however, is that it will be difficult to enlist established artists that have been accustomed to feeding at the trough that RIAA has created. No matter that the signed artist only gets a small fraction of what the recording label collects, the total price of a CD tells you in no uncertain terms that the old distribution network was raping the consumer for profit margins far beyond what the media itself cost. (I know, I know, they'll tell me that advertisements aren't cheap, but I won't buy that line all the way to the bank.)
I think there's a good analogy to be made with alcohol and tobacco distribution. Those products command premiums due to taxes and various other restrictions on their sale and distribution. But, if you've noticed, if those extra costs get to a certain point above what they can be made for, then people will seek to circumvent the distribution network, buy cigarettes on a reservation or in North Carolina, etc.
By virtue of the Internet, the cost of making and distributing music has decreased drastically below the CD model. Old artists, accustomed to getting several million dollars from the recording labels, won't want to participate in the new scheme unless the old scheme dries up.
What really needs to be done is for new artists to be enlisted in an Internet distribution scheme that actually makes them some money. That's all.
But the auto-patching that Windows XP does is great. We need it for Linux, both desktop and server.
I don't run XP (though my bro-in-law does, hates it, is going back to Win2K, a good move IMHO), but some feature like what you describe would be nice if they're properly balanced and thought out.
I'd like the ability to assess what the patches are needed, what they are supposed to do, and ideally be able to see the source code before I patch my servers.
The last thing I want my server to do is to "figure out for itself" that it needs to download some worm and then automatically go do it.
Rather, let me decide and then it's my fault if I download a worm.
One of the nice things about Linux in general is that it exposes its guts to you and lets you make as many decisions as you want about what to do with it and how to modify it. If you want to shoot yourself in the foot or shoot for the moon in a new way that works for you, then by all means go for it. Linux distributions won't be so arrogant as to presume that "they know better what's good for you".
You can see where it's difficult to judge the proper tradeoffs between ease and convenience on one hand, and security on the other hand. All those Outlook attachments have been more than sufficient evidence of how easily such judgement can be in error.