Main "Hating Microsoft in a nutshell" thread

[andysimmons]

Originally posted by Piix4
In any case... nuke that Windows box....

I remember when I used to feel that way. Then I started working on Linux servers and found out what Linux is really good for.

Seriously, who wants to spend 3 hours installing a decent game in Linux, when you could install the same thing from Windows in 15 minutes? Wake up folks... Linux isn't superior to Windows in every aspect. Flame away...

[Piix4]

Hmm.

We have divergent views on this (though... we agree on distro... I notice). Then again, I use my machine for work.

If I played games on, sure, it'd use Windows or spend my 'gaming money wisely'.... and get a PS2.

[zdude255]

Originally posted by MB[DK]
I swear, some of you guys really need to step away from it all, and visit real life.

Umm, a multi-billion dollar industry is usually considered real life. Moral principles also go into that category.

[El_Cu_Guy]

I'm confused. I could be wrong as I don't have XP (I have used other NT based OSes and I routinely use my grandmother's and brother's XP box when I visit) what's all this about scandisk?

Did they change the name for familiarity purposes? I thought NT based Windows used CHKDSK.

[Nuada Storm]

For what it is worth, I have two Windows XP boxes and rarely shut them down. If I must power down the computer, I simply log out and power down. I have never had any corruption nor has it ever asked to run Scandisk (XP doesn't ship with Scandisk anyway). Only once when the PC got turned off without the user logging out first did it run CHKDSK on boot up.

Of course I don't use FAT32 on the machines. There is no reason to when NTFS is available and hard drives are cheap.

Personally, I like Windows. I like Linux. They are comparable in my experience. It depends on the user and your system setup. Both OSes get rebooted about as often, maybe once a week.

[paj12]

Originally posted by El_Cu_Guy
Did they change the name for familiarity purposes? I thought NT based Windows used CHKDSK.

Yeah, what's up with that? Chkdsk used to be an MS-DOS tool to tell you stuff about your HD like free space, bad sectors, etc. The first time my Win2K box wanted to do a chkdsk, I was thinking, "That's not gonna do jack." I'm just wondering what was the logic behind the name change?

[paj12]

I was talking about the name change from scandisk to chkdsk. Windows 9x and ME used scandisk to annoy you at bootup. But NT, 2K, and XP use chkdsk.

[andycrofts]

..At a guess, you've got a dying hard drive.
We noticed here, before my drive (Win-ME+RH9) went tits-up (See "Did Wolfwenstein...") that Scandisk occasionally came in, and stayed in. All weekend once..
Sseemed to sort itself out, then a couple of weeks later, BAD DRIVE!
And, yes, we told the machine to shut down correctly (Actually, in our case, Sammuta, being Finnish version, but...)
I didn't really equate the two, 'cos She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed uses WinME far, far more than I did, and thus saw it far more often. We just didn't communicate the problem between us....
Go get a new drive!

[FlipinMonkeyPie]

*heads off to backup music, just in case*

[nextbillgates]

Reality check. What you are describing (editing the registry) would be beyond the scope of what is expected of most Windows system administrators, provisionally.

Ignorance is not an excuse.

Linux has a lexicon of Journalised Filesystems.
Windows, has, err, exactly, none.

NTFS is a "journalized" file system, and has been for over 10 years.

That really depends on one's defintion of 'restricted'.
I can log in as a 'normal' user on, oh, just about every M$ box I've 'ever' used and say, delete everything in C:\winnt\system C:\winnt\system32 in Program Files and such.
Hmm, yes. I'm noticing how "unpriveleged", excuse me, "access impoverised", that was.

By default, C:\winnt\system, C:\winnt\System32, and C:\program files all have the exact same permission for the Users group, Read and execute, and List folder contents. They have no permission to write, modify, or delete.

Part of my job is administering Win2K/XP servers and workstations. It's not going to be very easy to BS with me

Name, one, one application that can "take down" the Linux Kernel. Go on, you made the claim. Back it up.

I don't know of any application that can take down the kernel of Windows OR Linux, but there are apps on both of them that can lock up the computer enough that it either requires remotely accessing it to kill the offending process or reboot.

One example off the top of my head is the SNES emulator ZSNES for Linux. Once I emerged it and tried to change to a full-screen resolution, and I lost control of the keyboard. I couldn't exit the program or switch to a TTY to kill it.

Various other programs (mostly games) have forced me to reboot because it grabs the keyboard and then the program locks. At least in Windows, I can usually get to the task manager and kill the program regardless of how hard it locked. In Linux, there is no real equivalent.

Now, name, one Linux application (apart from a new Kernel), that you absolutely 'have' to reboot to install.
Didn't think so

Got straw man?

I never even mentioned that in my post. In fact, the reboots for every stupid little update in Windows is one of the biggest annoyances of the OS, and one of the biggest reasons why I'm reluctant to recommend it for anything more than a workstation.

Ok, let's make it easy.

Ever heard of the Exchange Server Licencing bug?
Basically after you patch Exchange Server 5, it introduces a bug, that doesn't decrement the available Exchange Licences, under certain login-logout circumstances.
The net effect being that, one, ends up having to reboot (the Server) in order to reset the Licence counter.
At a time when the Server is under the most load.

Considering that Exchange 5 is very old, no longer supported, and not used by anyone I know, I don't really care what bugs have affected it. But if you must know, turning off the license logging service will clear up the problem

...skipping a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with what I actually said.

More to the point. When was the last time you had a virus on a Windows box?

Not sure. I run as a restricted user, so if I did manage to get a virus, there's not much it can do.

A damn sight more recently then on any Linux box I'd venture.
Venture is the wrong word.

I have yet to get a virus on either, but that's because I believe that it's worth it to take the time to lock it down. I've seen lazy Windows admins get viruses weekly, and I've seen lazy Linux admins get rooted just as often.

Litestep is good.
Gnome and KDE are better. Plus.
Star Office reads Word docs these days.
Evolution does everything Outlook does... without being the major security exploit with an Email client Outlook is.

I like Gnome and Evolution. StarOffice is good at reading Office formats, but not good enough that I would trust to replace it.

Some aspects of Linux are not so good, however. From a user's perspective, CD burning is a hassle. There are a variety of CD burning front-ends, but all of them have various issues that keep them from being perfect. If I was a user that needed to burn a CD and I didn't know how to use the command line, I'd need about three front-ends to do everything I needed to do. Also, communicating with NFS or SMB networks in Linux is nowhere near as intuitive as it is in Windows.

From an administrator's perspective, Windows networks can be easily centrally managed, particularly in regards to security. Group Policy is easily one of the biggest advantages of Windows over Linux.

Blue Screen of 'DEATH'.
Windows can come back from the dead huh?
Someone had better tell the fundamentalists Jesus has risen so.
Tis the day of reckoning.

By default, when Windows BSODs, it does a core dump and then reboots. Total downtime: about 2 minutes, depending on computer speed. I have yet to find a way to do this in Linux.

I'd still challenge you to name an application that
'takes down' a Linux box. Then I'll go put it onto one of my Webservers, and have the Webserver publish an crond uptime and top of running processes.

I have yet to see Win2K BSOD due to anything other than flaky hardware. Granted, Linux is more tolerant of such hardware than Windows, but it still doesn't fix the flaw.

One example that's happened to me personally is my recent BIOS flash of my EPoX 8RDA. I flashed the BIOS and then spent time building up my Windows partition for the LAN party I was going to (I had previously had Windows installed on a software RAID and decided to break it to use one drive as a Gentoo desktop). I finally got back to Linux again to build that up, and it was going fine until I configured XFree. Starting it up locked the computer up tighter than a drum, and nothing short of flashing the BIOS to a much older version would fix it.

Also, another example is the Gentoo 1.4RC4 boot disk. I loaded the boot disk on an older machine with a 1280x1024 frame buffer and the option that fully loads the boot disc into memory. I was never successfully able to complete the install like that because it would OOPS at some point in the install, and while the kernel itself didn't die, every program I ran would cause a kernel OOPS.

So it does happen

What you're describing is actually a Linux advantage -- not all kernel panics (or OOPSes, actually -- the two are different) will completely hose the machine. If the kernel is executing on the behalf of a user program when it OOPSes or panics, it'll just kill the user program (with a segfault, I believe) after logging the panic or OOPS. Your machine is still usable.

And if a Windows program oversteps it's bounds, the kernel kills it as well with an error message. I'm not sure what you're getting at here

[Nuada Storm]

Originally posted by paj12
I was talking about the name change from scandisk to chkdsk. Windows 9x and ME used scandisk to annoy you at bootup. But NT, 2K, and XP use chkdsk.

Scandisk cannot repair and fix NTFS drives. Since NTFS is the recommended file system under WIndows XP, they had to use CHKDSK so that it was supported by the basic tools needed to maintain the filesystem properly.

The name is a non-issue to those users who are not tecnical. They won't be running it unless the system boots up and tells them to run it. Then the chances of it running are usually only if you have FAT32 drives which are not journaled like NTFS.

[CMonster]

andysimmons -Richard Simmons younger brother

BTW - the "game" (Probably "I Felch Satan II") would install in about 5-minutes and run on Linux if it was made for Linux... I agree with you Andy, it would be much better if you were using Windows for such things.....

nextbillgates -(name says it all)

Ignorance is not an excuse.

-no, Ignorance is bliss, and you should know.. BTW you are "name calling" when you say "Ignorance is not an excuse" (yes, I know I did too)

NTFS is a "journalized" file system, and has been for over 10 years.

-Yep, and 99% of desktop users and 90% or corporate desktops were unable to take advantage of this until the advent of Win2K, and without an expensive upgrade, 99% or all 9x kernel users will still not benefit from it.

[nextbillgates]

-no, Ignorance is bliss, and you should know.. BTW you are "name calling" when you say "Ignorance is not an excuse" (yes, I know I did too)

Name calling? You lost me here.

-Yep, and 99% of desktop users and 90% or corporate desktops were unable to take advantage of this until the advent of Win2K,

NTFS has been available since NT 3.51.

and without an expensive upgrade, 99% or all 9x kernel users will still not benefit from it.

Kind of like how Red Hat 6.0 or any other distro that is no longer supported would have a difficult time adapating to today's software. Win9x is old and very quickly on the way to obscelesence, not to mention the fact that any sysadmin would be insane to use them for anything even remotely important.

[chatins]

Fat32 is not journaled like ext3. This is the monkey's point. Windows file system is vastly inferior. Windows XP files systems in general are more sensitive to bad hardware, shutdown then any previous version of windows.

[Sepero]

I was googling for a new "blue-screen-of-death" wallpaper and came across this. The BSOD on an ATM. I'm not sure, but it looks pretty real.

http://wolfox.werewolves.org/Photojo...20BSOD_JPG.htm