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Re: MS Fascistic, Orwellian -- Linux Democratic, Free

  • Subject: Re: MS Fascistic, Orwellian -- Linux Democratic, Free
  • From: "Rex Ballard" <rex.ballard@xxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: 19 Mar 2007 07:08:34 -0700
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On Mar 17, 10:02 am, chrisv <chr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Rex Ballard wrote:
> >Many corporations have not
> >just decided to "wait until later",  they have decided "stay with XP",

> But again, this is all rather obvious.  It's just not the nature of
> serious business to leap at a new OS, no matter how good or bad it may
> be.  It's the apps that are important.

Normally, the corporate IT department has taken the stance of WHEN to
make the migration.  In this case, the driving force is the finance
and legal department.  And they are saying don't even plan on a
Migration.  In fact, many companies began formulating migration plans
to Linux shortly after the release of Windows XP.  Microsoft got too
greedy and many of these larger companies just decided to take
ownership of their XP licenses, and plan their migration to Linux as
their next "Upgrade".

Keep in mind that Windows 2000 was an automatic upgrade.  About 70% of
the corporate NT licenses were sold with the understanding that there
would be a free upgrade to NT 5.0 (Windows 2000) when it was released
if they purchased the support contract.  When XP came out, Microsoft
tried to triple the price of their support contracts.  By then, the
corporations had learned, the hard way, that most of Microsoft's
"support" consisted of restart the app, reboot the machine, reinstall
the app, reinstall the OS, and, if all else failed, reformat the drive
and re-image the machine.

Microsoft didn't even seem interested in root cause analysis.  Even
the BSOD errors often turned into "reimage" opportunities.  Nobody
bothered to ask WHY the machine was crashing.  Microsoft's public
statements were always "Video Driver problems" or "device driver
problems", blaming everyone else for the problem and never actually
doing the root cause analysis. to find out what the problem actually
was and get it fixed.

Meanwhile, Linux has spent the last 10 years fixing problems that
often don't even manifest themselves in the form of defective
machines.  When there is a driver problem, they fix or replace or
create a new driver.   When the kernel was slow on SMP machines, they
redesigned the scheduler to make it 5x faster on those machines.

Even when a vulnerability was imaginary.  Code was being called by
wrappers that protected the "vulnerable" code, the vulnerable code was
rewritten to better manage the updates.  When hackers tried to break
Linux systems, Linux administrators not only put in firewalls,
bulkheads, antivirus, and auditing.  They also put in tripwires,
honeypots, and other enhancements which have made OSS/Linux and OSS/
UNIX systems more secure than their original vendor supplied systems.

Today, most UNIX vendors are trying to be "Linux Compatible", because
there are so many advantages to being able to run the code originally
written for Linux.  Linux has now become a formally recognized
standard (LSB-3), and many UNIX vendors are now trying to support
most, if not all of those standards.

Meanwhile, Microsoft seems determined to pervert even the most widely
accepted standards, with "enhancements" that end up becoming huge
"security problems".

The standard for "plain text" documents is line-feed termination.
Microsoft adds a carriage return to each line-feed.  Notepad STILL,
after almost 15 years, cannot edit an industry standard linefeed
terminated plain-text file.

The standard for HTML was designed to provide protection for both the
server and the browser, and was very carefully designed to limit the
ability of either being able to invade the privacy and access or alter
confidential data of either party.  Microsoft introduced the
"Enhancement" of ActiveX controls, which made it possible for servers
to corrupt and invade clients, and vice-versa.

The standard for LDAP/Kerberos was designed to provide a secure access
control in which the "password" changed every few seconds.  Microsoft
decided to add new identity fields which made it possible to access
the password from a certificate authority.  In effect, this completely
comprimized the security of the LDAP subsystem - which manages all of
the permissions and credentials for the user.

The problem is that Microsoft was never willing to submit to the
standards process.  Even today, with at least 2 court orders demanding
it, Microsoft refuses to submit to the same review process that was
used by the standards they tried to hijack.

Windows "Enhancements" now cost a average of $600 billion/year.
Identity theft happens an average of once every 6 minutes, and costs
thousands of dollars to clear up per incident.  Most of this identity
theft involves the use of Microsoft's corrupted "standards".   There
are now 1/2 million viruses.  Every year, 80% of all PCs are
successfully attacked by undetected viruses which are not detected
until after the virus has done it's damage.  Even a simple attack can
cost over $1000 per incident in lost productivity and recovery
effort.  More recently, Microsoft began "selling" the right to invade
PCs with viruses, known as "spyware", which has now plagued nearly all
computers, costing almost $1000 per machine per year in recovery
efforts.  Sure that's an average, and there are some very competent
Windows users who have never had a problem, but for most companies,
and most PC owners, the costs, which are usually recovered through
involuntary overtime, are enormous.

Linux publishes their standards, and encourages critical review of
their standards.  They also implement standards, as origanally
published, not trying to make proprietary enhancements which are then
placed under strict nondisclosure agreements.

Over the last 20 years, the GNU Manifesto has turned out to be
prophetic.  In 1995, Richard Stallman predected that proprietary
software would ultimately be used in an extortion scheme to extract
money from corporations who's most vital corporate information would
be held hostage.  Microsoft has done that.  Richard also predected
that proprietary software would lead to more opportunities for
unethical programmers to engage in criminal activities using
undisclosed information in proprietary software.  When he wrote that,
a hacker was a very well trained, very experienced, and very ethical
computer programmer, today it's a term for a criminal who uses
computers to commit crimes ranging from trespassing to copyright
violation to terrorist acts.

Ironically, it was those well trained, experienced, and ethical
programmers, those who subscribed to the original MIT "hacker's
ethic", who ultimately led the OSS revolution, and created what we now
know as Open Source Software, Linux, and Linux distributions.

In 1984, we joked that Orwell's vision had not been realized.  Later
that year, Bill Gates boasted in an interview about how he was going
to achieve "world domination" by replacing all PC applications with
Microsoft versions.  PCs would communicate with each other using
protocols that only Microsoft understood.  People would conduct
financial transactions, personal correspondences, even telephone
conversations, all under the watchful eye of Microsoft.  Bill Gates
was Big Brother, and he had a plan.





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