http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/facts/default.asp
most of you who read /. already know about this, though

anyway...
discuss.

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i thought about this being the anti-sig... or the sig virus... or the sig of your nightmares... but i decided that some painful rhetoric might work instead...
just kidding.

Summary: Windows is better for large buisness.

Alalysis: D'uh!

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Do you have stairs in your house?

You know what's funny? In order for Windows to be used by the US gov't, it has to be opensource software. So somewhere along the line, Microsoft said that Windows was opensource.

So, as an invitation to all you l33t haxorz, out there, if you manage to get the Windows source code, it's not technically illegal!

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MadQuack on Military school: Pro's: I get to shoot a gun. Con's: Everything else.
"I'm going to beat you until the laws of physics are violated!!" ! Maeve's Warcry

RIP -MaDaVentor-. You will be missed.

I love the smell of bull**** in the morning.

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The future is here, and all bets are off.

...but hacking government computers is.

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"LC Tusken: the idiot is the person who follows the idiot and your not following me your insulting me your following the path of a idiot so that makes you the idiot"
NMGOH || Jack Chick preaches it || The Link of the Dead

Correction, dude... you can go back to Uncle Bill's beach house now =P

happydud: really??? that's whack... got any more info on that opensource US gov stuff? it'd be VERY interesting to read up on.

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i thought about this being the anti-sig... or the sig virus... or the sig of your nightmares... but i decided that some painful rhetoric might work instead...
just kidding.

It's my understanding that the US Gov doesn't use any code it can't alter. That doesn't mean Windows is opensource. It just means Big Brother can access anything- even Windows source code.

I'm shokced to find pro-Microsfot/ant-Linux stuff posted on Microsft's website. What is the world coming to these days?

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I'm not an actor. I just play one on TV.

How dare Microsoft try to convince people to buy their products!

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Have Lightsaber Will Travel JK Editing tips, troubleshooting information, resources and more.
www.swgalaxies.net For all your Star Wars Galaxies needs
The Massassi A SW Galaxies Player Association

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Do you have stairs in your house?

Lies!!

No, I was talking about breaking into windows on your own computer, not a government one.. Only an idiot would try that. Though it would make for a funny /. story.

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MadQuack on Military school: Pro's: I get to shoot a gun. Con's: Everything else.
"I'm going to beat you until the laws of physics are violated!!" ! Maeve's Warcry

RIP -MaDaVentor-. You will be missed.

I know! We should beat them call the MBS!

Exactly, those "facts" are just bull****. Why can't people just get a OS and that's that!?

(I'll know that I could get annoyed answers for that, but :P)

...Long live DOS.

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<landfish> FastGamerr > Satan

Rub a dub dub, thanks for a working OS. YAY DOS!

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Yeah, but you know what? This one, this one right here, this was my dream, my wish, and it didn't come true. So I'm takin' it back. I'm takin' 'em all back.

And you know /why/ the costs of training and tech and management are lower for windows ?

This just in: DeBeers Diamonds cost 33% less to ship, and 10 times less to extract from mines..

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[Blue Mink Bifocals !] [fsck -Rf /world/usr/] [<!-- kalimonster -->] [Capite Terram]
Applecore scowled. "What does that mean, 'real'? Amn't I real, you? If you cut me, do I not bleed? If you piss me off, will I not kick you up the arse?" -War of the Flowers
NPC.Interact::PressButton($'Submit');

Fun fact is, if it were the other way around (OpenSource/Linux attacks MS), I wouldn't be surprised if everyone would be praising them(with them being the 'heroic Linux users who dare to make a stand against the evil Microsoft Empire').

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Burrie - an old, pissed, dillusional, ghetto Scott-Dutchman with an Austrian accent

[This message has been edited by burrie (edited January 07, 2004).]

Microsoft isnt evil. They just make really crappy operating systems.

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The future is here, and all bets are off.

But they make damn good user interfaces.

It's funny cause they talk about expenses, yet fail to mention that Linux is free and Windows is not.

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Please frame your insults in the form of a question.

"What a bunch of blowhards." - Kieran Horn

Sure windows has some downside but frankly I'm being trainned in both right now and I personally like Windows.

Not that good. Apple does it way better, for sure.

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Bassoon, n. A brazen instrument into which a fool blows out his brains.

burrie, in fact, even though I hate microsoft and despise windows, I still regularly recommend it to people that should be using it instead of Linux. I think Linux is far superior (at least, Debian/Knoppix), but it does take someone of a certain mindset to appreciate the qualities that make it superior. So yeah, if I see people bashing Windows (as a product) for bogus stuff, I will definitely set them straight.

Linux (to me) is all about freedom. Freedom of choice, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom from BSOD, freedom from corporations harvesting your personal information for marketing purposes, freedom to just get work done without having to jump through so many annoyances, and freedom from "agreeing" to draconian license agreements that most people don't read anyway (if you read them, you likely wouldn't agree, but would use the software anyway with the mindset of "they will never find out").

I like my Linux for everything I do except games. So I guess I'll always have to at least dual-boot a copy of windows simply to play games. Oh well.

hear hear Brain

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i thought about this being the anti-sig... or the sig virus... or the sig of your nightmares... but i decided that some painful rhetoric might work instead...
just kidding.

Precisely.


Linux is the ultimate do-it-yourselfer OS. Ive always loved doing things myself, or the hard way, so its a perfect fit for me. Unfortunatly, the average (l)user doesnt want to do it themselves, and would die of cardiac troubles if it was even suggested that they do so. The average (l)user just wants the computer to fetch his/her email and browse pr0n. They dont care about the innards of their system or what makes it tick, merely that it behaves predicatably.


When I try to do something on my Linux workstation, I know I can get it done fast, and right the first time. When I try to do something on a Windows box, I realize I dont have any tools to do it, or those tools dont exist on the win32 platform.... But then again, most of the stuff I do doesnt fall under the relm of "common computing"...


But even so, this article isnt about desktop computing, its about servers. You cant beat Linux on a server. You just cant. Samba 3.0 performance beats out Windows 2003 server in serving files, Apache beats the hell out of IIS in both speed and security, and dont even try to tell me that I have to pay for a good FTP, SSH, telnet, or Terminal Servers.

And as for cost of operation? Whoever said it was easier to set up shares in Windows was ****ing insane, and never used Samba to any significant degree. I can have a Samba share set up on a LInux box in a minute flat, with exactally the permissions I want. In Windows, theres no telling how many dialogs youve got to lick through, permissions youve got to set, etc. With Samba, its a single section in a single config file. And the config file actully makes sense.


Web serving? Dont get me started. Apache is a cinch to set up and maintain. Its fast, its stable, its bloody secure. You cant say any of that about IIS. Remember children, 9 out of 10 Script Kiddie root kits run on MS Windows server through IIS.


Development? Hah. MS wants me to pay for a development suite? They want me to pay for a compiler? A GUI designer? Pfft. I get all of those for free with my OS. Why the hell would I want to pay for theirs?


Bah. Im ranting. Id better shut up before I say something Ill regret...

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The future is here, and all bets are off.

[This message has been edited by GBK (edited January 07, 2004).]

Ok, I like my oS to behave predictably. Why? Because I mostly play games on my computer. Just because I don't use my computer to program or run a server doesn't mean all I do is browse porn. Now, don't you have to go whine about not having a girlfriend? (|)user.

The thing is GBK, you don't want to have to pay for anything. Tell me, how many music CDs do you own in comparison to the amount of mp3s or oggs on your hard disks? What about DVDs in comparison to DivX, XviD or one of the many other types of encoded video files?

Now i'm pretty sure Apache can run on Windows, so that's half of your post gone already.

I like the Unix terminal, it's quite useful, but Explorer is by far the best user interface i've used in an operating system (the Mac GUI is technically better because it follows HCI principles far more closely, but these days it's getting bloated with pretty stuff).

I also like the fact that if someone wants to use my computer, they can. I also like Internet Explorer's interface compared to Opera and Mozilla/Firebird. I have the google bar so I don't have to worry about popups.

Microsoft may want information about what hardware I have, what sites I visit. But to be honest I don't care, what I do on the internet is certainly far less interesting than what the majority of people get up to.

I'm perfectly capable of using unix/linux when I have to, I just prefer not to.

I think they may be reffering to the latest RH Enterprise release. Red Hat will no longer be free.
Although they may have come out with Fedora (which I haven't even looked at yet), RH is one of the top 2 Linux distro's suggested for newbs. Now they can't download the latest versions free.

About the free part of Linux and it's software; it is very comforting to know that if you come across something that you feel you need, you can get it free. I paid $150 for Paint Shop Pro. I love it. Well worth the money and I would never complain about it, but if I could've gotten it for free (with the manual and the CD and the support from the publisher (I have a guilty conscience when it comes to getting software for free when it wasn't free in the first place)), it would've been much better.

In defense of Windows/MS, name another OS that can be purchased anywhere these days, that the average user... that's right, Joe Blow average user... who doesn't care about learning how to configure his comp., he just wants to plug it in, install a few things and go, and have that OS work. And yes Windows does work with pretty much every piece of hardware out there.
There isn't another OS that works with all of it.
Kudos to MS for doing the seemingly imposible for those that don't care, making an OS that works with 234982848503985740698372 configurations of hardware and software.
It is definatley not easy.
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To artificial life, all reality is virtual.

[This message has been edited by Darth Evad (edited January 08, 2004).]

windows is inefficient, slow and horrid, but i'd take it over linux, because it has everything i need, and no hassle of linux, since i dont use my computer for anything imperative enough to constitute a 10 page argument.

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mmm, smells like something burning.

I deal with difficult computers, complicated operating systems, and technically adept pieces of equipment every hour of every day I work. When I come home, I want to sit in front of my computer. Play a game or two, and browse the internet. I don't want to recompile my kernel, I don't want to scour the internet for a precompiled .RPM of anything.

Windows is superior because of the .EXE file format. Make linux handle Windows executables, and I might use it for my daily OS.

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-=I'm the wang of this here site, and it's HUGE! So just imagine how big I am.=-
1337Yectiwan
OSC Returns!!
10 of 14 -- 27 Lives On

OMG! Enough freedom talk all of you WHEN YOU DOWNLOAD LINUX YOUR DOWNLOADING COMMUNISM!

/me walks away

/me goes to class for t3h Linux...

/me hugs t3h penguin

There are file managers for Linux that are much better than windows explorer. Have you used the latest KDE Konqueror? Or perhaps the latest version of GNOME's Nautilus? If you want something fast, you can always use Rox Filer, which is probably the best one for any OS in my opinion. I also really enjoy the one that comes with xfce (a window manager - I don't know the name of the file manager). But really, I *never* use those when I'm on linux. I use the command line. You have to understand, you don't use Linux the same way you use Windows. It's a completely different thing. Desktop Environments like KDE/GNOME are trying to hide that fact, but I'm of the mind that you should not try to hide it. It's another layer of software complexity for the sake of "being like windows" so people don't have to learn anything new. But the problem is that the parts of Linux that are different than windows are precisely why I like Linux better than windows. You change it all to be just like windows and all of a sudden I don't like it anymore. I can't get as much work done in the same amount of time. It's not as convenient. There are tons of reasons.

As for your CD argument, I have about 30 MP3s and about 150 CDs. Of the 30 MP3s I have, I own the cds for about 90% of them. The rest I simply can't find the CDs for or don't like and don't listen to anyway. I don't mind paying for stuff. I especially don't mind paying for software (hell, I'm a "professional" software developer - I do this for a living). However, I find it really hard (make that impossible) to give MS any more money, because every time I do, I'm disappointed. They keep promising that "this next, NEW version is faster and rock solid-stable compared to our old versions!" - but in reality, they crash just as much, have just as many bugs, and never fix any of the problems. When I boot up Win2k or WinXP, I still see all the gui glitches and still have all the same crash bugs (well, not the same ones, but similar), and the only noticable difference is that they load slower, are less responsive, and tools are renamed and moved around (network neighborhood, msconfig, ipconfig, the start menu, etc.).

My comment about paying for things was directed at GBK alone.

By Explorer i'm not referring to the file manager, i'm referring to the Explorer shell. It's precisely why I said Explorer rather than Windows Explorer.

You mean the windows desktop then? Another thing I simply don't *need* in Linux. I use IceWM, a window manager that doesn't have a physical desktop that you can interact with. It has a taskbar at the bottom, and of course any number of background images (I have a different one for each of my 4 desktops), but I don't have icons or anything on the desktops. I have shortcut keys set for my most used applications, as well as quicklaunch icons, and of course with one keystroke, my taskbar will let me execute commands without having to even open a terminal.

If you do like the windows desktop, you should try the Rox Desktop: http://rox.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/ - It's a very simple, fast, easy-to-use-for-windows-people desktop system. They have screenshots there you can look at, too.

None and none. I dont own any CDs or DVDs. Personally, I despise music CDs. They are fragile, awkward, and hold far too little. And since I dont even have a TV, DVDs wont do me much good...

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The future is here, and all bets are off.

rofl. <3 Det

Too bad GBK deleted his thread, nobody else will get it.

Doesn't mean the rest of us can't laugh.

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Baby Mama's Drama

I deleted the thread because everybody was flaming me for ""theft"", even after I said more than once that the system was broken, in a junk pile, and in a batch of computers donated to my school. If you cant understand that, sod off.


..But you guys wouldnt care anyway. It was just something else to insult me over. Go ahead. Flame away. It doesnt bother me anymore.

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The future is here, and all bets are off.

Not to take this thread off track, but since you made the claim I feel the need to shoot it down.

You said that you 'liberated' the computers.

'Liberated' when placed in the quotations, as you did, implies theft. You later, after we called you on being morally bankrupt, admitted that you had permission.

Seems more like you wanted to be seen as 'cool.'

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Baby Mama's Drama

Maybe he is just taking Pagewizard's advice and becoming more confident so he can get with the ladies.

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"She turned me into a newt!"
Pause
"Well I got better..."

Yeah, R, thats it exactally.


It was a joke, Zul, simple humor. But then again, you dont have a sense of humor, and I keep forgetting that. Please forgive me for my gross oversight.

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The future is here, and all bets are off.

[This message has been edited by GBK (edited January 08, 2004).]