Re: dear mr big un

From: Richard Atkinson (big@un.com)
Date: 08/02/02 

From: "Richard Atkinson" <big@un.com>
Date: Fri, 2 Aug 2002 10:09:44 +0100

Alpete,

I actually prefer Solaris x86 for my sins.
My first system was SunOS 4 running on a Sparc before moving to Solaris
Sparc & x86.
I've been at the Sun Offices in Sale, Manchester a few times on training
courses and their offices in Brussels and Luxembourg.

The thing about Sun and Microsoft for me really is that Sun products are
just not desktop systems. You can't give a secretary a unix box and tell
them to get on with it.

Microsoft also lost a golden opportunity when it failed to develop an
MS-Office suite for unix. I've tried the IE & OExpress for unix and it
works great, all the windows functionality and even, right mouse button &
ctrl-c and ctrl-v work.

Also working as an administrator dealing with office desktops, I saw MS
overtake Sun & PCNFS a long time ago. Even Novell tried integrating with
Sun but little came of it.

Everyday people will have to get a lot more IT skilled to be able to use
unix as their desktop and unix will need a lot more desktop integration
tools to attract more use.

Sad to say though (for IT diversification), I think we're beyond that now.
The market differentiation is too great unless someone is willing to spend a
lot of cash trying to break the market up and move it. However, that isn't
to say someone won't come up with a good idea.

The other thing that might've made IT life interesting is if DEC had made
VMS opensource - I know plenty of VMS geeks who would've loved to run their
own VMS systems - that sort of competition in the opensource arena would
have been more interesting and challenging than the play off of *nix OS's.

"alpete" <alpete@usa.com> wrote in message
news:6fb8ff27.0208012211.5109ba06@posting.google.com...
> i use red hat linux at home. i roll out windows at work. neither are
> very secure out of the box honestly. the goal is to secure both for
> normal every day use as servers, workstations or whatever. Windows is
> MUCH more difficult to secure for both local logons and network
> intrusions. However, for office applications like MS Money or Office,
> I don't see any better alternatives. However you will pay a price for
> going this route. You will begin with licensing fees for the OS. You
> will add considerable extra time securing the system or accept the
> risk of not securing it. You will then pay for each individual
> application you want to use with the OS, plus extras for backup
> software and other maintenance utilities that work better than the
> ones delivered with Windows. You will likely pay for an upgrade or
> two for a few of these applications. You will always pay more for
> hardware to run Windows, or you will pay more in performance. Then
> you will pay in stability. Finally you will pay because you will not
> learn about what causes the problems you encounter or how to fix them
> except that "General Protection Fault" means you will at least reboot
> if not re-install your system from scratch.
>
> I think I could say more about windows.
>
> download linux for free, however, and you have at your disposal a much
> higher quantity and better quality tools at your disposal out of the
> box. For instance, windows did not ship with tools to build a
> stateful firewall last time i checked. Apache had a bad run with
> buffer overflow exploits a few weeks back, but the fixes started
> coming out before anyone reported actually getting hacked. linux is
> free to be understood at the source code level. that means you can
> fix anything you find wrong and anything you don't like if you're
> smart enough. and if you're really smart you can start finding out
> who to ask to fix it for you :) your input about features to add or
> improve actually counts in the linux arena. You will enjoy the ability
> to remotely administer every facet of machine operation without the
> necessity of a terminal services or vnc type environment that really
> only works well over fast connections.
>
> linux is worth the challenge.
>
> alpete