No, the reason that your post is unworthy is exactly that line. It instantly casts doubt on everything you said.
Ron, c'mon now, take a look at this:
Most people cannot properly comment because either they are still partially dependent on Windows or have never used anything else. Please, if you fit either criteria, don't comment.
(someone who might use XP all the time will not notice due to Microsoft's conditioning).
4) Bad documentation - Wait! There is no useful documentation! Please, don't start on MSDN ...
Please, don't post the typical responses ... like I said, if you've never used anything else then you shouldn't even be replying in this topic. The typical windows user has computing tunnel vision ... its a sad thing.
Now, I know you're vehemently anti-Windows, but c'mon, this is loaded language. Now, I'll step back and admit, Glove's responses to what I said definitely are making me re-evaluate how I thought he was approaching the topic (I thought he was going to be a Warrior for Unix, and by Warrior, I mean the member). We'll see as time moves forward, but I think you're just being silly.
I used to talk like this until I tried and used something else.
Huh?
Windows is consistent, agreed. KDE and Gnome are not the only window managers available. I personally love Window Maker.
RRAS likes handles rules on a per nic basis ... I haven't found a way to do NAT on one nic in Windows 2000 ADV Server.
I don't do network programming at that level, but because of the multilayered nature of drivers in Windows starting with WDF (Windows Driver Foundation) model in Windows 2000, I'm sure you can do something like that. Unfortunately the DDK (Driver Development Kit) is not publically available - I believe you need to be an MSDN subscriber to get access to it.
Please see: kldload, kldunload, kldstat and my favorite, securelevel
I can forcefully load, unload, and even view loaded kernel modules with builtin system tools. With securelevels, I can prevent modules, firewall rules, and certain device nodes from being loaded, modified, and written to during system run time. No other OS I know of has such a feature ... very handy. Unfortunately X likes to write to /dev/io and so I cannot even run the system at securelevel 1. These securelevels cannot be lowered during multi user run time. I do not know of any ways to do this in Windows...Sysinternals has some tools like Process Explorer but thats the best I can think of.
For example:
%kldstat
Id Refs Address Size Name
1 14 0xc0400000 4033b4 kernel
3 2 0xc080a000 20448 sound.ko
4 1 0xc082b000 3f44 acpi_ibm.ko
5 17 0xc082f000 6057c acpi.ko
6 1 0xc0890000 41c4 wlan_tkip.ko
7 1 0xc0895000 6fe4 wlan_ccmp.ko
8 1 0xc1ef5000 18000 linux.ko
9 1 0xc4079000 5000 snd_ich.ko
I'm not sure what the availability of these kinds of things will be, but I am sure that with the movement of drivers into userspace, that many more drivers/modules will be able to be forcibly loaded/unloaded at runtime. Now, you cannot unload the kernel; nor can you unload the graphical environment (obviously). I can't think of an instance where I would need to, though; I've only two or three times ever had to resort to a tool such as the Recovery Console, and that's on my desktop computer, not my laptop, although that number may be moderated by the fact that I usually maintain two separate installations of Windows as well as a Linux distro on that particular computer.
Man pages are great and they usually list indepth examples. I learned a lot about network programming in Unix just from the man pages. They also have "intro" man pages for topics. See, for example, netintro
Unfortunately I cannot come up with man pages that I have found woefully inadequate, but particularly when I was *brand new* to Linux, some of the operating system features themselves were not well-documented (although I suppose that could have been due to the distro itself). The experience pretty much tainted man pages for me.
MSDN is very frequently a fantastic resource that you dismissed out of hand.
Are you sure its all gone? Might popup again one day
Yes, I'm sure. I monitor these kinds of things. How do you think I discovered it anyway? It had bypassed MS anti-spyware and it broke ad-aware.
Doesn't make it alright for Microsoft to ignore vulnerabilities.
What amazes me is a project like OpenBSD, totally volunteer driven, has a team of code auditers that look for bugs and security vulnerabilities. That's not even the beginning to security in OpenBSD. I invite you to read their security policy: http://www.openbsd.org/security.html
Does Microsoft have a team of code auditers? I'd wager not...they seem to only respond to problems.
Well, there is a slight difference in culture between Windows and OpenBSD users, I'm sure -- that OpenBSD users use it because of its security.
But yes, MS does have a team of code auditors, I have read about them in their published works. With as much code as they have, though, it's questionable whether code review is as effective with them.