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I don't have experience with Red Hat. My experience with
MS is improving quickly. The announcements now come fast
and the Windows Upgrade process is easy. That's a desktop
perspective, but I do have SQL Server running locally, and
so far, so good. When the Love bug hit the wires, we had
some serious problems here. Since then, our IT department
has become not politely but strenuously insistent, to the
point of Draconian measures when needed to get the attention
of the droid owners. Hopefully, everyone has gotten the
message that security is a serious business issue. But have they?
Here is the kind of thing that frustrates the IT folks:
"It's no secret that the advantages of upgrading operating systems or
application software has diminished quite significantly over the last few
years. If you look back over history, there were great advantages from one
release to another. You just don't get that anymore. You just don't get the
bang for your buck switching from 2000 to XP.
--Toni Duboise"
It's just dead wrong and spreading the idea contributes to
the problems by insisting there is no value
in getting a better operating system. XP is waaaay better
than 2000 and one can see that easily by dropping some
more RAM into the machine and watching what happens.
Security is better but not perfect. There is something
to be said for killing Outlook Express whereever one
finds it. Scripting inside mail systems is a bad brew.
So part of the problem is the old legacy not having been
fully patched, part of it is competence in that sloppy
code gets released, part of it is institutional in that
sloppy code isn't discovered early enough, part of it is
architectural in that the trade offs of ease and security
aren't fully understood and implemented, and part of
it is cultural, in that the web culture has yet to
mature to the point to realize the deep nature of its
interdependencies and the folly of unsavory or ill-informed
opportunism.
Everyone is learning. We need to encourage collboration
on solving these problems, learn to improvise and work
together quickly, and stop stomping on each others lines
or riffs just to get more of the spotlight on ourselves.
A theatre troup banishes an actor who does that and any
technician that helps them. A jam band beats them up. ;-)
len
From: Rick Marshall [mailto:rjm@zenucom.com]
that's why i primarily use windows 2000/xp and redhat linux distros -
redhat in particular is very fast at getting fixes out - so they
obviously recognise the problem from a business perspective. ximian has
an alternative that is almost as good. microsoft does the job, but i
find it's response a bit patchy although i haven't done the stats.
basically i watch the announcements from cert and then how long to get a
fix from the vendor.
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