Posted on 09/18/2006 9:27:01 PM PDT by Panerai
LONDON--Bob Gleichauf, the chief technology officer in Cisco Systems' security technology group, has raised concerns that integrating Vista into a complex IT infrastructure could present problems.
"Parts of Vista scare me," Gleichauf said at the Gartner Security Summit here on Monday. "Anything with that level of systems complexity will have new threats, as well as bringing new solutions. It's always a struggle in security, trying to build for what you don't know."
Gleichauf told CNET News.com's sister site ZDNet UK that Cisco views the Microsoft operating system update, set for broad release in January, as a bearer of possible solutions to security problems, but also as a potential trigger of security issues.
"Vista will solve a lot of problems. But for every action, there's a reaction and unforeseen side-effects and mutations. Networks can become more brittle unintentionally," Gleichauf said.
The Cisco executive's remarks come as Microsoft and the European Commission move deeper into a tug-of-war over security features in Vista. The company wants regulators to set clear guidelines as to what it can include in the operating system, but the Commission will say only that Microsoft must abide by its competition rules.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.com ...
ping
That one little word is what will kill Micro$oft. There is only so much the human mind can process. Rather than go for many, simple, effecient solutions, each doing exactly one well-defined task extremely well and working together, they traditionally opt for the extremely complex overkill one. There are too many interdependencies, too tight a coupling.
Given human limitation, wheel-reinvention is inevtiable. Ever wonder why an activity as simple as booting (i.e. simply moving data from disk to RAM and then calling an entry point) takes over a minute from power-on to desktop/drive not spinning? Given machines that run, not at MHz, but GHz!?
I frequently spend more time waiting for features I don't even want in the first place to "do their thing", and solving susequent problems created by these unwanted features, than getting productive use out of my machine.
In their pride that makes no allowance for the reality of human error, they've created an unmaintainable Frankenstein. The machine is the master, in their view. The user is the servant.
2.5 GB DVD... I recall it needing like 6GB of disk space... I like my XP... I am currently using Ubuntu for my desktop at work (my own choice) and XP on my work laptop. I really am liking Ubuntu... So many free programs it is unbelievable...
I thought about that once. Given my processor, I should have been able to process over 60 billion commands and read over 1.8 GB from my hard drive in the optimum theoretical 30 second XP startup time. My entire OS install plus the programs that run at startup aren't anywhere close to 1.8 GB.
A large portion of that time is redundant. The BIOS discovers your hardware and creates hooks for it. Once it hands off operations to the OS, the OS then repeats the process again, sometimes actually using the BIOS values to confirm it's own findings.
Given that most OSes today perform their own hardware discovery, BIOS POST operations should be cut drastically, if not eliminated altogether. There are several projects currently in development that will do this. Some full-featured OS setups have been timed to boot in under 30 secs with these new BIOSes.
Given my processor, I should have been able to process over 60 billion commands and read over 1.8 GB from my hard drive in the optimum theoretical 30 second XP startup time. My entire OS install plus the programs that run at startup aren't anywhere close to 1.8 GB.
Both work well; slight advantage to Ubuntu IMHO.
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When <pick your favorite application> is part of the OS there is a serious problem.
This has been MS's problem all along - throw all the app garbage in the OS to create a faster, flashier app with the downside of breaking all known design principles not even to mention the anti-trust implications.
They lived by that sword and now they are dying by the same sword. In the 90's they won the browser and desktop wars by loading up the OS with application code. Now they're paying for it in the 2000's by having a unwieldy, unmaintainable "kernel" which is not even a kernel at all but a collection of apps, display managers, window managers, wizards and the like.
Vista may be their Waterloo. It's looking like that now, at least to me.
I see you meant Spam Filtering as an example to prove a more general point - you and I are in complete agreement.
I am damn close to wiping Windows off my parents' laptop and replacing it with Ubuntu Linux, just so they'll stop calling me and complaining about how slow both the machine and "the Internet" are.
Can you give any possible technical explanation for how the operating system on a given PC could affect the speed of data from the Internet to the network interface?
I've considered doing the same for my dad, who only really visits one financial website anyway.
Have you tried the Ubuntu Live CD on their computer?
Sure: Windows has a lot of internal "code fat," in addition to having to run necessary applications like antivirus, that take up CPU/system resources and slow down the broadband conneciton.
I couldn't compare XP on that system because it won't even run on a lowly K-7.
Yes. I'm a programmer. But that's a LOT of horsepower being used just to start a program. OS X, with all its power and advanced GUI system, boots much faster than XP on the same hardware.
Windows spyware phoning home. Botnet trojan participating in a DDOS. More innocent is simply the design of the network stack. OS X uses the time-proven BSD stack, and Linux's stack is also good, but Windows XP's simply sucks, an attempt to fit a limited version of the BSD stack into the quite different Windows API (which is why Vista has a completely new networking stack).
As a quick test, I just ran what I think is the same speed measurement test you ran (speakeasy.net) on four configurations: my main laptop, which is a P4 Centrino 1.7GHz with 2GB of 533MHz DDR2 on XP Pro SP2; an Ubuntu browser appliance running on VMWare Player under XP on that same system; my backup laptop, which is an AMD Athlon 1.8GHz with 512MB of 400MHz DDR, also on XP SP2, and the same backup laptop booted to a PCLinuxOS 0.93 LiveCD. The Ubuntu virtual machine and PCLinuxOS LiveCD had no applications running other than the browsers (Firefox and Konqueror(?), respectively); I did not bother to shut down any applications on either laptop running XP. I performed ten speed tests to each of three of the possible testing servers under each configuration.
As expected, I noted no statistically significant difference among any of the four tested configurations for either upstream or downstream speed. On the newer laptop, Firefox never used more than 2% of system resources during the tests in XP. On the older laptop, Firefox peaked at about 30% of system resources in testing. I don't know how to monitor such things under Linux but I would expect similar results.
I respectfully submit that the large disparity you noted was either an anomaly in the single test or a problem with your Win 98 setup. I admit that I haven't used Win 98 in about five years, nor do I recommend it, but I do not believe it will process a 10MB data stream at less than 4MB. Linux may have certain speed advantages in certain situations, but at broadband speeds I do not think they come into play.
Yes, any application consuming significant network bandwidth will leave less available for a speed test, but then that test isn't a valid measurement of bandwidth. Such applications should be terminated prior to running a valid test.
More innocent is simply the design of the network stack.
See my post #19. Such factors may come into play at gigabit Ethernet speeds, and I would be inclined to believe any statistically valid tests that were performed to prove such, but not at common <10MB broadband Internet speeds.
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