Precisely! Can someone explain to me why my Windoze ME box keeps running this at startup every freakin' time, while the system is still in text mode (something like this anyway)?
I don't think even the leader of the M$ development team could explain this... Why? Because the directive to do this is stuck somewhere in the murky depths of the Windows registry. Who knows where it is? And if you don't know where it is, you cannot remove it. I don't even know how it got there. Maybe it was one of those times when InstallShield crashed? Maybe it's some kind of a stupid virus that my AntiVirus company doesn't bother identifying?

The point is, nobody knows. And that pisses me off. On *NIX, I know that my configuration is stored in /etc. Period. It's not either in the registry, or as an INI file in C:\WINDOWS, C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM or the directory where the program is installed.

Once again, M$ uses obscurity instead of security in their products. The Windoze registry is "obscurity" at its darkest. To put it bluntly: "I have not seen a nastier and messier data puree then the Windoze registry is." Don't believe me? Fire up regedit and take a peek at your CLSID section. Tell me if you can make sense out of it.

LOL! I don't know is they want people to pirate their software, and I don't care. I just know that no matter what "precautions" they would take to protect their software, pirates will always find a way to circumvent it.

A friend of mine received a copy of the M$ Office XP CD-ROM in a local computer newspaper. That was probably the biggest mistake M$ ever did, because he installed the sucker, went to www.cracks.am, and downloaded a 300K crack that easily bypasses M$'s latest pathetic attempt at piracy prevention (namely, the "activation wizard" that asks everything about you, apart from the size of your underwear). That crack even lets you undo the changes it made. You don't see M$ DirectX doing that. Anyway, from that day on all his buddies are now enjoying M$'s latest office suite in "unlimited trial" mode.

Microsoft programs their software because thats what the user community as a whole asks for. You can not check someone else's calender in Pine, nor can you you create tasks and get notifications in Eudora. Pop email is very useful if all you are doing is email.
If other programs, such as Star office, catch on and become popular, then viruses will soon be written for them as well. If you can run a script in it, chances are you can write a virus for it. And warning users only partially works. If you send a message to 100 users, 50 will do as you ask, 25 will consider it and 25 will ignore you completely and tell you "I dont understand" (seems to be the ones with doctorates or better.. go figure). So Viruses will always be around in the user community and if you take usability away from the users, they will find something else to use, or the President of the corp will make you change back.
I'm willing to bet everyone has administrator access to the Windows systems, anybody can and people do install programs on said computers. I'll also bet that the Linux systems are locked down, only certain people install programs on them and they are constantly monitored? Let someone like me at you linux system for a week with root access and see how stable the system is. I've burned my system at home to the ground several times trying to get the Python libraries updates.

Well I totally agree with Sewer_monkey.
My Old company with about 400 Work stations and Intranet, and of cause owen HTTP servers, was running Windoze NT servers in 1998, but then they spend more than 1 Million Dollars on change to Linux/Unix why would a big company like that spend such amount of cash, if Windoze was that good and you could like cdhjrt says just hire some school kids as system admin, as windows is so easy, in fact to be a system administrator in such a company you need to hire QULIFIED Experts even for Windoze.
Then there is the problem that every time you do something in Windoze you have to restart sometimes two times sometimes three times, I don't remember I ever have to restart linux, now just think in a small company with only one server, and everytime you have to install or modify something you need to restart the computer, how pissed off would the people on the workstations be ? Another thing if you install linux on two partitions so the home partition is on its own partition and you install most of your software on the home, then if, and I say only if you should hapen to crash linux, and you have to reinstall linux it would only take about 20 min, and all your settings and shortcuts, files, and even office would not have to be reinstalled, now if windoze crashes ( which it will do from time to time ) and yo have to reinstall then you have to reinstall everything, and I mean everything, and all your shortcuts will be lost I know you will say allways take backups, just think where outlook default to the system partition
so all e-mails would be lost ( of cause you can re-direct outlook to another partition )..
Windoze re-start, and re-start , and every time Micro$oft brings a new windoze on the market, it require more and more, and still the same speed as NT4 on a MMX300 aqnd with 64MB RAM, now try XP on 128MB ram and on PII it is like a snail, now give it a P4 and 512MB, then it is still no faster than NT4, in fact NT4 was the best Micro$oft ever came up with, no to forget the service packs, which almost daily have to upgrated now I think they are on SP8
and each SP is about 90MB in size.
Windoze is great for kids who want to learn, and play..

If you happen to crash linux is is only 20 min to re-install, and most likely ( if you have configured it properly ) you don't need to reinstall anything other than Mozilla and you fax program if you have a newer version.
The other thing is that it is very easy to get admin access in NT4 or WIN2K without password , and then change the password, try to get root access in linux without password.

Sewer_monkey
Once again, M$ uses obscurity instead of security in their products. The Windoze registry is "obscurity" at its darkest. To put it bluntly: "I have not seen a nastier and messier data puree then the Windoze registry is." Don't believe me? Fire up regedit and take a peek at your CLSID section. Tell me if you can make sense out of it.

I just tried and I'm totally confused. You are right in Linux you know where everything is

agreed... altho i can't say i know EVERYTHING about linux... then again, that's my limitation... not the fault of the OS...

What system are you installing Linux on? My PII333 takes at least an hour to get everything installed and configured. I have a laptop that I had to remove linux from because it would not even run (IBM P200 48MB ram). Yea, Linux would start and run fine but for what I need a laptop for init level 3 just was not going to cut it. As soon as you started KDE or Gnome the thing would go into disk cache mode and never stop. I ended up formatting it and putting NT on it, runs fine now. I also had to up my 333 to 256 MB ram because Gnome would not run on 128, so who is the memory hog?
And for getting root access to a system, all you need is a boot disk and you are root, you can now mount / and and get at anything you want, at least with NT you need to find a program that will access NTFS from Dos, then you have to find the administrator security token, then you have to crack it (using a cracking utility). If you have Windows 2000 you can encrypt your data and make it even more difficult to break into.
My point is, with access to the console, a hacker can get into most anything.

I've run KDE and Gnome on a K6/2-400 Laptop with 32MB of RAM, but it runs pretty slow with them on. So there is must be something wrong with the way you set it (Linux) up.

Do you always assume these type of things when you compare one product to another. BTW: What brought you over to Linux if you think Windows 2000 is better?

And for Windoze you need several days to get all the servers and 3d party applications running. At least Linux installs the main OS components and all the programs/servers you use with it. With Windoze you spend 1-1.5 hours installing it, then 5 more hours intalling Office, IIS, etc... Overall Linux installations are faster, because there's no registry to change and the filesystem is superior. When I installed Windoze 9x on my computer, I distinctly remember restarting my computer over 5 time and finally waiting for Windoze setup to set up tens of megabytes of nonsense in my Windoze registry (Class identifiers, Control Panels, e.t.c.). Lots of time wasted. I also know that the Windoze NT/2000/XP installers do the same thing, except for the newer versions (especially XP) these operations happen faster. All you do is stare at the pretty blue background while the countdown timer ticks... 120 minutes... 100 minutes... 60 minutes... 1 minute... restart... 30 minutes.... restart .... 40 minutes... restart... setting up stuff - 10 minutes... restart... finally done!

First of all, you can get a DemoLinux CD for free, that will read your NTFS partitions fine. And the kernel will not give a rodent's behind about all the NT security tokens that may be present on the filesystem. Heck, Linux even reads Mac (HFS) partitions and floppies!

Many Linux-compatible filesystems support encryption. And you have a lot of control over which algorithm to use, the key length, e.t.c. In Windoze you just say "encrypt hard drive" and hope that Billie Boy's caffeine starved VisualBasic programmers' encryption scheme actually works.
A *NIX root console, maybe. A Windoze NT/2000/XP console... ok, maybe after installing CygWin. But seriously, what are you going to do with an NT/2000 console? Heck, M$ implemented the full TCP/IP stack only with XP. So, to DOS attack someone with ping you need to upgrade to XP. On *NIX, you just "ping -f" as root from several boxes, and watch the Windoze IP stack overflow!

I've said it countless times and I'll say it again: the system is as secure a you make it.

If you don't bother putting a password on your bootloader, for example, then someone could just boot with the "init=/bin/bash" parameter, and voila, an instant root prompt. Then the culprit can set his/her UID to zero, change the root password, you name it.

this thread has been alive for 17 whole pages............
is this a record?

lol i simple havent the time to read through all of these posts but to participate in the orignal question, for me linux represents 1 thing OPEN SOURCE!!! ive been messing around with c,c++,c-api programming for a while and i would really love to be able to mess with linux the sheer fact that learning linux is going to be achallege is just another interesting challege,

as for m$ i have nothing against them i just dont like the way they seem to trying to imitate big brother, it seems the more they try and watch over the com-sys community the more the top spill over in to linux-town

Why is this thread still going?
I think it imght be time to let it rest in peace.