I am engaged in a battle with this guy on a private forum. He works for MS and is able to refut alot of the stuff I say, but I think I made a good point that he said was ridiculous.

We were discussing audit logs, and I basically asked him how to audit object access on FAT32 and told him he couldn't, thereby throwing it in his face.

He laughed and said that it indicated my lack of knowledge on the platform as there was no good reason to use it over NTFS anyhow. I really would like to get him on this one, so I was hoping that maybe someone here could help out.

Thanks in advance!

I'm not sure what you're looking for... an excuse to use FAT over NTFS? The only two reasons I ever had for using FAT were a) being able to use a Win98 bootdisk to fix things or access files if the system broke (more important for NT4 than 2k or XP), and b) being able to write data safely from linux.
But if you're in a situation where object access is a security concern, why would you be using a filesystem that doesn't have any kind of access permissions? I don't think you can win an argument on those grounds. You're basically asking why a filesystem designed several years ago doesn't support newer security features.

If you actually want to log accesses to files, it's possible regardless of what filesystem you use, but Microsoft don't provide a tool to do it - filemon and diskmon from sysinternals.com can do something like this.

I think the NTFS object auditing does.


Hmm. Now I'm going after cmd not being a real shell and only being a DOS VM. I think I may get him here.

Sorry, I meant MS don't provide a tool to do it for any filesystem. Obviously they do give you a way to log access to NTFS

CMD is not a DOS VM, COMMAND would be closer to that, as it runs under NTVDM. CMD.EXE is a 32 bit process, and has a lot of features to make it more like a real shell (it is nowhere near as powerful as, say, bash, but it does a lot more than DOS ever did). In fact, I used to run XP with the shell set to CMD.EXE so I didn't have to look at that godawful start bar.

Threads asking to help you prove someone else wrong in an argument not even Linux related or Linux on a technical level belong in our General forum, not our technical Linux forums. Please try to place your threads in the most appropiate forum.

If you don't program for MS it seems to be a futile effort.

The main points still are. MS costs, the command line is crap , tweaking the sytem is crap. You can't modify the system to your liking. Remote server admin has 3 million buttons with too much overhead to find them. The Registry is untransparent and just messy. Ther is obviously some logic involved, but too complicated to be user friendly. His company dominates the world in some predefined boring look.

Many of the issues against MS are policy related. every time someone comes up with stuff that improves MS, they rebuild it and force companies out of business. Netscape, now zip is included. The whole filemanager issues etc.

For example I disable the fecking Messanger, then I have to test Outlook for a customer and that fecking thing pops up again. They try to force you to use their stuff.

They do an OS and user software and constantly force you to be confronted with their stuff. IE being one issue, that messenger the next than the fecking passport crap.

If they would do just OS, there wouldn't be that much of an issue, but no they try to force you to use their shady software crap too. Constantly.

It can NOT BE that ONE company controls how the whole world exchanges information.

Now why the fuck should they control how I bank, how I am identified etc. They are a company not a fecking elected government.

Rant over

woot on, man. Nice rant.

You say:
and then
I don't follow. In what sense is not programming for MS futile? Thousands of people seem to be making software that doesn't run on Win32, and I don't see any of them whinging that their efforts are futile. If you mean writing software to make money, then how can you complain that MS charge for their software?

The command line is far from crap nowadays - what's really missing are some of the extra tools, but you can find Win32 versions of those. I have sed, awk, grep, cut, zcat, less, which, xargs, you name it, all win32 native. But hey, if you don't like it, install Cygwin, or 4NT. The command line you were given is not the only one available to you. As for tweaking the system, I don't seem to have any trouble making the system match my working style. Hundreds of people with various themes, or alternate shells, don't seem to be bitching about how impossible it is to get away from explorer. What exactly are you trying to tweak that you can't?

I agree somewhat. They've pushed a few wrong buttons with me trying to force me to run Messenger, with deceitful claims that it's needed for Outlook Express, but there are (at least) two ways to stop it running. One is through setting the policies, and the other is renaming or removing Messenger. Neither one is hard to do, and there are simple step-by-step instructions for both easily found on the web.

I use two different XP systems, and neither of them run Messenger, and they only run IE when I specifically order them to (or use software that uses an embedded IE component). If I click an internet shortcut, Opera loads. How have they forced me to use their software? They have created a system to try and make it easy for the clueless to operate without getting in their way (in some cases they have even succeeded). They have also made it possible (not always simple, but possible) for the clueful to make the computer operate the way they want. The only problem is when the user falls in somewhere between clueless and clueful - i.e: smart enough to know what they want, but apparently not smart enough to do a little investigation into how it's done. 30 minutes with google would solve most of your Windows complaints, but it's much more fun to pretend that it's all crap than admit you can't (be bothered to) figure it out.

The only point I can totally agree with you on is Microsoft's predatory nature - they do have a tendency to crush the competition, but that is not a trait solely restricted to Microsoft - it's a product of the 'money is everything' focus of the US, and it's only more obvious with them because they're so huge.

It's one thing to disagree with their policy, it's quite another to make up bullshit to make your disagreement seem more valid.

Sorry if this sounds confrontational - I just can't stand seeing baseless accusations go unchallenged. The best thing you can do for yourself and others is become platform agnostic, and learn to use every system. Learn to appreciate the good things, and pinpoint the bad, and when you've done that you might be in a position to improve some of the horrible linux software out there

What I ment it is futile, to argue with a guy actually programming for MS. He will by default know more than you.

MS costs. It's a disadvantage if you consider you can get some things for free. I don't mind charging for software at all. Good software should cost money. But in the context of a linux guy arguing with a MS guy, he can use it as an argument, if the original poster wants to.

MS forcing on it's software. Take the IE. The US had a court case about it. I doubt I am wrong here.

All i tried to express to the original poster was that MS will by default have also good programs and good programmers. Their _management_ policies are though a different issue.

The issue is very simple: Do you want to allow a company, with 92% market share to grow even more? You might have lived in nice times in your lives. But history shows that too much power corrupts. That's why anti-trust laws have been made. I would conclude from this it is a generally accepted fact that too big ain't good. It supresses honest competition.

hello

[edit - oops! this is really long]

let us not forget that M$ is a company built on lies and deception (DOS anybody?).

i jest, but there is truth to it.

The principal problem is the way in which M$ treats its users. Just like nixon and kissinger, M$ appears to see the 'average citizen' as an unfortunate inconvenience that must be placated in order to 'get on with business'. For so long as the 'average citizen' continues to vote/buy to their favour the 'average citizen' will remain utterly unimportant.

Again like nixon and kissinger, M$ calculatedly encourage ignorance. It was the general ignorance of the population that allowed the nixon administration to illegally cluster-bomb millions of inocent Cambodians. And it is the general ignorance of the population which allows M$ to retain its (partially) dishonestly acquired market share.

It is all about power. the user of an M$ slOperalting System is forced to cede power to the corporation ('treacherous computing'?). On the contrary, GNU/Linux, and open source software generally, works according to an antithetical ideology - the user should have the power (don't like the code? then change it, or ask someone who knows how to do it for you). Another nixon/kissinger comparison ( , sorry): if you were around at the time and found the idea of America illegally bombing Cambodia offensive, then you could have done nothing about it - because you wouldn't have known it was happening. So, how much offensive code does Sindows install on you PC? who knows.

CroMagnon wrote:

This is about the potential of the Sindows command-line. I won't dispute the potential (as i am totally unqualified to do so), but how many Sindows users know that these tools exist? it is quite impossible to google for "win32 grep" if you are completely unfamiliar with the term "grep". a bigger issue with the Sindows command-line is the fact that M$ actively discourage its use. the 'Sindows way' is to use the keyboard as little as possible - GUI all the way. GNU/Linux is the opposite - it actively encourages use of the command-line, and nurses new users into it. How long would we expect a new GNU/Linux user to go before they find themselves at a terminal? a week? However long it takes, once they get there, they will find a truly abundant amount of support - most man pages are extensive and clear, there are literally countless web pages devoted to introducing new users to the command-line in very straight-forward language, and then there is LQ and similar forums where a new user can genuinely expect to have things explained within minutes. This is where the true power of the GNU/Linux command-line is to be found.

With regards to 'tweaking' Sindows. I am told that XP made it impossible to turn off 'tooltips' (i can't verify this, but i trust the source). Equally, i find the idea of a mandatory "my documents" directory truly offensive - and as far as i know, it is impossible to delete this, or (in XP) even move it. Please take a few seconds to consider the implications of this directory (and also please forgive the fact that i come from a literary background - this may seem trivial to others). The word "my" explicitly refers to the speaker/writer (i cannot say "my" when i am refering to "you"). In this case the word "my" was writen by M$. So who owns the 'documents' in said directory? Such practice is symtomatic of a company that believes it retains ownership of, and all rights to, a product it has sold while the buyer has no rights whatsoever.

CroMagnon wrote:
this is true enough but falls short of the mark. "criminally predatory" is more accurate, but i am just being picky.

CroMagnon wrote:
Same here, save that i am responding to a defence which may not be "baseless", but is certainly too strong.

CroMagnon wrote:
Although this was directed at another writer, i would like to explain why this is not possible for me.

M$ are evil. As far as i know they have not been responsible for any deaths, unlike some other of the worlds most lucrative corporations, which keeps them shy of the 'top of the heap'. But they have demonstrated that they are completely indifferent to any suffering their actions may cause and have consistently shown a total disregard for the ethical standards which govern the lives of the vast majority of people on this planet. Wrong is Wrong, and no amount of capital reward can alter this. Nor can an immoral act be justified on the basis of the profit it generates.

Now, since i believe that M$ is overtly unethical, and since i beleive that complacency towards an immoral act is equivalent to complicity in that act, i cannot in good conscience become "platform agnostic".

Finally, regarding "some of the horrible linux software out there". Most GNU/Linux users who openly criticise M$ do not do so on the basis of the vast amount of clumsy, barely-if-at-all functional, third-party software available for the Sindows platform. We criticise on the basis of M$'s own applications. And all of us, regardless of what our beliefs are, cannot help but express our own biases. Rather than becoming "platform agnostic", it is far more productive to treat all opinions, even those we agree with, with a certain amount of scepticism and do our utmost to ensure that the beliefs we have, or acquire, are founded on actual evidence rather than simple prejudice.

thank you for reading my rant

. -ant.

DrNeil: I misunderstood your first comment, so I'll apologise for that. I don't think cleoro stood a chance arguing with this guy in the first place, as he has been fed a lot of anti-windows propoganda that isn't true (like the CMD/COMMAND thing - a lot of people still think CMD is DOS).


I think you are misunderstanding the basis of the court case. MS was in court because they were using the prevalence of their OS to win market share for another application (their browser). They were not in court because people were "forced" to use their browser. As I said, IE does not run on my system until I tell it to (which is less than once a month). Have I been forced to use IE? Nope. To an extent, I am forced to have the various components on my drive, but that's all.

fourleggedant:
Some nice points in your rant...

how is it that you think MS is built on lies and deception because of DOS?

I don't think so. MS take the same approach as Apple (though less effectively) that user ignorance is not an obstacle to be demolished, but rather a fact to be taken into consideration. Most users are ignorant, and they have no qualms about staying that way. Try to explain to someone even something as simple as why they have two drive letters (C: and D but only one hard drive, and watch their eyes glaze over. They're not interested in learning, they just want the computer to (sometimes magically) do what they want.

True to an extent - in that you don't have the ability to modify the code directly or remove cerain parts of the system MS has deemed necessary (it bugs me that a core, unkillable part of XP is called "remote procedure call"), but I don't see how I am forced to cede anything at all. MS have no power over my machine, even if they think they do due to legally questionable EULAs.

I agree to a point - there could be anything in that code, and who knows? You're right. Now who knows what code is in the average Linux system? Just reading the questions on this board, it appears that at least 80% (and more like 95-99%) of people using Linux have no desire to read the documentation, much less the code for each program. And I assume you're familiar with the 'hide exploit code in the compiler' trick? If RedHat wanted to, they could have full control over each and every RedHat box, and no-one would ever know unless someone pored over the raw machine code of the gcc binary. Coincidentally, this is the only way someone could find out whether MS has any exploit code hidden in their system.


MS actively discourage the use of the command line? How so, when it has been improved with every iteration of Windows? The average user is not 'introduced' to the command line, because it's far beyond their needs, but if you want documentation, you can type "help" into a command prompt and you are given an excellent starting point. What happens if I type 'help' into a linux machine? If I'm running bash, I get a list of all the shell builtins for bash, not exactly a glowing starting point. Perhaps a friend tells me I need to use 'man' ("man? what the hell does that mean?"), so I type 'man' and get asked "What manual page do you want?". If you ask me, this is worse than the Windows command line, from the point of view of a new user. As you said, a user unfamiliar with grep doesn't know he can google for grep. Likewise, that same user doesn't know he can type 'man grep'. The man pages are (usually) great, and packed full of information, but for a new user, these things are complicated and scary - sometimes the entire first page can be filled with just the options complete with ['s ]'s and |'s all over the place. I can just imagine the new user's reaction looking at the man page for 'transcode': What the fuck? This is the reaction of all of my non-geek friends when they see me typing something in a terminal.

Linux does absolutely nothing to 'nurse' new users to the command line. Their first exposure to it is usually pure confusion because someone on a message board told them typing the nonsenical looking magical incantation "/etc/init.d/network restart" might solve their problem. Another user might recommend "rm -rf /" to them as a joke, or purely out of malice. How is a new user to know the difference? "Gee Tim, you're an idiot - you should have type 'man rm' before doing that!"? The linux command line, while powerful, is far from simple and well documented - it is arcane and cryptic, as a result of history. 'Grep' to search? 'ls' to show files? cat? bash? sed? awk? These are not intuitive or self-describing names. It takes a hefty time investment to learn to use it effectively, and as I pointed out earlier, most non-geek users are simply not interested in devoting that much to time to learning about a system. There are people who think their operating system is "Windows97".


[/quote]and then there is LQ and similar forums where a new user can genuinely expect to have things explained within minutes. This is where the true power of the GNU/Linux command-line is to be found.[/quote]

LQ is great - I have received semi-instant help on my questions, and I have been able to help a good number of people with their problems. But a new linux install does not tell people this site exists, and there is no guarantee their problem will be solved.

Besides that, there are similar sites available for Windows problems too! Experts-Exchange, for example, is the one I've found the best answers on.


The problem with tooltips is that it is a per-application setting. If an application doesn't give you a way to turn them off, you are more or less stuck with them. I actually believe you could exploit the weak security of the Windows message stack to turn them off if you could find exactly the right message to send to exactly the right handle, but this is certainly too complicated for most people.
I usually find tooltips are more useful than not - only the balloon tips bug me ("Get a passport!", "Clean your desktop!"), and they are quite possible to disable.


Do you find the idea of a user home directory as offensive? If you don't like 'my documents', save your files somewhere else. If you want 'my documents' to be called 'MS-Sucks' and be stored on Z: drive, this is easily doable. How much time did you invest in trying to find out whether this was possible? This is my biggest gripe - someone can't see a simple way to do something in Windows after five seconds looking, and starts complaining that Microsoft are "forcing me to comply" and "not letting me do what I want with my computer" when they haven't even bothered to find out whether they could do it another way. Here's a hint: in explorer, viewing the 'desktop' level (the top node), right click on my documents and go to properties. If you couldn't find a way to do something in Linux after five seconds of looking, what would you do? Complain that Linus is forcing you to use /home?

I'm not even going to address your bizarre conspiracy theory about MS owning your documents because of a naming decision, except to say that when you look at another user's directory, it calls them "Sue's Documents" or "Bob's Documents", not "Microsoft's Documents". I too hate the phrase "My Documents" (probably for different reasons to you - I hated having to deal with "Progra~1" and "Mydocu~1"), that is why my 'documents' directory is called "W:\Docs" and my "Program Files" is "C:\Apps".


I understand your point about MS and their unethical behaviour. I have despised many of their past actions myself. But the OS world is changing. I've seen posts on LQ from users who can barely tell a partition from a mouse pointer! Pure computer illiterates, using Linux, a system designed by geeks for geeks! And others are helping them, and they are enjoying the new system. It says a lot when someone at that level of (in)experience has even HEARD of linux, much less has it installed on their system. Linux is on the move, getting more popular every day, and Microsoft knows this. Their immoral actions in the past have cost them dearly, and they are finally beginning to wake up act in a competitive manner again. Every time they place artificial restrictions on users, two or three more people become fed up with it, and move to another system, and they are changing their attitude, slowly but surely. There is still the PR side, spewing lies and deceit, as all marketing departments do, but on the technical side, the system is improving at a rapid pace.

Perhaps you think I am using the plethora of unfinished/unusable software out there to unfairly criticise the Linux kernel or something, but that is not what I meant to say. The linux kernel is nothing without applications to run on it. To consider a system that can be used by people who have no interest in learning to compile a kernel, or type confusing commands into a terminal, you must have applications that they can understand. Microsoft's apps (and some third party apps) have been designed and tested extremely well. They are easily understood by a huge percentage of users, for their everyday tasks. It would be an incredible waste for linux software developers to put on blinders and ignore all the work done on the windows platform because of some perceived ideological superiority. Am I saying everyone should run Windows? Not at all. Am I slamming linux for having too many unfinished third party products? Not at all. I am saying that to improve the free software we want to use, it is stupid to ignore the UI work done on Windows (and all other systems), especially for a reason as vague as "MS is evil". If you don't want to support MS, shit, just copy their software. I don't care! I pay for it myself, because I can see that XP is a decent system (the best Windows they've made so far - if they can stop with all the stupid insecure choices, Longhorn will be even better).

Well [the prevalence of their OS to win market share for another application (their browser)]

Exactly what I ment. Led into using. Kinda forcing in a way. But if you go all technical, then forcing is the wrong word in principal.


Of course I can supress it, BUT i get constantly annoyed with it. And others will be led into using it, by default. Its the first they see so they use it. MS has the OS and programs on it and as every company would probably do, lead you to use them. Absolutely understandable from their perspective.

But from my perspective, I see a company thats too big and overshoots the mark.