Gates Comdex Keynote Shows Plans, Matrix Spoof 803
An anonymous reader writes "According to Eweek, Bill Gates' keynote speech at this year's Comdex showed Microsoft's 'focus on security, spam and [the] tablet PC', including a new version of its Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server, an extension of the SmartScreen Technology for spam prevention, and the next version of the Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition operating system. But the showstopper was a filmed spoof of The Matrix (screencaps available here), with Gates and Steve Ballmer as Morpheus and Neo respectively, and including a jab at Linux."
How many times... (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously all the comments here will be about... (Score:2, Insightful)
Interesting choice of characters (Score:5, Insightful)
Those who forget history... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of you may not be aware of this, but at one point (20-25 years ago) Microsoft was seen as the little guy, fighting against the big, powerful, market-dominating, innovation-stifling IBM. Remind anyone of a certain penguin?
Microsoft has turned into everything they used to be against (and sometimes worse). Kinda reminds me of what happens to revolutionaries in the political world. Let's just hope Linus' ego can be kept in check
So according to the analogy... (Score:4, Insightful)
It only goes to show (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It all makes sense now (Score:3, Insightful)
a couple of years ago... should it be a compliment to Linux or an insult to your memory that you couldn't think of anything more recent than "a couple of years ago"...
Re:Streaming Video Links (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My god, who would want to eat that massive pill (Score:4, Insightful)
What is more important? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh and you forgot about IE. Copied from Mosaic.
Re:Interesting choice of characters (Score:4, Insightful)
1) to make linux look bad they need to make it look like Windows.
2) they can't even come up with a common error message in Linux that people actually see (because those kind of of errors get fixed in Linux). Unlike say:
"The driver for the display device got stuck in an infinite loop. This usually indicates a problem with the device itself or with the device driver programming the hardware incorrectly. Please check with your display device vendor for any driver updates. "
The last two Windows XP laptops I've used got this BSOD error with different video cards and up to date drivers, although usually they just froze up and quit working entirely. Under Linux, this problem "with the device" or "driver" disappeared.
"LINUX Kernel Error! Recompile Driver!" My ass!
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It all makes sense now (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't they have an empire to run and stuff? I'm surprised they didn't make Agent Smith be Linus or Larry Ellison (that one's probably more appropriate, though, they think of Linux as a virus, so Linus is probably more what they wanted to use).
Seriously, and I thought I slacked at work! These guys sit around shooting spoofs
Re:Bad comparison (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It all makes sense now (Score:5, Insightful)
How about last week... One of our competitors that pride themselves on being the best in the industry with Security and using Linux Servers as their flagship of security had about 100 customer's web servers root hacked.
Linux can be secure, but it just isn't as easy as the Open Source world tries to create. The Myth becomes so predominate that people install Linux and just assume that their computers are more secure, and hence never take into account updates, patches, or basic security measures.
People here simply saying that Linux is more secure is doing a DIS-service to the Linux and Open Source movement, as customers that do make the leap feel too comfortable with the 'myth of security' and then let their system get hacked right and left and flee Open Source and Linux after being burned.
Tell the truth, all systems are susceptible, no matter who makes it. All it takes is time and a smart mind to virtually get into anything.
Re:Ballmer as Neo? (Score:4, Insightful)
And the innovation pill? I have some explanations...
- It's a placebo.
- You can only take the pill after reading the EULA that's was in the package.
- The package itself is flawed and tampered with because some script kiddie got into it first.
- The pill would advertize for other pills, mostly blue and purple.
Two thumbs down. Even Keanu can act better than Gates.
Re:It all makes sense now (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a lot of truth to this. But it misses the point that, if you try, it's much easier to make Unix/Linux systems relatively secure, whereas it's an uphill battle with Windoze. Until recently, Microsoft gave the appearance that they didn't even care very much how secure their software was, regardless of whether the customer cared or not.
You are correct in that this is almost a side issue, given that it is not easy on any system, and most people don't try hard enough on any system.
But that doesn't mean that all systems are therefore equal.
Re:It all makes sense now (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm actually sorry, but I have to disagree with this.
Dropping in a Windows 2003 server or even a Windows 2000 server, applying the initial SP and patches available (which are downloaded during the setup even), set it for auto update, turn on the Firewall, turn off NetBIOS over TCP/IP for the Internet connection and leave it alone. (This also applies for Desktops with Windows2k and WindowsXP)
Because of the various components distributed with Linux, there are a mass of patches to not only initially install, but there are also many services to turn on/off if used as a server with most default variant installations. Linux is not a consolidated solution, and this is not a strong point as you have many pieces with their own security issues you have to deal with.
If you are talking about securing Windows98 or Win9x, then I agree with you completely. But don't put the DOS/Win3.x/Win9x into the 'Windows' level of insecurity - there are entirely different products. This is the year 2003, everything before the NT code base is effectively a dead OS, just like Linux of 1998 and its flaws are dead.
The NT code base, especially since Win2k is very secure, even though Microsoft was foolish in the past to leave Windows specific ports open for intranet communications.
NT was designed with security as the forefront of the base OS architecture; hence the Object/Token based security system in the NT kernel itself.
But even with all the security Microsoft is throwing at it OS products, it will be a long time before there are no patches or flaws found.
The good news with all OSes is that Security is getting better, and will continue to get better.
Re:It all makes sense now (Score:5, Insightful)
(Yes, particular daemons have been upgraded, but using straightforward Unix techniques there was zero interruption to service.)
During the last 400 days, there have been many times when we've had to take internal NT servers down to install service packs. Probably about six times that I recall, although I may have supressed the memory of the others... And these Windows machines are not even exposed to the internet, they're just at risk from worms and similar crap on a private network.
"Would you like to restart your computer now?"
"Why yes, of course, it's not like I was actually using the machine for anything!"
There are anecdotes in favor of either system but the simple fact is there is no security-critical Windows machine with an uptime of more than a couple of months, since service packs invariably require a reboot. I think that ought to tell us something.
And this is to say nothing of the outright bastardry of making people sign a new licence agreement to get a critical security fix.
It's funny, laugh ! (Score:3, Insightful)
Most people here seem to hate that spoof, and it seems just because it's MicroSoft making fun out of Linux.
I really hate MicroSoft, and I really love Linux. But I have to admit that this spoof has style. I mean, it's normal for MicroSoft to bash Linux, but this time they're doing it with style, and I find it very funny.
It's not good to take everything serious, and while I really hate MS, billg and Monkeyboy this spoof really is funny, IMHO. It's childish to say it's bad just because it's MS bashing Linux. If it were Linus and Alan Cox doing that very same video, bashing MicroSoft, everyone would praise it as the best piece of humor in IT ever...
Matrix (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How many times... (Score:2, Insightful)
this just says that they do write new code before launching new operating systems. what really bothers me is seeing bugs that affect all OSs from win98 to 2003... that means that is the same 10 years old code running in there!!!
Re:It all makes sense now (Score:3, Insightful)
And I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with this.
Turning on auto update on a production server is a good way to lose one's job. I can't tell you how many times I've seen things break when a new MS patch or service pack is applied. So when a new MS patch comes out, we can't patch immediately, since we have no idea what that patch might break. We have to provide lots of testing results with the patch first, then patch production.
In the linux world, you *usually* have the code for the patch, so if push comes to shove, you can review the changes this patch will be making to your system. Compare this to the Microsoft world, where you don't have the source, and you literally have no idea what this patch could possibly affect in your system. I recall less than six months ago, a patch applied to a production server at a friend's office caused SQL server to fail on startup. Took them 3 hours on the phone with MS to try to figure out what was going on, and finally they gave up and had to restore from a backup, and ask all users to re-enter their last 4 or 5 hours worth of work.
And even with a Win2000 server, when a new patch comes out, you have required downtime as part of the patching. All those updates and service packs require reboots, many of them require a reboot after each and every patch! If you find out at 9AM on a Wednesday that your system is vulnerable and needs patching, the soonest you could probably do it in a production environment is lunch time, if you're lucky to get a window there. More likely, you'll have to wait until outside of business hours. And forbid that you have to wait until a weekend maintenance window or something along those lines, you could be running for days without a patch applied, because if you do apply it, your server is going down. That's often not acceptable.
Oh yeah, I should mention that several linux distros also download recent patches during the installation. Mandrake, for example, does this, and I believe SuSE does too.
NT was designed with security as the forefront of the base OS architecture; hence the Object/Token based security system in the NT kernel itself.
Again, I have to disagree. NT security was inherently weak because of the fact that the server only challenges the Domain Controller once per session, so if you have a decent hacker, they can fairly easily hijack your session. Fortunately, Kerberos goes in a different direction, but that's another topic.
Re:It all makes sense now (Score:3, Insightful)
We have clients with closed systems that have run for over 600 days on NT4 servers back in 1997/1998.
However, rebooting is not a good thing for service packs and updates, I agree completely.
But it doesn't mean the OS is inherently unstable or insecure, it just means that a 30 second downtime has to be scheduled for the update.
It would be a bigger argument if the Updates required the system to be down for hours, or Windows took longer than 30secs to fully boot.
And yes, before I get flamed from the crowd, 30 seconds is pretty average on today's hardware, even Windows Servers with every feature/service imaginable turned on still boot in under 45secs on our Pentium II 400mhz systems running 256MB of RAM.
But again, I completely agree that Microsoft needs to stop the 'Please Click to Reboot' crap for updates. With the NT architecture, there are so few times this is really necessary, at the very least, restarting a service or restarting a driver or process is all that is required and the NT architecture is designed to do things like that.
If WindowsXP can flip between several Video Cards and drivers on the fly without restarting, installing an updated DLL is not something that should require a restart either.
Re:It all makes sense now (Score:3, Insightful)
You should schedule some downtime for that machine. If you don't cold-boot your machines periodically (once a year is a good rule of thumb), you may find after the next power outage that they don't boot anymore (generally because a dying disk is willing to continue to spin long after it's decided never to spin up again).