Carterpants

Today, our hosting provider IXWebhosting took one in the shorts in the form of a massive server outage. Email, web, and database servers were unavailable for nearly 5 hours for an undisclosed reason. How lovely.

We’ve had little issues with our hosting provider over the last few years, so I guess it was all a matter of time. I was impressed with their blog/twitter updates keeping customers apprised of the situation, though.

I had a cool post about the recent “here you have” virus that is ripping through Windows user’s machines, but it was lost during the outage so I’ll just paraphrase.

At my place of employment we have a monthly Java Users Group meeting to discuss industry topics affecting development within our organization, and today the topic was malware/virus intrusion. The meeting started at 1:30pm, and shortly before I hopped in the elevator I got this rather suspicious looking email. Since I don’t have an extra chromosome or chase cars, I certainly didn’t click on it. Within seconds other employees popped their heads our of their cubes stating they received a similar email. Sounded like a good old fashion email worm found its way in, just moments before I sat in on a discussion covering the very topic of concern. Irony at its finest.

During the discussion the presenter stepped through the process of a few well known bot-net attacks and how they took over a user’s Windows machine. I kept my tongue bit until he was finished, and then had my hand in the air ready to ask a question.. or should I say, begin pointing out the obvious that Linux would be impervious to this attack. To my surprise another attendee who got the mic first beat me to the punch. Between the two of us we quickly had the guy circling around typical Windows fanboi jargon, shooting him down at every twirl. He had that look in his eye that said, “crap, Linux folk, Ballmer save me!”

It was then that I realized something.. something that, now that I look back over the years, I’ve known all along but was just too blind to see. Those in the IT Security business LOVE Windows as Microsoft is practically guaranteeing their job security! After the quick spread and proliferation of this latest worm, it would seem the market for Windows security staff solidified a bit more.

The only reason I still have a Windows partition is thanks to the impending Final Fantasy 14 release in September. Wine can only do so much with games developed with DirectX, and often the result is an experience slightly lower than that on a native Windows install. So be it. Emulation is emulation. OpenGL games though, you know that graphic engine not weighted down by proprietary Micro$oft licensing sludge, are a totally different story.

I’ve played a few native Linux games that were able to stretch my NVidia GT250 to the max, and I’ve always wondered how a complex OpenGL game would benchmark on Linux vs Windows. Apparently Phoronix can read my thoughts, as they’ve just published the Windows 7 vs Ubuntu OpenGL benchmarking results.

Dare I say, booya!

Hell, even some DirectX only games are being played on the latest version of Wine flawlessly. Take for example, StartCraft 2. Honestly, I should just put that poor partition out of its misery. Apparently there is really no need to keep it around!

Phoronix has released their latest benchmark results comparing Ubuntu 10.04 versus Windows 7 Professional. As I expected, Ubuntu spanks Windows in a majority of the tests. Why are you still using Windows? Wait that’s a misnomer, no one uses Windows they fight it.

Check out the performance results for yourself.

I came across this article and I couldn’t help but laugh. Yet another mouthpiece that spews meaningless statistics trying to enforce Micro$oft’s delusion that they produce a superior operating system.

First let’s crack into their stats. “9 out of 10 people choose Windows”. No you clowns, 9 out of 10 people buy their computers from big box stores who have been strong armed into bundling Windows with the hardware. This is especially true for laptops despite the once prominent surge of Linux powered netbooks. Show me any store that offers a laptop (or desktop for that matter) without an operating system. Yeah, didn’t think so. But why is that? Simple. That “superior operating system” requires the installation and configuration of anti-virus and malware protection software, which companies love to sell as additional services in-store. For example, Best Buy quickly snuffed out the Linux powered netbooks once they realized they couldn’t make another $100 on “customizations” (aka virus/malware software) per sale. That, and their sales force can barely spell Linux let alone speak to its benefits compared to Windows.

Furthermore, these numbers don’t take into account the number of system sales from these big box stores that are never actually registered with Microsoft. Sure, 9 out of 10 people will buy the hardware that’s already infected with Windows, but how many of those immediately blow away the hard drive and install Linux? Where are those stats? It would seem to be simple math honestly. (Number of sold units w/Windows) – (number of registered Windows users) = those who said screw this insecure, bloated, efficiency-vampire of an O/S. For such a superior company I would think this 2nd grade math wouldn’t be tough to calculate. Or perhaps they just don’t want you to hear that side of it.

Really all these stats show is that 9 out of 10 computers purchased have Windows on them. Not that people are actively choosing Windows, or only buying machines BECAUSE they have Windows. If this were the case, and Windows was truly superior, then why do 99% of all supercomputers run *nix? Why is the internet powered by FOSS gems like Apache and not IIS? What category is Windows superior in!? Desktop gaming, perhaps? Well that’s a niche market anyhow and would certainly not account for “9 out of 10″ computer users. Actually with Wine I’ve been able to play Guild Wars at max resolution with all effects turned on, and I’ve been very impressed. We could get into the whole DirectX debate but I’ll save that for another rant.

The only thing Windows 7 is superior to is Vista. Hell even WinXP’s end of life was extended to 2020 due to its continued popularity. Why is that? How can their 9 year old operating system continue to be the version of choice, especially when they’ve released such a superior build in Win7? Could it be that Windows and its mangled registry architecture, closed source stack, and rampant exploits are preventing people from willingly padding Micro$oft’s coffers any further?

Perhaps their definition of superior needs a slight tweak or two. Or thirty.

I was so pumped yesterday, I got an email from NewEgg stating my hard drive was out for delivery and should be arriving at my doorstep in a matter of hours. Finally, back to MMO gaming on the PC, right? Oh, oh no. Nothing is simple or makes logical sense when you’re talking about Windows.

First I removed the hard drive that housed my Linux partition. I knew Windows would stomp on my boot partition like a meandering retarded giant plowing through a forest, so I took preventative measures. With that drive removed I installed the new 80gb drive, powered on my rig and plopped in the Windows 7 DVD.

The “Starting Windows” screen pops up for only for a few seconds.. and was followed by a lovely BSOD. Really, I think Microsoft should just change the Windows logo to a screenshot of a BSOD. Honestly. That would be truth in advertising on an epic scale. At least I would gain some respect for them.

After an hour of research I found the error message on the BSOD was indicating a memory allocation failure. Most forum posts claimed that this could ONLY be caused by a bad stick of memory. Well sir I call bullshit. Not but 2 hours ago I had 8 Linux VM’s running simultaneously and was allocating nearly 90% of my memory intentionally just to verify both of my memory modules were in good shape.

Another forum post mentioned that the Win7 install process had known issues with systems running PCIe video cards, when running over 2gb of system memory, and installing from a SATA DVD drive. Really!? Well ok fine, let’s see what we can do to tip-toe around the fragile-as-egg-shells installer…

I went back to focusing on the memory allocation assumption and thought hey, why don’t I throttle the available memory to the PCIe bus? In my BIOS I disabled memory mapping above 3gb, and tried the installer again. MAGIC! Suddenly the installer works like a charm and I’m ready to partition my new drive. After partitioning the file copy process began. Finally, I thought to myself, we’re rolling.

Nope. 5 minutes later I began hearing the “ping of death” from my brand new shiny hard drive. Soon after, the installer began reporting errors and BSOD’d again. Well just great. Did my hard drive just bomb!?

I put my Linux hard drive back in so I could inspect this new drive with native disk utilities (you know, since Linux is smart enough to read all disk partitioning formats, unlike Windows..) The moment Linux was up and running it was reporting a failed hard drive was detected. Awesome. I opened the disk utility and sure enough this new drive had more bad sectors than Microsoft has ignorant fan boys.

Apparently that new drive realized what operating system it was about to house and committed Hari Kari.