neurological dryer lint

i tell you what, at GE they like to hook you up with some hardware. for a few months i've been operating on my dell laptop running win2k... but always feeling a little hesitant about doing scans and investigations on virus-infected and spyware-infected PC's from a windows box. after all there's a fairly good chance that despite my software firewall and antivirus client that a yet-undiscovered variant of one of a thousand worms is on the box i'm trying to repair and my system will become a victim. that's the unfortunate reality of signature-based defenses. there are tooks like cisco's CSA out there that are supposed to be intelligent enough to defend against unknown threats... i just think it's unreal how much a company like ours can spend on basic defense against the most baseline threats out there - on staff, equipment, software, etc...

anyway. so i finally got bothered enough to request a linux workstation to do all my investigation from. and they hooked me up with a fine, fine piece of machinery: an HP box with dual xeons, 2GB of RAM and 320GB Ultra-3 SCSI disks. it runs Fedora Core rather well.



so now my tiny frickin desk is crammed with LCD's. and my sweet Yoda bobblehead pen that makes me the envy of many a geek in the office.

as a workstation i'm very impressed with Fedora. if you don't need to perform home-entertainment tasks (watching DVD movies or using an iPod, basically) it's flawless. i'd grown disillusioned with redhat-based OS's but this has restored my faith. it auto-set my desktop resolution to 1600x1200, found all the hardware perfectly...

i also threw vmware on it and i'm using it as a virtual test lab for simulating attacks against windows machines (i had XP on the box, incidentally, before i installed linux and it was disappointingly slow for the hardware... what's really funny is XP runs faster in VMWare than it did non-virtually outside of linux). just to screw around i also installed windows vista beta1 into a virtual machine to see how it'd work. setup was much simpler than previous windows installers (although they replaced the standard grey-on-blue ascii text setup with a graphical one - that is unreadable at the default resolution of 640x480x16 color). they ask you which disk to install to, a product key, and hostname for the PC... and then you hit go and it installs.

honestly though if the feature set for vista is accurate, i see absolutely no reason to upgrade. ie7 with tabs, transparent window titles, and 'virtual folders' based on searches. that's it. no real security changes, no WinFS, no improved command shell (Monad won't be included by default, it turns out)... the new explorer interface feels cluttered and confusing, with little buttons that highlight when you mouse over but you don't know what they do.. it's more than a little irritating. the desktop icons are larger, OSX-style, and i can't figure out how to shrink them to normal size.



we'll see how beta 2 looks. i doubt anyone but hardcore windows zealots and MCSE's will upgrade in the end. although XP wasn't a significant jump in anything but ease-of-use (and eventually security thanks to SP2) over windows 2000. the difference is, XP followed Win2k by two years... Vista took twice as long and the feature set is completely uncompelling.

maybe microsoft needs to start over? maybe windows needs to be buried and a new avenue taken on PC OS's? sure everyone's used to it, they have brand recognition and piles of third-party development support... but it won't matter much when windows collapses under its own weight in 5-10 years. PC's need to change and windows remaining essentially the same for the last 15 years isn't exactly ushering in a revolutionary new era.

the dealer up in columbus that busam is getting my altima from apparently sucks and so i don't have the car yet. ended up getting 'smoke' (gunmetal) instead of blue, which i wanted in the first place (smoke or black). it's supposed to be down here by tomorrow night... heads will be a-rollin' if it ain't.

more feedback on the great depression - it's growing on me already. this is a heart attack has been in my head all morning - it's infectious, son.