China Looks To Linux As Windows Alternative 222
Bismillah (993337) writes "Once again, after the Red Flag Linux effort that petered out this year, China is considering Linux to sort out its pressing Windows XP issue. The Windows 8 ban by China's government procurement agency and promises of official support may help."
Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
2014, the year of the Linux desktop!
Wait ... what's a desktop?
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
A desktop is that thing you put your tablet on when you don't use it.
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A tablet is the thing I use to level my desk.
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Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
That was point I made a while back.
Linux for the desktop will only take over, after the desktop usage has declined out of the hands of average user.
The days of the Personal Computer is gone, the Desktop is now a serious Business workstation, reserved for the likes of Engineers, Programmers, Architects, and Finance. Where you need to do a fair amount of processing, isolated from a server so you don't need to share.
Not the end of the Desktop, but a cut in its usages and move towards more serious jobs.
This trend is similar to the Mainframe. Desktop PCs and Desktop based servers took over a large chunk of the Mainframe, Mainframe operators touted simular arguments about how you need a Mainframe for real work and these PC are just toys for kids. However over time as the PC got more powerful, it proven itself to be a good replacement for most of the tasks.
The Mainframe is still around, and it has been relegated to very particular type of work. The same thing will Happen to the Desktop, and in probably 20 year the same thing will happen to mobile devices.
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Where you need to do a fair amount of processing, isolated from a server so you don't need to share.
Or just where convenience of typing is more important than mobility. So, basically any office job.
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Citation needed.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
No, we still have the days of the PC.
The difference is, we don't need one PC per family member anymore. One PC per family would satisfy most families around - techies will probably go with one PC per adult.
And we're seeing it where PCs are basically stagnating, sitting in the corner unused while tablets and smartphones serve as the daily use model for most people. For the odd task that they don't satisfy, the PC is there.
But I don't see the PC fading like the mainframe. First, mainframes were relegated to special data centers and owned by a few. Whereas most families (at least the ones that matter) have 2 or more PCs - one for mom, one for dad, one for the kids, etc. And that model will change to probably one for everyone to use when they need it - e.g., school work.
The PC still has its uses, but the need for everyone to have their own "personal" one over sharing one has dropped significantly.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
The "desktop PC" is sort of morphing into a server or a media hub. It won't go away because tablets, e-readers, and smartphones are great media consumption devices, but for media production, there isn't anything that is going to replace the role of a decent monitor, large desktop hard drive, keyboard, and pointing device. It might be a tablet in a dock, but the role of a desktop in a home isn't going to vanish anytime soon.
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Well the "media hub" (or similar) will become less of a PC and more of a device - closed off and in a shiny case. Accessed over your tablet in a nice web 3.0 interface. Same for games - on your console. PCs will become a niche thing, maybe kept alive as gaming rigs or enthusiast machines in the corner, but otherwise banished from the homes of "ordinary" people.
The server can go too, replaced with cloud storage or processing. Why do you think all the big players are giving you Office in the cloud (ok, apart
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Insightful)
That is true... however, in the US, Canada, and other places, bandwidth isn't increasing, but fees are, so having everything in the cloud can get very pricy. This is why the LAN/WAN model will probably be around for a while. LAN-wise, having a machine have the role of the desktop and the server. With the current climate of ever decreasing data caps, it may end up pricy enough for even "landline" service that one is just better of not using any cloud services whatsoever and having the backups and such handled by a device on the LAN with removable hard disks or a tape drive.
I can see one device taking up multiple roles. For example, a MS Surface can function as a tablet, a server (when docked and some drives attached), and a desktop (when docked or used with a Bluetooth keyboard.) However, until WAN bandwidth becomes inexpensive, the role of a server on the LAN may not go away anytime soon.
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I actually think we are going to see more specialised servers appearing in average joe blogs homes. People are more IT comfortable now (not necessarily more literate) and most people seem to be quite comfortable in how to pirate media content. If you live somewhere where you can stream HD then great for you but most people can't so queuing up the Game of Thrones torrent to watch it tomorrow is a very common usage case.
This is then stored somewhere in their house and sent to what ever is the playback devic
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I think that's the point - none of us really stress the PCs CPU, so you can easily "outsource" it to a server somewhere and just download the results either on-demand like streaming a game, or via a web interface.
That's why I think the cloud will actually become something (I didn't think this a few years ago) simply becuase people want the processing capabilities for various things, but do not want the hassle of a PC they don't understand and have to keep maintained (ie updated)
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I think that's the point - none of us really stress the PCs CPU, so you can easily "outsource" it to a server somewhere and just download the results either on-demand like streaming a game, or via a web interface.
Why would you want to pay to "outsource" an application that you could easily run on your PC and have full control of everything?
What makes you so sure that it is any easier for the average PC user to actually use "Cloud" services compared to actually running their own applications on their PC?
That's why I think the cloud will actually become something (I didn't think this a few years ago) simply becuase people want the processing capabilities for various things, but do not want the hassle of a PC they don't understand and have to keep maintained (ie updated)
The so called "Cloud" is a marketing buzzword that IT people back in the early 1980's knew as "Remote IT Services". So far nothing has changed.
The problem with using the "Cloud" is that you have to pay for it. Thi
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I know that many who are still using XP and so would prefer someone else to handle their computing needs... obviously they fail to maintain their PCs or they wouldn't still be running XP!
Most cloud services are easier to use - always on, always there, stream music with a click of an app. Stream movies to your TV with a click of your remote. Compare to your home PC streaming to your phone, this is actually simpler. Same for documents in Office 365 or Google Docs, or other files stored in Evernote (or whateve
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One PC per family would satisfy most families around
Unless multiple kids need to type up homework. Or would most families have multiple tablets each with a Bluetooth keyboard?
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You didn't mention the workplace either, which is where the majority of us still use PCs. I don't see tablets taking over the roles of PCs for many of us that use them daily in our work.
Tablets are fine for small stuff, but for work? In my opinion the screens are too small, and typing on them is horrible, wireless is slower than hard wire and less secure, and storage is much smaller than an internal HDD/SDD. Obviously you can buy extra devices for your tablet to give it most of those things, but you are
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" Whereas most families (at least the ones that matter) have 2 or more PCs - one for mom, one for dad, one for the kids, etc. And that model will change to probably one for everyone to use when they need it - e.g., school work."
real life doesn't work that way. i am the tech person for my family there are three people here, and here is what works. 1 office desktop with printer, one game/altcoin miner desktop, 4 laptops one of which is dedicated linux to scan and wipe windows flash memory etc., 1 smartphone '
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The computing unit will only grow smaller and smaller, to the point where the form factor is dominated by the interface but no smartphone will give you a huge screen, full size keyboard or beat a person with a mouse in an FPS. I do expect that at some point you just come home and your smartphone hooks up to your TV/monitor via MHL, your bluetooth keyboard/mouse and the phone drives your "desktop". I mean a quad core 2GHz ARM processor, 2GB RAM, 32+128GB storage with microSD... specs from a recent high end p
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growing smaller and smaller...
But what you just described is how MS envisions the Surface being used.
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One mainframe per house. It controls the hvac, lights, windows, doors. It operates the multitude of touch screen walls and microphones for voice control. It connects you to the world and holds all your stuff. it'll never happen due to copyright and internet connection monopolies and people finally realizing that once your computer can understand and respond to your voice that they've wanted all these years, it has to listen to you all the time which is bad now that it is actually decent.
It would not necessary have to listen all of the time you could go the star trek approach and have to press your com-badge (read bluetooth) to talk to it that way its only listening in when you initiate communication. Alternatively you could just host the voice recognition software locally so that even though it is listening constantly no one outside can get a record of your yelling at the TV and sleep talking.
Re: Finally! (Score:2)
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Linux as a desktop instead of Windows can bring some advantages. However, China has some problems to be solved:
1: Windows has one big advantage -- Active Directory and GPOs. It is relatively easy to manage tens of thousands of desktops with the tools provided. Yes, one can use Puppet, Chef, etc... but Windows's GPO provisioning is still ahead and the expertise is available almost anywhere to deploy this.
2: F/OSS alternatives to AD and Exchange that are scalable. This means a mail server that probably
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I would suspect there is an appeal to having an expensive, western operating system. I also would conjecture the Chinese aren't dumb and therefore don't trust their government any more than the rest of the world trusts their governments.
Think of it this way, would you use:
A: a government issued (ANY government), government approved (Somehow I just don't believe it would actually
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1, That is not really a problem. If you know shell scripting and SSH you have basically unlimited power. Its not even much work administrating 10000000 computers.
2, I don't know about this, most likely Exchange is more polished. Anyway, I would use a local cloud provider for email. There is no point wasting resources administrating mail myself.
3, Shell scripting and SSH again? Not really a problem at all.
4, Access control list (ACL) ?
5, Do you need encryption if you don't have any read access?
6, I don't und
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If you lump laptops and desktops together, I don't think it's time to say those days are 'over'. It's just when:
the hardware you can get for 400 dollars at Walmart is relevant for running 99% of all the applications the average user wants
the hardware you can get for $900 dollars can pretty much run the next 4-5 years worth of games at pretty much maximum resolution and quality
There is virtually no incentive to upgrade.
Compare this to the late 90's and early 2000's Year on year the performance gains of GP
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is also why the GNOME's insistence on designing for (what I call) "the mythical grandmother" was always flawed.
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The mythical highly technically competent grandmother?
I never knew the Gnome folks were trying to keep things 'grandmother' friendly. I get along with Gnome (mostly because I can't be arsed to install anything else), but easy to use it ain't.
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GNOME 1.x was really great. It was fairly configurable while still being relatively easy to use and did what I (as a developer) needed. Current day GNOME looks like it borrows from the worst of Windows (the stuff even the Windows folks don't even like), and only recently adopted a few things that the Mac does (possibly because Windows copied some of it) but in some weird way that lost all of the intent behind the actions. So we end up with something that's simple but still not understandable because it's
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So what you are saying, whilst seeming to miss it completely. Is the desktop will continue to be used by the very same people who have used it since its first inception and that the general computer market, the rest of the consumers, lets be blunt, the idiot box market, will end up using alternate simplified devices, more along the lines of appliances, mobile phones and big screen smart TVs with the tablets as a remote for the TV and as mounted family message boards.
So the desktop market is pretty much n
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"If we discount the hobbyist computers--TRS 80, Apples, Commodore, etc."
If we ignore the evidence that disproves proves your point, then your point seems valid.
"If mainframes + dumb terminals were cheaper, then PCs"
Smart Phone and Tablets, especially if they get discounted on some sort of data plan you may want anyways, are cheaper then PCs. Also more convent. Sure the cost goes into the data plan. But and perhaps it is more expensive overall... But it doesn't hurt as much.
The rest you are trying to expl
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My fortune cookie says Year of the Penguin, biiiiitch!
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My fortune cookie says Year of the Penguin, biiiiitch!
Fortune cookies are American, not Chinese. Since they were first made in California, they have spread to other countries, but not to China. Most Chinese have never seen one, or even heard of them.
This is similar to the situation with Cinco de Mayo, which most Americans consider a Mexican holiday. But the celebration on that date originated in the United States, it is still primarily celebrated in the US, and most Mexicans have never heard of either the celebration or the obscure historical event being ce
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Poor Linus.. (Score:5, Funny)
Torvalds raging at Asian kernel patches in 3.. 2.. 1..
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At least he won't throw chairs. ;)
Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Good. They should be considering Linux. We all should be.
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Considering even the most culturally illiterate westerners have heard of Bruce Lee, Jet Li, and probably Chun-Li, I have no idea where the notion that the Chinese can't pronounce 'L' came from.
Oh wait, yes I do. [youtu.be]
Damn you, Jean Shepherd.
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Rinux?
The R/L confusion is Japanese, not Chinese. In Chinese, R and L are distinct, but some of them have problems with phonemes that don't occur in Chinese, such as "th" and "v". Of course, most native English speakers also mangle Chinese when first learning to speak it.
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Actually, I doubt it would even work, *unless* they honored the GPL. They need it to work on all sorts of different computers with different devices and what not. There isn't a good way to do that with linux, without providing the source.
Individual small manufacturers can get away with not releasing their source code for their customized version of linux, because it has a small scope and doesn't need to be supported on anything else. This would need to be supported for a long time, on a wide array of device
Re: Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course I don't know, but I think it's likely that they will eventually honor the GPL to some extent because of the inherent non-legal punishment for not honoring the GPL: increased maintenance costs.
If I take your code and build my own version, making changes, and then you make substantial improvements to your code, then I'm left with 4 choices:
1) Ditch my changes and use your new code.
2) Go back and re-impliment my old changes on your new code, possibly needing to rewrite my changes to account for changes in your code.
3) Live without the improvements of your new version.
4) Submit my code to your project so that they become part of the parent project, and then I can continue to get updates from you without additional work.
Unless you have some reason to keep your changes secret, option number 4 is actually pretty attractive.
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Apparently you've never heard of "patch".
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A short sighted man thinks "there is no software I use for this". A wise man thinks "can this accomplish the tasks need."
Do you need software, or do you need what the software does?
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Unless, of course, you wish to play games that are Windows only (and don't want to suffer through making Wine work, and then hoping your game actually functions properly in Wine)...
Fix that issue, and you'll start to see more Linux converts.
I've had Linux as my primary desktop for over 10 years now. It can be done.
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That would be the point that, if you tell users often and loudly enough, they'll come to believe that choice is somehow bad?
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That's why many go to a restaurant and pick from a menu which doesn't have zillions of choices and they expect the chef to use his/her experience, talent and judgement to make good decisions - how much salt to use, when to use it
os agnostic (Score:2)
This is dumb. They shouldn't be considering alternatives to a locked in OS. They should getting rid of the entire premise and going OS Agnostic. Then they can switch OS's at will.
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Why?
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Competition Yields the Best Price (Score:2)
The upstarts with lower cost and equal or better OSs will take the customer's business. No surprise. Bundled deals to keep the price up will also fail.
Microsoft has no choice but to lower prices, significantly. That is the real world of competitive business.
Not Gonna Happen (Score:4, Insightful)
MS will not allow this. Look for them to give China whatever they have to, including a few billion in bribes to keep Linux from becoming the official OS.
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Lots of funding for dissident groups and cults?
Its not the 1960's-80's anymore. What the US can hold back in exotic tech the EU will gladly sell or find. Anything else China can now make or work around with its EU friends.
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Microsoft can't shut down the NSA though, so in the end (China's) national security is likely to win out. Also, bribery of party officials is punished extremely harshly, including by death, and especially so if it is a foreign company doing it. These days it's more likely that an official would expose the foreign bribery and take credit for that, rather than accepting it.
Deja Vu (Score:4, Interesting)
Sudden outbreak of common sense? (Score:2)
I don't even understand why china, of all places, is not 100% Linux wall to wall already...
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They understand more, have their own better deep packet options and fully understand encryption.
China can now do without US consumer OS brands - a better place to be in any trade negotiations.
Re:Sudden outbreak of common sense? (Score:5, Insightful)
Certainly not true in my case.
I think windows, especially after XP, is a total POS. Linux desktop blows it away in terms of speed, security, reliability, and everything else.
Although I hardly use it anymore, I constantly have to muck with win7 on my laptop. Badly behaved apps put crap in my start up - making the boot time even slower. Every time I boot up, or shut down, I have to wait for updates. Sound stopped working for no apparent reason, had to fix something in the registry. On and on, one thing after another.
Linux just works, and work well. After using windows, linux is like a breath of fresh air.
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I have used several. Right now I have a quad-core AMD 64-bit. I am using CentOS 6.5.
Key to this. (Score:2)
People forget. One of the biggest reason businesses have for sticking to MS is that their customers use MS and they have to be able to exchange documents in MSs latest format. Well, with China using Linux companies are going to have to use document formats friendly to Linux.
Goodbye a large chunk of vendor lockin.
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LibreOffice works for me.
BTW: MS's nasty vendor lock-in scam is just another very good reason to ditch windows.
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LibreOffice works for me.
BTW: MS's nasty vendor lock-in scam is just another very good reason to ditch windows.
THIS!
I've gone full open office, and now have zero compatibility issues between all my machines - including the last Windows laptop. Microsoft Office isn't even compatible with itself between Mac and PC.
I'm not a Linux fan, I'm a Unix-like system fan.
ReactOS (Score:2)
not quite (Score:2)
Considering that XP is pirated in China to a significant percentage less than 99%, you're missing that if everybody is using Linux nobody is going to be buying MS anything at all. Effectively total market lockout. Which can affect the NSA as well.
Truthfully, this probably won't affect anything.
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You realize, that I said the same thing ten years ago when they announced Red Flag Linux, right?
Re: Good for them (Score:2)
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Hmm, so the government actually pays for all of its windows clients? That's great if that's true. The prevaling wisdom here ( which is dripping with xenophobia), is that China doesn't pay for licensed software.
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You realize that in China most corporations are government-funded
Only about 3% of companies are SOEs (state owned enterprises), and that number is declining. The SOEs tend to be big rust-belt companies, such as steel mills, and shipyards, that use relatively few computers per employee, compared to the private companies in the tech and service sectors.
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Re:Time to change the terms of my licensing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Somehow, Nazis got a press so bad even Wolfenstein won't show a swastika, yet we have hammer&sickle proudly displayed on major government parades, Stalin and Lenin widely worshipped, and so on. It's scary how investing in some propaganda can whitewash even the most murderous ideology in world's history.
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what ideology is that?
BTW the hammer and sickle predated Lenin.
Re:Time to change the terms of my licensing... (Score:4, Interesting)
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The fact that Stalin brought Russia from a mostly agrarian backwater to a massive industrial superpower during his 30 year rule doesn't hurt neither.
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um, what? the hammer & sickle is a labor / union symbol. of course it was used as the symbol of communist USSR, but they hardly have a monopoly on murderous ideology.
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um, what? the hammer & sickle is a labor / union symbol.
What non-communist labor/union group uses the hammer & sickle symbol? I'm genuinely curious.
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That's a cute license but it could never be upheld. You can't prove damages from someone owning a shirt. Moreover you have to be a lot more specific about how licenses are responsible for determining whether Che wearing people are using your software.
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It is only meant to raise awareness and let the healing begin. Please, don't hate.
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hello? this is 1980. i want my cold-war rhetoric back. thank you.
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let me know if you'd like to compare track records of so-called capitalist regimes to so-called communist regimes. just to warn you though, you aren't going to like it.
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Yeah, cherry-pick the nicer capitalist regimes and the worst Communist excesses look horrible. I'd suggest looking at Nazi Germany and militarist Japan to start with. As far as I can tell, their murder rate exceeded the Soviets and Chinese, and their totals are lower only because we took them down like mad dogs.
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oh that's where _nsakey.lkm comes from (kidding - it's a joke referring to _NSAKEY [wikipedia.org]
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China knew the GCHQ (Tai Mo Shan and other sites) and NSA where into every telco system and signal around China looking in from shared sites in Asia and from above.
The US and UK also liked to use Western container ships as cover to hide complex collection equipment via tame Western shipping firms.
China understood US supplied networking, telco systems and OS would be a natural evolution of past data collection efforts.
Ch
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you mean Red Flag?, that's defunct
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In linux, the source code is visible, makes it harder to hide stuff.
In my experience - and I have quite a lot - linux is *far* more secure than windows.
Closing ports, or whatever, is ridiculously simple. Finding hidden code in a binary distribution is much tougher.
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Also, don't mark me as a troll, but Linux platforms when not constantly maintained can be more susceptible to attack than Windows machines.
For some reason, that got me to thinking of all those old Windows XP Machines.
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As soon as you reverse engineer windows, MS will change something so that your reverse engineered version is no longer compatible.
Look at MS does with it's ms-office formats.
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A concerted government initiative to adopt Linux is great, but what about reverse engineering Windows? You also have to consider compatibility with the Windows applications that already exist in greater numbers than comparable Linux/Unix applications.
Somehow that seems like the US reverse engineering the Trabant.
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Gotta think long term.
MS has been pulling the same scams for decades. Bottom line: you cannot trust Microsoft. Not now, not ever. MS is going to do everything it can to force people onto win8, everybody knows it.
Maybe China has finally wised up?
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