Alright. I’ll admit it first and foremost. I like Windows. Kind of. As I type I’m actually using windows 7, and whatever. I like it. My ATI graphics card isn’t acting like a retarded 4 year old, and I can watch youtube videos at full-screen without issues. Either way, that’s not why I’m angry.
I”m mad with Windows Server 2008. It’s true, it has a lot of easy stuff, and cool features like auditing (also known as PROPER LOGGING…finally), but it also has very retarded things about it. Take Server 2008 Standard edition for example. They restrict your maximum memory to 4GB – because they can. It in no way related to the fact that they can’t address above that amount of memory with 32 bits. They’ve developed PAE (physical address extention) so the kernel natively supports up to 64 GB. In case you don’t understand here’s how it works.
Windows (32 bit version) can only make calls to 2^32 bits of memory
2^32 = 4,294,967,296 bits OR 4.29 GB
With PAE instead of using 32 bits, they extend it to 36 bits
2^36 = 68,719,476,736
The numbers don’t add up exactly, but that’s because of things like overhead and whatnot.
If there’s one thing that pisses me off more than anything else in the IT industry it’s the trickle down effect. Limiting hardware with nothing more than software that refuses to use methods developed to make you pay another 100$ per license makes sense from a business standpoint, but it’s just greasy.
Another thing that really bugs me is the “server core” installs you can do. Having learned about them before I actually got to see what it was like was a huge disappointment. I thought microsoft had finally realized how much more flexible their operating systems can be if they would just get rid of their graphics all together. It’s not for everyone, sure. But don’t piss on my head and tell me its raining. If they REALLY wanted to actually reduce the load on their servers they would actually have a ‘headless’ mode. What the hell is the point in loading a graphical window system into memory to display a command prompt? Hundreds of dlls with unspecified functionality. Hundreds of calls made to your hard drive, scores of kernel modules loaded just to display something that people aren’t even going to be looking at!
It goes along with the Microsoft’s solution. Instead of actually fixing what’s fucking broken, they come out with patches. Instead of fixing their shitty code, or asking for help, they develop DEP. Good job, how’s that working out for you?
It’s not like you can STILL programmaticly disable it. Oh wait, that’s right YOU CAN. Obviously nothing’s perfect and combined with ASLR (Address space layout randomization) it makes it much more difficult, but as long as we’re in the 32 bit world there simply aren’t enough bits to sufficiently randomize memory locations. It just won’t happen for a while.
Keep in mind though this is a vast improvement over server 2003, but show me a windows network that I can’t maliciously become domain admin within a day (a VERY liberal time estimation), and I’ll show you a heard of buffalo that fly.
Just because you replace the shell with CMD.EXE doesn’t mean that you’ve streamlined crap.
Good job M$, that'll totally help.
