Windows 7 vs. Fedora 11 - Part 2

Well the experiment to only run Linux while on a road trip was a partial failure. I had to boot into Windows to get some work done that involved email and Exchange. I can't seem to wean myself from Exchange. I thought I had Evolution working but it keeps locking up on me. I've always had problems with Evolution but I had high hopes for the current version and Fedora 11. It works flawlessly while directly connected to my Exchange 2003 server. Working remotely is another story altogether. It works sporadically. There will be long pauses of up to five minutes where it seems to be locked up then suddenly it's working fine for a few minutes. Eventually it will lock up completely. I switched to using OWA (Outlook Web Access) instead. The OWA experience with Firefox is not the best. OWA in Exchange 2003 really needs IE with ActiveX to be productive. I've tested Exchange 2007 and it has a much better OWA Experience with a non IE client. I'll be updating my Exchange server to 2007 in the near future. Hopefully the combination of OWA, Exchange 2007, and Firefox in Fedora 11 will be more productive.

My other problem is my Blackberry. I haven't found a way to sync the BB and Exchange in Linux. I could setup a Blackberry Enterprise Server. This will sync Exchange and the BB over the cellular carrier in real time. It would cost me more money. I'd have to upgrade my wireless plan from BIS to BES. I'd also be running another server. Even virtualized it seems like overkill.

Other than the Exchange problems the experiment has been a success. VPN and RDP access to the networks I manage hasn't been a problem. I've recieved some Excel attachments that Open Office had no problems with. I received some .PDF files that weren't a problem. So far I have to say I prefer Windows 7 over Fedora 11 but it has nothing to do with the OS. It's all about the applications and it seems as long as I'm married to Exchange I'll be running Windows.

Windows 7 vs. Fedora 11 - Part 1

I'm leaving this morning for a three day trip to Ottawa for a CIRA board meeting. I depend on my Blackberry and my laptop to run my business while I'm on the road. I'm going to do an experiment this trip. I'm going to run Fedora 11 exclusively on my laptop. I've always had a multi-boot setup on the laptop of Windows Desktop, Windows Server, and Linux. The current setup is Windows 7 Ultimate, Server 2008 R2, and Fedora 11. I've set the default boot to Fedora 11 and hope to keep it that way for the next three days. I've tried this in the past with various distros of Ubuntu and OpenSuse. Neither worked out. For some reason I always had to boot into Windows sometime during the road trip. It was usually something to do with Exchange or my Blackberry. I rely on my Blackberry and Exchange to manage my time, email, and basically my business. I'll try to keep this blog up to date with my experiences and at the end I'll post the results.

Facts vs. Beliefs

Last night I was on my deck watching the Perseid meteor shower. I started wondering what our ancestors must have thought about events like this. I was thinking that they must have had all sorts of weird superstitious beliefs about omens and such. Laying there watching the sky gave me lots of time to think. The more I thought about it I started wondering what someone several thousand years in the future would think about my beliefs regarding the meteor shower. To me they are facts that I know. I am sure that to our ancestors their beliefs were also facts that they knew with absolute certainty. This means that my facts may in fact be only a belief and not really a fact. In the future they may think that our current beliefs about space, meteor showers, etc. are quaint, superstitious beliefs because they have discovered some new facts.

What does all this have to do with computers? Many people have beliefs regarding computers that they see as facts. One example of this is the fact that OS X is more secure than Windows. An alternate fact, just as wrong, would be that Windows 7 is more secure than OS X. My belief about this fact is that you can't measure how secure an OS is so the question is moot. My point is we all have many beliefs about computers. Many of these beliefs, which currently are thought of as facts, will probably change over time. Don't get too comfortable with the facts.

Windows 7, Vista, and the Blogoshpere

Windows 7 is about to hit the RTM milestone any day now. I've been playing with it since the public beta release last fall. I like it. As soon as it hits RTM I plan to install it in on both my laptop and desktop. I'll only run Vista in virtual machines for testing. That said I can't believe all the hyperbole about Windows 7. Yes, it has some nice new features but come on people it's really not that different from Vista. The vast echo chamber of the blogosphere which dissed Vista is praising Windows 7 like it's the second coming. I've been trying to analyse why.

Resistance to change and resistance to admitting you may be wrong is my best guess. Vista was a huge change from XP. I was in on the beta testing of Vista quite early. It was still called Longhorn. I knew immediately there was going to be a lot of resistance. It was actually reasonably secure and forced users and programmers into a better security model. Anyone remotely interested in security knows that increased security always means increased inconvenience. How often did we hear new Vista users saying things like "I'm the administrator dammit. I can look after my security myself." Well you know what? 99.9% of us can't. If you're running XP it's probably impossible. Amongst other things I enjoy figuring out how malware works. I don't make much money at it but I remove malware for customers when I have time. I do this so I can see real world infections and figure out how the malware works. I see malware all the time on the computers of network administrators and highly sophisticated users. You want to know why this is? It's because they run an insecure OS as administrator all the time. The programs they use expect to have administrator rights. The services and drivers running in the background have carte blanche to do whatever they want. XP is a security nightmare people became used to. There was no way to fix it thus Vista came into being. Vista while mitigating a lot of the problems forced everyone to change their habits in a way that wasn't convenient. More importantly it took a while to figure out these changes. It took even longer for a moderately competent geek to figure out new ways to bend the OS to their will. Couple this with the fact that Vista required significantly more hardware than XP and it was a recipe for disaster. This caused much angst and bad press in the blogosphere. This angst was endlessly echoed until it was the "truth" that Vista was flawed. Once this "truth" was out there it was impossible for any blogger to argue against it. There is still no better way to get click throughs than by writing a blog that disses Vista and links to other blogs as proof. Many of the bloggers and experts over time learned that this "truth" wasn't really true. They were afraid to say anything for fear of admitting they'd been wrong. Along comes Windows 7. It has a few cool new features. The UI has been tweaked a bit. It's been highly optimized to appear faster to the user. Most people now have hardware capable of running Vista. Windows 7 runs great on this hardware. More importantly all the bloggers and moderately competent geeks can get up to speed very quickly as they already climbed the learning curve with Vista and it's not Vista. They don't have to admit they were wrong in order to say they like it. It's a recipe for good press in the blogosphere.

Don't get me wrong. I really like Windows 7. Some of the new features are really cool. The new taskbar is a huge improvement. Aero peek has become indispensible. The UI really is more intuitive most of the time. There are a few things I don't like. The libraries feature is a great idea that isn't fully implemented. It has tremendous potential but as it is implemented in Windows 7 it doesn't work for me. The Homegroup networking feature is a security problem. It makes it very hard to share one folder in your profile. If you share a folder in your profile the whole \USERS tree is automatically shared. I had a good discussion about this with someone from Microsoft and in the end we agreed to disagree. He said the default ACLs and Access Based Enumeration locked down the folders well enough for home use. I felt they didn't, especially for a very small business many of which run the Home version of Windows.

So what's my conclusion? I'm somewhat grumpy about the fact that Vista will go down in history as Windows Me the second. The blogosphere is praising Windows 7 which will cause a lot of people to finally move away from XP. That's a very good thing. The Internet will be a better place.

Security is a never ending journey

I'm at the 2009 Microsoft MVP Summit. Around 2000 MVP's descend on Microsoft's Redmond Campus for four days of sessions with various product teams. The sessions include a lot of two way feedback, which can be brutal from both sides. It's a lot of fun. Today I went to several security sessions. I got to hear Steve Riley talk and then answer questions from an audience that included Jesper Johansson. It was amazing. At one session Ziv Mador and Steve Adegbite were talking about the Conficker worm and Microsoft's response to the vulnerability the worm initially used to spread itself. It was fascinating to hear the process they went through to identify the vulnerability and patch it then have to wait and see the exploits developed when the bad guys reverse engineer the patch. During the session Steve Adegbite said something that really resonated with me. He said "Security is like a never ending marathon." I think that is one of the best statements I've heard regarding security. Security is hard work. You have to give it 100% all the time. There are no shortcuts. You will never be finished. To some that sounds depressing. Steve Adegbite said it was a challenge he and his team relished. I got the sense that almost everyone in the room agreed. I realised I was sitting in room full of the cream of the crop in the Windows security world. It was fun hobnobbing with the cream of the crop. Thank you Microsoft.

Computer Performance - Perceived vs. Absolute

With the public beta of Windows 7 in full swing many people are talking about performance and comparing different versions of Windows. I see many posts in forums and on newsgroups exclaiming Windows 7 boots x seconds faster than Vista. They carefully measure how long XP, Vista, and Windows 7 take to boot or shutdown. Others measure how much RAM each OS uses when at idle. Some people run benchmark software comparing various OS's. There are web sites dedicated to performance with tips on which services and scheduled tasks can be disabled to improve performance.

Most users are more concerned with perceived performance rather than actual performance. If I click on something is there a pause before something happens? If that pause is longer than x (I don't know what x is but I suspect it's less than a second) the computer or application is perceived as slow. If it's faster than x then the computer or application is perceived as fast. There isn't really any in between. There is no perception of medium performance for most people. It's either acceptable or too slow. Most current operating systems take all this into account and are optimized to give a good user experience. Sometimes this perceived better performance comes at the expense of actual performance. The operating system is doing things in the background like indexing files, optimizing the file system, pre-caching disk sectors, and more. These background tasks may cause benchmarks to run slower. Some people jump on this and disable these background tasks then proudly post benchmarks proving how much faster their computer is. The problem is that disabling these background tasks quite often makes the computer less optimized for the user experience. Programs may actually run slightly faster but loading the program or loading/saving files from within the program take longer. Finding the email you sent to Joe Smith about next week's hockey game takes impossibly long as you have to manually open each email. Over time Windows slows down because the disk is fragmented.

When tuning or measuring computer performance you have to take many things into consideration. It's very similar to a car. Most of us don't want to drive a souped up hotrod that's temperamental and needs constant attention. Most us want a car that starts up when we turn the key. The heat or the air conditioning comes on quickly not several miles down the road. We want power locks, windows and seats. We want comfort. It's the same with computers. There are enthusiasts who enjoy eaking out every millisecond of performance and don't care about the comforts or ease of use. Unfortunately many people listen to their advice and think that if they apply the same tricks their computer will be faster. It will, but the catch-22 is that their day to day computing may actually seem slower.

Why Do I Need a 64 Bit OS?

Except in very specific circumstances anyone installing Vista should be installing a 64 bit version. The day of 32 bit Windows is over. Once you’ve used a computer that can use lots of RAM you won’t want to use one that doesn’t have lots of RAM. The OS is really irrelevant here. Running a 64 bit OS with 8GB or more is just a better experience. This is true for every current OS I’ve tried. All current computers are 64 bit capable. Most can use at least 4GB. Many can use 8GB or more. Even if you initially don’t have a lot of RAM you still want to install 64 bit from the start. There isn’t a noticeable performance penalty. When you do install more RAM, at least with Windows, there is no way to upgrade from 32 bit to 64 bit. A clean install is required. This can be very painful if you have a lot of programs installed. The procedure is to backup everything. Back up everything again. Install 64 bit Windows, erasing your old install in the process. Install your programs. Restore your data. Restore all your program settings. I just did this on my laptop. It took around six hours. I’ve got way better things to do than spend six hours staring at my computer just to get it back to where I started. The payoff is I can now use all 4GB that I have installed. If I’m just checking my email or doing some word processing I don’t see much of a difference. If I start up a virtual machine to test something in XP, click on a link to a video that was in an email, start a video call on Messenger, and then decide to edit a picture I see a huge difference. If you go to 8GB, this laptop only goes to 4, the difference is startling. As you load up tasks you don’t see much of a slowdown. Everything is usable. RAM is one of the least expensive upgrades. Install a 64 bit OS and upgrade your RAM. You won’t be sorry.