[EMAIL PROTECTED] replied to Jason: > You can harp on "best practices" all you want - hell, *I* certainly do
8-) > it enough. However, you have to come to some realizations here. All > "best practices" cost something to implement. And at some point, the > cost of prevention is going to exceed the cost of cleaning up. That does tend to be the way things are now. In turn, this may be because of Redmond's historic view that "so easy any idiot can make it work" was _the_ way to do things. Remember all that "total cost of ownership" rubbish^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpromotional material from back around the time of the Win95 launch through sometime after NT 4.0 shipped? What that was about was "we have realized that many of the people we really want running this stuff are too lazy/ stupid/etc to learn how to do it properly so we just turned everything on" (and, credit where it's due, they did improve the installers no end compared to pevious versions and much of the "competition" -- OS/2 was arcane in the extreme to install, even on half of IBM's own machines and most Linux distros were downright painful...). Of course, that was before the much-heralded chest-beating known as "Trustworthy Computing". Reputedly TC means that much of the stuff that was previously enabled by default (so the 3.917% of users of each feature wouldn't have to think about looking in a manual or on a web page to see what they had to do to enable some feature) will now be disabled "out of the box". This change (if it really happens!) will alter the TCO in interesting ways, such that the initial minimum cost of "designing" anything but the most basic and straightforward desktop configuration machine will increase (i.e. many of the folk who run large networks of "out of the box" installs today will actually have to do some pre-rollout design to justify their pay-checks when Longhorn (??) eventually hits). What the longer-term effects on the perceived additional costs of on-going patching, etc are is very much an open guess at this point... <<snip much more good stuff...>> Regards, Nick FitzGerald _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
