The Official Rants and Trolls Thread

I had go to Wikipedia and learn about forum spammers. The conclusion is that all this is for search engine results. This is crazy; I never knew!

Forum spambots surf the web, looking for guestbooks, wikis, blogs, forums and other types of web forms which it can then use to submit bogus content. These often use OCR technology to bypass CAPTCHAs. Some spam messages are targeted towards readers and can involve techniques of target marketing or even phishing, making it hard to tell real posts from the bot generated ones. Other spam message are not meant to be read by humans, but are instead posted to increase the number of hyperlinks to a particular web site, to boost its search engine ranking.
This category of spambot has gained considerable notoriety since November 2006, with the introduction of XRumer, a forum and wiki spambot which can often bypass many of the safeguards administrators use to reduce the amount of spam posted.
One way to prevent spambots from creating automated posts is to require the poster to confirm their intention to post via e-mail. Since most spambot scripts use a fake e-mail address when posting, any email confirmation request is unlikely to be successfully routed to them. Some spambots will pass this step by providing a valid email address and use it for validation, mostly via webmail services. Using methods such as security questions are also proven to be effective in curbing posts generated by spambots, as they are usually unable to answer it upon registering.

 

I've always been a Windows user, and tuned up Windows 7.

Seems pretty fast and stable.

Then I installed Zorin Linux on my much slower powered "crash dummy" 32-bit desktop and it may be faster than my notebook running 64-bit Win 7 with an SSD. Now I'm trying to figure out how to install Linux on my notebook.

 

There is no "one-solution-fit-all" for computers. I have oodles of PC experience, and a Windows Machine will net you the best use of your computer if you are an average user. If you are a fashionista then get a mac and install Windows in a virtual machine.

If you are looking for a good stable Linux solution that works on pretty much anything, then Ubuntu is probably your best bet. If you are new to *nix then there is a lot of support available, and the goo is hidden much like in Windows.

For my Router I have a Google Search Appliance (2 2.4GHz Xeons and 12GB of RAM) running a linux distribution.
For my Firewall I have a FirePass F5 Appliance (2 2.6GHz Xeons and 16GB of RAM) running another linux distribution.
For my Wireless Router it is a Broadcom chip running another linux distribution.

These are places where Linux shines. Standalone, stable, and does what you configure it to do. It took days to configure them as needed, but it works perfectly.

Every other machine in my house (upwards of 15 on 24/7 then numerous laptops) is Windows (Windows 3.1, Windows 98, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8).

For my main server which sees 3MB/s (18MBit/s) average use, spikes to 80MBits/s, it runs good 'ol Windows 7 Professional (i7, 32GB RAM, 16TB HD). This is hosting tens of domains, multiple databases, and concurrent programs. Ontop of this it runs a BOINC server helping SETI and Einstein @ home projects.

The Windows machine is just as stable as the Linux machines. In fact, the only down time either has had in 2 years is when I was under mandatory evacuation for wildfires and the 4 hours it took to get out on congested streets to a zone outside of the mandatory evac zone (3.75hours for 10 miles) and then set it back up and then again when it was moved back.

The main issue with Windows is PEBKAC: Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. When you download all those "free" games, antivirus, pictures of lol-catz, surf porn, whatever, it is not safe. It is akin to walking down a dark alley at night full of gangsters, mobsters, and salesmen holding a stack of cash and then complaining when you reach the otherside broke.

Windows will take more horsepower to run. To bring in Prius examples, this is like saying "A Geo Metro can get 50mpg". Well yeah. Newer things are heavier and more powerful so it is harder to eek out more mileage. If you are running the Aero theme, you are burning a lot of CPU cycles to add a small amount of transparency to application bars. If you are running the live preview, that takes horsepower to render everything even when minimized and so on.

If you are running lower end hardware (below 1Ghz nowadays) stick with XP. However I have installed Windows 7 on a Via M10000 (1Ghz Via CPU, similar to a 700Mhz Pentium 3) and it ran fine. Just like you can install Ubuntu and it will run fine. It depends on what you want to do.

There is no #1. The reality is that today's OS's are so stable and secure, it doesn't matter. Apple has the name going for it, and that's it. All the Linux distro's have various pros and cons over a vanilla install but in general are all very stable and lightweight. Windows by definition is not lightweight, it is powerful. It is just as stable, but requires more power then most linux distros.