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No one can know exactly what NSA is doing and talk about it publicly without worrying seriously about being sent to Gitmo in a private jet.
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NSA's been putting lot of interest in SELinux though, some SE patches have even been written or more asked for by the agency, here's an article off of nsa.gov (
http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/)
The thing is that SE has the potential to be the most secure, the permissions that you can set on there are crazily crazy, there was a box available online that you can telnet and ssh into as root, but you could not do squat, but you were root the permission set was insane, i think it never got cracked even after it got slashdotted and everything, it was kinda cool, my friends spent a few hours everyday for a few weeks trying to find a loopwhole, there were people who were even more obsessed, but natta, nothing to my knowledge noone was able to do anything signifficant...
And it does not mean that the NSA runs SE boxes everywhere, but it is safe to assume that they at least have a few, however it can be argued. (P.S. they probably run OpenBSD on some routers, it would make sense, OpenBSD is the safest OS on the market, its security measures cause unnecessary overhead, but on a decent box that is just supposed to be a router, its not that big of a deal. I admire OpenBSD, they have been progressing to provide a functionality of any Cisco device or software on your own system, you can already do things like load ballancing between nics, routing, firewall(full blown filtering by anything), IDS and some other nifty features that will allow you to turn a box into an awesome, smart and fast router for free.)
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True to an extent, though some well designed GUI features can be nifty. In past years I was quite at home with VMS command lines. I also enjoy hacking in C/C++ in which you can do things that Coffee would never allow you to do, but I'm not enamoured with Posix notation and I think an OS command language should be clear and easy to remember.
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well, let me put it this way, a programmer explanation, you can write a program to do anything you want in a text editor, and although it might take you a few more key presses to create windows and generate menus, it is all doable, so C++ compiler and a text editor is the most powerful tool you can have (yes you can argue that you can write in binary or assembly, but for the time matter, i'm just relating). Well, that would be your command line, bash is insanely powerful and useful, but you can also do what they refer to as Visual programming. You can drag things into places, right click on it and assign them actions and names, and yes if you are short on time and dont care about performance, sure there are some nifty features of Visual programming, but is it anywhere as powerful as a programming in a text editor?
Aah, Posix, why are you using posix again? there are better unix interfaces than straight up posix, try Bash, tab completion is your friend, plus bash scripting is many times more intuitive and if you are a scripter, you'll find many similarities between bash scripting and perl, actually more of perl/python mixeroo. I personally have nothing against looking stuff up in man pages, you need to know basic less commands and it becomes a whole lot easier as now you can search for whatever it is you needed, if i'm working on something i constantly have one to 2 (many times while programming in python i'll have 3-4, but those would be referencing pydoc) teminals with opened up man pages that way i can reference to them on the fly, and you have to remember, the man pages are 100% more informative, make much more sense, are written by the developers and turn out to be exact 999 put of 1000 times, and the 1 time left is when the program is still a beta and had recent impovements, but man pages have not been updated, then Windows help, and tutorials and wikis for linux are many times more easier to follow and figure out what's what then microsofts FAQ, oh and there is no "it sometimes works" that my frieds found on the M$ site while seaching for information about active direcory i think, I'll have to ask again, but it was hilarious
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Microsoft, the leader in using innovative tactics to promote irksome experience, coupled with antiquated technology that's held together by a pyramid of makeshift afterthoughts.
Apple, the leader in using irksome tactics to promote innovative experience, coupled with an antiquated core that's enhanced by state-of-the-art afterthoughts.
Linux, the leader in not using any tactics to promote user-defined experience, coupled with state-of-the-art core enhanced by innovative afterthoughts.
