You gotta feel for Microsoft sometimes. They have the most successful products out there, bar none, and the reason is that they are the best out there. Why is that a problem, well when your programs are used by everyone, obviously the bugs are going to be found, and flaunted.
Of course when I say Microsoft make the best applications, it's a relative thing. How do you define best? I mean if you are a Linux freak the automatically the Microsoft Logo reduces the quality of an application, but that's just fanboism which is silly.
See in the end Microsoft makes the most accessible applications. My mother can use them, as can my parents-in-law. I shudder at the idea of any of them trying to compile their own kernel to upgrade their desktop environment.
Hell, I consider myself to be a power user. I really do. But even I find Linux an extremely user unfriendly environment to work it. You see the irony is that Linux fanbois spend ungodly amounts of effort to make their applications act like Microsoft apps, but all they manage to do is to make extremely buggy applications. Maybe they don't have the same security holes as Microsoft Products (and maybe they do, they just aren't found or flaunted), but they crash, core dump, leak memory, and generally don't do what they are meant to do. Windows XP does none of the above. I haven't had Windows crash on me in years. I commonly have uptimes of weeks without a reboot, and on the rare occasion when I do need to reboot, it tends to be drivers (God nVidia and ATi are bad at writing drivers) that are the fault, not Microsoft.
But I guess in the end its cool (well as cool as you can get when you are discussing nerd issues) to hate Microsoft. But then I work at EA, and I know how cool it was to hate EA before I started here, I guess if someone is successful, it's cool to hate them.
I really like the author of The ArcterJournal, he has cool links about photography, but I guess on the issue of Microsoft he and I will have to agree to disagree.
Thanks for the compliment! A bit underhand, don't you think?:)
Actually I agree that MS has some of the most successful (and in some cases, some of the best quality) software out there. However, they give a LOT of lip service to telling everyone how they're doing great, they're making it better, more secure, longhorn is going to be awsome, etc etc etc, without actually following through.
I'm not saying that they have to be perfect, no one is (not even Linus!), but when you have an OS and two or three MAJOR apps that are used by 90% of the desktop computers (IE/OE/O), security should be paid more attention than it's getting. XPSP2 will fix all these problems we're told, but it's not going to be out till.... when? 2k3 is less vulnerable we're told, but there's no push to put people on 2k3 (and it's not suited for desktops anyway).
But as you said, we disagree :) (To be totally honest I saw the post on bugtraq and it made me laugh as to how simple the described exploit was, so I posted!)
Posted by: Arcterex at May 20, 2004 04:33 PMAside (having now read your full post properly) - I don't know what sort of hardware or linux distro you've been using lately, but I think you view on linux is a lot different than reality (seen perhaps through the MS koolaid?). Yes, it's still got it's problems and yes, some of the apps are modelled after MS or apple apps, but if the linux folks wanted to do nothing more than rip off MS and apple I'm sure they could do a lot better job of it. There is a difference between using the ideas from and ripping off. Also, it's been ages since I've had things crash, core dump or leak memory... crash occasionally, or if it's beta/CVS code that I'm testing, but the environment I use (gnome) is very stable. I'd encourage you to try out knoppix or a gnome based livecd or try out the latest say, fedora core release under something like VMWare and see how you like it.
Posted by: Arcterex at May 20, 2004 04:37 PM