Rich wrote:
[...]

Note that all the recent mass worms have been MS specific worms/viruses.

I have, my point remains.

Note that certain OSes are more vulnerable by _design_ due to their marketing compromised design philosophy... It is a moot question as to whether they attract so many worms because of whether they are a flawed design or whether they are just more successfully marketed and hence more widely used. Their flawed design philosophy does make infestations easy...


[...]

That's always been a problem with patches and updates, they tend to
break other things and other patches and updates. It's not a pretty picture.

Especially when marketing puts on pressure to leverage value from that updating, including deliberate feature breakage and EULA ransoms.

As a general rule, I don't update unless I need something I don't have.
And I don't patch unless I something is broken or won't install, except
possibly for security patches.

Good, and exactly correct.

[...]
Possibly so, but there is also a lot of cohesion for getting the 'important' bits together. There are some major worldwide voluntary efforts that surpass the efforts of Redmond. Then there is the Linux kernel itself!

The Chinese choice. Not sure if this is a good thing or not.

Sorry, I don't understand. Please expand.


[...]

All very dependant on the distribution. With Linux you have choice!

You have choice period. Linux is a choice, your sentence does not parse.

It makes excellent sense. Consider what GNU/Linux _is_ and note that it is far from one source or just one animal. It might be loosely called a single 'philosophy' with a family of real world results...


[...]

If you know your way round unix you can make anything secure (short of
bugs and undiscovered security holes). You can also make windows pretty
secure, just by a router with a NAT firewall and/or install one of the
many PC based firewalls ( I don't care to argue whether it's a firewall
or not). With reasonable and cheap security measures ( Zonealarm is free)
you can eliminate or reduce most external security threats. But same
as with Linux, you need experience and some platform specific knowledge.

Using third party firewalls is just a kludge to patch up the OS holes for the many exploits available in MS products.

Good security can be considered as a layered 'onion' approach. With MS Windows you pretty much only have the firewall to rely upon! MS may well work fine on an isolated system...

Note the many known (and published) exploits available for various (supposedly) inseparable parts of MS Windows (later flavours) that have not been patched, and, particularly for Internet Explorer, that are very long ago known about!

I prefer a multi-layered onion model of security with the system well understood as opposed to a fragile egg model where most of the yolk is unknown territory and 'proprietary'.

...And then there's the suspicions of various 'phoning home' tricks. Whether really true or not, we cannot easily know or find out or trust the marketing misinformation.


[...]

The phone and billing details of a few million Russians getting 'lost' last year or so is just one of many examples. I'm certainly not going to use any 'online passport' type system REGARDLESS of what OS supports it!

Neither will I. But clearly some are using them.

And they will get more popular until some form of bio-id becomes established. Few people like having to remember passwords...


[...]

If you'll buy a Mac. Many ex-customers feel the same way about Apple
you feel about Microsoft. Frys has a $200 Linux based system on sale
right now for $200. It runs thin-linux. I'd buy that or build my own
and install linux if I was of a mind.

The PC model is an open (cheap) platform that consequently can have bafflement of choice and compatibilities.

With MACs, you pay extra for a more restricted platform where there are simpler choices and a 'guarantee' of operability. Seems to be very popular with certain segments of the market.

This Linux stuff is a lot more productive for s@h in just avoiding all the foul-ups with MS. You can get an MS system to work well, but it always remains very fragile.

I've not had that problem with mine. I think the problem is that many
vendors seem to have moved product testing to the customer site. Computer
stuff is cheaper than ever, and the quality is worse than ever.

Very true. Bill Gates made a very aggressive business out of selling deliberately buggy software. There's the classic story of his first BASIC interpreter being sold with known trig function errors... I suspect they make a good business out of selling the next buggy upgrade so that you'll have to upgrade again (to chase other bugs)...

How many
can find intermittent hardware and fix it? Not many in my estimation.

My experience has been that of depressingly few.

A warm room and memtest86 and the GIMPS primes torture test are very worthwhile. Also include a good disk thrash test utility and leave on severe test for 24 hours. Then briefly retest on each reboot at least.


Summary:

All the above systems mentioned have their place. However, I feel that MS have significantly upped the ante with their latest EULAs, and have been a detriment to Computer Science in general over the last few years with their marketing driven product and subsequent misplaced efforts...

And there are very good useful alternatives available...


Regards,
Martin

Mandrake 9.1 Linux