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[Fairlight]

On Tue, Aug 10, 2004 at 11:45:20PM -0700, after drawing runes in goat's blood,
Bill Campbell cast forth these immortal, mystical words:
> 
> Windows XP came out three years ago this month, and was supposed to be the
> answer to all Microsoft's security problems.  If I remember correctly, the
> first major exploit of XP came out within a week or so of that release.
> New exploits of Windows, of ever increasing severity, come out almost
> weekly.  I've often wondered (a) why people continue to use Windows given
> it's security history, and (b) why the land sharks haven't gone after
> Microsoft or the managers and directors of public companies who endanger
> their company's assets by putting critical data on Windows.

Can't answer B.  

The answers to A are multi-fold.  You have companies entrenched in Windows
and other MS products, and there's never really a great time to toss away
that investment they've made, even if they know they'll be spending more
down the road--it's a syndrome where they think, "Well, we've sunk this
much into it, we may as well get our money's worth and not have it all be
for nothing."  It's really poor logic, but I've seen it at work.  Some are
just indoctrinated--either directly or by virtue of the wankers they get to
run their IT departments.  Others just insist nothing can do the same job.
And then there are those that trot out the user friendliness excuse.  There
are more, but those cover a large majority of cases, I'm sure.  Oh, the
other largest reason is the sheer number of applications available for it
as opposed to Mac or *nix, and even where comparable ones exist, the price
discrepancies that usually lie therein.

Part of the problem with XP being the "solution" is that they keep
"innovating" new ways to let people get screwed.  DCOM subsystem exploits
accounted for more than a few problems for them, for example--but that
technology doesn't exist in older versions of Windows.  The more the
come up with, the more potential fault points there are.  And they have
plentiful enough enemies to go looking for the holes.

I remember a time when more than a few people figured the only way to get
MS to fix a Windows bug or even take it seriously was to use it to crash
their web site servers.  Of course, this was before the whole deal where
they purportedly switched those to FBSD servers and stripped the ident
codes.  :)

I actually don't mind win2k.  We have it on one machine here.  It has only
acted up once, and I think that was strictly a strange hardware glitch to
be honest.  I fixed that one.  It crashes hard once in a blue moon, but
it's far superior to 95 and 98se.  

Treating it as a firewalled insecure system to begin with, we don't
particularly mind it as a productivity/multimedia/whatever machine.  I'd
never recommend 'doze of any flavour for a server environment--certainly
not a mission-critical production one.  But overall, I don't mind it as a
desktop.  Then again, I liked Mac System 7-9, OS/X looks nice, and NeXTStep
is cool.  I like X11 with NeXT-like window managers.  I'll use damned near
anything as a desktop as long as it doesn't hinder me.

I don't have a huge problem using it as a desktop, so long as Outlook of
any version is -banned- from receiving incoming email traffic.  Damned if
I'd ever put Windows in a server role though.  Some people strenuously
disagree and cite having had no problems.  I say they've probably been very
lucky, no matter how much love and care went into keeping them patched.

I'm at the point where I hate the company more than the products.  Their
filing for 3000 patents for the coming year is outrageous.  The one
regarding displaying images sorted chronologically is...amusing, after the
amount I've seen that particular one ripped to shreds in discussions.  It's
their lack of attention to detail, and their monopolistic practices that I
object to.  If they'd gotten their because their software was actually
-good-, I wouldn't really care.  But it isn't.  They got to where they are
by means I consider questionable, riding on mediocre products and
broad-based public ignorance--the latter of which they take huge advantage
of at every turn.  And then they abused the position they fanagled
themselves into.

Ugh.  Had to start me, eh Bill?  Nothing like a good wind-up.  :)

mark->
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