OT: Linux most breached OS

[Bill Vermillion]

As Fairlight was scratching "For a good prime call 
391581 * 2^216193 -1" on the wall, he suddenly said:

> Oh...one extra thing you should be aware of. I know that you
> and I both prefer win2k to winxp. I don't know if you're aware,
> but they've said they will -not- release further IE patches
> against anything earlier than IE on XP with SP2 installed.

Do you always believe what MS says :-)^32.

I see that on my system had updates to IE 6.  And I don't have
SP2.   They backtracked on this and put those out patches out
when they said they weren't going to.  They had to listen to
their customers - many of which won't install XP2.  

And while MS says you need XP2, Brian Livingston gives all the
steps in two consecutive newletters [last week and the week before]
on how to make IE secure without adding SP2.


> This is borne out by their reaction in the SecurityFocus
> article in the link cited below. You'll also note that this was
> reported on 10/25. The only systems they've apparently taken
> care of for the following is XP SP2 and Windows 2003.

Well that report shows that MS neither confirms the bug nor do they
have fixes for it.  If they do patch it, it will appear on
the next "Patch Tuedsday"  Decemeber 14th.  They were forced
to realease on patch for IE when they said they would not, and with
so many places not wishing to move to SP2 for various problems,
I suspect they will go back on their words - again.

> Novell has already released a version of SuSE under Novell's
> ownership 9.2 came out a few weeks back.

9.1 was also in a Novel green box.

> But I -have- always maintained that people should either have someone
> in-house with the necessary *unix skills, or outsource the work.

And many should also outsource MS.  I've seen some horribly messed
up systems that were worked on the a local staffer who considered
themselves an MS expert - where in reallity they were an ex-spirt.

> If they won't do either, then there's always Microsoft for
> those folks.

MS systems can be screwed up just as badly by local people.

> And if anyone that uses 'par' is reading--how do you get it
> to leave -two- spaces alone before and after a smiley when
> reformatting a paragraph? 

Well I could use the argument that I've heard strong Linux
advocates use when the argue for open source solutions.

You have the source to 'par' you can fix it yourself :-)

But seriously - after looking at the docs - you might
try setting 'guess' to 1.  'docs' are those paragraphs of text that
many seem to ignore.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com