Slashdot Mirror
Fred Moody Says Linux Worst Operating System Ever
I avoided posting this because it really is pretty lame, but its getting submitted a lot. Basically
Fred Moody says Linux Sucks on ABC. He calls it the worst operating system ever based on the fact that bug traq lists more bugs for it then any other operating system. Stories like this just make me roll my eyes: the thing will get tons of traffic from you guys and his editor will say "Good Job Fred" because they got to sell lots of banner ads on it. *sigh*
Its great, they listed under 100 bugs for every OS. I'm work with finding bugs every day and those stats seem riduculous. I can find 10-15 bugs a day in much simpler programs. Less than 100 bugs in an OS, ridiculous. From experience, I know LINUX crashes less than my Windows 95 or 98 box. How can LINUX have less bugs? There's probably just more people that care about LINUX and thats why the bugs get reported. (In fact my box hasn't crashed yet, but I just use it as a server, not a development machine.) He should look at Microsofts own list of bugs for windows. LINUX isn't perfect (no OS is, yet) but that reasoning as to why its the worst OS in history is ridiculous.
_Nobody_ puts that much effort into pre-emptively defending their integrity unless they're a con :)
Were it not for that comment I might think he was simply a fool- but fools are less self-aware. Moody's a _con_. He's like a 'mole', can't possibly be saying these things out of genuine sincerity. There's got to be some heavy secrets in there somewhere- though I doubt many people would care. "Fred Moody turned out to be a paid Microsoft employee working undercover!" "Fred who?"
The most touchingly pathetic bit is this- both Moody, and many Slashdotters being alarmed by him, seem to believe that non computer geeks, the un-tech-savvy, have NEVER EXPERIENCED a con before. Um, used car dealers have been around for many years guys- before then you had real estate cons selling you beachfront properties in Florida. Cons are NOT NEW.
A surprisingly large percentage of nongeeks of all ages and walks of life will look at this guy, this 'one journalist, at least, in whom readers could trust absolutely', and _automatically_ go 'shyeeeah right'... correctly spotting the CON of him without even having a technical background to rebut his claims.
Of course, I'm reminded of another phrase by all this: "Then they fight you,"
You know what comes next ;)
Someone should make an anonymizer that strips out banner ads ala Junkbuster. That would be cool, since Slashdot could link to any article it wanted through the anonymizer. Better yet, maybe Slashdot could implement it... (get out that Perl)
My first observation is that this is at least partially true, just because of the makeup of the slashdot community. Face it, we do have quite a few linux zealots and quite a few micros~1 haters.
However, I also believe that this has a great deal to do with some flaws in the moderation system.
The first problem I see is that the first posts to an article are the most likely to be modded up. Moderators tend to hang around the couple most recently posted stories.
Not everybody refreshes Slashdot every two hours. The people that do, are the ones that agree most with the stereotypical slashdot agenda.
Insightful posts take time. It could easily take an hour to *read the article*, do some other research, and post some meaningful commentary. Those who post fast seem more likely to spout out their gut feelings.
To sum up: The people who post first are likely to be avid slashdot readers and more zealotous. Posts that are made soon after the article goes up are not as likely to be based on facts.
On hot trigger issues such as this one, I have read comments soon, then comments later and been pleasantly suprised by a couple better posts that get moderated later. Often on looking further, I notice that there are several more that I would have modded higher than the ones that are modded higher.
Let me try to illustrate this with a graph:
Post Quality vs Time: ;+---+ ;+---------------
|high
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|+---+
|+++--+
|+-+&nbs p;+---+
|++ 
|++ 
|++
|+-+
|++
++
|
|low
+-----------------------------------------
time--->
Sum of moderation done
|more+-------------- -----------
|+-----+
|+--+
|++
|+
|++
|+
|+
|+
|+
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|less
+-----------------------------------------
time---> As you can see from the graphs, I think there are a lot of good comments posted later that don't get moderated, while a lot of earlier comments that might not be quite so good, do.
I suggest the golden moderation system.
You get 5 moderator points.
2 of the are gold.
2 of them are silver.
1 of them is bronze.
gold points can be used on any post at any time. Silver points can be used on posts attached to articles that are more than 2 hours old. Bronze points can be used on posts attached to stories that are more than 1 day old.
I think this would really do wonders for Slashdot.
For building a web server, for example, it's easy to strip down a Linux system to just a web server and ssh for remote administration, with no other exposures.. Then, the only vulnerabilities you are concerned with are those in the packet filtering code, the web server, and sshd. It's considerably harder to strip down NT to that degree, in particular if you want to keep some kind remote administrability.
Moody is either simply clueless, or he writes deliberately biased pieces. Which leaves me wondering: can't ABC get people with a sense of ethics and some competence anymore?
Dear AC,
... available whereever the LDP is sold!
I am his linux friend and I'm not so biased that I can't "see the forest for the trees," so to speak. I have windows computers, linux computers, macintosh computers, and various other unixen from time to time.
I can do of that stuff you say I can't do on Windows while drinking root bear through my nose and whistling dixie. All of it. Installable filesystems, multiple sessions, multiuser environments, multiple users simeotaneously, multiple versions of IE, even shell replacements - basally the equivalent of WM's on Win32 simply because it's structured differently than X. If you want to know how do do any of it (which is all really quite irrelevant in the real world anyway) then just e-mail me and I'll tell you how.
Why do I know this stuff? Know thy competition. My suggestion to you is to go out and read the Linux-Advocacy-HOWTO
~GoRK
> He may be in need of a clue, but isn't this the sort of thing that the common folk look at to make their decisions.
Mayhap, but in this case he actually did us a favor. He misrepresents the numbers so badly that even a PHB can understand it (well, at least after you point it out). Once your PHB understands that high profile pundits can so gratuitously misrepresent the facts, the seeds of doubt will be sown.
But it won't be the seeds of doubt Mr. Moody intended to sow. It will be seeds of doubt about all the Old Guard's desperate attempts to discredit the newcomer.
Thank you, Mr. Moody.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Thats nothing. Windows went from v3.1 to 95, then from 98 to 2000. Jesus, next it's Windows 1,000,000. With a name like that, that's GOT to be a good product.
- I like pudding.
A few thoughts about a recent article of yours.
"Linux Sux Redux"
First off, that title is purely flaimbait, surely not something a writer of your skill level would sink to.
Second, you have no clue what you're talking about, Linux didn't do too bad on bugtraq, much better than windows. You must have been referring to the aggregate results, which obviously consisted of a total of bugs from several distributions, as Redhat's, and Suse's numbers were much lower. Obviously, the aggregate results don't mean much, as you won't be running every distribution on the same machine at the same time. Surely someone as smart as you would realize this.
Third, someone who writes about technical issues would surely understand what these numbers mean. If not, let me tell you. Virtually NOTHING! Yes, that's correct, they mean next to nothing. These are reported bugs, so they are most likely fixed almost right away. They may also be insignificant bugs that don't really matter in most situations, as they don't distinguish between the severity of bugs. Also, since they are only reported bugs, there's probably plenty that are not known. For example, MacOS X has 1 reported bug! Surely MacOS X has WAY more than that, as it's still in development, and everyone who has a clue knows that it's just not possible for there to be ONLY 1 BUG in an OS in development!
So I think I understand. There are only three possibilities.
1. This article is pure flaimbait meant to create traffic, hence, more banner revenue! This is the most likely scenario. Job well done, you made an ass of yourself and it paid off.
2. This is a joke! Haha, pretty funny, I'm dyin! But seriously, that's really not a very good joke, I don't think many people will get it.
3. You are a complete moron and should be fired from your job immediately!
If 1 or 2 is correct, then I hope you are happy being a completely worthless human being! That must bring you great joy!
If 2 is correct... oh wait, same thing.
Thanks for you time,
Ryan
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
If bad press appears about Micro$oft, an M$ marketroid will respond to it, and generally speaking, the trade press will cover it. If bad press appears about Linux, we all sit around and gripe on Slashdot, and the press couldn't care less because, no matter how numerous we may be, we're not individually big corporations.
So where are our big commercial allies now? IBM purports to be basing a big chunk of its strategy on Linux, so why isn't an IBM marketroid out there in front to deflate MS (and MS-shill) FUD? I'm sure we'll hear from the various distros on this point, but what about the big guns?
It would be one thing if a major like Big Blue just talked and spent no money, but they're spending millions yet remaining strangely silent. What gives?
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
First, you did start out with such a statement. My point is that even if you go on to argue facts, editors, who get great, huge, steaming piles of cranky feedback, won't even read the rest of it!
I also take issue with equating bad reasoning with a lack of ethics. He is in error, but that doesn't necessarily mean he has no integrity. He could, for example, simply be stupid. You need more evidence when you make a charge like this.
Seriously, nothing personal, but I think your letter takes the absolute wrong approach, and I highly doubt it will be read. Most feedback on this sort of thing is too long, and tries to bring up too many issues. Short and sweet does the trick. The sentence
I would also appreciate it if one of your editors would have a chat with him about journalistic integrity and how even a columnist shouldn't misrepresent statistics to further an agenda.
is just plain bad. Can you imagine an editor saying, "Gee, this guy's right. Let's sit Fred down and talk about his journalistic integrity." I guarantee you the editor will have no more interest in the rest of your comments if you make officious and condescending remarks like this.
ChuckleBug
You said:
For instance, the apache server is included in the Linux numbers, but the IIS web servers numbers are split apart from the NT numbers and Mr. Moody didn't trouble himself to add them into the list of NT vulnerabilities.
WRONG. Here is a quote from the SecurityFocus.com article:
We consider a vulnerability to affect an application or operating system if the vulnerability affects a component that is part of the application or operating system when brought or downloaded. For example, this means that a vulnerability in IIS will also be considered a vulnerability in Windows NT at the later ships with the former.
cpeterso
why post the link and give the moron extra hits?
I've never seen a post about DOS on Bugtraq. So, but this logic, DOS is the best OS ever. :P
He's just a very moody guy... must have had :)
a bad day today
That's really funny. If I had the bandwidth, I'd script the page to re-load 100 times. I wonder if they would even notice the page hits dont match up with the ad impressions...
Adzap for Squid:
http://www.zip.com.au/~cs/adzap/index.html
The script also blocks Slashdot ads, but Rob's probably got all of The Who's CD's by now...
Don't be shy! Write ABC News.com at:
http://abcnews.go.com/service/Help/abc_contactus.
Here is my letter to ABC News.com:
Category: Factual Error
Regarding the article: Linux Sux Redux
Mr. Moody shows no understanding of operating systems.
An article like this does huge damage to your entire company and the ABC trademark. When an article that discusses things that I understand is completely uninformed, it makes me wonder if the other articles, that I can't check independently, are also completely uninformed.
In my opinion, the Microsoft Windows operating systems are buggy and quirky. They show a lack of caring for the users. More accurately, they show abusiveness toward the users.
I have found many, many bugs in Windows OSs. I don't report them because I would have to pay Microsoft to do so.
If I am already talking to a Microsoft tech. support person (and therefore would not have to pay extra to report a bug), I have found that many times MS tech. support will not accept a report! Apparently this has something to do with creating a hassle for the tech. support department.
Regards,
Michael Jennings
Jennings _ Michael @ hotmail . com
(Futurepower is a trademark.)
- Moody on MS employees newly hosed due to stock corrections: "The best you can say for them is that they made a deal with the Devil, and the Devil reneged".
- Moody wrote about how status for management at Microsoft had become a matter of _not_ answering your email, to appear more busy. This is a screaming red flashing warning sign of complacency and corporate rot, and Moody blithely did a column exposing it.
- Moody raked IE 4.0 over the coals, pointing out things such as the bug with Compaq Presarios that caused the installation to make the windows desktop a blank. He painted IE4 as an absolute betrayal.
The bottom line isn't simple, but people seldom are when they're as strange as Moody. This is a man who can go to great lengths to persuade the reader that (for instance) Linux needs to put a LOT OF WORK in before it can run for 24 hours at a time without crashing- a concept that is strikingly at variance with reality (as boring as the reality of a Xless webserver might unfortunately be...) And yet he's also capable of exposing some very damaging realities about Microsoft- I'd entirely forgetten that the "MS management intentionally not answering internal emails" story was his. The one consistent line to take through it all is this- Moody is a fanatic, a fanatic Microsoft supporter, but NOT necessarily of the real Microsoft company. He is a fanatic for the ideal Microsoft which he believes once existed, which he feels Bill Gates still personally represents, MS coders still represent. This is his fanaticism.As such, it's impossible to persuade him otherwise- if you show him that MS management are far gone in corporate rot, he writes a column about that and laments how MS 'lost its way' from the REAL Microsoft which he strongly suggests is still in there plugging away but unaware of all the nastiness. If you show him that IE 4 shipped buggy as hell and caused major problems with top-selling Compaqs, he laments this, wonders what happened to what he describes as the best, most rigorous testing operation anybody's ever had, and in the end blames Netscape for enticing MS marketers to release IE4 too soon- and again, the _ideal_ of Microsoft stays intact, and it's the suits' fault- his hero Microsoft coders and testers can do no wrong.
This is dangerous and quite frustrating, because it's impossible to contend with. You are never going up against Microsoft, in Moody's eyes- instead you are going up against the Ideal Microsoft, the one that delivers on all its promises and works really hard and benefits the consumer and is as tireless as an old-school Ma Bell employee. The one that doesn't exist, and never did...
So it's impossible for anyone to live up to that standard- it's an imaginary standard, and that is why nothing will ever sway Moody from his MS loyalty and determination to spin everything MSwards. Yet MS itself cannot live up to that standard, never could- it was a hype, a fake. So Moody periodically flames Microsoft itself- and proceeds to spin the flame MSwards, too, and this is why on the one hand he can expose shocking cynicism, contempt for consumers, and rot at the core of Microsoft, and on the other hand keep an unshakable faith that nevertheless, Microsoft is The One Answer. He's not actually hired- if he was he would certainly not expose some of the very embarrassing realities he's exposed. He's a fanatic- he fights for the _ideal_ Microsoft, so his fury is all the more obvious when he sees Microsoft failing to live up to what he sees as their true heart and soul. He blames marketing, Netscape, anyone other than the real coders at MS, the real brain trust, Gates- those he sees as keepers of the faith.
Unfortunately, those are exactly the people who have intentionally done all the things that break his heart. Moody cannot handle the truth- the heart of Microsoft is, and always was, mean, treacherous, and fraudulent. It's always been about the money and never about delivering a quality product. It's always been conflict with the rest of the industry (all the way back to Altair Basic) and dirty tricks and strongarm tactics worthy of Mafiosi. That is how they won. Cheaters do sometimes win, when they aren't punished. Otherwise, why cheat?
In the end, Moody is more to be pitied than censured. A thousand slashdot readers madly rebutting him will not shake his illusions. Not even the failure of his seeming idol will shake his illusions, because they are built on mirages, and you can't tear down a fantasy with real-world arguments.
The reason to pity him is this- the fantasy is all he has.
Here's a not so new idea, why do we keep feeding these corporate trolls? Someone with lots of bandwidth could put an ad free version of the story up and the story submitters could update the story with 'mirror sites.' We could have competitions for first mirror instead of lame first posters. Could happen.
Or just post the thing on deja and post the link, I'd much rather load deja ads.
Not that most slashdotters load ads in the first place, ad blocking files (mail me if you want mine) and junkbuster help.
Well, I recall two MAJOR remote root exploits in RedHat within the last year: bind and wu_ftpd.
I agree with you in principle... but I don't think RedHat is much better off than Windows is.
It looks like he added the numbers of Linux (aggr) and RedHat.
-- Abigail
Funny, when I add up the numbers I get the following:
/ middle.html%3Fvendor%3DMicrosoft%26title %3D%26version%3Dany
NT : 22
SQL Serv: 6
IIS : 12
IE : 6
Outlook : 5
------------
total : 51
And this is only for Microsoft software. You add in all the third party bugs and the total number of NT bugs quadruples.
The 51 number seems a little higher than the 34 that the site claims for the total number of NT bugs, or does NT not come with Outlook, IE, IIS and SQL server?
And W2K adds in 10 brand new bugs. And Office adds a couple more yet.
The grand total is around 218 with all NT bugs (excluding 98 and 2000 entries.) The total number of all Redhat bugs is only 71.
I got this information from this page: http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/?content=/vdb
Maybe you need to look closer next time and not take someone elses word for things? Don't take my work for it, look for yourself.
-- Never make a general statement.
Um, actually, Seattle Weekly is from Seattle. Bill G lives in Medina, works in Redmond, and probably reads the Eastside Business Journal.
Close enough. I wonder how much corporate tax the state of WA gets from Herr Gates? Remember, state taxes are spent throughout the state, not just in the locality in which they're received... Or am I writing to another tool?
Shit, maybe WA doesn't collect corporate taxes! If that were the case tho, every corporation on this planet would HQ there...
That's like me saying that New Jersey makes New York City do its bidding.
Heh heh, in some ways it does.. Can you say Port Authority? Can you say 'giving tax breaks to prevent luring'? Can you say 'Ellis Island bridge'? Where do you think the folks who work in NYC live? Why do you think there's an hour of traffic to drive ~1 mile across the Hudson River at 3 separate points in the morning? And that's _with_ one of the largest public transportation networks on the PLANET?
And we haven't even mentioned the northern and eastern suburbs, which are actually more apropos as they're in the same state...
But I digress. Moody is still a twit, and a partial one at that. Find me evidence otherwise.
Or not.
Your Working Boy,
As much as most of us love Linux, there are those who do not. There are those who hate linux. Their reasons are as mysterious as they are irrational, but they do exist. I know several people who think they are guru's and hate linux. The fact that their knowledge level varies from "nearly clueless" to "just enough to be dangerous," does nothing to keep them from telling even more clueless people how much they think linux sucks.
Just imagine a mac freak with an anti-linux attitude and you'll get a good mental image of what these guys are like.
Moody is trying to mislead people who simply don't know any better. Moody's lying, and anyone with half a clue knows it. Sadly most people don't have a clue at all, so BS like this gets repeated as truth, especially by suits and suit-like individuals.
But in the end you've got to see it as a good sign. If M$ biased stooges have to stoop to lying and misleading, well we've already won.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
So what do you call a website that puts up a huge, fuck-off headline saying that a major web-based email provider is about to collapse, then takes it back in a tiny print comment saying "from-the-well-it-could-happen dept"?
Slashdot wants to move out of that glass house before it starts throwing stones.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Go Apple!!! No vulnerabilities! It's the most secure of them all!
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.
Informative? Now its insightful!! +5 Insightful.
ROTFLMAO
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
Even using Moody's own reasoning and the data he refers to, Linux beats NT by a wide margin. But he misquotes the numbers. How do you suggest one can compete with deliberately erroneous reporting? Perhaps pay Moody more money than Microsoft did?
Besides, I think we have had lots of articles saying that Linux/UNIX sucks as well--but there seems to be some agreement that it sucks less.
> it just seems rather immature to me at times that opposition is instantly shot down like that.
... maybe then you'll see a change in the way we react to those opinions.
Is it perchance because the article had absolutely nothing to recommend it?
Yes, there's a big difference between the way we (most of us) respond to an article critical of Linux and an article critical of Windows. But there's also a big difference in what we have seen while using the two systems over the years. For the most part that experience has been that Linux has been functional and reliable while Windows has been marketable and crash-prone. But the media tend to publish the opposite: Windows is Wonderful, Linux {is a toy, is insecure, sux, etc.}.
Maybe when the media start publishing opinions that more or less jibe with what we've seen with our own eyes, rather than with what the highest bidding advertiser wants consumers to see,
Of course, if you think the article was a reasonable analysis of credible data, you should jump in and defend the unfair bashing we've been giving it. Meanwhile, pointing out the statistical patterns of our responses, without looking at the veracity patterns of the material we are responding to, is useless.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Click here to avoid abc ads:
/qA-hMD4JshJAC-y_G
http://www.remarq.com/read/34668
That aside, I'll agree the vulnerabilities in Linux are more visible than in the past due to deployments, but, most of us who've been doing it for several years, have enjoyed some key features that have helped us make this Operating System and it's applications the treasure to administer that it is today and has been for quite some time:
The list goes on. This is why I have 40 different servers out there in the wild supporting several thousand end-users in education, business, and, of course, entertainment.
I'm chalking this one up to a victory. I suggest all others do the same and keep at it. I still believe this is the greatest Operating System that ever existed. And, I do love my AIX and other UNIXes. But, there's really one word that makes the difference: free >:).
Linux rocks!!! www.dedserius.com
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
> so he wrote an idiotic little scare column about 'evil scientists'.
Many people propagate a claim that the media is "liberal". The simple truth is, what the media actually is is pro-controversy. Even before the days of flame baiting e-pundits and banner ad click counts, the media's prime interest was in generating controversy (followed closely by purient interest).
Sadly, there's nothing they love more than an airplane crash or a school shooting (particularly if they can start arguments about whose fault it was), a political scandal, a conspiracy theory, or a "revelation" that the OS that is taking the world by storm on its own merits is actually a piece of junk whose inferior qualities have somehow escaped the notice of the millions of techies who use it by choice.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Tall order people...
People who bash Windows generally don't call it the worst "EVER!"...
I occasionally brag that "I" wrote the wrost operating system ever. I know it's not true. I wrote a horrific OS and anything that ever made it to market could beat it bloody. But theres the software that NEVER made it to market to account for.
My system would fuction for about 30 min to an hour... scramble it's command structure and ignore all input. Thats pritty nasty. But then in prototypes there were operating systems that would scramble data on the disk. Reboot mine and your ok. Reboot a system with a scrambled disk and your dead forever.
It is posable for an operating system to distory hardware in some cases (this allows for both bad software and hardware defects.. this isn't hard to imagin).
Now those are the operating systems that never made it to market. The worst "EVER".
Let's move on to operating systems that did make it to market. I remember using a mainframe with the wonderful defect of occasionally sending data to THE WRONG USER. Ohhh great security guys MY PASSWORD ON SOMEONE ELSES SCREEN. This was a combonation of hacked hardware and an operating system that wasn't designed for it.
Then we have that wonderful security defect where valuable information is stored in memory can be grabbed up by clever crackers. This small problem (a way crackers went for low security accounts to high security accounts) has sence been fixed by.. get ready.... Amiga, Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Linux, IBM, etc etc etc etc etc Hover, Black and Decker, Toys R Us, Little Timmy, the guy working the fast food drive by window.... you get the idea...
[Disclamer.. Accually some of the above listed didn't.. I'm sure Little Timmy had no hand in fixing any such defect]
This defect is pritty well gone today but back 20 years ago big big security defect.
We have had many problems over the years making computers do what we want them to do and found many soltions to those problems. We use the cheapest most effective solutions and now they are history.
Nothing on the market today is anywhere near as bad as operating systems once were...
For the worst ever you need to look in trash bins of psycopath programmers still trying to fit Unix on Commodore 64s....
Or you can use this guys standard for best/worst... I sereously doupt the worlds worst would EVER get a bugtrap report... I mean I wrote the most second most secure operating system ever... 30 min to an hour and NO ONE has access.. yeah but the most secure is the one that makes the mother board explode....
I don't actually exist.
The SecurityFocus stats page clearly shows RedHat's '99 vulnerabilities as 38 - less than 40% of WinNT's.
So where did the 122 come from? Moody added RedHat's 38 to the Linux Aggregate of 84. He's done the same for this year's numbers (RedHat's count for this year is 17, and the total for Linux is 30 not 47). But the Linux Aggregate already includes the 38 RedHat vulnerabilities and it clearly states that in the preface on the page - Moody is either an incompetent researcher or he is deliberately counting vulnerabilities twice in order to discredit RedHat. I'd be consulting a lawyer about the possibility of a libel suit if I were them.
Somebody's gotta go first. With a lead in installations and a tendency to be an early adopter, bugs in a component that's used in all three will tend to be reported against RH. If you break down the bugs against the actual programs and match that to the distros that use them, it looks different.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Let's not all forget Fred Moody's column from '98, "The (Anti-) Linux Crusade: Charge of the Linux Brigade". In this, Mr. Moody interviews an anonymous informant who is willing to say bad things about Linux, but only through extremely poor grammar and inaccuracies. Moody quotes this informant as saying:
"linux isnt secure and it isnt stable, its a moving target that never really gets out of beta. sure people run production sites on linux. i know alot of these people. they dont get much sleep and have grown opaque from the lack of sunlight. i have admin'd large linux shops. they require huge amounts of admin overhead, and if you want shit to really work you are going to spend alot of time manually fixing things. the number of outstanding security holes and lack of stable functionality is monumental."
Yup, that's the source of his article. He couldn't get anybody to go on the record saying these things, because they're grossly inaccurate. Moody concludes by saying:
"It will be a cold day at the equator before L. Torvalds sets aside his ego for the sake of someone else's better ideas."
What a foolish, inflammatory asshole. There are few reporters that disgust me as much as this man.
-Waldo
-------------------
I'm sorry, I failed to provide a link. You can find this article at http://www.abcne ws.go.com/sections/tech/FredMoody/moody981120.html .
-Waldo
-------------------
- "Gates is fighting for the consumer and against the businessman, while most of his competitors, from Apple to Sun to Netscape, are fighting for the businessman at the expense of the consumer."
- "[Microsoft] is the most misunderstood company in the history of American commerce"
- "Microsoft...is driven by the need to make computers...cheaper and easier to use for consumers, rather than as profitable as possible for as many software and hardware companies as possible"
He's such a sycophant.-Waldo
-------------------
When /. editors post something like this, it should be preceded with a warning: "get some ad-blocking software first not to generate eyeballs for the troll".
It shouldn't be too hard to hack together a link via a junkbuster proxy, such that anyone, with or without ad-busting software, could click on the link and read the story, sans advertising.
That would be the responsible thing for slashdot to do, but I doubt their employers would hear of it (legal liability fears would rule the nest, most likely).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
don't waste flames on this guy
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
More likely:
You're a home NT user. Same scenario, only the bug wasn't reported. One fourteen year old who's spent half his life in a debugger has it. The entire internet is now screwed, because the kid released a worm that spread through those legions of "mainstream" MS boxen like wildfire. A bunch of Unix geeks spend a few hours developing filters to protect the world's MS boxen and post the filters to Bugtraq, reducing the load on the network enough that everyone can get back to their pr0n. A few days later MS releases a hotfix that does who-knows-what and may or may not work right on your machine. A few days after that it's discovered that the hotfix re-enables a vulnerable activex control, and another worm is released, but doesn't go anywhere because not many people installed the hotfix anyway...
I didn't see this in the comments (but given the laws of probability, with 800 and 135 above 2 comments it probably is)
You cannot add up the total number of Linux bugs by summing the individual ones form each distribution. Each distribution has a lot of the same programs. For example, when the wu-ftpd exploit was found, that is a common package. Almost every distribution has that, and thus that package was probably counted in Moody's "bug list" 5 or 6 times! I can't imagine how many times he must have covered the suid exploit in kernels < 2.2.16.
Besides a lot of the packages have version numbers < 1!! If you don't want to risk buggy software, don't install those! Most packages I've seen with version numbers > 1 are quite stable and effective, it's just the 0.x packages that are somewhat dangerous, and in some distributions this isn't true because they fix bugs independently but keep the version number the same! For example nano 0.8.6 (free pico clone) in Debian is as stable as the latest devel. releases, now a 0.9.14, but just without the other features. If you go download nano 0.8.6 from the developer, it will be full of bugs and probably will crash if you try to mark text.
If you want to find out how many Linux bugs there are in all the packages (which isn't fair anyway since MS has lots of bugs in the products that don't ship with windows) you have to keep a count of what packages are common to multiple distributions, and also unique bugs (which should probably be thrown out since they're insignificant to the OS as a whole, like a typo in the intaller). If you did this you would find surprisingly fewer bugs in Linux.
Also NT doesn't come with three mainstream text editors (vi, emacs, pico, maybe also joe, ae, etc.), two or three desktop environments still somewhat in development (GNOEM, KDE, xfce), three or four graphical shells/file managers (GNOME's, KDE's, Midnight Commander). The point is that when you give people this much choice and flexibility you increase the chance of bugs, okay. If NT gives you one of each of those and that one is buggy, there is reason to complain. In Linux, if GNOME crashes too much for you (I don't think so for the record) or is too slow, you can always switch to KDE. If vi is too cryptic, use emacs. If pine can't refresh that top blank row on the screen, use mutt.
# debian/rules
I'm glad that someone figured that out.
Redhat ships with some ludicrous number of packages that do everything from running the OS (kernel packages) to OMFG playing games! and SOFTWARE THAT IS STILL UNDER DEVELOPMENT
71 bugtraq announcements in all that hubub? I think that's a testament to greatness there. I would also imagine that a number of the bugs counted as "linux" (and probably added to the redhat total #) were for development kernels and stuff that doesn't even affect "stable" code.
Just because RedHat issues a security alert doesnt mean that it's redhat's fault for distributing an (optional) aplication with it's OS!
If so then everytime I find a bug in a microsoft or third party software program that microsoft endorses for its OS then i should count it as a microsoft windows bug and put it on MS's damn total.
How many core OS security problems in windows vs in the linux kernel? Way way more!
Still taking some kind of statistic from bugtraq is really pointless. Why dont i just go post all the shitty vulnerabilities in that really crappy release of apple system 7.something that totally sucked and call it the worst os ever?
Maybe i should add to the total by posting random windows bugs to bugtraq... like
"Tampered registry settings allow users to cheat in Microsoft Hearts! Your network play may be compromised!"
~GoRK
With still enough power to run Wordperfect at a reasonable speed.
It's a shame that as computers get more powerful, the software gets more bloated. My dad bought an eMachine recently, and the amount of crap on it slowing it down is boggling. You'd think people would want to optimize every last cycle in that new machine to make it go as fast as possible.
-legolas
i've looked at love from both sides now. from win and lose, and still somehow...
If you want to hear another view on linux, why don't you hop on over to Fox News which has some superior tech reporting. (Warning: site is java intensive)
This is another view of the world.
Obviously, no one has sent him the links (yes link_s_) to the "What's fixed in Win2k SP1" pages. I swear there are more bugs listed there than there are lines of source to Mozilla.
"If you look this list over, and measure each system's number of vulnerabilities against the number of its customers, Linux is arguably the worst operating-system product in history, and Microsoft's the best."
True. IF. Obviously, if you accept that criteria, he's right. He correctly notes earlier that NetBSD has just over one tenth the number of bugs as Windows. But, for whatever reason, it has a much smaller market share.
If you are a home user-- he may be right. Let's analyze a case: You are a home linux user. A vulnerability is reported Friday afternoon. Being a non-nerd computer geek, you spend your friday night at a bar. Saturday morning, you have a hangover. Saturday afternoon, you log on, and voila, a patch has been released! (Wow: an fast vendor response). But something else has happened. A lamer with no life rooted your box while you were out partying. Compare that to the following: You're a home NT user. Same scenario, only the bug wasn't reported. One super criminal has it... and maybe the Fortune 500 company is now screwed (which is why they need 24/7 sysadmins on a patchable OS), but there are no script kiddies around to attack you.
What Fred Moody forgets is that Windows is just as complicated an OS as Linux, and therefore, probably had just as many programming "mistakes" made which resulted in bugs. They're hidden... and he assumes they therefore don't exist. Oops. Obviously, in a high security case, this is absurd, and therefore for any serious target, they need an OS like *BSD (or Linux). But for the home user-- is full disclosure really the best choice?
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
This is a strength of a large, open community, not a weakness. If Windows source was open, the list would likely go well into the thousands.
Then it wouldn't be harder to hack... than nt.
See attrition.org statistics
No there are not more bugs. There are LESS bugs.
Look at the chart for your self. I have no idea where Moody is drawing his figures from but it certainly is not the chart which shows Windows to be head and shoulders above everyone else's bug count. I would have expected it to do a lot better given the inavailability of their source code.
The random number is a cache-killer so your browser properly counts pages.
The cookies are part of the anti-spam system, as you would see if you read the now GPL'd Slashcode.
God Fucking Damnit
The numbers he's using as the foundation for his story are not correct. He stupidly added the aggregated Linux score with the RedHat score, effectively counting RedHat vulnerabilities twice (no idea why he though he should add RedHat but not SuSE, debian, and Slackware...). Even so, the aggregated Linux score would not represent the total vulnerabilities on any single Linux system.
Of course, he didn't combine Win9X and WinNT scores. In fact, he skillfully ignored Win9X completely. Last time I checked, WinNT had like 150% the market share of Linux, while Win9X had some overwhelmingly huge market share.
Based on his assumption (and it's a gross assumption for sure) that detected-vulnerabilities-per-user is a measure of security, well then WinNT is at best a little more secure than the worst possible combination of Linux systems, while Win9X is overwhelmingly more secure than either. Of course, he couldn't mention this, because while he could pretend to pull the wool over everyone's eyes with some numbers that show WinNT is more secure than Linux, he couldn't possibly convince people that Win9X was more secure than WinNT. I guess he was afraid to demonstrate how insanse his assumptions were.
sigs are a waste of space
There's a major learning curve involved in using Linux, and until the public at large is ready and willing to take that step, no amount of GUifying or desktop building will remove the underlying need for Linux users to understand how Linux works. Additionally, Linux in the mainstream won't benefit the average user until it has something to offer that they don't already have. Normal people don't care if their programs are open source, they just want to browse the web, write their docs, and play their games.
Gnome and KDE are great, and I'm sure StarOffice and KOffice will be great too. But they don't take away from the need to understand that there are fundamental differences between Unix and Windows. Linux will not be ready for the mainstream until you can hand it to a neophyte and they can succeed without having a friend or relative that is a guru that can field hundreds of questions.
Try writing (politely) to the editor.
The quantity of bugs an OS has is a completely meaningless statistic. What do you think would be a bigger security problem: 60 bullet holes in my front door, or one cannonball hole?
That's where the difference lies. Microsoft security holes on bugtraq are almost guaranteed to be worse than Linux holes. Why? Because, without the source, someone has already encountered the bug in day-to-day use. A lot of these Linux bugs are things like, "Wow, this wasn't coded exactly right; in theory, although I don't know how it could be done, this could be exploited.". Microsoft bugs are likely to be along the lines of, "Ha, ha, I just exploited your OS again!"
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
I guess those are obvious points to most of us.. But the point has to be made, open source is open dirty laundry. But perhaps after all you got to be a rocketscientist to understand that. Abc news bad bad research! bad bad generalization!
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
This guy is a well known Microsoft fan. He wrote a book about a year inside MS with the incredible and unironic title
I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier . His partisan pro-MS credentials are impeccable.
This would be a good time to check out the Linux Advocacy HOWTO, before lighting up those flamethrowers.
The best-known competitor is Red Hat, but others - notably TurboLinux and Mission Critical Linux - are in the market as well.
Notably? Am I the only one who has NEVER heard of "Mission Critical Linux"? (I'm NOT saying it's bad, but it's pretty much an unknown, and he ranks it up there as "notable." How about Slackware? Debian? Those aren't notable, but "Mission Critical Linux" is. He hasn't done his research.
Linux zealots for years have insisted that the operating system is an invulnerable perpetual motion machine, incapable of crashing or being infested by the kinds of worms and viruses that hackers are constantly sending Microsoft-powered servers.
Can I ask who has ever said that Linux is "Invulnerable", or "incapable of crashing"? I've *NEVER* heard those claims. This guy is an Asshole! Seems to me, he's overexaggerating this crap just to start up the FUD machine.
This looks like an alarmingly high number in comparison with Solaris' 34 or NetBSD's 10, but it is significantly less than the 122 racked up by Red Hat...
For the 800 BILLIONTH TIME: Red Hat is NOT Linux! This idiot is taking a select few distros, and catagorizing them all as "Linux." Someone smack this moron.
If you look this list over, and measure each system's number of vulnerabilities against the number of its customers, Linux is arguably the worst operating-system product in history, and Microsoft's the best. As Linux zealots are beginning to find out, it's a lot easier to
masquerade as a better product than it is to go out and be one.
I could tear this entire paragraph up, but we all know it to simply be FUD. This jackass is trying to generate hits, and he's probably doing a good job.
Oh, did you happen to notice the bottom of the article? Look:
Fred Moody is the author of I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier
-- THIS ARTICLE IS A PAID ADVERTISEMENT FOR MICROSOFT CORPORATION. --
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
If he's just going by BugTraq why isn't OpenBSD the greatest OS out there? Or, if you want some sarcastic alternatives; what about BeOS, VMS, Minix, or GNU Hurd? Nevermind of course what he says later in the article (47 'sploits so far this year for Windows *AND* Linux) kind of contradicts his earlier statements that Linux is incredibly insecure. Also ignoring the multitudes of distributions, which increases the count...
Of course, I'm justing preaching to the choir here...
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Desire is not an occupation.
Not only is his claim that Linux has the most bugs disengenuous because he admits that no attempt is made to grade the bugs on severity or whether or not their fixed, but he's patently dishonest. An important part of his claim is that:
This is a bogus claim, though, because he's getting that number by adding up the count for each different version of Linux. That means that, for example, a kernel exploit being discovered will result in not just one but several vulnerabilities on his list- one for each version of Linux that uses that kernel.
To account for this, in fact, Bugtrax has its own Linux aggregate that avoids such double counting and has 84 total Linux bugs last year and 30 this year. (Actually, even that 122 figure seems a bit odd, since if you add up the figures separately you still only reach 98 for all of the distributions listed. It appears that he got it by adding the Linux(aggregate) figure to that of Red Hat, which is totally ridiculous.) Of course someone who uses only one version of Linux would experience only a fraction of these, but an honest count shows that even if you used Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, and SuSe in a heterogeneous network you'd still have fewer vulnerabilities than NT.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
... For Fred Moody's article:
Score: -1 (Troll)
-- iCEBaLM
He seems to be adding the Redhat number to the LINUX (all) number to get his "122" figure. That means the Redhat bugs are being counted twice.
All this is well-covered over on LinuxToday, btw.
There's more sucking here than a white house pizza party.
Were we display aggregate number of vulnerabilities (Linux and BSD) the number is
the size of the set that results from the union of all vulnerabilities for the components
without duplication. Vulnerabilities are not counted twice.
(quoted from the introduction at the top of the stats page he used http://www.securityfocus.com/vdb/stats. html)
Okay, lets for a moment assume that we want to go distro for distro... and most people believe that RedHat is one of the more insecure of them...
Vendor, Bugs in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 (so far)
LINUX (all), 10, 23, 84, 30
RedHat, 5, 10, 38, 17
WinNT, 4, 6, 99, 37
Geee... despite a minor problem at the beginning the numbers look a little different... don't they? In fact evem the agregate Linux numbers come up better then NT (while not a benchmark I would like to use, its the one he seems to be using). To compare the Unix agregate number properly to Windows, we would have to include the Win9x statistics also... right? Somehow I doubt he'd want to do that.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
As Linux entered the eye of the mass media, misinformation rapidly became one of its worst enemies. If you gathered 100 random computer using people, I promise you'll here 100 different descriptions of what Linux is, what Open Source is, and so forth. This is because they were told what Linux and Open Source were by 100 different ignorant mass media outlets like our pal at ABCNews.com.
:) It means any person who wants to introduce Linux into their company will have to start out by undoing all that misinformation before they can even begin to be taken seriously. It means schools that don't have any better source of information will take the mass media at its word and just ignore Linux. Misinformation needs to be countered, very carefully.
They don't get it, and they're spreading that ignorance to all their readers. This is bad.
OK, he's saying Linux is the worst OS, because it has the most security holes listed on BugTraq. But he also noted "Solaris' 34 or NetBSD's 10", less than Windows' 37. How can that make Windows the best OS?
Also, how many of those 122 security holes apply to non-RedHat distributions?
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I've been around Slashdot for a while now, and I've noticed something. First off, I'll agree with most everyone in saying this guy's article has little merit, but in my experience here's what I've seen with this community: Linux articles (esp. ones like this) are almost *instantly* trashed right off the bat, while any troll who has an article saying basically nothing more than "Micro$oft sux" is almost always praised. I don't mean to pick out MS in that example (and for the last time people, it is an S not a $) it just seems rather immature to me at times that opposition is instantly shot down like that. My 2 cents...
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
>Damn right. I propose that the link to
/. editors post something like this, it should be preceded with a warning: "get some ad-blocking software first not to generate eyeballs for the troll".
>Moody's "editorial" be removed from the story...
>why should we do this bastard the favor of
>slashdotting his pile of BS?
Because then everybody will go to the ABC site anyway, only to get at the story they will have to sift through many more ad-infested sites.
When
Moody actively misrepresents the data.
Check that chart and you will see Slack, Debian, Suse and Redhat plus a 'total number'. This is what moody uses. Look at the breakdown and it becomes clear what we all know: avoid Bughat.
However, even Bughat by itself only has about half as many issues as NT5.
Whereas all the other distros are in the low single digits and compare well with the commercial unixen and BSDs.
The author seems to confuse bugs in Linux (which is a kernel) with bugs in applications that run under Linux. Microsoft is never blamed for bugs in Windows program that they don't create (say ICQ for example), so why should Linux be blamed for bugs in applications that run under it (like sendmail)? I can think of 1 bug that ever crashed Linux from remote (which was fixed in no time), yet I can remember 3 that affected Windows 95/NT (remember OOB?!).
If an article were ever posted that said Windows is insecure because a lot of applications that run under Windows are buggy, Microsoft's army of lawyers would cause the page to be taken down in an instant. It's too bad there's no one to look out for Linux and other "free" OSes. Besides, to anyone with a clue, bugtraq specializes in bugs relating to UNIX type environments. There's a mailing list called "NTBugtraq" (www.ntbugtraq.com) which deals with all the bugs in Windows.
I'm sure I could ramble on longer if I actually read the article past the initial sentence..
Anyone else catch the double meaning of that statement? I'm sure he didn't intend it, but I am for sure going to take it that way!
"Though it may take a thousand years, we shall be FREE."
This guy's argument is based on a fallacy: that the bugs in one distribution, or in a collection of distributions, imply that ALL distributions are insecure.
You can't look at a single Linux distribution with exploits and say "See, Linux is insecure!" You have to look at ALL of them. Furthermore, you can't simply add up the number of bugs in all Linux distros. There are shared bugs there, because there are shared software components.
What this guy is doing is sort of like comparing a single bad apple to a whole box of good oranges. It's just plain wrong.
This is no surprise at all. Fred Moody is basically just a trained parrot for Microsoft. Check out this piece from last year where he attempts to trash Linux with such gems as
But my informant didn't just rant: he probed the psychology of the Grail-seekers: "because linux makes it easy ( due to its unix like nature ) to mess under the hood, people actually feel like they `control' or know whats up with their boxes...it doesnt come from any rational thoughts..."
"linux," he concluded, "sux."
For all we know, Moody just invented this person who allegedly works in a "non-Microsoft shop" and makes sweeping claims about Linux's instability and insecurity. Same with his invented numbers here.
I guess what I find odd is just how vitriolic and hateful Moody becomes in writing about Linux. He paints Linux users as zealots and freaks and just basically makes stuff up off the top of his head. Maybe he just needs therapy.
Or maybe he's just pissed cause his MSWord box keeps crashing as he tries to write.
In part, probably because he is published.
One can always peruse the reviews posted for and against his book, I Sing the Body Electronic , or The Visionary Position .
Of course, I should warn that these link to amazon.com -- but the reviews seem pretty split on the merits of his book-length work, too -- some are even a bit witty.
Or, I guess one could simply write him and ask.
AtheOS I don't know, but BeOS has 4 known vulnerabilities so far in 2000 (0 in '99, '98, and '97). Still kicks NT ass by the faulty logic in the article... and by personal experience :)
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Here is what I sent to http://www.abcnews.go.com/service/Help/abc_contacu s.html
Dear Sir,
I was suprised to read a news article on your site that was so clearly biased against Linux and so clearly biased in favor of Microsoft.
In the above article, Mr. Moody's conclusions are suspect and his methods are questionable.
Some of the mistakes that he makes are the following:
The totals for Linux includes many more software packages than does NT. For instance, the apache server is included in the Linux numbers, but the IIS web servers numbers are split apart from the NT numbers and Mr. Moody didn't trouble himself to add them into the list of NT vulnerabilities.
Since Linux distributions include several times the number of servers, clients and other software than an NT distribution, it hardly seems fair to directly compare the two OS'es in this manner. For a valid comparision Mr Moody should probably add in the mail, web browser, and other commonly installed server and client software vulnerablities for say the top three Windows packages in several different catagories to the number of vulnerabilites found in NT.
Since Linux is used as a desktop machine by 4% of the worlds computer users it has a lot of non-server software installed. It is possible to install only server software, turn off the services that you don't actually need and only have to update packages for security reasons 1-2 times a year. It is also possible to run Bastile software against a Redhat box and close numeous security holes before they are even a problem.
Because Bug Track is the primary method of tracking bugs in open source distributions nearly all the bugs will be reported here. Microsoft often hides its bugs in a security through obscurity method that rarely works.
It appears that if a single package has a vulnerablity in Linux then the Bug track list includes the vulnerablity for each affected distribution. Thus, a sendmail report will be counted once for each distribution that uses that version of sendmail. This will tend to artificially inflate the Linux numbers.
Mr. Moody also doesn't take into account how long it takes any given OS to fix each know vulnerablity. Linux will often post the fix with the bug report, or within a couple of hours, while NT products will often go many days or even weeks until a hot patch is released. An example of this is the current vbs vulnerablity that exists in the MS mail client. This is clearly a well known problem, but windows clients are hit again and again by the exact same mail worm.
A final point to make is the fact that even though NT is only used on a third of the web servers on the internet, nearly half the page defacements are against NT boxes.
I am not saying that any OS is more or less vulnerable than any other OS. All OS'es have vulnerabilities and need constant monitoring by well trained security personnel. But some OS'es are much more open and honest about their problems than others.
Thank You!
-- Never make a general statement.
Wipe bug traq clean, and accept no future submissions.
Then wait for Moody to proclaim that Linux is the "best OS ever", based on the fact that it has no listed bugs.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
There are plenty of other things not being considered:
1) OS versus Applications: The fact is that the core of the operating system (kernel, libc, shells) have relatively few problems. Only one or two vulnerabilities for these things have been posted. X may be the exception here, but is irrelevant if you don't install it (like on a web server).
2) Cross-Unix problems: when wu-ftpd posts another buffer overflow, it affects every Unix platform it is ported to, not just Linux.
3) Availability of choices: let's say that Unix programmers make half as many mistakes as people in Redmond. When I can choose from a dozen different ftpd's, there are going to be mistakes in all of them (theoretically, it'll still look like 6x the number of bugs to a layman).
4) Core application comparison: How many vulnerabilities have there been posted for pine vs. Outlook? Apache/Roxen/Zope/PHP vs. IIS? Sendmail/Qmail vs. Exchange? I suspect a more careful analysis would reveal that Linux is ahead in the last 2 years than NT.
5) Default applications: Due to the GPL, you get a lot with any Linux distro. More even than NT. The total number of packages available/installed is going to increase the number of bugs proporionally.
6) GPL Restrictions: Sun doesn't get to include GNOME, Apache, or even pine w/ Solaris. The GPL forbids them from "selling" these programs as a part of their OS. However, lots of sysadmins install them after Solaris is up. They're just as vulnerable.
7) Poplarity/availability of Linux: Since Linux is hot these day and everyone can get it, many vulnerabilities are discovered here (and later verified on other platforms). If everone in the security community got a free copy of NT Server and Exchange, I'm sure they'd pump out problems left and right. This is kind of security by obscurity.
All in all, I'd consider Mr. Moody's piece to be poorly informed and thought out.
Don't worry Mr. Moody, all those security holes are going to be fixed in the Linux Service Pack 1! Don't you worry! It'll be out Real Soon Right Now, just like MS's!
-Antipop
OFFTOPIC:
Debian has had 41 'security alerts' in the past 19 months, from 2.1 to 2.1r5. The thing to consider here is this applies to the distribution of Debian which contains over 2250 packages (from the web page, last dselect update I did reported 4000). When reporting Windows bugs, you don't get Explorer, Outlook, Access, Excel, Frontpage, PowerPoint, Exchange, SQL, Site, SBS, BackOffice, SNA, Proxy, SMS, BizTalk, Application Center, Commerce Server, Host Integration Server, Internet Security & Acceleration Server (That one is named funny). Those 19 packages which are not required to run WinNT (Although ntreskit is) should be included if considering the whole of Debian. Granted that nowhere achieves the 4000+ packages, but I'm pretty sure the bugs in those 19 apps would easily stack up to 41.
Please post the names of those who have been submitting this story so that they can be properly 'thanked' by the rest of us ...
I was thinking about how bugtraq might have more reports related to Linux than other operating systems. I suspect that the reason is that there are multiple distributions containing a utility that contains a bug, say sendmail. (I don't want to pick on sendmail, really, I've used it -- but I have kept patches up to date. :-) It just has a reputation.) Now suppose that 10, 20, 30, or more distributions include the buggy version of sendmail. Does this count as one submission on bugtraq? Or does each distribution that includes that buggy version bump up the bug count?
Please excuse me if I'm way off base here; I typically look at CERT or CIAC for security matters. BTW, the latest bulletin on CIAC lists 12 issues. Only two of these is an obvious Linux problem. Four were Microsoft related. For the year I see 61 bulletins; I counted 19 regarding Microsoft and only the 2 I mentioned earlier that were specific to Linux. (Of course, some of the utilities that had bulletins issued might run on Linux but I didn't look quite that deep.)
One's gotta ask: ``What's Fred smoking?''
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Yes and No. "Release early, release often." The very nature of how things get done encourages bugs to get out. That's how they get found. It's also the reason that it won't ever improve -- current versions of Linux will always be a bit buggy.
You can have stability, but you have to go back a few versions and you lose a lot of flash that way.
I'm messing with Mandrake 7.1 at home, and this Fred Moody guy is actually right about it. It really does suck. I hate it. But it's also has all the [buggy] stuff that I want included. It's flashy and flakey and adminned by a rather poor-quality sysadmin (me) and I can play games on it. That sounds pretty mainstream to me. ;-)
If someone's idea of mainstream is reliability (?!), then here's how to get a pretty bug-free Linux, like the Caldera box I have hidden away under a desk at the office: Get an old outdated distro from a year or so ago, and then apply all the updates. You can build a damn solid box that way, just don't expect Heavy Gear 2 to run on it.
Less bugs than what? As soon as the specify a specific distro release, they set themselves up for a counter-punch.
But there are so many ways of measuring bugginess and vulnerability, Bugtraq items is just one. Mention ILOVEYOU infection rates to the sheep, and the herd may run the other way. It's all just a game of words, and if the Dozers decide to play dirty by quoting meaningless numbers, the zealots in the penguin suits can do it too. BFD.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
More importantly, how do we convince companies like ABCNews not to hire these fools?
By not paying attention to them. Moody's column was very successful. It drew a hoard of ./ readers in to their web site. Moody's editors and bosses will give him a pat on the back.
Now, if no one ever went to Moody's columns, and if no one ever sent feedback indicating that they'd read them, then Moody would be tossed out.
See, the thing is, being right is irrelevant for pundits of any stripe. As long as you're pulling in the (ratings/web site hits/newspapers or magazines sold) your publishers will be happy with you, and you'll keep your job. It's only if you go way over the line and get sued or caught doing something really dumb (plagerism comes to mind) that you'll get canned, if you're pulling your weight.
So, just like with any troll, the best way to get rid of people like Moody is to simply not pay attention. Unfortunately, by looking at the reaction here, it looks like that's not in the cards. I'm sure that Moody and others of his ilk have learned by now that an inflammatory article about Linux will make a nice bump in their number of hits on the web site. That it also currys favor with certain industry leaders only helps them in the long run.
With quotes like "[a]ll that aside, though, one conclusion is inescapable", it's clear he understands the flaws in his argument but is willing to propound it anyway. He's clearly trolling for ad revenue and perhaps enough controversy to make a follow-up mea-culpa article a winner also.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Here's an article at SecruityPortal that looked at the same bugtraq data and came to the conclusion that Linux had superior security to NT and showed fewer total advisories and a fewer hacker recess days per advisory.
It seems obvious that ABC is full of crap and has fabricated their results by deliberately misrepresenting factual data.
Now why would ABC (A Bunch of Crap) News do such a thing?
sig:
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
Why are people like Mr. Moody automatically the authoritative source of information on whatever subject they feel like at that moment? Anyone with at least a partial clue knows that posts on bugtraq means fixes are soon to come, which is good for everybody. But how do we get people like Mr. Moody to only comment on subjects he knows and understands?
--
If this sort of news angers you enough that you feel compelled to perform violent acts towards Mr. Moody in the name of Linux, please just remember one thing: Don't mention Linux in the note. That's not good for the Open Source movement.
sig:
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
From the article:
;)
Fred Moody is the author of I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier.
Of course, Slashdot has no bias whatsoever either...
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Moody notes that Red Hat Linux leads the way with 122 noted vulnerabilities. Given the shockingly high number of holes open in a RH install, not to mention the overall lack of security (Red Hat 5.1 didn't even enable shadow passwords, and this was preserved in updates all the way up to 6.1, when I reformatted and went to Mandrake) this shouldn't surprise anyone.
"Other Linuxes" (sic) total 47 bugs, which means that any one distribution has fewer reported vulnerabilities than the 99 in Windows NT. Aren't numbers fun?
For more information, click here.
I'm glad someone mentioned this. Remember when Slashdot reported that Windows 2000 had 63,000 bugs in it? Of course, everyone here jumped at it and said, "See, that's why Open Source reigns supreme!" However, a bunch of people replied to that story, saying that Debian and Red Hat were comparatively just as bad.
So what's the point with this?
A bug isn't necessarily a design flaw that's going to take down your program (that bug could just be some complaint of a nitpicky programmer)
Quoting raw statistics without further elaboration is misleading
Just my two cents.
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The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
Let's jump in to an analogy...
You have a black box. Several times during the previous year, people have walked up to other black boxes with a remote control and managed to detonate a bomb inside the box. Are you safe sitting on your box?
You can't open your black box to see if there's a bomb in it. In fact, people finding bombs before were forced to have their remote control scan frequencies until they found the right combination to set it off. Not all black boxes explode so its unknown if they all have bombs. Yours might not. Or it might. Are you safe?
There's another vendor out there who makes red boxes. You can open those, but searching them for bombs is a complex process. But there are those who, for various acedemic and personal reasons, search red boxes and then publish their findings (often including instructions on how to immediately remove the bomb). More bombs are being found in the red boxes. Does that mean the red boxes are more dangerous than the black ones?
Sure... we'd all like boxes without bombs. But either way, red or black, you're liable to end up sitting on a bomb. The question you have to ask is do you feel safer having people opening boxes and publishing information on the bombs they find (and having to quickly remove it before some idiot runs up with a new remote) or are you happier sitting on a sealed box with the knowledge that there MAY be a bomb in there, but nobody's been able to set it off yet if there is one.
While I agree with your conclusions, I have to disagree with the following point.
6) GPL Restrictions: Sun doesn't get to include GNOME, Apache, or even pine w/ Solaris. The GPL forbids them from "selling" these programs as a part of their OS. However, lots of sysadmins install them after Solaris is up. They're just as vulnerable.
Actually, there is no such part of the GPL that forbids Sun from including GPL software in Solaris. The only thing would be they would have to provide the source code for those GPL programs on request. That would be a pretty easy thing for them to comply with, merely sell a 'source code' CD, and provide the source code on their FTP site.
If what you say was true, then companies like Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera, Mandrake, etc. wouldn't be able to sell their commercial Linux distros, as all of them include non-GPL software with them.
Also, you should note that Apache which is in your list is not GPL, it is covered by a BSD-like license which definitely is friendly to commercial bundling. It is also worth noting that Sun has said that they will start distributing Apache with Solaris media in the future (I don't remember right offhand, but it may already be in Solaris 8).
the scientific community too; when he ran an article: http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/FredMoody/ moody990914.html about how the new relativisiic heavy ion collider expirements at brookhaven. apparently he thought they were going to accidentally create a black hole that would destroy the world(completely unaware of the fact that collisions of comparable energy occur in the upper atmosphere every day, and we still exist). so he wrote an idiotic little scare column about 'evil scientists'. after recieving a huge amount of email from scientists who work in the field, informing him of how much of a moron he is, he wrote another 'oh poor me' column a few weeks later. now he's doing it again with linux! good job fred, you did it again! and now your burning at the stake will come from the tech. community. :] enjoy!
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
...I'm running CP/M. No bugs listed on BugTraq, no vulnerabilities. I'm totally secured.
And to think they laughed at me!
Does anyone know what bug's are included in the list? Because a lot of the errata's on redhat's site half to deal with other programs that ship with Redhat and is it right to blame linux for these programs failures?
After reading some of the blatant falsifications and b.s. in his article, I posted a comment through abcnews.com's contact page.
I would appreciate if, for the benefit of your readers, you would note that Fred Moody is a former Microsoft employee. I would also appreciate it if one of your editors would have a chat with him about journalistic integrity and how even a columnist shouldn't misrepresent statistics to further an agenda.
I refer to his column on Linux vulnerabilities, where he "uses" statistics from SecurityFocus to claim Linux is the "worst" OS of all time and Microsoft is the "best". SF states in the first paragraph of their vulnerability statistics page that the stats shouldn't be used to judge how secure an OS is, yet that's exactly what Moody proceeds to do. He then flagrantly fakes a total of "122" vulnerabilities for Linux in 1999, taking Red Hat's 38 and adding that to the aggregate (meaning all distributions, including Red Hat) total of 84. In effect, he counts Red Hat vulnerabilities twice to inflate Linux vulnerability numbers. He also fails to note that each individual distribution has fewer vulnerabilities than either Windows NT or 95/98. Were one to aggregate the Windows numbers, the total would come to 146. Windows NT alone racked up 99 vulnerabilities - higher than the Linux aggregate total.
He also glosses over the "package vulnerabilities" statistics near the bottom of the page. Microsoft products claim the first 12 spots. In 2000, MS products claim 7 of the first 12 - the various Red Hat products (which are known among Linux users as not focused on closing obvious holes) take the other 5. Only TurboLinux gets mentioned in the 2000 list, with 6 vulnerabilities in each of hte two packages mentioned at the bottom of the list.
It is clear that Moody is abusing available statistics, ignoring others, and using his pulpit to push a pro-Microsoft agenda. It is disheartening that ABC would give Moody credibility by posting his columns while they contain such falsifications and omissions. At the very least, a disclaimer noting Moody's past employment would help readers put his writing in perspective. At the most, I would like to see someone technically knowledgable review his columns before publication to ensure he can't twist facts and numbers like he did in this one.
Regards,
Mark Bialkowski
If you decide to feed the troll and read the article, send a comment to ABCnews.com through the aforementioned contact page. A flood of comments questioning Moody's "integrity" might prompt action on ABC's part. Or not. Either way, take the opportunity to call out Moody on this one.
Oh, and make your comment civil. Don't flame, swear, or threaten to "fucking kill" someone. Just explain your reaction to the column and what you feel should be done.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Wow! MacOS X rules. Out of all these, it's probably easiest to set up too. That's not based on experience, since I've never set one up. Although, if it's anything like running the webserver on the iMac, I'm sold. All I had to do was enable it, and drag files there.
Was OS X always based on BSD? That would explain the tight correlation.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
In other news:
A recent study announced that American president Bill Clinton coughs more than any other American citizen. Clinton has been seen coughing in public and on television over ten times this year, compared to three for actress Julia Roberts, one for celebrity Regis Philbin, and an average of 0.0000001 for every other citizen.
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
He says that BugTraq doesn't indicate which bugs might have been fixed, or which bugs might be tiny or huge in proportion. That means it's useless as a bean-counter. And I'd take into account the amount of bugs fixed each year as well. Who leads the ranking then? If I was using the system that has the "most bugs" but at the same time fixed the most bugs by just as large, or an even larger factor, I'd be quite happy. And as a counterpoint to BugTraq's warning of lesser-used operating systems might not have all cracks discovered, some operating systems have been proven insecure enough over time that some crackers have stopped inventing new attacks, and moved on to more challenging targets.
Here's the URL for ABCNews.com's feedback page. They even provide a handy "Factual Error" category for his repetition of the "Red Hat == Linux" fallacy and his subsequent bad math.
What's the over/under on how many days before the boot-licking mea culpa column appears?
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel/Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
This sig intentionally left blank.
I'm wondering if the drive by the major distributors to release a new version every 6 days or so is to blame for the problem. Most of the bugtraq exploits seem to involve redhat based distro's. I don't see very many for debian or slackware.
Basically, I think the issue is one cramming too much stuff in the distro and rushing things out the door.
Am I wrong here? I'm not a security expert, but these bugs seem to be due to overly fast releases.
I think it's a warning sign when a system goes from version 2.x to 7.x in a year. It means that marketing is in control and that's never a goodness.
--Shoeboy
I have a problem with comparing the number of bugs in a Linux distribution and MS WinWhatever. The two things are not the same beast. A Linux distribution typically includes a huge mass of various programs like TeX, AbiWord, gnumeric, all of KDE, Netscape, Apache, INN, a ftp server, proxy software, games, etc. Large numbers of smaller programs fill distributions as well. Windows though, includes IE, a media player, and that "Personal Webserver" thingy. NT's IIS adds in a ftp server. It seems to me that to sompare the two fairly, you must necessarily add a large chunk of MS Office and other programs to Windows. Somehow I doubt that MS's bug numbers would compare favoribly after those additions. Anyway, most of the stuff on BugTraq is fixed bugs, a signal that more work is getting done on linux than other platforms.
Check this article out. Mr Moody states:
"linux isnt secure and it isnt stable," my informant writes, with
his usual bracing disdain for grammar and punctuation. "its a
moving target that never really gets out of beta. sure people run
production sites on linux. i know alot of these people. they dont
get much sleep and have grown opaque from the lack of sunlight.
i have admin'd large linux shops. they require huge amounts of
admin overhead, and if you want shit to really work you are going
to spend alot of time manually fixing things. the number of
outstanding security holes and lack of stable functionality is
monumental."
At my last job, there were always 3 NT admins on duty for every 1 Linux admin. Why? New service packs, conflicts with old service packs, and constant rebooting (which couldn't be done remotely). It sounds to me like this paragraph should be run through "$paragraph=~s/linux/NT/g".
Oh, and btw, this is the original "Linux Sux" article that the current article refers to.
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
At least with Linux you know what the known bugs are, what they do, and how to fix them and how to help fix them. With Microsoft, you don't know anything till its too late.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Here are the actual stats
They pretty much speak for themselves as to how lame his argument is. Going by his argment, windows 95/98 are more secure than NT as they had few vulnerability reports!
But all you really have to look at the two charts: "Top vulnerable applications of 2000" and "Top vulnerable applications of 1999" to get a clue.
Also, I suspect that his 124 figure (which does not appear on the graph) includes some double counting, because it is what you get when you add the "Linux (aggr)" and "Redhat" figures. (Apparently, he doesn't realize that Slackware, Debian and Suse are Linux.)
The cake is a pie
The funniest thing about this post is that it was moderated up as Informative! ROFL... at least now we understand.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try."
No e-mail address, but you do have a vehicle to express your concerns. Take advantage of the ABCNews.com contact page, and let them know what you think about this.
As for the article, yes, people will be concerned with how buggy Linux is. However, Moody inflated the numbers to make Linux look bad. He added the Red Hat 1999 total of 38 to the aggregate total of 84 (which I assume would include Red Hat) to get 122 vulnerabilities. In short, he counted Red Hat twice. After doing that, he didn't mention a word about Windows' own stats - 99 for NT, 47 for 95/98. The Linux aggregate is less than NT alone.
Also, if you add the separate distro numbers, you come up with 98. I think this means vulnerabilities present across distributions were only counted once, though the page isn't too clear on that. The individual distro numbers are interesting - Red Hat is the worst at 38, Debian next at 29, yet both are lower than Win9x's total of 47.
Any way you slice it, Moody's screwing with the stats to promote his agenda.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
...ok not quite, but I knew this sounded familiar. We've heard from this guy before!
M$: "We're #2!"
I'm not an expert on how BugTraq works - in fact, I know nothing about it. But his article sure seems to imply that he is comparing the number of vulnerabilities in _all_ Linux distros to the number of vulnerabilities in one Windows distro.
For that matter, he doesn't mention whether any of those vulnerabilities have been resolved. He also doesn't mention the fact that NT 4.0 is, what - 4 years old? How many new vulnerabilities were discovered in RH1.0 last year?
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
There's a major learning curve involved in using Linux, and until the public at large is ready and willing to take that step, no amount of GUifying or desktop building will remove the underlying need for Linux users to understand how Linux works.
Nonsense! Linux could very easily be converted into very simple system.
A distro designed to come pre-installed and configured (or be installed and configured by a technician), go directly from the logon screen into a non-user-configurable GUI, install only new software packaged in a certain way from a central server, and never let the user see a shell, would be perhaps even simpler and easier to use than a Mac.
Why doesn't one exist already? Two reasons: you can't sell support for a system that just works (no commercial motive), and nobody who programs computers cares about a system like that (no "I'll write it to use it myself" motive). Currently, free software development optimizes for: minimal effort of development, stability, power, and "coolness". Ease of use for the new user is barely a consideration, except in distro installation programs.
Can you really see a bunch of Linux hackers sitting around trying to write a "toaster" distro in their spare time?
Mass market busking might provide the solution to this kind of problem, but it'll be tough to make people understand why giving their money away is in their best interests.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
The best-known competitor is Red Hat, but others - notably TurboLinux and Mission Critical Linux
Hands up - how many of you never heard of Mission Critical Linux until this? How many of you have never heard of Debian, Caldera or SuSE? And TurboLinux is major?
Linux is arguably the worst operating-system product in history, and Microsoft's the best
I don't think that there's one vulnerability in there for BeOS. I doubt there are any for AtheOS. Therefore, they're even better than Microsoft's platforms.
This boast[linux isn't vulnerable to worms/viruses] has been easy to make, since until 1999 Linux was too much of a fringe product to stand up to the kind of abuse more widely used systems endure.
Actually, it's because Linux is a true multi-user operating system, something not even NT can claim. Solaris is also immune to those kinds of things. If I try to delete every file on my system right now (I'm on Solaris) I will fail, except for wiping out some of my own data. The backups will remain. The system will still boot. Other users will be unaffected.
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
He may be in need of a clue, but isn't this the sort of thing that the common folk look at to make their decisions.
." and the general public won't think any more about it. They will accept is as given that Windows is better because of it.
If Linux is ever going to make it into mainstream, the mainstream will be looking at things just like that. Microsoft will come out with an ad campaign: "We've got less bugs than
So again it raises the question. Should Linux be mainstream? Is it even close to being ready for mainstream? I know a lot of zealots will start flaming away on this one, but when it comes to the general public, they are like sheep. Large numbers (unless it's their salery) frighten the sheep...
Does anyone out there have Moody's email address? Maybe someone could explain NICELY how he completely missed the boat on the bugs.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
This is amusing.
Just below the note that Mr. Fred "Hi, I'm a Microsoft Tool!" Moody wrote a book about Microsoft on the multimedia frontier (*cough*), the ABC site has a search button... which is pre-filled in with...
Search for more on... Microsoft .
So, ABC has classified this as "Microsoft" news, despite the headline being "Linux". Things that make you go "hmmm".
I hope Slashdot gets around to a follow up on this one. I really, really want to see if Moody does a correction article. If he has a trace of honesty, he will do another article which admits:
1. He is wrong, because he added Red Hat's numbers to the numbers for all of Linux. If he had done it correctly, he would have reached the opposite conclusion.
2. His so-called methodology for determining the "Suckiness" of an OS is ridiculous anyway, so even ignoring pt. 1, his article is balony.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
I sent this to editor@abcnews.com, couldn't find any email addresses on their site. If anyone has it, please post the e-mail address of people at ABCNEWS.com to send it to. (BTW, also sent it to legal@redhat.com :))
o ody.html
==============================
I'd like to inform you of a gross error in an article posted today on ABCNews.com:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/FredMoody/m
Quote:
"This looks like an alarmingly high number in comparison with Solaris' 34 or NetBSD's 10, but it is significantly less than the 122 racked up by Red Hat and the other Linuxes (their 2000 count stands at 47)"
Truth:
As Mr. Moody explained earlier, there exist different vendors who distribute Linux. Examples include Red Hat, SuSE, Debian, and Slackware. BugTraq counts security holes in each Linux distribution independently. In 1999 they counted 38 holes in Red Hat, 10 in Slackware, 21 in SuSE, and 29 in the Debian distribution [1].
Some security holes only affect a specific Linux distibution, and some security holes affect many distributions. For example, Red Hat might suffer from hole "A", but SuSE users might not be effected. SuSE might suffer from security hole "B" while Red Hat does not. Both SuSE and Red Hat distributions might suffer from security hole "C". This is very similar to the way sometimes Windows 2000, NT, 98, and 95 suffer from the same security holes, while other times the holes are dependent to a particular version
BugTraq also counts the total number of security holes in all Linux distributions. This means that in the previous case, we would have holes "A", "B", and "C" for a total of three security holes. Hole "C" would not be counted twice even though it is found in two distributions. This is where Mr. Moody did not bother to get his facts straight. He takes the total number of security holes found in all Linux distributions (84), adds them to the total number of security holes found in Red Hat (38, which were already counted in the previous number, 84), and comes up with the figure 122.
Therefore, the statement that there are "122 [security holes] racked up by Red Hat and the other Linuxes" is completely inaccurate. Minimally, the number 122 should be corrected to the real value, 84. I understand that this will completely undermine Mr. Moody's thesis that "Linux is... the worst operating system", since it clearly shows that all Linux distributions -- taken collectively -- have fewer security holes than Windows NT (99).
However, it is misleading to use the collective statistic of 84 security bugs for all Linux distributions. A user installs a single Linux distribution at a time. Thus, even if a user chose install the Linux distribution with the most security holes (RedHat, with 38), that user would be susceptable to less than 40% of the security vulnerabilities to which a user with Windows NT would be susceptable, speaking quantitatively.
Ironically, the very report to which Mr. Moody refers [1] clearly identifies Windows NT as the most vulernable operating system for both 2000 and 1999. In 2000, it has nearly three times the number of secutiry vulnerabilities as the nearest non-Microsoft operating system.
I believe that the article's gross inaccuracies and Mr. Moody's flagerantly misleading statements warrant a full retraction of the article.
References:
[1] "BUGTRAQ Vulnerability Database Statistics"
http://www.securityfocus.com/vdb/stats.html
If you base your assessment on the number of factual inaccuracies and misleading biased claims in the authors articles and divide by the number of readers you arrive at the inescapable conclusion that Fred Moody is the worst journalist since records began.
I'm not sure who should be more ashamed, Moody because he used to work for Microsoft or Microsoft because they once employed this idiot.
People express random and silly opinions. That's fine (it's always been like that). But those people who work for the biggest companies get their random, silly, uninformed opinions heard.
The only times I'm aware of ABC.com news.com msnbc.com suck.com slate.com salon.com etc are when Slashdot talks about them. Why should we pay them ANY mind at all? Why not have an article that says "Michael Low thinks that Windows 98 should have a different backgoround color"?
CT: your first instinct was right: don't bother with this crap. Don't bother ME witht his crap.
So what if there are a large number of bugs reported? Sounds like they have an agenda AGAINST getting bugs found and fixed. Currently, it is used as a bad mark against any OS to have a bug reported. I would rather have the bugs reported so that they can be fixed, than to have them go unreported and unaddressed.
... sk8hard posted his addy as 'fmoody@seattleweekly.com'..
seattleweekly? Where the hell do you think that is?
Who butters his bread? Who subscribes to his publication? Who contributes to the taxbase in his community and provides dollars for city services, education, etc? Who patronizes his publication's sponsors and provides for a pleasant civic environment (in theory: haven't been there in 15 years)?
No shit he doesn't like Linux.. It threatens his community!
If he had balls (or a clue: he may not know he's compromised!) he'd admit it.. If he's lucky, he's an acolyte of the Redmondian Illuminati.. I bet he's just a stooge, a patsy, a clueless tool..
<quote src='gandhi_struggle.txt'>
Your Working Boy,
Anyone even thinking of sending mail should read the Advocacy HOWTO, particularly the part about canons of conduct, before doing it. Moody made a lot of hay in a previous column about how rude and abusive the Linux crowd can be when he defends Microsoft.
Don't make the bad press even worse by giving him a mailbox full of fresh bile, which he can then turn into next week's column.
A thoughtful, well-reasoned response to a posting will not only provide insight for your readers, but will also increase their respect for your knowledge and abilities. - Linux Advocacy HOWTO
Many technical journalists have been writing books on technical subjects. Wearing these titles as a badge of honor, they get increased prestige within the mainstream technical media-a-go-go. Are these technical gurus really technical, or are they blowing smoke?
Different Shades of Blue
"Fred Moody is the author of I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier and of The Visionary Position: The Inside Story of the Digital Dreamers Who Made Virtual Reality a Reality." is the tagline that follows Fred Moody's well throught out and researched works of literature--a sort of "in your face" style bio. Just so he knows that you know that he knows what he's talking about.
After all, if he wasn't in the digital know, he wouldn't be published, or would he? News from Amazon's sales rank, a service of Online Book Giant Amazon.com tells a completely different story.
Amazon Sales Stats
Amazon.com keeps a running tally of their most popular books, from the worst in trash romance, to the best in literature, Amazon serves as the ultimate resource in determining how your favorite author rates among his peers.
Take, for instance, "The Official Three Stooges Encyclopedia : The Ultimate Knuckleheads Guide to
Stoogedom", it sold 3.75 as many copies as Moody's "I Sing the Body Electronic". That means it's 3.75 times better.
Techical books can't compare with madcap hijinx? "Using MS-DOS 6.22" has is supporting 4.67 more wobbly desks than Moody's "The Visionary Position", and DOS is better than "I Sing the Body Electronic" by a whopping multiple of 17.5.
Somone thought there wasn't enough idiots freefalling to their death or being rescued by National Guardsmen, and "The Complete Idiot's Gude to Rock Climbing" was born. Guess what Moody? That author is almost 10 times as talented as you.
All that aside, though, one conclusion is inescapable: A book which prompted my English Lit professor to laugh a girl out of class, "Jonathan Livingston Seagull : A Story", is 258 times as good as the year Moody spent with Microsoft. Drag Harry Potter into this and his ranking quickly approaches infinity.
As Fred Moody is finding out, it's a lot easier to masquerade as a great writer than it is to go out there and be one.
As for CmdrTaco: it wouldn't hurt to exercise some judgement. This is just another one of those Slashdot entries that are guaranteed to end up as a flamewar.
:p ))
Well, what else do you think pays for this site? Page views and banner CPM...
Paranoid? I don't think I'm paranoid _enough_..
(to be fair though, I'm sure that CT would have heard from hundreds of submitters about not posting this stupid article, and if any site deserves to have an exception in my junkbuster filters, it's this one (so far
Your Working Boy,
As Linux zealots are beginning to find out, it's a lot easier to masquerade as a better product than it is to go out and be one.
Penguinistas have known this for years. But enough about Windows...
--
Someone you trust is one of us.
I wrote out a long letter explaining what he got wrong, and got a "message returned, undeliverable" reply.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Out of Band. Ping of death in common parlance.
:)
Something along these lines: Take one one vanilla NT4 box (ie. without service packs), send a 65535 byte ping, gasp in wonderment as your 64K packet *plus*its'*header* overflows a 64K buffer in the kernel and bangs it over in one fell swoop.
They fixed that pretty quick.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
The title is "Oh, hah hah", and that couldn't be meant as a sarcastic, humorless laugh preceding a sarcastic, humorless, informative comment.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.