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Microsoft Raises Security Game, Notes Shortcomings Elsewhere
LMCBoy writes "Steve Ballmer recently told an industry conference that Microsoft software is more secure than Linux. PJ at Groklaw has a nice, thorough analysis of this dubious claim. She points out that not only are there vastly more Microsoft exploits reported, but that the exploits tend to be much more severe, involving remote administrator access." In related news, mhesseltine writes "According to an article from the Washington Post, in an unusually ironic twist, Microsoft has started talking smack about their own products, instead of those of their competitors. Bill Gates said of Office 'it's too hard to find things in e-mail' and described some features of Word as 'clunky.'"
Install Windows 2000 Advanced Server, and enable Terminal Services. Then post the IP address along with Administrator login, and password, and let Slashdot at it.
Scared? ssh root@selinux.dev.gentoo.org with password gentoo then.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Do we really need another bash-Microsoft article obsessively dissecting one sentence Bill Gates made at some promotional speech or interview or whatever?
Um, it was the Washington Post reporting on the "sentence" (although it was probably more on the orders of a paragraph or two), not Slashdot. We're not dissecting the sentence here. It's pretty clear that MS is going to have to make the sale based on overhyping the features of the new version and badmouthing the old. This sort of thing happens in companies all the time -- Clorox bleach had a big promo for powdered Bleach by badmouthing liquid bleach, their #1 product.
Just like a site focusing on Green Party politics would be crazy not talking about news concerning the Bush administration, it's important to talk about Microsoft here because for the forseeable future it will be that 800-lb gorilla that affects everything else in the tech industry.
If you really want to complain about excessive coverage, it seems like Apple has gotten more than its fair share of articles in the past week, too. Gee, maybe that's because there are a lot of newsworthy events going on with that company.
Things are happening with both Microsoft and Apple this week; big news items ( horrible security exploits patched followed by big talk from Balmer, iTunes for Windows, a Mac-based cluster possibly making #4 or #5 of the top 500 supercomputers). Maybe some things are happening on the Linux front; maybe not. But Linux is based around a community of nerds, not on a corporation with a snazzy PR department.
In a sense, this is exactly what makes Linux an ideal server platform: it's not "features" focused, and it's more into substance than style. It's also why it's less likely to break into the home desktop market any time soon (although it stands a chance in large-volume corporation and school environments).
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
It's hard not to laugh at the bully when he complains about being picked on.
Anyways, I'm ready to keep bashing Microsoft until they get their bloody act toghether and no amount of whimpering will change my mind.
Open source is about calling things the way they are: saying as loud as possible when something important sucks and need to be re-written. In Linux, thats what happens: when it sucks badly, it gets re-written. This is a concept most corporations often have a hard time digesting because it's too expensive for them.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
It may be funny, but I wasn't kidding. He's been asking me about linux for years, and as his small office grew from one machine to two, then three and four, he found out the hard way that Windows was never built to "share", that it's always just been one kludge on top of another to print to a remote printer, share files, and share applications.
That last one is the real sticking point. A good server with several clients is the ideal solution for a place like his (think thin). The way he's got it now, because of his slow growth into it, he's got to install the software on all the machines, the data is spread out all over the place, all the drives have different names on different machines (like I said - he grew into it without planning ahead, so you can blame that on him, but to name drives differently now would break everything).
When I told him about the ideal thin client solution, he thought that was an amazing concept. What's more amazing is how long the concept has been around and not implemented without kludgy hacks in Windows.
I could blather on and on about it, but it's not worth it. The software company doesn't care about Linux, and I've reminded him he's got other software that won't work in Linux. However, I believe he'd make the effort to switch if his primary accounting software was available in Linux - and if he could keep around the old versions (he's got to keep records for a certain number of years), maybe by using WINE or something.
Stupid sexy Flanders.