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Why Does Windows Still Suck?
RatBastard writes "SF Gate's Mark Morford asks: Why Does Windows Still Suck? After wtaching his significant other's Windows PC drown in a sea of viruses and worms after only 4 minutes on her new DSL connection, Mark Morford wonders why the masses have not stormed Redmond waving torches and scythes in anger over the never-ending security flaws in Windows. Why haven't they jetisoned the foul beast from Redmond and migrated en mass to the Macintosh or even Linux?"
Don't get me wrong, I'm a mac fanboy myself, and I agree 100% with most of the author's conetentions, but, some of his evidence is a bit whack:
He links to the Crack a Mac challenge, as evidence that macs are bulletproof. Fine, but read their story- most of the attempts to crack *that* mac were based on old UNIX and NT attacks, and well, duh! HOWEVER- nobody (hardly) uses macs for webserves. If we had been doing that for the past 15 years, well, perhaps there'd be heaps of *known* exploits. The Crack a Mac story doesn't prove that there aren't exploits, it proves that not many folks know what they are.
I was afraid too, even though I had used Linux on the campus PCs. I used to have the same problem (immediate infection/total system compromise within hours after hooking up to the net). It was so bad that after re-formatting and installing the online anti-virus software my university provided me, it was already too late. I fearcely battle virsuse for nearly two weeks, then I finally gave up and installed Linux. Now I thank those viruses, and Windows/M$ for failing to do anything to prevent them from entering my system. Had that not have happened, then it's likely I would still be trapped in Windows.
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
Perhaps this is just human nature. But as a "switcher" who is approaching his one year anniversary with a PowerMac after almost 20 years of Windows and DOS (starting with DOS 2.0!) I can honestly say: Windows users, it's not your fault. Microsoft should be ashamed, not you. Windows sucks, and there are better choices out there for you. Make them! You'll be happy that you did.
Longhorn will be the first release of Windows authored completely after Microsoft began their Trusted Computing Initiative and released .NET. Longhorn will reimplement and convert major Windows subsystems to managed code. This alone will substantially improve security of the operating system, as while the APIs will remain the same legacy Win32 apps will end up talking to managed code beneath the Win32 API (yes, .NET makes this possible)
This will dramatically lessen the exploitation potential of code flaws in the Windows application libraries. Microsoft has to maintain support for legacy application, but that doesn't mean they can't get a fresh start on the underlying code, and doesn't mean that existing Microsoft applications can't be converted to managed code as well.
Not a very accurate analogy. Wouldn't it suck if the car were to unconditionally burst into flames unless you were sure to also purchase an extra $1000 in "safety features" and have them installed perfectly before ever attempting to drive it? (And without the dealer actually telling you this.)
Get it now? You microsoft apologists should really get a clue.
The only reason so many Windows boxes get pwned out of the box is because the 'bad guys' have already written exploits that get in through an unpatched bug.
Who's fault is this? Is it Microsofts? Not really, at least how I see it.
I blame the computer manufacturer that you bought the box from.
Those holes that are in your windows box when you plug it into the net already have patches written for them.
It's the manufacturers that refuse to slipstream these packages into the software builds that they stick on their machines coming out of the factory.
Dell builds your PC to order, as do a few other guys.
The hard drive has an OS imaged onto the drive on the line.
And since there is a common image for each machine of the same family, it's a very simple process for Dell to image their machines on the line.
Each model has it's own OS image, based on hardware.
It would take very little effort to slipstream an updated patch into those images. No PC has to sit in an open box waiting to be patched; they are patched when they're built. That is not a difficult solution, it would take the hiring of one or two guys in the factory to add a slipstream into the disk image (and slipstreaming is *very* easy, as long as you know the process.)
It would be easy as pie. Your machine would come off the line patched, and current. It would only be out of date by a few days, the time it would take to ship the box to you from the factory. The likelihood of a new exploit that would pwn you in that time is very, very low.
Same thing with going to a retailer. They should be provided current and up to date boxes when they leave the store. It would not be difficult for BestBuy/CircuitCity/et al to stick the box/laptop you buy inside their secured network, and patch the machine before you walk out the door with it.
Let's use an analogy that the author of the article used; a new car.
You buy a new Ford. Before you bought it, Ford issued a recall, due to a defective gas tank that may or may not explode. When you buy the car off the lot, it may have sat there a few months (parallel = older unpatched windows build). You take it home to find out that the recall was not applied to the vehicle; why not? Because the dealer says it's your responsibility to get it in to get fixed; not the dealers.
Would that be acceptable? No. Not for a moment. The same thing is happening with Windows, and you can't blame MS for it. It's the PC makers that sell you an exploitable box.
There's too many people who are "comfortable" enough with what they've got. I've got a friend who's not willing to try anything other than Windows because he knows how to use Windows. He complains about the crashing and bugs and all, but he doesn't want to have to learn a new system. And avoiding that inconvenience is more important to him than getting a better quality product.
There's also the public image issue. Everyone knows about Windows. Mac still has a stigma of being prone to crashing and annoying users with all those old "Are you rally sure you were really sure you wanted to click that yes you truely indeed did want do do that?" dialog boxes. You and I know those issues are no longer things to worry about, at least they're far smaller bothers than they once were, but the mass public doesn't know that, and they aren't willing to even have a look to find out, much like so many slashdotters here are unwilling to fairly evaluate AmigaOS4 last week or so what that article came up. The mass public echoes your "Amiga is dead!" chants only they point it at Mac instead, or point chants about "What can *I* possibly use Linux for?!" at the Linux crowd.
Linux has other public image issues to work though. Things like "It's hard to install or use" have been addressed reasonably well, but the public again isn't willing to discover that to be true. Linux also has the old reputation of having no applications or games or stuff normal people would use. I know many people that cannot fathom what in the world I could possibly use Linux or AmigaOS for, yet are unwilling to be shown all the everyday applications like OpenOffice, Mozilla, Doom3, Unral Tournament, etc. that exist for Linux or AmigaOS equivalents for many things, and insist on continuing in their incorrect belief that such apps and games do not and CAN NOT exist outside of Windows. Even though the Mac crashes chants are obsolete and Windows has the same reputation, the masses are not willing to bother with reasoning.
The fact that MS pretty much looks like it IS the somputer software industry also has a great hold on users. There are lots who simply believe that since they are so big, they must have the best product. Even with the obvious bugs and other problems they experience, many people believe that since everyone else is such a small marketshare that they must of course have even worse quality products than the market winner has. For example, I can not get my dad to use anything but MS products because of this. He uses MSIE and Outlook, and there's no changing that, no matter how many viruses or spybots or zombies his computer is infected with. The friend I mentioned above is unwilling to use anything but MSIE because he doesn't care to learn anything else, as trivial as that learning curve may be, he's simply not interested even after all of his own complaining about MSIE.
It's not a "problem" with a rational solution, I don't think it'sbecause people are "stupid" or anything like that, I think it's because the vast majority of people simply do not care enough to actually do anything about it. Having what they're used to or what 97% of the world uses is more important to them than having a higher quality product.
hahaha..
that is funny..
My wife has me use my linux box to download pictures off her camera because the windows programs to do it are so unstable and buggy (and it is fuji digital camera)..
Easy for me.. plug it in and mount it.. takes about 5 seconds total..
yea.. a "hack" that took me 10 minutes tops to set up once and it has ran since we have had the camera.
Whereas my wife has re-installed her windows computer I don't know how many times and had to set up the camera equal number of times until she asked me to do that.. since, no problems.. She is shopping for a Mac right now..
Only thing I use windows for is some games.. and I refuse to install "anything" other than a game on it and only use firefox.
It is behind a tight firewall, has no open shares so I don't even windows-update it as even those cause problems.
My linux boxes are fine.. No problems ever..
One day you will get over your fear and see there are actual real alternatives.. Unless you like dealing with that crap?
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
They might know that you can't, but they'll probably just tell you, "It's because they're different kinds of computers" without any idea of what they mean by "different kinds". Now put your Ubuntu LiveCD on both the Mac and the Dell, and watch the confusion play out. Now, why is it that they can run the same programs?
If you're not pretty well versed in these things, it's confusing. Mention the words "memory management" or "virtual memory" or "kernel" or "process". Ask people, does your computer have these things? They don't know.
Let me give a thought experiment: Take four identical Macintoshes, one with Gentoo and KDE, one with Gentoo and Gnome, one with Darwin and Gnome, and one running OSX. Let them sit at each computer for a while, running what applications they can. Now, imagine explaining to them which computers of the four are running the same operating system, and what the difference is.
Are you imagining a glazed-over look peppered with looks of confusion and annnoyance? That's because most users, all they know is the GUI interaction. They know that they click on the "Internet Explorer" icon, type in a web address, and it shows a web site. So do they know the advantages one OS has over another? No, because they don't know that the two machines work any differently underneath the GUI, because they don't necessarily understand that there *is* an "underneath the GUI". All they know, if they know anything, is that the icons are in different places.
Point 2 is invalid. Migrating to Mac was pretty easy, actually. No worse than the annual reinstall of Windows:
1: Backup email - check
2: Backup bookmarks - check
3: Backup personal files - check
4: Backup porn/music/etc.. files - check
5: Import email into Mail.app - check
6: Import bookmarks into Safari/FireFox/etc... - check
7: Copy personal files into documents folder - check
8: hide porn in folder named "1997 tax records" - check
9: Import music into iTunes - Check
10: Profit.
It took me two hours to migrate my files from my Windows box to my Mac, not including the time iTunes needed to import my 17GB music collection from my file server. And that included installing Firefox (I don't care for Safari). The hardest part was finding a word processor that I liked when the 30-day trial version of Office ran out. But I never liked Word anyway.
Understand that when I migrated to Mac I had spent about an hour fooling around with OS X on a friends computer and had no real knowledge in what programs did what. Apple has very easy to understand help documents tailored to people moving to Mac from Windows.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Someone mod the parent up...! Really, I mean it.
I've been using Linux since '92 or so. It does a lot of neat things. I used it as my desktop for years.
Two years ago I got a new laptop and then a new job at a company that does a lot of Microsoft Exchange related work. So, I tried XP out, because I hadn't really tried a MS product in a long time. Guess what? XP is pretty fucking good. Sorry, it is.
Oh yeah. Exchange is pretty fucking good, too. So is Active Directory.
Deal with it.
robert
Microsoft in Poland sells Windows XP for over $100 on the market. And yes, people HAVE wisened up. They use pirate copies.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Microsoft sucks. Mainly on the basis of being a predatory monopoly. But that is a whole other article
But windows is not that bad, not the best, but not as bad as the article paints it.
While the article attempts to make light of it, the fact remains that being the dominant player attracts the most Malware, Virii, spyware etc...
But you can avoid problems by staying away from the pillars of the monoculture:
Use Firefox instead of IE,
Use Thunderbird instead of Outlook,
Use Open Office instead of MS office,
Use Media Player Classic instead of MS WMP 10.0.
Use some other chat instead of MSN (I use Miranda and Yahoo).
90% of your problems are now gone. Everything is free. You are now mostly divorced from the monoculture. There is one last piece of the puzzle:
Personal Firewal. I use Sygate Personal.
You are now at 95%.
That last 5% relies on being careful. At this point the crap you get will most likely be installed by yourself.
That is why I always look for opens source programs first. To me nothing says secure and safe like open source.
When I get beyond open source, google is my last line of defence:
Do a google on "divx spyware" and this...
Do all of the above and you should be pretty safe. I surf lots, Download all kinds of programs/ media etc and my system is clean whenever I check it.
A couple of years ago I did nothing till I got a few viruses, then I wised up. Clean sailing since then.
Working in a DSL support, just got off the phone with a XP customer. Had him set his static IP address, wouldn't work. MAC address wouldn't even show. Heard him mention a router... had him hook that up, even though we don't support them, I walked him through setup. Router's MAC address showed up immediately, he was on the internet. His nic was fine, so was the driver... or else DHCP wouldn't have worked. It's constantly doing crap like this.
And how about the new XP firewall? It fucking blocks icmp. Mind you, that's the only thing in the world that it blocks apparently, because it gets every virus in the world, even with Norton or Mcaffee running. And that's not a small thing, the people who need others to ping them are generally too illiterate to turn the firewall off for people like me.
Or how about the whole "let's hide how to get to classic view" thing? Or them deciding to change the label for "ok" button on the network adapter properties panel? How about not being able to use a static IP on more than one adapter, but still sticking a 1394 adapter into the mix, for ijits to mistakenly configure?
That last one sounds minor, but on an OS that has to hide the icons in the control panel from its own user because they can't be trusted, how many of those same people need to do IP-over-Firewire? Honestly.
XP isn't usable, not by the vast majority of people. Not even close.
Actually, I know what the problem is.
He bought a name brand laptop. These are not clean installs of Windows, these are all imaged at the factory with a master image. I work on a helpdesk, and had a user call in recently with a brand new, out of the box HP.
It had spyware on it. No joke. It had IE hosed to the point we could not use it to configure a router to get online.
All I can guess is that thier master image has the spyware. I connot conceive of them WANTING it there.
You say you want a revolution....
I run a mix of OS X, Linux, and Win2k machines at my home office. I'm familiar with network configs on pretty much everything, and have been putting together mixed networks for over a decade.
... and looking ... ... and looking ...
...and hunting... ...and hunting...
... like setting up a 2-node network via crossover cable with IP's 10.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.2. I've been doing that on other machines since college. I've tried FOUR times with XP machines, but never succeeded.
... it was the XP machines! Go figure. All the Win2k machines were fine.
But the first time I saw XP was when a friend brought over his shiny new laptop. He wanted to go online, so we just plugged in an ethernet cable, and I went looking for the setting to turn on ethernet and DHCP, nothing more.
"Set up new internet connection" wizard, asks if i want to set up a home connection or office connection. I don't know, I want a fscking ETHERNET connection with DHCP, but I figure the idiots in Redmond assume all offices have ethernet and all homes have dialup, so I try "office". No joy. I try "home". No joy. Both give me the same options, and are asking whether I have ISDN. (why the... in 2003? ISDN?)
After fully half an hour, I finally realized that the "new internet connection" wizard only does dialup and ISDN, but that it still somehow thinks there's a difference between homes and offices that is relevant. Can't do ethernet through the wizard, and I can't find the control panels.
Of course the owner of the laptop knows bupkus about his shiny new system.
So I started hunting for other ways to configure the network.
I finally figured it out, but it took me an honest 90 MINUTES to figure out how to unhide the icons in the control panel so that I could actually connect the damn machine. Any other computer would have taken me 30 seconds, tops.
And don't even get me started about all of last year, when my girlfriend had an XP laptop that needed to have a different static IP, plus different wireless network name, at my house and at hers. My powerbook switches between full net configurations in two seconds, straight out of the apple menu, and I can store as many as I like. Every time she brought that laptop to my place, it was a five-minute hassle to hook the f*cker up and switch the IP/DNS/gateway by hand. Every time she went home, it was a ten minute tech support phone call to get it working again.
The incompetence of Microsoft's human interface engineers is completely unreal. Instead of fixing their poorly-organized control panels that were powerful but hard to use and cluttered with unnecessary details, they simply hid them entirely and replaced them with wizards that are completely unable to configure anything for anybody.
There are things I still can't manage with it
And setting up filesharing. I can't fileshare between my XP box and any other machine in the house. I have to fscking FTP files to and from my mac with it. My last LAN party: six geeks, six PCs - and we had to distribute level files on burned CDs because we couldn't get sharing to work on more than half the machines, even with all the configs set identically. The machines that couldn't connect to the server? Why
Since XP came out, the amount of time I spend supporting friends and relatives has absolutely quadrupled. The patheticness of its' configuration design and unpredictability of its networking code is jaw-droppingly, embarassingly, bad. I mean stinky.
Hang on, I'm starting to get the urge to tell you how I REALLY feel.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Right up front I will say that I am a Linux user. Before that, I was a Windows user. Before that I was a Mac user. And before that I was an Atari ST user. All of this is my personal experience with many OSes and not work related at all. When I was an Atari ST user, I got very used to the fact that I could easily download any software I wanted from the internet and use it. A lot of it was shareware (a concept I misunderstood at the time. I assumed I could use it without paying for it and it was just an option to pay.) and some of it was freeware. At the time, I was basically JUST a user. I didn't write my own apps or even tweak config files. I just ran the shareware, freeware and some purchased software and JUST worked. That was OK. I also played some games. That was OK too. Then I moved onto GFA Basic and also got a C compiler and learned how to start writing my own apps. That eventually was OK too.
Then I got the chance to use Macs in college. They separated me even more from the technical side of computing and threw me even farther into the JUST a user crowd. This was OK. I had a chance to pursue more creative artistic endeavors without ever having to think about the computer as anything more than a music making tool, or a graphic editing tool, or a desktop publishing tool. This was OK.
When I graduated, I found that I couldn't afford a Mac and the Atari ST world was drying up. I was employed by a desktop publishing outfit that was PC based on an associate basis after I graduated. My employer was also kind of a mentor. I told him that I was in a quandry over PC vs. Mac. As he'd clearly gone the PC route but was handling desktop layout (engineering catalogs) for really big clients, I wondered whether or not I really needed to go Mac myself. At one point, I'd told him about the memory upgrade I built on my own for my Atari ST (I wired up a board to install SIMMs in it to get up to 2.5 Megs of RAM and saved myself considerable money) and he told me that I'd definitely be able to build a PC on my own. Up to that point I was afraid it would be too hard compared to the Mac. So in August of 1994, I built my first PC and installed DOS/Win31 on it. What surprised me was the lack of non-nagged shareware for DOS and Windows compared to the Atari ST. I wound up having to spend a lot of money on commercial products from Norton, Procomm, Microsoft, Aldus and Adobe. I found that Ihad to buy new versions/upgrades almost every year to year and a half as well. I went from Win31 to Win95. I learned that there were lots of thing about the Windows world that were half-assed compared to my experience with the Mac or even the Atari ST.
I got sick of the cost of computing with Windows and I tried Linux in 1995. I already had experience with *nix from a dial up shell account I got access to in College as well as VMS. So the prospect of running a nice flexible and easy to use CLI on my own PC compared to Windows 95 was very appealing. I had actually tried Linux in 1994 but when I failed to get X to run properly, I gave up on it since at that point I really wanted my PC to work like a Mac. The "killer apps" that got me to switch to Linux were Enlightment and GIMP. They were much closer to what I was accustomed to on the Mac and the ST and even my limited Amiga experience.
So between 1995 and 1999 I gradually moved further from Windows and more solidly to Linux. Al the while I've kept tabs on the Windows camp and I will say the Windows XP is probably the best version of Windows that Microsoft has made to date. It's the most stable version and the most user friendly version. It took the nearly 20 years, but they finally achieved parity with Mac OS 7 in terms of usability. Microsoft also finally acknowledged that the artistic community (musicians, graphic designers, videographers, etc...) is important too. I would argue that they are more important than business which is something that Microsoft still seems to fail to understand, but that is another discussion. However, these
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Day 1:
....
...
I purchased the magazine which had Knoppix 3.x cd on the cover and booting my Father in laws pc ( windows , infected , dying ) proceeded to knx-hdinstall the operating system into the pc ( 3 yr old machine with router for internet connection ) . Completed the install of Knoppix Linux ( email configuration ) and rebooted. Showed In laws how to login , and mail and surf.
Day 2
Added In laws new digital camera
Day 3 through 365 : hear nothing from in laws but praise for system that works, has not been inconsistent and lets them use their computer as they "expected" to be able to use it
Day 366 : read story about user who makes poor purchasing descision and then complains about the product.
Day 367 : write sequel to story
okay the version of knoppix last year was old, but backing up their data to a usb flash drive and reinstalling to 3.7 the other day toook less than 10 minutes !
And thats why Firecrackers and kittens don't mix.