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Vista Post-SP2 Is the Safest OS On the Planet
pkluss noted Kevin Turner, COO of Microsoft making the proclamation that "Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we've ever built. It's also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It's the safest and most secure OS on the planet today."
That this thread will consist only of positive remarks, and supportive statements towards Microsoft.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
He should have stopped here.
"Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we've ever built. It's also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It's the safest and most secure OS on the planet today."
See any serious problems with this story?
Do I see any serious problems with this story? Uh, yeah, maybe one or two...
I'm not sure why this is news - MS says this about every OS release they put out...
April 1st was 2 weeks ago.
Caveat Utilitor
It's the safest and most secure OS on the planet today
Until tomorrow when all those pesky exploits come out
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
Even if it is, it's too late. Vista is already perceived as the new Windows ME. With Windows 7 coming up soon, I doubt there will be much sales increase for MS.
In the history of man there have been several cases of fatal hilarity(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_Hilarity) and this article might inflict this seemingly comical effect on technically concious people.
Posting an article like this without thinking about the consequences might actually hurt and kill people. Please don't.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
It's also the most secure OS on the planet
Trusted Solaris would like to have a word with you.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Waving red in front of the bull. Always a good idea.
Pity that it will be MicroSofts' customers, not MS that will suffer when the hackers, script kiddies and miscellaneous ne'er-do-wells inevitably trash the security for their latest offering.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
Checks current date. No, not the 1st.
Checks date on the article. No, still not the 1st (though eight days different).
Well, somebody's a fool.
Did he mention that Vista post SP2, there is no network stack? Fwoppies FTW!
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pwn2own-mac-hack,2254-4.html
'The NX bit is very powerful.When used properly, it ensures that user-supplied code cannot be executed in the process during exploitation. Researchers (and hackers) have struggled with ways around this protection. ASLR is also very tough to defeat. This is the way the process randomizes the location of code in a process. Between these two hurdles, no one knows how to execute arbitrary code in Firefox or IE 8 in Vista right now. For the record, Leopard has neither of these features, at least implemented effectively. In the exploit I won Pwn2Own with, I knew right where my shellcode was located and I knew it would execute on the heap for me.'
And this was with Vista SP1. No one knows how to exploit Firefox or IE on Vista due to NX and ASLR.
This seems to be a pretty powerful statement, from someone who would stand a chance of knowing.
My only question is, where is Vista SP2? Last I checked, it was not yet released.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
You are about to boot up your Windows Computer -- (C)ancel, (A)llow, (F)ail
Yep, most secure, indeed!
Richard Stallman announced in a press conference today that Emacs is the safest operating system on the planet. According to Stallman Emacs is safer than Linux, Windows Vista, or Apple's Mac OS X.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it'll be because they, just like nearly every other piece of malware out there, are only capable of running on a single platform -- regardless of the actual security of that platform.
He never stated which planet...
If at first you don't succeed, so much for skydiving.
"..It's also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It's the safest and most secure OS on the planet today.... oh...uh.... i mean NOT including.. NOT including, sorry i misread that part, it actually says NOT including so.... can i start again please?"
No, he is probably right.
MacOS X isn't all that secure. Professional hackers have said that the implementation of ASLR/NX on Vista is far superior to Apples.
And as for Linux? Well, it wasn't that long ago that a certain high profile distribution accidentally disabled the pRNG in its core crypto libraries ... for two years. And then another high profile distro let attackers actually sign some rogue packages with their private key. I don't think anybody should be making smart comments about the security of Linux.
That leaves Vista, the result of many years of applying the Secure Development Lifecycle. Extensive fuzz testing on the APIs. Extensive security review of all features. IE uses a low privilege renderering engine like Chrome (and unlike any browser on Linux or MacOS).
This doesn't mean MacOS or Linux are bad. But Microsoft have been throwing enormous resources behind security for years now. Is it any surprise they are caught up and in many ways ahead?
Security through obscurity?
Brilliant!
Would you rather that RAM sit there doing nothing? Windows Vista has many features that utilize RAM to its fullest extent. Any free RAM on my system is RAM that is sitting on its lazy ass doing nothing. Windows Vista is actually smart enough to user it (Super Prefetch comes to mind) when my applications are not.
I'm actually typing this in Internet Explorer 8 on Windows Vista Business SP1 32-bit on a Pentium M 1.4 GHz with 1 GB RAM, and it's actually quite snappy.
That leaves Vista
...and all the security-designed systems. Do you really think Windows is safer than OpenBSD, let alone OpenVMS? Or whatever the NSA uses on their hardest systems? His quote is like saying that "the Ford Mustang is the fastest car on the planet".
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Did they send a copy of Vista SP2 to Mars or something?
one that allows the user to decide not to install potentially insecure software during the initial OS install. This is the biggest problem with Microsoft Windows when it comes to security, the huge amount of crap that gets installed automatically without the ability to decide DURING the install what features you want or do not want.
Linux as a whole does provide the ability to make a very minimal install with only those applications that you want on the machine. Solaris used to have this ability as well, though I am not sure if you can go package by package during the initial install to decide what you want or do not want on the machine.
You hear about Linux problems, but then it only applies to a specific Apache version that comes with a "typical" RedHat install, or some other issue which only applies to a certain software package. When a problem can be traced to the kernel or some other core component, that is when it applies to the OS as a whole.
So, saying that Vista is the most secure after SP2 means nothing if garbage like Internet Explorer is still open to all the exploits that Microsoft doesn't like to talk about.
Today Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, proclaimed "Google search is the best search on the planet!"
Also, Tom Long, CEO of Miller Brewing Company announced, "Our beer is the best tasting beer in the world!"
Here's a template: [Insert Person's Name Here], [insert title here] of [insert company name here] [announced|proclaimed|stated|declared|quothed] "[insert company's product here] is the [insert positive attribute here] in the entire [world|planet|universe]."
Repeat, ad infinitum.
Tell ya what. I have a cable right here that will connect your computer directly to the internet. Lets plug in a computer and kick off a Vista SP2 install (I assume you can get an installation disk that's pre-patched to SP2, right?) Then we'll measure how long it takes for the system to get taken over. Then we'll do the same thing with a stock Debian install CD. Then we'll post our results on the Internet. If your operating system is indeed so secure, you should have no problem with this, right?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
the safest OS on the planet is one stored in non-erasable ROM.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
"Do I see any serious problems with this story? Uh, yeah, maybe one or two..."
How about the fact tha Vista SP2 is not "in the marketplace" at all.
It hasn't been released yet and is still an RC candidate in beta testing!
If Microsoft wants to compare imaginary not yet released software to actual software, I set let them and Google play games with beta releases. The rest of us have actual work to do.
Does BSD do everything that Vista does? Those systems are so locked down that it affects their capabilities. I'm not saying it's bad, but I don't think you can compare BSD to Vista without starting by saying that BSD doesn't do alot of the important things that Vista users take for granted.
Your comment is like saying that an Abrams Tank is more secure than a Mustang.
True, but can a tank get on the freeway without causing a traffic jam?
Let's see here. On the left hand, we have the people at Microsoft claiming to make a secure operating system, and putting escrow into the encryption such that data can be seamlessly copied from the operating system to an unknown location. We witness Microsoft as an incredibly corrupt entity, in nearly every possible way - from locking in hardware manufacturers to using Windows to throwing lawsuits at everybody who even vaguely seems to threaten them (remember Lindows?). On the right hand, we have the code of Linux, FreeBSD, etc. available for the entire world to review, figures of authority are not chosen based on how much of a jackal they are, but how much their experience is worth. OpenBSD and FreeBSD have things like in-kernel crypto, chroot jails, are actually POSIX compliant, and seem to suffer from very little bloat due to the trend to make specific utilities as discrete as possible, and hence nearly as flawless as possible. Let's just agree to disagree. Or I can just call you an idiot. I'm fine with either.
The reason why Vista, Mac OS X, and Linux have fewer exploits is simple. Windows XP is easier to exploit.
Just remember that the security of the newer OSes is only one factor in the availability of the exploits.
If you want to visualize a flawed analogy; when you're being chased by a hungry lion, it doesn't matter how fast you run as long as you run faster than the guy beside you.
In this analogy XP is the slowest runner who is still plentiful. When the XP prey dwindles away, the hungry blackhat lions will look for the next slowest runner.
"And as for Linux? Well, it wasn't that long ago that a certain high profile distribution accidentally disabled the pRNG in its core crypto libraries ... for two years. And then another high profile distro let attackers actually sign some rogue packages with their private key. I don't think anybody should be making smart comments about the security of Linux."
Let's get this straight. You think *all* Linux distributions are unsafe because of TWO vendors. Do you believe in eugenics as well?
You do realize that your comment glosses over the hundreds(thousands?) of holes and exploits that M$ is responsible for it every OS up to and including this one you're waxing poetically about, right?
I wonder why I haven't ever had a rootkit on my Linux installations but I fix M$ installations all the time(Vista included) that have been rootkitted. Once a week at least.
Yes, it can. It just has to run over a few cars first. :)
Would you rather that RAM sit there doing nothing?
Yes.
Windows Vista has many features that utilize RAM to its fullest extent. Any free RAM on my system is RAM that is sitting on its lazy ass doing nothing. Windows Vista is actually smart enough to user it (Super Prefetch comes to mind) when my applications are not.
And what happens is that it determines that it wants to swap my actual program memory to disk to make room for these advanced features? And those features may save me 10 minutes a day, but they are 10 minutes I didn't know I was missing. But I notice the 10 seconds longer it takes switching between programs because my open programs have been moved to the slow disk and out of the fast RAM. I'd rather they don't touch them and waste my time, than think for me and get it wrong in a way that causes me trouble. It's an open program. There's available RAM. Don't touch my open programs, even if I haven't used them in 18 hours. (yes, if you leave a distro downloading over bittorrent overnight, you'll find that other programs will be swapped to the disk, and the open programs will take much longer to run in the morning)
Learn to love Alaska
Well, together Debian Ubuntu and Red Hat probably compromise the majority of Linux installs these days. If two large and well respected distros can fail in such basic ways, then it's reasonable to extrapolate that smaller and presumably less professional outfits will be even more flaky. Of course you can always find some Linux distro that has a perfect track record, but like I said above, usage counts. At some point if you want the word "Linux" to be meaningful you have to start talking about the bits actually in circulation.
... and not only because the article isn't about OpenBSD at all.
Anyway, yes, OpenBSD as an OS is probably pretty secure, but so are many others to, but the more crap you pile on top of it the more risk.
Anyway, the OpenBSD people count their "security" (marketing vise atleast) in years since the last remote root(?) exploit.
How likely is a remote root/administrator exploit vs Vista with a software firewall, no extra services and a user which don't do anything? ...
When it comes to exploits vs browsers, mail clients, IM clients, document viewers and such the OS isn't the issue.
Vista is arguably the most secure OS suitable for desktop use.
It is not the safest OS suitable for desktop use however.
What's the difference?
The President of the United States is arguably the most secured individual on the planet.
However, due to the large number of threats against him and his need to travel and be in the public eye often, he is not the safest individual on the planet.
Operating systems are the same. Vista has added many good defenses, but is still the OS with the target on its back.
I'm ok with Microsoft claiming to be the most secure OS for desktop use. OpenBSD and some hardened Linux distros might wish to disagree, but most people don't run hardened systems on desktops, they want more functional systems that are easier to support.
However, I'm not going to let MS get away with calling Vista the safest OS out there, because it just isn't.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
it wasn't that long ago that a certain high profile distribution accidentally disabled the pRNG in its core crypto libraries ... for two years.
Umm, no.
A certain high-profile distro accidentally disabled the pRNG in it's sshd initialization scripts.
another high profile distro let attackers actually sign some rogue packages with their private key.
again, no. The key was suspected to have been compromised, and as soon as it was discovered, the key was revoked, they performed a complete audit of all packages, and everything checked out.
I don't think anybody should be making smart comments about the security of Linux.
Least of all you... of course the fact that the only two incidents that you could come up with are entirely in your head actually speaks volumes.
Security has to be designed in.
When Microsoft deployed ActiveX installation and launch over HTTP and email with Active Desktop in 1997 they made Windows inherently insecure in a way that nobody had ever imagined anyone would be stupid enought to do. In fact it used to be a joke, the "Good Times" virus... a virus so effective it would run without you even opening the email message it was contained in. EVERYONE knew it was a joke, because EVERYONE knew nobody would be so stupid as to deliberately allow untrusted content to automatically run.
Nobody but Microsoft was that stupid, anyway.
Jesus Christ, man, the fundamental desing of Internet Explorer is so f-ing bad that over 10 years later I am STILL aghast that ANYONE would defend it, or any OS that depends on it. What the HELL are you smoking? DO you honestly not understand just how amazingly stupid this is? Honestly? By the bowels of Christ, consider that you might be mistaken.
Would you rather that RAM sit there doing nothing? Windows Vista has many features that utilize RAM to its fullest extent. Any free RAM on my system is RAM that is sitting on its lazy ass doing nothing. Windows Vista is actually smart enough to user it (Super Prefetch comes to mind) when my applications are not.
I'm actually typing this in Internet Explorer 8 on Windows Vista Business SP1 32-bit on a Pentium M 1.4 GHz with 1 GB RAM, and it's actually quite snappy.
Any RAM on my system that's doing nothing on my System is at my beck and call anytime I want it. The OS never knows when I want to start up Eclipse and JBoss to do some development, or maybe digiKam and convert a couple of hundred RAW images to jpegs. And while that batch is running, I probably want to start doing some image post processing with Gimp.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Windows Update does not use IE and hasn't since XP. You need to get information that isn't many years out of date.
IE is only used for Windows 2003/XP and earlier systems. Vista/2008 has its own separate updating program.
Windows Update does not use IE and hasn't since XP. You need to get information that isn't many years out of date.
Where are my mod points when I need them? Mod parent up informative please!
He is correct.. Vista and beyond use an interface in the Control Panel which is vastly superior to the IE Windows Update. Read up here: Windows Update
The foundation of any fact.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Locked down? In what way? Sure you can lock down both OpenBSD and Linux with additional patches and what not, but quite functional as is? The standard amount of applications and services may differ though, but then there is the question where you draw the line between OS and applications.
For comparison I'd like to draw it so that OS covers things various applications may use, whereas single applications which don't offer anything for other applications would be just that.
Point 1. Port filtering is still there. Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Windows Firewall with Advanced Security. Just because you're too fucking stupid to find it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Point 2. IE 7 runs in a sandbox. IE8 does as well as well as having inbuilt checking of known bad sites (Smartscreen filter), anti-phishing, popup blocker, blocking of add-ons etc. SO YOU DON'T NEED ANY OF THAT SHIT YOU'RE ON ABOUT which actually causes MORE trouble than its worth.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
If Max OS X isn't full of holes, why are there several pages of them on Securityfocus.com? Hell, Safari had a big enough list on its own.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Your comment is like saying that an Abrams Tank is more secure than a Mustang.
True, but can a tank get on the freeway without causing a traffic jam?
If the internet was a warzone, would you take the tank which is impervious to nearly everything they'll shoot at you with, or would you take the Mustang, paint a target on the back of your head, and relax, knowing you can have air conditioning while trying to dodge the bullets?
See all those wrecked Mustangs on the side of the road? They too can cause a traffic jam. It's called a botnet.
The pRNG was disabled in the openssl library, thus compromising any system using keys generated by that library. That is a major, major hole and has nothing to do with sshd initialization scripts (where did you get that from anyway?)
Oh, wait this is Slashdot! Sorry.
Linux rulz and Windoze Sux! If you use Windows you're a luzr!
---
Posted on my iPhone.
I'm sure no one can hack Vista SP2 because no one is using it. Therefore it's impenetrable!
You don't understand. Which is normal: You're about the sixtieth person I've had to correct on this issue.
In synopsis: you're wrong.
Here's why:
RAM that is sitting there holding stuff you might need, sometime (ala Superfetch) is just as ready to be utilized as RAM which is doing nothing at all. Superfetch is a read caching system, and any RAM it has in use for itself can be used by other programs IMMEDIATELY if they need it instead. Nothing has to wait buffers to get pushed out to disk, there's no longstanding delay. It just gets repurposed, and overwritten with other stuff. It doesn't need zeroed first. It's RAM, ie Random Access Memory, ferfuck'ssake.
In other words:
A system with a gigabyte of free RAM is a system with a gigabyte of RAM that it's failed to use. An optimized system does not have unused RAM.
Linux systems also eventually use all available RAM for caching. Your UID is low enough that you've probably even seen discussions of this "problem" in *nix years and years ago, and you should understand by now that it's not a problem at all, for all of the same reasons (listed above) that it's not a problem with Windows.
Kid-proof tablet..
More than that, if you suddenly try to load a large application that demands RAM, and there isn't enough due to the super pre-fetch or whatever, it's not like they're going to swap the super pre-fetch stuff to disk. They'll just drop it and load eclipse. Computer science is easy, folks!
"Saying that [Vista] is the most stable MS OS is like saying that asparagus is the most articulate vegetable." -- Dave Barry
Heh, "since XP," because man, that was freakin' eons ago. Like back before marketshare fell from 63.76% to 63.67%.
You are all loving superfetch.
That's not the problem.
NT/XP/Vista and presumably Win7 all have brain-dead paging algorithms which favor i/o buffering way too much over user code and data.
Open up a big app. Do a ton of sequential i/o - windows will page out most of that app in order to buffer up that sequential data which is never touched again. Switch back to that app and wait ages for it to page back in.
Do the same under linux and the memory manager is smart enough to recognize that sequential i/o should not cause buffercache to consume as much physical ram as possible.
That's why windows's memory management sucks ass and linux's doesn't.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
This really a rather complex statement. While it's true that no other consumer desktop operating system has quite the level of security and anti-exploit code, etc... Linux and Mac simply exist in a safer world. Perhaps one of the safest aspects of a linux system is that you're almost always running trusted code from a verified repository. This means that you really don't have to test the mettle of a linux installation (and thank god you don't) besides the fact that the level of incompatibility between linux systems provides a level of security through obscurity. Now, common images such as OpenWRT or (eventually) default Ubuntu installs may eventually be targeted, but right now they're simply not.
If someone is trying to take over your machine remotely, you're probably better off with Vista. If you're an idiot, you're probably better off with linux, where it's more difficult to shoot yourself in the foot by running insecure code as administrator.
From the results of the recent pwn2own competitions, I would say that Apple is going to eat a lot of security crow as they get just a tad bit more popular. I think Mac OS X will prove to be comically insecure when people start attacking it.
Microsoft is reeling from the vicious and unwarranted slanders of security companies and the US government's Computer Emergency Response Team that its Internet Explorer web browser has alleged "security holes" or is in any way less than the finest software known to mankind and excellent value for your money.
The festering paedophiles of CERT have gone so outrageously far as to make the ludicrous claim that just viewing a malicious webpage in IE could leave your computer open to being hacked and turned into a Russian Mafia spam server. "We don't know what could have triggered such vindictiveness," sobbed Microsoft marketing marketer's marketer Steve Ballmer. "Do they hate free enterprise that much?"
There are things you can do to make your computing experience even more secure. Microsoft's official suggestion -- make sure your anti-virus software is up to date and using an entire CPU doing nothing much, click through five screens to run IE in "protected mode," click through four screens to set zone security to "high," click "JUST BLOODY DO IT WILL YOU" when the User Access Control asks if you really want to do this, enable automatic updates with the minor side-effect of installing Microsoft DRM on your system or Windows Genuine Advantage randomly turning your computer into a paperweight, and sacrifice a goat to Microsoft at midnight on a moonless night -- is simple and straightforward. "It's the quality you're paying for."
On no account should you consider that there might be other web browsers out there, as researchers have demonstrated that all of them automatically download the cover of Virgin Killer. "I saw a report," said marketing marketer John Curran of Microsoft Completely Enderlependent Analysts, Inc., "that another browser had more vulnerabilities than ours! People would be very foolish indeed to move from the latest IE to Netscape 4.01."
"These CERT wankers are Mactards and trolls," said Guardian marketing marketer Jack Schofield. "They just want to take IE users out, brutally sodomise them, gas them in concentration camps and" [This comment has been removed by a Guardian moderator. Replies may also be deleted.]
http://rocknerd.co.uk
If you're the one driving the tank there are no traffic jams.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
It really means you have to either turn prefetch off on general purpose desktop machines or spec machines to have the full 3GB or so no matter what their purpose is.
Let me get this straight... you're installing keyboard drivers? That could be your problem...
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
The sad truth is the majority of people using Vista have it because that was the only choice at the computer store.
(Then there is the fun bit where MS counts every Vista license purchased as a downgrade to XP as a "Vista sale".)
It's absurd pedanticism. If Apple says "MacOS X is the easiest to use operating system in the world" do people respond with, no, the operating system that runs my car is easier to use? No they don't because that's obviously comparing apples to oranges. Trying to make a marketing dude look bad by comparing a production desktop OS like Windows to OpenVMS is just time wasting.
Well, Turner is comparing Vista to "open source", which isn't even an operating system. If we decide to be kind and limit the statement to "all open source OSes", he has still opened up quite a can of worms. In either case, that statement isn't limited to "production desktop OSes" (and we aren't talking about technicalities here). I will be very surprised if Vista SP2 stacks up against OpenBSD and hardened Linux.
Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we've ever built. It's also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It's the safest and most secure OS on the planet today.
That statement is very far-reaching, and Turner seems pretty confident about that. I'd say OpenVMS is a valid comparison, though a "tamer" one such as OpenBSD would be better. ;)
Of course, Turner is a businessman speaking to other businessmen, not a professor talking to other professors. I'm amused by the bragging, not angered at the inaccuracy.
Except that the RAM used for prefetch isn't paged out, ever. If an application needs it, it's immediately released to the application. All modern OS's that I know of do this, including Linux, OS X, and Windows. Don't talk about things that you don't understand.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
Would you rather that RAM sit there doing nothing?
No, I'd prefer that as I'm using my foreground application, the disk sit there idle waiting for me to ask it to do something, and when I do ask, it carries out that action immediately, rather than finishing the unnecessary swapping it had decided to do for no reason.
An OS has absolutely no clue which app I'm going to switch to next, because often I don't know myself. For all it knows, the memory pages it just swapped out for no reason, I'm going to want swapped back in half a second later. So I have to share my disk accesses with a totally unnecessary swap, and then wait for it to be unswapped. No thanks. Even if the cost of swapping out could be reduced to zero, it's still stupid. There's just no benefit, and at the very least puts more wear and tear on your drive, and on laptops, uses more power.
Wrong. They broke the entire OpenSSL library, not just some initialization scripts.
Wrong. Not only did they break the entire OpenSSL library - they broke it in such a way that every damn certificate created using that distro was one of a "limited series" of around a thousand certs.
They broke the seeding of the PRNG such that the only seed was the PID.
It was, in laymans terms, a fucking disaster. They may have well enforced everyones root password to be 'password***', pick your three numbers.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
I suggest reading the docs BEFORE accusing people of not knowing what they are talking about. You probably don't recall but there was a lot of discussion about this bizzare counterproductive feature of superfetch at the time Vista was released and it's all explained quite well on Microsoft's technet site.
I installed Zenwalk Linux on my 79 year old Mom's compromised (by malware) XP computer two weeks ago.
Linux can run on 79 year old hardware.
If VISTA is so sooper-dooper, why is there no mention of it on the front page of microsoft.com. Lots of other MS products, including Windows 7 Beta! Poor VISTA, she must feel unwanted even in her own birthplace. Strange way to treat your flagship product, if you are really, really proud of it.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
I think you don't properly understand how SuperFetch works. It caches in RAM frequently used program data by pre-emptively loading commonly used applications and program data into unused RAM in anticipation of the user intending to run these applications. If he/she does, load times can be greatly reduced.
However, note that the SuperFetch service runs at a very low priority, and will yield system resources to effectively any other process that requests system resources. Further, in the event of a program requesting memory that isn't available, SuperFetch will just dump from its cache a large enough portion of memory to accomodate the program. By your own admission, and correctly, RAM is _FAST_. The process of re-allocating a segment of memory from SuperFetch to your new program is negligible. SuperFetch will also never page to disk memory in use by an actually running program in order to fill the cache. I'm not saying that running programs won't be cached to disk, but it isn't SuperFetch that is the culprit. There are many other mechanisms in place that can result in this occuring, and SuperFetch isn't the only code on the system that plays around with the cache.
Suffice to say, if you dislike SuperFetch, it's easy to disable it. Just go into Windows Services and change the SuperFetch service startup from Automatic to Disabled, and stop the service. You've now disabled the aggressive pre-caching, no harder than any other tweak for any other operating system.
""It's also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It's the safest and most secure OS on the planet today.""
-----Translation: "The key is under the mat."
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
So they're saying that their client OS vista is more secure than windows 2008?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
As someone who spent many long hours performing patent searches while working for a consultant to MS Hardware, I can assure you that yes, they do their own hardware design. They are subject to counterfeiting and "third shift" IP theft* just like many other companies who manufacture overseas, and the keyboard you saw was no doubt one or the other. In parts of Asia it is just as easy to find counterfeit or copycat Logitech stuff too. I know because my company bought them to study.
* Third shift theft is when a company (often Chinese) signs a legitimate manufacturing deal with a U.S. company but purposefully overproduces. So say Company X does a deal to manufacture 2 million MS keyboards. They produce 2.5 million and do another deal on the side to slap a no-name label on the extra 500,000.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I'm quite disappointed.
The quote says that Vista SP2 "the safest, most reliable OS we've ever built". "we" as in Microsoft.
Since when is Microsoft "the world"?
If I can't understand how it does things, and if I can't explicitly enable/disable components as needed, then no, it is not the most secure OS on the planet. Not even close. And as for functionality? Please.
Hint: I can easily build a linux box to be a hardened gateway/firewall/ipsec device out of the box. I don't think windows can do that, nor will it ever with Microsoft's past and current philosophy.
Does windows include a flexible SPI firewall at the level of iptables yet? Can I disable all services that listen on network sockets yet without breaking *something* in the OS?