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Windows 7's Virtual XP Mode a Support Nightmare?
CWmike writes "Microsoft's decision to let Windows 7 users run Windows XP applications in a virtual machine may have been necessary to convince people to upgrade, but it could also create support nightmares, analysts said today. Gartner analyst Michael Silver outlines the downsides. 'You'll have to support two versions of Windows,' he said. 'Each needs to be secured, antivirused, firewalled and patched. If a company has 10,000 PCs, that's 20,000 instances of Windows.' The other big problem Silver foresees: Making sure the software they run is compatible with Windows 7. 'This is a great Band-Aid, but companies need to heal their applications,' Silver said. 'They'll be doing themselves a disservice if, because of XPM, they're not making sure that all their apps support Windows 7.'"
Mac OSX and Linux are as insecure as Microsoft Windows XP/Vista if not more so. Go ask the guy who hacked OSX in a contest.
Whoa! Wait wait wait.
I mean, wow. HOLY SHIT! Some guy hacked OS X in a contest! My fucking god, OS X's security must be TERRIBLE compared to Windows'! The fact that some guy managed to hack an OS X box PROVES it!
(Seriously, though: in the contest in question that you're thinking of -- I'm assuming it's the same one that all Windows apologists love to pull out -- the contestants got to keep whichever box they hacked if they were the first person to do it. So everybody went after the OS X box first. It's not surprising that the Linux and Windows boxes didn't get hacked first, since they weren't the primary target of interest. And the security hole the guy exploited was a client-side exploit in a web browser, not a remote exploit.)