I don't metamoderate (and rarely moderate, period) much anymore, but I think the area where moderation fails the most is the "overrated" category. There really isn't any point to it. Who cares if someone gets a "5" even though you think it shouldn't get any higher than a "4"? If you think it's flamebait or a troll, fine, but who's to say whether something's worth a 3 or a 5? Most of the time "overrated" is just used to squelch personal/opinion disagreements in a way so that the moderator doesn't really have to worry about metamoderation. At the least, for all posts moderated "overrated," metamoderation should at least show the score that the post had when it was moderated that way. Personally, I think that "overrated" should just go away, but barring that, all "overrated" modrations should be metamoderated as "unfair." You want to tag something as trolling or flamebait, fine, but as of now, "overrated" is just being used by the spineless as a way of saying, "Oooo, I don't want to hear an opinion like that!"
have you been filing lots of bug/crash reports, or just closing it and moving along.
File lots of bug reports? Hammer away at talkback builds? Ummm, I'll think about it when AOL/Netscape/Mozilla starts sending me a check to do their work for them. I don't know about you people, but my time actually costs money.
Things like this are why Mozilla's been a disaster. When someone just wants something to work, they get chastized (not by you in particular) for not filing bug reports and doing a bunch of other nonsense that isn't their job. If I have to hammer away on unstable builds, file bug reports, write my own themes, patch the code, etc. etc. just in hopes that it'll be working better not now, but in the future, then I might as well be throwing my money down the drain.
I know a lot of people here at Slashdot refuse to believe the whole "Linux is free only if your time has no value" thing, but it really shows itself when you consider all the time people expect you to put into Mozilla when you really just want something that works. The time saved by being able to use IE 5+ is enough in itself to be able to get a new copy of Win2K Server, provided that you've advanced beyond the flipping burgers/tech-support/allowance-from-parents stage of life. Again: Time is money, kids.
I really hope you didn't spend too much time thinking about it, because it's not interesting; your post is actually stunningly vacuous.
Anyway, if you really bothered to think about it, you'd realize that there's no reason why major OS components need to be tied to a certain OS version. I hope you don't think that you're stuck with one version of glibc depending upon the version of the Linux distribution you're using. Or that it's "BS," as you put it, that older OSes that aren't yet using IPv6 won't change their name once they do support it. Same with different versions of MDAC, MSXML, etc, being able to be used by different OSes. Please give it a little more thought next time, okay buddy?
In my opinion, this is a good sign for companies in the future. I mean, we have a company demonstrably committed to open source [...]
They're not demonstrably committed to open source, they're going to try their hand at a closed source, proprietary route in an effort to actually make money. That's what this article's about.
[...] able to or trying to make some money from their open source
They definitely haven't been able to, they've lost tons of money so far, including $290 million over the past 90 days. And how is "trying to make some money" a good sign for companies in the future? Back in 1999, ToothpasteHolders.com and MyBunghole.com and all the rest tried to make money, too. The only reason future companies will see these as good signs is if they're bankruptcy lawyers, repo men, or run a website at f---edcompany.com.
To me it shows that they've understood how to make a living out of the free software fad
But they're still losing tons of money, and they plan to soon have only around 3 or 4 million dollars of revenue (not profits, just revenue) per quarter, most of that coming from ads on their websites. (Which I really don't understand, since most OSDN/Slashdot ads are for other OSDN sites. Surely they can't be relying on such a simple scam to fool investors.). That's not making money, and if they actually stay in business it'll be a miracle. I understand that you like them, but you've gotta be realistic.
Where's the myth? It's been shown time and again that involving yourself with GPL'ed software isn't the way to go if you want to make money. That model you mention is totally unproven, and so far has pretty much been disproven. VA Linux basically acknowledged this in the announcement.
Also, the "or any later version" provision of the (L)GPL does not allow RMS to "to screw you when it pleases him", because the license explicitly states that "Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version."
I'm not sure why you're grasping onto the "Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version" bit. "Similar in spirit?" That phrase is so ambiguous and subjective as to make the sentence meaningless and unenforcible. It might as well not have even been in there, and the fact that it is in there should cause any properly careful person to start thinking about purchasing a nice plate metal protector to wear on his or her back.
It's a fairly obvious difference between cracking a system, and exploiting the problems found, and coming across a problem by accident and reporting them in a sensible manner.
How is what he did sensible? He works for company X. On day 1 he finds a misconfigured server run by company Y, his direct competitor. He spends this day poking around two of the sites hosted there, testing out usernames and passwords that he found on at least one of them. Does he tell anyone who could fix the server anything? No. Not until the next day does he let anybody know about it (assuming he didn't share the info with his buddies), and when he does so, does he call the server operators? No, he goes to company Y's customer and tells them. And he doesn't tell their IT department, he tells it to a newspaper editor. He's not some good samaritan, because he never did tell company Y about the problem with their server. He was still showing people the hole 10 days after he found it.
The sensible thing to do, which I've done a few times, is as that the instant he realized that there was a hole in the server, he should've immediately quit playing around with it and immediately called or emailed the customer or company Y. That is, if he really wanted to wanted to be a good samaritan. If he didn't want to be a good samaritan, that's fine, he doesn't have to call, but you don't sit there poking around the hole after you realize that it's there.
Interestingly enough. I think what will make this difficult, is the large number of old I.E. browsers out there (not to mention the 5-10% of users who use other browsers). These browsers won't have the capability to do what I.E. 6 supports.
Huh? Are you under the impression that.NET has anything to do with web browsers? It doesn't, not at all.
Who I feel really bad for are designers of web pages who are caught in the middle.
Why would you feel bad for them? If they've been coding to the W3C standards, then Microsoft's been the leader in displaying their pages correctly for years now. I guess it would suck if they cared about Netscape 4.x and earlier users, but well, few people care about them anymore, and there aren't that many left anyway. And if they do care about 'em, they'd be better off complaining to Netscape about poor standards support than spending a single second bitching about Microsoft.
Not related to your post, but maybe someone else can tell me why Microsoft is supposed to keep Netscape's shoddy plug-in API? When did Netscape ever support any of Microsoft's APIs? Hell, just dropping the stubborness over supporting "document.all" would've done wonders for their own users.
Oh yeah, and my RealPlayer, Flash, and Shockwave plug-ins (controls) work just fine. It's Apple's fault that they're not properly coding to the API, and this isn't the first time that they've had this problem with QuickTime. Why do you think QuickTime has always had such a bad reputation for nasty installs on Windows? That's why they're working with Microsoft to get the problem solved.
Finally, I'm guessing that it must be Mac zealots who think that this is some big anti-competitive move against Apple, because the rest of the world knows otherwise: The company with which Microsoft is heavily engaged in a battle over media is called Real. Apple's QuickTime isn't even on the radar screen, so please, for the love of God, get over yourselves already.
I'm not sure how you say that the iBooks are unquestionably cheaper than the PC equivalents. This isn't something I want to spend all night on, so I just went to the Apple store and picked the cheapest iBook, then went to Sony's site and picked a VAIO that cost the same. They're both listed at $1299.
Graphics: Mac, "ATI RAGE Mobility 128 w/ 8MB SDRAM and AGP 2X support." VAIO, "AGP," "Intel® 815 EM Chipset integrated with up to 11 MB video SDRAM (shared)."
Hard drive: Mac, 10GB Ultra ATA. VAIO, 15GB Ultra ATA
Connections: Both have built-in 56K modem, built-in 10/100BaseT, video output, 2 USB ports, and 1 FireWire port. In addition, the VAIO has serial and parallel ports built in. I couldn't tell what kind of cards the iBook accepts. The VAIO will take 2 Type I or II PC Cards.
OS: Mac, MacOS 9. VAIO, Win2K Pro.
Note that I just went to Sony's site and went with the first $1299 notebook I could find (All-In-One FX series). If I wanted to hunt around, I expect that I'd be able to find a better deal than my first pick. Then again, maybe not.
I'm not saying at all that Apple doesn't count, but I've really gotta take issue with one of your points.
The introduction of third party hardware showed that Apple was gouging their customers. Those cloners were putting such a hurting on Apple that the company was bleeding money to the point that they finally killed off all the cloners.
Not only is one month "long before," it's practically eons before. If you care about security, you don't leave your system unprotected for a single day much less a month. A month?? Geez, why don't you just walk into the local hackers den and hand your computer over to them?
What are these mythical hazardous hotfixes you speak of? Secondly, if you care about security, then you know that:
The security guidelines for IIS tell you not to use mappings that you don't need, specifically mentioning.ida/.idq mappings. If you followed the guidelines, you wouldn't have been vulnerable.
Microsoft's security bulletin didn't just link to a patch, it also explained a workaround to perform so that no patching is required.
If you want to compare apples to apples, then you should know that the hole exploited by Code Red wasn't an IIS hole. It was an Index Server hole, so if you just want to talk about merely serving up web pages, then you would've turned off the Index Server.
Maybe you'd like to talk to the Apache team itself about the wisdom of turning off extra services, since they've had their own web page hacked a couple of times.
Oh please. It had nothing to do with the way the votes were taken, but it had everything to do with how close the election was. Most U.S. presidential winners are known before the polls in the midwest are even closed. That was impossible this time, while the Canadian election was a landslide. If the Canadian election had come down to a single riding, with only a few hundreds of votes making a difference, as the U.S. election eventually came down to a close result in a single state, do you really think that the close precincts wouldn't have been contested?
Gore? You mean that guy who flunked out of freakin' Vanderbilt Divinity School? (F's in five of the eight classes he took over three semesters). Then again, if a majority of the people who know Gore best, the residents of his own state of Tennessee, hadn't voted for his opponent, then yes, he really would be president right now. D'oh!:)
Oh, great. Does that mean that in 2004 we might have to suffer a Slashdot article by Eric Raymond telling us how cool it is that he's president and you're not? Of course, judging by the karma hit he took after his last Slashdot article (his $41 million is now worth about $235,000), he'd probably be impeached.:)
Re:Maybe Palm will license BeOS for web pads?
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Palm To Purchase Be's IP
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Heh, yeah, and maybe they could end up bankrupt like those guys at Eazel who thought it would be a great idea to take the UI skills that they learned from Apple and try to make loads money from the Linux market. As the psycho dad in "Heathers" said, "Showed those fucks.":)
Yeah, Palm was heading down the road to destruction pretty well, but I think this move really seals it for them. Not that the stock itself is that much, it's more of a perception thing, showing how directionless Palm has been for the last couple of years. It's like they're in the death throes flailing around for anything they can grasp onto just to stay alive. It's hard to believe that a company with such a large marketshare is thought by so many to be destined for www.fuckedcompany.com, but that just shows you how badly the past couple of years has been for Palm and how poorly they've set themselves up for the future.
On a side note, and having used BeOS in the past: Ouch about being bought out for only $11 million. And not just $11 million, but $11 million in Palm stock, which is going to be about as valuable as VA Linux stock in a couple of years...
While you're at it, Berke, how 'bout inventing a word for dyed-in-the-wool liberals who sound ready to join a holy crusade to convince people that they aren't so liberal after all, they're really just libertarians at heart. You know, like you and Bill Maher.
And just between the two of us, would you mind giving the Elvis references a hiatus until you figure out a way to remove from humanity's memory banks that completely unfunny and untouching dreck you called "The Outlands?" Thanks.
Trust me, anybody doing anything interesting with Java on the server isn't going to want to use Microsoft's JVM to power their solution. MS's JVM kicked everyone else's ass back in the day, but it hasn't been updated with any of the newer Java technologies. Even if they did want to use Microsoft's JVM — and believe me, they won't — they'd know that they can still download it from Microsoft. If they're worried about the clients not having JVMs, they'd still be better off having the clients use more modern JVMs.
The whole Java on XP thing is just a way for Microsoft to tweak Sun by giving them exactly what they asked for (removing their "bastardized" Java from Windows) while taking away even more from Java's "buzz." Even though Java's turned into a flop both for standalone client apps (erm, where are they?) and now for web applets (in favor of Flash), Java still had a little buzz going on with the people who were familiar with it from web applets. Once this is gone, which Sun fears and Microsoft knows they fear it, Java will be "just another" server technology. Sure, it'll get a lot of use, but so do CORBA, DCOM, and TP monitors, and when's the last time anybody got excited over the latter three?
You miss the big contradiction in your post. You question why someone would use IIS after something like Code Red happens. Well, if someone cares enough about security for it to be the deciding factor in the OS they choose, then they also know that (1) Microsoft released a patch and a workaround for the security hole long before Code Red existed, and (2) all the Linux distributions have tons of patches for all the security holes in them. So if someone really cared about securing his own boxes, he applied the patches or the workarounds and never had to worry about his machines getting bitten. You act like a security-conscious person would just move to Linux, set up a box and forget it, and conveniently forget about all the holes that have been needed to be patched in the Linux distributions. Doesn't sound like much incentive to switch for anybody who knows what they're doing.
Only problem with that theory is that being free is the only reason that most people even use Linux. Of course, they have no idea what TCO is, but we won't get into that. Linux's initial zero cost is just about the only mitigating feature going up against all that Win2K/XP has to offer (better performance, better hardware, better business apps, better games, better tools, economy of scale, etc.). You start expecting people to pay for Linux stuff instead of getting it for free, and that single advantage goes away, and Linux will soon get its nuts stomped off.
Re:Sorry, but that counter is total crap
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Linux Turns 10
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· Score: 1
Actually, I thought it was due to the poor browsers available for Linux, which handle Javascript about as well as a Linux user handling a member of the opposite sex. Juuuuuust kidding, but I did have to point out that you're completely wrong, and that your theory is actually comically bad.
Sorry, but that counter is total crap
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Linux Turns 10
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· Score: 1
If there were really 60 million users, Linux would easily get more than the 0.5-2.0 percent that it always does whenever any tracking company releases their browser penetration surveys. Unless you really want to argue that the large majority of these people are using other operating systems when they do their web browsing. But I don't think you want to go there, do you?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't metamoderate (and rarely moderate, period) much anymore, but I think the area where moderation fails the most is the "overrated" category. There really isn't any point to it. Who cares if someone gets a "5" even though you think it shouldn't get any higher than a "4"? If you think it's flamebait or a troll, fine, but who's to say whether something's worth a 3 or a 5? Most of the time "overrated" is just used to squelch personal/opinion disagreements in a way so that the moderator doesn't really have to worry about metamoderation. At the least, for all posts moderated "overrated," metamoderation should at least show the score that the post had when it was moderated that way. Personally, I think that "overrated" should just go away, but barring that, all "overrated" modrations should be metamoderated as "unfair." You want to tag something as trolling or flamebait, fine, but as of now, "overrated" is just being used by the spineless as a way of saying, "Oooo, I don't want to hear an opinion like that!"
have you been filing lots of bug/crash reports, or just closing it and moving along.
File lots of bug reports? Hammer away at talkback builds? Ummm, I'll think about it when AOL/Netscape/Mozilla starts sending me a check to do their work for them. I don't know about you people, but my time actually costs money.
Things like this are why Mozilla's been a disaster. When someone just wants something to work, they get chastized (not by you in particular) for not filing bug reports and doing a bunch of other nonsense that isn't their job. If I have to hammer away on unstable builds, file bug reports, write my own themes, patch the code, etc. etc. just in hopes that it'll be working better not now, but in the future, then I might as well be throwing my money down the drain.
I know a lot of people here at Slashdot refuse to believe the whole "Linux is free only if your time has no value" thing, but it really shows itself when you consider all the time people expect you to put into Mozilla when you really just want something that works. The time saved by being able to use IE 5+ is enough in itself to be able to get a new copy of Win2K Server, provided that you've advanced beyond the flipping burgers/tech-support/allowance-from-parents stage of life. Again: Time is money, kids.
I really hope you didn't spend too much time thinking about it, because it's not interesting; your post is actually stunningly vacuous.
Anyway, if you really bothered to think about it, you'd realize that there's no reason why major OS components need to be tied to a certain OS version. I hope you don't think that you're stuck with one version of glibc depending upon the version of the Linux distribution you're using. Or that it's "BS," as you put it, that older OSes that aren't yet using IPv6 won't change their name once they do support it. Same with different versions of MDAC, MSXML, etc, being able to be used by different OSes. Please give it a little more thought next time, okay buddy?
In my opinion, this is a good sign for companies in the future. I mean, we have a company demonstrably committed to open source [...]
They're not demonstrably committed to open source, they're going to try their hand at a closed source, proprietary route in an effort to actually make money. That's what this article's about.
[...] able to or trying to make some money from their open source
They definitely haven't been able to, they've lost tons of money so far, including $290 million over the past 90 days. And how is "trying to make some money" a good sign for companies in the future? Back in 1999, ToothpasteHolders.com and MyBunghole.com and all the rest tried to make money, too. The only reason future companies will see these as good signs is if they're bankruptcy lawyers, repo men, or run a website at f---edcompany.com.
To me it shows that they've understood how to make a living out of the free software fad
But they're still losing tons of money, and they plan to soon have only around 3 or 4 million dollars of revenue (not profits, just revenue) per quarter, most of that coming from ads on their websites. (Which I really don't understand, since most OSDN/Slashdot ads are for other OSDN sites. Surely they can't be relying on such a simple scam to fool investors.). That's not making money, and if they actually stay in business it'll be a miracle. I understand that you like them, but you've gotta be realistic.
Where's the myth? It's been shown time and again that involving yourself with GPL'ed software isn't the way to go if you want to make money. That model you mention is totally unproven, and so far has pretty much been disproven. VA Linux basically acknowledged this in the announcement.
Because some of us actually think that thieves are scumbags? I pity you if you feel financially burdened by the price of a movie rental.
Also, the "or any later version" provision of the (L)GPL does not allow RMS to "to screw you when it pleases him", because the license explicitly states that "Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version."
I'm not sure why you're grasping onto the "Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version" bit. "Similar in spirit?" That phrase is so ambiguous and subjective as to make the sentence meaningless and unenforcible. It might as well not have even been in there, and the fact that it is in there should cause any properly careful person to start thinking about purchasing a nice plate metal protector to wear on his or her back.
It's a fairly obvious difference between cracking a system, and exploiting the problems found, and coming across a problem by accident and reporting them in a sensible manner.
How is what he did sensible? He works for company X. On day 1 he finds a misconfigured server run by company Y, his direct competitor. He spends this day poking around two of the sites hosted there, testing out usernames and passwords that he found on at least one of them. Does he tell anyone who could fix the server anything? No. Not until the next day does he let anybody know about it (assuming he didn't share the info with his buddies), and when he does so, does he call the server operators? No, he goes to company Y's customer and tells them. And he doesn't tell their IT department, he tells it to a newspaper editor. He's not some good samaritan, because he never did tell company Y about the problem with their server. He was still showing people the hole 10 days after he found it.
The sensible thing to do, which I've done a few times, is as that the instant he realized that there was a hole in the server, he should've immediately quit playing around with it and immediately called or emailed the customer or company Y. That is, if he really wanted to wanted to be a good samaritan. If he didn't want to be a good samaritan, that's fine, he doesn't have to call, but you don't sit there poking around the hole after you realize that it's there.
Interestingly enough. I think what will make this difficult, is the large number of old I.E. browsers out there (not to mention the 5-10% of users who use other browsers). These browsers won't have the capability to do what I.E. 6 supports.
Huh? Are you under the impression that .NET has anything to do with web browsers? It doesn't, not at all.
Who I feel really bad for are designers of web pages who are caught in the middle.
Why would you feel bad for them? If they've been coding to the W3C standards, then Microsoft's been the leader in displaying their pages correctly for years now. I guess it would suck if they cared about Netscape 4.x and earlier users, but well, few people care about them anymore, and there aren't that many left anyway. And if they do care about 'em, they'd be better off complaining to Netscape about poor standards support than spending a single second bitching about Microsoft.
Not related to your post, but maybe someone else can tell me why Microsoft is supposed to keep Netscape's shoddy plug-in API? When did Netscape ever support any of Microsoft's APIs? Hell, just dropping the stubborness over supporting "document.all" would've done wonders for their own users.
Oh yeah, and my RealPlayer, Flash, and Shockwave plug-ins (controls) work just fine. It's Apple's fault that they're not properly coding to the API, and this isn't the first time that they've had this problem with QuickTime. Why do you think QuickTime has always had such a bad reputation for nasty installs on Windows? That's why they're working with Microsoft to get the problem solved.
Finally, I'm guessing that it must be Mac zealots who think that this is some big anti-competitive move against Apple, because the rest of the world knows otherwise: The company with which Microsoft is heavily engaged in a battle over media is called Real. Apple's QuickTime isn't even on the radar screen, so please, for the love of God, get over yourselves already.
I'm not sure how you say that the iBooks are unquestionably cheaper than the PC equivalents. This isn't something I want to spend all night on, so I just went to the Apple store and picked the cheapest iBook, then went to Sony's site and picked a VAIO that cost the same. They're both listed at $1299.
Note that I just went to Sony's site and went with the first $1299 notebook I could find (All-In-One FX series). If I wanted to hunt around, I expect that I'd be able to find a better deal than my first pick. Then again, maybe not.
I'm not saying at all that Apple doesn't count, but I've really gotta take issue with one of your points.
The introduction of third party hardware showed that Apple was gouging their customers. Those cloners were putting such a hurting on Apple that the company was bleeding money to the point that they finally killed off all the cloners.
Oh please. It had nothing to do with the way the votes were taken, but it had everything to do with how close the election was. Most U.S. presidential winners are known before the polls in the midwest are even closed. That was impossible this time, while the Canadian election was a landslide. If the Canadian election had come down to a single riding, with only a few hundreds of votes making a difference, as the U.S. election eventually came down to a close result in a single state, do you really think that the close precincts wouldn't have been contested?
Gore? You mean that guy who flunked out of freakin' Vanderbilt Divinity School? (F's in five of the eight classes he took over three semesters). Then again, if a majority of the people who know Gore best, the residents of his own state of Tennessee, hadn't voted for his opponent, then yes, he really would be president right now. D'oh! :)
Oh, great. Does that mean that in 2004 we might have to suffer a Slashdot article by Eric Raymond telling us how cool it is that he's president and you're not? Of course, judging by the karma hit he took after his last Slashdot article (his $41 million is now worth about $235,000), he'd probably be impeached. :)
Heh, yeah, and maybe they could end up bankrupt like those guys at Eazel who thought it would be a great idea to take the UI skills that they learned from Apple and try to make loads money from the Linux market. As the psycho dad in "Heathers" said, "Showed those fucks." :)
Yeah, Palm was heading down the road to destruction pretty well, but I think this move really seals it for them. Not that the stock itself is that much, it's more of a perception thing, showing how directionless Palm has been for the last couple of years. It's like they're in the death throes flailing around for anything they can grasp onto just to stay alive. It's hard to believe that a company with such a large marketshare is thought by so many to be destined for www.fuckedcompany.com, but that just shows you how badly the past couple of years has been for Palm and how poorly they've set themselves up for the future.
On a side note, and having used BeOS in the past: Ouch about being bought out for only $11 million. And not just $11 million, but $11 million in Palm stock, which is going to be about as valuable as VA Linux stock in a couple of years...
While you're at it, Berke, how 'bout inventing a word for dyed-in-the-wool liberals who sound ready to join a holy crusade to convince people that they aren't so liberal after all, they're really just libertarians at heart. You know, like you and Bill Maher.
And just between the two of us, would you mind giving the Elvis references a hiatus until you figure out a way to remove from humanity's memory banks that completely unfunny and untouching dreck you called "The Outlands?" Thanks.
Actually, the languages all use the CLI (Common Language Infrastructure). The CLI was also submitted to ECMA.
Trust me, anybody doing anything interesting with Java on the server isn't going to want to use Microsoft's JVM to power their solution. MS's JVM kicked everyone else's ass back in the day, but it hasn't been updated with any of the newer Java technologies. Even if they did want to use Microsoft's JVM — and believe me, they won't — they'd know that they can still download it from Microsoft. If they're worried about the clients not having JVMs, they'd still be better off having the clients use more modern JVMs.
The whole Java on XP thing is just a way for Microsoft to tweak Sun by giving them exactly what they asked for (removing their "bastardized" Java from Windows) while taking away even more from Java's "buzz." Even though Java's turned into a flop both for standalone client apps (erm, where are they?) and now for web applets (in favor of Flash), Java still had a little buzz going on with the people who were familiar with it from web applets. Once this is gone, which Sun fears and Microsoft knows they fear it, Java will be "just another" server technology. Sure, it'll get a lot of use, but so do CORBA, DCOM, and TP monitors, and when's the last time anybody got excited over the latter three?
You miss the big contradiction in your post. You question why someone would use IIS after something like Code Red happens. Well, if someone cares enough about security for it to be the deciding factor in the OS they choose, then they also know that (1) Microsoft released a patch and a workaround for the security hole long before Code Red existed, and (2) all the Linux distributions have tons of patches for all the security holes in them. So if someone really cared about securing his own boxes, he applied the patches or the workarounds and never had to worry about his machines getting bitten. You act like a security-conscious person would just move to Linux, set up a box and forget it, and conveniently forget about all the holes that have been needed to be patched in the Linux distributions. Doesn't sound like much incentive to switch for anybody who knows what they're doing.
Only problem with that theory is that being free is the only reason that most people even use Linux. Of course, they have no idea what TCO is, but we won't get into that. Linux's initial zero cost is just about the only mitigating feature going up against all that Win2K/XP has to offer (better performance, better hardware, better business apps, better games, better tools, economy of scale, etc.). You start expecting people to pay for Linux stuff instead of getting it for free, and that single advantage goes away, and Linux will soon get its nuts stomped off.
Actually, I thought it was due to the poor browsers available for Linux, which handle Javascript about as well as a Linux user handling a member of the opposite sex. Juuuuuust kidding, but I did have to point out that you're completely wrong, and that your theory is actually comically bad.
If there were really 60 million users, Linux would easily get more than the 0.5-2.0 percent that it always does whenever any tracking company releases their browser penetration surveys. Unless you really want to argue that the large majority of these people are using other operating systems when they do their web browsing. But I don't think you want to go there, do you?
You don't need to install any patch to make your computer immune to Code Red, so what's their excuse?