What spyware are they getting? It would really be interesting to see spyware that bypasses LUA restrictions. At this point my research hasn't come up with any spyware that doesn't at least require access to write to HKLM in the registry. I'd like to be prepared if there are LUA spyware out in the wild!
I'm still having problems understanding what you are getting at. Windows 2000/XP doesn't allow non-administrators install applications. This is why you need to use "run as..." or log-in as an administrator to perform installs. It's the same in linux and in OSX. Where's the inconsistency?
It sucks that "run as..." wasn't working well in win2k. If you are in XP, give it another shot. It works great, and will save you a lot of pain, believe me.
I'm not sure what you mean in your first paragraph. Was "run as..." not working when installing an application? What application was it? I didn't come across that problem while running as limited in 2k, although granted that was only for a year or so until I upgraded to XP. The 'install for all users' confusion isn't a problem with windows, but a problem with the installation script for the program you were installing. You seem to be blaming inconsistencies in 3rd party software on the OS.
What do you mean by non-admin mode not being secure? Please clarify.
I agree, active-x on the net was a bad idea. SP2 disables it automatically. As was stated by drsmithy, active-x is quite extensively used in intranet situations and is very useful.
They are certainly treating the symptoms. Not only are vulnerabilities patched as soon as they are found, but MS is taking a proactive approach to keeping their OS secure. Not only through things like SP2, but also many of the vulnerabilities found and disclosed are done so by Microsoft itself, which is something I appreciate (they don't *need* to be telling us about all the vulns they find during code sweeps).
But the fact is, most of the spyware out there makes it onto the computer not through a vulnerability, but because the user presses 'accept' or 'OK' when most prompts come up. So some sort of pro-active measures have to be taken in these cases, similarly to how anti-virus software does to try and thwart the user's innate urge to open the 'superhappyfunball.exe' attached to their e-mail message.
--
Run as limited user, stop getting spyware.
http://www.techproblemsolver.com/limited.html h ttp://blogs.msdn.com/aaron_margosis/
If you are referring to things like browser cookies, then I'll accept you caveat and say that I probably have ad cookies lying around, but I'm not too concerned -- it's a fact of life on either browser (I'm in mozilla). I'm talking about the spyware that installs itself everywhere on your machine, intercepts your traffic, adds 'search' bars to browsers, icons to desktops, etc... Those are the real pains in the ass, that even Ad-Aware & Spybot have a hard time getting rid of. Those things can't get anywhere if you are a limited user.
Have you been missing the stream of patches coming from MS? How are they not dealing with the primary issues?
Even so, please tell me which pieces of spyware exploit legitimate security holes? The "security hole" they exploit is that users run as admin. Hardly a bug in the OS, just a horrifically misguided ease of use 'feature' in the installer. Easily fixed. I've never gotten infected with spyware while running as a Limited user, and neither has my Mom, who has a penchant for running little apps she finds on the web. In the cases where they are malicious, she just gets a protection fault and knows to happily move along to the next little animation.
the problem i do see is horrible horrible acting from hayden christensen.
Watch the Making of... Episode I in the EPI DVD to experience some major heart ache. They actually walk through the casting process for Anakin (kid), and show the audition tapes for the last two candidates. One of them does a fantastic job acting opposite Portman. The other kid flubs lines and has no emotional range, across takes and re-takes. Guess who Lucas cast? It's like they had no real sense of what is necessary to be a good performer. Lucas seems enamored with the bad actor and no one contradicts him. The rest is history.
There are so many painful behind the scene tracks where the kid can't get his lines straight. There's on in particular where they are all in a table eating, and he does so poorly they have to ask him to stop trying to simulate eating so he can just concentrate on delivering his two sentences.
The story was pretty bad, but man the acting blew in both movies.
XP SP2 had a long beta period, and a long pre-release period before it went live on Windows Update. Why didn't the vendor run the update on their machines, and diagnose/fix problems in their app? Furthermore, pretty much all cases of post-SP2 app incompatibility I've seen result from insecure coding practices from the vendor. Yes, the insecure way of doing things was available previously in Windows, but the secure way was also available. Let's hold the vendors to the same standard we hold Microsoft. Everyone wants Windows to be more secure, well guess what, the client apps are also going to need to be coded with more secure practices.
Anyone else think the pictures in the 'final product' linked page are just 3d renders? The lighting and geometry is great, but too perfect to have been taken in a real room under real lighting conditions. Nice 3d model though.
This has been my experience also. Any lock up of explorer.exe (be it caused by IE or not) can be remedied w/ a ctrl-alt-delete, click on task manager, kill explorer.exe. It will either automatically reload as if nothing happened, or in some instances you have to restart it from task manager. I have not seen a blue screen or system freeze in a long time (barring faulty hardware).
You are totally right about this -- Microsoft dropped the ball when they opted for ease of use versus running the desktop securely. They knew that if 2000 or XP defaulted to making desktop users non-root, people would not understand why they couldn't install stuff, and why all the crappy software out there didn't quite work, so they tried to dodge that roadblock and created a nightmare for themselves.
Longhorn's development has a whole team looking into these issues across the board -- how to make the 'LUA' (limited user account) experience streamlined, make sure that every component in the OS works as expected with LUA, and make sure the default Longhorn installation procedure is smart enough to create primary accounts as LUA. But the proof is in the pudding, we'll see.
By the way, I'm sure you do, but hopefully you know it's really easy to remove yourself from the administrators group and run as a regular user. Refer to http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=133173&cid= 11121239 for useful URLS on the subject.
Games, most shareware, and even a whole lot of commercialware - they just will not work
Is that the fault of Windows, or the fault of bad programmers? If you ran across, say, an accounting program in linux that requires you to be root to run it, would you think that Linux sucks, or that the programmers for that accounting package suck?
I'm not going to let MS off the hook on this one, though, they definitely ran a loose ship for too long a time and let programmers do really dumb things. But it's high time we start holding the software designers to task -- they shouldn't expect a user to have full access to their machine in order to run. And the fact is,
since Windows 2000 (even NT4) there has been built in user access control mechanisms for both filesystem and system resources. Try it out, Win2k lets you run as non-admin, and even has built in 'run as...' capability (you have to right click the executable with shift held down for the option to come up). It's not something new in Windows -- software ompanies have had 5 years to adopt the right way to do things. The problem is that it took until SP2 and Microsoft's push for security for those companies to even care that they were also guilty of running insecure software.
I've been running as non-administrator for years now, and at least all the professional commercial apps I run work just fine (photoshop, all the MS products, norton anti-virus, etc...). There are certainly a bunch that don't work perfectly, but it should be the responsibility of the company to fix up their software.
nothing installs
Well that's really how it should be! If she needs to install something, it's probably for the best that she require your direct intervention to do so. Personally, my dad knows the Administrator password for the machine, and I've showed him how to either 'Run As.." or switch users to install, but we have a set procedure where he consults with me before installing anything. It's kept him spyware free since I made the move the change for him in '03.
I dunno, with 3 billion dollars in profits this year year alone, I'd say quite a few people actually.:) It's a 11% increase... amazing given the security blunders last year.
The fact that the OS gets infected has nothing to do with IE being 'tied to the OS'. It has everything to do with the fact that most people who run windows run as Admin. When you are admin no security in the world can stop a user from clicking 'yes' when asked to install software. While IE definitely doesn't make it hard for the program to be installed, even running Mozilla won't stop grandma from downloading an executable and installing it.
Microsoft intends to provide the software free of charge. The article says they are considering providing it for a fee in the future. While that would be a dumb move, for the forseeable future it will be free.
I wonder, if that boneheaded PM hadn't mentioned their considering a pricing model for the software, would the headline on slashdot have read 'Microsoft will provide free spyware remover, how nice of them!!'. Hmm... maybe not.:)
Let me preface this with the statement that the lax security in pre-SP2 IE is shameful. But MS has realized it's faults, and they are quickly securing their products. You can ascribe whatever evil motivation you like to the security push.
While there have been a few viruses in the past that legitimately exploited vulnerabilities (like buffer overflows and such), all of the spyware in the post SP2 world requires (a) user intervention (pressing yes at a prompt) and (b) running as admin.
Make your grandma a limited user, and even if she presses yes at the prompt, the installation will fail and she'll remain spyware free. While you are at it, you can install Mozilla and let her discover the joys of tabbed browsing.
it's precisely the Windows-specific skills of a certain level, the familiarity with all the quirks and hacks that turn every driver test on ReactOS into a deadlock-memory-corruption-bugcheck fest.
It's precisely these situations why I feel that your talents would be better spent working on top of an existing system. You guys need to strip away dealing directly the hardware layer and concentrate on getting the APIs implemented. The generic details underpinning OS development will keep you bogged down long enough for the release of the successor to Longhorn before you even get NT 4 compatibility. And even with API compatibliity, you risk building an OS that isn't really any more secure than Windows. If linux is dreadful, take a crack at the BSDs, or the handful of other open source OSs out there.
Funny, many people said the same thing about Linux when it was starting out...
How many full fledged commercial open source operating systems were available when Linus started his project? More power to them for being so ambitious, but the fact is we have Linux, Darwin, *BSD, and soon Solaris, all filling the void of robust open source operating systems.
Their intended goal is to provide an alternative to Windows... well given all the other open OS's out there, spending endless hours trying to get the bootlader just right and writing driver subsystems and all that other jazz, while a ton of fun, is retracing steps many others have taken before, and neither implicitly furthers the goal of ReactOS being Windows compatible, nor necessarily instills confidence that the code is solid (v1 code rarely is). Unless these people are complete geniuses, they will be bogged down w/ all the bugs that have already been dealt with and ironed out throught the years in the other OS's.
Getting 100% compatibility with windows is hard, if not impossible. They definitely won't achieve it if they also have to deal with the minutae of building a full fledged operating system from scratch.
... a great project for the developers, since they gain a hell of a lot of marketable experience building the OS; I'm sure it's quite fun too. But outside of that, it's a total waste of time. These people are very talented... drop this and join the Linux movement! They are re-inventing a wheel that Linux has already long since created. Take that drive and knowledge, and apply it towards building a windows emulation layer in Linux. Hell, join WINE and make their app commercially usable. Another alternative, if you are that confident that your solution will be better than the NT core, is to simply join MS and make the NT kernel stronger (and make a nice mint in the process).
ReactOS will keep these people busy and entertained, but in the end will never result in any singificant piece of operating system.
Unfortunately, as reactionary as Microsoft is, it works. They take existing ideas, improve on it, and make a killing. The Xbox,.NET & ASP.NET, IIS6, Tablet PCs, Embedded Windows, etc... are neither original or revolutionary, but taken for their merits outside of the Microsoft specter are fantastic applications/platforms. Much like many v1 pieces of software, they had somewhat inauspicious starts, but have slowly matured into solid platforms.
Microsoft is not doomed. Even with the, frankly, much needed, arrival of customer friendly alternatives like OSX, newer linux desktops, Firefox, etc... Microsoft continues to expand into new markets and grow. Even with some horrible embarassments like the constant e-mail viruses, their profits this year were up 11%. Why is that? Is it just because they have a monopoly? Or could it be that even with the issues companies see great value in using MS products?
Being on the inside, I'm quite confident that things look *really* good for the future of MS. They've got quite a few fantastic features in the pipeline for existing products and quite a few new products up their sleeves. And as 'evil' as the company has been, they've realized that they will get eaten alive by Linux and other competitors if their products can't compete on a level playing field -- their monopoly will not last forever. So they have honed in on the one thing that *kills* them now -- Security. And in the past year have totally overhauled the company. All their products are being deeply analyzed for security flaws using threat modelling and other techniques. A huge pain in the ass for my team but much needed. SP2 is a step forward, as have been the patches to many desktop and server products. It sucks that it took this long for Microsoft to realize it, but they have, and the proof is in what's continually coming out of their doors in recent years.
Anyway, enough of a rant. I'm very glad Linux is in the picture. Microsoft can't afford to be a sleeping giant, and in the end we all win -- with killer strides in the Linux Desktop, and with leaps in security in Windows servers. Competition's where it's at!
Slashdot Mirror
What spyware are they getting? It would really be interesting to see spyware that bypasses LUA restrictions. At this point my research hasn't come up with any spyware that doesn't at least require access to write to HKLM in the registry. I'd like to be prepared if there are LUA spyware out in the wild!
I'm still having problems understanding what you are getting at. Windows 2000/XP doesn't allow non-administrators install applications. This is why you need to use "run as..." or log-in as an administrator to perform installs. It's the same in linux and in OSX. Where's the inconsistency?
It sucks that "run as..." wasn't working well in win2k. If you are in XP, give it another shot. It works great, and will save you a lot of pain, believe me.
I'm not sure what you mean in your first paragraph. Was "run as..." not working when installing an application? What application was it? I didn't come across that problem while running as limited in 2k, although granted that was only for a year or so until I upgraded to XP. The 'install for all users' confusion isn't a problem with windows, but a problem with the installation script for the program you were installing. You seem to be blaming inconsistencies in 3rd party software on the OS.
What do you mean by non-admin mode not being secure? Please clarify.
Thanks!
I agree, active-x on the net was a bad idea. SP2 disables it automatically. As was stated by drsmithy, active-x is quite extensively used in intranet situations and is very useful.
They are certainly treating the symptoms. Not only are vulnerabilities patched as soon as they are found, but MS is taking a proactive approach to keeping their OS secure. Not only through things like SP2, but also many of the vulnerabilities found and disclosed are done so by Microsoft itself, which is something I appreciate (they don't *need* to be telling us about all the vulns they find during code sweeps).
h ttp://blogs.msdn.com/aaron_margosis/
But the fact is, most of the spyware out there makes it onto the computer not through a vulnerability, but because the user presses 'accept' or 'OK' when most prompts come up. So some sort of pro-active measures have to be taken in these cases, similarly to how anti-virus software does to try and thwart the user's innate urge to open the 'superhappyfunball.exe' attached to their e-mail message.
--
Run as limited user, stop getting spyware.
http://www.techproblemsolver.com/limited.html
If you are referring to things like browser cookies, then I'll accept you caveat and say that I probably have ad cookies lying around, but I'm not too concerned -- it's a fact of life on either browser (I'm in mozilla). I'm talking about the spyware that installs itself everywhere on your machine, intercepts your traffic, adds 'search' bars to browsers, icons to desktops, etc... Those are the real pains in the ass, that even Ad-Aware & Spybot have a hard time getting rid of. Those things can't get anywhere if you are a limited user.
Have you been missing the stream of patches coming from MS? How are they not dealing with the primary issues?
h ttp://www.dotnetdevs.com/articles/RunningAsNonAdm in.aspxt tp://www.pluralsight.com/keith/book/html/howto_r unasnonadmin.htmle fault.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;305780
Even so, please tell me which pieces of spyware exploit legitimate security holes? The "security hole" they exploit is that users run as admin. Hardly a bug in the OS, just a horrifically misguided ease of use 'feature' in the installer. Easily fixed. I've never gotten infected with spyware while running as a Limited user, and neither has my Mom, who has a penchant for running little apps she finds on the web. In the cases where they are malicious, she just gets a protection fault and knows to happily move along to the next little animation.
http://www.techproblemsolver.com/limited.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/aaron_margosis/
h
http://support.microsoft.com/d
For the handful that did take advantage of some buffer overflow, please point out those vulnerabilities that remain unpatched through Windows Update.
the problem i do see is horrible horrible acting from hayden christensen.
Watch the Making of... Episode I in the EPI DVD to experience some major heart ache. They actually walk through the casting process for Anakin (kid), and show the audition tapes for the last two candidates. One of them does a fantastic job acting opposite Portman. The other kid flubs lines and has no emotional range, across takes and re-takes. Guess who Lucas cast? It's like they had no real sense of what is necessary to be a good performer. Lucas seems enamored with the bad actor and no one contradicts him. The rest is history.
There are so many painful behind the scene tracks where the kid can't get his lines straight. There's on in particular where they are all in a table eating, and he does so poorly they have to ask him to stop trying to simulate eating so he can just concentrate on delivering his two sentences.
The story was pretty bad, but man the acting blew in both movies.
I sure hope their market share increases, so we can start suing them for monopolistic practices! :)
stupid.
XP SP2 had a long beta period, and a long pre-release period before it went live on Windows Update. Why didn't the vendor run the update on their machines, and diagnose/fix problems in their app? Furthermore, pretty much all cases of post-SP2 app incompatibility I've seen result from insecure coding practices from the vendor. Yes, the insecure way of doing things was available previously in Windows, but the secure way was also available. Let's hold the vendors to the same standard we hold Microsoft. Everyone wants Windows to be more secure, well guess what, the client apps are also going to need to be coded with more secure practices.
Anyone else think the pictures in the 'final product' linked page are just 3d renders? The lighting and geometry is great, but too perfect to have been taken in a real room under real lighting conditions. Nice 3d model though.
This has been my experience also. Any lock up of explorer.exe (be it caused by IE or not) can be remedied w/ a ctrl-alt-delete, click on task manager, kill explorer.exe. It will either automatically reload as if nothing happened, or in some instances you have to restart it from task manager. I have not seen a blue screen or system freeze in a long time (barring faulty hardware).
Make what things work?
You are totally right about this -- Microsoft dropped the ball when they opted for ease of use versus running the desktop securely. They knew that if 2000 or XP defaulted to making desktop users non-root, people would not understand why they couldn't install stuff, and why all the crappy software out there didn't quite work, so they tried to dodge that roadblock and created a nightmare for themselves.
= 11121239 for useful URLS on the subject.
Longhorn's development has a whole team looking into these issues across the board -- how to make the 'LUA' (limited user account) experience streamlined, make sure that every component in the OS works as expected with LUA, and make sure the default Longhorn installation procedure is smart enough to create primary accounts as LUA. But the proof is in the pudding, we'll see.
By the way, I'm sure you do, but hopefully you know it's really easy to remove yourself from the administrators group and run as a regular user. Refer to http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=133173&cid
Games, most shareware, and even a whole lot of commercialware - they just will not work
Is that the fault of Windows, or the fault of bad programmers? If you ran across, say, an accounting program in linux that requires you to be root to run it, would you think that Linux sucks, or that the programmers for that accounting package suck?
I'm not going to let MS off the hook on this one, though, they definitely ran a loose ship for too long a time and let programmers do really dumb things. But it's high time we start holding the software designers to task -- they shouldn't expect a user to have full access to their machine in order to run. And the fact is, since Windows 2000 (even NT4) there has been built in user access control mechanisms for both filesystem and system resources. Try it out, Win2k lets you run as non-admin, and even has built in 'run as...' capability (you have to right click the executable with shift held down for the option to come up). It's not something new in Windows -- software ompanies have had 5 years to adopt the right way to do things. The problem is that it took until SP2 and Microsoft's push for security for those companies to even care that they were also guilty of running insecure software.
I've been running as non-administrator for years now, and at least all the professional commercial apps I run work just fine (photoshop, all the MS products, norton anti-virus, etc...). There are certainly a bunch that don't work perfectly, but it should be the responsibility of the company to fix up their software.
nothing installs
Well that's really how it should be! If she needs to install something, it's probably for the best that she require your direct intervention to do so. Personally, my dad knows the Administrator password for the machine, and I've showed him how to either 'Run As.." or switch users to install, but we have a set procedure where he consults with me before installing anything. It's kept him spyware free since I made the move the change for him in '03.
I call bullshit. You must have been running the computer in a bathtub full of water if Notepad crashed 2000/XP.
Who cares about Microsoft?
:) It's a 11% increase... amazing given the security blunders last year.
I dunno, with 3 billion dollars in profits this year year alone, I'd say quite a few people actually.
The fact that the OS gets infected has nothing to do with IE being 'tied to the OS'. It has everything to do with the fact that most people who run windows run as Admin. When you are admin no security in the world can stop a user from clicking 'yes' when asked to install software. While IE definitely doesn't make it hard for the program to be installed, even running Mozilla won't stop grandma from downloading an executable and installing it.
e shold=-1&commentsort=0&tid=109&tid=172&tid=201&mod e=thread&cid=11121239
I'll refer you to my other post for good resources on how to fix the issue:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=133173&thr
Microsoft intends to provide the software free of charge. The article says they are considering providing it for a fee in the future. While that would be a dumb move, for the forseeable future it will be free.
:)
I wonder, if that boneheaded PM hadn't mentioned their considering a pricing model for the software, would the headline on slashdot have read 'Microsoft will provide free spyware remover, how nice of them!!'. Hmm... maybe not.
Let me preface this with the statement that the lax security in pre-SP2 IE is shameful. But MS has realized it's faults, and they are quickly securing their products. You can ascribe whatever evil motivation you like to the security push.
m in.aspx r unasnonadmin.html ; en-us;305780
While there have been a few viruses in the past that legitimately exploited vulnerabilities (like buffer overflows and such), all of the spyware in the post SP2 world requires (a) user intervention (pressing yes at a prompt) and (b) running as admin.
Make your grandma a limited user, and even if she presses yes at the prompt, the installation will fail and she'll remain spyware free. While you are at it, you can install Mozilla and let her discover the joys of tabbed browsing.
Here are some resources that might help:
http://www.techproblemsolver.com/limited.html
http://www.dotnetdevs.com/articles/RunningAsNonAd
http://blogs.msdn.com/aaron_margosis/
http://www.pluralsight.com/keith/book/html/howto_
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb
Thanks for your response!
it's precisely the Windows-specific skills of a certain level, the familiarity with all the quirks and hacks that turn every driver test on ReactOS into a deadlock-memory-corruption-bugcheck fest.
It's precisely these situations why I feel that your talents would be better spent working on top of an existing system. You guys need to strip away dealing directly the hardware layer and concentrate on getting the APIs implemented. The generic details underpinning OS development will keep you bogged down long enough for the release of the successor to Longhorn before you even get NT 4 compatibility. And even with API compatibliity, you risk building an OS that isn't really any more secure than Windows. If linux is dreadful, take a crack at the BSDs, or the handful of other open source OSs out there.
Funny, many people said the same thing about Linux when it was starting out...
How many full fledged commercial open source operating systems were available when Linus started his project? More power to them for being so ambitious, but the fact is we have Linux, Darwin, *BSD, and soon Solaris, all filling the void of robust open source operating systems.
Their intended goal is to provide an alternative to Windows... well given all the other open OS's out there, spending endless hours trying to get the bootlader just right and writing driver subsystems and all that other jazz, while a ton of fun, is retracing steps many others have taken before, and neither implicitly furthers the goal of ReactOS being Windows compatible, nor necessarily instills confidence that the code is solid (v1 code rarely is). Unless these people are complete geniuses, they will be bogged down w/ all the bugs that have already been dealt with and ironed out throught the years in the other OS's.
Getting 100% compatibility with windows is hard, if not impossible. They definitely won't achieve it if they also have to deal with the minutae of building a full fledged operating system from scratch.
... a great project for the developers, since they gain a hell of a lot of marketable experience building the OS; I'm sure it's quite fun too. But outside of that, it's a total waste of time. These people are very talented... drop this and join the Linux movement! They are re-inventing a wheel that Linux has already long since created. Take that drive and knowledge, and apply it towards building a windows emulation layer in Linux. Hell, join WINE and make their app commercially usable. Another alternative, if you are that confident that your solution will be better than the NT core, is to simply join MS and make the NT kernel stronger (and make a nice mint in the process).
ReactOS will keep these people busy and entertained, but in the end will never result in any singificant piece of operating system.
Unfortunately, as reactionary as Microsoft is, it works. They take existing ideas, improve on it, and make a killing. The Xbox, .NET & ASP.NET, IIS6, Tablet PCs, Embedded Windows, etc... are neither original or revolutionary, but taken for their merits outside of the Microsoft specter are fantastic applications/platforms. Much like many v1 pieces of software, they had somewhat inauspicious starts, but have slowly matured into solid platforms.
Microsoft is not doomed. Even with the, frankly, much needed, arrival of customer friendly alternatives like OSX, newer linux desktops, Firefox, etc... Microsoft continues to expand into new markets and grow. Even with some horrible embarassments like the constant e-mail viruses, their profits this year were up 11%. Why is that? Is it just because they have a monopoly? Or could it be that even with the issues companies see great value in using MS products?
Being on the inside, I'm quite confident that things look *really* good for the future of MS. They've got quite a few fantastic features in the pipeline for existing products and quite a few new products up their sleeves. And as 'evil' as the company has been, they've realized that they will get eaten alive by Linux and other competitors if their products can't compete on a level playing field -- their monopoly will not last forever. So they have honed in on the one thing that *kills* them now -- Security. And in the past year have totally overhauled the company. All their products are being deeply analyzed for security flaws using threat modelling and other techniques. A huge pain in the ass for my team but much needed. SP2 is a step forward, as have been the patches to many desktop and server products. It sucks that it took this long for Microsoft to realize it, but they have, and the proof is in what's continually coming out of their doors in recent years.
Anyway, enough of a rant. I'm very glad Linux is in the picture. Microsoft can't afford to be a sleeping giant, and in the end we all win -- with killer strides in the Linux Desktop, and with leaps in security in Windows servers. Competition's where it's at!