How is a Blackberry any different than your average game controller? I remember the old-school Nintendo nothing (not 64, Super, etc.) had the most painful control pad i've ever used, I'd get "The Claw" from playing it for more than a couple hours.
The store doesn't need to know who the shopper is, they need to know what the shopper is. Sex, nationality, age, household income, location of residence, any kind of demographic info they can get to correlate with sales and target their advertising appropriately.
If I know that White Males age 21-30 with household income below $35k living in area A, B, and C tend to buy razor blades around the 5th of the month, I will hilight that nice, high-margin shaving gel in my regional flyer on the 1st. Then, hopefully, I will see a rise in sales of both blades and gel, because the advertisement hilights the gel as A Good Thing(TM) and it also reminds my target demo that they need to get new blades.
I don't understand why the information needs to be tied to a person rather than a demographic. The fact that Joe Blow bought this stuff shouldn't mean anything, only the fact that demo XYZ bought it should. It sounds great when they say "buy $200 worth of products and we'll mail you a $20 coupon for the products you use", but it'd be nicer (and more private) just to get that coupon on the already ridiculously-long receipt the next time you visit the store.
I've said it several times before: it's mirrored there to keep my bandwidth down.
Yes there are those weirdos that will click it because they think naked petrified natalie portman hot grits, but most people accessing/. from work (like me) can't justify clicking on such a link, so at least the monitored business-types won't visit.
Anytime I mirror something near the top of a discussion, I get about 3 gigs a day from the zombie army that is/., I can't even imagine what i'd get if i posted to legitimate-business.com....
Also, something like facial recognition needs large test datasets, and it's never a "solved" problem. There's always a way to do it faster or better or more easily. Other things like Canterbury Corpus or Calgary Corpus are datasets used for comparison between compression algorithms. Meaningful comparisons can be made between different algorithms based on how well they perform on them simply because they've been used enough and are standard enough.
I'm so interested in this that I just registered gpldata.com... finally something useful to do with my free time!!!
IANAL, but if you read their AUP (with my hilighting):
Compliance with Law
Customer shall not post, transmit, re-transmit or store material on or through any of Services or Products which, in the sole judgment of the Company (i) is in violation of any local, state, federal or non-United States law or regulation, (ii) threatening, obscene, indecent, defamatory or that otherwise could adversely affect any individual, group or entity (collectively, "Persons") or (iii) violates the rights of any person, including rights protected by copyright, trade secret, patent or other intellectual property or similar laws or regulations including, but not limited to, the installation or distribution of "pirated" or other software products that are not appropriately licensed for use by Customer. Customer shall be responsible for determining what laws or regulations are applicable to its use of the Services and Products
and
Suspension and Cancellation
Company will use reasonable care in notifying the Customer and in resolving the problem in a method resulting in the least amount of service interference as reasonably possible. Company reserves the sole right to suspend service to any Customer located in our datacenter for violation of the AUP without notice. Company reserves the right to terminate service without notice for any violations of the AUP.
and
Violations of the AUP will result in the following:
A warning notification via email, Orbit trouble ticket or telephone with 72 hours notice for resolution. 72 hours is the standard notification; situations involving law enforcement, phishing, fraud, password harvesting, network interference, Denial or Disruption of service, IRC mis-use, or other malicious activity can reduce the notification time frame.
So essentially they can terminate you with zero notice for any reason if there's a law anywhere in the world against what you're doing. That's the wonderful thing about Legalese, it's easy to get this kind of stuff past people because they rarely read EULAs.
How far can they sag? If they only drop six inches over 40 years (20-year-old breasts vs. 60-year-old breasts) then you're looking at 11 feet of boob drop over 900 years. That's pretty disgusting.
As for divorce, "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
I doubt it'd be 100%, some people would HAVE to die before getting divorced... but I'd agree that there would be a lot of other changes to society if such a thing were possible.
Get off your high-horse. Read TFA again, read my FC, and try thinking about it before you post knee-jerk defenses
I thought about this very carefully, for the original as well as the follow-up posts. I read the article, even read other comments made in the same vein. I've been thinking about this a lot as I write it, it's far from a knee-jerk defense. But then again, i'm not out to crucify him for saying something he should have known better about, I just want to understand what he said and why he said it before I pass judgement.
First, from your original post: If it needs to be studied before it can be proven, he shouldn't be asserting it as fact.
I never read that he asserted any hypotheses (def 2) as fact. As far as highlighting an unproven theory, I don't know that this was the main point of his speech. My guess is that he made these stupid comments as part of something else, but I can't tell without a transcript of what was actually said. Note that this was not the only hypothesis he offered, he also mentioned that discrimination might be a factor:
Lawrence H. Summers, speaking Friday at an economic conference, also questioned how great a role discrimination plays in keeping female scientists and engineers from advancing at elite universities.
Again, from your original: One unconfirmed, uncontrolled example does not proof make. Period. I agree with this statement. I think it's irrelevant simply because A) Mr. Summers, AFAIK, did not claim that single instance as proof of that theory, he simply offered it as an example. B) I never claimed it was proof of anything, only that it was an interesting example.
I want to know more about it, I want to know if there is a biological basis for such reactions. I doubt it, but I don't dismiss it out of hand just because it's not PC.
Inappropriate I won't argue with, he should have thought a bit more before presenting these ideas this way. I just don't see where your FC mentioned "inappropriate", just "he shouldn't say that".
In another branch of this thread I saw one person refute the example, and I offered proof (which you DEMAND) of my own upbringing that showed this theory to be false on an individual basis.
I also saw another post that backed this up 100%, across four children who chose "typical" gender roles even despite an inversely-biased environment. Again, a single instance.
Is there a correlation? I don't know. I don't think there is, just from interacting with the amazingly intelligent and/or stupid people i've met, but i'm not going to condemn Mr. Summers as a heretic until I see more detail.
Here's a great analogy: From this series of posts, you seem like a real asshole. BUT: If I take the time to look at your posts about roads, Star Wars and FireFox, I'll see that you're not so bad, and even fairly intelligent. You might look at mine and feel the same, or it might just stoke your fires. Give him the same benefit of the doubt, don't assume that he's evil until you hear him out. Once you've done that, you can rail about him as you like.
I agree with everything you said, but that has no bearing on this subject. Did you read either the article or my comment?
From TFA:
Summers told the Globe he was discussing hypotheses based on the scholarly work assembled for the conference, not expressing his own views. He also said more research needs to be done on the issues.
From TFC:
That example says "innate difference" to me, but I'd like to see more detail.
How about we are all individuals? While there may be some difference between males and females, I suspect the overlap between male and female brains is much much larger.
I think you made his (and my) point... Keep reading though, i'm not a complete asshole.
Yes it's anecdotal evidence that his daughter named trucks as she would dolls. That's why - as you and several others seemed to miss in my comment - I believe there needs to be some more detail and/or research regarding this.
I got straight As in Home Ec. I cook, I sew, I used to know how to crochet. I'm not gay either. (GF is amazed at all of the above) But why do I insist on driving fast and having the latest geek tech? Why do you like playing dress-up and reading trashy romance novels? What is it about men and women that make them men and women? I'd certainly like to know.
That "Example" is a shining example of why *anecdotal data is misleading*. Who knows what sort of other details or context might apply to such a story?
From TFC (comment): That example says "innate difference" to me, but I'd like to see more detail.
Based on TFA (I know, I know), I'd have to say the guy really is a pompous jerk who wants to believe his sexism has some actual merit... but it has no place in public/professional comments in any academic setting.
So in an academic setting we're not allowed to challenge popularly held beliefs? I have no details on this conference nor even on what exactly Mr. Summers said, but according to TFA "Summers told the Globe he was discussing hypotheses based on the scholarly work assembled for the conference, not expressing his own views. He also said more research needs to be done on the issues."
And again, it comes down to first having to show there IS a difference, and then having to show that it's tied to gender as opposed to childhood development.
There are obvious, innate differences between males and females. For the most part you just have to look at someone to see that. The question is how much do physical / physiological differences affect any given situation versus how much social differences affect it.
I can't cite an article right now, but I believe there have been studies that show that women can multi-function better than men. IIRC that is because multi-tasking is an advantage in child-rearing, a traditionally female role. That is not to say exclusively nor that males cannot multi-task effectively, but that females have an innate difference that is/has been beneficial to them.
It might be a result of their upbringing, it might be inborn/genetic, it could be a little of both. Nobody really knows; that's why more research is needed.
He just said the right thing the wrong way... he was apparently trying to "be provocative" according to the same AP article on CNN.
He also gave an example of what he intended (emphasis mine):
"It's possible I made some reference to innate differences," he said. He said people "would prefer to believe" that the differences in performance between the sexes are due to social factors, "but these are things that need to be studied."
He also cited as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral upbringing. Yet he said she named them "daddy truck" and "baby truck," as if they were dolls.
That example says "innate difference" to me, but I'd like to see more detail.
What I really mean in place of = is the twidly little symbol for correlation (like U for union or U umop-apisdn for intersection), but I don't know it and I don't know how to put said symbol into a format slashcode will understand and/or pass through.
Plain inglitsch: Usefulness and obscurity are in no way related.
Please consult the definition of obscure to understand my intent. #3 is the best fit for what i'm trying to convey, "relatively unknown" versus "useless" or anything similar.
I have no doubt that it's useful to somebody (otherwise IBM et al would have no interest in it), but that doesn't make it any less obscure. Most organizations will throw another box on the line instead of parallelizing / virtualizing the OS, it's just Easier(TM). It might be more secure to set up different VMs, but that's probably trickier than setting up another box and slapping a firewall in between. Also, if an org is running several apps on a single box they should already understand the security implications of doing so, and that's their choice to make.
Just for curiosity's sake, what separate purposes do system file flags, ACLs and SELinux templates serve? Never worked with it, have no idea what they are beyond the generic sense...
Easier is a registered trademark meaning "how we've done it forever, and we're not going to change because change is bad".
You've only had it for a week and you're already downloaded "50 cds worth of [illegal movies from IRC]"? You really should expect to get a nice letter and/or knock on the door from you local TLA agency at the end of the month.
If you use the same amount of bandwidth as a BT user then somebody will undoubtedly come looking for you, even if you aren't using the same protocol.
its a virtual machine monitor that allows you to run concurrently multiple OS on the same machine, achieving the same kind of functionnality than vmware, although the approaches are different
Maybe I'm mistaken, but can't you just switch to a different frequency if you're getting too much interference?
It won't help to switch to a different frequency if you've got 12 WiFi neighbors instead of your eight.
Doesn't matter to me 'cause I live in the boonies (nearest neighbor = 1/4 mile), but for high-density housing such as apartments/dorms this stuff could be quite useful, especially since wireless use is growing fast these days.
Another point might be that by removing interference, everything could be set to transmit at lower power, and there could be even smaller or longer lasting devices without any significant technical advances. My handheld could last hours longer if it had a cleaner signal that it didn't have to amp as much.
(No jokes about "smaller" or "longer lasting" or "my handheld", please)
Have you never heard of a pinhole camera? For your example, you could increase aperture XOR exposure to achieve the same results.
I agree with the grandparent, I think it's cheap lenses and / or sensors. I also think that the aperature is too small, but only because it then requires a much longer exposure and nobody bothers to tripod their phone.
Anybody have f-stop ratings for their camera phone?
Typing for a skilled typist is both much faster and easier than speaking.
I can say that sentence at about 200WPM without rushing. Can you type it that fast?
For commands it might be faster to type, as you can probably type #!/bin/sh faster than you can say pound exclamation slash bee aye en slash ess aych, but for general text, you'd be hard-pressed to beat speaking with typing.
If we ever do progress to a keyboard-free environment, the way we do things will have to change. Your second example is ridiculous, and with good reason: It's the way that you would perform an action with a GUI. If you put that into command-line-ese, you'd get almost exactly what you typed (minus one parent - your example will try to paste to My Computer which won't work).
As you said, the command line will probably still exist, it will just evolve. Speech would change the format / interface of the command line, but it wouldn't change its usefulness.
Divide the # of viruses by the user base of the affected platform? why?
Because that will give you a comparable number of machines per virus or viruses per machine. If the infection rate is the same between two OSes, it doesn't matter how much potential there is for either one, in terms of virus protection there's no advantage to using one versus the other.
Biodiversity will only help a little. The disadvantage is that it will bring security through obscurity (which is just as bad as no security) unless those new entities have fundamental security built-in to everything they do. It will also bring complacency, as there is to some extent with Linux and virus protection: "There are no viruses, so why bother protecting?" As evidenced above there are several hundred Linux viruses, but I still hear mentions that "Linux doesn't have viruses".
And don't use the "they exist, but they don't do anything to a properly configured Linux box" argument either, because the same fact holds true for a properly configured Windows box, it's just one step harder under Linux.
Searching for this very info, I found a note that claims 496 Linux virus-like things as of "November of last year". I still haven't found a reputable number that shows how many there actually are today, but 530(Lnx) and 28(Mac) will work fine for now.
If desktop market share (ms) is around 5% as suggested in one of the GPs, there are about 10x as many infections per virus on a Windows system as there are on Linux. If it's closer to 10% ms (as suggested in several articles w/ Win @ 85% ms), then the ratio goes up to just over 22x.
That shows that my thoughts were a bit off (well, 22x versus "just a little slanted"), but that doesn't match the 187x (99442* Win / 530 Lnx) ratio implied above.
You'd still do better with a Mac, they're at almost 209x the number of users per vulnerability as a Win box, about 10x a Linux box.
* 99442 Win = 100,000 total - 530(Lnx) - 28(Mac), ignores all others for cellphones/etc.
Bollocks back at you AC! Exploits and viruses aren't the same thing, although the article doesn't seem to mention the difference.
Viruses don't need to do anything tricky to propagate, they're just programs that people run. If I want to make a virus, why the hell would I do X amount of work to make it run on Linux when I could expend the same amount of effort to make it run on Windows? Just by switching I can increase my target base by a huge amount.
Exploits are different, they are based on actual software errors that shouldn't be. Exploits are solely the result of poor programming / design, and I agree that they are not in any way related to market share.
The article doesn't differentiate anything, but I would add: Worms are another matter, since they are viral exploits... that's where there's a real grey area, as you could legitimately classify them under either type.
Slashdot Mirror
How is a Blackberry any different than your average game controller? I remember the old-school Nintendo nothing (not 64, Super, etc.) had the most painful control pad i've ever used, I'd get "The Claw" from playing it for more than a couple hours.
The store doesn't need to know who the shopper is, they need to know what the shopper is. Sex, nationality, age, household income, location of residence, any kind of demographic info they can get to correlate with sales and target their advertising appropriately.
If I know that White Males age 21-30 with household income below $35k living in area A, B, and C tend to buy razor blades around the 5th of the month, I will hilight that nice, high-margin shaving gel in my regional flyer on the 1st. Then, hopefully, I will see a rise in sales of both blades and gel, because the advertisement hilights the gel as A Good Thing(TM) and it also reminds my target demo that they need to get new blades.
I don't understand why the information needs to be tied to a person rather than a demographic. The fact that Joe Blow bought this stuff shouldn't mean anything, only the fact that demo XYZ bought it should. It sounds great when they say "buy $200 worth of products and we'll mail you a $20 coupon for the products you use", but it'd be nicer (and more private) just to get that coupon on the already ridiculously-long receipt the next time you visit the store.
I've said it several times before: it's mirrored there to keep my bandwidth down.
/. from work (like me) can't justify clicking on such a link, so at least the monitored business-types won't visit.
/., I can't even imagine what i'd get if i posted to legitimate-business.com....
Yes there are those weirdos that will click it because they think naked petrified natalie portman hot grits, but most people accessing
Anytime I mirror something near the top of a discussion, I get about 3 gigs a day from the zombie army that is
Actual list is http://www.eff.org/endangered/list.php.
Mirrored here, but the link is NSFW so I can't check to make sure I got it right.
Also, something like facial recognition needs large test datasets, and it's never a "solved" problem. There's always a way to do it faster or better or more easily. Other things like Canterbury Corpus or Calgary Corpus are datasets used for comparison between compression algorithms. Meaningful comparisons can be made between different algorithms based on how well they perform on them simply because they've been used enough and are standard enough.
I'm so interested in this that I just registered gpldata.com... finally something useful to do with my free time!!!
IANAL, but if you read their AUP (with my hilighting):andandSo essentially they can terminate you with zero notice for any reason if there's a law anywhere in the world against what you're doing. That's the wonderful thing about Legalese, it's easy to get this kind of stuff past people because they rarely read EULAs.
"...any researcher who touches them can kiss his [Federal] funding good bye."
Very important distinction.
How far can they sag? If they only drop six inches over 40 years (20-year-old breasts vs. 60-year-old breasts) then you're looking at 11 feet of boob drop over 900 years. That's pretty disgusting.
As for divorce, "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
I doubt it'd be 100%, some people would HAVE to die before getting divorced... but I'd agree that there would be a lot of other changes to society if such a thing were possible.
I thought about this very carefully, for the original as well as the follow-up posts. I read the article, even read other comments made in the same vein. I've been thinking about this a lot as I write it, it's far from a knee-jerk defense. But then again, i'm not out to crucify him for saying something he should have known better about, I just want to understand what he said and why he said it before I pass judgement.
First, from your original post:
If it needs to be studied before it can be proven, he shouldn't be asserting it as fact.
I never read that he asserted any hypotheses (def 2) as fact. As far as highlighting an unproven theory, I don't know that this was the main point of his speech. My guess is that he made these stupid comments as part of something else, but I can't tell without a transcript of what was actually said. Note that this was not the only hypothesis he offered, he also mentioned that discrimination might be a factor:
Again, from your original:
One unconfirmed, uncontrolled example does not proof make. Period.
I agree with this statement. I think it's irrelevant simply because
A) Mr. Summers, AFAIK, did not claim that single instance as proof of that theory, he simply offered it as an example.
B) I never claimed it was proof of anything, only that it was an interesting example.
I want to know more about it, I want to know if there is a biological basis for such reactions. I doubt it, but I don't dismiss it out of hand just because it's not PC.
Inappropriate I won't argue with, he should have thought a bit more before presenting these ideas this way. I just don't see where your FC mentioned "inappropriate", just "he shouldn't say that".
In another branch of this thread I saw one person refute the example, and I offered proof (which you DEMAND) of my own upbringing that showed this theory to be false on an individual basis.
I also saw another post that backed this up 100%, across four children who chose "typical" gender roles even despite an inversely-biased environment. Again, a single instance.
Is there a correlation? I don't know. I don't think there is, just from interacting with the amazingly intelligent and/or stupid people i've met, but i'm not going to condemn Mr. Summers as a heretic until I see more detail.
Here's a great analogy: From this series of posts, you seem like a real asshole. BUT: If I take the time to look at your posts about roads, Star Wars and FireFox, I'll see that you're not so bad, and even fairly intelligent. You might look at mine and feel the same, or it might just stoke your fires. Give him the same benefit of the doubt, don't assume that he's evil until you hear him out. Once you've done that, you can rail about him as you like.
From TFA:
From TFC:
How about we are all individuals? While there may be some difference between males and females, I suspect the overlap between male and female brains is much much larger.
I think you made his (and my) point... Keep reading though, i'm not a complete asshole.
Yes it's anecdotal evidence that his daughter named trucks as she would dolls. That's why - as you and several others seemed to miss in my comment - I believe there needs to be some more detail and/or research regarding this.
I got straight As in Home Ec. I cook, I sew, I used to know how to crochet. I'm not gay either. (GF is amazed at all of the above) But why do I insist on driving fast and having the latest geek tech? Why do you like playing dress-up and reading trashy romance novels? What is it about men and women that make them men and women? I'd certainly like to know.
That "Example" is a shining example of why *anecdotal data is misleading*. Who knows what sort of other details or context might apply to such a story?
... but it has no place in public/professional comments in any academic setting.
From TFC (comment): That example says "innate difference" to me, but I'd like to see more detail.
Based on TFA (I know, I know), I'd have to say the guy really is a pompous jerk who wants to believe his sexism has some actual merit
So in an academic setting we're not allowed to challenge popularly held beliefs? I have no details on this conference nor even on what exactly Mr. Summers said, but according to TFA "Summers told the Globe he was discussing hypotheses based on the scholarly work assembled for the conference, not expressing his own views. He also said more research needs to be done on the issues."
And again, it comes down to first having to show there IS a difference, and then having to show that it's tied to gender as opposed to childhood development.
There are obvious, innate differences between males and females. For the most part you just have to look at someone to see that. The question is how much do physical / physiological differences affect any given situation versus how much social differences affect it.
I can't cite an article right now, but I believe there have been studies that show that women can multi-function better than men. IIRC that is because multi-tasking is an advantage in child-rearing, a traditionally female role. That is not to say exclusively nor that males cannot multi-task effectively, but that females have an innate difference that is/has been beneficial to them.
It might be a result of their upbringing, it might be inborn/genetic, it could be a little of both. Nobody really knows; that's why more research is needed.
He just said the right thing the wrong way... he was apparently trying to "be provocative" according to the same AP article on CNN.
He also gave an example of what he intended (emphasis mine):That example says "innate difference" to me, but I'd like to see more detail.
What I really mean in place of = is the twidly little symbol for correlation (like U for union or U umop-apisdn for intersection), but I don't know it and I don't know how to put said symbol into a format slashcode will understand and/or pass through.
Plain inglitsch:
Usefulness and obscurity are in no way related.
I repeat: "And that's not obscure?"
useful != not obscure
Please consult the definition of obscure to understand my intent. #3 is the best fit for what i'm trying to convey, "relatively unknown" versus "useless" or anything similar.
I have no doubt that it's useful to somebody (otherwise IBM et al would have no interest in it), but that doesn't make it any less obscure. Most organizations will throw another box on the line instead of parallelizing / virtualizing the OS, it's just Easier(TM). It might be more secure to set up different VMs, but that's probably trickier than setting up another box and slapping a firewall in between. Also, if an org is running several apps on a single box they should already understand the security implications of doing so, and that's their choice to make.
Just for curiosity's sake, what separate purposes do system file flags, ACLs and SELinux templates serve? Never worked with it, have no idea what they are beyond the generic sense...
Easier is a registered trademark meaning "how we've done it forever, and we're not going to change because change is bad".
You've only had it for a week and you're already downloaded "50 cds worth of [illegal movies from IRC]"? You really should expect to get a nice letter and/or knock on the door from you local TLA agency at the end of the month. If you use the same amount of bandwidth as a BT user then somebody will undoubtedly come looking for you, even if you aren't using the same protocol.
Doesn't matter to me 'cause I live in the boonies (nearest neighbor = 1/4 mile), but for high-density housing such as apartments/dorms this stuff could be quite useful, especially since wireless use is growing fast these days.
Another point might be that by removing interference, everything could be set to transmit at lower power, and there could be even smaller or longer lasting devices without any significant technical advances. My handheld could last hours longer if it had a cleaner signal that it didn't have to amp as much.
(No jokes about "smaller" or "longer lasting" or "my handheld", please)
Actually, it'll be lossy... take the exact picture you just described and then go into Photoshop/Gimp and do Auto-Levels.
Have you never heard of a pinhole camera? For your example, you could increase aperture XOR exposure to achieve the same results.
I agree with the grandparent, I think it's cheap lenses and / or sensors. I also think that the aperature is too small, but only because it then requires a much longer exposure and nobody bothers to tripod their phone.
Anybody have f-stop ratings for their camera phone?
For commands it might be faster to type, as you can probably type #!/bin/sh faster than you can say pound exclamation slash bee aye en slash ess aych, but for general text, you'd be hard-pressed to beat speaking with typing.
If we ever do progress to a keyboard-free environment, the way we do things will have to change. Your second example is ridiculous, and with good reason: It's the way that you would perform an action with a GUI. If you put that into command-line-ese, you'd get almost exactly what you typed (minus one parent - your example will try to paste to My Computer which won't work).
As you said, the command line will probably still exist, it will just evolve. Speech would change the format / interface of the command line, but it wouldn't change its usefulness.
Is one step ??? and another Profit!?
Biodiversity will only help a little. The disadvantage is that it will bring security through obscurity (which is just as bad as no security) unless those new entities have fundamental security built-in to everything they do. It will also bring complacency, as there is to some extent with Linux and virus protection: "There are no viruses, so why bother protecting?" As evidenced above there are several hundred Linux viruses, but I still hear mentions that "Linux doesn't have viruses".
And don't use the "they exist, but they don't do anything to a properly configured Linux box" argument either, because the same fact holds true for a properly configured Windows box, it's just one step harder under Linux.
Searching for this very info, I found a note that claims 496 Linux virus-like things as of "November of last year". I still haven't found a reputable number that shows how many there actually are today, but 530(Lnx) and 28(Mac) will work fine for now.
If desktop market share (ms) is around 5% as suggested in one of the GPs, there are about 10x as many infections per virus on a Windows system as there are on Linux. If it's closer to 10% ms (as suggested in several articles w/ Win @ 85% ms), then the ratio goes up to just over 22x.
That shows that my thoughts were a bit off (well, 22x versus "just a little slanted"), but that doesn't match the 187x (99442* Win / 530 Lnx) ratio implied above.
You'd still do better with a Mac, they're at almost 209x the number of users per vulnerability as a Win box, about 10x a Linux box.
* 99442 Win = 100,000 total - 530(Lnx) - 28(Mac), ignores all others for cellphones/etc.
Bollocks back at you AC! Exploits and viruses aren't the same thing, although the article doesn't seem to mention the difference.
Viruses don't need to do anything tricky to propagate, they're just programs that people run. If I want to make a virus, why the hell would I do X amount of work to make it run on Linux when I could expend the same amount of effort to make it run on Windows? Just by switching I can increase my target base by a huge amount.
Exploits are different, they are based on actual software errors that shouldn't be. Exploits are solely the result of poor programming / design, and I agree that they are not in any way related to market share.
The article doesn't differentiate anything, but I would add: Worms are another matter, since they are viral exploits... that's where there's a real grey area, as you could legitimately classify them under either type.