No sane President is going to push for the crucifiction of the one tech stock that isn't currently in the toilet with today's poor economy.
That's insane. Many of those companies were pushed into the toilet, directly or indirectly, by Microsoft. After having left the hen-house unguarded for so long, the attitude seems to be ``not much left in here, just this fox, we'de better protect it in case it goes too.''
The sanest thing to do would be to promptly fine Microsoft a hundred billion dollars, payable in five-billion-dollar annual installments over twenty years, and throw it at the national debt, OSS incubators, net access for the poor, or something else actually useful.
Scene opens with a programmer at his keyboard, with adjacent coffee pot producing delicious, stimulating caffienated mud.
Begin: 100 health
Drink 1st coffee: 90 health
Drink 2nd coffee: 80 health
Drink 3rd coffee: 71 health (decimals omitted for simplicity)
Drink 4th coffee: 62 health
Drink 5th coffee: 53 health
Drink 6th coffee: 44 health
Drink 7th coffee: 35 health
Drink 8th coffee: 26 health
Drink 9th coffee: 17 health
Drink 10th coffee: 8 health
Drink 11th coffee: -1 health, get sideways view of the floor.
Drink up! Yippeee...! Er...
Enter a tall, thin chap in a black cloak and bearing a huge white feather, who sets about banishing you to the IPT.
Scene closes with programmer's workmates, each with coffee in hand, shaking their heads sadly as paramedics bear away a sheet-covered object on a stretcher.
My point: less harmful is not the same as harmless.
HTML + CSS support all of the above, including (AFAICT) everything static that MS-Word can do. Doesn't support StarWriter's greater ability with tables, though, or passing spreadsheet formulae, or MS-Office's reknowned virus SDK (AKA macros). StarWriter does export actual believable XML, which is a start, and infinitely better than the botch that MS-Office adds to its HTML exports.
Of course, if people weren't so much in love with pointless `futzing' to get the layout `right,' we could use one of the Unix press standards liky LyX that have been around and stable for decades... I can't begin to imagine the horror which a Word plugin to export this would have to go through...
I think the ultimate solution is World Domination. When MS-Office is no longer relevant, we can forget about supporting it as a special format. Until then, there must be some emulation.
StarOffice imports & exports better than MS-Of
on
Linux Office Suites
·
· Score: 2
All bar (at last count) presentation files.
I've acually used StarOffice 5.2 (for Linux) to read a large MS-Word 2000 file and write a Word 97 file that didn't crash MS-Word 97 (which was something that MS-Word 2000 couldn't do with this file, even in (and see below) RTF). So you could say that StarOffice exports Office files better than MS Office itself does.
this doesn't say much for the justice system, but that's how the world works... sadly...
Speaking of justice systems and how the world works, EU Competition Commission have closed their electronic `mail' system. If you live in the EU, please send a pen-and-paper letter to them asking why you can't buy a new computer at retail which dual-boots between a Microsoft operating system and another operating system such as Linux or BeOS.
XP borrows several features from Mandrake Linux, particularly in their installer. It's nice to see them exercising innovation, it's just a pity that it isn't Microsoft's innovation being exercised.
For those features, you don't have to wait. Mandrake's 8.1beta1 (Raklet) is at least as stable as XP, contains a lot more by way of useful applications, and doesn't tie you in to anything.
Oh, yes, and it's a free download.
BTW, if you live in the EU, write (as in pen and paper, their online comment system is closed) to the Competition Commission and ask why you can't buy a machine that dual-boots between Mandrake 8.1 and Windows XP. There is no <upside-down> HTML tag, so here's the answer: because Microsoft's secret OEM licencing forbids it. Oh, yes, we support innovation. But only the right brand of innovation.
if say Bill Gates had bad intentions he could do a lot of damage.
Yo? Are you blind? He has.
As has been diligently pointed out elsewhere, their most telling illegal action has been requiring their OEMs to sign a secret agreement, one part of which says, in essence, that if the OEM wants to be included in Microsoft's 95% desktop market share, they don't offer alternative operating systems on Windows-equipped machines. This prevents the OEM from offering dual-boot systems, or systems with Linux installed and offering Win4Lin-backed Windows sessions. Your average user hasn't the competence to install an OS by themselves, end of market story.
Microsoft have done much illegal stuff, including some things that if done by an individual would be considered very shameful (like their latest astroturfing expedition) and know it's illegal, and occasionally even admit that they know it's illegal, and do still more illegal stuff to get out of paying the price for earlier crimes.
And while they're raping, murdering and hamstringing other companies and talking away your choices, their public relations firms paint a picture of them as innocent, try-hard `innovators' who are forced to protect their investments in a cut-throat market.
If it weren't for Microsoft, the market wouldn't be so cut-throat. They really are a flock of wolves dressed in carefully-presented lamb's fleece, bright and helpful individuals in their team notwithstanding. And you've been thoroughly sucked in by them.
Personal computer and microwave in one! It bakes! It fries! It dices! It comes with a free set of steak knives... well, no, actually, it doesn't do any of those things - but with an appropriately shaped waveguide and a metal-free ceramic mug it could heat your coffee (or my herb tea) directly.
Take a workable alternative: buy a bunch of near-identical machines from an educational institution or business that's doing an upgrade rollout. Rip the hard drives out, upgrade the RAM, keep a one-line-per-machine config file that maps MAC address onto hostname, IP, kernel/filesystem components to mount for each machine (e.g. different kernel for each network card, different image mounted on/etc/X11 for each video card).
In my case, I wind up with three different kernels and three different/etc/X11 images mounted in various combinations for thirty machines. Each machine (Digital Venturis FX-2, P2-133) cost $Oz100 (about USD$50) including screen plus $Oz80 each for a 256MB SIMM plus about 30 minutes per machine checking it out and recording the config (total of $Oz5400 ~~ USD2700 plus two full days for the machines themselves plus cables, cabling time, and two 16-port switches for 30 workstations). Swapping via the (CAT5 100MHz) LAN saves a machine from locking up when the user does something dim, but causes it to run slowly to let them know that they goofed).
If you build bitzer machines, be prepared for endless headaches making everything work together. If you use noname machines (and sometimes if you don't) be prepared to discover that not all of those crashes were Windows' fault. <rant>If Mr Trey ``It-Will-Work-Next-Version-For-Sure Oh-This-Blue-Screen-Must-Be-Why-Its-Called-Beta'' Gates had taken the time and trouble to sell reliable, predictable software instead of pushing pretty rubbish out the door in a flurry of false reassurances, the machines we use wouldn't be so crappy: blame for failures would land fair and square where it belongs instead of being masked behind said crappy software and the problems would actually get (ghasp) fixed!</rant>
There is a direct positive correlation in every measured case between the onset of compulsory schooling and prison populations. In short words, when you force people to go to school, you make more prisoners.
Why?
Two reasons. First, in school you get to practice for prison - you know, rank-and-file stuff, everything run by the bell, authority vested in officialdom and grudgingly delegated to the goody-two-shoes and special favourites. Students exchange bad habits, bad information and bad diseases just like inmates.
Second, consider the tactics used by many icecream and candy sellers when hiring staff. They require the new employee to eat themselves sick on the product, after which there is little temptation to snack on the job. So with school, you are required to immerse yourself in schoolwork, and unless you're lucky enough to have a personal interest in it (and sometimes even then) you pretty soon choke on the style-monotonous diet.
The same trained teacher can produce students 10-20 percentile points up the ladder if they turn to home schooling.
This tells you that the system as implemented is broken
The average untrained home-schooling parent produces students 30 or more percentile points better than the State average (ie 20+-10 percentile points better than the homeschooling trained teacher).
This tells you that the training to suit you for the system is also broken.
Full disclosure: I install systems for schools, TAFEs (vocational colleges) and universities. My wife has teacher training. My mother was a teacher. I home school.
Improve public education all you want- the bell curve will always be there with a few at both ends.
Well, goody for it. Home schooling moves the bell curve up 30 percentile points, and I'm sure even that can be readily improved upon.
What's wrong with making the next generation's ``dummies'' better than today's ``average'' student, and the average drudge better then most of today's ``advanced'' students?
Homeschooling parents qualified as teachers produce students who average only 10-20 percentile points above State school. Untrained home schoolers average around 30 percentile points. That should tell you something important about teacher training...
...it's gunna be cool. In fact, it already is cool - just not stable enough yet.
Microsoft are to real-time graphics what Macdonalds are to food. If instead of doing their own thing they'd got behind OpenGL and pushed instead of telling lies about its performance, OpenML would have been here many years ago.
the incredibly poor support for DirectX in Linux is one of the reasons it is failing in the games market.
No, the incredibly low number of desktops is why Linux is a small gaming market. D'uh?
Basically, DirectX == Windows == locked in to Microsoft.
DirectX started as a poor copy of OpenGL and was developed into something reasonably fast but still up to the eyebrows in gotchas. Pretty typical Microsoft, really. Make Windows 3 incompatible with DR-DOS instead of better at what it does, make Word incompatible with every known document standard instead of better at what they do, make VMS into a buggy GUI support layer instead of leaving it as a low-bug, secure and efficient OS then layering the GUI onto it, make DirectX incompatible with OpenGL and X (why call it DirectX anyway? X without networking? That's a feature, is it?) instead of adopting OpenGL and driving the standard somewhere better.
Small mercy, in a way, M$ might have enforced 8.3 object names or something. But one reason for being different is to avoid direct comparisons. Plugin card drivers like XFree86v4 uses would clearly show DirectX up for the convoluted dog that it is.
today's fast paced games do not require its generality, or its ivory-tower purism.
Actually, they'd benefit quite a bit from a good dose of ivory tower purism. As well as being portable, they'd be less buggy. Might be faster, too, if they were designed around good software principles, rather than to take advantage of or avoid specific features and bugs in DirectX.
Also, there's a world of difference between 1999 and 2001 in security terms - as CodeRed illustrates. At peak, an IIS box here would have been broken every three minutes per IP (so if it owned a Class C subnet, every 0.7 seconds).
New Linux boxes hitting the net aren't arriving with known superuser vulnerabilities (except one in Samba, difficult to exploit, not installed by default, configured unusably by default even if installed, and you'd have to be a bean-head to expose SMB to the Internet anyway; I get SMB probes several times per hour per IP during the quiet periods); new Win2k boxes hitting the net are arriving with known superuser vulnerabilities.
The more you fight a war, the better you get at it, and Microsoft will only get better and better at it, the general public will only grow more and more confident with their fight, and less and less exploits will be discovered.
You left off a qualifier: ``by Microsoft.'' Crackers will continue to find exploits, and one day, one of them will release the worm-to-end-all-worms for IIS. I favour one which installs Linux, copies across the existing services, and sets up shop as a P2P server for its children to download from. Wouldn't it be fun to see all of the penguins popping up on the screens in a Windows server farm? (-:
The problem isn't the platform, it is the administration of the platform.
Tony-A's answer was succinct, but I'd like to add that you're ignoring both the frequency and the quality of vulnerabilities on each system. More of the Unix holes are mere DoSes and/or extremely difficult to exploit than is the case for Windows, and when an exploitable hole is more than a DoS it often either requires local access and/or only gives you the provs of the user running the service (e.g. `apache' or `nobody') rather than open slather.
Those are big differences and largely independent of administration.
Some newer server software like Exchange integrates a lot of functionality in ways it hasn't been done in the past.
The big issue with Exchange is that it appears to have evolved, conceptually at least, from Microsoft's ancient single-user-OS mailer programs. As with most Microsoft software, when things go wrong, they go totally wrong (the wings fall off rather than the engines simply stopping).
PostFix (to pick a competing service that I use daily) is the exact opposite: it has been componentised almost to excess, no piece trusts another (to say nothing of the trust not accorded to information from the outside world), no piece runs with more privs than it needs, no piece does anything it doesn't need to, sharing is painfully minimalist, and finally it understands timesharing and user separation from the core outwards. Best of all, you don't need to lose these layers of safety to add something like calendaring to it (just add another delivery method).
When was the last time you heard of an exploitable root vulnerability - or even a read-everyone's-mail vulnerability - in PostFix?
No matter what OS you are supporting and using if you as an Admin dont have the proper service packs and updates installed then your OS will be a victim sooner or later.
"Sooner or later" is effectively a LIE because whether it's sooner or it's later makes a huge difference in securityville. You're also ignoring the ``quality'' of the intrusion (such as carte blanche versus mere DoS).
Me for later, much later. While I could do even better, I use Mandrake 8.0 for production work. It's a bit bleeding edge in some ways - and I pay for that - but it comes with two massive advantages over many Linux distros: it installs reasonably securely unless you tell it not to (warns you when you install world-visible services and if you choose a "high security" install even disables those), and it can automagically update itself. Debian users in particular have long had these comforts.
All Linuces have at least five huge additional advantages over Windows:
There are significantly less holes to start with, because (among other reasons) they are generally implementation mistakes rather than systemic design flaws; and
If a hole opens, the damage that can be done is less because you don't automatically get ring-zero (better than administrator/root) privs; and
Patches tend to come out sooner and often involve no more than restarting a single service rather than downing the whole machine; and
Tricks like chrooting the whole service, and/or using the immute bit (chattr +i) plus running with a kernel incapable of removing it (patch or capabilities) and a chattr program/syscall that rings bells and flashes lights instead of ch'ing the attrs, and/or one-way capabilities patches are simple to do; and
Most distros arrive with secure remote administration, so dealing with a widespread attack (successful or not) is much easier; and (-:
for Win 9X/ME in particular:-) distinction is actually made between superuser and mere mortals
Yes, administration makes a big difference, but all OSes are a loooooong way from interchangeable when it comes to vulnerability.
Slashdot Mirror
That's insane. Many of those companies were pushed into the toilet, directly or indirectly, by Microsoft. After having left the hen-house unguarded for so long, the attitude seems to be ``not much left in here, just this fox, we'de better protect it in case it goes too.''
The sanest thing to do would be to promptly fine Microsoft a hundred billion dollars, payable in five-billion-dollar annual installments over twenty years, and throw it at the national debt, OSS incubators, net access for the poor, or something else actually useful.
Drink up! Yippeee...! Er...
Scene closes with programmer's workmates, each with coffee in hand, shaking their heads sadly as paramedics bear away a sheet-covered object on a stretcher.
My point: less harmful is not the same as harmless.
HTML + CSS support all of the above, including (AFAICT) everything static that MS-Word can do. Doesn't support StarWriter's greater ability with tables, though, or passing spreadsheet formulae, or MS-Office's reknowned virus SDK (AKA macros). StarWriter does export actual believable XML, which is a start, and infinitely better than the botch that MS-Office adds to its HTML exports.
Of course, if people weren't so much in love with pointless `futzing' to get the layout `right,' we could use one of the Unix press standards liky LyX that have been around and stable for decades... I can't begin to imagine the horror which a Word plugin to export this would have to go through...
I think the ultimate solution is World Domination. When MS-Office is no longer relevant, we can forget about supporting it as a special format. Until then, there must be some emulation.
All bar (at last count) presentation files.
I've acually used StarOffice 5.2 (for Linux) to read a large MS-Word 2000 file and write a Word 97 file that didn't crash MS-Word 97 (which was something that MS-Word 2000 couldn't do with this file, even in (and see below) RTF). So you could say that StarOffice exports Office files better than MS Office itself does.
Speaking of justice systems and how the world works, EU Competition Commission have closed their electronic `mail' system. If you live in the EU, please send a pen-and-paper letter to them asking why you can't buy a new computer at retail which dual-boots between a Microsoft operating system and another operating system such as Linux or BeOS.
XP borrows several features from Mandrake Linux, particularly in their installer. It's nice to see them exercising innovation, it's just a pity that it isn't Microsoft's innovation being exercised.
For those features, you don't have to wait. Mandrake's 8.1beta1 (Raklet) is at least as stable as XP, contains a lot more by way of useful applications, and doesn't tie you in to anything.
Oh, yes, and it's a free download.
BTW, if you live in the EU, write (as in pen and paper, their online comment system is closed) to the Competition Commission and ask why you can't buy a machine that dual-boots between Mandrake 8.1 and Windows XP. There is no <upside-down> HTML tag, so here's the answer: because Microsoft's secret OEM licencing forbids it. Oh, yes, we support innovation. But only the right brand of innovation.
Yo? Are you blind? He has.
As has been diligently pointed out elsewhere, their most telling illegal action has been requiring their OEMs to sign a secret agreement, one part of which says, in essence, that if the OEM wants to be included in Microsoft's 95% desktop market share, they don't offer alternative operating systems on Windows-equipped machines. This prevents the OEM from offering dual-boot systems, or systems with Linux installed and offering Win4Lin-backed Windows sessions. Your average user hasn't the competence to install an OS by themselves, end of market story.
Microsoft have done much illegal stuff, including some things that if done by an individual would be considered very shameful (like their latest astroturfing expedition) and know it's illegal, and occasionally even admit that they know it's illegal, and do still more illegal stuff to get out of paying the price for earlier crimes.
And while they're raping, murdering and hamstringing other companies and talking away your choices, their public relations firms paint a picture of them as innocent, try-hard `innovators' who are forced to protect their investments in a cut-throat market.
If it weren't for Microsoft, the market wouldn't be so cut-throat. They really are a flock of wolves dressed in carefully-presented lamb's fleece, bright and helpful individuals in their team notwithstanding. And you've been thoroughly sucked in by them.
Personal computer and microwave in one! It bakes! It fries! It dices! It comes with a free set of steak knives... well, no, actually, it doesn't do any of those things - but with an appropriately shaped waveguide and a metal-free ceramic mug it could heat your coffee (or my herb tea) directly.
Cool!
Er, no, that doesn't sound right, either...
Take a workable alternative: buy a bunch of near-identical machines from an educational institution or business that's doing an upgrade rollout. Rip the hard drives out, upgrade the RAM, keep a one-line-per-machine config file that maps MAC address onto hostname, IP, kernel/filesystem components to mount for each machine (e.g. different kernel for each network card, different image mounted on /etc/X11 for each video card).
/etc/X11 images mounted in various combinations for thirty machines. Each machine (Digital Venturis FX-2, P2-133) cost $Oz100 (about USD$50) including screen plus $Oz80 each for a 256MB SIMM plus about 30 minutes per machine checking it out and recording the config (total of $Oz5400 ~~ USD2700 plus two full days for the machines themselves plus cables, cabling time, and two 16-port switches for 30 workstations). Swapping via the (CAT5 100MHz) LAN saves a machine from locking up when the user does something dim, but causes it to run slowly to let them know that they goofed).
In my case, I wind up with three different kernels and three different
If you build bitzer machines, be prepared for endless headaches making everything work together. If you use noname machines (and sometimes if you don't) be prepared to discover that not all of those crashes were Windows' fault. <rant>If Mr Trey ``It-Will-Work-Next-Version-For-Sure Oh-This-Blue-Screen-Must-Be-Why-Its-Called-Beta'' Gates had taken the time and trouble to sell reliable, predictable software instead of pushing pretty rubbish out the door in a flurry of false reassurances, the machines we use wouldn't be so crappy: blame for failures would land fair and square where it belongs instead of being masked behind said crappy software and the problems would actually get (ghasp) fixed!</rant>
See http://hedland.edu.au/~ad-temp/, cue twilight-zone theme.
Unbelievable. (-:
What you're describing is home education, or at least very small classes, something that State teachers often dream passionately of having.
There is a direct positive correlation in every measured case between the onset of compulsory schooling and prison populations. In short words, when you force people to go to school, you make more prisoners.
Why?
Two reasons. First, in school you get to practice for prison - you know, rank-and-file stuff, everything run by the bell, authority vested in officialdom and grudgingly delegated to the goody-two-shoes and special favourites. Students exchange bad habits, bad information and bad diseases just like inmates.
Second, consider the tactics used by many icecream and candy sellers when hiring staff. They require the new employee to eat themselves sick on the product, after which there is little temptation to snack on the job. So with school, you are required to immerse yourself in schoolwork, and unless you're lucky enough to have a personal interest in it (and sometimes even then) you pretty soon choke on the style-monotonous diet.
The same trained teacher can produce students 10-20 percentile points up the ladder if they turn to home schooling.
This tells you that the system as implemented is broken
The average untrained home-schooling parent produces students 30 or more percentile points better than the State average (ie 20+-10 percentile points better than the homeschooling trained teacher).
This tells you that the training to suit you for the system is also broken.
Full disclosure: I install systems for schools, TAFEs (vocational colleges) and universities. My wife has teacher training. My mother was a teacher. I home school.
Well, goody for it. Home schooling moves the bell curve up 30 percentile points, and I'm sure even that can be readily improved upon.
What's wrong with making the next generation's ``dummies'' better than today's ``average'' student, and the average drudge better then most of today's ``advanced'' students?
Homeschooling parents qualified as teachers produce students who average only 10-20 percentile points above State school. Untrained home schoolers average around 30 percentile points. That should tell you something important about teacher training...
...it's gunna be cool. In fact, it already is cool - just not stable enough yet.
Microsoft are to real-time graphics what Macdonalds are to food. If instead of doing their own thing they'd got behind OpenGL and pushed instead of telling lies about its performance, OpenML would have been here many years ago.
No, the incredibly low number of desktops is why Linux is a small gaming market. D'uh?
Basically, DirectX == Windows == locked in to Microsoft.
DirectX started as a poor copy of OpenGL and was developed into something reasonably fast but still up to the eyebrows in gotchas. Pretty typical Microsoft, really. Make Windows 3 incompatible with DR-DOS instead of better at what it does, make Word incompatible with every known document standard instead of better at what they do, make VMS into a buggy GUI support layer instead of leaving it as a low-bug, secure and efficient OS then layering the GUI onto it, make DirectX incompatible with OpenGL and X (why call it DirectX anyway? X without networking? That's a feature, is it?) instead of adopting OpenGL and driving the standard somewhere better.
Small mercy, in a way, M$ might have enforced 8.3 object names or something. But one reason for being different is to avoid direct comparisons. Plugin card drivers like XFree86v4 uses would clearly show DirectX up for the convoluted dog that it is.
Actually, they'd benefit quite a bit from a good dose of ivory tower purism. As well as being portable, they'd be less buggy. Might be faster, too, if they were designed around good software principles, rather than to take advantage of or avoid specific features and bugs in DirectX.
And lots of things scan port 111 (RPC).
New Linux boxes hitting the net aren't arriving with known superuser vulnerabilities (except one in Samba, difficult to exploit, not installed by default, configured unusably by default even if installed, and you'd have to be a bean-head to expose SMB to the Internet anyway; I get SMB probes several times per hour per IP during the quiet periods); new Win2k boxes hitting the net are arriving with known superuser vulnerabilities.
You left off a qualifier: ``by Microsoft.'' Crackers will continue to find exploits, and one day, one of them will release the worm-to-end-all-worms for IIS. I favour one which installs Linux, copies across the existing services, and sets up shop as a P2P server for its children to download from. Wouldn't it be fun to see all of the penguins popping up on the screens in a Windows server farm? (-:
$$$ are only a motivation to get more systems out there, vulnerable or not.
And I have to say this: QED!
Tony-A's answer was succinct, but I'd like to add that you're ignoring both the frequency and the quality of vulnerabilities on each system. More of the Unix holes are mere DoSes and/or extremely difficult to exploit than is the case for Windows, and when an exploitable hole is more than a DoS it often either requires local access and/or only gives you the provs of the user running the service (e.g. `apache' or `nobody') rather than open slather.
Those are big differences and largely independent of administration.
Ah. I think I know what you're talking about.
If even one of them is professionally administered, your point is made. Inconvenient facts are the terror of grand and popular theories. (-:
The big issue with Exchange is that it appears to have evolved, conceptually at least, from Microsoft's ancient single-user-OS mailer programs. As with most Microsoft software, when things go wrong, they go totally wrong (the wings fall off rather than the engines simply stopping).
PostFix (to pick a competing service that I use daily) is the exact opposite: it has been componentised almost to excess, no piece trusts another (to say nothing of the trust not accorded to information from the outside world), no piece runs with more privs than it needs, no piece does anything it doesn't need to, sharing is painfully minimalist, and finally it understands timesharing and user separation from the core outwards. Best of all, you don't need to lose these layers of safety to add something like calendaring to it (just add another delivery method).
When was the last time you heard of an exploitable root vulnerability - or even a read-everyone's-mail vulnerability - in PostFix?
"Sooner or later" is effectively a LIE because whether it's sooner or it's later makes a huge difference in securityville. You're also ignoring the ``quality'' of the intrusion (such as carte blanche versus mere DoS).
Me for later, much later. While I could do even better, I use Mandrake 8.0 for production work. It's a bit bleeding edge in some ways - and I pay for that - but it comes with two massive advantages over many Linux distros: it installs reasonably securely unless you tell it not to (warns you when you install world-visible services and if you choose a "high security" install even disables those), and it can automagically update itself. Debian users in particular have long had these comforts.
All Linuces have at least five huge additional advantages over Windows:
Yes, administration makes a big difference, but all OSes are a loooooong way from interchangeable when it comes to vulnerability.