we could have a nationwide vote, everyone leaves with a piece of paper with a number printed on it,
Please don't be so hasty, ok? We are still at step #1: Removing the "fair" from american elections. Step #2: Removing "secret" is scheduled for 2010, right before the removal of equality.
If I have any way to reliably find out how you voted, then it has not been a secret election. You being able to tell me is ok, because you can lie. Me being able to verify means I can wait at your home with a gun and check that you voted what I asked you to before I let your wife and daughter go.
I don't think it matters whether you store the votes on paper, in NVRAM, on a disk drive, or as stacks of pebbles in labeled buckets.
Dead wrong. Out of 100 random people, or election helpers, or UN election watchers, how many will be able to - without having to rely on some person or technology they do not fully understand - verify the count on a stack of papers? How many in buckets of pebbles? And how many for disk drives or NVRAM?
So the watchers are at a disadvantage. What about the other side, the attackers?
Pebbles and paper mean I have to have physical access and have to mess with the actual physical evidence. Electronic storage of any kind means I have lots more options I can mess with. Data formats, transformations, CPU, bus system, not to even mention the whole software thing.
It does matter a lot whether you have physical tokens or purely electronic ones. The electronic ones are much easier to manipulate and much more difficult to verify. And that doesn't even take into account the legal trouble you get into when you actually try to verify - which is what this whole thing is about.
7. grub, elilo, etc., all do not work on the Intel-based Macs at this time.
Bummer.
winDos ain't that important, a PS3 can easily replace anything it's good for. But no grub? How am I supposed to survive a MacBook without Linux and OpenBSD on it??
Actually, it seems the aggregate sites are worth something. Looking for what side scored a few games very low I'd also consider failures but which were hyped anyways, I stumbled upon:
why does he stick to the an overall numerical rating system at all?
Because game magazines aren't there to educate their readers. Their purpose is to sort game producers by advertisement money spent and then arrange their games in a simple list of "most worth buying" to "tell them to buy more ads next time".
And just like Pro-Footballer or Pro-Soccer player, it's not all the dream it's sold as.
As in any other business, thousands of young people enter that career path every year, and most of them never make it past "it pays the rent". In fact, I would be surprised if a considerable percentage came even that far.
Been about time. When I stopped regularily reading gaming mags 5 or so years ago, 70% (or 7/10 or whatever the scale was) was a pretty mediocre result, and it's only got worse. The same magazines that once celebrated the first ever game to score over 90%, ever - are now giving out 90% every month or so.
It's all marketing pressure. 100% does not mean "perfect" anymore. Problems that would've dumped the score 5, 10 points are shrugged off by many testers as "will certainly be fixed by the next patch" or "but it's still better than elsewhere".
There is one online review page that still writes very criticial and sometimes harsh reviews, where the stuff that rates 94% in your average mag (which only by coincidence has a two-page ad by the same company that month...) - well, that overhyped crap gets its 47% or whatever it's really worth once you remove the "big names" and the photoshopped screenshots.
I just wish for the life of me I could remember the URL. I lost my bookmarks once, and that was the only game review site worth having a link.
I also remember what some of those tester dudes said when flat out confronted with the fact that they only ever seem to review 70%+ games. They said "we don't want to waste precious magazine space with the mediocre games". Sounds believeable. Except that the rations are still way overblown. I like "The Movies", for example, but it's not a 9/10 game. Civ4 - great game, but 9.7/10? If you can only imagine 3% missing to absolute perfection then you have damn little imagination. And so on, and so forth.
Really, an honest rating should either allow > 100%, or say "90% if you do everything in the best way that I can imagine. Points above that only if you found better ways to do it, and because you had a few years to work on it that's not an unrealistic expectation".
Gates' prediction has come true for people using the right tactics and advanced filtering technology."
And absolutely nothing of that is thanks to Bill.
It also fails short for many other scenarios, as it requires the people to either have good control over their mail environment, or have the right people do it for them. Point: At home, spam is mostly a non-issue for me. At work, it's horror.
What I'd love to make a comeback - and what is part of the problem here - is a simple "off" switch that actually means off.
The problem isn't that electronics are not smart enough. The problem is that electronics manufacturers aren't. As customer, I would like to have one very simple thing: A button that when I use it actually means "off" as in "absolutely no more electric power going into this device".
No being "always on" isn't security it's just reducing your chances of being hit. Not to mention lots of malware comes by mail or when you visit a questionable website.
Your friend's advise is nonsense.
If your system is secure, you won't get anything bad, no matter how long you are online. If your system is insecure, you'll sooner or later get it, and the only thing you do by not being "always on" is pushing it towards later.
Software-only will not work in this market. Incompatability and other issues will quickly kill the hard- and the software.
The only way is offering an integrated solution that "just works", like Apple does. People have become to take problems and faults in software for granted, but for MP3 players, they compare it to a walkman or radio, which must be simple and flawless.
Whoever get's their digital media appliance in the living room is probably going to be the ultimate winner.
Which is why M$ has tried that unsuccessfully for years, and Apple will probably succeed within the year with the new Mac Mini.
M$ took too long to realize that it's not about the software. Living room customers want to buy a box that just works. And that's what Apple has and M$ doesn't.
Running OSX on some non-Apple hardware may be the techno-geeks wet dream, but Apple's customer base is mostly people who just want things to work. They're not going to go through a five page "and then flush the BIOS at 0xfe67e80c and replace it with this EFI hack" manual to get it running on a cheap PC.
The more important question is when will it run Linux? Linux has EFI support, so can I just install Grub on the MacBook Pro and dual-boot? Please, please tell me I can.
Other OSes on the MacBook sounds like a much better investment of time than forcing OSX to run on your toaster.
There's a good reason the media is interested in Apple announcement and Steve's keynotes.
Apple delivers.
Not only are they a year at least ahead of the competition (check the feature list for Vista, you can write numbers beside each one, representing the year Apple introduced that feature into OSX) - there's also the point that most of their announcements end with "available today" or a date in the very near future.
Most of the crap Bill announces is Vaporware or so far off that it'll likely change considerable before hitting the market late and incomplete.
So as a media entity, you'll have to ask yourself the question what your readers will be more likely interested in - something they can go and buy or some theoretical wishful thinking.
Interesting approach which shows just "where we are".
If it warrants its own conference, then that's a clear sign that it's not yet anywhere. The problem is that there's no sex in games. Where it appears to be, it's some add-on. Either it's masturbation material, or the sex is just the dressing for some mini-games.
The thing is that it isn't a natural part of any game I know. Just as in the wet dreams of G.W.Bush and many religious-right fanatics, it's been completely removed from (virtual) reality.
Where's the RPG where you can have some casual sex? Blowing a dozen goons away goes without saying, but getting laid even once just doesn't happen in a normal game. Where it happens it is the goal or the entire selling point.
Interestingly, GTA's "hot chocolate" thingy came very close. There you are, and part of the game world is just having some fun with your babe. That's the ticket. And look how they cried and yelled about that being the first sign of armageddon.
I'd love to see more sex in games, and at the same time I hate all the sex-games. I've not yet seen even one that was fun beyond the curiosity new-game-let's-try-it-out stage.
Betsy said, "I think registered number of users does measure at least casual interest, while concurrent users measures ongoing/active interest.
That's a pretty good reply, provided they clean the userbase occasionally.
I run my own online game. It's not as big as any mentioned in the article, but the numbers mean something to me:
About 13,000 people have registered during its 5 year life. That's the number of people interested enough to take a peek (the game's free, so there's no reason not to register if you care at all).
Currently about 1500 players are registered. However, that includes people who took a look yesterday and will never come back.
About 1100 players logged in during the past 3 days. That's what I consider my "active player base". While it includes people who took a look yesterday (etc), it also includes active players who're away for a few days and will log in again tomorrow. I guess it about averages out.
It would probably be very interesting to run more statistics, but I don't. I can generate a bit of data from what I have, for example I can say that about 6000 accounts or almost half of them were made in 2005, so the game is getting much more publicity than before.
The point I'm trying to make is: Numbers mean nothing. You have to look behind them and find what they mean. I could say I have 13000 registered users (actually I don't, because I clean out inactive accounts) or I could say I have 1500 active players. It depends on whether I want to appear big or have a more honest number. I could also say I have 950 active players (the number logged in yesterday) if I wanted to appear smaller.
(*) Note: "Concurrent users" doesn't have a meaning for my game because it's a web-based game, not a MMORPG and you don't interact real-time anyways. That's another point: In some MMORPGs, you don't have to be online to be able to be interacted with. Your shop in Second Life or some other games may still be open, you can travel or go about automated tasks in other games. It all depends on what the game is.
You're going out on a limb there. You assume that security == code quality == no bugs.
And that's the problem.
Code will always have bugs. There's no way to write bug-free code, though there are certain techniques (features on/. recently) to write code an order or two of magnitude less buggy than the current standard.
The solution to security, however, is not less bugs. It is making the system so that it fails safely. That even if there is a bug, it doesn't mean game over. The security problem with IE, or Media Player, is not that they are buggy. The security problem is that external data scheduled for display to the user is at all able to compromise the system. And that's a design fault in the system, not a bug in IE or Media Player.
Re:Why put a fake horse in front of the automobile
on
Sony Reader Taking Hold?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
These dedicated e-readers are all trying to look like a dead-tree book and are missing a big part of the point. My PDA is small enough to fit in my shirt pocket. A book, even a paperback, isn't. Neither is a paperback-sized e-reader.
Paperback size is about perfect for a form-factor. Why do you think books converged on that size? It's not as if making smaller books were impossible, but publishers rather vary the page count than the size. Yes, I know there is a lot of variation in book sizes - but up from paperback size rather than down. There are lots of thicker or larger books, but very few smaller. Most publishers rather publish a thin book than a small one.
You might be comfortable reading on a PDA screen. I for sure am not. I don't want to have the screen 10 cm in front of me, and neither do I want to ready tiny letters.
a) I can't work on Microsoft products like SQL Server on a Mac
I'm not really entirely sure, you know, but it just might have a little tiny weeny bit to do with the word "Microsoft" up there...
Quite honestly, I don't use windos for anything but gaming, but I've found quite a lot Mac-only tools while looking for Linux stuff that I dare to claim more productive and useful software exists for the Mac than for windos. Of course, you'll have to kiss the firewood screensavers and the $5 shareware shit goodbye.
b) The Mac only has a few games, compared to the PC
True, that. On the other hand, though, most games worth my time and money are available for the Mac. Again, it's mostly the crap and low-end stuff that isn't.
I don't know laws or business practice in the US enough for this, but over here in Germany, bancruptcy is a very serious issue. Yes, it clears your debts. But it also virtually guarantees that:
* You'll never be C*O anywhere, for life * Most banks will treat you like you had the black plague, you'll have difficulties even opening a savings account * A lot of high-profile public positions are closed to you because nobody would want you there. I know of people who couldn't go into politics because of this.
If the period is 10 years in the US, then it still means he's a beggar for the next 10 years. I'm not so sure if the first thing he'll be doing afterwards is setting up another spam business. Even if it were - let's bancrupt all the spammers and we'll have 10 years to come up with a final solution.
After 10 years or so, we've finally arrived at the stage where we threaten the only thing that matters to the spammers: Their money.
This might be a good turning point, especially with these ridiculously silly amounts which actually do mean that life, economically, is over for you. Everything the guys ever earns above and beyond whatever the minimum-for-life-that-you-can't-legally-take-away is in his jurisdiction will go poof, for the rest of his years.
In other words, the spam equation just changed from "make tons of money, if caught, lose some and continue" to "make tons of money, if caught you're pretty much dead". That's a different game.
True for most cases, however I would like to make one exception:
If an application error allows an attacker to gain root (Admin on windos) on the vulnerable system, the problem becomes an OS vulnerability.
In other words: It very well is the job of the OS to ensure that applications can not hurt the system. Both windos and most Unixes do a pretty shabby job at that, though stuff like privilege seperation have pushed Unix ahead in the game.
The real solution to this, SELinux, Trusted Solaris, etc. - the whole RBAC/MAC area, is currently still too much in development and too complex for the average admin to get mainstream acceptance.
That just might be because they are comparing a group of systems (the entire Unix world) with one system (windos, though there are several flavours, one might count it as actually two systems - those NT based and those win32 based).
Then there's the whole issue of assigning issues, especially with applications. Yadayada.
Then there's the whole issue of configuration. It's a well-known fact that windos systems can be made reliable and secure, if you can find one of the rare really good windos admins. Unix admins, on the other hand, are better on average, though the real pros are just as hard to find. But it's easier to set up well, so with better admins and better default settings it tends to be more secure on average, but that's due to secondary factors, not higher code quality.
In the end, you arrive at one conclusion: These things are sufficiently different that they are hard to compare. Whatever you do, you have to make some assumptions, and if your assumptions are wrong, your results are worthless.
Speaking strictly for me personally: I'd much rather entrust data worth $1 mio. to a Unix system - any unix system - than data worth $100,000 to a windos box. Call it prejudice or experience, I don't care, I've been proven right often enough to know that's a good rule-of-thumb.
* If I can mix'n'match on the commandline, I can write a script * Since all my scripts use standard commands, I can mix'n'match scripts (e.g. loganalyzer.pl webstats.html) * IF I can mix'n'match scripts, I can write a nice GUI to make it easier
The whole point of the Unix way is using components, plugins, extensions - whatever the hype of the month calls them.
CD Writing software is a great example. Choose the GUI you like. Under the hook, none of them had to reinvent the wheel, they all use the same software to do the actual burning.
Great concept. I'm sure 10 years down the road, M$ will "invent" it and hype it to hell just in time for Windos ZX or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
we could have a nationwide vote, everyone leaves with a piece of paper with a number printed on it,
Please don't be so hasty, ok? We are still at step #1: Removing the "fair" from american elections. Step #2: Removing "secret" is scheduled for 2010, right before the removal of equality.
If I have any way to reliably find out how you voted, then it has not been a secret election. You being able to tell me is ok, because you can lie. Me being able to verify means I can wait at your home with a gun and check that you voted what I asked you to before I let your wife and daughter go.
I don't think it matters whether you store the votes on paper, in NVRAM, on a disk drive, or as stacks of pebbles in labeled buckets.
Dead wrong. Out of 100 random people, or election helpers, or UN election watchers, how many will be able to - without having to rely on some person or technology they do not fully understand - verify the count on a stack of papers? How many in buckets of pebbles? And how many for disk drives or NVRAM?
So the watchers are at a disadvantage. What about the other side, the attackers?
Pebbles and paper mean I have to have physical access and have to mess with the actual physical evidence. Electronic storage of any kind means I have lots more options I can mess with. Data formats, transformations, CPU, bus system, not to even mention the whole software thing.
It does matter a lot whether you have physical tokens or purely electronic ones. The electronic ones are much easier to manipulate and much more difficult to verify. And that doesn't even take into account the legal trouble you get into when you actually try to verify - which is what this whole thing is about.
7. grub, elilo, etc., all do not work on the Intel-based Macs at this time.
Bummer.
winDos ain't that important, a PS3 can easily replace anything it's good for. But no grub? How am I supposed to survive a MacBook without Linux and OpenBSD on it??
Actually, it seems the aggregate sites are worth something. Looking for what side scored a few games very low I'd also consider failures but which were hyped anyways, I stumbled upon:
http://pc.gamedaily.com/.
why does he stick to the an overall numerical rating system at all?
Because game magazines aren't there to educate their readers. Their purpose is to sort game producers by advertisement money spent and then arrange their games in a simple list of "most worth buying" to "tell them to buy more ads next time".
Professional Gamer is now a valid career path.
And just like Pro-Footballer or Pro-Soccer player, it's not all the dream it's sold as.
As in any other business, thousands of young people enter that career path every year, and most of them never make it past "it pays the rent". In fact, I would be surprised if a considerable percentage came even that far.
Been about time. When I stopped regularily reading gaming mags 5 or so years ago, 70% (or 7/10 or whatever the scale was) was a pretty mediocre result, and it's only got worse. The same magazines that once celebrated the first ever game to score over 90%, ever - are now giving out 90% every month or so.
It's all marketing pressure. 100% does not mean "perfect" anymore. Problems that would've dumped the score 5, 10 points are shrugged off by many testers as "will certainly be fixed by the next patch" or "but it's still better than elsewhere".
There is one online review page that still writes very criticial and sometimes harsh reviews, where the stuff that rates 94% in your average mag (which only by coincidence has a two-page ad by the same company that month...) - well, that overhyped crap gets its 47% or whatever it's really worth once you remove the "big names" and the photoshopped screenshots.
I just wish for the life of me I could remember the URL. I lost my bookmarks once, and that was the only game review site worth having a link.
I also remember what some of those tester dudes said when flat out confronted with the fact that they only ever seem to review 70%+ games. They said "we don't want to waste precious magazine space with the mediocre games".
Sounds believeable. Except that the rations are still way overblown. I like "The Movies", for example, but it's not a 9/10 game. Civ4 - great game, but 9.7/10? If you can only imagine 3% missing to absolute perfection then you have damn little imagination. And so on, and so forth.
Really, an honest rating should either allow > 100%, or say "90% if you do everything in the best way that I can imagine. Points above that only if you found better ways to do it, and because you had a few years to work on it that's not an unrealistic expectation".
Gates' prediction has come true for people using the right tactics and advanced filtering technology."
And absolutely nothing of that is thanks to Bill.
It also fails short for many other scenarios, as it requires the people to either have good control over their mail environment, or have the right people do it for them. Point: At home, spam is mostly a non-issue for me. At work, it's horror.
Turn your appliances completely off if you know you won't need them for a while. Unplug your cell phone charger once you used it.
That's the problem. In more and more cases, "turn off" equals "unplug".
If you enjoy a tidy-looking home, you've stuffed all your cables away as far as possible. For some of my stuff, "unplug" means opening up cable ducts.
What I'd love to make a comeback - and what is part of the problem here - is a simple "off" switch that actually means off.
The problem isn't that electronics are not smart enough. The problem is that electronics manufacturers aren't. As customer, I would like to have one very simple thing: A button that when I use it actually means "off" as in "absolutely no more electric power going into this device".
No being "always on" isn't security it's just reducing your chances of being hit. Not to mention lots of malware comes by mail or when you visit a questionable website.
Your friend's advise is nonsense.
If your system is secure, you won't get anything bad, no matter how long you are online. If your system is insecure, you'll sooner or later get it, and the only thing you do by not being "always on" is pushing it towards later.
Software-only will not work in this market. Incompatability and other issues will quickly kill the hard- and the software.
The only way is offering an integrated solution that "just works", like Apple does. People have become to take problems and faults in software for granted, but for MP3 players, they compare it to a walkman or radio, which must be simple and flawless.
Whoever get's their digital media appliance in the living room is probably going to be the ultimate winner.
Which is why M$ has tried that unsuccessfully for years, and Apple will probably succeed within the year with the new Mac Mini.
M$ took too long to realize that it's not about the software. Living room customers want to buy a box that just works. And that's what Apple has and M$ doesn't.
Running OSX on some non-Apple hardware may be the techno-geeks wet dream, but Apple's customer base is mostly people who just want things to work. They're not going to go through a five page "and then flush the BIOS at 0xfe67e80c and replace it with this EFI hack" manual to get it running on a cheap PC.
The more important question is when will it run Linux? Linux has EFI support, so can I just install Grub on the MacBook Pro and dual-boot? Please, please tell me I can.
Other OSes on the MacBook sounds like a much better investment of time than forcing OSX to run on your toaster.
There's a good reason the media is interested in Apple announcement and Steve's keynotes.
Apple delivers.
Not only are they a year at least ahead of the competition (check the feature list for Vista, you can write numbers beside each one, representing the year Apple introduced that feature into OSX) - there's also the point that most of their announcements end with "available today" or a date in the very near future.
Most of the crap Bill announces is Vaporware or so far off that it'll likely change considerable before hitting the market late and incomplete.
So as a media entity, you'll have to ask yourself the question what your readers will be more likely interested in - something they can go and buy or some theoretical wishful thinking.
Interesting approach which shows just "where we are".
If it warrants its own conference, then that's a clear sign that it's not yet anywhere. The problem is that there's no sex in games. Where it appears to be, it's some add-on. Either it's masturbation material, or the sex is just the dressing for some mini-games.
The thing is that it isn't a natural part of any game I know. Just as in the wet dreams of G.W.Bush and many religious-right fanatics, it's been completely removed from (virtual) reality.
Where's the RPG where you can have some casual sex? Blowing a dozen goons away goes without saying, but getting laid even once just doesn't happen in a normal game. Where it happens it is the goal or the entire selling point.
Interestingly, GTA's "hot chocolate" thingy came very close. There you are, and part of the game world is just having some fun with your babe. That's the ticket. And look how they cried and yelled about that being the first sign of armageddon.
I'd love to see more sex in games, and at the same time I hate all the sex-games. I've not yet seen even one that was fun beyond the curiosity new-game-let's-try-it-out stage.
That's a pretty good reply, provided they clean the userbase occasionally.
I run my own online game. It's not as big as any mentioned in the article, but the numbers mean something to me:
It would probably be very interesting to run more statistics, but I don't. I can generate a bit of data from what I have, for example I can say that about 6000 accounts or almost half of them were made in 2005, so the game is getting much more publicity than before.
The point I'm trying to make is: Numbers mean nothing. You have to look behind them and find what they mean. I could say I have 13000 registered users (actually I don't, because I clean out inactive accounts) or I could say I have 1500 active players. It depends on whether I want to appear big or have a more honest number. I could also say I have 950 active players (the number logged in yesterday) if I wanted to appear smaller.
(*) Note: "Concurrent users" doesn't have a meaning for my game because it's a web-based game, not a MMORPG and you don't interact real-time anyways. That's another point: In some MMORPGs, you don't have to be online to be able to be interacted with. Your shop in Second Life or some other games may still be open, you can travel or go about automated tasks in other games. It all depends on what the game is.
You're going out on a limb there. You assume that security == code quality == no bugs.
/. recently) to write code an order or two of magnitude less buggy than the current standard.
And that's the problem.
Code will always have bugs. There's no way to write bug-free code, though there are certain techniques (features on
The solution to security, however, is not less bugs. It is making the system so that it fails safely. That even if there is a bug, it doesn't mean game over.
The security problem with IE, or Media Player, is not that they are buggy. The security problem is that external data scheduled for display to the user is at all able to compromise the system.
And that's a design fault in the system, not a bug in IE or Media Player.
These dedicated e-readers are all trying to look like a dead-tree book and are missing a big part of the point. My PDA is small enough to fit in my shirt pocket. A book, even a paperback, isn't. Neither is a paperback-sized e-reader.
Paperback size is about perfect for a form-factor. Why do you think books converged on that size? It's not as if making smaller books were impossible, but publishers rather vary the page count than the size. Yes, I know there is a lot of variation in book sizes - but up from paperback size rather than down. There are lots of thicker or larger books, but very few smaller. Most publishers rather publish a thin book than a small one.
You might be comfortable reading on a PDA screen. I for sure am not. I don't want to have the screen 10 cm in front of me, and neither do I want to ready tiny letters.
a) I can't work on Microsoft products like SQL Server on a Mac
I'm not really entirely sure, you know, but it just might have a little tiny weeny bit to do with the word "Microsoft" up there...
Quite honestly, I don't use windos for anything but gaming, but I've found quite a lot Mac-only tools while looking for Linux stuff that I dare to claim more productive and useful software exists for the Mac than for windos.
Of course, you'll have to kiss the firewood screensavers and the $5 shareware shit goodbye.
b) The Mac only has a few games, compared to the PC
True, that. On the other hand, though, most games worth my time and money are available for the Mac. Again, it's mostly the crap and low-end stuff that isn't.
I don't know laws or business practice in the US enough for this, but over here in Germany, bancruptcy is a very serious issue. Yes, it clears your debts. But it also virtually guarantees that:
* You'll never be C*O anywhere, for life
* Most banks will treat you like you had the black plague, you'll have difficulties even opening a savings account
* A lot of high-profile public positions are closed to you because nobody would want you there. I know of people who couldn't go into politics because of this.
If the period is 10 years in the US, then it still means he's a beggar for the next 10 years. I'm not so sure if the first thing he'll be doing afterwards is setting up another spam business. Even if it were - let's bancrupt all the spammers and we'll have 10 years to come up with a final solution.
After 10 years or so, we've finally arrived at the stage where we threaten the only thing that matters to the spammers: Their money.
This might be a good turning point, especially with these ridiculously silly amounts which actually do mean that life, economically, is over for you. Everything the guys ever earns above and beyond whatever the minimum-for-life-that-you-can't-legally-take-away is in his jurisdiction will go poof, for the rest of his years.
In other words, the spam equation just changed from "make tons of money, if caught, lose some and continue" to "make tons of money, if caught you're pretty much dead". That's a different game.
True for most cases, however I would like to make one exception:
If an application error allows an attacker to gain root (Admin on windos) on the vulnerable system, the problem becomes an OS vulnerability.
In other words: It very well is the job of the OS to ensure that applications can not hurt the system. Both windos and most Unixes do a pretty shabby job at that, though stuff like privilege seperation have pushed Unix ahead in the game.
The real solution to this, SELinux, Trusted Solaris, etc. - the whole RBAC/MAC area, is currently still too much in development and too complex for the average admin to get mainstream acceptance.
That just might be because they are comparing a group of systems (the entire Unix world) with one system (windos, though there are several flavours, one might count it as actually two systems - those NT based and those win32 based).
Then there's the whole issue of assigning issues, especially with applications. Yadayada.
Then there's the whole issue of configuration. It's a well-known fact that windos systems can be made reliable and secure, if you can find one of the rare really good windos admins. Unix admins, on the other hand, are better on average, though the real pros are just as hard to find. But it's easier to set up well, so with better admins and better default settings it tends to be more secure on average, but that's due to secondary factors, not higher code quality.
In the end, you arrive at one conclusion: These things are sufficiently different that they are hard to compare. Whatever you do, you have to make some assumptions, and if your assumptions are wrong, your results are worthless.
Speaking strictly for me personally: I'd much rather entrust data worth $1 mio. to a Unix system - any unix system - than data worth $100,000 to a windos box. Call it prejudice or experience, I don't care, I've been proven right often enough to know that's a good rule-of-thumb.
You missed the important part of the Unix way:
* If I can mix'n'match on the commandline, I can write a script
* Since all my scripts use standard commands, I can mix'n'match scripts (e.g. loganalyzer.pl webstats.html)
* IF I can mix'n'match scripts, I can write a nice GUI to make it easier
The whole point of the Unix way is using components, plugins, extensions - whatever the hype of the month calls them.
CD Writing software is a great example. Choose the GUI you like. Under the hook, none of them had to reinvent the wheel, they all use the same software to do the actual burning.
Great concept. I'm sure 10 years down the road, M$ will "invent" it and hype it to hell just in time for Windos ZX or whatever.