Yes, that hugely hilarious post was just marvellous. Tragically, though, it entirely missed the point I made very early on that none of the extra things OneCare is supposed to provide are considered intrinsic bits of an operating system, and that all the things that are considered essential (plus several more) are already, and will continue to be, free (basic firewall, security updates, monthly ad-ware scans, etc.). Could you perhaps name an OS which you believe does include free viruschecking, free virus updates, free tuneup and free backup services? No, you can’t. This is what consistently pisses me off about Microsoft threads. People see the words “Microsoft” and “security” and seemingly chuck out all reliance on fact and reason in favour of the most simplistic conclusion they can possibly draw.
At the risk of sidetracking this into yet another Battle of the Fucking Stupid Analogies, what you are doing is more like complaining about Ford garages charging for periodical tuneups and oil checks. Windows XP is, pace the default administrator priveleges, a pretty secure OS, and is, as I have pointed out, perfectly amenable to being run in a secure manner by a moderately competent user. If you can explain exactly which feature of OneCare you feel ought to be free, and why, then maybe you’d have a point. But no-one has, choosing instead to stoically ignore what OneCare actually is in favour of the facile chant “but it should be secure already!”
Mindfield, could you provide an example of Symantec releasing patches for Windows flaws before MS do? Symantec provide no such service, instead releasing new definitions to spot viruses once they’re found in the wild, which is a considerably easier process than tracking down a vulnerability and fixing it. Microsoft patches the system itself, and while it hasn’t been great about doing this in the past, is now pretty speedy with the updates. As for worms and such, a quick trawl through Symantec’s own virus charts will show you that pretty much no successful virus of the last 2-3 years has relied on a Windows vulnerability; the positively vast majority rely on tricking the user into executing malicious code, something no operating system can protect against. Which is why you need a virus-checker, which is just one of the services MS are trying to offer with OneCare.
Hey look. I bought a house. But sometimes the locks stop working through no fault of my own. But I can keep my locks working, I just need to contact the builder and have them come fix my locks once a month.
Just because you have a stiffy for MS, don’t bitch at the rest of us for thinking they have a shitty product.
I don’t have a stiffy for MS. For example, I detest IE, won’t touch Word with a ten foot pole, and spend most of my working life using Linux. However, I do like to introduce the occasional shade of grey into my world view, and have thus arrived at the conclusion that MS introducing a combo tuneup service in addition to existing security efforts might not actually be a dastardly thing to do. I’m bitching at you because you are seemingly incapable of thinking without using your knee. Nice work introducing yet another completely Fucking Stupid Analogy, though. Would it be expecting too much for you to actually address the real world for a bit, and answer my question about which part of OneCare ought to be free? So far absolutely no-one has, which I find a bit odd.
There is no such beast; never has been, and likely never will be. More secure, perhaps; but there is no operating system that cannot be compromised. And on the road to the perfect OS, every contender will issue patches, updates and upgrades when the barbarians breach the gate.
But on the Mac, you only need one button. To do anything.
It’s the wave of the future. Haven’t you see Star Trek?
Stranger
Who destests our weekly “Reboot Wednesday” after corporate Windows desktop patch installs. Funny how our HPC Irix/Linux/BSD machines never roll over and die spontaneously while performing basic system operating tasks and don’t require constant patching.
Don’t you mean Unix? Linux wasn’t even a wet spot in Linus Torvalds’s trousers until 1991.
Unix certainly has had a lot longer than Windows to refine its code, but Linux has not. Please don’t think that I’m just being nit-picky, but the reality of the matter is that Unix and Linux are fundamentally different, were developed in different times, and do not both share the open source platform, nor the extremely distributed development by corders who are not all employed by the distribution company.
Many versions of Unix are just as open source as Windows, and come with a price tag, so don’t make the mistake of assuming that all *nix operating systems are Linux, open source, and free.
If you’re going to extoll the virtues of Linux, perhaps you should get your facts in order?
I’m sure you mean closed source, and over the years various flavors of Unix and is system aps have had a number of gaping security holes. The difference, however, is that Unix providers (both proprietary and freeware) have been open both about holes and quick to respond with fixes. (Some sysops have been not so quick to respond with upgrades, however.) Microsoft, however, has traditionally relied upon the policy of security by obscurity, which is like locking your doors but leaving a window unlatched. Even now, their closed-source development prevents the kind of pre-release hammering that Linux and BSD-based systems get, and the Unixes/Mac OSX see the advantage from that as well.
Also, by its “system utilities as individual applications” nature, the Unix-like OSs are much easier to patch and secure than the traditionally monolithic kernels of Microsoft OSs. Add to that the transparent permissions and root access scheme, combined with many of the secure communication tools developed by the OpenBSD crew and you have an OS that is seriously robust and secure. Winders–even XP–has its pants around its ankles by comparison.
Where I work, our corporate policy is to user MS products on desktops and, wherever possible, on servers. The company eats the price; nonetheless, we fight tooth-and-nail to justify using Unix and Linux/BSD for our HPC applications and servers 'cause they work, and work well. I shudder at the thought of a computing cluster running Windows NT; it’s bad enough we have to run our CAD PDM server on a Windows box.
Yeah, I was referring to the fact that Mindfield had confused Linux with Unix and started talking as if Linux was an open source OS with a thirty plus year development history.
I’m well aware that many, many flavors of Unix are closed source, which is why the comment that they are ‘just as open source as Windows is’ (i.e. not at all).
I’ve been a *nix user for the last 13 years, and I’m well aware that it doesn’t come perfectly secure out of the box. You have to patch, patch, patch. Any admin who doesn’t keep up with that stuff is a shitty admin. Unix was mainly better in the patching arena because the developers seemed to get patches out in a more timely manner.
Amiga. 1985. Earlier if you want to count workstations/supercomputers.
I know you were being sarcastic, but two-button mice were around as early as 1973; you could find them attached to the Xerox PARC Alto workstation, along with such nifty innovations as Ethernet, graphical user environment (desktop, windows, icons, etc.), InterPress (the prototype to PostScript), the laser printer, and a few others interesting ideas.
Yes, sorry; I meant Unix. Linux was designed from the Unix concept, though (and shared much of its code initially) so it was already being built on a well-established foundation.
And yes, I know Unix was primarily closed-source, though there were half a million companies with their own flavours (Xenix, Minix, etc.) but admins could still program their own apps for it. With the release of Linux however it opened the doors for just about anyone to be able to develop apps for it – or even work on the kernal itself, thus giving it the kind of wide development and testing in the 15 years it’s been around for that Unix and its derivatives couldn’t even accomplish in its 30.
As for the “closed source” distributions with a price tag – that’s unsurprising. You’re not paying for the OS there, though; you’re paying for the particular distribution – complete with a custom installer package. There’s really not much difference between these and freely downloadable distros though; you can download equally robust, stable distros like Ubuntu, Mandrake or a host of others that give you more or less the same sort of things the commercial packages do.
And this says it all right here. snerk The really hard stuff needs a monetary reward or it don’t get done.
Also, we have the bad stuff because the bad guys are willing to work harder than the good guys.
Why can’t you guys make a perfectly secure system? Because you are lazy and greedy.
Wonder why we need a perfect system? It has been a long held opinion by the majority here on the SDMB that people are basically nice and good if we would just leave them alone. So why we got ‘script kiddies’?
Not necessarily. Virtually all of the modern encryption and security tools for *nix systems–like SSH, sudo, chroot, et cetera–were developed either in academia or by volunteer users and (originally) released as freeware. Much of the security of Mac OSX owes to the FreeBSD and OpenBSD developers, none of whom profit from their work, and indeed, Mac OSX’s underlying OS comes from a combination of FreeBSD utilities and the (free) Mach kernel; the only thing Apple did was create (or more correctly, hack) the OPENSTEP-like GUI framework and toolkits. Mac OSX is an example of a robust, yet transparent OS that is strengthened by encouraging challenges to its integrity.
Indeed, one may argue that Microsoft’s profit motive has lead them to try to obscure vulnerabilities as an attempt to bolster customer confidence, whereas the policy with Linux and the open source BSD “Unixes” has been “Break it and report back,” resulting in distribution that are robust and secure, and a tester/developer network that rapidly identifies and corrects vulnerabilities.
*nix admins tended to be technical minded anyway, which was sort of a requisite of being a *nix admin in the first place, and 2) *nix came with all the development tools you needed in the distro. Given 1), the presence of 2) meant more people would be inclined to make apps using them.
Neither Windows nor DOS came with development tools (neither GWBasic nor DOS Batch count) and neither OS attracted or required technical-types to operate.
GWBasic was strictly interpreted and its apps could only be run from within the GWBasic shell. I’m not sure if compilers were avaialble for it, but none came with DOS anyway so it’s a bit moot.
DOS Batch … well, that part’s fairly obvious. You couldn’t even do in DOS Batch half of what you could do in, say, tsch under *nix, and you wouldn’t use either to write any serious apps anyway.
Going back to the idea of Microsoft selling security products…
I was at a presentation recently. The room is filled with sysadmins and security professionals - everything from people running small businesses with 40 PCs on up to worldwide enterprises with over 100,000 PCs.
While the product was being described as something for corporate networks that would coordinate patches and virus defs, and use directory services to identify and quarantine non-compliant computers, pretty much everyone in the room thought it sounded great. The moment it was disclosed that Microsoft was behind it, giggling broke out and just about everyone withdrew their support for the idea.
Microsoft’s operating system is insecure by design. It’s more than promiscuous - it’s a slut that will welcome communication on any inbound port that’s not been actively closed by the administrator. Only two people in the room thought they’d have a chance of doing a decent job with this, and that’s mainly because they wrote the OS and know all of the secret hidey-holes.
Going with that car analogy someone had earlier, this is like GM selling cars where the wheels tend to fall off, then selling a service plan that tightens the lugnuts every month, and offers discounted towing if the wheels do fall off, rather than selling cars with lugnuts that stay on. They probably would not be allowed to profit from this design flaw for very long, so why is it OK for Microsoft to profit from a patch service?
