Worm attack forces Reuters IM offline

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So, you relate?

I "seldom have to boot my Windows boxes", either. Unless I install something --- like software But by comparison, my *Nix boxes are "rocks"...I do have months upon months of uptime on most of them. And, I could count on my digital appendages the number of times I've "cold booted" a 'Nix system *in my life*, and it would be about equal to the number of times I've "cold booted" Windows systems in the past 4 days. A necessary quid pro quo would be that I mostly see Windows systems for repair, but do you remember that TV commercial about the Maytag repairman, and why he wasn't busy?

Furthermore, I didn't call the "general public who uses Windows" morons. I pointed out, as an aside, the fact that morons can exist on either of two operating systems, specifically Microsoft's Windows and Red Hat Linux; I could have also listed any number of Linux distributions, Solaris, Minix, IRIX, BeOS, Amiga, and maybe even the BSD family, although generally the morons over there are only the ones who think that FreeBSD runs under the Win32 API has an "uninstall.exe"; I don't think OpenBSD has any morons at all :-D

There are two facts that bear on the issue: 1] You have to be either inebriated, pretty naive, quite distracted or quite dumb to click on such a link and install this malware on your own system, and 2] even if you click on such a link, unless you're running Microsoft's Windows operating system, you *won't* be infected.

Therefore, the only people who can get the bug are, loosely, "morons who use Windows." You state the you use Windows --- did I hit a nerve with the other thing, too?

"Look, until you provide everything on other OS's that MS developers do for Windows products stop complaining."

What am I complaining about? I made an observation. Ah, this, perhaps? "Windoze, however, *creates* morons from otherwise rational, thinking, human beings...."

I think I'll stand by that statement. There are many Windows users who have a pretty good idea of how to keep, more or less, out of trouble. But there are many, many more who think that it should "just work" because Microsoft tells them so.

I wouldn't mind to spend time porting software or adding features to some already very good Open Source programs, but I have to spend too much of my time supporting fairly clueless Windows users, most of whom have infestations of malware that hamper their (ease of?) use of what is a rather poor OS (performance-wise) in the first place. I will give Microsoft credit for this: if they hadn't made Windows so error-prone and insecure by default, I'd probably be out of a job....

Posted by: dalecosp   Posted on: 04/15/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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