Why Longhorn matters

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Nice post

Really? I think virus/trojan/worm/malware authors would severely disagree. Did the Sasser worm have any legs to stand on? ;-)

I used my words very carefully and I stand by them:
so real security is attainable with XP
It doesn't come out of the box very secure but at least good security is attainable with XP. If you follow good security practices that are common to all OSs (use a firewall, don't run as admin, turn off unecessary services, tweak default file permissions, turn on software restriction policies if necessary, and, most important of all, DON'T USE IE!!) then XP is very secure.

I also said:
Those who whine about "fundamental security flaws"
and again, I used my words carefully. As I mentioned above, XP doesn't come secure out of the box but this is a defaults problem, not a "fundamental security" flaw. If I created a distro of Linux that didn't prompt you to create a user but instead logged you on as root by default and left it up to you to create your own restricted user accounts, would you say that suddenly Linux was fundamentally flawed? If I created a distro where by default, all files were created with a+rwx, would you say that Linux was suddenly fundamentally flawed? Of course not, it just means that I created a distro with some really poor defaults.

XP has lousy defaults which has created some very lazy third party software writers but considering that I've been running for well over a year with my day to day account in the Users group only, I don't think the situation is as bad as some make it out to be.

If we could get a truly accurate accounting of how many copies of XP were sold not pre-loaded on machines, I think it would be a surprisingly dismal number compared to how it was anticipated to sell.

I wonder though what percentage of Macs owners will buy Tiger in the store? I suspect that most home users who are happy with the OS that came with their machine probably won't fork out $100 to upgrade so does that mean that Tiger will be a flop? I don't think so and I think the same reasoning could be applied to XP sales. The geeks will all upgrade because we have to run the latest version but across OSX and Windows, we are a tiny minority. I suspect that in 6 months, the largest % of people running Tiger will simply have gotten it with their new Macs. If anything, all this means is that people were mostly happy with 98 and OSX 10.3.

Posted by: NonZealot   Posted on: 04/22/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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