On Sat, 2002-07-27 at 10:41, Daniel Churchill wrote: > I guess it was obvious that this is how this thread would end up after the > first post. Still, I am disappointed and disgusted by the fact that it > actually dipped to the low of one person calling the other a dumb ass, > followed by someone else showing enthusiastic support for it. > > For the record, I thought that Ryan brought up some valid points. It's > obvious though, that too many of the people on this list are too far gone > to acknowledge them. > > What Linux users fail to acknowledge in too many cases is that part of the > reason Microsoft products "cause" such problems is a result of the product > being designed for _users_ who *don't* "worry about administering their > own boxes". But, of course, somebody has to, which is why the popularity of pre-installed systems and restore disks. While, in theory, various forms of Windows can easily be installed in a wide variety of systems, there's often some hardware issue that needs to be tweaked, and the manufacturers get around that by tweaking once, and deploying many times. > If they weren't so popular in the first place, there wouldn't > be so many people trying to maliciously target them. True. To further that > logic, if a comparable Unix app was to replace a Windows app at that level > of popularity (and thus scrutiny), it would likely have just as many > errors, just as many exploits. Nah. Exploits are proportional both to the attention given and the vulnerability, not just the attention. Why are the mistakes made by Linux > developers any less severe? Mostly because there aren't as many clueless > users to propagate the exploits. And because of the large open source community, portions of which spend a lot of time finding exploits, and a mechanism for distributing both the nature of the problems and fixes very quickly.