Is this slashdot or Classiccmp? Re: Microsoft bashing

Perhaps not, but the zeal borders on religious - and equally without factual basis. (No disrespect to any religion: the fundamental premise of any religion with which I'm familiar is faith, i.e. belief in that which is not proven.) Fact: CERT reports just about as many exploits for Linux-derived systems as Windows (at least, that was the data I researched back when I was in grad school three or four years ago). There is a lot of argument (again, mostly rather zealous) about which OS has the more "serious" vulnerabilities, but in any event they ARE flaws. Fact: The most commonly seen causation for crashes in either Windows or Linux-derived operating systems is defective device drivers. Interestingly, the two operating systems approach this differently. Windows preemptively crashes: the logic is to return the machine to a known state. Linux tries to keep going, which may result in an inexplicable error later on. One can argue the merits of either approach, and I'm sure many do. Fact: I have a large box filled with 'Software Revision' release publications for RSX-11. (Hey look, I got it back to vintage systems!) Microsoft is not the first operating system vendor to issue patches and patches to patches and.... I'm not sure why it seems more "egregious" with one vendor than another - except that there is a tendency to bash "corporations", despite the fact that the majority of corporations are small, privately held companies.

These days, I've been spending a lot of my time on VMS on a VAX-11/780-5, using CMUIP as the networking layer. THAT will give you a sense of perspective. Hey, backups are done - I need to go finish reassembling this TU56 for a PDP-8/e.... -- Ian