Microsoft Suckiness (from: Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters)
http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/02/microsoft_sucki.html
An article title “Why Does Windows Still Suck?” recently appeared on SFGate, and thence on Slashdot.The title is a bit misleading; the events happened a year ago (before Windows XP SP2 shipped), and even then the author describes his SO’s computer as a “creaky Sony Vaio PC laptop”. So she was probably running — what — Windows 2000 or something? Well, no surprise there. The same thing happened to me when I put a Windows 2000 machine out on the wilds of the Internet. I had to do a clean install of XP SP2, but now the machine seems fine on the Internet. Buy Viagra now. Well, almost fine. No, really, I have not detected any spyware on the new system.
The article purports to be fair and balanced, but of course it isn’t. He uses an analogy with a car (common target of bad computer analogies): “Here is your brand new car, sir. Drive it off the lot. Yay yay new car. Suddenly, new car shuts off. New car barely starts again and then only goes about 6 miles per hour and it belches smoke and every warning light on the dashboard is blinking on and off and the tires are screaming and the heater is blasting your feet and something smells like burned hair. You hobble back to the dealer, who only says, gosh, sorry, we thought you knew — that’s they way they all run. Enjoy!”
Of course it’s not like that. As he said, the computer worked fine before she put it on the Internet. It’s more like, you get a brand new car. Works great. Then you take it to a war zone and drive down the middle of the street. The tires get punctured, the windshield cracks, the engine explodes. Yes, the car stops working.
Sure, Microsoft continued to sell convertibles when it should have been selling up-armored Humvees, but the fact is it really is a war zone out there. But the article glosses over the real question, which do Macintoshes have thicker steel, or do they (for whatever reason) have virtual red crosses painted on them? The article states: “And I know, finally, the argument that says that if the world was using Macs instead of PCs, the hackers would be attacking the Macs…Which is, of course, mostly bull. I’m no programmer, but I know what I read, and I know my experience: the Mac OS architecture is much more robust, much more solid, much more difficult to hack into. Apple’s software is, by default, more sound and reliable, given its more stable core.” Since I worked on the Windows core I am pretty confident that it is just as reliable and stable as Mac OS X; the vulnerabilities you see exploited are mostly not in the Windows core, and if they are, they are not due to any fundamental issue with the architecture of Windows, but are just plain bugs.
As the author says, he has no way of knowing this; his end-user experience can’t really give him direct insight into the architecture of the OS, only empirical evidence. At its heart, his argument is circular; the Mac has fewer attacks because it is more robust, and the proof of its robustness is that it has fewer attacks. It reminds me of the special shoes I wear, the ones that keep crocodiles away.