Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 22:03:01 -0400
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>, WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Spam filtering (was Re: Capclave)
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

At 08:26 PM 10/11/2005 -0400, Steve Smith wrote:
>Ted White wrote:
>> Mike B. wrote:
>
>>> Mac and Linux viruses aren't unknown...but they are far less common
>>> than on Windows, which, if it was a public facility would have been
>>> closed by the department of health long ago.
>
>> And if either Mac's OS or Linux was the dominant OS around the world,
>> *that's* where the viruses would be.  It has nothing to do the the OS's
>> intrinsic merits (or lack thereof) and everything to do with which OS is
>> most widely used.
>
>Not completely.  While it's possible to trick a user into running a
>program on any system, Mac and Linux/Unix are far better at limiting the
>damage it can do.
>
>Also, Microsoft has made an incredible series of bad design decisions
>that show that they simply don't understand the basic concepts of
>computer security.

I replied to Ted off-list.  Thanks for saying much the same thing on-list.
;-)

I'm not sure the problem is that they don't understand computer security so
much as they just don't care about it...at least not when it gets in the
way of some new feature they want to blab about in their marketing
collateral.  The problems they create for their customers are irrelevant to
them.  What choice do people have after all?  Well, the choices are
shifting...in large part as a response to the attitudes of MicroSoft.

There are others who don't seem to get it too...have you noticed that the
seti at home folks have gone to BOINC?  The idea that they can send you
software updates whenever they like and have them install and run
automatically with no work on your part sounds wonderful to anyone who is
only looking at what it lets them do...and not at what it lets *others* do...

I'm still running seti at home classic for that reason, and won't be changing
to BOINC.  If they stop accepting stuff from the classic users, I'll drop
out and do something else with the spare cycles.  They've already removed
enough support for classic to take away most of the fun, so I'm mostly just
running on momentum now (16,648 work units so far).

-- Mike B.
--
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| what you thought you read.  Statistics show that this whole thing is more |
| than likely just a hideous misunderstanding.                              |
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