Up and at ‘em

More on the theme of operating systems.

I have been downloading patches and upgrades for the windows vista operating system for nearly three days now.  Now, some will think that this proves that windows is a sucky operating system.  That might be true.

But consider another way of looking at it.  Vista has been out in the wild for at least five years now and has been attacked daily by script kiddies, Russian hacker rings, the Chinese government, the NSA, and probably its competitors.  They live in a very rough neighborhood and their neighbors are nasty.  They have been improving the defenses on this thing steadily for over five years.  What does that have to say?

Apple is a cute computer.  But they have spent so much time and money on the idea of being cuddly that the bad folks seem to give them a free pass.  I wonder how they would fare if all the sudden the ecosystem of hackers and folks who make a hobby out of tearing down microsoft were to turn on them?  I have a feeling that the saintly apple reputation would start to tarnish pretty quickly.

Linux and BSD may very will be more secure and a better system (and always remember OSX is a pretty set of pictures plastered over BSD), but now one has went after these systems with the savagery reserved for microsoft windows.

How you get your computer to do the things you want to do is really a pretty trivial part of your life.  Folks who obsess over their choice of operating systems and somehow derive feelings of self worth from the vagaries of this choice may want to think about the grand scheme of things and what constitutes a useful system.  There appears to be more than one way of looking at these things