Vista Post-SP2 Is the Safest OS On the Planet 1010
pkluss noted Kevin Turner, COO of Microsoft making the proclamation that "Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we've ever built. It's also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It's the safest and most secure OS on the planet today."
what? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we've ever built. It's also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It's the safest and most secure OS on the planet today."
See any serious problems with this story?
Do I see any serious problems with this story? Uh, yeah, maybe one or two...
I'm not sure why this is news - MS says this about every OS release they put out...
Aahh I Needed a Laugh (Score:3, Interesting)
See a problem? Check Vista SP2's release date (Score:5, Interesting)
"Do I see any serious problems with this story? Uh, yeah, maybe one or two..."
How about the fact tha Vista SP2 is not "in the marketplace" at all.
It hasn't been released yet and is still an RC candidate [windowsteamblog.com]in beta testing!
If Microsoft wants to compare imaginary not yet released software to actual software, I set let them and Google play games with beta releases. The rest of us have actual work to do.
Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, MS Press Releases... (Score:0, Interesting)
I've stopped listening to anything Microsoft, Steve Balmer, or Bill Gates says (not to mention MSNBC, Fox/Faux News, etc.)
Too many half truths, lies, blatant lies, and pure crap has lost them any credibility with me. I rely on opinions from people I trust.
Call "shenanigans" on everything MS releases and maybe, just maybe, they will eventually start to tell the truth.
Or they will just go on they way they always have...
Re:I have a feeling.... (Score:5, Interesting)
And XP is slower than 2k.
And 2k is slower than NT4.
More functionality means less performance. Doesn't matter much. Vista on my i7 is still faster than XP on my old 4 year old Athlon machine.
For a home user, there are currently few advantages in using Vista, even though there are many under-the-hood optimizations that may help them.
As such, i would not recommend a home user to go through the effort of upgrading his existing machine to Vista. At this time, that machine is likely to be over 2 years old.
However, when deciding to buy a new machine, why use an 8-9 year old operating system? There is no reason for a home user to not use Vista on a new machine.
Re:That's great... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes.
Windows Vista has many features that utilize RAM to its fullest extent. Any free RAM on my system is RAM that is sitting on its lazy ass doing nothing. Windows Vista is actually smart enough to user it (Super Prefetch comes to mind) when my applications are not.
And what happens is that it determines that it wants to swap my actual program memory to disk to make room for these advanced features? And those features may save me 10 minutes a day, but they are 10 minutes I didn't know I was missing. But I notice the 10 seconds longer it takes switching between programs because my open programs have been moved to the slow disk and out of the fast RAM. I'd rather they don't touch them and waste my time, than think for me and get it wrong in a way that causes me trouble. It's an open program. There's available RAM. Don't touch my open programs, even if I haven't used them in 18 hours. (yes, if you leave a distro downloading over bittorrent overnight, you'll find that other programs will be swapped to the disk, and the open programs will take much longer to run in the morning)
Re:is the safest, most reliable OS we've ever buil (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, together Debian Ubuntu and Red Hat probably compromise the majority of Linux installs these days. If two large and well respected distros can fail in such basic ways, then it's reasonable to extrapolate that smaller and presumably less professional outfits will be even more flaky. Of course you can always find some Linux distro that has a perfect track record, but like I said above, usage counts. At some point if you want the word "Linux" to be meaningful you have to start talking about the bits actually in circulation.
Testing isn't security (Score:4, Interesting)
Security has to be designed in.
When Microsoft deployed ActiveX installation and launch over HTTP and email with Active Desktop in 1997 they made Windows inherently insecure in a way that nobody had ever imagined anyone would be stupid enought to do. In fact it used to be a joke, the "Good Times" virus... a virus so effective it would run without you even opening the email message it was contained in. EVERYONE knew it was a joke, because EVERYONE knew nobody would be so stupid as to deliberately allow untrusted content to automatically run.
Nobody but Microsoft was that stupid, anyway.
Jesus Christ, man, the fundamental desing of Internet Explorer is so f-ing bad that over 10 years later I am STILL aghast that ANYONE would defend it, or any OS that depends on it. What the HELL are you smoking? DO you honestly not understand just how amazingly stupid this is? Honestly? By the bowels of Christ, consider that you might be mistaken.
Re:The winner of Pwn2Own seems to agree (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The winner of Pwn2Own seems to agree (Score:3, Interesting)
How about you read the link and then post again?
Charlie (the winner) says due to ASLR and NX, no one knows how to inject code into a Vista SP1 machine. That seems pretty good to me.
If you take his comment "safest OS" (not most secure) as an absolute, he's surely wrong. But the most secure OS is also probably not nearly as useful for getting actual work done as many other OSes that present a compromise, like various forms of Linux or Vista.
Re:That's great... (Score:3, Interesting)
You are all loving superfetch.
That's not the problem.
NT/XP/Vista and presumably Win7 all have brain-dead paging algorithms which favor i/o buffering way too much over user code and data.
Open up a big app. Do a ton of sequential i/o - windows will page out most of that app in order to buffer up that sequential data which is never touched again. Switch back to that app and wait ages for it to page back in.
Do the same under linux and the memory manager is smart enough to recognize that sequential i/o should not cause buffercache to consume as much physical ram as possible.
That's why windows's memory management sucks ass and linux's doesn't.
...with the most dangerous community imaginable (Score:3, Interesting)
This really a rather complex statement. While it's true that no other consumer desktop operating system has quite the level of security and anti-exploit code, etc... Linux and Mac simply exist in a safer world. Perhaps one of the safest aspects of a linux system is that you're almost always running trusted code from a verified repository. This means that you really don't have to test the mettle of a linux installation (and thank god you don't) besides the fact that the level of incompatibility between linux systems provides a level of security through obscurity. Now, common images such as OpenWRT or (eventually) default Ubuntu installs may eventually be targeted, but right now they're simply not.
If someone is trying to take over your machine remotely, you're probably better off with Vista. If you're an idiot, you're probably better off with linux, where it's more difficult to shoot yourself in the foot by running insecure code as administrator.
From the results of the recent pwn2own competitions, I would say that Apple is going to eat a lot of security crow as they get just a tad bit more popular. I think Mac OS X will prove to be comically insecure when people start attacking it.
Re:I have a feeling.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Meaningless Anecdote 1: One of my colleagues went to upgrade to VISTA a few days back. I'm only surprised it took him so long, as he has been dutifully following the MS upgrade treadmill since before WIN95, a Windows-lover's Windows-lover. VISTA refused to install on a 2.2GHz AMD64 with 2GB RAM. He is such a happy camper he started asking me about Linux. He is also tired of viruses, spyware worms etc. I burned the 5.3 LiveDVD of Scientific Linux for him, so he can see if he likes it and wants to install it.
Meaningless Anecdote 2 I installed Zenwalk Linux on my 79 year old Mom's compromised (by malware) XP computer two weeks ago. She does have an occasional question, however, she's enjoying the use of her computer again.
Have a nice day.
Re:The problematic truth (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd be really curious to see some actual statistics re: downgrading. I doubt it'd be as high as Slashdot seems to think.
Linux and Vista in same sentence (Score:2, Interesting)
"Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we've ever built. It's also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It's the safest and most secure OS on the planet today."
All of the MS bashing is missing the real point here. Kevin Turner, COO of Microsoft compared Vista to Linux.
Do I need to spell that out? If the OP is accurate, an executive officer of Microsoft, the largest software company around, and one of the richest companies in the world is worried enough about competition from Linux to make comparisons with their flagship OS.
He didn't mention BSD, right? Didn't mention SunOS. Or Unix. Or OS/2. Or OS9 (personal fave). Or any one of three dozen other smaller OSes. But he did mention Linux. This isn't some marketing drone. This isn't a throwaway statement from a salesman. This is the Chief Operating Officer. This is a Big Deal. No, strike that, this is a Huge Deal.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Linux has arrived. It is on the big stage now. Let's not blow it.
Re:I have a feeling.... (Score:3, Interesting)
In the case of most hardware under Linux, it's the Linux community supporting the harder, making the community responsible for crappy drivers.
You neglect to take into consideration crappy drivers that are crappy because the manufacturer has not released any information OR drivers for their product (for a particular platform), and the community has had to make do with whatever information they could glean from the hardware. eg. as used to be the case for many video drivers under Linux - the video card makers would provide minimal, if any, information about various low level hardware details for fear of providing dome edge to their competition. This meant the community had to basically reverse engineer a lot of the workings of the card instead of being able to just write a driver according to proper hardware and firmware specs.
I would argue that in this case, although the poorly performing driver may have been written by the community, it is still largely the fault of the hardware company that the drivers do not work as well could be wished, because the hardware company refused to release data about the hardware that would make it possible to write more stable drivers.
Re:I have a feeling.... (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't want to hear any whiny "oh they didn't give us an documentation" bullshit, because it's just that: BULLSHIT. They are under no obligation to support Linux. If they don't believe supporting Linux would be worth the investment, they don't have to. Likewise, they are under no obligation to release the documentation. Most corporations would such documentation as something that could potentially help their competitors, should they get their hands on it.
Simply put, any given company has ZERO obligation to make their product what YOU want it to be; their only obligation is to make the product what they CLAIM it to be. If you feel otherwise, it's because you have some sort of misplaced sense of entitlement.
Re:That's great... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I have a feeling.... (Score:2, Interesting)
So, by your logic, Linux sucks since the shitty wifi drivers crash my year old Toshiba laptop. Because users shouldn't have to care who writes the drivers.
I'm responsible for about 2 dozen linux machines, and a dozen windows machines (7 servers, a couple of laptops and three desktops). The windows machines give me less trouble. None are trouble free. I've had more driver/device issues with Linux than with windows over several versions of each.
2008 (Score:4, Interesting)
So they're saying that their client OS vista is more secure than windows 2008?
Re:I have a feeling.... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're talking about desktop usage, I just did some back of the envelope calculations and I think you're right as far as current userbase goes. If you're talking about everyone who has ever touched linux, however, I think you'd be pretty wrong.
I came up with:
42,000,000 Vista downgrades in 2008 based on
this http://www.crn.com/software/207402009
and this
and 15,000,000 linux users based on
this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems [wikipedia.org]
and this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems [wikipedia.org]>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems
Now, I'm sure I'm wildly off the mark and someone can do better than I did. Regardless, that's depressing.