On Tue, 30 Jan 2001, Me wrote:
Of course it will be faster and more stable, he will never run a single program on it.
I'm sure your message was a joke, but, he won't get it and everyone else first heard it years ago.
Not a joke: I was dead serious. Windows/Outlook is the preferred platform for viruses. If he wants to run a virus free system, he should get a system that is not the preferred platform for viruses. Windows is also built to be insecure; there are backdoor keys for law-enforcement types to stick "trusted" trojans on the system, broken security programs that leave unencrypted temp files lying around, "encrypted" systems that just XOR the plaintext with a short repeating key, etc ad nauseam. And this is just the stuff that auditors have been able to find without recourse to source code. If you want secure systems, get a system that you can read the source code for and *see* what the hell is going on -- or *fix* it if you find something broken. Finally, it's really nice to have a comprehensive system of permissions, etc -- that way some idiot running zork can't trash out anything that the system actually depends on, even if he runs a virus-infected zork. And let's not forget the "autoregister" feature in Whistler. Isn't it nice that I'll be able to upgrade hardware without buying a new operating system?
Also, if you are running W2K and are suffering regular crashes the problem is operator error, not Windows.
bear@bolt~>uptime 11:27am up 46 days, 21:30, 76 users, load average: 0.31, 0.28, 0.16 <<
The last downtime, a month and a half ago, was for a hard drive upgrade. The one before that was four months prior, and that was for physically relocating the machine. I don't even remember the last time it crashed; I don't think it ever has in the five years I've been using it. Bear