Absolutely not a joke.

[Ray Dillinger]

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 at 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