Subliminal Messages To Microsoft

a reuters article in salon states that business executives are criticizing the 'technology industry' for the lack of good security in their products. apparently, they're upset with the financial damage wrought by a recent string of nasty viruses. however, most of these security hazards cost the average mac-head or linux-geek nada because the vast majority of these costly security flaws have been found in windows software.

i should know. i have windows 98 SE. every time i give my computer its quarterly enema and re-install that old creaky OS, i have to download about sixty 'critical updates' from the microsoft website. note that i have the second edition of windows 98. the original win98 was so buggy that they actually had to re-release it. i suppose the last umpteeth million security patches didn't merit a third and fourth edition.

visual basic viruses abound. they range from mildly annoying such as the type that disables or hides menu options in microsoft office applications to the destructive type that can wipe out a corporate network's connectivity for hours.

at least xp has a built-in firewall. i have to download zone alarm and run it on my five-year-old win98/linux computer.

must. re-install. suse. linux.

i installed red hat a while back because i wanted to explore other flavors of linux after a pleasant six-month stint with suse. i just don't like red hat. in fact, since i installed it, i have not used my linux partition at all. prior to replacing suse with red hat, linux was my main OS. i used windows only for photoshop and microsoft office.

suse is a more programmer-oriented distro, but i found that it ran slowly on my 500 mhz machine, even with 256 megabytes of ram. the thing i dislike most about the gnome and kde desktop systems is that they eat ram on toast for breakfast. otherwise, they're a good step in the right direction.

the whole point of this long ramble is that the article elides the role of microsoft's market dominance in corporate network security problems. it's not a good idea to place all one's eggs in a single basket. i think a good trust busting is in order. we might not even need that. reverse engineering is slowly severing the ties between microsoft office and windows. the windows emulators are getting better by the day.

in the meantime, these dudes could use linux server software even if they want to keep windows on their desktop systems. it would help diversify their technological base so to speak.