[Mainly offtopic] Jeremy Buchmann said:
I don't understand this weird uber-advocacy stance that says we have to convert every single Windows user to Linux and make Linux the one and only operating system on earth. It's completely irrational and goes against the very idea of having a choice of computer operating systems.
While I agree with you that blind advocacy is a stupid thing, I must say that more people using Linux and seeing it as a viable alternative to Windows could well make a difference for many of us: my work is maintaining a network of about 100 client PC, and as of today linux could be used to do a good 95% of all we need to do with these computer. But we have to use Windows, mainly for Office and for easy interoperability with "external" software and software houses (accounting, payrolls, etc are windows only, or at best unix-but-not-linux). If Linux will become (still) easier to use - and it's becoming more and more so - there'll be many more people and software house that will be accepting it, using it and developing for it. And I could use linux instead of Windows on a good 95% of my PCs. Doing this is not only better for me (easier administration) but also for the company I work for, that will be able to save millions in stupid licenses and associated management/"ownership" costs (did you ever try the new Windows 2000 Terminal Server License? ;) Moreover, if you're not a US citizen, maybe you could like (as I do) not having your country dumping lotsa money on the US paying for insecure, disfunctional and often plain stupid software (PLEASE flame me on private mail and not on the list, thanks! ;-) This goes without speaking of security risks (wow! back on topic! ;): we may put up very aggressive firewalls using Linux (see active probing of incoming attacks and maybe active defenses ;) but we have to accept mails and documents from the internet, and if you're using ANY mail program that uses IE HTML rendering object, or Office, you're exposing yourself to *A LOT* of threats. I follow NTBUGTRAQ to stay ahead of these problems, and I often found myself thanking the gods we don't use dangerous mail programs. But MANY times there were series of so many horrible bugs in only a few days that I was *praying* noone will want to use the combination of those to write a nasty stealth virus, or else we'll all close shop in a few months. And we cannot set up a mailfilter to check for buffer overflows and/or the use of badly signed/catalogued objects that already are on our computers. And I wouldn't put my faith in Antivirus firms either: if the exploit writer is smart and stealthy enough, they'll never see the virus before activation. Remember the CIH virus? It was very stealthy, and was caught only because a version of it was programmed to wipe your disks (and BIOSes) every month instead of every year. What if the monthly version of the virus didn't exist? Even with that and the antiviruses ready in August 1998, more than 300.000 were wiped out. This is not to say that Linux is absolutely secure and doesn't have these kinds of problems, but it *can* be more secure if we care. With windows we don't have the opition (try using tripwire on %SYSTEMROOT%\SYSTEM32 ;-). Moreover, I firmly believe that diversity is strenght, and having different people, companies, governments etc. of the world using different but faily interoperable OSes and programs will avoid having a single virus wiping out us all. Ciao, Roberto (and sorry for the rant! :-)