It is karmawhoring because Firefox is a far bigger problem these days than IE10 / 11 / soon-to-be-12, and at the moment the single biggest security vulnerability out there is a FOSS one.

Arguing that Microsoft is "bad" because theyre not FOSS (which is really what you are driving at) is irrelevant. Everyone knows they ship proprietary software, but that has no relevance either to this story or to the quality of their code. As we've seen, OpenSSL has a bug that has been hemorrhaging private keys and passwords for days while the closed-source Schannel has not seen such a bug.

Ideological spiels about how Windows sucks simply because its proprietary are really getting kind of old. If you dont like closed-source software, dont use it, but dont pretend that the license has an impact on code quality; there are a number of FOSS vs proprietary examples where FOSS is horribly deficient.

Thats from a blogger who very clearly is attempting to paint this as negatively as possible. Generally I prefer facts, not hysterical opinion.

Microsoft's official statement was that you must install a certain update in order to get further updates. Im sure I could find examples of that in all OSes; dependencies are nothing new.

Generally Windows bugs get patched fairly quickly. Obviously there are outliers. Making the claim that Windows or IE in particular are security nightmares is karmawhoring, becuase its generally not accurate; Internet Explorer 11 for example is generally considered more secure than firefox which is currently a bit of a problem child. How long did it take them to get TLS 1.2 implemented? And they still dont have the browser sandboxed?

They are the only big-name vendor who was supporting a 12-year old OS until a week ago. RHEL just a few years ago committed to supporting RHEL 5(?) for 13 years, which matches Microsoft's commitment to Windows 7 (both 2007-2020). The thing is, you can still call MS and get them to support XP if you beg with enough money. Good luck calling RedHat and getting them to support RedHat Linux 7 (not the enterprise one, the 2002 one).

This whole thread is absurd, as are all the people jumping on the "bash MS" bandwagon.

  * Microsoft will continue to support 8.1, and everyone here KNOWS that.
  * Everyone knows that because Microsoft has a bigger problem with having to support old platforms than any other vendor out there. Many posters here generally know this, too, but are being obtuse so that they can harp about Microsoft ending support for a new platform (which isnt even remotely believable).
  * The author of the blog even knows that! The Microsoft technet entry says almost the opposite of what the blogger does-- that 8.1 WILL recieve updates. All he got right is that you do need to install a prereq to get them, like we've seen with countless other OSes. The venerable XP does this, too.
  * Half the people gloating over the "bugginess of Windows" are fans of an OS that is experiencing one of the biggest internet vulnerabilties in about a decade in its SSL stack, but thats OK in their eyes somehow because its not packaged with the OS and therefore theyre allowed to be buggy.
  * Some people are taking the time to smirk about the confusing version numbering of Win8-- which is doubly hillarious given how ridiculous Linux's versioning was until about a year ago.
  * And if I had to guess, the aforementioned problems could possibly be related to the aforementioned heartbleed bug, as we dont know what all was leaked and Microsoft is almost certainly not going to want to go into it.

But yea, dont let that stop the fun.

They should have gone with something more meaningful, like 8.6.31-11, and perhaps 8.4.x for the old version of the OS.

How long did it take Ubuntu 12.10 to fix their "installing this OS bricks E1000 adapters" bug?

Anyone claiming Linux doesnt have these sorts of issues is full of shit.

Going off on the Windows OS codebase and license in a heartbleed discussion? No personal vendetta detected here, no sir.

Seriously, a discussion on how FOSS dropped the ball so seriously that private keys are being disclosed is not the time to bring up complaints about Windows.

Its not, because some of the areas on the lawn are only hit during the turn-around. And with a circular pattern, you will HAVE to travel over-top of already-done areas in order to hit the corners of the circular path.

Trying to use a circular path to fill in a rectangular area will by necessity involve hitting areas more than once, or going outside of the rectangle.

Thats not correct. Correlation is a prerequisite for causation, but it is not indicative. That is: all things that are causally linked are correlated, but not all events that are correlated are necessarily causally linked.

It always gives me chills when someone jokes about something like this: Someone out there (probably lots of someones) thinks that would be a great thing to do for the betterment of humanity. Theres probably a number of them here on slashdot, even.

Im pretty sure that
A) he did name those subcultures
B) you know exactly what hes talking about
C) you didnt read his post all the way through.

Because it can massively slow down access to SSL sites.

I think the technical term for his post is "troll". That is, you've been trolled.

How do you know its your bank's public key and not someone elses?

Thats the ENTIRE problem that CAs attempt to solve.