Criticize MS this time as a stockholder and they mod you down.

Do you ever get the sense that there's a population of MS boosters who are here semi-officially ready to pounce on anyone who doesn't tow the MS party line?

Apple's history of switching CPUs is as old as Apple. First was the 6502 then the Moto 68000 series then the PPC and now Intel. Seems like it's not such a leap after all and isn't it really what we've been asking for for 2 decades? To build & sell a PC where the internals don't matter to us.

It's one thing to query results it's quite another to query searches for results. You would be in effect enlarging the child pornography statute to include looking for child porn.

And let me add - fuck slashdot and the posers who run it. Fuck them all to death.

Feel free to post this in the appropriate Nash interview thread. I forget sometimes that I'm persona non grata here at Anime/LotR/Nerd Porn Central.

Without saying 'everything' what are the actual ranked or prioritized security issues at MS for Windows?

DRM?
Spyware?
Integrating tools that already exist into the MS sphere?
Patch management?
Time -to -fix cycles?
Better security architecture?
Other?

Note: since I've been targetted by /. modbombers for banning and day by day my karma is being synthetically erased, I've decided to post everything here in duplicate as long as I'm permitted to post. When I'm no longer permitted to post then everything will go here. Until of course, /. admins decide to ban my IP outright. This has already happened to one of the places I commonly post from, but only after I complained to /. admins about being attacked here. That ID that I complained to them, from, has been banned permanently. Word to the wise: /. is rapidly turning into the darkest version of everything they claimed to hate.

I get regular security vulnerability email alerts all the time. Just today there was a long list of potential problems with 10 different flavors of Linux, HP-UX, Cisco, OS/400, Z/OS and of course Windows.

Now the issue is, how bad is that? And the other question is what is the cost - benefit of fixing it?

Many of the vulnerabilities in the alert I alluded have the potential to be serious enough to warrant your attention but this assumes that you already have NOTHING in place to protect yourself, that you've effectively not implemented any security infratrature whatsoever. The probability of this is quite low.

But - and this is the big issue with Windows, your exposures surface out of EVERY SINGLE ordinary everyday common task you employ the machine to do. It would be as if every Cisco vulnerability surfaced specifically and only when it routed packets and only because it routed packets.

Therein lies the difference.

In the Mac world, no one is seriously suggesting that their BSD based OS is defacto immune from problems. What they're arguing convincingly is that those problems when they arise will arise out of non common tasks and obscure problems that typically stem from operating your machines in a very nonstandard way to begin with. For instance the ordinary Mac user could, if they were motivated, run as root all day everyday. But why would they? That's a nonstandard operation mode. Moreover the common problems you do see in the Mac world won't ordinarily occur because of executing common tasks that ordinary users employ their machines to do. You won't see many vulnerabilities exploited the same way that simply using AOLIM or Limewire or reading a rich email or any of the other innumerable problems in Windows stems from.

My email alerter shows my last post was modded 8 times up and 8 times down. /. continues to be the nerds revenge for the cool table in the lunchroom in highschool. What they fail to appreciate is that social maladaption is social maladaption.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=173869&cid=14464389

Seriously it's a statement of fact based on real world experience.

I honestly think that /. is quickly killing itself.

if I'm ever able to post and mod again I'll randomly single out specific posters and mod them down as much as I can. I really want to share the wealth here at slashfuck.

I have been banned for the second time in 10 days. Apparentlt at this point no matter what, if anyone mods any post I've ever made I risk being banned again. There is no way to wipe the slate clean after being repeatedly banned. So fuck /. and circle jerk of anime wannabes that run it.

See this is exactly my point. /. has a secret modding scheme that will punish you if you don't plod along with their normal bovine groupthink. Got banned for weeks over something I never knew and the first post back when I comment on it it's back to being downmodded. This to me is the beginning of the end of /. Pretty much it's all about anime, sci fi movies and Libertarian bullshit. If you're not down with that or, perish the fucking thought, express an opinion you might actually have a knowledgeable background in, if it's not part of the official /. checklist-o-thoughts, you get punished. And it's in a very capricious way.