I wish I didn't comment already so I could have modded you up. I had a feeling some evanglists would use this as a shiny model of the evils of MS and capitalist made operating systems.

You can't argue with a crazy man. If you discredit your colleagues before even replying with a general statement like what Kevin did then it gives the crazy guy a mental excuse to discredit whatever you or I say. You can't win as any argument you make will be a personal attack back.

Or he is a troll and is laughing right now.

I used to be such a Linux guy myself in my youth, but I at least understood non technical people have no reason to leave as soon as XP came since it is fairly stable by design.

Go ask slashdotter Hairyfeet how many Linux boxes you sells at his shop? Lol. The calls of where the fuck is the start menu? To an update breaking X. To why can't I run MS Office cdrom all ring a bell to most users. Even with knowledge I turn the tables and ask what can Linux do that Windows 7 can't on a desktop or workstation? I can't think of anything other than some rare tools. The same can't be said vice versa.

MS ecosystems are sold as a great advantage too for the corporate folks as it makes sure things like MS excel, MS Access, and MS SQL Server all talk to each other with MS Visual Studio for cheap development. I do not want to go all 100% proprietary to not be trapped, but for many corps who are already MS shops this makes sense. They prefer Windows even if the software is available for Linux and MacOSX as evident as only a few offices use Macs even if all they need is Office.

Why don't you read that article?

The trojan installs itself through backdoors by visiting a website. Not by a user clicking on anything. That shows an exploit in Linux.

Right I chose the best hardware for the price so I can run VMWare Workstation makes me incompetent.

I run VMWare Workstation and got a nice 6 core cpu with full hardware virtualization that was not crippled in the bios for $599. Nvidia crap has made unstable products in the past and I found my ATI hardware very good quality all for $599. The intel ones would have cost $300 more at least when you combine a chipset that doesn't disable hyperthreading and virtualization and a bigger PSU and only would have had 4 cores!

The fact that Linux lacks a stable ABI which means drivers wont work after a freaking kernel recompile show that Linux is incompetent and I would be equally incompetent to throw money away to use the Intel/Nvidia branded hardware. Every other OS in the world has this but the GNU purists actually think hardware makers can opensource their drivers when IP agreements with patents prohibit them! So its CentOS or SuSE Enterprise only for semi stable work.

It is wonderful to have a stable crash free os like Windows 7 that also runs office and all my games. I guess that makes me incompetent too to use an OS that meets my needs right? You know my wife used to say the same about Linux as I had to use wine and sometimes struggle to join her in Wow and Vent when her Vista machine just worked! I left Linux after gnome shell 3 and after I got my AMD system with Windows 7. I found no reason to hate Windows other than the gui is not as customizable.

You are a fanboy with no basis in reality. FYI I run Linux on my VMs and used Unix since 1999 and I am not a paid shill. I refuse to blindly follow one religion in the OS/browser wars so I do not appear like an ass.

Also the accounting guy is not corner case. Every profession out there has their apps if it is white collar. Sales would be the only exception I can think of, but even they need to trade files with customers in MS ecosystems and a margin error in a file can cost a sale worth millions of dollars!

You are aware that something insane like 1/7th of the worlds money is on these systems right? Not 1929 at all.

Theoretical logic error where a less than instead of a less than or equal too is in one of these HTC systems.

Lets say this is a big one with trillions and trillions to use like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs. I dated a woman who used to work for BOA and she told me the books have 40 trillion in assets that are processed nightly on their computers. The US GDP is only $14 trillion for the record on how big of anumber this is. Mainly inflated home values spiked this as they assets were really liabilities when the housing market crashed.

Now lets say in 1/10000th of a second it shorted 15 companies stocks by accident by only 10%. Now the Goldman Sachs computer sees this and it has $15 trillion to play with. What will it do? If it is quick and short it will quickly repurchase them and sell them also at 1/10000th of a second. But it sees this on 5 other fortune 500 companies. It sells fast. Now the slower trading firms computers see this in Chicago and the 2nd tier financial systems see these 2 systems quickly selling fast as now 12 companies are affected.

What do they do Sell to keep what is has and so and so on. A full 2 seconds pass and what happens? The world's weath is gone your 401k is history, the treasury is insolvent as bonds crashed, banks are insolvent, as they always owe more than they have in assets which all their debts are traded with each as assets collecting interest.

Seems laughable just 10 years ago but this great recession and what is happening recently shows otherwise. Money is just generated out of thin air by debts and used to buy stocks which fund your 401ks and investments.

What would happen today is a totally collapse of civilation as businesses rely on computers and debt to function if you have taken any finance course. I do not mean this as an insult or to imply anything by the way as I have taken college level finance and it was shocking how answering using your profits to fund your expenses is the wrong answer. To obtain credit and hold onto your cash to raise your shareprice is always the right answer and even small business today with no shareholders relies on IOUs to stay in business unlike in 1929.

With no money 98% of all businesses would close. This is why the bailout happened in 2009 despite very angry resentment from voters.

So it is not inconcievable that a flash crash can wipe out a lot. This is why the Glass-Seagul act was written to prevent banks from being vulnerable with a crash which is now sadly appealed.

Yeah, that was before people discovered. Now everyone is doing it and these companies can not grow anymore and no more investors will come in to boost the shareprice.

Shit most do not even pay dividends anymore! That is a terrible buy if you ask me. That is like me selling you a vacation home where I keep all the rent money and you get nothing. Would you agree to such a deal even after you buy it?! Hell no. ... but don't worry Johhny down the street just may buy it so you can still get rich ... wink wink.

Now it is Gold and bitcoins. As more people buy them the value goes up. Yes, this is gambling. The more someone learns about the stock market the more they will see how rich computer trading high frequency traders steal your money and how overvalued some of these companies are. In the old days more stocks meant these companies could use the cash to buy more factories to make more money and you would see it every quarter as a solid 30 year investment.

Today it is traded in 1/10000th of a second by scammers and the traders still pay themselves pre financial deregulation like it is their money for compensation rather than yours. You are getting rob unless you know what the hell you are doing.

There are other investments that pay more today and unless these companies can grow why invest. The pre-IPO new guys starting out you say? Well the investors get the same shares for 1/4th the price before it hits the market. It is inflated on opening day. You simply can not win these hustlers.

A flash crash was what I thought.

Since these insane investors want core algorithmic changes made that could ruin the whole economy done in a matter of hours it would not surprise me if protections in the trading systems shuts them down equally in a blink of an eye so that particular investment wont lose money and cause a 2nd great depression in the process.

Here is just one and sometimes even Linux desktop users are targetting too because they refuse to run AV software and feel invulnerable.

Slashdot will never post an anti linux article. There are plenty out there in places like itworld, neowin.net, and other sites.

Linux machines are frequently targetted because many run SQL databases and good old fashioned SQL inserts and other exploits are easy targets. Windows kernel actually has more security features like ASLR that Linux does not have.

I had someone at a Linux Users group whose SuSE Enterprise servers were all rooted and bank phising site was hosted on it. Rootkit installed to make it undectable and everything. It was found by the CISCO guys noticing strange traffic and it took 3 weeks before IT could track it.

Where do you think the term "Root"kit came from? They would be called adminkits otherwise.

Seriously?

You mean no security like this and servers running linux are never targeted.

Mac users at work keep going ballastic when their accounts get disabled because they do not run AV software and think they are invulnerable because the highschool kid at the Apple Store said so. Same is true with Linux users who refuse to patch their damn Apache boxes. Incompotence is in every platform and I would say profession.

Windows users use Windows because they need to get stuff done. Software is written for it. That does not make then incompetent. If you are an accountant and you use some project at SourceForge then how the hell can one of the big 4 accounting firms audit your work? They wont and will tell you to put it in excel or quickbooks/great plains and get back to them.

Windows 2008R2 and Windows 7 and later are fairly secure and have more security options in the kernel like browser sandboxing, UAC, ACL, ASLR, DEP (linux uses dep for some services now), and other things. It is not Windows 98 anymore where everything runs in ring 0 and shares ole activeX components unsigned, full admin, to the os and other apps anymore.

Yes Windows 98 was fucking crap. XP meh ok kernel for the 1990s with crap thrown on top of it from windows 9.x, and a horrible browser framework.

I have AMD/ATI hardware and Linux updates are known to break except for Centos or Fedora distros on both my computers due to the lack of a stable ABI. So would I be competent to run Linux then with all these issues or anyone else who doesn't want to play with these things and just needs to get to work?

That is one of the reasons I run Windows 7. I am working on a pet project which I hope to turn into a business and have DNS address to my virtual Linux servers in my HOSTS file. Windows 8 ignores the hosts file and I do not want to put physical IP addresses in my source code for obvious reasons.

But, Linux at a kernel level does lack somethings Windows has for security like ASLR and I am not trolling here honestly, but I would also rely on a good AV package for Linux and not just a host file for security. Arstechnica.com 2 weeks ago mentioned a Linux banking trojan that only works on Linux. Why? Linux users feel invulnerable to viruses and do not take security precautions or run AV software! ouch.

Microsoft has been excellent with timely updates and do make much more secure operating systems than they used too and have a whole dedicated department with many teams in charge of dismantling bot nets, finding security holes, and doing r&d in better security, complete with a command center monitoring the internet just like Norton and Google.

Just because you have not run windows since Windows 2000 doesn't mean things are the same. Infact Linux lacks ASLR, and kernel level sandboxing that Windows Vista and higher have. It does have DEP I believe but that is it. In many ways UAC is even more secure than sudo as a limited user in Windows uses a token to another account admin complete with a passowrd that needs to be entered which then send another token to the admin account. A real admin is disabled for the desktop. Windows 7 admins are not really admins but just regular users with the tokens.

These make it pretty hard to hack compared to an OS that just checks for a password and occasional buffer overflows if it is compilied with amore recent version of glibc but nothing else.

Back when I was a Linux fan I kept saying this.

3 years have passed and that situation has not changed. Unfortunately, Windows software is a fact of life for people who do more than text their friends and play farmville on facebook.

Funny when Vista came out they started selling XP units at all the major retailers by the following fall.

Not this time around and I wonder if MS is forcing OEMs not to bundle Windows 7 on these f*cking lines. I know at my bestbuy MS ordered the destruction of all copies of Office 2010 and Windows 7. Not sell them at a discount but actually destroyed them in a trash compatactor!

MS wanted to sell Windows 8 and ugly Office 2013 only. ... wait what do you mean you do not want to leave XP?! Oh how could this happen etc.

And the lack of support after 3 years is a HUGE drawback for such an expensive investment!

October 2010 I had a choice. I blew too money for a new computer then, but it was a choice between a 2010 era Imac vs a crappier Asus + nice monitor +gaming keyboard + office 2010+ an ok GPU ati 5750 (for its time)+ electrical outlet lan plugs.

Imac $1699 - 8 gigs of ram, 500 meg hd, ATI 5770
Asus $799 - hexcore 2.6 ghz Phenom II, ATI 5750, 1 tb hd, 8 gigs of ram +$450 extra goodies like a high quality monitor = $1300 with taxes.

Why did I choose the PC? Video card not upgraded. Only ram and Hard disk and I knew by 2013 the video was going to have trouble with some games (I was correct). Now I realize I still get Windows 7 updates too! I would have to buy
+$180 for Windows 7 pro license
+ $150 for VMWare fusion or parrellels
+ $250 for Office 2010 for Windows or the mac version ... now now I would have a useless machine with no updates which software developers will no longer support anymore and hackers now targetting it.

I just put an ATI 7850 and 16 gigs of ram in that crappy desktop and it runs VMWare workstation really well. Windows you can bitch how it is all sooo horrible on slashdot but it works well with apps and has +10 years of support and security updates.

Something Linux lacks

That is a frankly bold statement!

True that is starting to change thanks to web 2.0, HTML 5, cloud services, and PDFs replacing .docs in some areas.

But outside of slashdot, this would be modded down or have a million different responses.

As a linux geek are you positively absolutely sure you do not at least need a VM of Windows? What if a headhunter calls you and wants your resume in a .docx format because the client uses some statistics software searching for keywords?

What if you have a customer who wants a pretty brochure in a nice adobe or publisher format? Will it look like crap made in numbers or LibreCalc? How do you know that document wont have the margins and formatting messed up? Oh, billly send it as a PDF YOU MORON. Oh wait Officedepot needs to edit and trim some whatspace around that business card. Yes that actually happened to me and I sent them as publisher files for now on.

Same with resumes where HR loves .doc formats so they can highlight them and pass multiple versions with each other.

That my friend is a non niche general use applicable to every white colar job out there.

If you design websites Windows is a requirement! If you do advertising and marketing then Windows and or MacOSX is a requirement! If you are an accountant Windows is a requirement!

If you say I use Wine or use VirtualBox/VMWare then what you are saying is YES windows is a requirement, but I prefer Linux anyway. Not technical people have real issues with launching a VM as they do not know what it is and it is a confusing process.

This is why the corps are keeping XP instead of using XP Mode inside Windows 7. The calls to helpdesk would shoot through the roof otherwise as users do not know what this is and look for cute text around an icon for their win32 apps.

TPM is great for security so I do not understand the article. Yes DRM haters despise it, but corps and governments should love it?!

Ah yes, but I'm in Canada, the land of the Three Big Cel Companies with no competition. The Nexus 4 at Telus runs $425, and good luck finding a decent plan for less than $60 a month - that includes 500 megs of data, voicemail that will only hold THREE messages, and everything in the world is $10 a month extra.

You haven't actually read anything I've read in this entire thread, have you?