2001 called and said you can't use that tired old argument anymore. The default install of Firefox since 2.x (I believe) does not spoof IE in the user agent string. Firefox being the largest market share aside from any version of IE, the weight given to any other browser would be a statistical blip at best. In fact, if I remember correctly Konqueror in KDE3 and 4 actually spoofs Gecko by default. And Opera stopped spoofing MSIE after 6.x, IIRC.

Probably heavily locked-down desktops and even more heavily restricted internet access (basically none whatsoever; HTTP is allowed through a proxy that requires a username and password and doesn't allow access to the whole web).

Yes, voodoo magic.

This is quite possible to do in a company of such size because you can usually divide your staff into groups that match up quite well with their responsibilities and grant access accordingly, blocking everything else.

So you're saying that the folks in HR can browse porn, but the ones in IT can't?

When you're dealing with a much smaller organisation, the amount you can lock things down is generally much reduced

I don't see how that's the case. If you do it right you can scale your solution from 10 to 10,000 machines.

Sorry, but I don't think you understand how this works out there in the real world.

I'm very curious as to whether that shop you mentioned fits within Microsoft's "TCO" calculations.

I don't know what they do beyond any other company I've worked for/at. They run their own internal WU server, the corporate XP images have AV, IE8 is customized to use their proxy, a few company-specific apps installed, you have no admin rights and that's it. What in that list would you consider to be above and beyond what MS recommends, or particularly expensive? More to the point, which of those things would you not do if the roles were reversed and all these were Linux machines?

get harder to maintain compatibility, it starts to get more expensive to hire/train staff, and it starts being less user friendly.

Compatibility in what sense? And the hire/train thing is a no starter on either side. Their desktop folks have this stuff down to a science. User friendly? I don't get that. These are people who use Office and a web browser, that's it.

HOW much is spent per year by businesses in general (not your pet data point) cleaning up malware?

I'd imagine it's a lot, especially if you let it through to begin with. Duh?

I find the "IQ of a sponge" comment amusingly ironic.

Oh, that wasn't for you.

Hope that went well. I know it's tough out there. But best of luck finding something you *like*.

Oh it's not out of the ordinary at all. Stuff like this has been ordinary since 2001. Still funny as hell... or disturbing, depending which end of the stick you happen to be holding.

I'm sorry you were modded troll, but maybe you didn't express your point correctly. Let me give it a try.

One of the companies I consult for has something like 30,000 desktops. They were not affected by Conficker in any way shape or form. In fact, I think they were bitten by the "anna kournikova" thing back in 2000 or 2001, and never again had any problems with worms or viruses.

How is this possible? I don't know. Maybe some common sense was involved.

But the premise of this article is that this company - and indeed, every other company in the planet that uses Windows but doesn't have these problems - should factor into their operation of Windows a "hidden" cost that simply does not apply to them.

That's clever, isn't it? It's a great argument, assuming you have the IQ of a sponge to begin with.

To make the comparison fair, maybe a comparison (pardoning the redundancy) between the companies that don't patch and have no meaningful data security policies in place and those who do would be indicated. I say that because Conficker went live in November of last year, and the out of band patch was available in October. A replay of the other ones where a patch has existed well before the exploit was seen in the wild - in fact in the case of (I think Slammer) the exploit was based on what the patch was fixing.

This is especially meaningful in the case of companies who have control over their users' PCs, rather than home users that need to be bothered with letting Windows Update run in the background and help them patch their boxes occasionally. We all know how much of a bother that can be.

All of the people who will pay $29 for snow leopard paid apple for their hardware

There we go.

That used to be true the last time Taco released an aggregate analysis of the Slashdot Apache logs. Which was in 2002, IIRC. I doubt it's 80% nowadays, considering other FOSS-centric sites that release their traffic numbers tend to figure about 50/50 in some cases. They are also highly Firefox-biased (I don't mean that negatively) with some being 90%+ of all visitors over IE and everything else.

But I hope they're being very careful with these things. Excited Chrichton-like sci-fi visions notwithstanding, we could easily get ourselves into a lot of trouble with things like these. And I'm not thinking about dinosaurs, but rather things like our collective genomes losing resistance to things that are supposed to have disappeared from our ecosystems.

Another device crippled by another half-baked service scheme that oozed off the completely broken US communications ecosystem.

I am in complete awe of how backwards the US is compared to Europe and Asia in this regard. It's just weird.

Before I get excited about things like these (and I do want to) or even consider buying one (and I do want to), they need to fix the basic problems, not just make better gadgets and hope everyone stays ignorant as to how bad they have it compared with the rest of the world.

Which makes Rob Weir what, exactly?

http://www.robweir.com/blog/rob.html

... I work for IBM, as Chief ODF Architect ...

Also interesting is the fact that, as far as I can tell, these "shills" are editing Wikipedia with their real names, or with well-known handles uses elsewhere that identify who they are. As opposed to "WackyButterfly1965" or something - not a particularly hard thing to do on Wikipedia at all.

Facts. Presented out of context (or without enough of it) have been used extensively on Wikipedia and elsewhere to paint Microsoft and everything they do in a negative light. I'd suggest these people either suck it up now, or stop whining about how Wikipedia is being gamed and use their considerable energy and time to work the website's bureaucracy. $Deity knows they're going to need it. I loved this part of that Groklaw article:

This certainly is an interesting statement. There is nothing I can point to that is false here. Everything here is 100% accurate. However, it seems to be reckless in how it neglects the most relevant facts, namely that the proposals did not make it into ODF 1.2 at Microsoft's sole election.

For anyone involved with OOXML on the Microsoft side, this is sweet revenge. Hoisted by their own petard and so on. I think it's funny as hell.

Yep, second the Astraweb recommendation. I was going to post about them as well. I started using them a few years ago when a move from one city to another left me with an ISP whose retention of some of the comp.* groups was terrible. And you can't beat the speed.

Actually I never rode a school bus... But if my school had had them, the magic marker solution would have probably crossed the feverish imagination of the evil proctors :)