Posted on 09/06/2002 10:36:06 AM PDT by toupsie
Friday 6 September 2002
Brian Valentine, senior vice-president in charge of Microsoft's Windows development, has made a grim admission to the Microsoft Windows Server .net developer conference in Seattle, USA.
"I'm not proud," he told delegates yesterday (5 September). "We really haven't done everything we could to protect our customers. Our products just aren't engineered for security," admitted Valentine, who since 1998 has headed Microsoft's Windows division.
In August the company put out eight security bulletins. This month it has released two, so far, with the latest urging users to patch a flaw in its digital certificate technology that could allow attackers to steal a user's credit card details.
Microsoft's regular stream of security bulletins has continued despite Bill Gates company-wide Trustworthy Computing Initiative, announced earlier this year.
The Initiative was launched with a memo from Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, and saw the company halt production on new code in all of its products while employees scanned every line of existing code in search of vulnerabilities.
"We realised that we couldn't continue with the way we were building software and expect to deliver secure products," Valentine said.
But the company is dealing with a problem that is not easily resolved. Valentine told developers at the conference that as the company works to shore up its products the security dilemma will evolve as hackers become more sophisticated.
"It's impossible to solve the problem completely," Valentine said. "As we solve these problems there are hackers who are going to come up with new ones. There's no end to this."
Microsoft has also been employing new tools developed by Microsoft Research that are designed to detect errors in code during the development process, Valentine said.
According to Chandra Mugunda, a software consultant with Dell who attended Valentine's presentation, buggy software is "an industry-wide problem, not just a Microsoft problem. But they're the leaders, and they should take the lead to solve them," he said.
Well that would make YOU the idiot because most of what makes up "Linux" to people like you is platform agnostic. BASH, XFree86, KDE, GNOME, Apache, etc run just as well on FreeBSD and now on Darwin as they do on Linux. Let's see IIS run just as easily on MacOSX as it does on Windows. IIS is tied down far more heavily to Windows than Apache is to any particular UNIX. Of course you already knew that; you were just making yourself look like a moron for our amusement.
If GDI or another component of the Windows windowing system has a problem it's a Windows issue. If XFree86 has a problem it's a XFree86 issue, not a "Linux" issue. Of course the concept of having XFree86 be a separate product that runs on the Linux kernel, *BSD, Darwin and MacOSX would make no sense to someone like you.
Mac OS X does include an ODBC driver, so Access is accessable. But the demand for MS Access on Macs is virtually nil because better solutions are available.
I prefer to run MySQL on Mac OS X. It has many excellent features, tons of support software are available, it's web accessible and it's free. It also runs on Linux and several other platforms. MySQL is used on the FreeRepublic servers for storing information about user accounts and threads.
Oracle, Sybase and FileMaker RDBMS software is also available for Mac OS X.
Macs also includes a simple database system built-in to the AppleWorks applications suite.
Past tense, you moron.
Don't insult him because the average elementary school student has a more thorough grasp of English verb conjugation than you do.
For those of us using high-end Intel boxes for entertainment(gaming), the answer is an unfortunate yes.
Sure, consoles are a lot cheaper and have scads of available titles, but I'm more partial to strategy games and realistic flight sims, neither of which seem to be well-supported by the Playstation or the XBox.
Current flight sim titles on my PC: FS2002, IL2, Jane's F/A-18, X-Plane, Jane's WWII Fighters, Rowan's Battle of Britain, Mig Alley, European Air War, B-17II The Mighty Eighth, and Xtreme Air Racing. Of those, I know X-Plane has a Mac counterpart. The rest are, as far as I know, pure Windows apps. I'm aware of the Windows emulators available for OSX, but I have serious doubts that the kind of CPU cycle hungry sims I fly would run smoothly in that environment.
So are those "must-have" apps? Not really. But then again, neither is satellite or cable television, or any TV for that matter. It's just the kind of entertainment I prefer. (I don't own a TV, BTW. Ditched it in 1990 and haven't missed it a bit.) The television analogy, should I ever decide to buy one again,would be something along the lines of a sexy HDTV set with Dolby surround that only received Garrison Keillor and Live From Kennedy Center. Nice hardware, but where's Monday Night Football, Cinemax, Speedvision, and Fox News?
Don't get me wrong - I think that Apple builds some very desirable hardware, with a good OS to match. I'd like to see the kind of gaming support the Mac enjoyed in the early 90s before I'd consider buying a new machine.
That's what I call a user friendly app. LOL
The software is available, but I don't know how many businesses use them.
Intuit has announced that QuickBooks Pro 5.0 for Mac OS X will be released early next year.
I am not sure about OS 9 (I try not to use it) but I do know that System 7.5 is available for free. Mac OS X is completely open at the kernel level. However, unless you want to kill your product, I would never touch the code of kernel from the old "Classic" Mac OS. I am a UNIX fan and not a fan of Apple's past OS design. They got it right with OS X.
I think that was the Alpha version of NT if memory serves me right. I ran it (played around with it is more accurate) on one of my DEC Alphas as a Dual Boot a several years ago. I even have a PPC port of Windows NT which never made it out to the general public -- just a developer release -- I am sure that was not the secure one. :)
Yes, video action games are the main area where Windows has an advantage over Mac in software availability.
You are aware, aren't you, that the vast majority of Windows games will run just fine on Linux using Wine?
And if you are squeamish about configuring Wine, you can always buy a $15, three-month subscription to TransGaming and download their version of Wine that has a nice installer and lots of little fixes to make Windows gaming on Linux a bit easier.
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