This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: It just keeps getting better....
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Even though most businesses have installed the patch for MSBlast, there is another vulnerability that could completely overshadow last week's events. On 23 July Microsoft posted a security bulletin on its Web site that describes a "critical" vulnerability in DirectX. According to Microsoft, unprotected systems could be at the mercy of an attacker by simply playing a midi file or visiting a malicious Web page.
So we could be in for another exciting round of duck and patch. You know what? I'm seeing a lot of hype about the wonders of Longhorn and the criticality of the PDC from Scoble - here's some unsolicited feedback:
As recently as 2 months ago, I never would have considered a Mac, and Linux as a full desktop replacement just seemed too painful. Now I'm pretty well convinced. I'll be in the market for a new PC soon, and I will be looking very seriously at the Mac platform. Why? Because it's built on top of a stable OS, and the incidence of utter stupidity in application integration at the expense of security (recall that NT 4 pushed much of the graphics code into ring zero of the OS to enable better game performance, for instance) at Apple. I don't care how many new features you put into Longhorn, or how much cooler you think your database is. The bottom line is, your platform sucks. It's insecure, and simply unacceptable in terms of business risk. I wish I could get our IT group to see that; 2-3 infected (Blaster) systems yesterday knocked Cincom's websites off the air for hours. That's a huge cost, and it's being incurred because of sloppy, stupid crap in Redmond.
You've lost my trust; it's going to be a long hard road for you to get it back. And it's not just me - ComputerWorld's editorial page is starting to question MS as a realistic default choice.
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