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Re: How much longer..

  • From: Crist Clark
  • Date: Wed Aug 13 19:18:28 2003

"McBurnett, Jim" wrote:
>

I hate top posting, but I want to make sure to get this out of the way first.

I was not trying to defend Microsoft. I meant to point out,

  JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT USING MICROSOFT DOES NOT MEAN THAT YOU ARE SAFE!

Bugs happen. Vulnerabilities happen. Worms happen. This worm has happened.
Now that it has happened, it's impact is greater because of its install
base. And solely for that reason.

That's all I wanted to say.

Why the worm happened and whether is should have happened are a completely
different issues I was not trying to address. I do not plan on addressing
them. People with more eloquence, more research in hand, and much, much more
time to compose thoughtful essays have debated that endlessly for years now.
I doubt my limited remarks on NANOG will move and hearts or win any minds 
who do not already agree with the classic, well-known arguments I would trot
out one more time.

But I'll respond to this mail anyway.

> OK..
> I have lurked enough on this one..
> $60 Billion plus for microsoft..
> and 600 millions lines of code.
> thousands of employee programmers...

No way MS has spent $60 billion on development. That's why they
look soooo good, so much in sales versus the development costs.
Or did you mispell "bazjillion?"

> $1 million for *NIX
> less than a million lines of code.
> rewritten on a whim, and source given to
> millions..
> Bugs will be found and squashed easier.
> Less code, more eyes. and less complex.
> Less market, less users, less interest for hackers
> 
> 5 less than statements for *NIX and how many more
> statements for Micro$oft?

A pretty outlandish comparison with some broad characterizations and 
implicit assumptions.

Where's the $1M for "UNIX" from? AT&T gave it away since they didn't
think it was worth anything. Back then, vendors made money off of the 
hardware, the software was an incidental. (Sony makes the money selling
you the DVD player, the pretty menus and configuration screens are just
soft/firmware that comes with it with no real indpendent value... Now 
the soft/firmware on a TiVo or an X-Box... Maybe appliance software
will develop independent value of its own someday too.)

Oh, and I can rewrite the source to Solaris, a direct UNIX Sys V 
descendant, and they give it all away? I guess they forgot to send
me my copy. Could I borrow yours? And send me your source to AIX 
while your at it too. And SCO's UnixWare? I'd like to look into
this whole SCO versus IBM thing.

> This is like trying to comparing the towing capacity of
> car to turbo diesal pickup.

OK, two things which are very easy to compare.

> there is no comparison...

Uh, no, it's pretty easy to measure the power, torque, and many other 
capacities of interest for each vehicle and then do an objective comparison.

> I don't care if MicroSoft spends $600 Million a year,
> there will always be bugs.

Sure will.

> If a software package was perfect or a network was perfect how many
> of us would have jobs?
> Nothing in this world is perfect, and complaining about it does
> absolutely no good....

So your point was...?
-- 
Crist J. Clark                               [email protected]
Globalstar Communications                                (408) 933-4387

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