Rhys666:
Why are you directing all your comments to me? I did not slam anybody -- I just pointed out a counter example to
johnwm's argument.
Also, would it be correct for me to infer from the content of your post that it's okay to rant and chide other fellow members in this thread, but not okay to comment on another member's post?
I'll provide what I see as the reason Mi¢ro$oft gets slammed in the TT fora.
Mi¢ro$oft gets slammed so often in the fora because although their software is popular and well-marketed, their software is often of poor quality. Their software is often buggy, is often unstable, is always based on an undocumented closed pseudo-API, reuses code libraries inappropriately, and seems to be based on the development model that simply adding a feature improves the code base. Their software engineering methodology does not differentiate between an OS developer and a application developer, so it allows application developers to modify libraries that Mi¢ro$oft itself defines as OS-level libraries. Mi¢ro$oft itself is slow to react to user needs, treats all users as beta testers, is slow to admit to the existence of bugs, is slow to provide fixes to bugs, and often provides bug fixes that introduce as many bugs as the patch fixes.
The members of Tek-Tips are a marvelously talented and experienced group. They have has to support Mi¢ro$oft's software in the enterprise and have had to deal with the nightmares Mi¢ro$oft has inflicted on them. I will be among the first to admit that Mi¢ro$oft has cleaned up its act, particularly in the past couple of years. But when you're living at the bottom of a bowl, nearly any direction you go is up.
Some Mi¢ro$oft market-droids came to a company where I once worked to demo some new software. They started playing buzzword bingo to such an extent that I lost interest and began to grammatically diagram their sentences to keep myself awake and to try to make some sense of what they were saying. This allowed me to notice that one of these clowns spoke two utterances in a row that were so chock-full of marketing buzzwords that he'd forgotten to put verbs in them. Right after that, the other clown spoke up and uttered the single most truthful sentence about Mi¢ro$oft I have ever heard:
Microsoft is not a service company. Microsoft is a marketing company.
Now let's go on to your thesis that common knowledge of a product is necessary for virii to be written for it. I agree that this is certainly a factor in a virus-writer's targeting a product. But it still ignores the one necessary feature a product must provide to a virus-writer: exploitable bugs.
Here's a hypothetical:
Two software products fulfill a need: productA and productB. ProductA has a 99% market share and is well marketed and known to the public. ProductB is an also-ran that no on has ever heard of.
ProductB is known to be buggy, unstable, and to have a number of easily exploitable holes.
ProductA is generally bullet-proof. It has some bugs, but none that are exploitable to any degree.
Which product will virus writers target? There's no point in targeting ProductA -- there's no holes to exploit. The virus writers, if they want to target a product of that class, must target ProductB.
Want the best answers? Ask the best questions: TANSTAAFL!!
![[lol]](/data/assets/smilies/lol.gif "[lol] [lol]")
