Microsoft’s Jeff Jones, the security strategy director of Microsoft’s own Trustworthy Computing Group, unleashed the big news on June 21st that Vista is more secure than both Linux and OSX in a posting on his blog.

I don’t even know how to properly address the level of stupidity in this Wonderful News Item, but here are a few quick points.

a) If it’s so damn secure, why didn’t MS have a third-party evaluate the security of the operating systems in question?
b) Are they so fucking stupid at MS that they expected this to be heralded as Good News after being corporate piranhas for 25 years?
c) Given the level of Open Source loathing for MS, was this supposed to be something to celebrate?

Furthermore, someone at Microsoft needs to give Jeff Jones some basic training in how to write PR blurbs (let’s face it, that’s what this is. Real techies won’t be touching Vista seriously until the first service pack anyway). His tone is arrogant, insipid, and quite foolish. According to him, Vista is Chateau Galliard. Perhaps he should remember that Richard I’s “impregnable fortress” fell to the Muslims less than a year after it was constructed.

I swear, I can’t figure these wonks at Microsoft out. Their reputation is shit most of the time anyway; why poke a stick in the eye of everyone who would loooove to have a go at hacking Vista, knowing that with any true evaluation of the operating system, all their claims would fall flat?

If MS had any brains at all, they’d be trying to get the OSF guys on their side instead of continually antagonizing every IT professional in the world by making outlandish claims. Vista may be good, but to say it’s better than everything else right out of the gate, when history has sadly and painfully taught us that MS products have always been dogs until they’ve been in true production environments, hacked to bits, and patched out the ass is breathtakingly microencephalatic.

You wanna impress us, Jeff? Put a server out on the internet and give us a time limit. You’ll get your ass blown off, and you know it.

Microsoft’s Silverlight platform intrigues me, not unlike a terrible auto accident on I-45. Here’s what The House of Gates has to say about it:

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

Okay, check me on this, fellow geeks.

It’s a dot-Net gizmo to deliver media-based content. Let’s see–what other platforms, some of which aren’t Microsoft-owned–exist to do this?

• Flash
• Some PHP plugins
• The Windows Media platform toolkit
• Java (antiquated)
• etc.

I freely admit that I am not a Microphile. However, I’m not a rabid MS-hata, either. The cold truth is that Bill Gates has simply played the game much, much better than his competitors. None of the Microsoft products are perfect, but let’s face it–they are better than anything else, especially with respect to office productivity. Everybody bitches and moans about Word and Excel, but everybody uses them.

My principal problem with Microsoft is the exorbitant fees for licensing that are charged. If you have 90% market share, you can afford to quit ass-raping your customers. However, that does not seem to be Microsoft’s business plan, more’s the pity. And don’t get me started on the 31 flavors of Vista.

But I digress–this is about Silverlight.

I run an information technology company. It is populated with a group of very senior engineers in systems, networks, and infrastructure that are all at the top of their form. Let me take one example from one of these departments as an object lesson: Infrastructure. First their was thick coax, and it was good. Then there was thin coax, 10 years later. It, also, was good. Cat 5, cat 5e, Cat 6, fiber…all good. But in those two sentences, I’ve covered the last 50 years of data communications. In short, engineers come up with a faster, bigger, meaner pipe when circumstances demand it.

Let’s transfer this simple, sound logic to Silverlight.

ANYONE who has ever had the painful, wrenching opportunity to code applications using dot-Net will at least agree on the fact that this platform has always had problems, whether these take the form of “more bugs than a decomposing murder victim” or “as insecure as US telephone records.” Furthermore, with the ubiquity and relative stability and security of Flash, is this simply another effort by Dr. Gates to horn in on another market with a substandard, but very familiar product?

I tend to think “Yes, it is,” but other opinions are welcome. Enlighten me.

Rootkits, after dying down for a bit, seem to be back. Beware. If you’re a *nix user (yeah, that means you, too, MacZealots!), get rkhunter. If you’re a Windows user, kill and burn a small animal.

Superduper geek crap accomplished this weekend…

1) Install Yellow-Dog Linux on an older PowerMac G3 I have (we don’t need no steenking Mac OS!) It’s up now–192.168.26.21 on my home network. Muhaha.

2) Install DCLinux on my old DREAMCAST. Yup, that’s right…a RAM/ROM based Linux box, blazingly, achingly fast….running of a former game system console. Almost done. It’ll be 192.168.26.201, machine name “traumeri.”

I’ve already upgraded my Handspring to a Sharp Zaurus 5600–a PDA that runs Linux (I have Apache/PHP running on it, hosting a small version of one of my websites…).

My next projects will be to install Slackware Linux on the leaf-blower and lawnmower and write two daemons (tentatively named “mowd” and “blowd”) that I can add to these devices as cron jobs to automatically do the yardwork. I’ll have to sync the clocks on the leaf blower and lawn mower, though, otherwise I might end up with some device conflicts if blowd kicks off before mowd has finished executing…