Still, to assume you’re safe from viruses is a bad assumption to make. Could cost you a computer.

And, #35, tablets have been around for a while. Many of them Windows.

Bring on the tablets!

Don’t believe me? Assuming you haven’t removed Admin rights from your user account, verify for yourself on your own computer: right-click on My Computer and select “Manage”. Open up “Local Users and Groups”, then “Users”. Right-click on your username, select “Properties”. Click on “Member Of”. There’s the Administrators group, the very same one which is assigned to the Administrator account. Genuine administrator rights, not “‘fake admin’ mode”.

As a systems administrator who deals with not only Solaris and Linux but six versions of Windows (2000, XP, Server 2003, Server 2008, Vista and 7) on a daily basis, I can assure you that I’m neither “anti-Windows” nor stuck in 2006.

“Process (INCOMPREHENSIBLE) wants to do (INCOMPREHENSIBLE).
[OK] [Cancel]”

I haven’t used Vista (let alone Windows 7) except for briefly on a borrowed tablet that BSOD’d within twenty minutes and then took a good fifteen minutes to finish rebooting, so I can’t comment on it directly. However, you might want to consider what a typical user will do when a dialog box pops up that says “Process wants to do [OK] [Cancel]”. Users get trained very quickly to just always click OK.

Meanwhile, the security model in Windows is not anything like the security model in Unix. It’s from VMS, and it shares many of the same problems. Most notably, it’s too complicated.

As far as architectural-level security problems in NT/XP/whatnot (as opposed to Win95/98/Me which were still basically MS-DOS and had no security at all)… there have been plenty. Reviewing some Windows security bulletins from the 1999-2004 era or so might refresh your memory. For (one) example, because of Windows’ silly obsession with filename extensions, there were a pile of really stupid vulnerabilities where Windows would blithely execute files that users and applications thought were e.g. pictures or text. Most of the exploit paths for these design flaws have been fixed by now, but the design flaws still mostly remain, because changing things is hard and Microsoft has little interest in or commitment to bothering.

Why do you suppose there’s (last I heard anyway) only one known virus for Linux that has never been seen in the wild? There’s no shortage of hacker-kiddie scripts and rootkits and other material, and outdated/unpatched and unfirewalled Linux systems get hacked quite rapidly, so it’s not like the user population isn’t large enough to support plenty of malware.

I could take the anti-Windows commenters a lot more serious if they’d at least keep up on what features are in the 3 year old Windows version.

That is an inherently more secure model than “give the user admin rights, and if they want to restrict the account to make it safer, they’ll have to do it themselves - if they even know it’s possible to do so, which most end-users don’t”.

Microsoft did recognize there were architectural-level security problems… in Windows 9x. That’s why they moved everybody to Windows XP (which doesn’t share those problems) in the first place.

Also, I always find your complaint a little goofy, since the security model in Windows is virtually identical to the one in Unix/Linux. I mean, if Windows is “insecure” and Linux is “secure” and they both have the exact same permissions implementation… that doesn’t even make sense. Especially when people go on to say “Windows permissions should be more like Linux.” How would that be possible!? It’s already a super-set of Linux’s! Anyway, sorry to rant.

* Personally, I find UAC better than Linux, since in Linux the only way to know you need to elevate is by letting it fail the first time!

Microsoft spent a long time denying that they had any such thing as architectural-level security problems, but did eventually wake up, and they’ve spent most of the last 9-10 years or so playing catch-up. They’re finally starting to get there, maybe…

Steffen: normally “viruses” are a subcategory of “malware”.