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I agree with much of what is being said here. I'm in no way trying to say windows is better than nix or mac. In fact I prefer to use nix for many things. I'm not a big fan of macs though (maybe because i haven't used them enough, or maybe because i hate only have 1 friggen button on the mouse haha!).
My main point was this, the ammount of sanity checking needed on code to make it fully secure is next to impossible for an OS. Who wants to do formal verification of an entire OS? There will always be buffer overflow bugs that can be exploited somewhere. This is not nessarly the fault of microsoft but a problem that lies much deeper. Either in the way we have chosen to do software design (default accept vrs default deny) or in the natural complexity of code to increase vastly when doing sanity checking. Simple code segments that are 10 lines of code can quickly grow to a couple hundred lines of code with sanity checking.
My point was this saying you are switching OSes because one is more secure is being blind to the truth. At least say you are doing it because this OS is attacked less than another. Case in point the USA is probably one of the most secure nations in the world yet there are countries out there that are safer (Luxemburg maybe? Switzerland, ect) because people don't bother attacking them. The same is true with OSes.
And to the comment on my parents surfing habbits, it is true that their habbits are safer than some but not all that safe. In addition my 11 year old nephew uses their computer a lot and he definatly does not have safe surfing habbits. Plus most of the nasty viruses these days don't require you to even visit a website that contains it (love bug for example). Windows 98 was immune to the love bug.
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