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When i said 'practically impossible' i meant it, its just not possible to test every variable, jsut think of the size of the Os, all the things you can do in it.
Do we honestly think that MS doesn't do as much as they can to make sure the product is as secure as it can be, unfortunately the way the commerical world is it will sometimes slip. They want you to buy it, they want you to like it, your average microsoft employee takes pride in their work and get satisfaction out of seeing people having a good experience using it.
its just a fact of life that complex systems have complex failures, look at firestone, there are multiple checks in place to stop stuff like that happening, but it frequently does.
Even a dedicated hardware firewall from a network giant like cisco has lots of flaws, they have a huge repuation at stake over this, yet they still have failures, and a hardware firewall is a gazillion times less complex than a windows OS
How many products do you see recalled that are a potential choking hazard, or can burst into flames etc etc.
I wish it were simple to have a dedicated group of people work out all the bugs (which they do already have ) but it wouldn't matter, for every 100 testers microsoft has theres 500 cracker script kiddies on the outside looking harder, these guys will spend months and months going over over one possible exploit, thats just not viable in business.
Hindsight is always 20/20 and every code base has the same percentage of flaws, Apple don't have any super human coders, they are from the same pool.
Its very easy to look in at something you think you can see every aspect of and critique it. The old 'that doesnt seem so hard' line.
Using old code doesn't mean its automatically bad, since that code has been tested over and over and over, if its got a legacy bug that wasn't found, then its very obscure, so iits tough to find ( again the pentium math bug, it was years before it was found )
Its the mediocre virus writers that get it out, there, but its generally the smart guys that find and publish the exploits they use.
As for 'ease of use' i thought that was apples line.
Hehe Cyn, the Amiga spawned some of the worst virii out there.
The best programmers in the world write 3-5 lines of fully debugged full working code a day, there are 100s' of millions lines of code in a major OS sytem. It just takes one character difference to make a major flaw that is stealthily hidden, that my never be found.
i think if someone could invent something that allowed you to understand or visualize just how complex a computer and its software is, you'd be dropping your jaw in amazement.
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