Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1571

"Windows Server 2003 is the fastest, most reliable, most secure Windows server operating system ever offered by Microsoft. " .mspx

"Microsoft's patch factory was running at full production last week at the same time that the company's formidable marketing arm was publicly launching a new operating system designed to reduce the frequency of security bugs."

As late as THIS MONTH, they release 7 critical security vulnerability updates for 2003 server, and a host of lower severity ones. The interesting thing is these patches apply to ALL of the OS platforms, even though, we are supposed to believe that 2003 Server was somehow rearchitected through a "trustworthy computing" effort to be safer. So, why do the same bugs that show up on WindowsME apply to 2003 Server?

Also consider all the FUD spread by Ballmer and others to the effect that open source software is bad, useful applications like OpenOffice violates 200 patents" thing from Ballmer is another example. A little light reading...

One of the more interesting Ballmer quotes: "Technology innovation has happened much, much more from commercial software developers than from open source," he said, adding that big companies also have marketing muscle and resources to support their products. "Who's going to stand up and support open source? At least, with us, it's clear who you have to come and pound down on. There's a clear line of responsibility."

I was referring primarily to where companies spend huge amounts of money on the back-end data center licensing, for the desktop users. It's not clear from here if client licenses for servers are included in the "Client" or the "Server" bucket. Obviously on volume, they are going to make more in absolute dollars on the desktop side, as large numbers of desktop sales are to attach to a server. Even so, the gap between client and server revenue has narrowed 386 million dollars in the last year, despite heavy (and well-publicized) account losses on the server side due to Linux deployments. On the income side, the gap has narrowed by 1.68 plus 1 Billion over the same time period. Presumably, their accountants made sure the cost of developing all that secure server software (see above) where accounted for properly in 2003.

-- Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR) "Making it hard to do stupid things often makes it hard to do smart ones too." -- Andrew Koenig