disclaimer: my cynicism on this topic will tend to exagerate things a little bit.
Tonight at work we had our “Windoze sucks, it’s users are incompetant, and we need to accomodate them anyways” seminar. Essentially talking about what needs to be done before people are “allowed” on the campus network.
Windoze XP SP2 will supposedly make it the OS it “should have been” in the first place, what took so long? And holy shit, a 400+MB upgrade?? That’s disturbing! Not that I’ll trust a microsloth branded anti-virus, pop-up-blocker, or firewall anyways. Now, I’m not saying the entire world needs to use Macs… just that the best solution to computer and network security is DIVERSITY. If everyone was using a different operating system, these viruses and worms would have a much harder time propagating themselves.
I am sufficiently content using an operating system that doesn’t need to be anti-virus’d, and severely patched before getting on any form of network… and I also don’t mind not needing to remove hundreds of pieces of spyware from my computer once a month or so.
On a very positive note, we were told that we can push people away from IE/outlook* onto different and better applications. Especially Mozilla/FireFox (web browsers), and Thunderbird (e-mail client). Though I would also be comfortable setting users up with Opera (another browser), or Eudora (another e-mail client). Seriosly folks, try some of this software out, use whatever you like, but realize that microsloth’s “integration” is it’s greatest downfall, and using another application is a big step in the right direction.