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by powertower 5073 days ago
> And it is not obvious to me that it's not a valid comparison; ... Android is a lot younger, so you could just as well expect it to be less mature and therefore less secure.

There is a reason why PC games are so much more advanced in their design, graphics, and game-play today than they were 10-20 years ago.

By your logic, there is little reason why Crysis 3 should not have been developed 15 years ago. If they can do it now, and the product/market fit for it is good now, why not 15 years ago!

That's just not how it works.

> In the Unix world...

Different world, different people, different needs/wants.

Microsoft didn't ignore anything; they have maintained a billion users for more than a decade. And profited more than most companies with an increase in sales every single year. They did something right, more than they did something wrong.

Easy-of-use was a priority for them over security until after XP because...

1. It would have impacted their users negatively (do you remember the response due to the new security in Vista?... people couldn't handle a pop-up, couldn't understand privileges, etc).

2. There previous OSs started from a single-user standpoint and it's difficult to change that (and maintain backwards compatibility, 3rd party drivers and software, support, etc).

You make things seem so easy. That's not how it works.

1 comments

No, that is a totally different thing, and a fairly ridiculous comparison. You clearly can't have Crysis 3 15 years ago because the computers weren't powerful enough. Please don't apply a bad metaphor and tell me that's my reasoning, because it clearly wasn't.

Security does not require computing power, it needs careful code. By your logic, OpenBSD would have been an insecure mess 15 years ago, and nobody's web server would be getting hacked today. That is not how it works.

I've pointed out how ridiculous it's to blame Windows 95 for not being what today OSes are.

Since that wasn't good enough, I then pointed out how ridiculous it would be to compare IE6 (circa 2001) with the latest version of Chrome (2012).

But that wasn't good enough either.

So in the most general of ways I gave you one even better, which BTW had a small part to do with PC performance and more to do with everything else.

> OpenBSD would have been an insecure mess 15 years ago, and nobody's web server would be getting hacked today.

Have no idea what logic you're talking about.

I think we'll just have to disagree.