[PLUG] Windows versus Linux security

[Shannon C. Dealy]

On 22 Jul 2002, Ed Sawicki wrote:

> On Sun, 2002-07-21 at 10:45, Carla Schroder wrote:
> > I think the fairest metric is the actual damage done. Measured in dollars,
> > time, and aggravation, Microsoft is the undisputed world champeen.
> >
> > Good response, Ed.
>
> Ditto, Carla. Dollars is the best metric.

Dollars might make a good metric, but using gross amounts do not, it needs
to be normalized in some manner, so a much better approach would be
something like dollars lost per user hour of usage, though even this is
not without problems, since different types of usage will alter both
patterns of stability and degree of vulnerability, after all is it a fair
comparison when one computer is never connected to the net or used for
email, while another is connected 24/7, and acts as a web server, email
router, database server and user workstation all at once?  Ultimately, I
think to get a truly fair comparison would require much more fine grained
metrics such as: cost per million characters of word processing, cost per
web page hit, cost per database transaction, cost per email received,
etc..  We all have a pretty good idea of what Microsoft's level of quality
is, but to have credibility when discussing it, the numbers must be
honest, or we shouldn't be using them, otherwise we are just as bad as the
marketing drones who create fictional numbers to try and prove that
Microsoft products are superior to Linux.

Shannon C. Dealy      |               DeaTech Research Inc.
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