Al Hoang

A friend of mine was mentioning to me the recent “study” that mentioned Linux seems to get more attacks and that supposedly the BSDs (and OS X) were the most secure OS.

After thinking about this a little bit more (5 seconds) I realized something. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Linux, Windows, Oberon 2 or something else. What matters is whether YOUR systems are secured. Have you bothered to check all the software you have installed and running for security exploits? Do you even know WHERE to find this information? (That’s a very easy thing to lose track when you have hundreds of programs installed all coming from a gazillion places).

“Huh? What? What OS I’m running? What apps?”

Yeah, exactly.

Better figure that stuff out quickly or ask your trusty computer geek buddy to help you out on this. Otherwise all the horn tooting on my OS is more secure than yours means zilch if you don’t even know what you have on your own system(s).

Joel’s Software Forums have an interesting discussion on outsourcing with a lot of very well thought out responses on the topic. In general I agree with Joel’s assessment.
If you understand your core competency DO NOT outsource that. Here’s a snippet of one post:

Grisham does not have some super-secret word arranging technology that calculating the most interesting and pleasing word arrangements and then maximizes the word-arrangement quotient for a new book.