First, let me be the first to say that people are entitled to their own opinions, no matter how inane or illogical they might be.

That said, I am writing this about the mother of all inane articles, written by a guest on ZDNet. The person that wrote the article is Todd Hooper, who appears to be a developer of software, and is writing in a column devoted to security.

The article starts out with his proud admission that he is, in fact, a PC – you know, the idiot who uses the PC in the Apple commercials. Does anyone in their right mind really want to be compared with this dolt? The guy in the commercial looks, and acts, as though the act of tying his shoes in the morning is a tax on his abilities. The author then speaks glowingly of his use of Vista on a Sony VAIO notebook. He states that BitLocker is the best thing for security he has ever seen, and he, being concerned about security on a daily basis, simply loves it. The preceding statement is his entire case for the assertion that Vista is so much more secure than Windows XP. Well, perhaps he has never heard of PGP, or any of a number of other privacy utilities, that accomplish the same thing, but don’t do it at the lowest level, the OS, where, if something goes wrong, there is little chance of recovering anything.

He then begins extolling the other benefits of Vista. Cited are speed, network access protection, and the newest iteration of the one part of Windows most frequently replaced by something else, Explorer. Surely the man is joking. No, it seems he is serious. Nearly every one of my customers longs for the days of XTree Gold or Norton Commander to work with files, and is always looking for something to make that task easier and more natural.  The only ones who don’t have this need are the same ones who use the My Computer icon to access files, and who have huge hard drives, with no partitions – you know, the uninformed, and happily proud to remain that way.

I’m not a platform bigot - once upon a time I worked for Apple, my previous company Trillium Lane Labs was Macintosh based and I’ve used Unix and Linux for most of my career. But at the end of the day Mac OS X just doesn’t work for me as a laptop OS. The combination of Vista plus great Office 2007 applications (especially OneNote) is unbeatable, and I like having my own choice of hardware rather than being tied to Apple’s hardware roadmap.

No, perhaps he is not, but he certainly seems shortsighted. It seems that if you are really concerned about security, you would either invest in some 3rd party utilities, such as antiviral and firewall applications, or, better, use some form of secured Linux, such as Fedora. It’s what the people who are really interested in security do, after all.

At the end of the article, he talks about no OS being perfect. (yes, the one area in the article I can truly agree with!) But then he speaks of how Windows 7 will allow users to get the experience that Microsoft envisioned with Vista. What? This certainly sounds as though he might have had some problems he is unwilling to disclose.

He finishes the article once again speaking of how secure Vista is. He must not have read any of the unbiased reviews, that said the differences between the security of Vista SP1 versus Windows XP Service Pack 3 are minimal.

The author seems to be one of those who either don’t do anything to uncover the flaws of Vista in their daily work, or are satisfied with low performance in the name of security. He doesn’t seem to be annoyed by the constant intrusions of User Account Control. That, by itself, makes me wonder what this man does with his machine. Either he has the patience of Job, or he never does anything out of the ordinary. Can this really be true? Of course, the man also mentions in more than one place that he thinks Office 2007 is great also. This, far different than the experiences of people I have spoken with, shows that this is someone who is widely divergent from the average person. In my travels, I have yet to have a single person speak kindly of Office 2007, and many have said they begrudgingly got used to it out of some necessity, or because there was no choice in the matter.

I really don’t like to speak of conspiracies, but this seems like one of those cases where some form of inducement has elicited the resounding praise of something judged by most as tepid at best.

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Life is hard. After all, it kills you.Katharine Hepburn