Minneapolis skyline

Summary: At a time when Windows crashes a lot, falls under the control of crackers, and contributes to suspension of airlines, Minnesota tactlessly decides to put all its E-mail on Microsoft's own Windows servers

A LOT of the world is moving away from Windows rather than move to Windows. Even Microsoft is moving from Windows to GNU/Linux in the sense that it has just signed a submissive deal where Microsoft agrees to hand over 30 million blogs, putting them all on GNU/Linux rather than Windows:

Microsoft has entered into a partnership with Automattic, which is owned by WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg.

[...]

On its Windows Team blog, Microsoft praises WordPress' "impressive capabilities" with regard to scalability, spam protection and configuration. Rather than investing in its own service, Microsoft has opted to offer its customers the WordPress.com blogging solution.

So, expect some hardcore Microsoft supporters who actually used Microsoft as a blogging platform to find themselves having to eschew Windows and embrace freedom. It's the only option given here.

Relying on Windows servers is difficult for a plethora of reasons, one of which is security. There is currently big trouble with Stuxnet [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15], whose progression we find out about in The Register:

The infamous Stuxnet worm infected 14,000 systems inside Iran, according to new estimates.

The sophisticated and complex malware was tuned to infect supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that are used to control power plants and factories. Stuxnet was tuned to attack specific configurations of Siemens Simatic WinCC SCADA system software. The technology is used in industrial control systems in power plants, oil pipelines and factories.

Another problem to be experienced with Windows is stability. There were many examples recently where even Microsoft itself was unable to keep its servers up [1, 2, 3] and it is said that an airline has just been downed again due to Windows (service was down for one day, but no plane crashed as a result [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]).

As usual, the failure was put down to “hardware”. Chuckle… How long does it take to replace a failed drive, folks? Is 21h a new record??? No. The failure was software and they used that other OS. It’s just not reliable for mission-critical stuff. The system was supposed to have automatic fail-over in case of hardware failure. Nothing worked as planned.

The LSE switched to GNU/Linux. Maybe airline reservations will as well. How about you?

For information about LSE see [1, 2, 3, 4].

A reader of ours was mystified to find that despite Windows' poor track record, someone in Minnesota decided to 'pull a Bush' and let Microsoft handle state E-mail, thus ensuring no privacy and low availability. Who would make such erroneous judgment? It already appears as though the person responsible got ousted, but Minnesota's problem remains. It's not exactly shocking given that Minnesota has already subscribed to the American EDGI scam [1, 2, 3, 4] and let Minnesota schools be hijacked by Gates. Still, this is something which can be corrected if enough people protest. Deals with government need to respect the taxpayers after all. ⬆