*The possibility exists that a purchased CD of some software company has been infected by a virus, but how much is the probability of it to happen?

*I don't have statistics, but it sure happened to me! Long time ago, DOS age, PC Tools 6.1. The original disk contained a very nasty boot sector virus.

Why that Microsoft hatred? They're a very rich company, sure. Why are they rich? Why is Windows the most used operating system by far?
Because MS made some very clever marketing moves in the past. Because DOS and later Windows were the only viable operating systems for quite some time (Mac being far too expensive, Linux being far too user unfriendly, and Unix being both too expensive AND too user unfriendly).

Some people seem to believe that everything that's worng in the software world should be blamed on Microsoft. Wake up! Ever heard why Oracle bought the InnoDB database engine? Not because they needed a transactional storage engine - their own storage engine is better than InnoDB. No, they wanted to blow MySQL out of the water by denying it a transactional engine - MySQL was eating into their profit. 
And what did Microsoft do? They released MSDE, a free database engine, as a competitor to MySQL. Better in some regards (fully ANSI-92 compliant, fast transactional engine), less in others (not cross-platform, database size limited to 2 GB, no clustering).
But of course, it's Micosoft, so it's evil. And what Oracle did is not evil, because Oracle is not Microsoft.
(By the way, that InnoDB move bit Oracle on the ass in a big way)

Security? Why is Linux more secure than Windows? The average Linux user is far more computer savvy than the average Windows user, and knows how to protect his system and prevent malware from coming in.
Script kiddies know this. Their target is the unknowing Windows user - there's loads of unknowing Windows users - to maximize the impact of their vandalism. About the same goes for the Mac - there are too few Macs around to be an interesting target for the Internet hooligans. If and when the popularity of Mac or Linux grows to the current level of popularity of Windows, those systems WILL be interesting targets, and I am sure the security of those systems will be breached on a regular basis. 

Not supporting OpenGL out of the box is a bad move however. And I'm fairly sure MS will fix that soon. Many popular games are developed as cross-platform, and those games invariably use OpenGL - and an operating system that can't run those games is not going to sell very well. 

Ah well. I run XP Pro 64 bit, and I like it. Pretty secure too, my logs tell me that I get an automated attack on my IP address about once a week. Nothing has ever gotten through.

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

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