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ref 2; one person reported 15% of their CDs were beginning to fail, and 85% were not.
This is supposed to be evidence that not-failing is atypical?

Links to stories are easy to find these days, here's one from the other side;

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/opticalmedialongevity.html

A testament to the durability of Audio CDs is a natural aging study conducted by the Library of Congress. The study found discs that, despite exhibiting both unacceptable levels of BLER and uncorrectable errors, remained playable and failed to exhibit noticeable audio defects. [19]

DVD rot has been debunked as a chronic problem, yet it remains a persistent urban legend. [20] While there have been documented cases of deterioration in specific discs, they appear to be the result of poor manufacturing. [21]

Personally, I trust the Library of Congress analysis, but hey - believe what you want.

I'll gladly bet with you that those all DVDs won't last one hundred years. Unless the archival problem planning you were involved in was more than ten years ago DVD was an insane option, even then it was sketchy at best.

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/opticalmedialongevity.html

The brand new Mac I use at work doesn't have any trouble with viruses either, but for some reason I can't use it for more than a week without needing to reboot because it becomes unusably slow. I don't know what the culprit is exactly, but my wife's Apple laptop has similar behavior and I'm inclined to think it's the operating system itself.

Make sure that the maintence scripts are running. (Yeah, yeah, it just works ....)

Perhaps proprietary is too strong then. But .avi was born of Microsoft and remains a Windows-centric container format. As such, cross-platform compatitbility issues invariably crop up (in the same way that Quicktime and .mp4 can create problems for 'not invented here' Microsoft products). These issues may stem more from cross-platform availability of the codecs - and particularly the shoehorning of certain codecs into the avi container (H.264 for example). You might find that similar content encoded in a Quicktime/MPEG-4 container would have fewer problems.

Anyway, if Perian isn't to your taste for solving the problem, try here.

Apple has already put badly thought out "anti-malware" components in OS X, and they have already failed to detect malware and caused more problems from false positives than they prevent. Until there's enough exploits in the wild that the risk of not running anti-malware is clearly higher than the risks of running it it's crazy to run it.

And that's where we've been at for two years. I brought this up in MAY 2004, June 2004 and January 2005, and in May 2005, as well as numerous times since then.

Apple's would be coding this, not symantec or some third party.

I don't care if Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and the ghost of Alan Turing were coding it, the whole purpose of "anti-malware" code is to detect "suspicious" patterns of activity and block them. It inherently creates a certain amount of false positives, and even the minimal "anti-malware" Apple has already put in OS X has managed to lock me up so I had to ssh in and kill a screen saver that it had decided was doing something suspicious (as noted in the January note above).

Security is about protection, not Convenience.

Security is about defense in depth. Windows has to depend on anti-malware and obtrusive firewall rules because it has so many holes in the system that these "last ditch" defenses are all it can manage. It's possible to design a system that's more convenient and secure by using the right approach.

Such as what's listed at http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/malspyware.html?

Of which the only one found in the wild is a social-engineering attack. Anti-malware can't prevent a social-engineering attack (install this, unpack this and run that, trust us). It can't prevent DRM software being installed even if that DRM software is doing dangerous things, because that's what DRM software is all about (and I've got a fine selection of rants about that if you'd like to hear them)...

do nothing but reduce the reliability...
How? Apple's would be coding this, not symantec or some third party.

and convenience...
In some cases, there would be some convenience hit, but it would be minimal. Remember this is checking for things that could be used as possible virus entries, Such as deleting everything in a user's account or adding a startup entry. Security is about protection, not Convenience.

Until there's actual malware to look for...
Such as what's listed at http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/malspyware.html? Lets see:

-The Sony® Digital Rights Rootkit - installing kernel extensions even if you decline to accept the license agreement. This software is both a rootkit and spyware.
-OSX.Inqtana.A, which propagates via Bluetooth®.
-OSX.Leap.A deletes, infects, or corrupts files and attempts to spread through iChat.
-SH.Renepo.A / SH.Renepo.B, aka Opener, is a rootkit that can disable the Mac OS X firewall, steal personal information, destroy data, and replicate itself to other systems on your network. That SH.Renepo can replicate itself to other systems on your network by copying itself to any mounted drive, including shared volumes
-MacOS.MW2004.Trojan, a nasty bit of malware that masquerades as a Microsoft® Word 2004 installer that erases the infected users Home folder and potentially more.

Sounds like pretty nasty stuff to me. Again. it's not about hash checking, it's about intercepting potential vulnerable points, whether good or malicious, and accepting or denying them. What I'm proposing is what most Active Firewalls do with ports and programs today. What is so different if you start asking the same question that an active firewall would ask when it comes to what the program is doing to your PC?

Windows users get the Earth and the Moon. We get a spinning beachball.

I wish there was a way of disabling spotlight during certain times. especially when I'm running a script that's creating dozens of files only to trash them again later. I think it's taking a bit of a performance hit from spotlight.

Apple still claims that OS-X never crashes. Mac users will say the same thing in public. However the Big Secret is that on Mac-centric bulletin boards (like this, for instance) you see that there are many "kernel panics" (the equivalent of a Windows BSOD).

I give Apple credit for putting up a nice, friendly message that "your computer needs to be restarted" instead of a blue screen with scary numbers on it. That way, Mac users believe that they simpley have to reboot because Macintosh said so, and there's nothing "Wrong."