Slashdot Mirror
Wall Street Journal On The Switch
An anonymous reader writes "Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal's personal technology columnist, has long appreciated Macintosh, in a very unbiased, but still probably slightly business-oriented way. Today, in honor of tomorrow's "Panther" release, he has a very positive article in favor of "consumers and small businesses" switching for peace of mind. "If you're tired of the virus wars, the Mac can be an island of serenity.""
>So if one of the main arguments about why Macs are so
>virus free is their small market share, should we really
>keep telling people to switch, since a growing market
>share will make Macs a bigger target?
How much would it have to grow before it becomes a likely target? A factor of 10? 20?
That said, there are two main reasons why viruses on the mac are less common:
1) Mail.app makes it more difficult to launch an application sent to you directly and warns you. It doesn't keep you from doing so, but its not as easy (or defaulted, like it used to be on Outlook).
2) Better security model. The damage one app can cause, even in an admin account, is limited unless it's given extra permissions, which requires giving it a password.
>Also, is it wise to keep pointing out so loudly that its so
>hard to write a virus for OS X and that none currently
>exist? I mean, it sounds kind of pompous and
>arrogant...like an invitation to try write one?
The question would then be, providing you (or whoever) could actually write it, "how long would it stay in the wild."
The low marketshare means that even if you could get it to be as infectious as a virus on windows (same infectious characteristics) it wouldn't have a large pool of systems that it could infect, this means that it is more likely to fizzle than become an issue.
Even providing you could get it work and people to run it.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
First off, the parent is not flamebait. It's unfairly moderated.
That said,
For the individual user, opportunity cost, lost productivity, and essentially waste of resources are far less of a noticeable factor than for MegaCorp Inc. I should know, I'm building an incident response team at a large international bank--they blew millions and millions either preparing for or responding to shit that never should have happened in the first place. Check the CSI/FBI computer crime survey, Gartner, whatnot--you'll find absolutely stunning figures. Whether they're the result of underlying flaws in Windows, or just of a higher suscepbility of that OS to attack because it's further spread I won't argue--I have made up my mind on that already.
Furthermore, while I have no issue with your general comments, there's one important thing you're missing--vulnerabilities in Linux/BSD tend (note careful choice of words) to be results of configuration errors, or of vulnerabilities in software running on top of the OS.
I just had this discussion with a colleague recently--your fundamental difference, compared to Windows is that (a) the existence of Linux workstation in a corporate network does not require you automatically to run vulnerable services as part of the core OS (vulnerabilities in OpenSSH notwithstanding, it's a far more secure mechanism for administering distributed boxes than mapping a C: drive via RPC), and (b) if you do have to run service, I can't think of many (and if you mention NFS, I'll throw a shoe at you) which cannot somehow have their running privileges limited (run as different user, chroot, jail, whatever.)
Of course, if you allow remote root logins, that's your own problem.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage