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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.""
I own 2 macs and a pc. I prefer my mac for my research mainly because of the GUI and Unix underpinnings. Since I do a lot of coding for my biological modeling work, the built in compilers come in handy. Plus, I like the fact that I do not have to worry about viri. I'll always keep a pc around for certain things, especially gaming, but my mac goes with me for work. It is a simple matter of personal choice. I personally would hate to have to give up my 12" powerbook.
I think the Mossberg Article makes the point when it is contrasted with the article he wrote last week about which pc one should purchase. In that article he advises about the feature-set one should look for and how to best make use of the digital life apple has been attempting to push for years. I remember a Steve Jobs MacWorld Keynote where he introduced iLife and another where he makes it clear that apple will innovate its way out of the bad times. I guess everyone else in the industry is ready to follow the leader. I think the fact that this week's article is selling the point that, "Hey, as you are downloading this week's M$ critical update, you should know there is a platform where people are not targeted nor is this platform flawed in the foundation of its design." I have always thought life would be better if we worked on a *nix platform at work and when home to a Mac. One could make the argument that it is now in print.
For games I have my ps2, and my fastest box is this laptop a P4-2000m so I have been I thinking about what I should do for a workstation.
Assuming neither KDE, GNOME, or someother desktop become as freindly as OS X, my next computer will be an apple.
I read that article and I wonder whether it's time to be more specific when it comes to calling something a virus. Yes, often times the behavior can be annoying either way, but the viruses that most Windows machines are exposed to today are dramatically different than the few macro-viruses that macs are succeptible to.
A trojan horse or something that can slowly kill your hard disk is much more severe than something that adds characters to your Excel spreadsheets.
It makes me feel that the Symantec quote is more FUD than anything else. Aside from that, I enjoyed the read.
As a long time Mac user, I personally learned nothing new in the article, but it's good to get that info into wider circulation. Particularly the sort of people who read the WSJ, influential but not tech savvy.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
Mossberg's always liked Macs. Sure, he's had gripes before,
all of them pretty much justifiable, but he's always been one
of those straight-shooters that's been able to see around
the "Apple is dying" bullshit a lot of his peers loved to spew.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
A big problem brewing in the wings is the continued use of .SIT Stuffit Archives on OSX. .SIT has no provisions for the x (01) bit on files, so Stuffit Expanders version 7 and 8.0.1 set the x bit on every file. This makes it much easier to launch the theoretical mac virus.
.sitx format that handles this properly, and there's little that you can't do with an OSX .dmg image natively (just drag&drop onto Disc Copy). Panther will make a .zip for you from the Finder, although I'm not sure how it handles forks and file attributes.
Aladdin has created a
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
So what you're saying is that a good exploit only needs to be a trojan that runs at user-level (no manipulation of anything critical) and asks the admin password (which everybody is so used to handing out all the time). Getting regular users used to using sudo a lot isn't necessarily a good thing.
A Good Intro to NetBS
Not really. Representatives from anti virus companies and security experts have stated that it is much harder to write viruses for OS X.
It also has been out for several years. Don't you think that any enterprising visur writer would have written one by now?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...