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.""
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.
Please, "unbiased", my ass. This guy will gush with praise about any product that's easy to use and free of bugs. Every time he reviews something with flaws, he feels like pointing them out.
Sometimes I read his column and all he talks about is "oh, this program was fun to use", or "I didn't like this music player because it was hard to operate and the battery cover broke off". Like any of that matters.
His constant annoying praise for Apple products is clearly due to the quality of the product and it's usefulness to the average consumer, and not due to any objective standard like how big Apple's cash position is or how man deals they've cut with other computer companies.
This kind of yellow journalism must be put to an end.
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.
>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