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RIP G4 PowerMac
squiggleslash writes "An a not entirely surprising move, Apple has taken the PowerMac G4 out of production (see the last few paragraphs of this interesting article in Mac Central about the new G5s.) The PowerMac G4 had continued to be in production largely for users of Mac OS 9, and it had been speculated it might be kept as a lower-end headless entry-level Mac. You can still buy them from the Apple Store, while stocks last. On a seperate note, it looks like the 3GHz G5 is a while away, and G5 PowerBooks are no nearer production."
I know a lot of people that were hoping dual G4s would come down in price when the G5s came out. I think it would be nice to have a low-end *upgradeable* (not iMac or eMac) tower offering from Apple. Perhaps the G4 could have filled that niche. Dual G4s in a mini tower maybe, plus the G5 powermac. Kind of like the iBook Vs. Powerbook. (Oh yeah there isn't much difference between them now.)
I know, I know. Apple needs to sell G5s in order for IBM to make faster ones, cheaper ones etc. Still an only dual processor offering from Apple would be neat.
I boycott signatures
I believe there are plenty of Artists and other non-techfreaking users out there who are afraid of OS-X. They stay with what they know and what supports the application they use for years now.
Nerds like us get the most recent OS version of whatever gets thrown at us. We even buy stuff like the BeBox or the new Amiga, that dont have any real apps.
if so acourding to this it is a pump, thus proving you wrong.... something tells me based on how old the article is it most likely is this watercooling setup.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
It could also mean that Tiger will have an improved Classic layer, which will be able to run QPS without problems (yes, I know it's unlikely...)
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
And I could counter with the New York Times, the New York Post and every Time-Life and Condé Nast magazine.
Your information is out of date. Time Warner made the decision to migrate nearly a year ago. Conde Nast did it earlier this year.
I've got fifteen years in the industry. How about choo?
Twenty-one, if you broadly define "the industry." You want to compare resumes, or should we just drop our pants and get a ruler?
I write in my journal
The system will crash rather than be taken over. So while it's more "secure" from being taken over, it would be much easier to DoS into crashing.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
This is not entirely true. Somebody broke into the Mac running WebStar that was hosting the "Crack-a-Mac" contest. But they did it by exploiting a vulnerability in a filemaker script that was running alongside the webserver. But a remote compromise is a remote compromise.
As someone else pointed out, an app like Timbuktu gives you remote back-office-style control over a Mac if you can install the program; I used to have an installer program that installed an invisible version of the Timbuktu on any Mac, making it easy to gain access if you could get physical access to the machine once (or get someone to run the file). More troubling was the application distributed at the time by securemac.com (I forget the name of the app) that opened an obscure port on the mac for a user to telnet into and the user could issue commands via a simple command language. The commands allowed a user to open programs, files, delete files, etc; most things that you could do sitting in front of the machine.
Of course the latter two aren't really exploits as they require a user to actually install them (once). But the lack of a firewall means that if they are installed once they do damage; whereas a firewall would head off the damage they might do (assuming the apps are installed by trickery rather than by a malicious user sitting at the machine, who could also turn off the firewall of course.
But all this is academic -- os9 was more secure "out of the box" because it didn't do anything. Like someone else wrote, you can't telnet into a rock either. Once you make the os do things, like run webservers, or cgi scripts (like the filemaker one that got exploited), or remote access apps, or ftpd (I believe there was a vulnerable ftpd program under os9, actually more like os7.1 or 7.5), etc., you open up the potential for exploits. The same with any services you open up under UNIX. If you run OSX without any network services turned on and with all ports closed, it is just as secure as OS 9 "out of the box" -- and just as useful.
Their web servers weren't "in the box" when they bought OS9. The very first sentence of the article you linked points out that the Army was running WebStar, which certainly wasn't part of OS9, and isn't running "out of the box."
No, NOT the same. Because nothing runs on a Mac under OS 9 unless you explicity enable it. Unlike UNIX, where services run by default out of the box.
Right - including webservers. That was exactly my point. An OS9 (or 8 or 7) out-of-the-box install didn't "do anything," as far as the internet is concerned, so it didn't introduce any vulnerabilities, whereas most UNIX out-of-the-box installations do have network services running. When the Mac is running the same or similar services it is much more vulnerable. It is this -- and not some mysterious design feature of the OS itself -- that makes the Mac more secure -- and less useful -- "out of the box."
Look, I'm a huge MacOS fan, even OS 9,8,7 (actually 8.5.1 was my favorite; it was downhill from there in my opinion until X), but there is no sense in pretending things that aren't true. Mac OS9 was not inherently any more secure than any other OS; it was more secure in practice because all network services were disabled and not too many people used them (and not too many used Macs anyway), so the hunt for Mac security holes was never as vigorous and popular as the hunt for UNIX and Windows exploits. There was a Mac hacking community, and it came up with some pretty clever things (including that remote control program that I wish I could remember the name of), but the few Macs running WebStar were never an attractive enough target for hackers with acres of apache & IIS servers in front of them to play with.
I guess my point is that the OS is only as secure as the services it is running, and that's true of UNIX as well. There is nothing inherently more secure about OS9; UNIX can certainly be installed without turning on vulnerable services but nobody bothers because these machines are meant to be used on the internet.
There were versions of apache for Mac, for example, vulnerable to whatever exploits were around for the version of apache they were based on. And WebStar was a damn fine server, but its big selling point was that it was a freakin' workhorse, not that it was any more secure than apache, except perhaps through obscurity. And either way it says nothing about the inherent security of OS 9. Arguably OS9 is less secure as an OS than UNIX because it treats every user as root.
Don't compare Mac and UNIX "out of the box" because they're in very different boxes. Compare Mac + network services to UNIX "out of the box" or Mac "out of the box" to UNIX with all network services turned off if you actually want to compare them for this purpose.
You keep repeating the claim there has been no successful exploit "in the wild" (that you know of) -- which may be true if you ignore the crack-a-mac contest, but it is irrelevant. A mac running insecure services is no more secure than a UNIX box running insecure services, and a Mac that is not connected to a network at all is as secure as a UNIX box not connected to a network. And, again, it is probably less secure, since once the service has been compromised, the attacker now has root access to the Mac. At the OS-level the Mac is probably less secure.
I realize that you think your claim that there has been no successful compromise of os9 is some kind of self-evidently significant argument, but it is basically just interesting data until you suggest some actual hypothesis (other than obscurity) as to what might make OS9 more secure.
My hypothesis is that OS9 was more secure simply because out of the box it didn't do anything (as far as the network is concerned). And the majority of users left it that way. It's a simple hypothesis, and all you can say is "Bogus."
HP, for example, can deliver hardware that's tested, warranteed, supported, and, most important, homogenous. When a school system buys 2000 new PCs to run Windows 2000 (which predates OS X), they know that every PC will be the same, every PC will be working out of the box (or will be replaced quickly), and that every PC will be supported in two years.
I'd love for someone to point to ANY company still selling new computers with waranties still offering support for Windows 98. Even in the much larger world of PCs you have to EOL stuff. Companies who stay current, stay current. Companies that wait for something to break, massively upgrade. Every OEM supplier offers warranties(HP is not usually rated very highly). How are HPs any more homogenous than any other computer? Macs are a LOT more homogenous when it comes to drivers/system software.
They also know that any applications they buy will still work in five years.
Not all apps are happy to go between 2000 and XP, and a lot of apps broke between 98/ME and NT/2K.Windows XP SP2 is going to break a shitload of apps(many developers are getting ready for this). Hell, any update can break almost anything, a stupid video card update broke our terminal emulator(Reflections) on our Win2k boxes. P.S. Biege and AIO G3s were discontinued over 5 years ago*.
Most teachers won't even notice the change. XP is that compatible. OS X is not. OS X requires new training, new applications (unless you want to use Classic, which isn't exactly a great solution), new servers, and new machines.
Soooo, Windows hasn't ever changed and will never change their GUI? OSX was a huge change, but that was years ago. If you are still bitching about that, then I'll bitch about Windows 3.1 to 95! Wah! Wah! As far as new servers and machines, WTF? Any Mac produced in the last 5 years* is officialy supported by Apple with OSX and OSX will hook up to pretty much any server.
It would be impossible for a 100% OS 8/9 district to become a 100% OS X district. The all-in-one (and beige) G3s simply do not work correctly on OS X. The PII 233s work fine under Windows XP.
This is silly, OSX will install in a biege G3* as much as XP will work on a PII 233, both machines are on the fringe of being usable even with upgrades. People have to retire machines if they want to stay current.
*Apple officialy stopped supporting beige computers running OSX, but you can still install it, and it works well if you upgrade the video card and RAM. These machines were discontinued back in 1998.