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A Six-Step Plan for Apple
An anonymous reader writes "Open letter from Alex Salkever to Jobs. One thing in particular strikes me: 'The latest round of attacks on Microsoft software is terrifying. If using a Mac means servers in Russia are less likely to harvest my passwords and offer my identity to the highest bidder, I think that's an offer I'd like to hear more about.' I think he's got something there."
All units move into Phase III battle positions! Commence Apache vs. IIS flamewar!
Do you think that when Apple talks about 'superior design', they aren't talking about color, but the OS and user interface? When Alex says 'technology', and Apple says 'design', I think they are talking about the same thing.
People don't pay premium prices because of a Mac's color, or shape, but for the OS and interface. They expect the nice 'design' (in the "looks-nice" sense) because of the premium price, but are not paying premium solely for its looks.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
It may not be the only alternative in existence, but it is the only real alternative for all the grandmothers, and computer incompetents in the world. As much as you linux zealots hate to admit it, Linux is not the most user friendly OS to install and use. If all they want to do (or know how to do) is email, IM and download pictures off their cameras, they really don't need the flexibility Linux(or variants) gives them. Apple is similar to MS in the fact that pretty much anyone can install a mac and pick it up and use it without many problems
It's not just security through obscurity. To install any new application in Mac OS X (as I imagine it is in Unix), the admin password must be input. Windows does not have this extra safeguard.
Thanks a million. Push Start to replay.
Are we phishing for passwords? Yes. Are we preying on the gullibility of millions of computer users? Yes. Are we using the information that we're receiving to access as much cash/credit from the end-users as is possible, probably ruinging their credit and their lives? Yes.
But we're doing it all to fight terrorism. Didn't anybody watch our recruitment movie, Swordfish? We're the good guys. Now give us your passwords and leave us to fight the good fight.
Is that why about 50% of the laptops at the USENIX Advanced Technical Conference last week were Macs?
Seems like lots of geeks, at least the ones that go to USENIX (people like, er, Rob Pike, who might know something about innovative software) use Macs.
According to these statistics Firefox's "obscurity" is disappearing quickly. We (Firefox users) currently hold 12.2% of the market, which is a 4% increase this year. Great news for us developers who are sick of IE work arounds.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
And this is well bourn out by the evidence with regards to attacks on web servers. As has been well documented, IIS servers have been vulnerable at various times to several well known viruses, which have been able to spread themselves to other IIS web servers.
It is a well known factoid that IIS web servers provide the vast majority of the content available on the Internet. As a result they have been targeted by virus writers and script kiddies the world over for attacks.
On the other hand there is an open source web server that has a very low volume of sales, known as Apache, that because it provides such a low volume of the content of the Internet, has remained of little interest to virus writers and script kiddies.
Should Apache ever take off and become popular, it is likely that it will become a significant target of attack.
What's that you say? Apache actually serves more than half the content of the Internet? Damn! There goes this bit of evidence.
-Rusty
You never know...
But still, social engineering will allow viruses to get installed even with the password safety, because Joe User loves "free celebrity screensavers!!!" and will happily enter the password to install them.
His first 4 recommendations are basically to be like everyone else:
So basically, he's another of those people who thinks that, of course, Steve must be trying to maximize his market share at the expense of everything else! And, of course, the best way to do that is to make Macs cheap, like Dells. Because Dell sells a lot of units! ....Which is true. But it's not the point.
Apple's purpose is not to maximize marketshare but to maximize money. They do that by selling with high margins. Removing the high margins would make Apple unable to function, basically. They are not another assemble and resell outfit. They are not another Dell.
Why do so few people realize that?
As for making a headless "iMac," first, that wouldn't be an iMac, and second, that's not what Apple needs. They have a whole bunch of headless machines--what the heck do you think a PowerMac is??? And if I'm not mistaken, the PowerMacs come with iLife installed. So....he wants them to make a PowerMac. Yay! They're already doing that!
Why do people keep insisting that the way for Apple to dominate the market is to become another low-margin box-assembler? They're doing just fine the way they are. They're not in any trouble. Their stock price is higher than it's been in years--granted, it was higher a couple of weeks ago, but it always rises before and tanks after a major show.
My six steps for Apple?
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I'm speaking from a linux point of view; I would guess the Mac is similar.
That is such a tired, over-simplified, and patently false rant I'm surprised it rates an insightful...Yes, lower market share will result in fewer exploits. But giving half a thought to basic security precautions will too. Between the two of them you end up with an operating system which currently has 0 viruses in the wild and very few exploits which affect the default installation.
It is also inane to suggest that all of a sudden, everyone will switch to a mac and suddenly get viruses. The point is that with a diversified eco-system (linux, freeBSD, Solaris, MacOS, Windows, etc.) all using different client and server software, the threat potential goes down for everyone because it makes it that much harder for a worm or virus to spread.
Explain how Apache is the most popular web server, and yet the server which gets holed by worms on a regular basis is IIS
They'll find bugs, but let's face it, Microsoft cut corners when designing the security in Windows. Replacing it with any system that was designed by people who care about security is going to be better, bugs or no bugs.
That whole IE Zones thing has got to go, every other exploit seems to work by confusing IE into think it's the local machine zone. This is a badly designed security mechanism, and it's just the tip of the iceberg of very poor decisions made by Microsoft.
They are if you want to run photoshop, illustrator, Macromedia products.... if you need Office for whatever reason. If you do video.
:-| The Gimp is getting useable but the Gimp is still Not Photoshop.)
For the Creative Professional, your options are the Mac, which gets out of your way, and Windows, which goes out of your way to get in your way, but is so stupidly cheap and ubiquitous that the vast majority of young / struggling artists go with it.
Adobe dropped Photoshop for IRIX a long time back, and there's no comprable solution for Professional Image Editing.
(save the Gimp arguments, I've heard them.
That's not going to happen, and it's not going to work either. Just think about it....
OS X is a very nice OS, and has some very nice software running on it, and it's got a great API and IDE. As a niche player, it's working great.
Now you make it instalable on any old PC. You're a PC developer and you've got the choice of developing for windows on PC or OS X on PC. Are you going to change your development practises to something new and untested, or are you going to go the safe route with the devil you know and keep on developing for windows PC?
Now, just imaging Apple put something like WINE in with OS X on PC, so that you can run your PC apps as is, but under the new GUI. Now there's no incentive to write specifically for OS X on windows, but without the ability to run existing PC apps, there'd be no sales of OS X for PC.
It would be a disaster for Apple and anyone who bought it, and would only strengthen the Microsoft monopoly. Jobs has more sense than that.
BTW, Macs are not 3x the price. Price up a new G5 and a comparable PC from a decent manufacturer and you'll see that the G5 is really a bargain in the computing world.
What Apple really needs is an affordable entry level machine with no monitor, but can be bought bundled with a lovely flat screen. Fill the hard drive with lots of easy to follow video tutorials and apple will cash in big - especially if they do a "test drive an iMac today" type program.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
I talked to the marketing head of Apple in Norway about why they did not use the awful track record of Microsoft as an advertisment opportunity. He stated that it is not that easy, and if a similar problem was to surface in MacOS X, they'd lose any credibility they had harvested from the PC community.
*nix systems tend to handle mutli-user environments much more gracefully. I run as a non-privilidged user on all *nix machines I touch. I tried to do the same thing in Win2K but ran in to so many hassles with it that I eventually gave up and followed the advice of more experienced Windows users - added my account to Administrators.
Stop crying and buy a Mac. I mean, your already up to 2 computers with 2 different OSes to "surf the web". Within 10-20 minutes of powering on your mac you can "surf the web" and not have these problems.
Sheesh, do you also use 2 cars in tandem because one is always broken? It never ceases to amaze me how many people's intelligence gets halved when they are behind a computer.
I bought AAPL at 21, it's at 30 today. Get this dumb-ass away from my portfolio.
Seriously, every couple of months we get another MBA-bot posting his (never her) Grand Unified Plan for "saving" Apple, usually based on dumb ideas that have already failed (competing against Dell on price - look how well that went for eMachines and Gateway), are failing (tablet PC's do everything users want... really shittily), or are obviously going to fail (taunt virus/worm writers and script kiddies with boasts of Mac's invulerability).
Enough of the madness. Seven years ago, Wired ran a piece called 100 Ways to Save Apple, most of which were stupid (#76, "Make damn sure Rhapsody runs on an Intel chip"), fucking stupid (#81, "Merge with Sega"), or so fucking stupid it blocks out the sun (#61, "Ink a promotion/development deal with Shaquille O'Neal"). The item that looks best in retrospect is #101: "Don't worry. You'll survive. It's Netscape we should really worry about."
Slashdot and other sites with a collective IQ greater than that of a turnip should pass on these articles in the future. They're utterly garbage, have been for 20 years, and probably will be in another 20.
--realinvalidname
The parent of this post was modded up "funny" but it it actually makes an interesting point. The most interesting comment on Mac v. Windows security issues, or just mac security more generally, was at
s
http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/broken_window
Addressing the common line about mac's being more secure only because no one uses them He had the following to say:
"------
The reason this argument is so popular with Windows apologists is that it's a convenient bit of rhetoric. They say it's so, we say it's not. You can't get past this argument, because it can't be disproven without the Mac OS actually attaining a Windows-like market share.
So, let's concede the point, just for the sake of argument: OK, fine, if the Mac had the same market share as Windows, the tables would be turned and there'd be just as many Mac security exploits as there are Windows exploits today.
Now what? Given that the Mac is never going to attain a monopoly share of the operating systems market -- that merely expanding its share to, say, 10 percent would be universally hailed as an almost-too-good-to-be-true success -- isn't it thus only logical to conclude that the Mac is forever "doomed" to be significantly more secure than Windows?
------"
Of course you would be hard pressed to find someone to grant in reality the points he grants for argument's sake, but it is an interesting comment on the argument itself.