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Bill Gates Brags About Vista, Reacts to Apple's Latest Ads
fr8_liner writes "In an unusually candid interview with Newsweek Bill Gates lays it all on the line, bragging about the benefits of Vista, ragging on Apple for their 'I'm a Mac' ads, and claiming primacy in a number of features shared by Vista and OSX. Specifically, it is Mr. Gates' opinion that the Apple adverts are misleading if not untruthful. He makes the claim that 'security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.' The interview also touches on the future of Microsoft and Operating systems, and some of the company's plans for internet-based computing."
I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.'
Yeah, there's one this month.
also here.
Great write up at Daring Fireball already: http://daringfireball.net/2007/02/lies_damned_lies _and_bill_gates
I assume he's referring to the Month of Apple Bugs
Actually, you can upgrade most if not all the non integrated componants in the new intel Macs. Even the CPU on the new Minis can be upgraded, whereas before it was soldered iirc.
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
Newsbytes News Network, April 6, 1994 Yeah, cool new idea there, Bill.
Edith Keeler Must Die
I think the point is that to upgrade a Mac to the latest version of Mac OS X doesn't require rebuilding the computer (nor buying a new one). In fact each version of OS X is a little more efficient and streamlined, so that older hardware may actually run *faster* with the new OS.
(I'm not saying I particularly approve of the Apple ads, but I don't think your comments about having to throw out apple hardware are particularly fair.)
Sorry bud, GP got it right. MPAA = Motion Picture Association of America, while RIAA = Recording Industry Association of America.
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The MOAB actually only came up with three or four Apple bugs, the rest were in third party software that also applied under Linux and Windows!
The most serious exploit (Quicktime) could only be replicated by one in sixty people, and that was when RUNNING A CUSTOM EXECUTABLE LOCALLY, generating the attack file from the binaries on your computer - again, which only worked for one in sixty people.
Ridiculous. Now we know exactly what projects like MOAB lead to, idiocy at the highest levels of the executive quarter.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When OS X 10.3 (Panther) discontinued support for the Beige G3s, the line was six years old and had been discontinued for four. It makes sense that Apple chose to abandon support for a line of machines that wouldn't have run the new OS acceptably anyway.
Linux can get away with supporting ancient hardware because, well, because they don't actually have to support it. Nobody calls up the GNOME foundation complaining that 2.16 crawls on their PIII-450 with 256MB of RAM. In comparison, Apple actually has to live up to the specifications they outline on the box.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I don't think the argument is that PC hardware upgrades are easier than hardware upgrades on the Mac, but rather that Vista requires very substantial hardware upgrades while Leopard won't. Each release of OS X tends to be faster than the previous one, on the same hardware (though they usually use more memory). Tiger runs perfectly fine on a circa-2001 PowerMac G4 (composited windows and all), and so will Leopard. Meanwhile, Vista is going to crawl on a circa-2001 Athlon XP with a Geforce 2, and won't do Aero Glass on that machine at all.
To put a sharper point on it, Apple's upgrade cycle is very gradual, and very incremental. They release a new major version every year or two. Each new version obsoletes a couple of the oldest supported models, and breaks a minor number of applications. An upgrade is generally not very traumatic. Meanwhile, Vista is being released half a decade after its predecessor. It's instantly obsoleting a huge amount of hardware, and breaking a lot of applications in the process.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
When I used to be employed to write adware, we did this at least once a day. I shit you not.
You just can't hide running processes as well as you can on Windows. No other operating system offers so many diverse methods to run executable code as a privileged user. Believe me when I say: Exploiting Windows is like stealing candy from a baby.
It ships with a lot of stuff, but very little of it is turned on by default, and most users will never change that. I don't even think that OS X ships with sshd running by default. It's a very minimalist configuration, in terms of enabled services.
It's not a totally fair comparison; saying that some of the installed software on Mac OS X has vulnerabilities, is like saying, if you turn off Windows' firewall, and run these services, you can get rooted. Well, duh, in both cases. What's really important is the default configuration, (or the 'minimal configuration necessary to get real work done') because that's what 90% of users will ever have running.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Exactly right. My parents are not the most savvy tech people - they call at least once a month to me at work with computer questions. The ads appeal to them, my dad has even started asking whether he should get a Mac. Why? Because he has the experience of the computer not "talking" with the new camera that he purchased or wanting to do a simple slide show of his recent trip to Hawaii. Those are things he knows others do on their computer and he cannot understand why he is not able to. It is to him that the Mac ads are so simple and so appealing.
Gates' claims are so absurd, they're not really worth refuting. So instead I'll go to bed and let Gruber do the job.
Good night.
It ships with a lot of stuff, but very little of it is turned on by default
Actually, NONE of it is turned on by default.
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
I'm certain he was referring to MoAB. My OS X setup is unaffected by the majority of MoAB "bugs"; as you said, many rely on third party apps (and therefore aren't really "Apple" bugs at all). That's not the only reason Mr. Gates can rightly be accused of a lie: "every day"? As in "every single day" since a particular date? MoAB had a hard time stretching a full month out of the few security flaws they were able to find in Apple's software, but a full year? And given the restriction of operating system (Tiger) bugs ONLY?
I was opposed to the MoAB project because I thought it irresponsible. I would say the same of YoAB (Year of...) but my hat would come off to anyone who could accomplish
Gates lied about several other things in this interview, even contradicting himself: he claims he hasn't seen the Get A Mac campaign ads (which are broadcast during some of America's most popular prime time television shows) but knows full well what sort of creature Apple paints Microsoft Windows to be.
Apple has done more than they could hope for with their Get A Mac campaign: they've really really pushed Bill's new Aero-skinned captionless Start button.
NSFW
It was weird he went all Xerox PARC when the question with Vista is the skin. The Windows logo has been ensconced in glassy bubble that is such a Mac OS X wannabe that it's a self-parody ... the very Windows logo has been made to look Mac-like. The swoopy desktop pictures are too much just by themselves, although I heard them defend that by saying that they got all the desktop pictures from third-parties ... so it is not actually Microsoft that did the off ripping. And the "parental controls" feature he keeps saying is a first is in Tiger, released in 2005. It is really weird to hear him say they are first with these things when they are clearly not.
... the soft links or aliases or shortcuts have the little curly arrow. Also, using a modifier key plus Tab to cycle through running applications started on Windows and is everywhere else now. That's not much for 20 years of MS Windows.
Apple not only hired people from PARC and gave them a chance to make real products out of their ideas, Apple also paid Xerox with pre-IPO Apple stock. When Apple went public, Xerox made millions and millions and that was what Xerox wanted. The very reason they had the CEO of Apple and his computer design team touring around the Palo Alto Research Center was because they didn't know how to make any money from the stuff they had there. They were like a motorcycle company who came up with a cool concept car and didn't know what to do so they called the local car company CEO to come down and see if they couldn't get him to take the car project forward. He said, yeah, I like this, I'll hire the team and compensate you with stock and everybody was happy.
When you read the list of GUI features that were developed AFTER that, solely by Apple, at Apple, and for Apple products, it is embarrassing to think about anyone trying to take Apple down a notch with the Xerox PARC story. Just in the 1980's Apple invented and shipped drag and drop, the clipboard cut/copy/paste, the double-click, the pull-down menu, overlapping windows, marquee selections (marching ants), the little box of painting tools like you see in Photoshop, files-and-folders, proportional fonts, WYSIWYG, the Trash, keyboard shortcuts for menus, File-Edit-View, a system menu full of shortcuts (Apple menu/Start menu), little hardware controls in the corner of the screen. The other day I saw a screenshot of System 6 and I was stunned at how much like Mac OS X it looked.
The only stuff I know that Microsoft has contributed to GUI science is the little curly arrow they put on shortcuts, which is a classic innovation in that you see that on every system now