I don't think so. In my experience big corporation have really crappy security and a lot of disgruntled and/or underpaid employees practically begging for someone to offer them cash to screw over the man. So they're poorly equipped to counter any kind of real threat.
Maybe I've just been working in the wrong places:-/
Have you ever tried Cheggit.net ? It's pretty good, or so I hear from my deviant friends:-). I think people actually prefer not paying for porn to avoid the paper trail. It's silly but it's still stigmatized.
I agree, nothing is 100% secure bugs are found in all operating systems all the time including the ones considered most secure. But of course that shouldn't prevent OS vendors from implementing modern security measures and Apple is keeping up with the latest trends, better securing most of the programs you mentioned (at least the Apple ones.) Windows has by all accounts made great strides in the security area recently, it'd be a shame to have OSX fall behind.
Lion also has all new privilege separation framework to help with that. From the Siracusa review :
"The idea is to break up a complex application into individual processes, each of which requires only the few entitlements necessary to perform a specific subset of the application's total capabilities. [...] Another example from Lion is the Preview application, which completely isolates the PDF parsing code (another historic source of exploits) from all access to the file system."
Together with the sandboxing it sounds pretty robust though time will have to tell.
I say that it doesn't matter if you use Chrome to visit Bing. What matters IMHO is that Microsoft and Apple can't dictate anymore which search & ads you'll use even though they had/have the power to dictate which browser you used or to say that Flash isn't going to run on a device.
You do realize that a device in order to call itself Android and have access to all of Google's goodies must pass the CTS ? What exactly prevents them from demanding Google is the default search engine, or video should be WebM, or add any other arbitrary restriction ?
There's a theory out there now that I find interesting which is that a lot of the Android phones out there, in particular the cheaper versions, aren't actually being used as smartphones but as "regular" phones. That would explain why Android users use (and pay for) less apps and iOS devices seem to be more prevalent on the internet (according to some studies) and use more data. If that's true then that increased marketshare actually wouldn't do Google much good unless they find a way to "activate" those people.
Reading up on Pwn2Own results, and reading the security update notes on major browsers / flash / acrobat would prove really informative. Most of the viruses Ive seen are not from incompetent users.
In Lion all those are now separated into independent processes and sandboxed. Should make things a lot more secure.
Until a non-Windows OS is installed on a plurality of machines, Windows will be the primary target and have the most hackers going after it. The Pwn2Own contests have shown that Macs are plenty vulnerable when people are willing to put in the effort to go after them.
The guy who won all those Pwn2Own contest says that OSX Lion's security is now better than Windows 7.
Talking of Mr. Zovi, here's what he says about Lion :
"[...] now, they are also more secure than PCs, thanks to several crucial security improvements in the operating system itself, Mac OS X 10.7 So says Dino A. Dai Zovi, an independent security consultant. Those operating system features now put Lion ahead of Windows 7, the latest version Microsoft’s operating system, whose leadership was forged from the fire of relentless attacks by hackers and malware writers, he says."
Seems obvious to us geeks, but when a photographer at a christening I went to recently asked if anyone was a "computer expert" so he could give them the CompactFlash card to transfer the pictures no-one wanted to touch it. Syncing,as opposed to just exposing the device as a filesystem, is a better solution if you are going for mass appeal.
It's open source but - if you want the latest version on your device you will have to agree to Google's terms - if you want the brand recognition and all the Google apps that make up the core user experience you will have to license - if you want that license you will have to certify and comply to specifications Google can change at anytime at will. - once the latest version is released they might release the now current one's sources. If, you know, they feel like it.
If MS came up with a scheme like this and called it "open source" they would be laughed out of town.
The price of Internet Explorer was never the real issue. What created anti-trust problems for Microsoft was telling computer manufacturers that they couldn't install any other browser on the computers they sold.
While that's true there's no denying they ruined Netscape's business by giving away what Netscape were charging for. Around the time of IE3 vs Netscape 3 most people still preferred Netscape but IE3 was free and Netscape wasn't. Then along come IE4 which wasn't only free, but actually better (according to most people at the time) and it was all over. Choke off revenue for your competitors, slowing their development while you ramp yours up. Sounds exactly like what Google's trying to do but failing to since the iPhone is still by far the most profitable smartphone out there.
As I'll remind you the next time this comes up. Macs do fail and dont always work, next we'll deal with the myth of inherent security.
Again with the straw man arguments.
It really sucks when your own propaganda is used against you.
Propaganda ? Get some perspective. Take a deep breath and repeat: we're discussing a preference for certain technical solution, not a religion. Don't project your attitudes onto me.
BTW, Windows updates dont fail as badly as this. Have not done so for years. The difference is when an update with Windows or Linux buggers up the drivers, I can get the original driver from Nvidia/Inte/AMD and fix it myself.
Well here's the driver for Snow Leopard for the GeForce GT 330M that's in that Macbook, that might work. Of course once Nvidia releases a driver for Lion you could try installing that but once they do Apple will just distribute it through an update so there'd be no point looking for it yourself. You seem kind of ill informed, you really think there's no downloadable drivers on OSX ?
It 's not friggin' magic. While being a lot better than Windows things fail, nothing has a 100% success rate and nobody will claim that. Even iOS upgrades fail from time to time or have bugs and they are as braindead as you you can make an OS upgrade. But hey, enjoy that straw man you got there.
These things happen which is why everybody will advise you to wait until the 10.7.1 release which is coming soon. Don't be an early adopter if you you can't stand the pain. For god's sake some of these people don't have sense enough to even have a backup.
None of the Nortel patents would have done Google any good as a defensive weapon against Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle if they too were part owners in the patents. I wouldn't have put a dime into them.
Sure it would've, it would have defended them against these patents.
They sued a patent troll over his patents. But you know Google hasn't had cause to sue, they're the ones moving in to others' territory (in mobile OS's, netbooks, etc.). Taking on established companies in court in an area you are trying to move into is a good way to get get knocked out as they've undoubtably got larger relevant patent portfolios. It'd be more interesting to see what they'd do if one, or several, credible competitor showed up in the search and/or ad space.
I think the USSR-US alliance during WW2 worked out pretty well for the western world and the eastern block alike. If it had carried over into the post-war period maybe we would've had some perestroika and glasnost much sooner after Stalin kicked the bucket. But they're very different things, real alliances instead of power brokering and base manipulation through the funneling of funds to factions.
"Yet the Bush administration did more than praise the Taliban's proclaimed ban of opium cultivation. In mid-May, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a $43 million grant to Afghanistan in addition to the humanitarian aid the United States had long been providing to agencies assisting Afghan refugees. [...] That $43 million grant needs to be placed in context. Afghanistan's estimated gross domestic product was a mere $2 billion. The equivalent financial impact on the U.S. economy would have required an infusion of $215 billion. In other words, $43 million was very serious money to Afghanistan's theocratic master"
I wanted to use OpenOffice, I think that's pretty reasonable.
The reason people started NeoOffice was to have OpenOffice on the mac with a real native UI back before OpenOffice finally got it together and released a version with a native interface (a couple of years ago now.) I used NeoOffice for a time back when, it was adequate which is also pretty much how I'd describe OpenOffice.
The original wording was fine, and applies to everyone who wants to do something that is awkward under OSX. I've remembered my specific issues now, and they were that trying to get certain CPAN modules working under OSX was a nightmare
I tempted to use that old FOSS chestnut "it's open source why don't you just fix it" but I'd just be trolling. Maybe it was just another example of how certain FOSS developers are writing code with Linux in mind to the detriment of portability. But you got to go with what works, more power to you.
and also X apps were ugly as f***.
Who in their right mind would use X apps on OSX except as a last resort ? You could bitch about support for X in Windows and it's make about as much sense.
No sensible choice there but to switch to an OS with more solid support and consistent aesthetics.
Linux as a paragon of consistent aesthetics? Now I've heard everything.
I grew up with Macs, and I like OSX, but I can't think of a single thing about it that I miss.. wait, one of the screensavers was pretty cool. But that's it.
They will need to be paid indefinitely then ? That's the problem with mercenaries, they don't quit when you do they just switch sides or go into business for themselves. At least with traditional mercenaries they were the problem of the peasants of whatever far flung region they were in when you stopped paying them, hackers can strike anywhere. Also last I heard the US was suffering a little cash-flow problem already, why throw money away on BS like this ?
"U.S. government financial support for the Afghan Islamic militants was substantial. Aid to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan mujahideen leader. and founder and leader of the Hezb-e Islami radical Islamic militant faction, alone amounted "by the most conservative estimates" to $600 million. Hekmatyar "worked closely" with bin Laden in the early 1990s.[71] In addition to hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid, Hekmatyar also received the lion's share of aid from the Saudis.[72] There is evidence that the CIA supported Hekmatyar's drug trade activities by giving him immunity for his opium trafficking that financed operation of his militant faction.[73]"
Then after those radical islamists took power in the 90's :
"Foreign powers, including the United States, briefly supported the Taliban, hoping it would restore order in the war-ravaged country. For example, it made no comment when the Taliban captured Herat in 1995, and expelled thousands of girls from schools."
I also distinctly remember CNN reporting how the US was giving Afghanistan money to burn (opium) poppy fields, this was in the 90's way before 9/11 and before alliances shifted and we suddenly began hearing about how evil Taliban were destroying priceless buddha statues in the lead-up to war.
This is more like a digital Taliban: giving resources to people whose goals might allign with your now (and a long as the money keeps coming) but who in the end likely have a morality that's 180 degrees opposite to yours. Of course we all know how well supporting the Taliban worked out for the US in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think so. In my experience big corporation have really crappy security and a lot of disgruntled and/or underpaid employees practically begging for someone to offer them cash to screw over the man. So they're poorly equipped to counter any kind of real threat.
Maybe I've just been working in the wrong places :-/
Have you ever tried Cheggit.net ? It's pretty good, or so I hear from my deviant friends :-).
I think people actually prefer not paying for porn to avoid the paper trail. It's silly but it's still stigmatized.
I agree, nothing is 100% secure bugs are found in all operating systems all the time including the ones considered most secure. But of course that shouldn't prevent OS vendors from implementing modern security measures and Apple is keeping up with the latest trends, better securing most of the programs you mentioned (at least the Apple ones.) Windows has by all accounts made great strides in the security area recently, it'd be a shame to have OSX fall behind.
Lion also has all new privilege separation framework to help with that. From the Siracusa review :
"The idea is to break up a complex application into individual processes, each of which requires only the few entitlements necessary to perform a specific subset of the application's total capabilities.
[...]
Another example from Lion is the Preview application, which completely isolates the PDF parsing code (another historic source of exploits) from all access to the file system."
Together with the sandboxing it sounds pretty robust though time will have to tell.
I say that it doesn't matter if you use Chrome to visit Bing. What matters IMHO is that Microsoft and Apple can't dictate anymore which search & ads you'll use even though they had/have the power to dictate which browser you used or to say that Flash isn't going to run on a device.
You do realize that a device in order to call itself Android and have access to all of Google's goodies must pass the CTS ? What exactly prevents them from demanding Google is the default search engine, or video should be WebM, or add any other arbitrary restriction ?
There's a theory out there now that I find interesting which is that a lot of the Android phones out there, in particular the cheaper versions, aren't actually being used as smartphones but as "regular" phones. That would explain why Android users use (and pay for) less apps and iOS devices seem to be more prevalent on the internet (according to some studies) and use more data. If that's true then that increased marketshare actually wouldn't do Google much good unless they find a way to "activate" those people.
Reading up on Pwn2Own results, and reading the security update notes on major browsers / flash / acrobat would prove really informative. Most of the viruses Ive seen are not from incompetent users.
In Lion all those are now separated into independent processes and sandboxed. Should make things a lot more secure.
Until a non-Windows OS is installed on a plurality of machines, Windows will be the primary target and have the most hackers going after it. The Pwn2Own contests have shown that Macs are plenty vulnerable when people are willing to put in the effort to go after them.
The guy who won all those Pwn2Own contest says that OSX Lion's security is now better than Windows 7.
Talking of Mr. Zovi, here's what he says about Lion :
"[...] now, they are also more secure than PCs, thanks to several crucial security improvements in the operating system itself, Mac OS X 10.7 So says Dino A. Dai Zovi, an independent security consultant. Those operating system features now put Lion ahead of Windows 7, the latest version Microsoft’s operating system, whose leadership was forged from the fire of relentless attacks by hackers and malware writers, he says."
Seems obvious to us geeks, but when a photographer at a christening I went to recently asked if anyone was a "computer expert" so he could give them the CompactFlash card to transfer the pictures no-one wanted to touch it. Syncing,as opposed to just exposing the device as a filesystem, is a better solution if you are going for mass appeal.
Android is Linux in the same way OSX is mach. That's a pretty useless statement.
It's open source but
- if you want the latest version on your device you will have to agree to Google's terms
- if you want the brand recognition and all the Google apps that make up the core user experience you will have to license
- if you want that license you will have to certify and comply to specifications Google can change at anytime at will.
- once the latest version is released they might release the now current one's sources. If, you know, they feel like it.
If MS came up with a scheme like this and called it "open source" they would be laughed out of town.
The price of Internet Explorer was never the real issue. What created anti-trust problems for Microsoft was telling computer manufacturers that they couldn't install any other browser on the computers they sold.
While that's true there's no denying they ruined Netscape's business by giving away what Netscape were charging for. Around the time of IE3 vs Netscape 3 most people still preferred Netscape but IE3 was free and Netscape wasn't. Then along come IE4 which wasn't only free, but actually better (according to most people at the time) and it was all over. Choke off revenue for your competitors, slowing their development while you ramp yours up. Sounds exactly like what Google's trying to do but failing to since the iPhone is still by far the most profitable smartphone out there.
As I'll remind you the next time this comes up. Macs do fail and dont always work, next we'll deal with the myth of inherent security.
Again with the straw man arguments.
It really sucks when your own propaganda is used against you.
Propaganda ? Get some perspective. Take a deep breath and repeat: we're discussing a preference for certain technical solution, not a religion. Don't project your attitudes onto me.
BTW, Windows updates dont fail as badly as this. Have not done so for years. The difference is when an update with Windows or Linux buggers up the drivers, I can get the original driver from Nvidia/Inte/AMD and fix it myself.
Well here's the driver for Snow Leopard for the GeForce GT 330M that's in that Macbook, that might work. Of course once Nvidia releases a driver for Lion you could try installing that but once they do Apple will just distribute it through an update so there'd be no point looking for it yourself. You seem kind of ill informed, you really think there's no downloadable drivers on OSX ?
It 's not friggin' magic. While being a lot better than Windows things fail, nothing has a 100% success rate and nobody will claim that. Even iOS upgrades fail from time to time or have bugs and they are as braindead as you you can make an OS upgrade. But hey, enjoy that straw man you got there.
These things happen which is why everybody will advise you to wait until the 10.7.1 release which is coming soon. Don't be an early adopter if you you can't stand the pain. For god's sake some of these people don't have sense enough to even have a backup.
The topic here is android, that is opensource, is given for free to phone manufacturers.
Where's the Honeycomb source then ? For that matter where are the Google apps in the Android 2 source ?
None of the Nortel patents would have done Google any good as a defensive weapon against Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle if they too were part owners in the patents. I wouldn't have put a dime into them.
Sure it would've, it would have defended them against these patents.
They sued a patent troll over his patents. But you know Google hasn't had cause to sue, they're the ones moving in to others' territory (in mobile OS's, netbooks, etc.). Taking on established companies in court in an area you are trying to move into is a good way to get get knocked out as they've undoubtably got larger relevant patent portfolios. It'd be more interesting to see what they'd do if one, or several, credible competitor showed up in the search and/or ad space.
I think the USSR-US alliance during WW2 worked out pretty well for the western world and the eastern block alike. If it had carried over into the post-war period maybe we would've had some perestroika and glasnost much sooner after Stalin kicked the bucket. But they're very different things, real alliances instead of power brokering and base manipulation through the funneling of funds to factions.
Here's some more on the money funneled to the Taliban (from "How Washington Funded the Taliban") :
"Yet the Bush administration did more than praise the Taliban's proclaimed ban of opium cultivation. In mid-May, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a $43 million grant to Afghanistan in addition to the humanitarian aid the United States had long been providing to agencies assisting Afghan refugees. [...] That $43 million grant needs to be placed in context. Afghanistan's estimated gross domestic product was a mere $2 billion. The equivalent financial impact on the U.S. economy would have required an infusion of $215 billion. In other words, $43 million was very serious money to Afghanistan's theocratic master"
I wanted to use OpenOffice, I think that's pretty reasonable.
The reason people started NeoOffice was to have OpenOffice on the mac with a real native UI back before OpenOffice finally got it together and released a version with a native interface (a couple of years ago now.) I used NeoOffice for a time back when, it was adequate which is also pretty much how I'd describe OpenOffice.
The original wording was fine, and applies to everyone who wants to do something that is awkward under OSX. I've remembered my specific issues now, and they were that trying to get certain CPAN modules working under OSX was a nightmare
I tempted to use that old FOSS chestnut "it's open source why don't you just fix it" but I'd just be trolling. Maybe it was just another example of how certain FOSS developers are writing code with Linux in mind to the detriment of portability. But you got to go with what works, more power to you.
and also X apps were ugly as f***.
Who in their right mind would use X apps on OSX except as a last resort ? You could bitch about support for X in Windows and it's make about as much sense.
No sensible choice there but to switch to an OS with more solid support and consistent aesthetics.
Linux as a paragon of consistent aesthetics? Now I've heard everything.
I grew up with Macs, and I like OSX, but I can't think of a single thing about it that I miss.. wait, one of the screensavers was pretty cool. But that's it.
Like I said choice is good.
They will need to be paid indefinitely then ? That's the problem with mercenaries, they don't quit when you do they just switch sides or go into business for themselves. At least with traditional mercenaries they were the problem of the peasants of whatever far flung region they were in when you stopped paying them, hackers can strike anywhere. Also last I heard the US was suffering a little cash-flow problem already, why throw money away on BS like this ?
It's pretty uncontroversial.
Wikipedia on US support for Jihad in Afghanistan :
"U.S. government financial support for the Afghan Islamic militants was substantial. Aid to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan mujahideen leader. and founder and leader of the Hezb-e Islami radical Islamic militant faction, alone amounted "by the most conservative estimates" to $600 million. Hekmatyar "worked closely" with bin Laden in the early 1990s.[71] In addition to hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid, Hekmatyar also received the lion's share of aid from the Saudis.[72] There is evidence that the CIA supported Hekmatyar's drug trade activities by giving him immunity for his opium trafficking that financed operation of his militant faction.[73]"
Then after those radical islamists took power in the 90's :
"Foreign powers, including the United States, briefly supported the Taliban, hoping it would restore order in the war-ravaged country. For example, it made no comment when the Taliban captured Herat in 1995, and expelled thousands of girls from schools."
I also distinctly remember CNN reporting how the US was giving Afghanistan money to burn (opium) poppy fields, this was in the 90's way before 9/11 and before alliances shifted and we suddenly began hearing about how evil Taliban were destroying priceless buddha statues in the lead-up to war.
This is more like a digital Taliban: giving resources to people whose goals might allign with your now (and a long as the money keeps coming) but who in the end likely have a morality that's 180 degrees opposite to yours. Of course we all know how well supporting the Taliban worked out for the US in the end.