Give it a few more years. When 3G cellphone service prices drop, then you'll be able to use Internet radio like you'd use a standard FM receiver today. As long as you have passable cellphone coverage, you'll be fine.
I rather doubt Apple would switch again. Intel will eventually develop a similar capability or will license the production of it from IBM. I rather doubt Windows laptops will be switching to PowerPC anytime soon so there's a long road ahead for laptop chips at Apple.
Apple didn't move because of the performance of Intel versus IBM, it was that IBM was very unresponsive when it came to making a laptop variant of the G5. Now that Apple's on the Intel ship, they'll benefit from working with a company that has a vested interest in developing laptop chips. Name me one manufacturer other than Apple that made PowerPC based laptops and you'll see what I mean.
Yeah, this is kind of a ridiculous concept. The power level on a most modern cellphones will never go above 2 watts. In addition, the peak output is typically only used when the phone first connects to the network. So we're talking well under 2 watts most of the time.
On top of that it's an omnidirectional signal. As some others pointed out, you're talking to the tower, not directly to the other phone, but even that suggests that it's somehow directional. So in the end, the amount of power were talking about hitting the egg is miniscule.
If two phones were putting out enough wattage to cook an egg in 3 minutes. I should think after a 10 minute phone call with one phone, you're head would start to feel warm.
I've been using Netbeans pretty routinely for a few years now. It's a little sluggish on the old development box I used (dual 733). I've found it to be quick and responsive on anything upwards of a 2.8Ghz P4 (haven't tried anything in between though). It benefits from having a good amount of free memory because gc'ing from the hard disk is expensive.
Keep in mind that a "free" market is one in which you have a number of choices for a given item that are equivalent replacements. Automobiles are a free market as their are many manufacturers and models that I can choose from that will fill my transportation needs. In this care, there's no "free" market.
What this is talking about isn't verizon's customers, but rather network traffic that has to go over Verizon's network. So, in essence it could cause an aggregate slow down of other network providers. Customers of those other networks might be pissed but there's nothing they can do about it save for switching to Verizon which is causing the problem in the first place.
The problem I've seen in most of the licenses franchises like this is that they tend to pick things that are too popular. For example the problem with SWG was everybody wanted to be a Jedi and everybody wanted to go whoop up on Darth Vader. The storyline is too well settled and the characters are too well ingrained in our culture. It makes it very hard to give developers some flexibility.
With Stargate, yes there's a fan base, but Stargate isn't near the level of the Matrix, or Star Wars. But the universe of Stargate is quite huge and there's already an established notion that while there are many stargate teams, the show is about the SG-1 team. So you can have people play the game as SG-130494505 and still have fun and not feel like they are getting ripped off because they can't be Colonel O'neil with the +5 Vorpal Snark.
So they get name recognition, a fan base, and a good slate of material to work with, but not a lot of the overhead that comes with some of the bigger franchises. Plus I'm sure they got the rights for a lot cheaper:)
This is partially avoided by the size limits that are placed on a cookie. Frankly though you've got bigger issues if you're that trusting of a cookie's contents:)
If I'm reading this correctly, it's not that bad for most websites these days. There are two exploits that I see are possible from this.
1) Pushing a hacked cookie to the client that then is transmitted to a legitimate site 2) Stealing data contained in a cookie
In the first case, this seems like an exploit of limited value. Great I can make you send the wrong data to a site, but what exactly would be the construction of this wrong data such that it would cause mischief. I can make you log into your bank as me... great... so you can log take all my money? I mean there may be some strange setup that this can be used to exploit but I should think it's a rarity.
The second case is a more disconcerting concept, but I think this is a matter of common sense security. Most sites these days use a unique user identifier in cookies and don't store real data on the client. So the cookie doesn't provide a direct way to steal the information about that user. It does permit the ability to impersonate a user, which could be nasty, but most sites that have some sort of security consideration (i.e. banks, etc) require users to authenticate each time they access the site whether they have a cookie or not.
Having said that, my impression is that neither of these is all that easy to pull off in the real world. For #1, you have to visit a corrupted site, get the corrupted cookie, then go to a site that is vulnerable to the particulars of that corrupted cookie. So when you create the page you kinda have to know what the target is and the user may never go to that target. You might pick a high profile site to increase your odds, but the higher profile, the greater the likelyhood that they'll apply some level of paranoia to such things (on average).
For #2, you not only have to get them to hit your corrupt site, and hit a valid site, then you have to have them hit your corrupt site again. Then, for this to be of value, the valid site has to engage in realtively risky behavior with the cookies. So, once again, you'll get the most bang for the buck on higher profile sites which will be more likely to double check what you're doing.
So in the grand scheme this could be bad, but isn't terribly practical from what I can gather.
So yeah... They could afford to give it away at an almost free price as long as it above $1. If a new game was sold at $1, I'd bet everyone who owned a PS3 would buy one.
Not really. Distribution cost of a game is negligible in the grand scheme. It's the cost of developing the game, marketing the game, etc, that are expensive. Now you might think, well at $1 they don't need marketing, but then that only works for that one game, otherwise all the games start competing with eachother at the $1 mark, and you now need a marketing budget again.
A good developer is going to cost between $100-150K per year, give or take. So how many developers does the game require? How many graphics people, etc? Suddenly you're getting into quite a bit of money. How long does it take to develop the game. A year? Two? Five? Multiple that times the salaries and you see how this goes.
Now, keep in mind that for every game they release that sells well there are a few others they make that don't. So in order to remain profitable they have to charge more for games to make up for the duds they lose money on.
So a couple years of development with a group of developers plus marketing costs, packaging, and distribution it costs quite a bit to make just one game. If that one game fails, then you have to make up that cost on other games. If you've noticed, the cost of games has been pretty consistent over time. There's been a steady increase as inflation is incurred and game complexity increases, but overall what I pay for Half Life 2 is on par with what I once paid for pac man (and arguably cheaper).
If you can't travel anonymously, then you in fact do not have an independent right to petition your government.
Can you please:
1) Explain how my inability to travel anonymously prevents my petitioning the goverment for the redressing of grievances 2) Point to where in the constitution they said you were guaranteed anonymity
Yet it turns out that discounting new releases also results in higher sales.
This is about as duh as it gets. It's basic economics. At a given price, based on demand, you'll sell a given quantity. Lower the price, and generally you sell more. Raise the price, and you generally sell less. Of course it depends on factors like whether people can live without it (gas price increases for example).
The question is whether they make more money selling more copies at a lower price than they would selling less copies at a higher price. By the logic suggested here, they'd be making piles of money if they gave the game away because they'd sell more.
I use Itunes because Itunes works with my Ipod. I buy stuff through the Itunes music store because it's the music store hooked up to ITunes. It's that tight and effective integration that makes it so powerful. If I want new music, my first instinct is to just click the music store button and find something there. I can have whole albums in a couple minutes, loaded onto my ipod and everything.
Even if my ipod could use the DRM of some other music store I probably wouldn't bother with it even if the songs were slightly cheaper.
Making the content available is all positive for these universities. If I downloaded everything they made, and studied it thoroughly, I might have a strong grasp of the subject matter but I still wouldn't have a degree from MIT or Stanford. In the end there's value in the degree because it certifies your knowledge. If you go for a job interview, etc, and say I downloaded Stanford's coursework from ITunes, I rather doubt they'd consider me on par with a Stanfor graduate.
It's a good thing for them because it builds their image. It shows an interest in promotion education in general and sharing knowledge with those who cannot afford the $30K+. It also gives prospective students a chance to see what that money would be going for before they shell it out. So really all around a good thing for them.
Does anybody here really believe that a CEO's perspective changes if they get a $1 salary versus a multi-million dollar salary when they have a ton of stock and options? Good CEO's will feel a vested interest in the company's performance, and bad CEO's will not. Awarding them scads of cash may keep them on board with your company, but that's all it buys you.
So not only how many bugs in Athlon, etc, but also...
How many bugs in other Pentium chips? What was the rate of discovery of bugs in other chips?
Keep in mind that during Intel's entire history they've released one desktop processor that had a bug sufficient to require a recall. Most of the bugs are easily worked around including that one. Hell, I've got an old P60 that I was using as a router until the last year or so and it just worked fine and it was always amusing to see Linux notice the FDIV bug on boot.
No. There are a number of drawbacks to me as a user by using cygwin. What I'm saying is, if this provides an effective driver, then is it a problem? Logic being that if it makes it easier for people to use Linux then eventually the installed base of Linux will grow sufficiently to make development of native drivers worth their time. If, in the mean time, this provides a good bridge for getting people up and running, what's wrong with it?
Not only are they less likely to worry about security updates, but are you going to sit there and kill your bandwidth for days trying to download some major upgrade. For me I have DSL with 3Mbps downstream, so when new patches come out I can download them without skipping a beat.
Besides, the dialup doesn't really make you more secure. It's slower, so the amount of harm you can do to others by some worm is lower, but I can assure you, you can still get infected. I bought a new laptop while I was on a trip somewhere (long story), and while I was on the trip I used the dial-up modem on it for a couple days. During that short period of time it picked up a virus.
So get DSL and get a firewall. Firewalls will kill the vast majority of attacks. Sure you can still get crap through e-mail and websites, but then at least you're at the controls and can avoid screwing up too much.
All of the financial markets are based on a simple concept. It is the "some shmuck" theory. It goes something like this. I buy X and I buy it under the belief that "some shmuck" will buy it from me later for more money. The company performance, world economy, etc, do not matter. All that matters is the ability for you to find another shmuck.
Think about it for a moment. After the IPO for a stock is over, what value does a share of their stock really have if they don't offer a dividend? If the company is worth $200,000 or $200,000,000,000, the stock's value is completely arbitrary based on the number of shmucks lined up to buy it.
Good example: VA Linux. At IPO it went from $30 to $300. Why? There were a lot of shmucks who wanted it. They wanted it because they thought some other shmuck would but it at $400. As it turns out there were no such shmucks.
The housing market is the same way right now, though a bit different because everybody has to live somewhere. So there's a definite value in property other than the "some shmuck" value. Having said that, you know there's a lot of people buying $500,000 postage stamps on the assumption that some shmuck will pay them $600,000 or a million.
Of course, eventually, you run out of shmucks. You can tell when a crash is coming because everybody you talk to talks about whatever the hot commodity is at the moment. Suddenly everybody's a dot com developer, or they're a realtor making scads of money. They talk about how housing prices always go up 5-10% year (even though incomes have dropped relative to inflation for the past few years). They say crazy things about how we've eliminated the business cycle and we'll have steady low inflation growth until the infinite future. Then he shmucks run out and it all comes crashing down.
The thing is, Copper, unlike oil is something we can go get if we have to. There's long been talk of the possibility of mining asteroids for minerals. We have the technology today to fly an unmanned probe out to an asteroid and bring it back into orbit so that we can mine it. It's a risky and expensive operation, but if we absolutely need copper, it becomes viable.
With oil... well, there aren't oil fields flying around space so far as I know:)
Invariably the security of your data is dependent on the security of your OS. If you have some wonderfully encrypted data files you have to interact with them via the OS. So somebody exploits a vulnerability, you end up with a key logger on your machine, and now your intricate password to protect your encrypted files is forfeit.
As for the article's conclusion that viruses are unlikely, I think he's wrong. What makes Unix safer from viruses, etc, is the isolation between user level activity and administrator activity. Thus while one account may be compromised a whole system isn't. So this makes it harder for viruses, but not impossible by any stretch.
For example, a virus can be destructive without becoming root. It can, as you allude to, attack only your data, instead of a whole system's data, but in the end, it's still your data getting corrupted. Furthermore, most of the exploits I've seen of Linux systems involve taking a non-root exploit and then using another vulnerability to make it a root exploit.
Something else to consider on OSX is the sudo. As I understand it, any user on an OSX system can use sudo. So, if an exploit can gain user level privleges, it can then use social engineering, keylogging, etc, to gain the users password and then, in effect, gain root priveleges through sudo.
What protects OSX for now is that it has a smaller share of the market so there are less people trying to exploit it. Eventually if OSX gains market share, then there will be far more incentive to write malware for it. Certainly it will take greater skill to exploit OSX and it will be easier to defend against those exploits, but it only takes one clever hacker to completely ruin your day.
But I was thinking about how such a book should be structured. It occurs to me that there's a lot of stuff that a person might like to know but might not need to know. And so I'm thinking the book should begin with an explanation of what's right in front of them. What each object on their desk does, how they relate to eachother, and the basics of how to interact with all of them.
Then from there, the next sections would go one step beyond that. So the first part would be to talk about what the computer is, then the second part would talk about how memory works, etc. So at any point if the person gets spooked by any of it they can just stop where they are and have a good amount of knowledge. Make it easy for it to be a gentle progression.
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Give it a few more years. When 3G cellphone service prices drop, then you'll be able to use Internet radio like you'd use a standard FM receiver today. As long as you have passable cellphone coverage, you'll be fine.
I rather doubt Apple would switch again. Intel will eventually develop a similar capability or will license the production of it from IBM. I rather doubt Windows laptops will be switching to PowerPC anytime soon so there's a long road ahead for laptop chips at Apple.
Apple didn't move because of the performance of Intel versus IBM, it was that IBM was very unresponsive when it came to making a laptop variant of the G5. Now that Apple's on the Intel ship, they'll benefit from working with a company that has a vested interest in developing laptop chips. Name me one manufacturer other than Apple that made PowerPC based laptops and you'll see what I mean.
Yeah, this is kind of a ridiculous concept. The power level on a most modern cellphones will never go above 2 watts. In addition, the peak output is typically only used when the phone first connects to the network. So we're talking well under 2 watts most of the time.
On top of that it's an omnidirectional signal. As some others pointed out, you're talking to the tower, not directly to the other phone, but even that suggests that it's somehow directional. So in the end, the amount of power were talking about hitting the egg is miniscule.
If two phones were putting out enough wattage to cook an egg in 3 minutes. I should think after a 10 minute phone call with one phone, you're head would start to feel warm.
I've been using Netbeans pretty routinely for a few years now. It's a little sluggish on the old development box I used (dual 733). I've found it to be quick and responsive on anything upwards of a 2.8Ghz P4 (haven't tried anything in between though). It benefits from having a good amount of free memory because gc'ing from the hard disk is expensive.
Keep in mind that a "free" market is one in which you have a number of choices for a given item that are equivalent replacements. Automobiles are a free market as their are many manufacturers and models that I can choose from that will fill my transportation needs. In this care, there's no "free" market.
What this is talking about isn't verizon's customers, but rather network traffic that has to go over Verizon's network. So, in essence it could cause an aggregate slow down of other network providers. Customers of those other networks might be pissed but there's nothing they can do about it save for switching to Verizon which is causing the problem in the first place.
That's not a free market.
Unless, that is, you subscribe to one of Microsoft's pay security services, in which case your machine will have the worm removed in advance.
This is what is commonly referred to as "extortion". Pay them now or something bad might happen. You wouldn't want something bad to happen would you?
The problem I've seen in most of the licenses franchises like this is that they tend to pick things that are too popular. For example the problem with SWG was everybody wanted to be a Jedi and everybody wanted to go whoop up on Darth Vader. The storyline is too well settled and the characters are too well ingrained in our culture. It makes it very hard to give developers some flexibility.
:)
With Stargate, yes there's a fan base, but Stargate isn't near the level of the Matrix, or Star Wars. But the universe of Stargate is quite huge and there's already an established notion that while there are many stargate teams, the show is about the SG-1 team. So you can have people play the game as SG-130494505 and still have fun and not feel like they are getting ripped off because they can't be Colonel O'neil with the +5 Vorpal Snark.
So they get name recognition, a fan base, and a good slate of material to work with, but not a lot of the overhead that comes with some of the bigger franchises. Plus I'm sure they got the rights for a lot cheaper
Interesting twist on it. Only problem is under both scenarios, I'd be readily able to track you down :)
This is partially avoided by the size limits that are placed on a cookie. Frankly though you've got bigger issues if you're that trusting of a cookie's contents :)
If I'm reading this correctly, it's not that bad for most websites these days. There are two exploits that I see are possible from this.
1) Pushing a hacked cookie to the client that then is transmitted to a legitimate site
2) Stealing data contained in a cookie
In the first case, this seems like an exploit of limited value. Great I can make you send the wrong data to a site, but what exactly would be the construction of this wrong data such that it would cause mischief. I can make you log into your bank as me... great... so you can log take all my money? I mean there may be some strange setup that this can be used to exploit but I should think it's a rarity.
The second case is a more disconcerting concept, but I think this is a matter of common sense security. Most sites these days use a unique user identifier in cookies and don't store real data on the client. So the cookie doesn't provide a direct way to steal the information about that user. It does permit the ability to impersonate a user, which could be nasty, but most sites that have some sort of security consideration (i.e. banks, etc) require users to authenticate each time they access the site whether they have a cookie or not.
Having said that, my impression is that neither of these is all that easy to pull off in the real world. For #1, you have to visit a corrupted site, get the corrupted cookie, then go to a site that is vulnerable to the particulars of that corrupted cookie. So when you create the page you kinda have to know what the target is and the user may never go to that target. You might pick a high profile site to increase your odds, but the higher profile, the greater the likelyhood that they'll apply some level of paranoia to such things (on average).
For #2, you not only have to get them to hit your corrupt site, and hit a valid site, then you have to have them hit your corrupt site again. Then, for this to be of value, the valid site has to engage in realtively risky behavior with the cookies. So, once again, you'll get the most bang for the buck on higher profile sites which will be more likely to double check what you're doing.
So in the grand scheme this could be bad, but isn't terribly practical from what I can gather.
So yeah... They could afford to give it away at an almost free price as long as it above $1. If a new game was sold at $1, I'd bet everyone who owned a PS3 would buy one.
Not really. Distribution cost of a game is negligible in the grand scheme. It's the cost of developing the game, marketing the game, etc, that are expensive. Now you might think, well at $1 they don't need marketing, but then that only works for that one game, otherwise all the games start competing with eachother at the $1 mark, and you now need a marketing budget again.
A good developer is going to cost between $100-150K per year, give or take. So how many developers does the game require? How many graphics people, etc? Suddenly you're getting into quite a bit of money. How long does it take to develop the game. A year? Two? Five? Multiple that times the salaries and you see how this goes.
Now, keep in mind that for every game they release that sells well there are a few others they make that don't. So in order to remain profitable they have to charge more for games to make up for the duds they lose money on.
So a couple years of development with a group of developers plus marketing costs, packaging, and distribution it costs quite a bit to make just one game. If that one game fails, then you have to make up that cost on other games. If you've noticed, the cost of games has been pretty consistent over time. There's been a steady increase as inflation is incurred and game complexity increases, but overall what I pay for Half Life 2 is on par with what I once paid for pac man (and arguably cheaper).
If you can't travel anonymously, then you in fact do not have an independent right to petition your government.
Can you please:
1) Explain how my inability to travel anonymously prevents my petitioning the goverment for the redressing of grievances
2) Point to where in the constitution they said you were guaranteed anonymity
Yet it turns out that discounting new releases also results in higher sales.
This is about as duh as it gets. It's basic economics. At a given price, based on demand, you'll sell a given quantity. Lower the price, and generally you sell more. Raise the price, and you generally sell less. Of course it depends on factors like whether people can live without it (gas price increases for example).
The question is whether they make more money selling more copies at a lower price than they would selling less copies at a higher price. By the logic suggested here, they'd be making piles of money if they gave the game away because they'd sell more.
I use Itunes because Itunes works with my Ipod. I buy stuff through the Itunes music store because it's the music store hooked up to ITunes. It's that tight and effective integration that makes it so powerful. If I want new music, my first instinct is to just click the music store button and find something there. I can have whole albums in a couple minutes, loaded onto my ipod and everything.
Even if my ipod could use the DRM of some other music store I probably wouldn't bother with it even if the songs were slightly cheaper.
K... but how does what you quoted relate to my comment?
Making the content available is all positive for these universities. If I downloaded everything they made, and studied it thoroughly, I might have a strong grasp of the subject matter but I still wouldn't have a degree from MIT or Stanford. In the end there's value in the degree because it certifies your knowledge. If you go for a job interview, etc, and say I downloaded Stanford's coursework from ITunes, I rather doubt they'd consider me on par with a Stanfor graduate.
It's a good thing for them because it builds their image. It shows an interest in promotion education in general and sharing knowledge with those who cannot afford the $30K+. It also gives prospective students a chance to see what that money would be going for before they shell it out. So really all around a good thing for them.
Enron. Enron. Enron. Ummm... Enron?
Does anybody here really believe that a CEO's perspective changes if they get a $1 salary versus a multi-million dollar salary when they have a ton of stock and options? Good CEO's will feel a vested interest in the company's performance, and bad CEO's will not. Awarding them scads of cash may keep them on board with your company, but that's all it buys you.
So not only how many bugs in Athlon, etc, but also...
How many bugs in other Pentium chips?
What was the rate of discovery of bugs in other chips?
Keep in mind that during Intel's entire history they've released one desktop processor that had a bug sufficient to require a recall. Most of the bugs are easily worked around including that one. Hell, I've got an old P60 that I was using as a router until the last year or so and it just worked fine and it was always amusing to see Linux notice the FDIV bug on boot.
No. There are a number of drawbacks to me as a user by using cygwin. What I'm saying is, if this provides an effective driver, then is it a problem? Logic being that if it makes it easier for people to use Linux then eventually the installed base of Linux will grow sufficiently to make development of native drivers worth their time. If, in the mean time, this provides a good bridge for getting people up and running, what's wrong with it?
If the Windows drivers work fine, who cares?
I mean, yeah it'd be nice if they supported Linux, but in the grand scheme, if the card works, then what does it matter?
Not only are they less likely to worry about security updates, but are you going to sit there and kill your bandwidth for days trying to download some major upgrade. For me I have DSL with 3Mbps downstream, so when new patches come out I can download them without skipping a beat.
Besides, the dialup doesn't really make you more secure. It's slower, so the amount of harm you can do to others by some worm is lower, but I can assure you, you can still get infected. I bought a new laptop while I was on a trip somewhere (long story), and while I was on the trip I used the dial-up modem on it for a couple days. During that short period of time it picked up a virus.
So get DSL and get a firewall. Firewalls will kill the vast majority of attacks. Sure you can still get crap through e-mail and websites, but then at least you're at the controls and can avoid screwing up too much.
All of the financial markets are based on a simple concept. It is the "some shmuck" theory. It goes something like this. I buy X and I buy it under the belief that "some shmuck" will buy it from me later for more money. The company performance, world economy, etc, do not matter. All that matters is the ability for you to find another shmuck.
Think about it for a moment. After the IPO for a stock is over, what value does a share of their stock really have if they don't offer a dividend? If the company is worth $200,000 or $200,000,000,000, the stock's value is completely arbitrary based on the number of shmucks lined up to buy it.
Good example: VA Linux. At IPO it went from $30 to $300. Why? There were a lot of shmucks who wanted it. They wanted it because they thought some other shmuck would but it at $400. As it turns out there were no such shmucks.
The housing market is the same way right now, though a bit different because everybody has to live somewhere. So there's a definite value in property other than the "some shmuck" value. Having said that, you know there's a lot of people buying $500,000 postage stamps on the assumption that some shmuck will pay them $600,000 or a million.
Of course, eventually, you run out of shmucks. You can tell when a crash is coming because everybody you talk to talks about whatever the hot commodity is at the moment. Suddenly everybody's a dot com developer, or they're a realtor making scads of money. They talk about how housing prices always go up 5-10% year (even though incomes have dropped relative to inflation for the past few years). They say crazy things about how we've eliminated the business cycle and we'll have steady low inflation growth until the infinite future. Then he shmucks run out and it all comes crashing down.
The thing is, Copper, unlike oil is something we can go get if we have to. There's long been talk of the possibility of mining asteroids for minerals. We have the technology today to fly an unmanned probe out to an asteroid and bring it back into orbit so that we can mine it. It's a risky and expensive operation, but if we absolutely need copper, it becomes viable.
:)
With oil... well, there aren't oil fields flying around space so far as I know
Invariably the security of your data is dependent on the security of your OS. If you have some wonderfully encrypted data files you have to interact with them via the OS. So somebody exploits a vulnerability, you end up with a key logger on your machine, and now your intricate password to protect your encrypted files is forfeit.
As for the article's conclusion that viruses are unlikely, I think he's wrong. What makes Unix safer from viruses, etc, is the isolation between user level activity and administrator activity. Thus while one account may be compromised a whole system isn't. So this makes it harder for viruses, but not impossible by any stretch.
For example, a virus can be destructive without becoming root. It can, as you allude to, attack only your data, instead of a whole system's data, but in the end, it's still your data getting corrupted. Furthermore, most of the exploits I've seen of Linux systems involve taking a non-root exploit and then using another vulnerability to make it a root exploit.
Something else to consider on OSX is the sudo. As I understand it, any user on an OSX system can use sudo. So, if an exploit can gain user level privleges, it can then use social engineering, keylogging, etc, to gain the users password and then, in effect, gain root priveleges through sudo.
What protects OSX for now is that it has a smaller share of the market so there are less people trying to exploit it. Eventually if OSX gains market share, then there will be far more incentive to write malware for it. Certainly it will take greater skill to exploit OSX and it will be easier to defend against those exploits, but it only takes one clever hacker to completely ruin your day.
But I was thinking about how such a book should be structured. It occurs to me that there's a lot of stuff that a person might like to know but might not need to know. And so I'm thinking the book should begin with an explanation of what's right in front of them. What each object on their desk does, how they relate to eachother, and the basics of how to interact with all of them.
Then from there, the next sections would go one step beyond that. So the first part would be to talk about what the computer is, then the second part would talk about how memory works, etc. So at any point if the person gets spooked by any of it they can just stop where they are and have a good amount of knowledge. Make it easy for it to be a gentle progression.