1. There are still people writing new software for the Mac. The tools you use to write viruses are the same as the tools you use to write any other software.
2. I don't know what 90/10 rule you're talking about. Certainly it's not anything I've written.
The reasons that viruses simply took off on the Windows platform in the late '90s are the same reasons that viruses are still overwhelmingly common on Windows. Microsoft introduced a mechanism for virus distribution that is so much more attractive that it was like chum in the water.
A virus targeting the HTML control can go off even if the user knows it's a virus and is just clicking on it to delete it! And the user can't even turn this feature off! A virus targeting the Mac, or a Windows user using Netscape or Eudora, has to convince a user to save the attachment or download a file, and then run it.
Microsoft's made it a *bit* harder than that, but they've taken seven years to get there and they still haven't closed all the holes. You're a virus writer. If there were 90% Macs and 10% Windows users, you'd STILL write that Windows virus... because it might only hit 1/10th as many potential victims but instead of infecting maybe 1% of the targets who don't have paid-up and up-to-date antivirus software, you'll infect almost all of them.
This is such a tremendous advantage to Windows that it completly swamps the market-share difference. And anyone who watched the email worms hit in the late '90s and still thinks it's a matter of market share is simply in denial.
A linear accelerator would make a good launch system for long-term use. You need a big mountain near the equator in a politically and seismically stable area to place it in, though. In the US the best spot would probably be Mauna Loa except for the little problem that Hawaii is an active volcanic island.:)
The big problem is that you need insanely long tracks to get to earth orbit without exposing the cargo to multi-thousand-G acceleration. This would be OK for launching nuclear waste to Del Rey Crater, but humans and communication sattelites would tend to be a bit shopworn when they reached orbit.
It seems to me that simply painting the tank would eliminate the "dandruff" problem. Doing good science near the space station has always been problematical because it's always sitting in a little "cloud" of human exudate no matter how air-tight they make it... and in any case it's awfully low in the well to get a good vacuum. Those kinds of projects should really only use the station as a construction shack.
Even if you weren't going to use the tank, there were probably going to be a few tons of LOx/H2 which would have been incredibly useful for on-orbit fuel-cells and thrusters...if only there was a way to transfer it. I don't know if there was any way to do that.
Tank Darm Dynamo (1983) by David Brin uses tethers to provide enough gravity. Incidentally, Brin's afterword is particularly telling 22 years later: "Ironically, what we thought would be obvious -- the need to find ways to use external tanks in space -- has met with substantial resistance by the aero-space community. Tethers on the other hand, an idea we thought would be seen as "California freaky" have been taken up with enthusiasm as an important future component in space transportation."
I like the idea of using an SRB-derived crew-transfer vehicle.
I don't.
The big problem with SRBs is that they're basically big bottle-rockets: once you light them you can't turn them off again... they were only reluctantly included in the shuttle in the first place.
These designs look like a Morton Thiokol bail-out more than a realistic man-rated launch system.
If they ARE going to be used, move the construction to a sea port so they can be shipped intact and don't have to be built in stages. It will cost a bit more up front, but it'll make the boosters themselves a lot cheaper and safer... and if that makes them less cost-effective than liquid fueled boosters then... maybe solid fuel isn't the way to go.
Morton Thiokol and Orrin hatch will bitch and moan. Let them.
If you're going to use the SRBs in a multistage configuration the original reason for using the SRBs... avoiding the cost of throwing away an expensive liquid-fueled engine after one launch... evaporates.
Having a station in orbit means we don't have to have huge living quarters for the crew. However, the use of capsules would necessitate the development of a "space tug" to carry the crew to places they can't reach with the station or via EVAs.
The original shuttle design included a space tug (inter-orbit transfer vehicle), as well as an unmanned non-reusable heavy launch vehicle.
Actually, apart from the capsules and SRBs this plan is a lot closer to the original shuttle design than what eventually got built.
Any situation where you redistribute GPLed software in a way that prevents people from effectively modifying it has the same problems with provision 6. You are applying additional restrictions on the use of the software.
The idea that you can modify the software but you can't use the modified version as a functional replacement for the original software, without that being "an additional restriction"? Was that restriction in the GPLed source you received? No. Is it a restriction? Yes. Then you can't distribute GPLed code that implements this.
Linux has TPM support, and that TPM support can be used for many things (for example, you could use it to secure your own computer), but there's no way to use it for DRM without violating the letter of the GPL.
If you want to play music or videos that are owned by publishers who demand strong DRM, then you'll need to be running Windows or a dedicated player running a non-modifiable operating system, or you'll have to convince them that the benefits of using a weaker DRM scheme outweigh the hypothetical (and I believe imaginary) advantages of strong DRM.
Personally, I think the least painful solution to the problem of running strong DRM on user-modifiable software is to simply not do it. Embed the whole thing in the video card and just use the software as transport.
You have been given all of the rights that the GPL says you must receive.
I still think this is simply sophistry.
Are you suggesting that if you are capable of running a GPL program on top of Windows, that somehow Windows magically becomes GPL?
No.
You wrote "and then the OS can transparantly pipe any ordinary read/write operations through"...
If you're running on a GPL kernel, the software in the OS that performs this operation has to be GPL.
I don't know what Windows has to do with this. The GPL doesn't say anything about what a non-GPL operating system you happen to be running GPL software on is allowed to do.
If the author of this review had even bothered to read the information on the Apple website, he would have found that there are no sounds associated with the mouse.
From the Apple website: "Mighty Mouse even sounds as good as it feels. The audio feedback built into Mighty Mouse provides an aural sensation that responds to your movements." It is also obvious by simply looking at the mouse that it is not "solid-state touch-sensitive like our beloved iPod wheels."
From the Apple website: "Thanks to a smooth top shell with touch-sensitive technology beneath, Mighty Mouse allows you to right click without a right button. Capacitive sensors under Mighty Mouse's seamless top shell detect where your fingers are and predict your clicking intentions."
Also, one of the small features I love about Macintosh is the ability to plug your mouse into the keyboard, therefore getting rid of the need for a long mouse cord. Sounds like a guy who doesn't work on a Mac very often.
Um, what's your point? He didn't say this was a problem, he just noted it as one of the features of the mouse and that this was typical of Apple mice.
You have every right to change the software however you like... but if you break the software and it mis-reads certain files, oh well.
This is not a matter of the software being broken, this is a matter of the software being written in such a way that it can not be modified by the user. That violates provision 6 of the GPL.
and then the OS can transparantly pipe any ordinary read/write operations through crypto using that hash as part of the key
But the code that does that has to be GPL so it can always be subverted to save off the plaintext, or feed false information to the crypto code.
This scheme is also bad crypto, because it depends on a key that can't be changed without changing the algorithm, becomes invalid if you have to distribute a bug-fix because that changes the hash.
Trusted Computing is incredibly insidious.
So is the GPL, and this is the first situation I've run into where that may actually be a good thing.
I've been looking for a mouse with a good 2-way controller for some time. The ones out there with tilting scroll wheels are too asymmetrical in the X and Y direction. IBM came up with a mouse with a trackpoint button on it... but the stupid thing only supports up-and-down (HELLO, IBM, DID YOU FORGET WHAT THE POINT OF THE TRACKPOINT WAS?). Unfortunately, the 2-d scrolling on the Apple mouse is one of the features that requires a Tiger upgrade to use.
Ironicaly, a plain old 3-button mouse works VERY WELL as a 2-d scroll mouse. Logitech came up with the ideal solution (though they implemented it badly)... the third button is "grab". You hold it down and move the mouse and you drag the image around under the window... kind of like Adobe's PDF viewer does, except this works in all apps.
Why everyone didn't implement this instead of playing around with a billion variants of the scroll wheel I don't know... well, I guess I do. Logitech's implementation was so badly done (it was never really explained, and it left weird graphics all over the screen, and the eventually abandoned it) that nobody ever realised what a basically cool idea it was.
Someone needs to write a Haxie that makes the 3rd or 4th button do this. The Mighty Mouse's "squeeze" buttons would be ideal for this, because it would actually FEEL like you're grabbing the document you're dragging...
I love the mouse too, but you've failed to mention a major shortcoming of it.
If both fingers are resting on the mouse, and you click with your middle finger for a right click, it doesn't register it as so. Seems the touch sensors don't see which side has more pressure, and do the click that way.
You have to remove your index finger from the mouse, then click, for it to register as a right click.
That seems like a deal-killer to me.
Original shuttle design had multiple vehicles...
on
NASA's Shuttle Plans
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· Score: 1
The original design was for a somewhat smaller reusable manned orbiter, and a separate heavy launch vehicle for big payloads, as well as a couple of other vehicles for inter-orbit transfers and a somewhat optimistic lunar lander.
If they'd followed the original design the shuttle wouldn't have to run over original rated capacity, because it wouldn't have had to reach as high an orbit and it wouldn't have had such an oversized cargo bay... plus, they'd have been able to send up really BIG space station modules in the HLLV.
I'm not so sure this new approach is all that great, I'm particular unhappy about having the crew going up on top of an SRB. The manned part of the system is where you really want to stick to liquid fuelled components.
You're missing the point. I'm not saying that market share doesn't have an effect, I'm saying that market share's effect is much much smaller than the effect of the basic design of the OS and the user interface.
The market share changes over the late '90s were steady, Microsoft was already dominant and was just picking up the last few percentage points really... so market share isn't why the mass mailer worms took off, followed by the various cross-zone exploits and spyware in IE. There was a huge new opportunity for virus writers to exploit, a new mechanism that was orders of magnitude more effective than anything they been able to use in the past.
These attacks ONLY exist in Windows, and the ONLY exist in Windows IF you use IE, Outlook, and other programs that use the MS HTML control.
There's a couple of other problems in Windows networking that have made things worse than they should, and are why it's critical that you have a firewall up in Windows when other operating systems can get away with simply not running any server software to get the equivalent protection, but these are minor compared with the HTML control.
If all of a sudden Mac OS X was the #1 target for virus writers, you would NOT get the same problems as you have on Windows, because it simply does not have the deep fundamental and unfixable security flaws that make Windows so easy to get into.
Read this: So, if you haven't already upgraded to Mac OS X Tiger, isn't Mighty Mouse reason enough?
It's pushing the upgrade. If I wasn't already thinking of waiting until Microsoft or Logitech copied the scrollball and put it in a mouse that was less weird, this would have done it. Even though I don't want the tertiary button support, I hate push marketing.
The no part of the answer is that the Apple market share is still small enough that the virus writers simply do not target it.
Urban legend.
Around 1997 there was a MASSIVE influx of viruses on the PC. It was huge. Insane. Before that the PC really wasn't any more of a virus target than anything else, you did have a few more because they were more common, but it was a small integer multiple, and the people who tended to get viruses were the people who were doing dangerous things like downloading warez. Most people didn't even need antivirus, even if they used online services or the Internet or used email, if they were careful to avoid downloading and running attachments.
There was even a joke going around about an email virus so nasty you couldn't even click on it to delete it because as soon as you clicked on it it would run. Everyone knew it was a joke, because no mail software would ever implement the kinds of features that it would take to make that happen.
Then came the integration of Internet Explorer and the Desktop, Outlook and IE, the whole sloppy mess. The "good times" virus hoax became real. Right then, viruses on the PC took off.
Not because the PC suddenly had 10 times the number of targets, but because now EVERY PC was a target... EVEN IF you took reasonable care, if yu ised Outlook, you could still be infected.
Active Desktop. Active Content. Cross Zone attacks. Unless Apple does something really amazingly stupid they will NEVER get the kind of virus problem that Microsoft has. Now, I don't rule out Apple doing something stupid. They've done stupid things (open "safe" files after download? No effing thanks, dude, assume NO files are safe), but nothing as colossally daft and arrogant as the Typhoid Mary known as the Microsoft HTML Control.
THAT is the problem with Windows security. Not Market share. Microsoft has, what, 95% US market share, 70% worldwide? They don't have 95% or 70% or even 99.70 or 99.95% of the viruses. Every single virus that is actively propogating in the wild, right now, is on Windows. Every single one.
You don't get that kind of virus "market share" just by being popular.
From the page you pointed to: The first reason deals with the technical ability of the average computer user. Having once worked doing technical support, let me explain one very common point of frustration for techs.
Double-clicking on menu items. No, I'm not kidding. The double click Apple invented to support the one-button mouse was a freaking nightmare.
Two-button mice are easy to explain. There's a selection button, and a menu button. You don't say "click", you say "select". You don't say "right click" you say "click the menu button". People catch on really quickly. It's a lot easier to keep straight than single-double-shift-control-option/alt-command-and -hold-it... don't sneeze.
Microsoft could port the OSX userland to run on top of Interix/NT instead of XNU/Darwin, since NT and Mach are similar not-quite-microkernels. That would get them Microsoft's DRM support and let them make the iPod compatible with PlaysForSure. What's not to like?
I'd be willing to pay $200 a year to keep getting the newest versions of OS X.
Me too, if I could run it on a Thinkpad. I hate the Powerbooks.
But...
I liked Mac OS X so much that I traded my at-the-time decent P4-1.7 for a used Powermac 7500 and a G3/400 upgrade card and a Radeon 7000 to run it on. Because that's all I could afford.
So while you complain about the mini I'll be over here playing the world's smallest violin. I just upgraded to a mini and couldn't be happier.
And while I suspect that Apple could make more money selling OS X for generic PCs for $200 or $300, I don't expect them to. But... who knows what the heck Steve Jobs will do, the man just loves keeping people guessing. These days I suspect he works for the thrill of freaking people out more than the money.
Um, that's only a problem if you NEED 3rd button emulation.
That's not the only use for chording. A lot of window managers and old-school X11 applications use chording to give you an extra 2 or 3 buttons on the mouse. Also, don't forget about the guy who posted about his fire-while-running problem in his video-game.
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You'd have a good argument execpt for two things:
1. There are still people writing new software for the Mac. The tools you use to write viruses are the same as the tools you use to write any other software.
2. I don't know what 90/10 rule you're talking about. Certainly it's not anything I've written.
The reasons that viruses simply took off on the Windows platform in the late '90s are the same reasons that viruses are still overwhelmingly common on Windows. Microsoft introduced a mechanism for virus distribution that is so much more attractive that it was like chum in the water.
A virus targeting the HTML control can go off even if the user knows it's a virus and is just clicking on it to delete it! And the user can't even turn this feature off! A virus targeting the Mac, or a Windows user using Netscape or Eudora, has to convince a user to save the attachment or download a file, and then run it.
Microsoft's made it a *bit* harder than that, but they've taken seven years to get there and they still haven't closed all the holes. You're a virus writer. If there were 90% Macs and 10% Windows users, you'd STILL write that Windows virus... because it might only hit 1/10th as many potential victims but instead of infecting maybe 1% of the targets who don't have paid-up and up-to-date antivirus software, you'll infect almost all of them.
This is such a tremendous advantage to Windows that it completly swamps the market-share difference. And anyone who watched the email worms hit in the late '90s and still thinks it's a matter of market share is simply in denial.
For example, could you put the ablative heat shield in the *back*?
Sure, if you don't mind the front part burning away.
A linear accelerator would make a good launch system for long-term use. You need a big mountain near the equator in a politically and seismically stable area to place it in, though. In the US the best spot would probably be Mauna Loa except for the little problem that Hawaii is an active volcanic island. :)
The big problem is that you need insanely long tracks to get to earth orbit without exposing the cargo to multi-thousand-G acceleration. This would be OK for launching nuclear waste to Del Rey Crater, but humans and communication sattelites would tend to be a bit shopworn when they reached orbit.
IIRC, from the time of the Challenger disaster (when we all learned about how the SRB's worked),
a. Speak for yourself.
b. The Challenger disaster was caused by a leak between two segments of the booster.
IANACE either, just someone who's been avidly following the space program since before Apollo 11.
It seems to me that simply painting the tank would eliminate the "dandruff" problem. Doing good science near the space station has always been problematical because it's always sitting in a little "cloud" of human exudate no matter how air-tight they make it... and in any case it's awfully low in the well to get a good vacuum. Those kinds of projects should really only use the station as a construction shack.
Even if you weren't going to use the tank, there were probably going to be a few tons of LOx/H2 which would have been incredibly useful for on-orbit fuel-cells and thrusters...if only there was a way to transfer it. I don't know if there was any way to do that.
Tank Darm Dynamo (1983) by David Brin uses tethers to provide enough gravity. Incidentally, Brin's afterword is particularly telling 22 years later: "Ironically, what we thought would be obvious -- the need to find ways to use external tanks in space -- has met with substantial resistance by the aero-space community. Tethers on the other hand, an idea we thought would be seen as "California freaky" have been taken up with enthusiasm as an important future component in space transportation."
Doh. Brain panic. Sorry Jacqui.
I like the idea of using an SRB-derived crew-transfer vehicle.
I don't.
The big problem with SRBs is that they're basically big bottle-rockets: once you light them you can't turn them off again... they were only reluctantly included in the shuttle in the first place.
These designs look like a Morton Thiokol bail-out more than a realistic man-rated launch system.
If they ARE going to be used, move the construction to a sea port so they can be shipped intact and don't have to be built in stages. It will cost a bit more up front, but it'll make the boosters themselves a lot cheaper and safer... and if that makes them less cost-effective than liquid fueled boosters then... maybe solid fuel isn't the way to go.
Morton Thiokol and Orrin hatch will bitch and moan. Let them.
If you're going to use the SRBs in a multistage configuration the original reason for using the SRBs... avoiding the cost of throwing away an expensive liquid-fueled engine after one launch... evaporates.
Having a station in orbit means we don't have to have huge living quarters for the crew. However, the use of capsules would necessitate the development of a "space tug" to carry the crew to places they can't reach with the station or via EVAs.
The original shuttle design included a space tug (inter-orbit transfer vehicle), as well as an unmanned non-reusable heavy launch vehicle.
Actually, apart from the capsules and SRBs this plan is a lot closer to the original shuttle design than what eventually got built.
One of the biggest problems with using the tanks once they arrived was that they were, in fact, covered with insulating foam
Why is this a problem?
Who said we were running on a GPL kernal?
:)
Well, um, I did.
Sorry, I missed the change of subject.
Any situation where you redistribute GPLed software in a way that prevents people from effectively modifying it has the same problems with provision 6. You are applying additional restrictions on the use of the software.
The idea that you can modify the software but you can't use the modified version as a functional replacement for the original software, without that being "an additional restriction"? Was that restriction in the GPLed source you received? No. Is it a restriction? Yes. Then you can't distribute GPLed code that implements this.
Linux has TPM support, and that TPM support can be used for many things (for example, you could use it to secure your own computer), but there's no way to use it for DRM without violating the letter of the GPL.
If you want to play music or videos that are owned by publishers who demand strong DRM, then you'll need to be running Windows or a dedicated player running a non-modifiable operating system, or you'll have to convince them that the benefits of using a weaker DRM scheme outweigh the hypothetical (and I believe imaginary) advantages of strong DRM.
Personally, I think the least painful solution to the problem of running strong DRM on user-modifiable software is to simply not do it. Embed the whole thing in the video card and just use the software as transport.
You have been given all of the rights that the GPL says you must receive.
I still think this is simply sophistry.
Are you suggesting that if you are capable of running a GPL program on top of Windows, that somehow Windows magically becomes GPL?
No.
You wrote "and then the OS can transparantly pipe any ordinary read/write operations through"...
If you're running on a GPL kernel, the software in the OS that performs this operation has to be GPL.
I don't know what Windows has to do with this. The GPL doesn't say anything about what a non-GPL operating system you happen to be running GPL software on is allowed to do.
If the author of this review had even bothered to read the information on the Apple website, he would have found that there are no sounds associated with the mouse.
From the Apple website: "Mighty Mouse even sounds as good as it feels. The audio feedback built into Mighty Mouse provides an aural sensation that responds to your movements."
It is also obvious by simply looking at the mouse that it is not "solid-state touch-sensitive like our beloved iPod wheels."
From the Apple website: "Thanks to a smooth top shell with touch-sensitive technology beneath, Mighty Mouse allows you to right click without a right button. Capacitive sensors under Mighty Mouse's seamless top shell detect where your fingers are and predict your clicking intentions."
Also, one of the small features I love about Macintosh is the ability to plug your mouse into the keyboard, therefore getting rid of the need for a long mouse cord. Sounds like a guy who doesn't work on a Mac very often.
Um, what's your point? He didn't say this was a problem, he just noted it as one of the features of the mouse and that this was typical of Apple mice.
Sheesh.
You have every right to change the software however you like... but if you break the software and it mis-reads certain files, oh well.
This is not a matter of the software being broken, this is a matter of the software being written in such a way that it can not be modified by the user. That violates provision 6 of the GPL.
and then the OS can transparantly pipe any ordinary read/write operations through crypto using that hash as part of the key
But the code that does that has to be GPL so it can always be subverted to save off the plaintext, or feed false information to the crypto code.
This scheme is also bad crypto, because it depends on a key that can't be changed without changing the algorithm, becomes invalid if you have to distribute a bug-fix because that changes the hash.
Trusted Computing is incredibly insidious.
So is the GPL, and this is the first situation I've run into where that may actually be a good thing.
I've been looking for a mouse with a good 2-way controller for some time. The ones out there with tilting scroll wheels are too asymmetrical in the X and Y direction. IBM came up with a mouse with a trackpoint button on it... but the stupid thing only supports up-and-down (HELLO, IBM, DID YOU FORGET WHAT THE POINT OF THE TRACKPOINT WAS?). Unfortunately, the 2-d scrolling on the Apple mouse is one of the features that requires a Tiger upgrade to use.
Ironicaly, a plain old 3-button mouse works VERY WELL as a 2-d scroll mouse. Logitech came up with the ideal solution (though they implemented it badly)... the third button is "grab". You hold it down and move the mouse and you drag the image around under the window... kind of like Adobe's PDF viewer does, except this works in all apps.
Why everyone didn't implement this instead of playing around with a billion variants of the scroll wheel I don't know... well, I guess I do. Logitech's implementation was so badly done (it was never really explained, and it left weird graphics all over the screen, and the eventually abandoned it) that nobody ever realised what a basically cool idea it was.
Someone needs to write a Haxie that makes the 3rd or 4th button do this. The Mighty Mouse's "squeeze" buttons would be ideal for this, because it would actually FEEL like you're grabbing the document you're dragging...
The original design was for a somewhat smaller reusable manned orbiter, and a separate heavy launch vehicle for big payloads, as well as a couple of other vehicles for inter-orbit transfers and a somewhat optimistic lunar lander.
If they'd followed the original design the shuttle wouldn't have to run over original rated capacity, because it wouldn't have had to reach as high an orbit and it wouldn't have had such an oversized cargo bay... plus, they'd have been able to send up really BIG space station modules in the HLLV.
I'm not so sure this new approach is all that great, I'm particular unhappy about having the crew going up on top of an SRB. The manned part of the system is where you really want to stick to liquid fuelled components.
I want a pony.
Perhaps they should add an electronic shock to the controller for replying to spam or any pop-up add that sneaks through Firefox or Safari...
I ENDORSE THIS PRODUCT AND/OR SERVICE!
You're missing the point. I'm not saying that market share doesn't have an effect, I'm saying that market share's effect is much much smaller than the effect of the basic design of the OS and the user interface.
The market share changes over the late '90s were steady, Microsoft was already dominant and was just picking up the last few percentage points really... so market share isn't why the mass mailer worms took off, followed by the various cross-zone exploits and spyware in IE. There was a huge new opportunity for virus writers to exploit, a new mechanism that was orders of magnitude more effective than anything they been able to use in the past.
These attacks ONLY exist in Windows, and the ONLY exist in Windows IF you use IE, Outlook, and other programs that use the MS HTML control.
There's a couple of other problems in Windows networking that have made things worse than they should, and are why it's critical that you have a firewall up in Windows when other operating systems can get away with simply not running any server software to get the equivalent protection, but these are minor compared with the HTML control.
If all of a sudden Mac OS X was the #1 target for virus writers, you would NOT get the same problems as you have on Windows, because it simply does not have the deep fundamental and unfixable security flaws that make Windows so easy to get into.
Read this: So, if you haven't already upgraded to Mac OS X Tiger, isn't Mighty Mouse reason enough?
It's pushing the upgrade. If I wasn't already thinking of waiting until Microsoft or Logitech copied the scrollball and put it in a mouse that was less weird, this would have done it. Even though I don't want the tertiary button support, I hate push marketing.
That it happens to be the right strategic move is irrelevant.
That remains to be seen.
The no part of the answer is that the Apple market share is still small enough that the virus writers simply do not target it.
Urban legend.
Around 1997 there was a MASSIVE influx of viruses on the PC. It was huge. Insane. Before that the PC really wasn't any more of a virus target than anything else, you did have a few more because they were more common, but it was a small integer multiple, and the people who tended to get viruses were the people who were doing dangerous things like downloading warez. Most people didn't even need antivirus, even if they used online services or the Internet or used email, if they were careful to avoid downloading and running attachments.
There was even a joke going around about an email virus so nasty you couldn't even click on it to delete it because as soon as you clicked on it it would run. Everyone knew it was a joke, because no mail software would ever implement the kinds of features that it would take to make that happen.
Then came the integration of Internet Explorer and the Desktop, Outlook and IE, the whole sloppy mess. The "good times" virus hoax became real. Right then, viruses on the PC took off.
Not because the PC suddenly had 10 times the number of targets, but because now EVERY PC was a target... EVEN IF you took reasonable care, if yu ised Outlook, you could still be infected.
Active Desktop. Active Content. Cross Zone attacks. Unless Apple does something really amazingly stupid they will NEVER get the kind of virus problem that Microsoft has. Now, I don't rule out Apple doing something stupid. They've done stupid things (open "safe" files after download? No effing thanks, dude, assume NO files are safe), but nothing as colossally daft and arrogant as the Typhoid Mary known as the Microsoft HTML Control.
THAT is the problem with Windows security. Not Market share. Microsoft has, what, 95% US market share, 70% worldwide? They don't have 95% or 70% or even 99.70 or 99.95% of the viruses. Every single virus that is actively propogating in the wild, right now, is on Windows. Every single one.
You don't get that kind of virus "market share" just by being popular.
From the page you pointed to: The first reason deals with the technical ability of the average computer user. Having once worked doing technical support, let me explain one very common point of frustration for techs.
d -hold-it... don't sneeze.
Double-clicking on menu items. No, I'm not kidding. The double click Apple invented to support the one-button mouse was a freaking nightmare.
Two-button mice are easy to explain. There's a selection button, and a menu button. You don't say "click", you say "select". You don't say "right click" you say "click the menu button". People catch on really quickly. It's a lot easier to keep straight than single-double-shift-control-option/alt-command-an
What next Apple branded Windows XP?
Microsoft could port the OSX userland to run on top of Interix/NT instead of XNU/Darwin, since NT and Mach are similar not-quite-microkernels. That would get them Microsoft's DRM support and let them make the iPod compatible with PlaysForSure. What's not to like?
I'd be willing to pay $200 a year to keep getting the newest versions of OS X.
Me too, if I could run it on a Thinkpad. I hate the Powerbooks.
But...
I liked Mac OS X so much that I traded my at-the-time decent P4-1.7 for a used Powermac 7500 and a G3/400 upgrade card and a Radeon 7000 to run it on. Because that's all I could afford.
So while you complain about the mini I'll be over here playing the world's smallest violin. I just upgraded to a mini and couldn't be happier.
And while I suspect that Apple could make more money selling OS X for generic PCs for $200 or $300, I don't expect them to. But... who knows what the heck Steve Jobs will do, the man just loves keeping people guessing. These days I suspect he works for the thrill of freaking people out more than the money.
Um, that's only a problem if you NEED 3rd button emulation.
That's not the only use for chording. A lot of window managers and old-school X11 applications use chording to give you an extra 2 or 3 buttons on the mouse. Also, don't forget about the guy who posted about his fire-while-running problem in his video-game.