"It will not change the fact that malware and viruses are simply a non-issue for any platform but Microsoft Windows..."
It will also not change the fact that virtually no one runs any version of UNIX on the desktop.
Wake me up when OSX or Linux or any other flavor of UNIX is subjected to the same conditions as Windows and then we'll see how incredibly secure your favorite family of OSs is.
"...around the central premise that Daddy was too mean in my posh suburb..."
I'm not sure where you came up with that. The only member of Nirvana that might have grown up in a "posh suburb" was Dave Grohl, and he just pounded the sticks.
"you know, something more persuasive than a random blurb about how somebody somewhere kinda exploited a long-ago patched Safari bug?...Since I kinda do this for a living, I would just mention I'm not maybe as naive as you think" If you do this for a living, please find another line of work.
You need 2GB to have a system that is usable. So many have said this about Vista, but it has not been my experience at all.
My work computer is a Athlon64 3000 (Single Core, 1.8Ghz) with 1GB RAM and a cheap GeForce graphics card that barely supports Aero. I'm currently running Vista Enterprise with Aero turned on.
With McAfee Virusscan 8.5, Outlook 2003, Firefox with four tabs open, Thunderbird, Yahoo Messenger, a couple of MMC consoles, an RDP session and a puTTy session running, my machine is currently using 731MB of RAM.
Vista is a little more sluggish than XP was on this machine, but it is certainly usable.
The percentage of potential hosts in the entire pool is the important part, not the total number of hosts. Whether the pool is one thousand or one billion computers, the chance that one infected OS X host will run into another OS X host will still be 4%. The ability of an infected host to find and infect other hosts before it "dies" is the important part.
As I said before network-based worms that require no human interaction (like all those windows worms from a few years ago) are not hampered by low numbers, since they reach a huge number of hosts in very little time. The "Black ICE" worm from 2004 is the perfect example.
OS X comes with good defaults in this regard, as it doesn't have any network daemons come "spread-eagle" out of the box, like Windows.
Not this old ass myth again. Considering how much hate is out there in the anti-mac crowd, it would only be obvious for some anti-socialite hacker to try and "totally pwn" a "Macintrash". They simply haven't been able to. Not for lack of trying, though. More like they lack the sophistication to be able to hack OS X. "Macintrash" computers are "totally pwned" all the time you moron. Fuck, it took two guys 12 hours to find an exploit as soon as 10Gs were dangled in front of them. Windows malware is a BILLION dollar industry.
In the "Classic" MacOS days, there was a fair amount of Mac malware -- never as much as in the PC world, of course, but plenty of it running around. Since OS X became the standard, this hasn't happened. The "vulnerability through popularity" argument just doesn't hold up to this fact. Why not? OSX has never had nearly the same install-base that classic Mac OS did during it's heyday, and of all the predominant methods that malware spreads simply can't work on OSX like they do on Windows because there are not enough potential hosts.
Take the classic email based worm for example. Given that only about 4-8% of computers run OSX, how would an email worm spread on Macs? If you sent it to 100,000 email addresses you'd be lucky if 8,000 OSX users received the email. If 50% of those 8000 OSX users fell for it and executed the payload, the worm would have to find 25 new email addresses that belong to uninfected OSX users in order to maintain it's population. Otherwise he number of new infections would decrease exponentially until the worm became extinct.
The 50% infection rate and number of new email addresses required per infected host are both unrealistic IMO. More realistic numbers would only serve to further prove my point - that spreading malware to OSX computers is virtually impossible.
Network borne malware is a different story, but that's become an almost non-issue since Windows XP SP2 came out and enabled the firewall by default.
It seems to me that there must be some other chemical at work when it comes to the addictivness of cigarettes. It's the psychological part of the addiction. I smoked for 14 years and quit about six weeks ago. I started with the Nicotine gum the first week. I found that the gum helped ease the "pain" slightly and made it easier to deal with the psychological aspect of the addiction. After a week passed and the psychological torture had eased a bit I stopped the gum and have gone cold-turkey since. I found it disturbing that the gum was more expensive than the cigarettes themselves, and that was part of the reason why I stopped using it after the first week.
I was exposed to that too, recently. Judging from the pattern of downmods, i.e. always 5 points spread on my 5 recent posts, regardless of topic and all mods occuring in bursts within some minutes from each other, I assume that is someone spending all his mod points at once on his favourite foe, who happens to be my humble persona. You must be doing something right.:)
...the first native desktop operating system was actually Windows XP... What is your definition of "native desktop OS?". As the parent poster said, NT4 workstation, which came out in 1996, was a native 32bit OS and was for desktop use. XP was actually the third native 32bit desktop OS from Microsoft as Windows 2000 Professional came out before that.
Firstly, Streets and Trips is produced by Microsoft. Anything by Microsoft doesn't count because Microsoft is evil. Besides, I'm sure Microsoft bought streets and trips from at gunpoint from some starving open source developer anyway, which would mean they didn't even make it.
Second, Streets and trips costs money. Things that cost money and promote capitalism are evil. Only when a free good or service obtains a benefit that a non-free good or service has had for eons, does it become a good thing.
Case in point: The Areca 1210 PCIE SATA controller I bought specifically for it's FreeBSD support. After buying it, I also wanted to try out the latest version of SuSE and assumed that it would support it out of the box, but it didn't. I was quite surprised at this. The Areca Card had been on the market for more than a year an it came with open source drivers.
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"It will not change the fact that malware and viruses are simply a non-issue for any platform but Microsoft Windows..."
It will also not change the fact that virtually no one runs any version of UNIX on the desktop.
Wake me up when OSX or Linux or any other flavor of UNIX is subjected to the same conditions as Windows and then we'll see how incredibly secure your favorite family of OSs is.
Idiot.
"...around the central premise that Daddy was too mean in my posh suburb..."
I'm not sure where you came up with that. The only member of Nirvana that might have grown up in a "posh suburb" was Dave Grohl, and he just pounded the sticks.
And unlike the mob, the RIAA randomly selects it's victims.
No. It's the mess made when Santa wrestles with a bunch of angels in a vat a Jello.
My work computer is a Athlon64 3000 (Single Core, 1.8Ghz) with 1GB RAM and a cheap GeForce graphics card that barely supports Aero. I'm currently running Vista Enterprise with Aero turned on.
With McAfee Virusscan 8.5, Outlook 2003, Firefox with four tabs open, Thunderbird, Yahoo Messenger, a couple of MMC consoles, an RDP session and a puTTy session running, my machine is currently using 731MB of RAM.
Vista is a little more sluggish than XP was on this machine, but it is certainly usable.
Hey! That's the perfect modern-day remake of The Murders in the Rue Morgue.
"...this hair is most unusual --this is no human hair."
The percentage of potential hosts in the entire pool is the important part, not the total number of hosts. Whether the pool is one thousand or one billion computers, the chance that one infected OS X host will run into another OS X host will still be 4%. The ability of an infected host to find and infect other hosts before it "dies" is the important part.
As I said before network-based worms that require no human interaction (like all those windows worms from a few years ago) are not hampered by low numbers, since they reach a huge number of hosts in very little time. The "Black ICE" worm from 2004 is the perfect example.
OS X comes with good defaults in this regard, as it doesn't have any network daemons come "spread-eagle" out of the box, like Windows.
Repeat after me: There is nothing special about UNIX.
Do the math yourself...if you can.
The 8% I made up for my example was generous. It's most likely smaller than that.
= 2
If you want an idea of what percentage of machines on the net that are Macs, web stats are a very good indicator....
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid
The article is not proof.
Take the classic email based worm for example. Given that only about 4-8% of computers run OSX, how would an email worm spread on Macs? If you sent it to 100,000 email addresses you'd be lucky if 8,000 OSX users received the email. If 50% of those 8000 OSX users fell for it and executed the payload, the worm would have to find 25 new email addresses that belong to uninfected OSX users in order to maintain it's population. Otherwise he number of new infections would decrease exponentially until the worm became extinct.
The 50% infection rate and number of new email addresses required per infected host are both unrealistic IMO. More realistic numbers would only serve to further prove my point - that spreading malware to OSX computers is virtually impossible.
Network borne malware is a different story, but that's become an almost non-issue since Windows XP SP2 came out and enabled the firewall by default.
But the gum *did* help for that first week.
...the first native desktop operating system was actually Windows XP... What is your definition of "native desktop OS?". As the parent poster said, NT4 workstation, which came out in 1996, was a native 32bit OS and was for desktop use. XP was actually the third native 32bit desktop OS from Microsoft as Windows 2000 Professional came out before that.That doesn't count for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, Streets and Trips is produced by Microsoft. Anything by Microsoft doesn't count because Microsoft is evil. Besides, I'm sure Microsoft bought streets and trips from at gunpoint from some starving open source developer anyway, which would mean they didn't even make it.
Second, Streets and trips costs money. Things that cost money and promote capitalism are evil. Only when a free good or service obtains a benefit that a non-free good or service has had for eons, does it become a good thing.
If you have any questions feel free to ask.
Case in point: The Areca 1210 PCIE SATA controller I bought specifically for it's FreeBSD support. After buying it, I also wanted to try out the latest version of SuSE and assumed that it would support it out of the box, but it didn't. I was quite surprised at this. The Areca Card had been on the market for more than a year an it came with open source drivers.
Not really. If you just say that, they will accuse you of not listening to and patronizing them and then you'll be in even deeper shit.
Rabbits hit the trifecta. They are cute, entertaining and tasty.