Every single similar claim in the past has been debunked. Ergo, the prior probability of such a device working is extremely low. So yes, absent further evidence, the most likely explanation is a mistake or fraud.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This claim is rather extraordinary and the evidence is rather paltry.
Nothing I read shows they took any significant security precautions whatsoever, either in the digital or physical security. It's not that hard to physically alter the device, the monitoring equipment, or the data if you're intent on fraud and there are no experts in physical and digital security constantly monitoring the integrity of the experiment and the equipment used to monitor it.
The fact is, few scientists are trained in detecting fraud. Science largely relies on an honor system. In the cases where scientists do things like completely fabricate data, they can usually get away with it for a good long while because the scientific community is very open and not very suspicious of actual malfeasance. Other scientists might pick a paper apart on intellectual grounds but nobody is going to ask, "how do we know that your measurements of tumor mass in your lab rats was not fabricated?" It is socially understood that when a scientist reports an observation, that observation is truthful. Outside of human medical trials it is rare for anyone to be required to back up experimental data with evidence that would meet requirements for legally being established as true.
So call me a skeptic, but I don't think that this experiment can even be trusted to establish what the experimenters think it established, because there were too many avenues for fraudulent manipulation of the results by the interested party.
In the context of what I wrote, I was making an analogy between particles seeming to move faster than light and a magic trick and you went on a tangent. The point was that they WERE fooled because they did not know how the trick was performed (at least not for the better part of a year). It has nothing to do with whether or not they were skeptical of the result (after all, I doubt too many people in the audience really believe that a magician saws a lady in half). What is relevant is that top physicists were not able to figure out a simple "trick" even when they were in their element, everyone was honest, they had a full understanding of the components, and they could control all the variables.
The point is, even when someone is actively looking to figure out how a magic trick is performed they can still be fooled. In an experiment like the one referenced here, physicists and chemists would tend to be out of their element if someone is actively trying to dupe them because science relies on experimenters honestly and accurately documenting their procedures. Most scientists are trained to detect faulty methodology and sloppy reasoning. They are not trained to detect deliberate fraud.
Converting isotopes is not outside of the "magician's domain" if the conversion is a trick. It is only outside their domain if there is an actual, honest-to-goodness natural reaction occurring.
No, his case is not 100% different. There are ways to fool everyone, including physicists and other professional scientists. Heck, the physicists at CERN fooled themselves for quite a while when their experiments demonstrated that they had succeeded in sending information at greater than the speed of light.
If the inventor actually made a real patent with a full technical explanation, physicists would be in their prime and could actually pick apart the flaws in the design and figure out that it does not work and that the results cannot be reproduced.
However, experimental physicists operate under the presumption that everyone they work with is honest and doing science. That's how they are trained. In fact scientists might be the most open and honest professions. That's also why physicists and other scientists are easy to fool IF you exploit the fact that their skepticism is going to be largely directed toward your science and engineering, not your honesty.
You set up the device, break into the lab at night, charge it up, and there's a good chance they'll never notice. A magician or a cop might be more likely to figure it out because they've been trained to think skeptically about the honesty of others and have experience dealing with fraud and criminality.
Levels of skepticism should be commensurate with the prior probability of something being true. In this case, people should be extremely skeptical. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, to paraphrase Carl Sagan.
Of course, a proper scientific approach is not to dismiss something out of hand but nobody should be getting excited about such a claim until the claimant actually clearly demonstrates something to get excited over.
I've seen a lot of wireless adapters that either don't work or work badly under Linux.
Of course, I've seen a lot of wireless drivers that were a pain in the tukis to track down for Windows, but once you find them they almost always install and work like a charm.
I only run Linux in a VM environment these days, because (aside from the occasional attached USB device) driver support for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V is pretty close to perfect.
But, just for instance, the live-USB version of Kubuntu absolutely will not work on my HP laptop because the Intel integrated graphics drivers are somehow badly broken. Once it starts booting you get nothing but a blank screen, so it makes it difficult (probably not impossible since there must be a workaround) if I ever wanted to install Linux (or at least Kubuntu) onto the laptop.
Linux driver support has always been a huge weakness for home users. Apple fans tend to use mostly Apple-approved hardware and everyone makes a driver for Windows. Linux support has always been an afterthought or a non-thought, often with enthusiasts hacking together support for a device months or even years after it is on the market.
I don't know too many people who use Linux as a primary home OS, but for those that do, good driver support is a must. It probably won't get Linux any more share of the OS pie, but it will mean less pulled out hair for the 1% or so of people who run it on laptops or workstations.
My plan is to get one of those $200-300 netgear routers. They have high clock speed, dual core processors and the $200 one can fully install DD-WRT (I believe) while the more expensive one does not have a build for it (due to it having multiple CPUs). It wouldn't be an immediate thing (I've got Linux on three routers already) since the netgear firmware seems pretty feature-filled. Hopefully, the tests are correct and it can handle 800 Mb/s, because I am capped at about 50-60 per computer right now, maybe achieving only about 80 Mb/s overall due to my Cisco's slow NAT.
I thought about using my server as a router. It's a quad-core 940 i7. But it's already running Windows 2012 and virtualizing Ubuntu Server. I'm sure it could handle the load, but I would prefer perhaps something a bit lighter weight and less power-hungry.
Still, if I had a 1 Gb/s connection like the OP, that might be the way to go. Either Linux or Windows should be able to pull home router duties without straining a quad or sex core i7 too much.
The PS3 actually had a pretty impressive CPU (for the time), but the PS4 and XB1 have a pretty low-powered CPU that is mainly optimized for running low-priority background tasks. The Wii U CPU is more impressive in terms of gaming performance for the dollar (the Wii U uses low power ARM for background tasks) but it's clock speed seems to be limited by an inadequate power supply and perhaps some thermal issues with heat dissipation.
All these systems work fine for games designed by talented programmers from the ground up. However, when you are talking about AAA ports, the PS4 and its two brothers are just underpowered, locked down PC's that are holding game designers back in many ways. At the end of the day though, a talented designer could still put out an awesome, modern game on a Gamecube or PS2. If the next Assassin's Creed is not as good as it could have been, it is not due to the lack of computing power on the PS4, XB1, and WiiU. It is because the designers put too much work into designing a flashier game rather than one of substance.
If you look at series like 3D Zelda, there has been a steady improvement in the overall quality of the game. It is not because the designers had better hardware to play with (even though they did). It is because the hardware just served as a canvas for the art-style they wanted and rather than focus on making the game look "pretty" or have more fidelity, they focused on continuing to do what they did right with previous games while fixing flaws (like character motivation and whatnot) that had little or nothing to do with the hardware.
If Ubisoft cannot make a good Assassin's Creed game, it is not because of the current generation's major hardware limitations. It is because of the limitations of the game designers and their managers.
My relatively new Linksys cannot even handle my 110 Mb/s connection. There are home routers out there from the tests that seem to handle upwards of 800 Mb/s, so be sure to buy one of those since they are actually pretty close to the real-world throughput of 1 GB/s copper ethernet.
As for how to take advantage? No question that you have to go with 1000 Mb/s ethernet, if not for the sake of your inetnet, then just for local sharing. You might also want to upgrade your wireless to take advantage, but really you should be concerned mostly with the speed of your desktops and home servers.
With DOD computers, the problem is the opposite of being too insecure. Windows computers and the networks they connect to are incredibly locked down and slow. Most users either cannot install software or their computers are automatically reimaged the next time they boot. You cannot log on to even a laptop without a smatcard that gets permanently locked if you enter the wrong key more than twice. Plugging an unauthorized device into the network triggers a lockdown and an investigation, even if the network itself is not used for classified information.
Windows is designed to be very secure and have its security policies easily managed but most corporate IT departments don't implement the best security measures because of the huge headache that creates.
One of the biggest (and most legitimate) criticisms of Windows, especially when Vista was released, was that older systems could not run an up-to-date OS effectively, something that is not so much of a problem with Linux.
Since Vista, MS has worked to make Windows more scalable. Reversing course to lock out a huge number of 32 bit computers from running an up to date OS would be a huge step backwards.
Almost every military-issued computer I have ever seen runs Windows. Until fairly recently, just about the only smartphones approved for classified communication were running Windows CE. Last year, the DOD spent over half a billion dollars on licenses for Windows 8, Sharepoint, and Office 2013.
I would be willing to wager a huge amount of money that the US government is far and away Microsoft's largest customer. Almost every standard-imaged US government workstation and laptop have ever seen runs Windows.
Just because YOU think that there is "no reason" to support the hardware does not mean that there actually is "no reason".
I have an old laptop that came with XP. It is 32 bit with 2GB of RAM. It works fine on Windows 7 which I upgraded for free. If it were still on XP, I would probably upgrade to 10 if it were free or cheap now that XP is kaput.
There are a ton of computers that are perfectly serviceable for what they are used for that have 32 bit processors. A lot of them are still running XP. These computers still need support. Since Microsoft doesn't profit from forcing you to retire your old computer, there is no reason to drop support for their customers who have serviceable units with 32 bit processors.
Because they still have to support legacy hardware. 2014 was the first year that Intel fully switched its x86 chips to 64 bit. Some manufacturers might still be shipping atom-powered PC's with 32 bit processors. There are a ton of netbooks from a few years back with 32 bit atom chips that shipped with the deprecated XP OS. Any computer ten years or older with an Intel chip is almost certainly 32-bit and laptop and desktops kept shipping with 32 bit CPU's long after 2005.
Dropping the 32-bit version of the NT desktop OS now would leave a ton of computers unable to run the newest operating systems. Unlike Apple, Microsoft doesn't make money by forcing you to buy new hardware. Until most 32 systems are retired or until Windows simply cannot run well on 32 bit systems, it makes no sense for Microsoft to drop support, especially with Windows XP being EOL and Windows 10 being capable of running on many if not most of the still-useful 32bit XP systems.
OS-X has penetrated into the market for highly sophisticated technical and scientific users forr easons which have nothing to do with security, but rather because such end users generally have their own choice of machines and often prefer OS-X for the reasons you listed.
Of course, in my own experience, getting open-source UNIX scientific software to work correctly on OS-X is often just as difficult as getting it to work under Windows with a UNIX emulator and SSHing into or virtualizing a Linux machine is my preferred solution, at least for a desktop computer.
More obscure programs not in standard Linux repositories tend to be equally painful to get set up on Cygwin, Linux, and OS-X, although at least commercial software like Matlab and Mathematica are much more easily set up on Windows or OS-X than Linux.
That's a corporate blog page that simply made a list with no actual explanation of what tests or methodology they used to generate the list.
You seem to have done nothing but link the first site that confirms your bias without any deeper research.
Right now, OSX is only running on around 1% of PC's worldwide, so doubtlessly it is "more secure" in the sense of obscurity, since exploits are less likely to be found and pursued.
That does not mean that it is inherently more secure than Redhat or Windows, or that when hardened with good security policies, is more secure than Redhat or Windows, or that it is easier to make secure.
Most of the security advantages that OSX had that were not originally in Windows NT operating systems (like elevating user privileges) have been incorporated into the 6.0 or later kernels, so perhaps it is true that OSX was more secure than the first release of XP, but that does not necessarily carry over to the newest Windows clients with the latest patches.
In high security environments (i.e. systems that handle sensitive or classified information) it is still mostly Windows machines, with servers running hardened *nix or Windows.
Windows also has pretty adaptable and sophisticated tools that system administrators can use to force security policies for client machines whereas, to the best of my knowledge, similar OSX tools are completely absent or third-party add-ons.
Several times groups have looked at how long security flaws exist before getting patched, and OSX has consistently lagged behind Redhat and Windows clients.
The adoption of Apple Computers in the corporate environment seems to have more to do with it's penetration into the consumer market (i.e. home and academic use) in the US and other first world countries than anything to do with security. I haven't seen any evidence that it is being adopted by enterprise users, especially those that handle classified information, due to security. Rather, it tends to be banned from such environments because it is harder for network security officers to lock down and manage.
16 bit applications were just an example. DOS is pretty much free as is Microsoft's visualization environment if you run 64-bit windows. There still are quite a few legacy 16 bit DOS applications out there, btw. You pay millions of dollars to code a solution back in the 1980's or 1990's and upgrading the software is not always the best option. Heck, there is still a lot of legacy code out there from before the introduction of the MS-DOS PC in the early 80's.
The point is, MS cares a lot about compatibility. A lot of times, "run in XP mode" is good enough to get most problems fixed and 64 bit windows supports compatibility modes going all the way back to the first 32 bit OS, which is Windows 95.
While a program written for Windows 10 probably won't run on Windows 95, a business program written for Windows 95 probably will run on Windows 10, and corporations care a lot about that compatibility.
Some of the fastest chips actually have the lowest "reference" clock speed because they are designed to dynamically overclock and shift loads between cores to maintain good thermal efficiency. Also, it's hard to compare the clock speed of a single core Pentium design to the newer Intel core designs because Intel's newer chips are a lot faster at lower clock speeds.
So, the comparison has become more complicated, but if you compare the maximum factory authorized speed of one Intel chip to another, you will find as a general rule that clock speed is still king in single-threaded performance (for instance, an i7 that uses turbo boost to reach 3.2 Ghz is going to be slower than an i5 which reaches a max of 3.8 Ghz). On the other hand, a Pentium IV clocked at 3.8 Ghz is going to be remarkably slower, even in single-threaded applications, than an i7 with a base clock of 2.26 Ghz, because you are comparing apples to oranges.
I guess it depends on what you consider "nice". The last time I bought a laptop, I was in school, and OS-X was not compatible with simple tasks that I wanted to do, like take notes while recording lectures. I haven't kept up with the latest, but I still don't think any OS-X device supports basic interfaces that MS has supported out of the box for the better part of two decades like handwriting conversion, active digitizers, touchscreens, handwriting-to-equation conversion, et cetera.
Even if you could hack OS-X to support such basic features, I don't believe Apple makes any touch-screen or active-digitizer enabled ultrabooks or laptops/tablets which support such input.
From my experience, NT has been far ahead of OSX since at least 2002. They're both stable kernels, but there is no question that in terms of operating system features and legacy support, there is a lot more money poured into Windows development than OS-X.
Now granted, the average user probably does not care about these things. Most people these days are happy with a little toy tablet like a Galaxy or an iPad, but for the rest of us, we care about the features that OSX does not have.
Not to say it is a bad operating system or inferior to Windows, just that it seems to be designed on a completely different philosophy (make the OS work well for the average consumer on a particular piece of hardware that Apple manufacturers) rather than the more general market (especially enterprise market) that Microsoft targets.
Many 16 bit applications from the 1980's will run fine on Windows 10 32 bit edition.
Microsoft, more than any other company, has spent money ensuring that old software runs smoothly on newer operating systems. It is not perfect, and it has a lot of downsides, but it is also whey the corporate world and government has embraced MS as the desktop operating system of choice.
They are not going to get rid of Windows 32 on the desktop until there are almost no desktops out there that will run it. 2014 was the first year that Intel fully embraced x64 bit architecture for all of its chips. Most computers more than 10 years old are x32. There are a ton of netbooks and netbook tablets manufactured up until 2013, many that shipped with the EOL OS XP that need to be upgraded to Windows 10.
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Your Bayesian analysis is flawed.
Every single similar claim in the past has been debunked. Ergo, the prior probability of such a device working is extremely low. So yes, absent further evidence, the most likely explanation is a mistake or fraud.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This claim is rather extraordinary and the evidence is rather paltry.
Nothing I read shows they took any significant security precautions whatsoever, either in the digital or physical security. It's not that hard to physically alter the device, the monitoring equipment, or the data if you're intent on fraud and there are no experts in physical and digital security constantly monitoring the integrity of the experiment and the equipment used to monitor it.
The fact is, few scientists are trained in detecting fraud. Science largely relies on an honor system. In the cases where scientists do things like completely fabricate data, they can usually get away with it for a good long while because the scientific community is very open and not very suspicious of actual malfeasance. Other scientists might pick a paper apart on intellectual grounds but nobody is going to ask, "how do we know that your measurements of tumor mass in your lab rats was not fabricated?" It is socially understood that when a scientist reports an observation, that observation is truthful. Outside of human medical trials it is rare for anyone to be required to back up experimental data with evidence that would meet requirements for legally being established as true.
So call me a skeptic, but I don't think that this experiment can even be trusted to establish what the experimenters think it established, because there were too many avenues for fraudulent manipulation of the results by the interested party.
You completely misrepresented what I wrote.
In the context of what I wrote, I was making an analogy between particles seeming to move faster than light and a magic trick and you went on a tangent. The point was that they WERE fooled because they did not know how the trick was performed (at least not for the better part of a year). It has nothing to do with whether or not they were skeptical of the result (after all, I doubt too many people in the audience really believe that a magician saws a lady in half). What is relevant is that top physicists were not able to figure out a simple "trick" even when they were in their element, everyone was honest, they had a full understanding of the components, and they could control all the variables.
The point is, even when someone is actively looking to figure out how a magic trick is performed they can still be fooled. In an experiment like the one referenced here, physicists and chemists would tend to be out of their element if someone is actively trying to dupe them because science relies on experimenters honestly and accurately documenting their procedures. Most scientists are trained to detect faulty methodology and sloppy reasoning. They are not trained to detect deliberate fraud.
Nice strawman.
Converting isotopes is not outside of the "magician's domain" if the conversion is a trick. It is only outside their domain if there is an actual, honest-to-goodness natural reaction occurring.
No, his case is not 100% different. There are ways to fool everyone, including physicists and other professional scientists. Heck, the physicists at CERN fooled themselves for quite a while when their experiments demonstrated that they had succeeded in sending information at greater than the speed of light.
If the inventor actually made a real patent with a full technical explanation, physicists would be in their prime and could actually pick apart the flaws in the design and figure out that it does not work and that the results cannot be reproduced.
However, experimental physicists operate under the presumption that everyone they work with is honest and doing science. That's how they are trained. In fact scientists might be the most open and honest professions. That's also why physicists and other scientists are easy to fool IF you exploit the fact that their skepticism is going to be largely directed toward your science and engineering, not your honesty.
You set up the device, break into the lab at night, charge it up, and there's a good chance they'll never notice. A magician or a cop might be more likely to figure it out because they've been trained to think skeptically about the honesty of others and have experience dealing with fraud and criminality.
Levels of skepticism should be commensurate with the prior probability of something being true. In this case, people should be extremely skeptical. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, to paraphrase Carl Sagan.
Of course, a proper scientific approach is not to dismiss something out of hand but nobody should be getting excited about such a claim until the claimant actually clearly demonstrates something to get excited over.
I've seen a lot of wireless adapters that either don't work or work badly under Linux.
Of course, I've seen a lot of wireless drivers that were a pain in the tukis to track down for Windows, but once you find them they almost always install and work like a charm.
I only run Linux in a VM environment these days, because (aside from the occasional attached USB device) driver support for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V is pretty close to perfect.
But, just for instance, the live-USB version of Kubuntu absolutely will not work on my HP laptop because the Intel integrated graphics drivers are somehow badly broken. Once it starts booting you get nothing but a blank screen, so it makes it difficult (probably not impossible since there must be a workaround) if I ever wanted to install Linux (or at least Kubuntu) onto the laptop.
Linux driver support has always been a huge weakness for home users. Apple fans tend to use mostly Apple-approved hardware and everyone makes a driver for Windows. Linux support has always been an afterthought or a non-thought, often with enthusiasts hacking together support for a device months or even years after it is on the market.
I don't know too many people who use Linux as a primary home OS, but for those that do, good driver support is a must. It probably won't get Linux any more share of the OS pie, but it will mean less pulled out hair for the 1% or so of people who run it on laptops or workstations.
My plan is to get one of those $200-300 netgear routers. They have high clock speed, dual core processors and the $200 one can fully install DD-WRT (I believe) while the more expensive one does not have a build for it (due to it having multiple CPUs). It wouldn't be an immediate thing (I've got Linux on three routers already) since the netgear firmware seems pretty feature-filled. Hopefully, the tests are correct and it can handle 800 Mb/s, because I am capped at about 50-60 per computer right now, maybe achieving only about 80 Mb/s overall due to my Cisco's slow NAT.
I thought about using my server as a router. It's a quad-core 940 i7. But it's already running Windows 2012 and virtualizing Ubuntu Server. I'm sure it could handle the load, but I would prefer perhaps something a bit lighter weight and less power-hungry.
Still, if I had a 1 Gb/s connection like the OP, that might be the way to go. Either Linux or Windows should be able to pull home router duties without straining a quad or sex core i7 too much.
The PS3 actually had a pretty impressive CPU (for the time), but the PS4 and XB1 have a pretty low-powered CPU that is mainly optimized for running low-priority background tasks. The Wii U CPU is more impressive in terms of gaming performance for the dollar (the Wii U uses low power ARM for background tasks) but it's clock speed seems to be limited by an inadequate power supply and perhaps some thermal issues with heat dissipation.
All these systems work fine for games designed by talented programmers from the ground up. However, when you are talking about AAA ports, the PS4 and its two brothers are just underpowered, locked down PC's that are holding game designers back in many ways. At the end of the day though, a talented designer could still put out an awesome, modern game on a Gamecube or PS2. If the next Assassin's Creed is not as good as it could have been, it is not due to the lack of computing power on the PS4, XB1, and WiiU. It is because the designers put too much work into designing a flashier game rather than one of substance.
If you look at series like 3D Zelda, there has been a steady improvement in the overall quality of the game. It is not because the designers had better hardware to play with (even though they did). It is because the hardware just served as a canvas for the art-style they wanted and rather than focus on making the game look "pretty" or have more fidelity, they focused on continuing to do what they did right with previous games while fixing flaws (like character motivation and whatnot) that had little or nothing to do with the hardware.
If Ubisoft cannot make a good Assassin's Creed game, it is not because of the current generation's major hardware limitations. It is because of the limitations of the game designers and their managers.
My relatively new Linksys cannot even handle my 110 Mb/s connection. There are home routers out there from the tests that seem to handle upwards of 800 Mb/s, so be sure to buy one of those since they are actually pretty close to the real-world throughput of 1 GB/s copper ethernet.
As for how to take advantage? No question that you have to go with 1000 Mb/s ethernet, if not for the sake of your inetnet, then just for local sharing. You might also want to upgrade your wireless to take advantage, but really you should be concerned mostly with the speed of your desktops and home servers.
With DOD computers, the problem is the opposite of being too insecure. Windows computers and the networks they connect to are incredibly locked down and slow. Most users either cannot install software or their computers are automatically reimaged the next time they boot. You cannot log on to even a laptop without a smatcard that gets permanently locked if you enter the wrong key more than twice. Plugging an unauthorized device into the network triggers a lockdown and an investigation, even if the network itself is not used for classified information.
Windows is designed to be very secure and have its security policies easily managed but most corporate IT departments don't implement the best security measures because of the huge headache that creates.
One of the biggest (and most legitimate) criticisms of Windows, especially when Vista was released, was that older systems could not run an up-to-date OS effectively, something that is not so much of a problem with Linux.
Since Vista, MS has worked to make Windows more scalable. Reversing course to lock out a huge number of 32 bit computers from running an up to date OS would be a huge step backwards.
Almost every military-issued computer I have ever seen runs Windows. Until fairly recently, just about the only smartphones approved for classified communication were running Windows CE. Last year, the DOD spent over half a billion dollars on licenses for Windows 8, Sharepoint, and Office 2013.
I would be willing to wager a huge amount of money that the US government is far and away Microsoft's largest customer. Almost every standard-imaged US government workstation and laptop have ever seen runs Windows.
Just because YOU think that there is "no reason" to support the hardware does not mean that there actually is "no reason".
I have an old laptop that came with XP. It is 32 bit with 2GB of RAM. It works fine on Windows 7 which I upgraded for free. If it were still on XP, I would probably upgrade to 10 if it were free or cheap now that XP is kaput.
There are a ton of computers that are perfectly serviceable for what they are used for that have 32 bit processors. A lot of them are still running XP. These computers still need support. Since Microsoft doesn't profit from forcing you to retire your old computer, there is no reason to drop support for their customers who have serviceable units with 32 bit processors.
Because they still have to support legacy hardware. 2014 was the first year that Intel fully switched its x86 chips to 64 bit. Some manufacturers might still be shipping atom-powered PC's with 32 bit processors. There are a ton of netbooks from a few years back with 32 bit atom chips that shipped with the deprecated XP OS. Any computer ten years or older with an Intel chip is almost certainly 32-bit and laptop and desktops kept shipping with 32 bit CPU's long after 2005.
Dropping the 32-bit version of the NT desktop OS now would leave a ton of computers unable to run the newest operating systems. Unlike Apple, Microsoft doesn't make money by forcing you to buy new hardware. Until most 32 systems are retired or until Windows simply cannot run well on 32 bit systems, it makes no sense for Microsoft to drop support, especially with Windows XP being EOL and Windows 10 being capable of running on many if not most of the still-useful 32bit XP systems.
OS-X has penetrated into the market for highly sophisticated technical and scientific users forr easons which have nothing to do with security, but rather because such end users generally have their own choice of machines and often prefer OS-X for the reasons you listed.
Of course, in my own experience, getting open-source UNIX scientific software to work correctly on OS-X is often just as difficult as getting it to work under Windows with a UNIX emulator and SSHing into or virtualizing a Linux machine is my preferred solution, at least for a desktop computer.
More obscure programs not in standard Linux repositories tend to be equally painful to get set up on Cygwin, Linux, and OS-X, although at least commercial software like Matlab and Mathematica are much more easily set up on Windows or OS-X than Linux.
That's a corporate blog page that simply made a list with no actual explanation of what tests or methodology they used to generate the list.
You seem to have done nothing but link the first site that confirms your bias without any deeper research.
Right now, OSX is only running on around 1% of PC's worldwide, so doubtlessly it is "more secure" in the sense of obscurity, since exploits are less likely to be found and pursued.
That does not mean that it is inherently more secure than Redhat or Windows, or that when hardened with good security policies, is more secure than Redhat or Windows, or that it is easier to make secure.
Most of the security advantages that OSX had that were not originally in Windows NT operating systems (like elevating user privileges) have been incorporated into the 6.0 or later kernels, so perhaps it is true that OSX was more secure than the first release of XP, but that does not necessarily carry over to the newest Windows clients with the latest patches.
In high security environments (i.e. systems that handle sensitive or classified information) it is still mostly Windows machines, with servers running hardened *nix or Windows.
Windows also has pretty adaptable and sophisticated tools that system administrators can use to force security policies for client machines whereas, to the best of my knowledge, similar OSX tools are completely absent or third-party add-ons.
Several times groups have looked at how long security flaws exist before getting patched, and OSX has consistently lagged behind Redhat and Windows clients.
The adoption of Apple Computers in the corporate environment seems to have more to do with it's penetration into the consumer market (i.e. home and academic use) in the US and other first world countries than anything to do with security. I haven't seen any evidence that it is being adopted by enterprise users, especially those that handle classified information, due to security. Rather, it tends to be banned from such environments because it is harder for network security officers to lock down and manage.
16 bit applications were just an example. DOS is pretty much free as is Microsoft's visualization environment if you run 64-bit windows. There still are quite a few legacy 16 bit DOS applications out there, btw. You pay millions of dollars to code a solution back in the 1980's or 1990's and upgrading the software is not always the best option. Heck, there is still a lot of legacy code out there from before the introduction of the MS-DOS PC in the early 80's.
The point is, MS cares a lot about compatibility. A lot of times, "run in XP mode" is good enough to get most problems fixed and 64 bit windows supports compatibility modes going all the way back to the first 32 bit OS, which is Windows 95.
While a program written for Windows 10 probably won't run on Windows 95, a business program written for Windows 95 probably will run on Windows 10, and corporations care a lot about that compatibility.
. . . it just is not as easy to compare anymore.
Some of the fastest chips actually have the lowest "reference" clock speed because they are designed to dynamically overclock and shift loads between cores to maintain good thermal efficiency. Also, it's hard to compare the clock speed of a single core Pentium design to the newer Intel core designs because Intel's newer chips are a lot faster at lower clock speeds.
So, the comparison has become more complicated, but if you compare the maximum factory authorized speed of one Intel chip to another, you will find as a general rule that clock speed is still king in single-threaded performance (for instance, an i7 that uses turbo boost to reach 3.2 Ghz is going to be slower than an i5 which reaches a max of 3.8 Ghz). On the other hand, a Pentium IV clocked at 3.8 Ghz is going to be remarkably slower, even in single-threaded applications, than an i7 with a base clock of 2.26 Ghz, because you are comparing apples to oranges.
I guess it depends on what you consider "nice". The last time I bought a laptop, I was in school, and OS-X was not compatible with simple tasks that I wanted to do, like take notes while recording lectures. I haven't kept up with the latest, but I still don't think any OS-X device supports basic interfaces that MS has supported out of the box for the better part of two decades like handwriting conversion, active digitizers, touchscreens, handwriting-to-equation conversion, et cetera.
Even if you could hack OS-X to support such basic features, I don't believe Apple makes any touch-screen or active-digitizer enabled ultrabooks or laptops/tablets which support such input.
From my experience, NT has been far ahead of OSX since at least 2002. They're both stable kernels, but there is no question that in terms of operating system features and legacy support, there is a lot more money poured into Windows development than OS-X.
Now granted, the average user probably does not care about these things. Most people these days are happy with a little toy tablet like a Galaxy or an iPad, but for the rest of us, we care about the features that OSX does not have.
Not to say it is a bad operating system or inferior to Windows, just that it seems to be designed on a completely different philosophy (make the OS work well for the average consumer on a particular piece of hardware that Apple manufacturers) rather than the more general market (especially enterprise market) that Microsoft targets.
Many 16 bit applications from the 1980's will run fine on Windows 10 32 bit edition.
Microsoft, more than any other company, has spent money ensuring that old software runs smoothly on newer operating systems. It is not perfect, and it has a lot of downsides, but it is also whey the corporate world and government has embraced MS as the desktop operating system of choice.
They are not going to get rid of Windows 32 on the desktop until there are almost no desktops out there that will run it. 2014 was the first year that Intel fully embraced x64 bit architecture for all of its chips. Most computers more than 10 years old are x32. There are a ton of netbooks and netbook tablets manufactured up until 2013, many that shipped with the EOL OS XP that need to be upgraded to Windows 10.