I've been holding off getting a new work laptop, waiting for the new Power^H^H^H^H^HMacBook Pros to come out, so I could get my OS X fix on someone else's tab, but I am disappointed to see there is still no 12" PowerBook replacement.
It's not a showstopper for me, because realistically a 15" vs a 12" notebook isn't a huge issue (heck, I might even get a 17"), but it would truly have been great to see a 12" PowerBook replacement that wasn't the redheaded stepchild the 12" was...
It's a shame to see there isn't a 7200rpm hard disk option. However, 2G of RAM *standard* is a bold (and welcome, given OS X's hunger for memory) move by Apple that makes up for it. On the downside, as has become ironically typical (from a company that stresses its graphically-oriented heritage and having the "first" mainstream OS that really took advantage of GPUs for acceleration) it's a shame to see weak video hardware on "Pro" hardware, with no faster BTO alternative.
These days, the problem of spam is mostly caused by compromised Windows systems which unknowingly send out millions of such messages a day each. Thus the best way to fix the problem of spam is to get it at the root: Windows.
You mis-spelled 'Users' there, chief.
It won't be an easy task for Microsoft, but they'll need to bring the security level of Windows up to at least that of Linux, Solaris, MacOS X and the BSDs.
Given that all currently supported versions of Windows, from a technical perspective, have security capabilities that exceed those of most unixes, how do you propose they do more than they already have ?
75% of the net uses Apache. The vast majority of that is on *nix.
Cherry-picking particular subsets of the marketplace is not a valid argument. It's nearly as dumb as deciding whether or not a platform is secure based solely on how often it gets "virus infected".
You were saying?
AFAIK, Apache has had a worse "security record" compared to IIS for a while now (or equivalent to it at best).
There are flaws on every platform. The difference is what you can do with the flaw.
Indeed. Another difference is how frequently that flaw presents itself.
On Windows your given the key to the city. On Linux you'll be lucky if you can execute anything.
Comparing IIS holes to viruses on unamanaged desktops is apples and oranges.
Let me introduce you to a friend of mine, IIS, and his brother, Apache.
Wow, how surprising to see that strawman rolled out in a discussion about marketshare...
Cherry-picking certain subsets of a set that just happen to agree with your point (or not, in this case) is not a particularly valid line of reasoning. It's nearly as dumb as grading how secure a platform is based solely on how often it gets "virus infected".
I'll leave the two of you to get accquainted.
For some time now, Apache has had a worse - or at best equivalent - "security record" than IIS.
Well, actually impossible, unless the user does something. But hey, I guess market share magically makes a machine exploitable, so lets watch the fun.
I never suggested marketshare had any bearing on the technical aspects, or presence, of platform vulnerabilities. Merely that it has an inherent and inescapable effect on how a platform is exploited, how frequently and the impact of those exploits.
And that's why Code Red was just a myth. And Slammer. And Blaster.
Indeed. Just like the Morris Worm. And those pesky PHP worms that were going around a while back.
Remotely exploitable holes like those are quite rare (and promptly patched). On all platforms.
Malware authors go after the easy targets. They don't consciously choose to go after home users only - this is a side effect of being able to amass thousands of unpatched machines weeks after the fact. But don't kid yourself - even if every single machine on the planet always managed to patch itself 24 hours after infection, we'd still see Code Red. And Slammer. And Blaster.
Nor did I suggest otherwise. No OS or third party security software can protect against ignorant end users.
Asshats are asshats. Botnet farming is a relatively new phenomenon, but infecting computers en masse has been going on for decades now.
Not at quite the same scale (or ease) that it does now. Largely because there's never been so many powerful machines on (relatively) fat pipes in the hands of people who can't even set the time on their VCR.
The risk and exposure profiles of an unmanaged desktop Windows PC vs a managed Linux server are so utterly different, comparisons between the two are simply worthless.
Of course, even if we magically removed Windows from the desktop entirely, we'd still never rid ourselves of this idiotic marketshare myth. People are quite happy to ignore history just to focus on one or two recent events, so I'm sure they'd remain happy to ignore reality just a little bit longer
It's not a myth, it's simple statistics. In fact, it's so trivial (and obvious) to demonstrate how important a platform's relative commonness is to things like exploits, speed of propogation and "security", it blows my mind that people even try to *suggest* it's irrelevant.
And the fact that few of them use Windows is a coincidence?
Not in the slightest. Windows is the most common platform, with the lowest common denominator of users.
A Linux virus would spread rapidly because of the density of Linux boxes in a ip block is high (Datacenter blocks would be popular).
I think you've got your viruses and your worms mixed up. Viruses don't spread like that.
Who cares if it gets taken down in a day. It would take 5 mins to get a 1,000 dedi strong botnet and that will remove nearly any website for a couple of hours.
Only on the off chance a remotely exploitable flaw was discovered and remained unfixed. This is extremely rare on any platform.
If the virus spread itsself (which by definition it must) then it wouldnt matter at all if it was removed within hours. It only takes 30 seconds to wipe a website off the net for hours with that amount of cpu and bandwidth.
You're missing the point. A botnet that can't be relied on to be working for more than a day or two before falling apart is worthless. Thus, botnet farmers target home Windows machines, where problems are rarely noted *at all*, let alone promptly chased down and fixed.
Managed server machines are incredibly poor environments for the types of malicious code that typically infest desktop PCs. They (relatively) are too well configured and too closely watched.
These products are based on identifying any of hundreds of thousands of programs and stopping them from executing--in an environment containing a few dozen programs the user actually wants to run. It's far easier to allow the few dozen and deny access to anything that isn't on this short list than to check everything against a very long and growing longer list of signatures and behaviours.
Whitelists don't work when they can be easily modified by the ignorant and/or malicious.
Ergo, locking out vendors in the antivirus/antispyware market while simultaniously creating a product in that market very clearly falls under that catagory. Microsoft may not use it's desktop operating system monopoly to manipulate another market. It only adds to the case that they are charging for some of these services.
AV vendors are not being locked out. They have full access to the same public and documented APIs that Microsoft's product is using (and have had for some time).
This whole kerfuffle is only happening because Symantec and McAfee don't want to spend money rewriting their software with decent code.
Good to hear. It was an example of a potential problem program. I'm sure there are others that will crop up that a major portion of home users considers 'essential'.
If you think a "major portion" of home users have even heard of Daemon Tools, let alone know what it does, you've got an extremely skewed perspective on what a "home user" is.
Heck, it's not at all uncommon to find people in forums on warez sites who don't know what Daemon Tools is.
Do tell me how antivirus can work without tapping in to the kernel.
By using documented APIs (which have been newly introduced in Vista *specifically* for things like AV software and third-party firewalls) to load appropriate filter drivers.
They arent patching it to fix a security flaw. Name one virus which patches the kernel.
Pretty much anything that installs a rootkit is patching the kernel.
Very true, but then again, this is when the user executes a file from a trusted source, and the file does not compromise the integrity of the computer, just the user's personal files.
Ie: typically the most important files on the machine.
On Linux, if you were to send someone a shell script that, on the other hand, said "rm -rf/", then you'd have yourself a problem: it wouldn't let you without first providing a root password.
Yes, it would. It would run and delete every file the user had access to. Which, as I noted above, are typically the most important files on the system.
Why can't Windows do this?
It can (and does). All you need to do is run it as a regular user.
And if it did... then why would there be a need for virus scanners?
The mere fact you have to ask this demonstrates you do not understand the issues at stake.
Removal tools, sure, for those idiot users who enter their password for everything. But dedicated scanners that bloat and slow down your computer? Not exactly a necessity anymore, are they?
Of course they are. How else do you intercept deliberately-run malicious code before it can do anything malicious ?
In Vista, Microsoft is actually trying to shut out third-party security products.
No, they're not. Indeed, it's the exactly opposite.
Your assumption is flat-out wrong.
Uh huh. Please explain what these "unthinkable things" are, and how they "screw over" their users. Let's not have any unsubstantiated and polarized name-calling.
They directly hook into and patch - at run-time - undocumented kernel structures (which they have reverse-engineered, without source code) to make their software work.
This is a mind-bogglingly bad way to write software and is directly responsible, in no small part, for the perception of instability Windows carries.
In (64 bit) Vista, Microsoft have locked down the kernel so this _cannot_ be done and have, instead, provided documented APIs to provide the necessary functionality AV software needs (which both their own products, and recently released third party products, are already using, directly disproving any claims that "it can't be done"). They've closed to door on a common way for software developers to create some of the best examples of "broken, ugly, dangerous code" known and simultaneously provided a method for achieving the same ends in a documented, best-practices compatible, way.
If a botnet creator could break in to Linux servers he most certainly would.
Millions of high powered servers with big fat net connections. The net would tremble in fear.
Most of which would be detected and repaired in a matter of hours (if not minutes).
"High powered servers with big fat net connections" are incredibly poor targets for people trying to create botnets, which is why they aren't targeted for them.
Symantect and McCafe are only parasites, leeching from Microsoft's -mistakes-.
Personally I think this article is utter rubbish on pretty much every level (firstly, Netscape lost because their product sucked and secondly because AV vendors have all the info and capabilities they need to write their software). However, this common meme that AV software only exists because of Microsoft is ridiculous.
AV software is not there to protect the user from OS flaws (although it can do that as a side effect), it is there to protect the user from himself and from attacks OS-level security _cannot_ defend against.
I personally loved the Mac's back in the 90's. I built a very successful commercial retouching business where our primary software/hardware was Photoshop on OS9 Mac's. OS9 performed well as you could lock down memory and dedicate it to Photoshop (no OS swapping). This is something that is sorely missing from OS/X and Windows.
No, it's something that would never have been in MacOS if it had decent memory management.
Like RAM disks and other similar "features", it is a crutch for a broken VM system.
Hm. Personally I would have picked Safari as the faster of the two.
All I can say is that my mini isn't sluggish. The firefox performance is roughly in the same class as my work machine, and that's a 3.4 ghz P4 with 2 gigs of ram and a fast disk.
Which is good for you, but I find it difficult to believe, based on my experiences (unless your PC has some serious issues).
Until about a month ago I was using a 10 year old Powermac 7600 as my primary machine. that had a 3rd party G3/400 daughter card, swapped for the original 120 mhz 604 cpu. Except for watching videos, performance was more than acceptable. I'm not surprised that some newer video codecs didn't work too well, since I never put in a video card, but used the on-board video ram (4 mb).
Good on you. But if you found OS X "more than acceptable" on a Mac of that spec (and having used OS X on 300Mhz, 512M Beige G3s, I've got a good idea of what it would be like) then Vista on a slow P3 or fast P2 and 512 of RAM should also be "more than acceptable", as it would be about the same.
Now, *I* don't find OS X to be fast enough for *my use* on anythng less than a 1G, G5+ machine (and even then, my mum's G5 iMac is chunky at times). Certainly, as I said, my 1GHz G4 is painfully slow most of the time with more than a couple of things running. But that's my opinion of, and preference for, UI responsiveness.
The important point here is that on computers of similar specifications, Vista - *at worst* - runs similarly to OS X. So for someone happy with OS X on a G4 class machine, they're going to be happy with Vista on a P3. OR, at least, they will be if thy're judging it objectively.
I tried vista (rc1) on my home PC... 1gb RAM, athlon 2400+ processor, SATA drive, geforce fx 5200 graphics card. This system is usually a XP system, and Vista ran like a dog on it. Like an aged, arthritic, dying, mangy dog. XP runs fine on the same system.
Something in your system is broken.
The $100 Mac with OS X would beat a $100 PC with Vista any day, and you know it.
A $100 Mac is ca. 233Mhz G3 with 128M of RAM. Having used OS X on that class of hardware before (albeit with more RAM), I can confidently say your assessment of Vista above would be a shining recommendation in comparison.
My point here is pretty simple. If you take a PC and Mac of similar spec, they're going to run Vista and OS X about the same. If you're going to go by timeframe, the PC will almost certainly be better, because PCs typically have a higher hardware specification at any given point in time. Vista also has the added bonus of being able to actually turn all the flashiness *off*, whereas OS X just pushes it onto the main CPU, bogging everything down more.
Slashdot Mirror
*sigh* I suspect that such limits do not exist on Linux or Mac OS X.
They do. It's an architectural, not OS, issue. Get a 64-bit version of Windows and you have nothing to worry about.
I've been holding off getting a new work laptop, waiting for the new Power^H^H^H^H^HMacBook Pros to come out, so I could get my OS X fix on someone else's tab, but I am disappointed to see there is still no 12" PowerBook replacement.
It's not a showstopper for me, because realistically a 15" vs a 12" notebook isn't a huge issue (heck, I might even get a 17"), but it would truly have been great to see a 12" PowerBook replacement that wasn't the redheaded stepchild the 12" was...
It's a shame to see there isn't a 7200rpm hard disk option. However, 2G of RAM *standard* is a bold (and welcome, given OS X's hunger for memory) move by Apple that makes up for it. On the downside, as has become ironically typical (from a company that stresses its graphically-oriented heritage and having the "first" mainstream OS that really took advantage of GPUs for acceleration) it's a shame to see weak video hardware on "Pro" hardware, with no faster BTO alternative.
These days, the problem of spam is mostly caused by compromised Windows systems which unknowingly send out millions of such messages a day each. Thus the best way to fix the problem of spam is to get it at the root: Windows.
You mis-spelled 'Users' there, chief.
It won't be an easy task for Microsoft, but they'll need to bring the security level of Windows up to at least that of Linux, Solaris, MacOS X and the BSDs.
Given that all currently supported versions of Windows, from a technical perspective, have security capabilities that exceed those of most unixes, how do you propose they do more than they already have ?
My desktop [p4] runs circles around many of our old Sun boxes [...]
I seriously doubt your P4 runs circles around them under any sort of *server* workload (ie: in anything other than raw CPU power).
75% of the net uses Apache. The vast majority of that is on *nix.
Cherry-picking particular subsets of the marketplace is not a valid argument. It's nearly as dumb as deciding whether or not a platform is secure based solely on how often it gets "virus infected".
You were saying?
AFAIK, Apache has had a worse "security record" compared to IIS for a while now (or equivalent to it at best).
There are flaws on every platform. The difference is what you can do with the flaw.
Indeed. Another difference is how frequently that flaw presents itself.
On Windows your given the key to the city. On Linux you'll be lucky if you can execute anything.
Comparing IIS holes to viruses on unamanaged desktops is apples and oranges.
Let me introduce you to a friend of mine, IIS, and his brother, Apache.
Wow, how surprising to see that strawman rolled out in a discussion about marketshare...
Cherry-picking certain subsets of a set that just happen to agree with your point (or not, in this case) is not a particularly valid line of reasoning. It's nearly as dumb as grading how secure a platform is based solely on how often it gets "virus infected".
I'll leave the two of you to get accquainted.
For some time now, Apache has had a worse - or at best equivalent - "security record" than IIS.
Well, actually impossible, unless the user does something. But hey, I guess market share magically makes a machine exploitable, so lets watch the fun.
I never suggested marketshare had any bearing on the technical aspects, or presence, of platform vulnerabilities. Merely that it has an inherent and inescapable effect on how a platform is exploited, how frequently and the impact of those exploits.
And that's why Code Red was just a myth. And Slammer. And Blaster.
Indeed. Just like the Morris Worm. And those pesky PHP worms that were going around a while back.
Remotely exploitable holes like those are quite rare (and promptly patched). On all platforms.
Malware authors go after the easy targets. They don't consciously choose to go after home users only - this is a side effect of being able to amass thousands of unpatched machines weeks after the fact. But don't kid yourself - even if every single machine on the planet always managed to patch itself 24 hours after infection, we'd still see Code Red. And Slammer. And Blaster.
Nor did I suggest otherwise. No OS or third party security software can protect against ignorant end users.
Asshats are asshats. Botnet farming is a relatively new phenomenon, but infecting computers en masse has been going on for decades now.
Not at quite the same scale (or ease) that it does now. Largely because there's never been so many powerful machines on (relatively) fat pipes in the hands of people who can't even set the time on their VCR.
The risk and exposure profiles of an unmanaged desktop Windows PC vs a managed Linux server are so utterly different, comparisons between the two are simply worthless.
Of course, even if we magically removed Windows from the desktop entirely, we'd still never rid ourselves of this idiotic marketshare myth. People are quite happy to ignore history just to focus on one or two recent events, so I'm sure they'd remain happy to ignore reality just a little bit longer
It's not a myth, it's simple statistics. In fact, it's so trivial (and obvious) to demonstrate how important a platform's relative commonness is to things like exploits, speed of propogation and "security", it blows my mind that people even try to *suggest* it's irrelevant.
And the fact that few of them use Windows is a coincidence?
Not in the slightest. Windows is the most common platform, with the lowest common denominator of users.
A Linux virus would spread rapidly because of the density of Linux boxes in a ip block is high (Datacenter blocks would be popular).
I think you've got your viruses and your worms mixed up. Viruses don't spread like that.
Who cares if it gets taken down in a day. It would take 5 mins to get a 1,000 dedi strong botnet and that will remove nearly any website for a couple of hours.
Only on the off chance a remotely exploitable flaw was discovered and remained unfixed. This is extremely rare on any platform.
If the virus spread itsself (which by definition it must) then it wouldnt matter at all if it was removed within hours. It only takes 30 seconds to wipe a website off the net for hours with that amount of cpu and bandwidth.
You're missing the point. A botnet that can't be relied on to be working for more than a day or two before falling apart is worthless. Thus, botnet farmers target home Windows machines, where problems are rarely noted *at all*, let alone promptly chased down and fixed.
Managed server machines are incredibly poor environments for the types of malicious code that typically infest desktop PCs. They (relatively) are too well configured and too closely watched.
There arent any new APIs which allow a level playing field. MS *will* have the upperhand.
You are wrong.
A rootkit on windows just creates a new administrator account. No need for it to go digging through the kernel.
Sorry, my mistake, you are clueless.
These products are based on identifying any of hundreds of thousands of programs and stopping them from executing--in an environment containing a few dozen programs the user actually wants to run. It's far easier to allow the few dozen and deny access to anything that isn't on this short list than to check everything against a very long and growing longer list of signatures and behaviours.
Whitelists don't work when they can be easily modified by the ignorant and/or malicious.
Ergo, locking out vendors in the antivirus/antispyware market while simultaniously creating a product in that market very clearly falls under that catagory. Microsoft may not use it's desktop operating system monopoly to manipulate another market. It only adds to the case that they are charging for some of these services.
AV vendors are not being locked out. They have full access to the same public and documented APIs that Microsoft's product is using (and have had for some time).
This whole kerfuffle is only happening because Symantec and McAfee don't want to spend money rewriting their software with decent code.
Good to hear. It was an example of a potential problem program. I'm sure there are others that will crop up that a major portion of home users considers 'essential'.
If you think a "major portion" of home users have even heard of Daemon Tools, let alone know what it does, you've got an extremely skewed perspective on what a "home user" is.
Heck, it's not at all uncommon to find people in forums on warez sites who don't know what Daemon Tools is.
It will be interesting to see if the EU continues to stand up to Microsoft and enforces competition law.
There is no way in which anti-trust law is being violated here (and if there is, the law is broken).
Microsoft are not preventing AV software from working.
Microsoft are not using insider knowledge to write their own AV software.
Do tell me how antivirus can work without tapping in to the kernel.
By using documented APIs (which have been newly introduced in Vista *specifically* for things like AV software and third-party firewalls) to load appropriate filter drivers.
They arent patching it to fix a security flaw. Name one virus which patches the kernel.
Pretty much anything that installs a rootkit is patching the kernel.
Very true, but then again, this is when the user executes a file from a trusted source, and the file does not compromise the integrity of the computer, just the user's personal files.
Ie: typically the most important files on the machine.
On Linux, if you were to send someone a shell script that, on the other hand, said "rm -rf /", then you'd have yourself a problem: it wouldn't let you without first providing a root password.
Yes, it would. It would run and delete every file the user had access to. Which, as I noted above, are typically the most important files on the system.
Why can't Windows do this?
It can (and does). All you need to do is run it as a regular user.
And if it did... then why would there be a need for virus scanners?
The mere fact you have to ask this demonstrates you do not understand the issues at stake.
Removal tools, sure, for those idiot users who enter their password for everything. But dedicated scanners that bloat and slow down your computer? Not exactly a necessity anymore, are they?
Of course they are. How else do you intercept deliberately-run malicious code before it can do anything malicious ?
In Vista, Microsoft is actually trying to shut out third-party security products.
No, they're not. Indeed, it's the exactly opposite.
Your assumption is flat-out wrong.
Uh huh. Please explain what these "unthinkable things" are, and how they "screw over" their users. Let's not have any unsubstantiated and polarized name-calling.
They directly hook into and patch - at run-time - undocumented kernel structures (which they have reverse-engineered, without source code) to make their software work.
This is a mind-bogglingly bad way to write software and is directly responsible, in no small part, for the perception of instability Windows carries.
In (64 bit) Vista, Microsoft have locked down the kernel so this _cannot_ be done and have, instead, provided documented APIs to provide the necessary functionality AV software needs (which both their own products, and recently released third party products, are already using, directly disproving any claims that "it can't be done"). They've closed to door on a common way for software developers to create some of the best examples of "broken, ugly, dangerous code" known and simultaneously provided a method for achieving the same ends in a documented, best-practices compatible, way.
Unfortunately, Microsoft still isn't fixing their O/S to create something as secure as Linux or Mac ...
There are few (if any) technical aspects of security missing from Windows.
If a botnet creator could break in to Linux servers he most certainly would.
Millions of high powered servers with big fat net connections. The net would tremble in fear.
Most of which would be detected and repaired in a matter of hours (if not minutes).
"High powered servers with big fat net connections" are incredibly poor targets for people trying to create botnets, which is why they aren't targeted for them.
Symantect and McCafe are only parasites, leeching from Microsoft's -mistakes-.
Personally I think this article is utter rubbish on pretty much every level (firstly, Netscape lost because their product sucked and secondly because AV vendors have all the info and capabilities they need to write their software). However, this common meme that AV software only exists because of Microsoft is ridiculous.
AV software is not there to protect the user from OS flaws (although it can do that as a side effect), it is there to protect the user from himself and from attacks OS-level security _cannot_ defend against.
If tomorrow they made their OS X available to run on any Intel type processors they would take 50% of the computer market in one year.
You're dreaming. *IF* they could convince a major OEM to "prefer" OS X, they might be able to get close to that figure in 5 years.
That's assuming Microsoft did nothing in the interim.
I personally loved the Mac's back in the 90's. I built a very successful commercial retouching business where our primary software/hardware was Photoshop on OS9 Mac's. OS9 performed well as you could lock down memory and dedicate it to Photoshop (no OS swapping). This is something that is sorely missing from OS/X and Windows.
No, it's something that would never have been in MacOS if it had decent memory management.
Like RAM disks and other similar "features", it is a crutch for a broken VM system.
Ah, safari. Yes, it is slow.
Hm. Personally I would have picked Safari as the faster of the two.
All I can say is that my mini isn't sluggish. The firefox performance is roughly in the same class as my work machine, and that's a 3.4 ghz P4 with 2 gigs of ram and a fast disk.
Which is good for you, but I find it difficult to believe, based on my experiences (unless your PC has some serious issues).
Bullshit.
No, opinion.
Until about a month ago I was using a 10 year old Powermac 7600 as my primary machine. that had a 3rd party G3/400 daughter card, swapped for the original 120 mhz 604 cpu. Except for watching videos, performance was more than acceptable. I'm not surprised that some newer video codecs didn't work too well, since I never put in a video card, but used the on-board video ram (4 mb).
Good on you. But if you found OS X "more than acceptable" on a Mac of that spec (and having used OS X on 300Mhz, 512M Beige G3s, I've got a good idea of what it would be like) then Vista on a slow P3 or fast P2 and 512 of RAM should also be "more than acceptable", as it would be about the same.
Now, *I* don't find OS X to be fast enough for *my use* on anythng less than a 1G, G5+ machine (and even then, my mum's G5 iMac is chunky at times). Certainly, as I said, my 1GHz G4 is painfully slow most of the time with more than a couple of things running. But that's my opinion of, and preference for, UI responsiveness.
The important point here is that on computers of similar specifications, Vista - *at worst* - runs similarly to OS X. So for someone happy with OS X on a G4 class machine, they're going to be happy with Vista on a P3. OR, at least, they will be if thy're judging it objectively.
Ha, are you kidding?
No.
I tried vista (rc1) on my home PC... 1gb RAM, athlon 2400+ processor, SATA drive, geforce fx 5200 graphics card. This system is usually a XP system, and Vista ran like a dog on it. Like an aged, arthritic, dying, mangy dog. XP runs fine on the same system.
Something in your system is broken.
The $100 Mac with OS X would beat a $100 PC with Vista any day, and you know it.
A $100 Mac is ca. 233Mhz G3 with 128M of RAM. Having used OS X on that class of hardware before (albeit with more RAM), I can confidently say your assessment of Vista above would be a shining recommendation in comparison.
My point here is pretty simple. If you take a PC and Mac of similar spec, they're going to run Vista and OS X about the same. If you're going to go by timeframe, the PC will almost certainly be better, because PCs typically have a higher hardware specification at any given point in time. Vista also has the added bonus of being able to actually turn all the flashiness *off*, whereas OS X just pushes it onto the main CPU, bogging everything down more.