But seriously, the only way to get a virus on OS X is user interaction by a very unknowledgable computer.
That would be most of them. Pretty much any user will happily run any piece of untrusted code (ie: just about anything they've downloaded) if it promises them money/porn/warez/etc.
Not something in which you go to a web page and *bam* your infected with malware and a rootkit.
I don't think there are any outstanding IE bugs that allow this.
They could implement a sane security model where file permissions disallow non administrative users from modifying executable code on disk, thus making 90% of what virus scanning programs do obsolete.
They do that now.
No amount of OS security can protect against deliberately (or ignorantly) executed malicious code. That's why anti-virus programs are important.
It'll be interesting to watch... if there are periods during which their anti-virus defends against it, but patches don't, they'll be found to have acted in very bad faith.
In general, anti-virus software doesn't protect you against things that _can_ be patched.
How are you measuring that ? How are you normalising the figures against marketshare, deployment environments and user demographics ?
The major defence offered is that as the ost widely deployed platform, MS receives more attention from the hackers and crackers than Linux or BSD.
This is the typical ridiculously over-simplified way of waving off Windows's higher marketshare as irrelevant, yes.
So let's consider the server market. Linux and BDS have (IIRC) more than twice the deployment of competing Microsoft products.
What justification do you have for such an arbitrary market distinction ? Do any of the remote Windows exploits have a method of automatically distinguishing if the target is a "server" or not ?
And yet even here, windows would seem insecure in comparison with Linux and particularly with OpenBSD.
OpenBSD is an incredibly niche platform typically used by people who are highly skilled in the realm of computing. Hardly a reasonable comparison.
IE doesn't do so wall against Firefox either, and (as reported on/. recently) Firefox has a 40% share in some countries.
As it should, it's clearly the better browser at this point in time.
It remains to be seen if the Free OSes would keep their lead for desktop use if they had comparable deployment, but based on areas where we can find something approachng parity, it doesn't seem too far a stretch.
There are very, very few (if any) areas where anything approaching parity can be established (and even fewer examples of people making comparisons trying to do so), so your basic assumption is simply wrong.
Computer security today has almost nothing to do with the OS and almost everything to do with Dancing pigs. Very few - if any - exploits have anything to do with the technical capabilties of (or lack thereof) or technical flaws in, an OS.
Except that any large vendor that could take advantage of buying in bulk pretty much had to sign per CPU licensing with microsoft.. the net effect being it was cheaper for both the retailer and the end consumer.
Conditional bulk-purchase benefits are hardly uncommon - in *any* industry.
The point is that if one wanted to buy a machine without windows, one would have to go elsewhere and end up paying more.
Ie: basic economics. The fewer people who want something, the more it's going to cost them.
Your reply is a red herring. I suggest you go back and review the legal reasons why refunds were being made back in 1999/2000 instead of making sweeping comments that are not pertinent.
My reply is completely truthful and accurate. PCs without Windows were less common (and often more expensive) because hardly anyone wanted to buy them.
Perhaps it is because microsoft is a convicted monopolist and Bill Gates is the worst of the bunch. They have been found guilty in court of illegally crushing their competition in the name of profits.
Every company tries to crush its competition in the name of profits. That's what corporations do.
Had they not done that, there would have been more competition and prices would have been driven down.
Prices have been driven down. Software has never been cheaper.
Gates and microsoft would not be so rich in the first place and the money would instead distributed in the rest of society where it should have been in the first place.
Who are you to say where money "should have been".
Every person who has paid for Microsoft software, had the option of either not buying it, or spending it on another product. At no point in time has any piece of Microsoft software *ever* been the only option for a given task.
You would rather that Microsoft scrape billions from businesses and individuals who are forced to use their software just because Gates donates some small fraction of those ill-gotten gains?
There is not a single person on Earth who is "forced" to use Windows.
Speaking more generally, Microsoft's dominance has slowed tech innovation (80% of internet users still stuck on 5-year old browsers for instance, but that's the tip of the iceberg) and costs its users billions annually.
How would it be different if they were using someone else's 5 year old browser ?
There is no way of knowing what exact cost Microsoft has had for the world in terms of productivity, technological progress and "TCO."
Nor whether or not such a "cost" even exists.
*Yes, I know that MS has made numerous advances in computing. That's not the point. The point is that a competitive market would have been much more productive even than MS has been. The difference between those two overall values is the "opportunity cost" of allowing MS to hold us back.
What proof do you have that we have been "held back" by Microsoft any more that we would have by the myriad other companies that have come and gone over the years ?
There *has* been a competitive market in every software product Microsoft makes. If there hadn't been, we'd still be using DOS 1.0 or Word on a Mac Plus.
What is this fetish with DRM? We got along just fine without it. Mass unauthorized duplication has been a problem since music was stamped on vinyl yet the world didn't collapse. People duplicated VHS tapes, audio cassettes and CDs. Games have been copy protected since the 1970's and cracked as fast they shipped. Yet those industries grew and prospered. Microsoft grew and prospered for twenty years with zero copy protection on their products.
These little things called "the internet" and "broadband" appeared.
Used to be duplicating and - in particular - distributing copied material was difficult to do on a wide scale, both for economic and practical reasons. Nowadays you can *trivially* distribute a copy of something to millions of people at a time.
Todays copyright infringement environment is qualitatively different to the one twenty years ago.
And yet Microsoft has more than its fair share of security woes, especially in comparison with the most popular (let's compare apples with apples here) open source projects. So why should that be?
How are you measuring "more than their fair share" ?
I wont bother mentioning who because we're in Australia.
Can you mention it anyway, please, because my current job only entails working 4 days a week and I wouldn't mind picking up some "moonlighting" work to fill the extra day - so I would be interested in joining your organisation for such jobs.
I use them both every day for many hours a day and for many common tasks. However, in spite of the CPU performance difference, the iMac seems faster (i.e. it's more responsive AND my productivity/output is higher).
I find this amazing, because I've always found OS X to be sluggish and unresponsive on anything short of top-end G5s (and even then, it's relatively slow).
My 1Ghz iBook, while usable running Mail and a few tabs in Safari, gets extremely sluggish when asked to do anything more - and this is with 768Mb RAM and a 5400rpm hard disk. Having used the same sort of iMac you're talking about, I find it hard to believe you could possibly call it more responsive than the Thinkpad (or even a sub-Ghz PC). Sounds to me like your PC is broken.
But Windows is designed as a distribution to use IE as the main shell program. If you kill IE in Windows (go to Task Manager, find "explorer.exe", and kill it - or just crash it, there are plenty of ways to do it), you lose the desktop, the Start menu, and the taskbar. IE is the shell that most people interact with. (It's worth pointing out that "iexplore.exe" is a stub program that essentially just runs "explorer.exe".)
No, *Explorer* is the shell. *Internet Explorer* is a component that *Explorer* loads on demand. It is explorer that is responsible for the Desktop, Start Menu, etc - not Internet Explorer.
(It's worth pointing out that "iexplore.exe" is a stub program that essentially just runs "explorer.exe".)
No, it's a stub that loads the rest of Internet Explorer.
Where the failing with the MS model lays (which it has always been) is that they rely on the programmer to handle architectual issues (sort of like the HT inefficeny discussion that was being spoken about on/. a few months ago) while when dealing with *nix its different because they deal in proper abstraction of hardware and always have.
I think you need to expand on this point, because Windows has - and has always had - hardware abstraction.
I do not care how much money you make being a VP, if you have ANY clue at all about programming and/or security, embedding the browser into the OS is a bad idea.
Such a bad idea that every major platform has gone on to do it. Guess all those OS X, KDE and GNOME developers must really suck
And the excuse that the email client needs it is just a joke.
Yeah, I have the way all those Linux distros include glibc just because so many apps require it as well.
Minor point - didn't the Amiga use co-operative multitasking without protected memory?
Half right. AmigaOS was pre-emptively multitasking, but did lack protected memory.
GP is incorrect, however. Microsoft's first foray into pre-emptive multitasking was OS/2 (or Xenix, or the unreleased multitasking version of DOS, if you want to get picky). This was over a decade before 1999.
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That would be most of them. Pretty much any user will happily run any piece of untrusted code (ie: just about anything they've downloaded) if it promises them money/porn/warez/etc.
Not something in which you go to a web page and *bam* your infected with malware and a rootkit.
I don't think there are any outstanding IE bugs that allow this.
No level of OS technology can protect you against most viruses.
There is nothing inherent to OS X that makes it virus proof.
Just like resetting the password on the typical Linux install is only a boot to single user away ?
I think I'm the only person I know who actually bothered to set the administrator account on his XP Home box.
For most people, it's probably safer _not_ to have it set, since password-less accounts can't be used to access network resources.
That said, you are correct regarding the privelege levels not being fully implemented into XP. They're barely implemented at all.
You are wrong.
This is not an excuse for bad coding. Writing software to not require admin-level access is just common sense.
Microsoft provides no straightforward way to perform occasional administrative tasks when you are logged in as a normal user (like 'su' or 'sudo').
Run As.
(I'll agree the UI around temporary privilege escalation in Windows needs some work, however.)
They do that now.
No amount of OS security can protect against deliberately (or ignorantly) executed malicious code. That's why anti-virus programs are important.
In general, anti-virus software doesn't protect you against things that _can_ be patched.
They did, 10 years earlier. It's called Windows NT. Apple is the one following Microsoft.
How are you measuring that ? How are you normalising the figures against marketshare, deployment environments and user demographics ?
The major defence offered is that as the ost widely deployed platform, MS receives more attention from the hackers and crackers than Linux or BSD.
This is the typical ridiculously over-simplified way of waving off Windows's higher marketshare as irrelevant, yes.
So let's consider the server market. Linux and BDS have (IIRC) more than twice the deployment of competing Microsoft products.
What justification do you have for such an arbitrary market distinction ? Do any of the remote Windows exploits have a method of automatically distinguishing if the target is a "server" or not ?
And yet even here, windows would seem insecure in comparison with Linux and particularly with OpenBSD.
OpenBSD is an incredibly niche platform typically used by people who are highly skilled in the realm of computing. Hardly a reasonable comparison.
IE doesn't do so wall against Firefox either, and (as reported on /. recently) Firefox has a 40% share in some countries.
As it should, it's clearly the better browser at this point in time.
It remains to be seen if the Free OSes would keep their lead for desktop use if they had comparable deployment, but based on areas where we can find something approachng parity, it doesn't seem too far a stretch.
There are very, very few (if any) areas where anything approaching parity can be established (and even fewer examples of people making comparisons trying to do so), so your basic assumption is simply wrong.
Computer security today has almost nothing to do with the OS and almost everything to do with Dancing pigs. Very few - if any - exploits have anything to do with the technical capabilties of (or lack thereof) or technical flaws in, an OS.
Conditional bulk-purchase benefits are hardly uncommon - in *any* industry.
The point is that if one wanted to buy a machine without windows, one would have to go elsewhere and end up paying more.
Ie: basic economics. The fewer people who want something, the more it's going to cost them.
Your reply is a red herring. I suggest you go back and review the legal reasons why refunds were being made back in 1999/2000 instead of making sweeping comments that are not pertinent.
My reply is completely truthful and accurate. PCs without Windows were less common (and often more expensive) because hardly anyone wanted to buy them.
Every company tries to crush its competition in the name of profits. That's what corporations do.
Had they not done that, there would have been more competition and prices would have been driven down.
Prices have been driven down. Software has never been cheaper.
Gates and microsoft would not be so rich in the first place and the money would instead distributed in the rest of society where it should have been in the first place.
Who are you to say where money "should have been".
Every person who has paid for Microsoft software, had the option of either not buying it, or spending it on another product. At no point in time has any piece of Microsoft software *ever* been the only option for a given task.
There is not a single person on Earth who is "forced" to use Windows.
Speaking more generally, Microsoft's dominance has slowed tech innovation (80% of internet users still stuck on 5-year old browsers for instance, but that's the tip of the iceberg) and costs its users billions annually.
How would it be different if they were using someone else's 5 year old browser ?
There is no way of knowing what exact cost Microsoft has had for the world in terms of productivity, technological progress and "TCO."
Nor whether or not such a "cost" even exists.
*Yes, I know that MS has made numerous advances in computing. That's not the point. The point is that a competitive market would have been much more productive even than MS has been. The difference between those two overall values is the "opportunity cost" of allowing MS to hold us back.
What proof do you have that we have been "held back" by Microsoft any more that we would have by the myriad other companies that have come and gone over the years ?
There *has* been a competitive market in every software product Microsoft makes. If there hadn't been, we'd still be using DOS 1.0 or Word on a Mac Plus.
No, they get Government to cast money at the problem.
People like Geldof would bankrupt an entire country throwing money at places like Africa, and it would *still* be basket case.
It has never, at any point in time, been impossible to buy a computer sans Windows.
Certain brands, yes. Certain models, yes. But these are the responsibility of the people selling those particular computers, not Microsoft.
If there is (or was) money to be made selling PCs without Windows, PCs without Windows will be (or would have been) easy to find.
These little things called "the internet" and "broadband" appeared.
Used to be duplicating and - in particular - distributing copied material was difficult to do on a wide scale, both for economic and practical reasons. Nowadays you can *trivially* distribute a copy of something to millions of people at a time.
Todays copyright infringement environment is qualitatively different to the one twenty years ago.
How are you measuring "more than their fair share" ?
What "complying" actually entails.
Can you mention it anyway, please, because my current job only entails working 4 days a week and I wouldn't mind picking up some "moonlighting" work to fill the extra day - so I would be interested in joining your organisation for such jobs.
But what were you advocating teaching it as ?
I find this amazing, because I've always found OS X to be sluggish and unresponsive on anything short of top-end G5s (and even then, it's relatively slow).
My 1Ghz iBook, while usable running Mail and a few tabs in Safari, gets extremely sluggish when asked to do anything more - and this is with 768Mb RAM and a 5400rpm hard disk. Having used the same sort of iMac you're talking about, I find it hard to believe you could possibly call it more responsive than the Thinkpad (or even a sub-Ghz PC). Sounds to me like your PC is broken.
No, *Explorer* is the shell. *Internet Explorer* is a component that *Explorer* loads on demand. It is explorer that is responsible for the Desktop, Start Menu, etc - not Internet Explorer.
(It's worth pointing out that "iexplore.exe" is a stub program that essentially just runs "explorer.exe".)
No, it's a stub that loads the rest of Internet Explorer.
You appear to have it arse-about-face.
I think you need to expand on this point, because Windows has - and has always had - hardware abstraction.
Such a bad idea that every major platform has gone on to do it. Guess all those OS X, KDE and GNOME developers must really suck
And the excuse that the email client needs it is just a joke.
Yeah, I have the way all those Linux distros include glibc just because so many apps require it as well.
Half right. AmigaOS was pre-emptively multitasking, but did lack protected memory.
GP is incorrect, however. Microsoft's first foray into pre-emptive multitasking was OS/2 (or Xenix, or the unreleased multitasking version of DOS, if you want to get picky). This was over a decade before 1999.
And,most importantly, made it trivially easy for most people to use.