I work for a small law firm in San Francisco, with 25 workstations running NT. We recently purchased a new server, a Dell PowerEdge 2550 1.16G PIII, a gig of RAM, and four 18-gig SCSI drives. With 2000 Server and 25 client licenses, the price installed was $15,000, of which hardware ~$4,000, OS ~$3,200 and installation (about 12 hours) the rest.
Still think $4,000 is a lot for a server? (I can't imagine it taking more than four hours to install an OS X server.)
I was looking at my web server's access log for the first time in forever yesterday (it's just a personal website), and I discovered that about 99% of the 6 megabyte log was attempted intrusions by either Code Red, nimda, or similar worms. Hardly any of the traffic was legitimate attempts to visit my site. Are there still that many infected IIS machines out there trying to infect new machines? It's pretty annoying; whenever I need to look at real traffic, I have to wade through hundreds of lines of crap.
I might be a complete idiot, but I think a lot of people are misunderstanding what this "feature" is about. Normally, if you download a.hqx'ed executable, using, say, OmniWeb, once the file is downloaded, Stuffit will launch, decode the file (usually it's also a.sit file, so it will keep processing the file until it's just a normal uncompressed file), and leave it on the desktop. This is NOT what's happening with Explorer. When you download an.hqx'ed executable, Explorer decodes it all by itself (without using Stuffit) and then EXECUTES the file (assuming it's an executable in the first place), without user interaction. That's what the problem is.
Personally, I like the convenience of downloaded files being automatically decompressed and left on my desktop. But, security issues aside (and they do seem pretty serious), it would drive me CRAZY if every time I downloaded e.g. the latest patch for my drawing tablet, Explorer automatically launched the installer, without even asking me if that's what I wanted to do. Especially on an OS X machine, where because I don't have administrative privileges, I can't install the patch anyway without logging out and then logging back in as an administrator!
I think M$'s internal motto is, "It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to press this button here."
I might be wrong here, but I believe you need at least administrative privileges (which under OS X are NOT the same as root privilges) to write to the "Startup Items" folder. A user can use the login preference panel to set programs to launch automatically on LOGIN (and therefore necessarily run as user, not root, processes), but that's different from putting executables in the "Startup Items" folder.
Two things to keep in mind 1) Administrative privileges are NOT the same as root privileges; and 2) the root account is disabled by default under OS X (and it's not that easy for a naive user to figure out how to enable it).
I think if you do not normally log in as a user with administrative privileges, you minimize security issues. You put up with a certain amount of inconvenience (no write privileges to the/Applications folder, for example), but it's not even possible to sudo from a non-administrative account.
Saying that most Mac users are clueless is narrowing your view far too much. The vast majority of users of ANY consumer OS are clueless. Walk up to your average accounting department employee, secretary, attorney, sales rep, and ask them what version of Windows (e.g., 98, ME, 2000...I'm not even talking service pack numbers.) they run. 75% of the time they can't tell you. Or, they'll say something like "Umm...Windows 97?" Most Windows people I know can't even tell you what e-mail application they use. "Ummm...Explorer?"
I'm absolutely astonished how many long-time users of Windows (and Mac) systems have no real understanding of the way their filesystem works, and many have a pretty hazy understanding of the difference between files and folders (directories, for you *nix people), or why anyone would want to organize files into folders. I know of ENGINEERS who keep all their data files in the "MyFiles" folder on their Windows 2000 Professional workstation.
Just a quick question which you don't need to know anything about processor architectures to answer. I've read a lot of posts here comparing USIII's to P4s, and I'm finding it a bit difficult to believe that a $5,000 PROCESSOR can even be compared to a processor that finds its way into $1,200 SYSTEMS.
Am I hallucinating?
Even similar architectures can perform differently at the same clock speed. Look at the PIII and the P4. IIRC, a P4 at 1.7MHz is approximately as fast as a PIII at 1.3 MHz.
Slashdot Mirror
I work for a small law firm in San Francisco, with 25 workstations running NT. We recently purchased a new server, a Dell PowerEdge 2550 1.16G PIII, a gig of RAM, and four 18-gig SCSI drives. With 2000 Server and 25 client licenses, the price installed was $15,000, of which hardware ~$4,000, OS ~$3,200 and installation (about 12 hours) the rest.
Still think $4,000 is a lot for a server? (I can't imagine it taking more than four hours to install an OS X server.)
I was looking at my web server's access log for the first time in forever yesterday (it's just a personal website), and I discovered that about 99% of the 6 megabyte log was attempted intrusions by either Code Red, nimda, or similar worms. Hardly any of the traffic was legitimate attempts to visit my site. Are there still that many infected IIS machines out there trying to infect new machines? It's pretty annoying; whenever I need to look at real traffic, I have to wade through hundreds of lines of crap.
I might be a complete idiot, but I think a lot of people are misunderstanding what this "feature" is about. Normally, if you download a .hqx'ed executable, using, say, OmniWeb, once the file is downloaded, Stuffit will launch, decode the file (usually it's also a .sit file, so it will keep processing the file until it's just a normal uncompressed file), and leave it on the desktop. This is NOT what's happening with Explorer. When you download an .hqx'ed executable, Explorer decodes it all by itself (without using Stuffit) and then EXECUTES the file (assuming it's an executable in the first place), without user interaction. That's what the problem is.
Personally, I like the convenience of downloaded files being automatically decompressed and left on my desktop. But, security issues aside (and they do seem pretty serious), it would drive me CRAZY if every time I downloaded e.g. the latest patch for my drawing tablet, Explorer automatically launched the installer, without even asking me if that's what I wanted to do. Especially on an OS X machine, where because I don't have administrative privileges, I can't install the patch anyway without logging out and then logging back in as an administrator!
I think M$'s internal motto is, "It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to press this button here."
I might be wrong here, but I believe you need at least administrative privileges (which under OS X are NOT the same as root privilges) to write to the "Startup Items" folder. A user can use the login preference panel to set programs to launch automatically on LOGIN (and therefore necessarily run as user, not root, processes), but that's different from putting executables in the "Startup Items" folder.
/Applications folder, for example), but it's not even possible to sudo from a non-administrative account.
Two things to keep in mind 1) Administrative privileges are NOT the same as root privileges; and 2) the root account is disabled by default under OS X (and it's not that easy for a naive user to figure out how to enable it).
I think if you do not normally log in as a user with administrative privileges, you minimize security issues. You put up with a certain amount of inconvenience (no write privileges to the
Saying that most Mac users are clueless is narrowing your view far too much. The vast majority of users of ANY consumer OS are clueless. Walk up to your average accounting department employee, secretary, attorney, sales rep, and ask them what version of Windows (e.g., 98, ME, 2000...I'm not even talking service pack numbers.) they run. 75% of the time they can't tell you. Or, they'll say something like "Umm...Windows 97?" Most Windows people I know can't even tell you what e-mail application they use. "Ummm...Explorer?"
I'm absolutely astonished how many long-time users of Windows (and Mac) systems have no real understanding of the way their filesystem works, and many have a pretty hazy understanding of the difference between files and folders (directories, for you *nix people), or why anyone would want to organize files into folders. I know of ENGINEERS who keep all their data files in the "MyFiles" folder on their Windows 2000 Professional workstation.
Just a quick question which you don't need to know anything about processor architectures to answer. I've read a lot of posts here comparing USIII's to P4s, and I'm finding it a bit difficult to believe that a $5,000 PROCESSOR can even be compared to a processor that finds its way into $1,200 SYSTEMS. Am I hallucinating?
Even similar architectures can perform differently at the same clock speed. Look at the PIII and the P4. IIRC, a P4 at 1.7MHz is approximately as fast as a PIII at 1.3 MHz.