I was totally unaware of that; I will have to look harder next time. Thank you!
This is particularly interesting now that I am weaning them off of AOL and onto gmail. Anything I can do to get rid of Windows is going to be good for all of us, and if I don't have to spend any more money on hardware (a mini isn't expensive, but the last few PCs I bought were still hundreds less) I would be ok with that:-).
I have had the misfortune of helping my in-laws, both 75 at the time, to jump into the digital domain. We did this originally with a hand-me-down PC onto which I installed Windows 98.
That PC was nothing but trouble, and we eventually gave up on it in favor of a new PC running Windows XP. I thought that XP would be less trouble; I couldn't have been more wrong. The thing got wormed and virused to death; I spent 14 hours cleaning all that stuff off.
After several multi-hour tech support phone calls I had had enough, and went down and bought a Mac Mini. There was a lot of retraining involved, but the number of tech support calls fell to basically nothing -- the only one I remember, other than getting it on the net when they first set it up, was when they accidentally removed something or other from the Dock.
I call it an unmitigated success.
One of the replies to this suggested a variant of Ubuntu. I couldn't do that; there aren't any tools for dealing with magnification, necessary for my father-in-law, and at the time of the conversion they were using AOL which also limited choices. But in principle Firefox is all they really need, so it could work.
If Linux is really infringing on Microsoft's property, why did Microsoft pay Novell a bunch of money instead of the other way around?
Seems like Ballmer is pushing more FUD to me, and I don't think the timing is at all coincidental: It's clear at this point that SCO is going to lose big. If Linux comes up squeeky clean, that's real bad for Microsoft.
If Linux is borrowing from anyone's IP then it would be UNIX... not Windows. If they can't even prove it for UNIX, Microsoft is going to have a heck of a time.
via purchase of wind power carbon credits from NativeEnergy
I'm not sure how that makes them carbon-neutral, it seems like sophistry to me, but on this subject I justify driving around in a 17mpg two-seater automobile as doing my part to turn Boston into a tropical paradise.
Lots of software requires Admin rights for installing - most of it doesn't actually need them for running once the software's installed.
That's true of software in general, and is the reason why my in-laws need admin privileges. I seriously considered not giving them the privilege anyway and dealing with the support whenever they needed to install something. But, in the end, the Mac solved the problem just fine.
But children's software... well, that's something else. It's all copy protected and needs special privileges for the copy protection to operate. (I tried granting a permission subset, like direct access to the DVD drive, to her account; worked for some software, other stuff needed additional privileges.)
I had a great talk with the Disney folk when I called to find out if there was a version of one of their games that didn't need admin privileges to run; nope. Did they plan one? Nope. They said I could return the software. As if 1) My daughter wouldn't freak; and 2) Any place would take back opened software.
What I really want to do is run my daughter's "PC" inside a VM. If it gets poisoned I just delete it and copy the virgin disks in place. I'd just do that if I could think of a way to get the PC to log her right into the VM (otherwise there's too much hand-holding).
Maybe I'll just buy her a Mac, too. There's a lot fewer games available but at least they don't need to run as root.
I found that virtually all of my daughter's games required admin access to run. It's irritating, and I hope Vista forces them to fix that. So, my 5-year-old daughter gets admin rights on her machine... and I treat it as a throw-away system.
My in-laws had lots and lots of trouble with Windows but I couldn't realistically remove admin access for them or they too wouldn't be able to do much with the machine. So I bought them a Mac. Haven't had a lick of trouble since.
It's partly the lack of market share. That's offset to a large degree by the extra l33t points accruing to the guy who manages to release the first malware to get widespread penetration into those "invulnerable" systems.
It's not about market share. Do you remember what systems were being attacked from the net most regularly from 1995-2000? It wasn't Windows. It was Linux. If people think Linux has a small market share today, just remember what it was like ten years ago.
Windows attacks jumped very dramatically exactly at the point where typical Linux installations were starting to ship in secure configurations by default. Coincidence?
Similarly, malware was pretty common on MacOS right through version 9. OSX comes out and... it's gone. It's been about six years since OSX was released and so far we've only really seen one working virus in the wild and it managed to infect all of about 50 systems.
What was different between OS9 and OSX? Lots of things, certainly, but the single most important thing was that it is shipped in a relatively secure configuration.
Let's consider Windows for a minute. In the move from Win9x to NT/2K/XP Microsoft made a sea change very similar to what Apple did with OSX. Yet malware not only followed, it has grown immeasurably. What Microsoft did not do that Linux and Apple did was ship in secure mode by default. Moreover, it provided more hooks (network services) for malware to infiltrate than did previous versions of Windows.
The reason Windows is a huge malware target is more than just that Microsoft's firewall is configured too loosely from the factory. It is the case primarily because, by default, all users and system services have the ability to write to any file on the system -- everything from their document files to the core operating system files. This was never the case for Linux, although it was the case that many system services ran in privileged mode and in fact that is what the attackers targeted. When those entry points disappeared, Linux suddenly got a reputation for being secure. Hmm. MacOS provides another example as it too was shipped with an open ability to write any file on the system through version 9; while it was the case, MacOS was easy to own and malware was indeed common.
Both Linux and OSX moved to a configuration where privileged mode was rarely used. Both saw attacks and malware drop to effectively zero as the user base switched over.
I don't think this is coincidence. The ability of any program to write any part of the system is an open door for every minor little bug in an application to allow someone to walk all over it. Whenever we have seen systems that had this issue they have been attacked -- SunOS saw it, Linux saw it, BSD saw it, MacOS saw it, Windows still sees it. These attacks had nothing to do with market share and everything to do with the default security configuration of the machine.
It's partly user sophistication. Except that Macs are targeted at people who're even less sophisticated than Windows users, who don't want to deal with things like the problems added new hardware to a Windows system.
I wouldn't agree with this assessment. It may have been true in the 80s, but it hasn't been true in a long time. If anything MacOS sees a much greater percentage of sophisticated users than Windows, I think in part because (like Linux) they have to be more sophisticated to use it effectively because there are fewer other users to lean on. There are a lot of reasons one might choose MacOS over Windows that don't have to do with your willingness to deal with drivers (not the least of which is that you might have bought the computer to get something done rather than as a toy to tinker with).
It's in large part inherent system design.
Bingo. More than just "in large part," in my opinion. The history of what has been targeted indicates that system design is easily the most significant determinant.
Mea culpa, you all are nitpicky, I wasn't trying to be literal. What I meant was that an awful lot of stuff that would have traditionally been under/usr/lib (like graphics, "traditionally"/usr/lib/X11 so long as you are young enough to think of X11 as "traditional") is found in/Library. There's some truth to that, but it's really a lot closer to the traditional use of/usr/lib (before there was a/usr/share).
The point remains: OSX is not wildly different from the UNIX norm these days; other than the Mac stuff laying on top it's actually fairly close to the way BSD was maybe a decade ago. Same shells, similar directory layout, many of the same configuration files. I dropped right into tcsh (ahh tcsh!) and had no trouble finding my way around and I have a hard time believing many UNIX diehards would either, except maybe people who are unfamiliar with BSD. As such it seems unlikely to me that very many people would skip it purely because of these things.
But the cost of the systems, well, that is a very commonly cited reason for not buying Macs. A number of people on this thread said exactly that. We could of course debate that, too; it's a lot less true than many people believe. But it makes no difference, the perception is enough to keep people away.
As for myself, I buy what works best for the task at hand. I'm fond of Mac hardware when it makes sense (like wonderfully designed laptops and high-end systems for graphic work) and I buy cheap PC stuff when it doesn't (especially servers). FreeBSD, Linux, OSX... it's all good, and you have no idea how satisfying it is to see UNIX make its way into consumer products.
However OSX is the wierdest one I've seen yet.
I guess I'm not seeing why it is so difficult to deal with/usr/lib moving to/Library and/home (itself a modern change) to/Users. Other than that it's very BSD (with good reason).
I will grant that the organization/Library is like nothing else I've seen, but AIX's library system at least asunique. OSX has its quirks, but so does every UNIX I've ever used and for the most part you don't even have to think about the stuff that differs from BSD because it's hidden behind an excellent GUI system (kind of like IBM hiding all their weirdness behind SMIT, except that SMIT sucks).
YMMV, and apparently does, but I don't see people skipping OSX on account of it not being UNIXy enough. No, the UNIXy nature attracted a lot of people, including myself. Rather, I see them skipping it primarily because they think the hardware is too expensive.
Plus a non standard filesystem layout. That IMO makes it unnecessarily harder to
use for unix people.
This cracks me up. I've used, oh, pretty darn near every UNIX since V7 and you know what? Stuff moves around, names change, even amongst the classic UNIXen. OSX is way less weird than AIX, for instance. And any loss in terms of filesystem reorganization is more than made up for by excellent GUI tools.
I think the reason you see a lot of geeks not using Macs is that they can get more or less the same thing using a dirt-cheap laptop and Linux and there is a lot of do-it-yourself ethos amongst geeks. If you're doing development work or just using it for Internet access there's little difference between that and a Mac, and you have a lot greater choice of hardware -- especially at lower price points. The differences in usability and ease of administration are not that material to a geek.
On the other hand there are benefits to using OSX over Linux, amongst them the fact that you just unpack it and it works (some geeks have less free time than others), and of course there is a lot of commercial software for OSX. I know a lot of people poo-poo about this benefit, and I realize the free stuff is often good and sometimes excellent, but let me tell you there is a reason I was willing to fork over $600ish for Photoshop rather than using The Gimp and even if the Mac is a backwater to Windows in the gaming world it's still head and shoulders better than Linux. I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Now, there are still lots of times when I would prefer Linux over OSX (or, if I'm on the desktop, Linux over Windows) but luckily VM technology lets me run both at the same time. And if I'm using Windows perhaps the coolest thing is that builds, cvs checkouts, and source tree greps are much faster in Linux in a VM than they are under native Windows. Nice.
YMMV, of course, but amongst the geeks I know it's pretty common to see them run a mix of hardware and OSs and OSX certainly improved the standing of Macs in that community. They were rarer than hen's teeth back on OS9, today they have good representation, far better than what you'd expect from the couple-percent market share Apple holds overall.
..don't want to sound like a Windows fanboy at all but there are many *NIX apps that expect to have root - ethereal for example.
While there is some truth to this, it's not the case that, say, "larn" or "hack" needs root access.
But it is the case that many (all of the ones I've tried) of those Disney game programs require administrator privileges. These are basically flash games, and they're being sold for children to use. But they simply will not operate without administrator privileges.
(This isn't even remotely unique to Disney, by the way.)
I called up Disney when I found this out because, frankly, I think it's insane that a 3 or 4 year old is given an account with administrator privileges. They knew about the problem, certainly, but weren't even remotely interested in fixing it. They suggested I could either run as administrator or return the software. Nobody accepts the return of opened software, so there you go.
Some people blame this on the ISVs, and it's true they could try harder. But frankly speaking they are testing their software on standard configurations. If you want security to work you have to turn it on all the time so the ISVs don't have any choice but to write with it in mind.
We know that works, even with consumer software, because the Mac has been successful at it.
It's also true that NT had the capability of doing exactly this right from the start. In fact, I built a simple tool to secure NT systems (and presented it at WinDev, even) back in I think 1996. But with the improving backwards compatibility we saw in NT4 came a host of software that simply wouldn't work in secure mode. Microsoft's prime mission was -- had to be -- to get people off of the Win9x platform and onto something modern. Backwards compatibility was paramount. WinXP would have never been accepted if half or more of the applications people ran on Win9x didn't work. So it had to ship open, at least until the market shifted to the new platform.
Vista really marks the first opportunity Microsoft has to fix it, the first time they could realistically shove security down everyone's throat. I don't have to like that fact but I do have to recognize it.
Meanwhile my daughter's whole computer is considered expendible (and the rest of us use Macs almost all the time).
Lemme tell ya, converting my wife's mom (my kid's grandma) to a Mac was the best damn thing I ever did. I haven't fielded a tech support question in months and there haven't been any completely bizarre happenings in mac-land (like the computer forgetting how to talk to th e camera).
She just wants to work with ebay. Keeping the Windows PC running so that she could do that took a ridiculous amount of time. It was worth the price premium for the Mac Mini just to get her off my back.
Well, again you're talking about network configurations you don't usually see except in larger companies with significant dedicated IT -- at least in my experience. More on that in a minute.
It turns out that POS systems are used even by mom-and-pop shops and you have to be nuts if you think those are any more complicated than they absolutely have to be to get the job done. They hire fly-by-night consultants to come in and do these installs and they're as basic as anything you've ever seen.
For that matter, I have done consulting for some pretty large and well-known companies who supposedly took security pretty seriously and you could still just walk in and plug a laptop into their net. I could tell you stories about companies whose names you know.
But that's kind of beside the point, since when I've seen laptops bring in malware those laptops were not randoms off-the-street, they were employees' work-provided laptops. They take them home, hook them up to their cable modem or whatnot, read their spam with Outlook, and bring them back in infected.
For example, the one that brought Slammer into my last employer's network was on a salesguy's laptop. Fully authorized, dontcha know. (And wouldn't you know it, we'd just converted most of the servers to Windows and they weren't fully patched. Doh!)
So, this is not theory or me talking out my a**, it's an observation. If you haven't seen it, good for you -- but I have so I know this actually happens in the real world.
Laptops get on the network by someone walking in the door and plugging it in. That's not uncommon at all, even if only for data collection. I don't think I've ever seen a seriously locked down network setup at anything but a large chain[1] but, admittedly, that's not my business (I work with backend systems). Small POS networks I have seen tended to be disconnected from the net, but data has to get in and out of them somehow and it's not just paper and data entry people anymore. Larger installations (or franchises) tended to be vpn'ed or privately networked into a datacenter. That's no guarantee of safety: Sometimes laptops get connected inside datacenters too, or so I hear, and if you're running a Windows monoculture it can work its way all the way back.
What makes this worse is that POS systems do not tend to be running fully patched operating systems.
Whatever the route, it happens all too frequently. I note that it never happened when they were using serial terminals hooked up to SCO boxes:-). For the life of me I cannot imagine what the appeal of putting Windows at the POS was; terminals are more expensive and a lot more failure prone even if you ignore the virus/worm issue.
[1] Heck, it was only two and a half years ago that Melissa took out all of Hertz or Budget or whomever it was I was trying to rent a car from the day that hit. The rental guys were literally having someone on the lot walk up to a car and radio back the plate number for each new customer. Choices were limited that day....
I am inclined to agree with one of the other respondants that the issue is that your LCD is broken. When the backlight starts to die it tends to cause a red shift in the LCD. I have had a few of them do that. As they start to die the red shift will be apparent when the display is first turned on, then become more accurate as it warms up. But as it continues to die it will remain more and more red.
But on the off chance that this isn't happening a good color corrector is Spyder2 PRO. At $250ish it may be worth buying a new monitor instead (and last I checked the competition was even more expensive), but if you're doing work that requires accurate color then it's a good investment. A lot of people doing digital photography have that kind of thing; find out who you know who is seriously into that kind of thing and ask them if they have one you could borrow.
When people say "shouldn't we do something to stop it?", they really mean "shouldn't we give the government vast new expanded powers to regulate society, because only the government authority is efficient and trustworthy enough to solve the problem of pollution". The concept of massive government regulation and central-planning are implicit in what you are saying, because absolutly no-one of any political persuation wants to stop people from voluntarily acting to stop global warming.
Why must it be solved by regulation, when it can be solved through brute-force engineering?
The problem is that the earth is retaining too much energy from the sun. So far, everyone has been talking about working to reduce the tendency of the earth to trap that energy. But that is not the only possible solution to the problem; you could also reduce the energy influx.
My cut is that cutting greenhouse gasses by any significant measure is politically infeasible. Kyoto wouldn't be enough even if it were universally adopted and actually adhered to (fat chance if you ask me). There are too many vested interests for significant reduction in the near term, although in the long term the growing scarcity of fossil fuels will drive the change to alternatives. The changeover will be rapid -- within two decades -- when it happens, but barring catastrophe (say, WWIII fought over oil supplies) that kind of economics will not kick in for another 20-30 years. So we're looking at 40-50 years before we might possibly see that kind of solution really get started, and the effects will take decades more to be noticable.
I think it's a fair guess that the warming trend will go nonlinear before then and we'll need to find a way to rapidly cool the planet (more on why in a minute). The obvious thing to do is to reduce the amount of solar radiation hitting the planet.
Most people don't realize it, but we have the technical capability to do that today. We could, for instance, fire reflective particulates into orbit; this would be the least expensive solution to the problem. A more expensive, but much more flexible, solution would use orbital shades. These would allow us to vary the amount of radiation reaching the planet by changing the aspect of the shade relative to the sun.
Engineering solutions like this are much more politically feasible and, perhaps more to the point, can damp the warming process almost immediately rather than requiring decades as would a reduction in greenhouse gas emission. Such a solution would be expensive, but expensive on the order of low trillions of dollars even using today's lifting systems, and we can do much better than rockets if we are going to have to spend that kind of money anyway.
In any case we're going to have to find some kind of solution that works very rapidly because the problem with global warming is not limited to rising ocean levels over the next century. The real issue with global warming that nobody really talks about is that hurricanes are going to start becoming really destructive. The warmer it gets in here the larger the hurricane formation zones grow and the more frequent and more violent the hurricanes will become. That, too, is a nonlinear effect. The only way we're going to stop it is by cooling down those formation zones, and the only near-term feasible solution to that is to damp solar energy coming down right on top of those zones.
Regardless of the reason we eventually decide to do something real about global warming we can be pretty sure based on history that we will sit around doing nothing until the cost of sitting around doing nothing exceeds the cost of doing some really big, complicated project to fix the problem. Then we'll pull out all the stops and spend whatever it takes to pull off the project. We humans do that kind of thing all the time; for an example, look up the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.
Besides, wouldn't the glitter of city lights back from orbiting reflectors look really cool?
The basic theory of this seems to be that since they have more people, they're going to have more scientists and so they can devote less of their GNP to science.
This concept is fundamentally flawed. Sure, they have more people, but to broadly discover the talents you have to educate the lot of them. Your return will scale roughly linearly with your investment; they don't get all those extra scientists for nothing.
But there are also a lot of throttling factors including limited communication, limited resource availability, and more rigid societal hierarchies.
I personally expect China to be the next economic powerhouse, but it remains to be seen as to whether they will be willing to loosen things up to the point where real innovation takes over and they become drivers rather than copiers. It never really happened with Japan, although Korea is doing pretty well....
In the States, the problem isn't that environmentalists don't want nuclear power, the problem is that they don't trust the Bush administration with it.
This is pure baloney. Bush wasn't in power during the last thirty years or so that the environmentalists were fighting against nuclear reactors. I remember my 6th grade teacher going off to fight Seabrook back in the 70s when Carter was president.
The reason this works is not because Windows is good at it, but because the application developers spend a lot of time making it work. If you look at your typical InstallShield script you'll see forks for various versions of Windows.
You don't see this as much on UNIXen because, by and large, you need a different build of the software for each one so it's easiest just to make different packages. But in the case of software that is built and then installed, you do see many of the same kinds of forks.
...that the terrorists who are smart enough to use the internet to coordinate in-air attacks are too stupid to use something like PuTTY?
Seems ridiculous to me. Moreover, we're not going to see another 9/11. Passenger psychology changed that day; no longer does anyone believe that sitting quietly in your seat is the best way to survive.
if I GPLed my framework, would I, Mr. Original Author Jr., be legally bound to GPL everything I built on top of it, or could I silently exempt myself from my own licensing without legal reprocussions?
You own the code. If you like, you can license it any of a dozen different ways, all at the same time. You are only bound by the GPL when you are reusing someone else's GPLed code along with your own.
I see how the GPL model can be used to force companies to give away their software.
This is not really the case. When you are contributing to a GPLed project you are not really "giving away" your software, you are trading it for the right to use another (probably larger) body of software. As I mentioned before in this way the GPL is really an IP sharing agreement.
But how is a developer able to receive money for the work he has already done if he gives away his work?
That is the million-dollar question, isn't it? We've seen GPLed software monetized a number of different ways, from packaging (Red Hat), to support (Cygnus). It's difficult to make much money doing these things even if you have a broad market. In a narrow (vertical) market I would say that there's precious little hope of that working. If it were my livelihood on the line I don't think I would GPL the software, nor offer it under any other open source license, until such time as I felt that the software itself had little intrinsic value.
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This is particularly interesting now that I am weaning them off of AOL and onto gmail. Anything I can do to get rid of Windows is going to be good for all of us, and if I don't have to spend any more money on hardware (a mini isn't expensive, but the last few PCs I bought were still hundreds less) I would be ok with that :-).
I have had the misfortune of helping my in-laws, both 75 at the time, to jump into the digital domain. We did this originally with a hand-me-down PC onto which I installed Windows 98. That PC was nothing but trouble, and we eventually gave up on it in favor of a new PC running Windows XP. I thought that XP would be less trouble; I couldn't have been more wrong. The thing got wormed and virused to death; I spent 14 hours cleaning all that stuff off. After several multi-hour tech support phone calls I had had enough, and went down and bought a Mac Mini. There was a lot of retraining involved, but the number of tech support calls fell to basically nothing -- the only one I remember, other than getting it on the net when they first set it up, was when they accidentally removed something or other from the Dock. I call it an unmitigated success. One of the replies to this suggested a variant of Ubuntu. I couldn't do that; there aren't any tools for dealing with magnification, necessary for my father-in-law, and at the time of the conversion they were using AOL which also limited choices. But in principle Firefox is all they really need, so it could work.
If Linux is really infringing on Microsoft's property, why did Microsoft pay Novell a bunch of money instead of the other way around? Seems like Ballmer is pushing more FUD to me, and I don't think the timing is at all coincidental: It's clear at this point that SCO is going to lose big. If Linux comes up squeeky clean, that's real bad for Microsoft. If Linux is borrowing from anyone's IP then it would be UNIX ... not Windows. If they can't even prove it for UNIX, Microsoft is going to have a heck of a time.
I'm not sure how that makes them carbon-neutral, it seems like sophistry to me, but on this subject I justify driving around in a 17mpg two-seater automobile as doing my part to turn Boston into a tropical paradise.
That's true of software in general, and is the reason why my in-laws need admin privileges. I seriously considered not giving them the privilege anyway and dealing with the support whenever they needed to install something. But, in the end, the Mac solved the problem just fine.
But children's software ... well, that's something else. It's all copy protected and needs special privileges for the copy protection to operate. (I tried granting a permission subset, like direct access to the DVD drive, to her account; worked for some software, other stuff needed additional privileges.)
I had a great talk with the Disney folk when I called to find out if there was a version of one of their games that didn't need admin privileges to run; nope. Did they plan one? Nope. They said I could return the software. As if 1) My daughter wouldn't freak; and 2) Any place would take back opened software.
What I really want to do is run my daughter's "PC" inside a VM. If it gets poisoned I just delete it and copy the virgin disks in place. I'd just do that if I could think of a way to get the PC to log her right into the VM (otherwise there's too much hand-holding).
Maybe I'll just buy her a Mac, too. There's a lot fewer games available but at least they don't need to run as root.
My in-laws had lots and lots of trouble with Windows but I couldn't realistically remove admin access for them or they too wouldn't be able to do much with the machine. So I bought them a Mac. Haven't had a lick of trouble since.
There's something to this MacOS X thing.
It's not about market share. Do you remember what systems were being attacked from the net most regularly from 1995-2000? It wasn't Windows. It was Linux. If people think Linux has a small market share today, just remember what it was like ten years ago.
Windows attacks jumped very dramatically exactly at the point where typical Linux installations were starting to ship in secure configurations by default. Coincidence?
Similarly, malware was pretty common on MacOS right through version 9. OSX comes out and ... it's gone. It's been about six years since OSX was released and so far we've only really seen one working virus in the wild and it managed to infect all of about 50 systems.
What was different between OS9 and OSX? Lots of things, certainly, but the single most important thing was that it is shipped in a relatively secure configuration.
Let's consider Windows for a minute. In the move from Win9x to NT/2K/XP Microsoft made a sea change very similar to what Apple did with OSX. Yet malware not only followed, it has grown immeasurably. What Microsoft did not do that Linux and Apple did was ship in secure mode by default. Moreover, it provided more hooks (network services) for malware to infiltrate than did previous versions of Windows.
The reason Windows is a huge malware target is more than just that Microsoft's firewall is configured too loosely from the factory. It is the case primarily because, by default, all users and system services have the ability to write to any file on the system -- everything from their document files to the core operating system files. This was never the case for Linux, although it was the case that many system services ran in privileged mode and in fact that is what the attackers targeted. When those entry points disappeared, Linux suddenly got a reputation for being secure. Hmm. MacOS provides another example as it too was shipped with an open ability to write any file on the system through version 9; while it was the case, MacOS was easy to own and malware was indeed common.
Both Linux and OSX moved to a configuration where privileged mode was rarely used. Both saw attacks and malware drop to effectively zero as the user base switched over.
I don't think this is coincidence. The ability of any program to write any part of the system is an open door for every minor little bug in an application to allow someone to walk all over it. Whenever we have seen systems that had this issue they have been attacked -- SunOS saw it, Linux saw it, BSD saw it, MacOS saw it, Windows still sees it. These attacks had nothing to do with market share and everything to do with the default security configuration of the machine.
It's partly user sophistication. Except that Macs are targeted at people who're even less sophisticated than Windows users, who don't want to deal with things like the problems added new hardware to a Windows system.
I wouldn't agree with this assessment. It may have been true in the 80s, but it hasn't been true in a long time. If anything MacOS sees a much greater percentage of sophisticated users than Windows, I think in part because (like Linux) they have to be more sophisticated to use it effectively because there are fewer other users to lean on. There are a lot of reasons one might choose MacOS over Windows that don't have to do with your willingness to deal with drivers (not the least of which is that you might have bought the computer to get something done rather than as a toy to tinker with).
It's in large part inherent system design.
Bingo. More than just "in large part," in my opinion. The history of what has been targeted indicates that system design is easily the most significant determinant.
The point remains: OSX is not wildly different from the UNIX norm these days; other than the Mac stuff laying on top it's actually fairly close to the way BSD was maybe a decade ago. Same shells, similar directory layout, many of the same configuration files. I dropped right into tcsh (ahh tcsh!) and had no trouble finding my way around and I have a hard time believing many UNIX diehards would either, except maybe people who are unfamiliar with BSD. As such it seems unlikely to me that very many people would skip it purely because of these things.
But the cost of the systems, well, that is a very commonly cited reason for not buying Macs. A number of people on this thread said exactly that. We could of course debate that, too; it's a lot less true than many people believe. But it makes no difference, the perception is enough to keep people away.
As for myself, I buy what works best for the task at hand. I'm fond of Mac hardware when it makes sense (like wonderfully designed laptops and high-end systems for graphic work) and I buy cheap PC stuff when it doesn't (especially servers). FreeBSD, Linux, OSX ... it's all good, and you have no idea how satisfying it is to see UNIX make its way into consumer products.
I will grant that the organization /Library is like nothing else I've seen, but AIX's library system at least asunique. OSX has its quirks, but so does every UNIX I've ever used and for the most part you don't even have to think about the stuff that differs from BSD because it's hidden behind an excellent GUI system (kind of like IBM hiding all their weirdness behind SMIT, except that SMIT sucks).
YMMV, and apparently does, but I don't see people skipping OSX on account of it not being UNIXy enough. No, the UNIXy nature attracted a lot of people, including myself. Rather, I see them skipping it primarily because they think the hardware is too expensive.
This cracks me up. I've used, oh, pretty darn near every UNIX since V7 and you know what? Stuff moves around, names change, even amongst the classic UNIXen. OSX is way less weird than AIX, for instance. And any loss in terms of filesystem reorganization is more than made up for by excellent GUI tools.
I think the reason you see a lot of geeks not using Macs is that they can get more or less the same thing using a dirt-cheap laptop and Linux and there is a lot of do-it-yourself ethos amongst geeks. If you're doing development work or just using it for Internet access there's little difference between that and a Mac, and you have a lot greater choice of hardware -- especially at lower price points. The differences in usability and ease of administration are not that material to a geek.
On the other hand there are benefits to using OSX over Linux, amongst them the fact that you just unpack it and it works (some geeks have less free time than others), and of course there is a lot of commercial software for OSX. I know a lot of people poo-poo about this benefit, and I realize the free stuff is often good and sometimes excellent, but let me tell you there is a reason I was willing to fork over $600ish for Photoshop rather than using The Gimp and even if the Mac is a backwater to Windows in the gaming world it's still head and shoulders better than Linux. I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Now, there are still lots of times when I would prefer Linux over OSX (or, if I'm on the desktop, Linux over Windows) but luckily VM technology lets me run both at the same time. And if I'm using Windows perhaps the coolest thing is that builds, cvs checkouts, and source tree greps are much faster in Linux in a VM than they are under native Windows. Nice.
YMMV, of course, but amongst the geeks I know it's pretty common to see them run a mix of hardware and OSs and OSX certainly improved the standing of Macs in that community. They were rarer than hen's teeth back on OS9, today they have good representation, far better than what you'd expect from the couple-percent market share Apple holds overall.
While there is some truth to this, it's not the case that, say, "larn" or "hack" needs root access.
But it is the case that many (all of the ones I've tried) of those Disney game programs require administrator privileges. These are basically flash games, and they're being sold for children to use. But they simply will not operate without administrator privileges.
(This isn't even remotely unique to Disney, by the way.)
I called up Disney when I found this out because, frankly, I think it's insane that a 3 or 4 year old is given an account with administrator privileges. They knew about the problem, certainly, but weren't even remotely interested in fixing it. They suggested I could either run as administrator or return the software. Nobody accepts the return of opened software, so there you go.
Some people blame this on the ISVs, and it's true they could try harder. But frankly speaking they are testing their software on standard configurations. If you want security to work you have to turn it on all the time so the ISVs don't have any choice but to write with it in mind.
We know that works, even with consumer software, because the Mac has been successful at it.
It's also true that NT had the capability of doing exactly this right from the start. In fact, I built a simple tool to secure NT systems (and presented it at WinDev, even) back in I think 1996. But with the improving backwards compatibility we saw in NT4 came a host of software that simply wouldn't work in secure mode. Microsoft's prime mission was -- had to be -- to get people off of the Win9x platform and onto something modern. Backwards compatibility was paramount. WinXP would have never been accepted if half or more of the applications people ran on Win9x didn't work. So it had to ship open, at least until the market shifted to the new platform.
Vista really marks the first opportunity Microsoft has to fix it, the first time they could realistically shove security down everyone's throat. I don't have to like that fact but I do have to recognize it.
Meanwhile my daughter's whole computer is considered expendible (and the rest of us use Macs almost all the time).
Lemme tell ya, converting my wife's mom (my kid's grandma) to a Mac was the best damn thing I ever did. I haven't fielded a tech support question in months and there haven't been any completely bizarre happenings in mac-land (like the computer forgetting how to talk to th e camera). She just wants to work with ebay. Keeping the Windows PC running so that she could do that took a ridiculous amount of time. It was worth the price premium for the Mac Mini just to get her off my back.
Hasn't happened yet? Are you kidding? That's AOL.
...or does the idea of a(nother) "ground up rewrite" of the TCP stack fill you with fear, too? All new bugs!
It turns out that POS systems are used even by mom-and-pop shops and you have to be nuts if you think those are any more complicated than they absolutely have to be to get the job done. They hire fly-by-night consultants to come in and do these installs and they're as basic as anything you've ever seen.
For that matter, I have done consulting for some pretty large and well-known companies who supposedly took security pretty seriously and you could still just walk in and plug a laptop into their net. I could tell you stories about companies whose names you know.
But that's kind of beside the point, since when I've seen laptops bring in malware those laptops were not randoms off-the-street, they were employees' work-provided laptops. They take them home, hook them up to their cable modem or whatnot, read their spam with Outlook, and bring them back in infected.
For example, the one that brought Slammer into my last employer's network was on a salesguy's laptop. Fully authorized, dontcha know. (And wouldn't you know it, we'd just converted most of the servers to Windows and they weren't fully patched. Doh!)
So, this is not theory or me talking out my a**, it's an observation. If you haven't seen it, good for you -- but I have so I know this actually happens in the real world.
Laptops get on the network by someone walking in the door and plugging it in. That's not uncommon at all, even if only for data collection. I don't think I've ever seen a seriously locked down network setup at anything but a large chain[1] but, admittedly, that's not my business (I work with backend systems). Small POS networks I have seen tended to be disconnected from the net, but data has to get in and out of them somehow and it's not just paper and data entry people anymore. Larger installations (or franchises) tended to be vpn'ed or privately networked into a datacenter. That's no guarantee of safety: Sometimes laptops get connected inside datacenters too, or so I hear, and if you're running a Windows monoculture it can work its way all the way back. What makes this worse is that POS systems do not tend to be running fully patched operating systems. Whatever the route, it happens all too frequently. I note that it never happened when they were using serial terminals hooked up to SCO boxes :-). For the life of me I cannot imagine what the appeal of putting Windows at the POS was; terminals are more expensive and a lot more failure prone even if you ignore the virus/worm issue.
[1] Heck, it was only two and a half years ago that Melissa took out all of Hertz or Budget or whomever it was I was trying to rent a car from the day that hit. The rental guys were literally having someone on the lot walk up to a car and radio back the plate number for each new customer. Choices were limited that day....
All it takes is one infected laptop being hooked up to the POS net. I've seen both heavily firewalled and isolated nets taken down that way.
But on the off chance that this isn't happening a good color corrector is Spyder2 PRO. At $250ish it may be worth buying a new monitor instead (and last I checked the competition was even more expensive), but if you're doing work that requires accurate color then it's a good investment. A lot of people doing digital photography have that kind of thing; find out who you know who is seriously into that kind of thing and ask them if they have one you could borrow.
Why must it be solved by regulation, when it can be solved through brute-force engineering?
The problem is that the earth is retaining too much energy from the sun. So far, everyone has been talking about working to reduce the tendency of the earth to trap that energy. But that is not the only possible solution to the problem; you could also reduce the energy influx.
My cut is that cutting greenhouse gasses by any significant measure is politically infeasible. Kyoto wouldn't be enough even if it were universally adopted and actually adhered to (fat chance if you ask me). There are too many vested interests for significant reduction in the near term, although in the long term the growing scarcity of fossil fuels will drive the change to alternatives. The changeover will be rapid -- within two decades -- when it happens, but barring catastrophe (say, WWIII fought over oil supplies) that kind of economics will not kick in for another 20-30 years. So we're looking at 40-50 years before we might possibly see that kind of solution really get started, and the effects will take decades more to be noticable.
I think it's a fair guess that the warming trend will go nonlinear before then and we'll need to find a way to rapidly cool the planet (more on why in a minute). The obvious thing to do is to reduce the amount of solar radiation hitting the planet.
Most people don't realize it, but we have the technical capability to do that today. We could, for instance, fire reflective particulates into orbit; this would be the least expensive solution to the problem. A more expensive, but much more flexible, solution would use orbital shades. These would allow us to vary the amount of radiation reaching the planet by changing the aspect of the shade relative to the sun.
Engineering solutions like this are much more politically feasible and, perhaps more to the point, can damp the warming process almost immediately rather than requiring decades as would a reduction in greenhouse gas emission. Such a solution would be expensive, but expensive on the order of low trillions of dollars even using today's lifting systems, and we can do much better than rockets if we are going to have to spend that kind of money anyway.
In any case we're going to have to find some kind of solution that works very rapidly because the problem with global warming is not limited to rising ocean levels over the next century. The real issue with global warming that nobody really talks about is that hurricanes are going to start becoming really destructive. The warmer it gets in here the larger the hurricane formation zones grow and the more frequent and more violent the hurricanes will become. That, too, is a nonlinear effect. The only way we're going to stop it is by cooling down those formation zones, and the only near-term feasible solution to that is to damp solar energy coming down right on top of those zones.
Regardless of the reason we eventually decide to do something real about global warming we can be pretty sure based on history that we will sit around doing nothing until the cost of sitting around doing nothing exceeds the cost of doing some really big, complicated project to fix the problem. Then we'll pull out all the stops and spend whatever it takes to pull off the project. We humans do that kind of thing all the time; for an example, look up the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.
Besides, wouldn't the glitter of city lights back from orbiting reflectors look really cool?
This concept is fundamentally flawed. Sure, they have more people, but to broadly discover the talents you have to educate the lot of them. Your return will scale roughly linearly with your investment; they don't get all those extra scientists for nothing.
But there are also a lot of throttling factors including limited communication, limited resource availability, and more rigid societal hierarchies.
I personally expect China to be the next economic powerhouse, but it remains to be seen as to whether they will be willing to loosen things up to the point where real innovation takes over and they become drivers rather than copiers. It never really happened with Japan, although Korea is doing pretty well....
This is pure baloney. Bush wasn't in power during the last thirty years or so that the environmentalists were fighting against nuclear reactors. I remember my 6th grade teacher going off to fight Seabrook back in the 70s when Carter was president.
You don't see this as much on UNIXen because, by and large, you need a different build of the software for each one so it's easiest just to make different packages. But in the case of software that is built and then installed, you do see many of the same kinds of forks.
Seems ridiculous to me. Moreover, we're not going to see another 9/11. Passenger psychology changed that day; no longer does anyone believe that sitting quietly in your seat is the best way to survive.
You own the code. If you like, you can license it any of a dozen different ways, all at the same time. You are only bound by the GPL when you are reusing someone else's GPLed code along with your own.
I see how the GPL model can be used to force companies to give away their software.
This is not really the case. When you are contributing to a GPLed project you are not really "giving away" your software, you are trading it for the right to use another (probably larger) body of software. As I mentioned before in this way the GPL is really an IP sharing agreement.
But how is a developer able to receive money for the work he has already done if he gives away his work?
That is the million-dollar question, isn't it? We've seen GPLed software monetized a number of different ways, from packaging (Red Hat), to support (Cygnus). It's difficult to make much money doing these things even if you have a broad market. In a narrow (vertical) market I would say that there's precious little hope of that working. If it were my livelihood on the line I don't think I would GPL the software, nor offer it under any other open source license, until such time as I felt that the software itself had little intrinsic value.