There might be, but I seriously doubt that gamers outnumber Kazaa downloaders by any stretch of the imagination. Gamers will also probably be Kazaa downloaders themselves.
First, nobody said anything about large files. Lots of people transfer small files by email all the time. As to stupidity & large files, one professor I work with, who holds named chairs in both physics and engineering, has the habit of sending 20 megabyte power-point files to large numbers of people at least three times a week. I sincerely doubt you'd win an "I'm smart and you're stupid" competition with this guy.
When it comes to securely and effectively transferring files, yes I would.
Second, Windows systems generally come with http and ftp servers installed. All the student has to do is bring up the configuration panel and click on the "Start Service" button. It even has a GUI to build a cheesy default page.
You're assuming that the student even knows it's there. Odds are he won't. He won't even know that his machine is capable of serving a web page, and it'll probably take a good half hour of explaining to get him to grasp the concept of internet paths and Windows paths. A good portion of file sharing done by students is actually done by accident, because the user shares out a public folder without even knowing due to whatever whacky defaults Windows has this week.
No, I work for my university's tech support center.
I'm curious, though, have you actually lived on a college campus in the last 5 years or so? Students game constantly, even the liberal arts kids. Yes, people use Kaaza, but more often than not, they're using it to get more games that they then play. I can't remember a time when I could walk down a dorm hallway and not hear some form of game going on.
I've lived in dorms for the past 2 years, and now I'm in an apartment. My school has a very high female/male ratio, and females generally don't play a lot of games. The ones I knew were always downloading shit from Kazaa. They wouldn't have a clue what to do with a game ISO that they downloaded. Neither would most of the guys I knew. In dorms, gaming is mostly done on consoles, not PC's. Console multiplayer, while it blows ass because of its split-screen nature, is more social and accessible to people.
Also, many schools are starting to throttle down services like Kaaza, forcing students to turn to other forms of entertainment....Not much use for getting mass quantities of music and movies when it only goes 1-10K/sec, is it?
When you can just leave the download running and have your time filled with classes and work, it is feasible.
If a user is stupid enough that his first instinct is to send a large file via E-mail (or every file), I can hardly imagine that user being able to set up a web or FTP server. The security risk is minimal. Most of them transfer files via AIM anyway.
Actually, they're used primarily for running Kazaa and sharing music and movies. The number of potential Kazaa users in a dorm is much greater than the number of potential gamers.
Basically what we've done is burn a shitload of CD's with the Blaster patch on them, given them out to people with the worm and then encouraged them to distribute the CD's to their friends. We've also given those CD's to our local residential hall tech support people (the ones who actually go to the person's room and fix whatever problem; they are assigned by dorm).
Recently, we've begun deactivated the ports of people who we've been able to trace the worm back to, having them call us, pick up the CD, install the patch and then having an RCC verify that the patch is installed before reactivating their ports. We've also closed off the ports that the worm is known to propagate through. We've still taken damage as a result of it, but I think we've managed to minimize it somewhat. In the meantime, I've been trying to convince the Mac users I support that they're not at risk. If you say, "impossible" enough times in a row, they start believing you.:)
This is true, however it had more to do with After Effects' extremely poor utilization of the dual processors on the OS X test box than anything else. After a sort of dual processor "hack" was developed for After Effects on OS X, which involved using separate rendering engines for certain parts of the video, the dual processor Mac scored significantly higher.
I would wager, although I don't know, that adobe focusses on optimizing the mac version better. Like I said, I could find a program that was the opposite - faster on PC. The code simply isn't the same for versions of the same program on different platforms.
I hope you're not a betting man, because your wager makes no sense at all. Adobe wants their programs to run well on both platforms, and optimization is not just putting in MMX, SSE, SSE2, 3DNow! or AltiVec plug-ins. It is scheduling the code properly for a given chip and performing operations with functions that are tailored to how well a chip performs in a certain area. A (very, very, very simplistic) example would be to do one calculation with integers on a Pentium 4 (since it excels at integer tasks), while doing the same one with floating point numbers on a PowerPC 970 (since it excels at floating point operations). This is nowhere near even valid for a real-world example, but it illustrates the point I'm trying to make. There is more to optimization that just throwing in some AltiVec plug-ins, and Adobe probably spends similar amounts of time optimizing for both architectures, if not gives more time to x86.
The reason that most people think Adobe spends more time optimizing for PowerPC is two-fold. Firstly, Adobe's PowerPC optimizations are simply more hyped than their x86 ones. If Adobe optimizes an application for x86, you see a blurb on a web page. If they optimize it for PowerPC, you see a MacWorld keynote with the PowerPC beating the shit out of the x86 box. Secondly, the PowerPC (well, the MPC74xx actually) has more room for optimization. AltiVec is simply the best SIMD implementation out there, and it allows for much more massive speed gains (16x faster for certain operations is beyond anything SSE2 could even dream of).
Either way, if you spoke to an Adobe engineer, I'd be willing to bet that he'd tell you they spend just as much time optimizing their applications for one platform as they do the other. Hell, they recommended a Windows PC as the best configuration to run Photoshop only a short while ago!
As the story goes, the big names wouldn't jump aboard the OS X bandwagon if Apple could not demonstrate that PowerPlant would be a viable development environment under OS X, since Adobe and all them develop their applications in that environment. PowerPlant can't develop in Cocoa, so Apple needed to show them that a major application in OS X could be developed in Carbon and still be usable.
Unfortunately, the test mule was the Finder, a bastardization of Carbon and Cocoa that seems to highlight the worst aspects of each one. The Panther Finder uses some.nibs for its stuff, but the main browser window is not a.nib; it is stored in the resource fork (you know, the thing that OS X was supposed to get rid of?) of a file in the Finder's package (I assume this is the case, since there is no.nib I could find for the main browser window).
My advice would be to stop over at Cocoatech and buy Path Finder. It's a Finder on steroids. Wait, I take that back. It's on a completely different level altogether. It's so far superior to the Finder that I can't conceive of any reason why anyone who considers himself a power user would ever want to use the Finder.
My condolences on still running Mac OS Crash, er OS 9.:)
And you're forgetting that a number of *nix geeks are switching to OS X. That's dropping the proportion of Mac users with serious aversion to the command line by a little.:)
Don't confuse my objectivity with supporting Microsoft. The open source community has a far better policy with regards to security. Microsoft tries to cover up security holes in their products ("Security Through Obscurity"), whereas the open source community tells everyone about the problem so that system administrators and end users can implement a temporary workaround, like turning off the service in question.
suid scripts can only be modified to be malicious if someone malicious already has root access to your system. Needless to say, if that is the case, there's not much of a point to worrying about your network scripts, is there?
I contend your point that Microsoft's patches are easy to install. They are not. Windows Update is confusing even to me. Apple's approach is far superior. A window pops up with the updates available, information on what they do, whether a reboot will be required and the option to make updates inactive, indicating you do not wish to install them.
So if it is true for mosquitoes, it must be true for the capitalist economy. The idea that you defend an incompetent company by saying that it's inferior products are necessary because they create jobs for people to correct those glaring flaws is frankly absurd. Quality software will survive on its own merits.
The only virus I've ever gotten running a Mac for 10+ years is SevenDust666 (C variant, if I remember correctly). It was simply a self-replicating virus that stored itself inside the menu resources of any application that was launched on the system. It had no payload. Even so, I remember getting wind of it when VISE updaters were complaining that the application I was trying to patch had MENU resources inconsistent with what it expected to find, and refused to patch.
I presently do Mac support for my university, and we distribute Virex 7 to students and faculty for some unknown reason. Rather than simply letting everyone know that there's literally no need for such an application on OS X, we'd prefer to spend shitloads of money on a site-wide license for a piece of shit that can't even let users schedule scans without (and I'm not kidding) telling them to modify their crontab in the documentation. Yeah, that works really well for Mac users, 90% of whom hate command lines. Not only is Virex 7 useless, but it's underpowered, lacking in basic features and useless.
Honestly, the massive amounts of FUD introduced by outbreaks like SoBig and Blaster are almost impenetrable. I can't seem to get it through to most of the users I support that they don't have to fucking worry.
Yes, Windows' popularity is definitely a factor in the number of viruses it is victimized by, but let's be realistic here. Seemingly every week there is yet another critical security flaw in Windows. Microsoft certainly haven't recognized that their OS will be more subject to attacks, otherwise they'd make a more solid effort to make secure code. They haven't stepped up to the plate to meet their obligations. But then again, since when has a monopoly ever? They didn't get there by making quality products, and by the looks of it, they won't stay there by doing so either.
There haven't been any viruses or worms that affected OS X to my knowledge. There are only remote security exploits, and those are usually either fixed in a timely fashion by the open source community and/or by Apple themselves.
As sick as defending Microsoft makes me feel, I'm going to have to point out that your analogy isn't fair. A more apt analogy would be Ford making a car with a radio so defective that the car would explode if it received a signal of a certain frequency. Ford learns of this and initiates a recall. People ignore the recall, and then someone hijacks an antenna two weeks after the recall has been initiated and broadcasts said signal of said frequency. Cars explode.
Did Ford send the signal out? No, so they are not directly liable. Did they attempt to correct this problem before it was taken advantage of? Yes. Should such a disastrously massive problem have been allowed to make it into the final design? Microsoft do share some liability for the damage done, but not all of it. It was, after all, their incompetence that created the problem in the first place. Is it all their fault? No, sorry.
The other angle to look at is the cost of installing the patch. Since Windows requires you to reboot after changing all but the most trivial aspects of your system, this makes installing the patch extremely inconvenient for many server administrators. Administrators have no such excuse with a Linux system, which really only requires a reboot after changing the kernel. On Windows boxes, however, such required restarts can end up costing a lot of money, especially if the patch breaks a service that the server is running. So, one thing Microsoft could do would be to reduce the amount of required restarts. Good luck, since the GUI is the operating system, unlike a *nix box, where it's just another process that can be terminated without bringing down the system.
As I said, I now feel sick for sticking up for the pricks in Redmond.
OpenOffice document the changes they make to the file format so that anyone can read them and update their software accordingly. Microsoft do not because they want to force you to shell out $400 for the latest version of Office (which includes another 3000 useless "features" and an exponentially increasingly-annoying help system). The two aren't even remotely comparable. When Microsoft open up their file formats, then we can talk.
Samba 3.0 has been in development and beta for quite some time. Those builds have all had functioning AD support. So they're not "just adding" it. They had to reverse-engineer it because Microsoft don't companies to have a choice outside of their shitty products. So yeah, go out and buy Windows 2000 Server. The rest of us will just download Samba 3.0 for free.
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There might be, but I seriously doubt that gamers outnumber Kazaa downloaders by any stretch of the imagination. Gamers will also probably be Kazaa downloaders themselves.
If a user is stupid enough that his first instinct is to send a large file via E-mail (or every file), I can hardly imagine that user being able to set up a web or FTP server. The security risk is minimal. Most of them transfer files via AIM anyway.
Actually, they're used primarily for running Kazaa and sharing music and movies. The number of potential Kazaa users in a dorm is much greater than the number of potential gamers.
Basically what we've done is burn a shitload of CD's with the Blaster patch on them, given them out to people with the worm and then encouraged them to distribute the CD's to their friends. We've also given those CD's to our local residential hall tech support people (the ones who actually go to the person's room and fix whatever problem; they are assigned by dorm).
:)
Recently, we've begun deactivated the ports of people who we've been able to trace the worm back to, having them call us, pick up the CD, install the patch and then having an RCC verify that the patch is installed before reactivating their ports. We've also closed off the ports that the worm is known to propagate through. We've still taken damage as a result of it, but I think we've managed to minimize it somewhat. In the meantime, I've been trying to convince the Mac users I support that they're not at risk. If you say, "impossible" enough times in a row, they start believing you.
This is true, however it had more to do with After Effects' extremely poor utilization of the dual processors on the OS X test box than anything else. After a sort of dual processor "hack" was developed for After Effects on OS X, which involved using separate rendering engines for certain parts of the video, the dual processor Mac scored significantly higher.
The reason that most people think Adobe spends more time optimizing for PowerPC is two-fold. Firstly, Adobe's PowerPC optimizations are simply more hyped than their x86 ones. If Adobe optimizes an application for x86, you see a blurb on a web page. If they optimize it for PowerPC, you see a MacWorld keynote with the PowerPC beating the shit out of the x86 box. Secondly, the PowerPC (well, the MPC74xx actually) has more room for optimization. AltiVec is simply the best SIMD implementation out there, and it allows for much more massive speed gains (16x faster for certain operations is beyond anything SSE2 could even dream of).
Either way, if you spoke to an Adobe engineer, I'd be willing to bet that he'd tell you they spend just as much time optimizing their applications for one platform as they do the other. Hell, they recommended a Windows PC as the best configuration to run Photoshop only a short while ago!
As the story goes, the big names wouldn't jump aboard the OS X bandwagon if Apple could not demonstrate that PowerPlant would be a viable development environment under OS X, since Adobe and all them develop their applications in that environment. PowerPlant can't develop in Cocoa, so Apple needed to show them that a major application in OS X could be developed in Carbon and still be usable.
.nibs for its stuff, but the main browser window is not a .nib; it is stored in the resource fork (you know, the thing that OS X was supposed to get rid of?) of a file in the Finder's package (I assume this is the case, since there is no .nib I could find for the main browser window).
Unfortunately, the test mule was the Finder, a bastardization of Carbon and Cocoa that seems to highlight the worst aspects of each one. The Panther Finder uses some
My advice would be to stop over at Cocoatech and buy Path Finder. It's a Finder on steroids. Wait, I take that back. It's on a completely different level altogether. It's so far superior to the Finder that I can't conceive of any reason why anyone who considers himself a power user would ever want to use the Finder.
The Finder is a Carbon application, so those tricks won't work. Its main browser window is not a .nib.
IBM. :)
No, it's on my system as well, and I never manually installed it. So feel free to shut the fuck up now.
My condolences on still running Mac OS Crash, er OS 9. :)
:)
And you're forgetting that a number of *nix geeks are switching to OS X. That's dropping the proportion of Mac users with serious aversion to the command line by a little.
Don't confuse my objectivity with supporting Microsoft. The open source community has a far better policy with regards to security. Microsoft tries to cover up security holes in their products ("Security Through Obscurity"), whereas the open source community tells everyone about the problem so that system administrators and end users can implement a temporary workaround, like turning off the service in question.
suid scripts can only be modified to be malicious if someone malicious already has root access to your system. Needless to say, if that is the case, there's not much of a point to worrying about your network scripts, is there?
I contend your point that Microsoft's patches are easy to install. They are not. Windows Update is confusing even to me. Apple's approach is far superior. A window pops up with the updates available, information on what they do, whether a reboot will be required and the option to make updates inactive, indicating you do not wish to install them.
So if it is true for mosquitoes, it must be true for the capitalist economy. The idea that you defend an incompetent company by saying that it's inferior products are necessary because they create jobs for people to correct those glaring flaws is frankly absurd. Quality software will survive on its own merits.
The only virus I've ever gotten running a Mac for 10+ years is SevenDust666 (C variant, if I remember correctly). It was simply a self-replicating virus that stored itself inside the menu resources of any application that was launched on the system. It had no payload. Even so, I remember getting wind of it when VISE updaters were complaining that the application I was trying to patch had MENU resources inconsistent with what it expected to find, and refused to patch.
I presently do Mac support for my university, and we distribute Virex 7 to students and faculty for some unknown reason. Rather than simply letting everyone know that there's literally no need for such an application on OS X, we'd prefer to spend shitloads of money on a site-wide license for a piece of shit that can't even let users schedule scans without (and I'm not kidding) telling them to modify their crontab in the documentation. Yeah, that works really well for Mac users, 90% of whom hate command lines. Not only is Virex 7 useless, but it's underpowered, lacking in basic features and useless.
Honestly, the massive amounts of FUD introduced by outbreaks like SoBig and Blaster are almost impenetrable. I can't seem to get it through to most of the users I support that they don't have to fucking worry.
Yes, Windows' popularity is definitely a factor in the number of viruses it is victimized by, but let's be realistic here. Seemingly every week there is yet another critical security flaw in Windows. Microsoft certainly haven't recognized that their OS will be more subject to attacks, otherwise they'd make a more solid effort to make secure code. They haven't stepped up to the plate to meet their obligations. But then again, since when has a monopoly ever? They didn't get there by making quality products, and by the looks of it, they won't stay there by doing so either.
There haven't been any viruses or worms that affected OS X to my knowledge. There are only remote security exploits, and those are usually either fixed in a timely fashion by the open source community and/or by Apple themselves.
As sick as defending Microsoft makes me feel, I'm going to have to point out that your analogy isn't fair. A more apt analogy would be Ford making a car with a radio so defective that the car would explode if it received a signal of a certain frequency. Ford learns of this and initiates a recall. People ignore the recall, and then someone hijacks an antenna two weeks after the recall has been initiated and broadcasts said signal of said frequency. Cars explode.
Did Ford send the signal out? No, so they are not directly liable. Did they attempt to correct this problem before it was taken advantage of? Yes. Should such a disastrously massive problem have been allowed to make it into the final design? Microsoft do share some liability for the damage done, but not all of it. It was, after all, their incompetence that created the problem in the first place. Is it all their fault? No, sorry.
The other angle to look at is the cost of installing the patch. Since Windows requires you to reboot after changing all but the most trivial aspects of your system, this makes installing the patch extremely inconvenient for many server administrators. Administrators have no such excuse with a Linux system, which really only requires a reboot after changing the kernel. On Windows boxes, however, such required restarts can end up costing a lot of money, especially if the patch breaks a service that the server is running. So, one thing Microsoft could do would be to reduce the amount of required restarts. Good luck, since the GUI is the operating system, unlike a *nix box, where it's just another process that can be terminated without bringing down the system.
As I said, I now feel sick for sticking up for the pricks in Redmond.
And beta-tested in the XP flying people. :)
OpenOffice document the changes they make to the file format so that anyone can read them and update their software accordingly. Microsoft do not because they want to force you to shell out $400 for the latest version of Office (which includes another 3000 useless "features" and an exponentially increasingly-annoying help system). The two aren't even remotely comparable. When Microsoft open up their file formats, then we can talk.
China is a communist government and therefore unconcerned with profit.
Samba 3.0 has been in development and beta for quite some time. Those builds have all had functioning AD support. So they're not "just adding" it. They had to reverse-engineer it because Microsoft don't companies to have a choice outside of their shitty products. So yeah, go out and buy Windows 2000 Server. The rest of us will just download Samba 3.0 for free.
Idiot.
Of course. Check out this link for details.