I'm afraid you're showing some ignorance - MS releases security patches and updates even more frequently than Apple.
If you think the frequency of security fixes is a reasonable measure of security, then you're more than a little ignorant about security to start with. There is a lot more to it. The best way to judge security is simply to estimate the likelihood that a given system will be compromised in a given situation. If you're talking about an OS in use by average people to do normal tasks, OS X beats Windows by a huge margin. You can argue the why of this, but that is simply the reason it is more secure, not whether or not it is more secure.
On the other hand, neither patches holes as aggressively as most Linux distributions or even the programmers of the open source CMS system I use.
When users and developers are the same people, you have very direct motivation to improve security, hence Linux does quite well. The average desktop Linux install is on par with OS X. Both are fairly resistant to automated remote exploits. Both can probably be remotely compromised by an expert. So what is your point? How does this indicate that Windows is "more secure" despite the fact that it is compromised so often by comparison?
All in all, this "Month of Bugs" thing is good approach to proactive OS support behavior by a user community.
All in all this project is an attempt to cause insecurity and gain publicity in so doing. Failing to notify the vendor before releasing a vulnerability is irresponsible, but if the problem can be mitigated by the user, could be justified. Refusing to notify either the vendor or the public about a vulnerability you have found until it is the right day for your PR move is simply malicious exploitation and hurts everyone.
There really is a long-term benefit from good behavior on the part of corporations: your customers will actually go out of their way to help you.
I think you're mistaken. These guys have already done this before for other vendors, and have, in fact, cancelled such a month of bugs after being paid off by one vendor. This is them trying to get PR and/or hush money, not trying to benefit the community.
Unlike macobserver, who seems to think things like security holes are better left unmentioned, I salute LMH and Kevin Finisterre for doing this.
I'm all in favor of finding bugs, but you have to be at least a little bit responsible with those bugs. Unless you're trying to promote worms (which I believe they are) you notify the vendor before going public so that they have time to fix the vulnerability. You certainly don't intentionally delay telling both the public and the vendor in order to generate more PR for yourself.
Sonny, I write device drivers for a living, on Linux and on Mac. I assure you, the Mac isn't more secure.
Umm, I suppose that depends on if you have a different definition for "secure" from most people.
You might want to do a little research into epidemiology and on the economics of hacking in the 21st century if you want to understand why no one has targeted Macs.
I'm not the original poster, but I have plenty of statistics on malware across platforms. The mac is less likely to be exploited because of its market share and because of other factors. More importantly, however, it is more secure because Apple does respond to security concerns on their platform, while MS has little motivation to do so.
nother way would be "rather than engaging in anything even resembling a cursorily, let alone thorough internal, investigation, Apple decided that the best way to resolve the issue was to hit a third party with tens of thousands in legal bills, rather than investigate the issue itself".
Sure, but the point you are missing is that Apple was legally in the right. They had every right to sue and not only for the name of the leak, but also for punitive damages large enough to shut down the small publication and discourage others. The fact that they didn't speaks to Apple's propensity to not use litigation to stop speech they don't like. And that is the subject we were addressing, should these researchers be afraid that Apple will bring a baseless lawsuit against them in order to stop their publication. The answer is, no, Apple doesn't stop speech it doesn't like when it can legally shut them down.
I'm a luddite I admit, but what makes IM so great?
IM provides the opportunity for realtime communication and you know who is available to talk right now. So it is faster and more responsive than e-mail. IM is text based so you can send exact numbers, quotes, etc. You can also easily multitask and chat with multiple people, unlike phone conversations which don't scale.
There's no way to archive the messages is there? Is there a way to catalog the information into a searchable index?
Of course. I log all my chats locally and they are indexed and searchable.
How can you "forward" an im to another person or group of people? Can you thread the information into a cohesive timeline?
If you want to "forward" info you should switch mediums to e-mail, which is not real time. Many e-mail clients now integrate with chat. I can send a selection or entire transcript with a key combo and one click. Chats are time stamped as well.
...if it were my sole means of electronic communication I wouldn't get anything done. What am I missing?
You're missing the fact that it is not going to be the sole means of communication. IM fills a role, it does not replace other mediums. Also, unlike e-mail which is standardized, IM is currently intentionally broken by the entrenched players who are trying to gain complete control. E-mail did not take off until AOL and other players agreed to a standard and you could send mail to anyone using your choice of client and server. When this happened, competition made them all better and now it is indispensable. If and when the same thing happens for IM, it will explode in popularity and usefulness. I'm not sure this will happen as soon as this article predicts.
MacOSX is still turning up significant flaws that were fixed in other flavours of UNIX many years ago.
True, Apple is running into some of the same old problems as they try to build new things to interact with old things. I wish they had stricter security reviews processes.
Apple has probably the worst attitude to quality control I have ever come across in the PC industry (ie. they don't appear to have any). You might think that Windows has many problems with security holes, but looking at the automated code review tools and approach to security within Microsoft, and comparing this to Apple's approach, it is safe to say that the inferior end product will most definitely be Apple's.
I don't know Apple's policies on code review. I know they do some audits and that is it. It looks like they could really use some improvement. That said, I do know people from MS and their security reviews are a joke. From anecdotes, less than half of all security holes reported internally are given high enough priority to ever be fixed and they don't have a thousand monkeys pounding on open code. And in the end, it is results that matter. Apple does not have a malware problem, and is mildly resistant to amateur directed attacks. Windows has a huge malware problem and can often be hacked with freely available script kiddy tools.
I also find Microsoft staff much more helpful and knowledgeable than the moron 'experts' that apple usually fields.
I've submitted bugs to both Apple and MS. Some of the Apple ones were fixes (all the security ones). None of the MS bugs have ever been fixed.
It is just to buggy, lacks scalability (try using heavily threaded programs, or I/O / network intensive apps), and the kernel seems to have some fairly significant and obscure bugs that can waste significant time.
Are you talking about server roles or desktops? Both OS X and Windows are less than optimal servers. Windows can't multitask its way out of a wet paper bag and has always had stability and security issues that result in unavailable services. I'd not build a server on either OS X or Windows though. If you're looking at the desktop, however, there is no comparison.
I am sticking to platforms I trust:- AIX, Linux, and Solaris. They have their own lesser problems, but at least quality and scalability are not a serious concern.
Quality and scalability aren't concerns on Linux? Where can I get this mythical version of Linux?
...when Microsoft gets treated to the same very few care, in fact some seem to relish in it.
Microsoft is not performing due diligence and is quite frankly not giving customers what they want. They routinely sit on publicly announced bugs for long periods of time and according to people I know who have worked there less than half of the security holes they find internally are prioritized high enough to be fixed. No one is happy worms are destroying computers, but some people are happy to see MS getting bad publicity because of their actions.
Now comes the fun, if a bug is reported to Apple how long do they get to fix it? Who will determine when enough time has passed?
Well, I believe the last serious security hole reported to them was fixed in 10 days, which is pretty good turn around for development and QA. OS's can be evaluated based upon the nature of the vulnerability, risk, and duration of exposure. For something like this, if it is easily reproducible, under normal circumstances, a couple of weeks seems reasonable. If they are constantly getting new vulnerabilities once a day, it may be longer since they might need to prioritize based upon those. Think of this from the developer's standpoint. If these guys are trying to make OS X less secure, they picked a good way. Thanks jackasses.
They haven't a big enough installed base to get the "Average user" which Microsoft has to both sell to and suffer with.
What do you mean? Apple has lots of novice users including the very young and very old attracted by their reputation for ease of use. How many people on this forum do you suppose convinced their grandparents or parents to get a mac?
When they do penetrate the "Average user" market and get into double digits of popularity then they attract attention they don't want.
There is plenty of motivation for hackers to attack OS X right now. The reason it does not happen is not the lack of motivation, but the difficulty/convenience of so doing. Smaller market share makes propagation more complex. Increased scrutiny makes exposures shorter. Many worm authors have a very windows-centric knowledge base. All of these factors may mean as OS X's market share goes up, worms become more common, but to attribute this to motivation is a mistake.
Do not under estimate the creativity and capability of the hackers out there.
I know people on both ends of the security spectrum. I'm not too worried about OS X becoming bug ridden as market share increases. In fact, I think both Windows and OS X security will increase as OS X's market share increases. The problem of security is one of motivation, but not of the motivation of malware authors, but of OS vendors. Apple needs to keep customers happy to maintain market share. Thus, if malware becomes a problem for their users they will fix it or lose money. Right now Microsoft has no such motivation, so their attention to security has been spotty at best. They don't significantly lose money when users suffer from security problems. Increasing OS X's market share might motivate them to improve security. Anyone who argues that MS or Apple is doing all they can has not been paying attention.
So why the hell is Slashdot participating with these dorks and posting their announcements? "Don't feed the trolls."
This is different from trolling in that it is a real problem. The bugs are real, the disclosure is real and we have to manage the situation. If terrorists did not get publicity for their acts, they would not be spreading terror and would thus be ineffective. That doesn't mean the media should not let you know the airport has been taken over. It is a real problem. These people are intentionally reducing the security of everyone using OS X. The reaction should be that LHM and Mr. Finisterre are regarded by the industry as irresponsible and shunned by responsible security people. They are the bad guys. They may not be breaking the law, but they are behaving unethically for their own profit.
It is my understanding that the vulnerability you reference as well as the other two they fixed were both the result of an internal audit of their wireless drivers and not the result of the exploit that was publicized. The issue is more than a little muddy, however, and I'd be grateful if you could provide a reference to show either way.
Leopard might be very multi-core aware, taking advantage of multiple cores regardless of whether a specific application is written to do so. More here.
Wow, no way... The kernel won't just magically make your already-installed copy of Photoshop go four times as fast - Adobe would need to recompile, at the very least.
Actually, one of the announced features of Leopard is a way to take some existing OpenGL applications and spawn a second "feeder" thread for the graphics card which encompasses some of the functionality of the OpenGL libraries. Theoretically, this means and OpenGL application designed to run in a single thread could obtain up to double the speed on Leopard with a multi-core processor, provided it was CPU bound and exactly half the bottleneck was feeding the GPU. Realistically, this will probably result in some more modest benefits, if any at all for a given application. Still, it is incorrect to assume that the only way an application can benefit from multiple cores is through a recompile, rather than through OS improvements.
..... Given Apple's tendency to sue just about anything that moves so that the can preserve the "reality distortion field," are these researchers not afraid of being sued out of existence?
The reality distortion field you cite is warping your perspective. Apple is actually not particularly litigious compared to most companies their size. To my knowledge they've never sued anyone for publicizing bugs. They don't even normally go after publications that intentionally publicize their trade secrets unless they admit having obtained those secrets from an insider Apple does not know the identity of, and in the one case of that, they sued only for the name of the informant, not for any damages against the publication. The thing is, the litigation they do enegage in, is often highly publicized, making it seem as though they are very litigious.
So to answer your question, if they have a reasonable grasp on reality, no they aren't worried about being sued.
Black hats are interested in profiting from their knowledge of vulnerabilities. These guys aren't.
I disagree. Black hats are interested in illegally profiting from vulnerabilities. White hats are interested in legally and ethically benefiting from vulnerabilities. Grey hats are interested in benefitting from security exploits in ways that are unethical and questionably legal.
They want them to be fixed and know that even the deified Apple won't allocate resources to fixing problems that have a low profile.
No, these guys want publicity for themselves. Apple has been quite responsive to security researchers and most that I know think Apple has been doing a pretty reasonable job. If you're going to argue that bugs need to be publicly released because Apple won't fix them otherwise, you need to support that assertion. Even then, what is your justification for not releasing it immediately, but doling them out more slowly? That doesn't benefit anyone but these researchers for whom it provides prolonged media exposure they hope to gain from financially.
So they're out to raise the profile of each problem.
Raising the profile of a problem makes sense, if it is being exploited in the wild or if you've contacted the vendor and they're dragging their heels while people are at risk. Otherwise, it is simply harmful to everyone involved.
Much better than using the vulnerabilities to build Mac-based botnets...
Ahh, the classic "we're not as bad as China" argument. Doing something unethical isn't made any less unethical by the fact that someone else is doing something even more unethical. These guys obviously are interested in one thing, getting themselves in the news to make themselves money.
Apple has had poor relations with security researchers for years.
Actually, Apple has had pretty good interactions with security researchers in general, in my experience. Being a huge PR magnet, however, they also manage to attract showboaters trying to capitalize on the popularity they can get by behaving in a less than reasonable manner. The wireless exploit you cite, for example, turned out to be hype about a problem that affected no mac in its default state, but Apple responded to it even though they were never contacted with the details of the supposed exploit and did fix several issues they found during a review of the wireless drivers they ship. Apple has done a pretty reasonable job of patching easily exploitable/wormable problems very quickly and they don't seem to be ignoring problems reported to them. One of my coworkers found a local exploit (low risk) and reported it through Apple's Website. The fix was in the next security update and even credited him. It seems like pretty good relations with the security researcher community to me.
As for the month of Apple bugs. It is more of the same. Sure these guys could report Apple bugs to the normal channels and they'd be fixed fairly quickly and overall security would benefit. That, however, won't make the news. So instead of reporting bugs when found, these guys are intentionally delaying releasing that info to both Apple and the public. Apple isn't pressured to quickly fix bugs if they don't even now what those bugs are. The public isn't served by bugs being fixed more quickly. Users aren't served by bugs being released to the public for possible mass exploitation without Apple ever being given a chance to patch their machines. The end result is decreasing the overall security or computing. It serves no one except the researchers who are showboating and being irresponsible.
Didn't Google object having Microsoft put their own site as default search engine of IE7?
In that case it is leveraging a monopoly (Windows) to promote a search engine through bundling. This is illegal because it undermines the market. When and if Google monopolizes Web searching, this action by them will be illegal because it to will undermine the free market. Until then, I don't see as anyone has any reason to complain.
Drag-and-drop installations don't have dependency management.
They bundle the needed libraries and use dynamic linking. What's harder, always downloading from repositories and using a tool to manage dependencies, or just downloading and not worrying about it? This is a win for drag and drop, not a loss.
And Apple-style fat binaries waste space compared to more modern alternatives.
Yup, this is the only argument that makes sense, but even it is very weak. For a workstation, the disk space used is negligible. If it is a concern on a given platform, the OS can handle stripping out the unneeded binaries so you only lose that functionality if you have that constraint.
Well, here you fail to give a reason.
Part of OpenStep (within PDO I think) is the dynamic linking and object handling that makes both of these features default behavior. Doing the same thing with another set of APIs would require adding that functionality or writing it from scratch for each app. And don't get me wrong. I'm arguing in favor of this as a default, not for any given implementation that provides that functionality.
...because it's better.
Yeah, better by having fewer features and by being harder to use.
GNUStep, Cocoa, and OpenStep are outdated APIs with inherent flaws. That is why people are not using them widely. Java and.NET are better in every respect.
Well, in every respect except they result in inferior programs with lesser functionality, right? Show me the OS + API combo I can use today that gives me both of the above features, for most applications. Gee, that would none of them. That is called "inferior."
The supposed "benefits" you list exist in all modern platforms, but developers don't usually use them because they are considered bad.
The benefits I list aren't included because they're hard, not bad. The reason they exist for most OS X apps is because the OS and dev tools are designed to provide that functionality easily. You can claim it is inferior all you want, but if the end result of one gives me more functionality than the other, then your claims lack any weight.
Lots of companies do the same thing with review sites. Send them a free (often cherry picked) whatever. If they give it a good reviews, send them a new one of the next product, otherwise don't. Only a few companies refuse to accept these, and they are the ones who really care about their reputation, like consumer reports. To me it simply calls into question the impartiality of the reviews.
To me, that's a gift not a bribe.
I remember Apple shipping free machines to developers when they released a new version, but not to the media. This is not to say Apple doesn't do this, just that I haven't heard of it.
They're saying "thanks for the coverage", and that's that.
If they shipped out free laptops at a normal time, perhaps, but this coincides with their shipping new product that these people will be reviewing. That isn't a "thank you" that is a "I hope this will get us better reviews" marketing expense.
First, the two examples (drag-and-drop application copying, processor independence) you give have nothing to do with the *Step APIs, they have to do with other system issues in OS X.
Both of these functions are enabled by use of OpenStep-like APIs. With either Gnome or KDE it is very difficult to recreate this functionality.
Second, drag-and-drop installations and Apple's approach to processor independence are arguably bad designs;
Arguably, round rather than square wheels are a bad design.
the fact that you find them occasionally useful is far outweighed by the headaches they cause for many users.
What headaches? You can't just label something a bad design and then not mention a single, specific problem that that design has ever caused, especially when you're arguing against several specific benefits.
Third, none of those properties you like were pioneered by NeXTStep or OS X, and none are unique to them.
Who cares? I don't care if Adolph Hitler came up with the benefits. I just care which systems provide those benefits to me.
In fact, if you want drag-and-drop installation and processor independence, your best bet at this point is not an OS X app, but a Java.jar file or a.NET assembly.
OS X is an operating system that (usually) gives me these benefits. This is partly due to their use of OpenStep. So you think I should get those benefits instead by convincing all developers of all the applications I create to start developing in Java or.net and switch to whatever platform they use? And this makes sense in your little world?
It's your choice to make your KDE desktop inconsistent;
True, if I want to use the best application for each task, I choose to mix KDE and Gnome apps. That doesn't mean the choice I have to make is a good one.
...and it offers a complete desktop solution that way.
...for some subset of tasks I want to do. Complete means I can do everything I want. That just isn't the case. I'm not arguing this is a major problem, just mentioning that my experience differs from that of the previous poster who claims most people only use one.
For developers, GNUStep is less mature than the alternatives, has limited language and tool support, is considerably more effort to program in than common alternatives, and a tiny developer community.
So GNUStep isn't commonly used and hence has less widespread support and maturity, so developers shouldn't use it? Doesn't that kind of thinking lead to everyone always using the same outdated APIs with the same inherent flaws, forever?
For users, GNUStep is wildly inconsistent with Linux desktop conventions.
Yeah, it is different than what is already being used. That's the point, because anything that is fundamentally better will be different, sort of by definition. I reject your, arguments because they boil down to the fact that OpenStep isn't what is being used now, so it is nonstandard. Almost all improvements require moving away from what is currently dominant. If people use the same thinking process it won't matter because no one will switch away from Windows to a nonstandard OS like Linux anyway.
The notion that Linux desktops are an inconsistent mix of different toolkits and interface styles is a myth.
Hm, My Linux install (KDE) has several Gnome apps I require.
There are several Illustrator clones for Gnome and KDE; what makes you think that GNUStep can deliver something that is better in any way?
The only argument against GNUStep I've ever heard that makes sense is that it adds bloat for servers. This is a very weak argument in my opinion. Here's my argument for GNUStep. A while back one of my remote coworkers needed an application I had been using. He didn't have a copy and the publisher had stopped distributing it. We were both using OS X. So I dragged the application into our chat session and he ran it. Problem solved. There was no searching for an installer that may or may not have been backed up somewhere.
Here's another argument for it. I upgraded my laptop from a PPC to an Intel and the installer automatically migrated my applications. Some of the applications it migrated already contained native binaries for Intel and they worked seamlessly without me having to download a new binary.
GNUStep/OpenStep is not perfect. It is better in several ways than anything else I've used. I'd like to see it extended even further so that packages may contain source, build instructions, licenses, and repository info for updates and registration info. I don't care about how pretty the windows are, just about real, objective benefits. I just wish people weren't so stubborn about rejecting real improvements because those improvements aren't ones they care about.
So all those *nix admins responsible for a few dozen, a few hundred, or a few thousand systems are doing what? Using their company-provided MacBook or Windows desktop to ssh into the server?
This is funny because I daily use my Macbook to SSH into three servers I use. I'm not sure, however, I understand your point.
Maybe you need to rethink your conclusion as "not interested in the desktop." I'd suggest the reality is that there is no overwhelming desire to write GUI applications to replicate what is traditionally done in a terminal window so that novice users will find things "easier".
I'm not talking about replicating CLI programs to make them more accessible to non-power users. I'm talking about everyday applications and functions of the OS that benefit pretty much all users. Using an OS X workstation I can use the same spellchecker on all those SSH sessions, in vi, in Word, in Adobe InDesign, in my mail program and Web browser. I can do the same with my grammar checker, and language translation service, and auto-bibliography citation, and dozens of other useful services. This makes it superior to my Linux and Windows workstations for the same task. It has nothing to do with making it more accessible to novices.
When I upgrade my Mac laptop I use as a workstation, it is basically one step. I plug in a firewire cable to my old laptop and it sucks all my settings, licenses, user accounts, programs, VMs, files, etc onto the new machine. It works across acrhitectures. When I come back from lunch, I can get to work. With a Linux or Windows machine this migration takes me days or weeks to get everything in the right state. This has nothing to do with me being unable to use a command line. It has to do with me having to do things, at all.
Those are just a couple of examples. That functionality could be replicated on another OS, but most people who care have already moved to OS X.
Unfortunate for some, maybe, but the reality is that *nix is designed around the concept of a terminal. Gnome, KDE and friends are mostly there to provide wallpaper.
Your conception of UNIX is pretty limited. Linux is no more UNIX than OS X or IRIX. The GUI provides a better way to accomplish some tasks. Try editing images for a living from the command line.
Many of us do use *nix as a "desktop". At the same time, most of us know there is no real distinction between desktop and server. Except for the wallpaper, perhaps.
While one machine can be both a desktop and a server, they are pretty distinct roles. Desktops provide a user with their interface to do work. Servers talk to other machines, including desktops. Very rarely does a user primarily access a server via the local console. I suspect you're trolling with your wallpaper comments. If so, good job. If not, you need to expand your world view.
So, us BSD license lovers are different people than GNU folks.
I'm a pragmatist. I think both GNU style and BSD style licenses are ideal for different circumstances and for different goals. I think Linux's ability to attract developers and gain popularity over FreeBSD is largely due to the licensing. A lot of people want to contribute to something, but they want more in exchange for their contribution than simply credit and getting the code out there. They want to be repaid with the contributions of others and they want to make sure that their contribution is not sold back to them. This makes the GNU style license work very well for end user applications and many other projects.
Sometimes it is more important to an author to get their code used, than it is for them to get contributions back. Implementations of new, standard protocols, for example. For these applications a BSD style license often provides more benefit.
I don't blame Apple for using BSD style code and closing it, nor for not opening their own contributions. So long as they aren't going against the wishes of the authors, more power to them. I merely mention that the code in an OS being GPL'ed as opposed to licensed with a BSD license or even being closed source, provides more benefit to me, the end user, rather than to developers. It is a feature. All things equal, I'd rather be using an OS that is GPL'd than one licensed the other ways. This is self-interest, not ideology.
Nonsense. The real issue here is not that Linux desktops need to progress anywhere. I use both Windows and Linux for hours a day and they both have their share of frustrations and joys.
I think you're trying to divorce two interrelated issues. Linux and Windows both have usability issues. For the average user it i hard to tell which is better. Because of the market situation, however, Linux is at a huge disadvantage. In order to overcome that, they need to not only be as good as Windows, but need to leapfrog Windows and be significantly better in multiple ways. I don't really see Linux as being all that far ahead on the desktop right now.
Mac has a devoted base of people willing to pay a premium price for Apple products, why I'll never know, since Apple's offerings have been an inferior price-to-value proposition since at least the release of Windows 2000.
Just because Apple products are an inferior price-to-value proposition to you, does not mean they are to everyone. The last time I upgraded my mac laptop I plugged in a firewire cable to my old laptop, selected the upgrade from and old machine option, and then walked away. That same task on Linux takes me about five hours of messing around and then an hour or two a day for the next week as I find things that aren't right, and then another hour or two a week for the next month. Add all that up and you get about 20 hours worth of work. My billable rate for contract work these days is $75/an hour. That's $1500 for one feature per upgrade. If I spend $1500 more on a Mac laptop instead of a different one, I've broken even for that one feature, not accounting any other benefits to OS X. It is actually my company's money, but I hope you get the point. Now I have a Linux install and a Windows install running in a VM, instead of needing a separate machine. How much money do I save by not having to dual boot and by having Windows divorced from the hardware and automatically working without wasting a week getting it into shape? How much money is saved by my having one integrated spellchecker for all my applications, including e-mail, terminals, and IM, rather than having to copy and paste text in order to spellcheck or having to train a dozen different spellcheckers to understand all the obscure terminology I use? What about the time saved by having a universal grammar checker? What about the time saved when I IM'd a program that is no longer available for download to a remote worker that needed it and it just worked, without me having to hope I'd archived an installer somewhere?
I'll stop singing OS X's praises now. I just wanted to make my point that unless you've used multiple systems, making assertions about the price-value of the system is pretty naive.
Apple is able to be profitable by serving a niche that is almost more fashion-driven than anything else.
Well, some of the guys at Defcon and Blackhat this year were "fashionable" but I don't think you could say most of them are... and there were an awful lot of mac laptops.
For the rest of the world there is only one choice: Windows. Linux isn't on the table.
There are two significant chunks of the desktop OS market. These are pre-installed (OS X and Windows) and large organization-managed. To win the former, Linux needs to leapfrog Windows by enough in some degree that an OEM is willing to bet the farm on it. It's unlikely to happen on a large scale. The real possibility is the latter market. Big companies and organizations and governments can save a lot of money if they move to Linux and gain a lot of flexibility and security. But big organizations are notoriously slow to move and easily influenced by big piles of cash. It is a hard market, but Linux can do it if it gets the right backing.
Until the consumer is informed that their hardware purchase includes a hefty charge for a Windows license and is offered Linux as an alternative (presumably at a different price point), they are not going to know or care about Lin
Right now OS X isn't as good an option for a lot of people.
Of course it isn't the best solution for everyone. It is just a better workstation than Linux for most people (in my experience).
The biggest thing is that the vast majority of Linux targeted desktop software (of which there is a vast range, even if you just restrict us to high quality and Free) either doesn't work or is horribly clunky.
This is sort of amusing. The vast majority of OS X targeted desktop software doesn't work at all on Linux. So that leaves us in a situation where one OS can run both sets of software (some of it not optimally) and the other OS can only run one set. Not exactly a win for Linux.
It's better than running on top of Cygwin but really not very much and *that means it's not UNIX, it's a pretty, closed bauble that effectively hides all of the good bits*.
You ideas seem pretty slanted. OS X is as much UNIX as Linux is, they're just different, partially incompatible, implementations of it. OS has some ability to run Linux software in a compatibility mode, that is not perfect. Linux can't run OS X software, pretty much at all.
If you don't believe me go and look at every OO.o release thread and see the Apple users asking for a better native port.
OpenOffice has come along way recently, but the important thing is it is almost 100% developed by Sun, which relies upon Xwindows. How well does Omniplan or Word for Mac work on Linux? You don't hear many people asking for it on Linux though, since most people using OS X, just don't care if it works on Linux.
In the mean time Linux has graphically caught up, application wise is only missing much, and is free. Why bother to switch at this point?
I'm a Linux on the desktop user and an OS X on the desktop user. For that matter, I run Windows too. My primary workstation has been OS X for quite a while because it has numerous wins over Linux. For starters, it runs a lot of really good software Linux does not. Photoshop, InDesign, Omnigraffle, iTunes, etc. Second the OS does a better job of handling those applications. The CLI and the GUI are integrated more smoothly than any Linux distro I've ever used. If I move a directory via the GUI, terminals that navigated into that directory update instantly. Applications and the OS share services smoothly. My Web browser, IM client, terminals, e-mail, word-processor, pro layout app, etc. all access the same spellchecker and grammar checker and language translation services and scripts and statistical package, etc. Third, the benefits of OpenStep mean I can use fat binaries that work on different systems and I can IM or e-mail them to friends, or transfer them when we don't have internet access and they work without any hassle. Fourth, with an OS X laptop I can run Linux and Windows in a VM to use any applications that don't have a port, or where the port is of poor quality. This means I have one machine instead of three and I can access all the OS's when I'm using my laptop at the coffee shop because I was too lazy to go to the office. Fifth, upgrading an OS X machine is years ahead of Linux. When I switched from a PPC mac laptop to an Intel mac laptop I plugged in a firewire cable and pushed a button. Then I went to lunch. All my user accounts, settings, authorization keys, applications, files, etc. migrated automagically. Migrating to a new Linux box and getting everything in its proper state usually takes me several days of messing around. And the best part is, since Linux and Windows are now in VMs, I never, ever have to to that again on any platform. When I get a new machine, I'll be taking a full Linux (Kubuntu) and Windows (XP) install with me, pre-configured and divorced from the hardware, with one button press. Until Linux distros duplicate that functionality, they'll have a hard time winning me back.
Now I'm not knocking Linux. It is an excellent server OS and a capable desktop. It beats OS X and Windows on a number of points. I'd lo
I think what people hate to admit is that in order to sell Linux to the masses, it's going to have to be dumbed down.
I don't think usability and power are diametrically opposed. You don't need to "dumb down" Linux to sell it to the masses, you just have to make the workflow easy by default.
The dumbed-down side of it is that there is no compiler... But then again, my mom doesn't want, or need, one.
Not having a compiler doesn't directly make Linspire any easier for your mom. The only thing it does is theoretically make developers that want to reach that market provide a binary, but I'd not wager even many of them to that, rather than let the distro do it themselves.
I'm not bringing this up to "bust your balls" but because I think this is a really important consideration that is often overlooked. You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see compilers used to improve the usability of Linux, rather than be removed to "dumb down" Linux. Here's my ideal software install/management system. Take a nice, package manager and integrate it with the OS. Have it set up with at least one nice repository of software by default, with the ability for users to add more repositories. This provides for finding and downloading a lot of software and keeping that software up to date. Combine this system with OpenStep so that all normal software is a contained package that can be installed globally or within a user account and can be installed and uninstalled via drag and drop. More than that, it is easy to store and move applications via thumb drives, CDs, e-mail, IM, etc. Augment OpenStep by adding repository information to it, so that even if you only have an application on a thumb drive, the next time you use it the system can look for updates. Further augment OpenStep's existing set of binaries for different platforms with a subdirectory for source code, licenses, and build instructions that let the OS build a customized binary at its leisure and without the user having to do anything. Use the compiler to make it faster and easier, rather than removing it. Build your toolset with an official software registration service to make ACLs a practical security solution.
So where does this get you? If you're thinking of Linux strictly in terms of a server OS, this gets you unnecessary bloat. That is why this will probably never happen. If, however, you're thinking of Linux as a server and desktop and possible embedded OS, then it gets you ease of use and flexibility. Disk space is cheap these days and the ability to drag and application onto a shared server, or automatically upgrade to a new laptop with a different architecture, or IM a program to a friend who uses a different OS, and have it just work... is a huge win, in my opinion. For servers or embedded applications where disk space counts and optimization is more important than ease of use, this same system can work fine and nothing stops the OS from stripping out and discarding unused portions of the package. There are already tools on OS X that go through and do just that for people with disk space constraints that want to recover the space taken up by Intel or PPC or 32 or 64 bit binaries. Even then, since it references the repository in the package, making a shared binary work is easy (but a bit slower) so long as you have an internet connection.
The problem with many linux users is that they fail to realize that your "normal" computer user is NOTHING like they are.
Actually, the majority of Linux users and contributors are pretty focused on Linux on the server, and are not all that interested in it on the desktop. Of the 20 or so regular Linux contributors in my office right now, only two I know of are running it on the desktop. A few are running a BSD, a couple are running Windows, and the remaining majority are running OS X. And that is one of the reasons I see Linux on the desktop having less support than it used to. While there are some great, motivated projects, like the OLPC project, a huge numb
Nice units you have there. I think those are even bit more obscure than mile, foot, etc.
Yeah if we just assumes the study meant 1 shot of scotch per drink it would be a lot easier. It would be wrong, but easier. The study used 10g of ethanol as their definition for a drink. The previous poster was just trying to convert that into something a normal person could understand.
So with a drink allowance of 4 drinks at 10g of ethanol each would allow you to have *almost* three Scotches, by American drink size standards.
Cool thanks. The article I read said three drinks for American drinkers, not four though, so that would be a bit more than two shots. Also, the original poster asked about tumblers, which are about 10 oz. by default, so we're talking a lot less than one tumbler of reasonably good scotch. Alas.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid you're showing some ignorance - MS releases security patches and updates even more frequently than Apple.
If you think the frequency of security fixes is a reasonable measure of security, then you're more than a little ignorant about security to start with. There is a lot more to it. The best way to judge security is simply to estimate the likelihood that a given system will be compromised in a given situation. If you're talking about an OS in use by average people to do normal tasks, OS X beats Windows by a huge margin. You can argue the why of this, but that is simply the reason it is more secure, not whether or not it is more secure.
On the other hand, neither patches holes as aggressively as most Linux distributions or even the programmers of the open source CMS system I use.
When users and developers are the same people, you have very direct motivation to improve security, hence Linux does quite well. The average desktop Linux install is on par with OS X. Both are fairly resistant to automated remote exploits. Both can probably be remotely compromised by an expert. So what is your point? How does this indicate that Windows is "more secure" despite the fact that it is compromised so often by comparison?
All in all, this "Month of Bugs" thing is good approach to proactive OS support behavior by a user community.
All in all this project is an attempt to cause insecurity and gain publicity in so doing. Failing to notify the vendor before releasing a vulnerability is irresponsible, but if the problem can be mitigated by the user, could be justified. Refusing to notify either the vendor or the public about a vulnerability you have found until it is the right day for your PR move is simply malicious exploitation and hurts everyone.
There really is a long-term benefit from good behavior on the part of corporations: your customers will actually go out of their way to help you.
I think you're mistaken. These guys have already done this before for other vendors, and have, in fact, cancelled such a month of bugs after being paid off by one vendor. This is them trying to get PR and/or hush money, not trying to benefit the community.
Unlike macobserver, who seems to think things like security holes are better left unmentioned, I salute LMH and Kevin Finisterre for doing this.
I'm all in favor of finding bugs, but you have to be at least a little bit responsible with those bugs. Unless you're trying to promote worms (which I believe they are) you notify the vendor before going public so that they have time to fix the vulnerability. You certainly don't intentionally delay telling both the public and the vendor in order to generate more PR for yourself.
Sonny, I write device drivers for a living, on Linux and on Mac. I assure you, the Mac isn't more secure.
Umm, I suppose that depends on if you have a different definition for "secure" from most people.
You might want to do a little research into epidemiology and on the economics of hacking in the 21st century if you want to understand why no one has targeted Macs.
I'm not the original poster, but I have plenty of statistics on malware across platforms. The mac is less likely to be exploited because of its market share and because of other factors. More importantly, however, it is more secure because Apple does respond to security concerns on their platform, while MS has little motivation to do so.
nother way would be "rather than engaging in anything even resembling a cursorily, let alone thorough internal, investigation, Apple decided that the best way to resolve the issue was to hit a third party with tens of thousands in legal bills, rather than investigate the issue itself".
Sure, but the point you are missing is that Apple was legally in the right. They had every right to sue and not only for the name of the leak, but also for punitive damages large enough to shut down the small publication and discourage others. The fact that they didn't speaks to Apple's propensity to not use litigation to stop speech they don't like. And that is the subject we were addressing, should these researchers be afraid that Apple will bring a baseless lawsuit against them in order to stop their publication. The answer is, no, Apple doesn't stop speech it doesn't like when it can legally shut them down.
I'm a luddite I admit, but what makes IM so great?
IM provides the opportunity for realtime communication and you know who is available to talk right now. So it is faster and more responsive than e-mail. IM is text based so you can send exact numbers, quotes, etc. You can also easily multitask and chat with multiple people, unlike phone conversations which don't scale.
There's no way to archive the messages is there? Is there a way to catalog the information into a searchable index?
Of course. I log all my chats locally and they are indexed and searchable.
How can you "forward" an im to another person or group of people? Can you thread the information into a cohesive timeline?
If you want to "forward" info you should switch mediums to e-mail, which is not real time. Many e-mail clients now integrate with chat. I can send a selection or entire transcript with a key combo and one click. Chats are time stamped as well.
You're missing the fact that it is not going to be the sole means of communication. IM fills a role, it does not replace other mediums. Also, unlike e-mail which is standardized, IM is currently intentionally broken by the entrenched players who are trying to gain complete control. E-mail did not take off until AOL and other players agreed to a standard and you could send mail to anyone using your choice of client and server. When this happened, competition made them all better and now it is indispensable. If and when the same thing happens for IM, it will explode in popularity and usefulness. I'm not sure this will happen as soon as this article predicts.
MacOSX is still turning up significant flaws that were fixed in other flavours of UNIX many years ago.
True, Apple is running into some of the same old problems as they try to build new things to interact with old things. I wish they had stricter security reviews processes.
Apple has probably the worst attitude to quality control I have ever come across in the PC industry (ie. they don't appear to have any). You might think that Windows has many problems with security holes, but looking at the automated code review tools and approach to security within Microsoft, and comparing this to Apple's approach, it is safe to say that the inferior end product will most definitely be Apple's.
I don't know Apple's policies on code review. I know they do some audits and that is it. It looks like they could really use some improvement. That said, I do know people from MS and their security reviews are a joke. From anecdotes, less than half of all security holes reported internally are given high enough priority to ever be fixed and they don't have a thousand monkeys pounding on open code. And in the end, it is results that matter. Apple does not have a malware problem, and is mildly resistant to amateur directed attacks. Windows has a huge malware problem and can often be hacked with freely available script kiddy tools.
I also find Microsoft staff much more helpful and knowledgeable than the moron 'experts' that apple usually fields.
I've submitted bugs to both Apple and MS. Some of the Apple ones were fixes (all the security ones). None of the MS bugs have ever been fixed.
It is just to buggy, lacks scalability (try using heavily threaded programs, or I/O / network intensive apps), and the kernel seems to have some fairly significant and obscure bugs that can waste significant time.
Are you talking about server roles or desktops? Both OS X and Windows are less than optimal servers. Windows can't multitask its way out of a wet paper bag and has always had stability and security issues that result in unavailable services. I'd not build a server on either OS X or Windows though. If you're looking at the desktop, however, there is no comparison.
I am sticking to platforms I trust:- AIX, Linux, and Solaris. They have their own lesser problems, but at least quality and scalability are not a serious concern.
Quality and scalability aren't concerns on Linux? Where can I get this mythical version of Linux?
Microsoft is not performing due diligence and is quite frankly not giving customers what they want. They routinely sit on publicly announced bugs for long periods of time and according to people I know who have worked there less than half of the security holes they find internally are prioritized high enough to be fixed. No one is happy worms are destroying computers, but some people are happy to see MS getting bad publicity because of their actions.
Now comes the fun, if a bug is reported to Apple how long do they get to fix it? Who will determine when enough time has passed?
Well, I believe the last serious security hole reported to them was fixed in 10 days, which is pretty good turn around for development and QA. OS's can be evaluated based upon the nature of the vulnerability, risk, and duration of exposure. For something like this, if it is easily reproducible, under normal circumstances, a couple of weeks seems reasonable. If they are constantly getting new vulnerabilities once a day, it may be longer since they might need to prioritize based upon those. Think of this from the developer's standpoint. If these guys are trying to make OS X less secure, they picked a good way. Thanks jackasses.
They haven't a big enough installed base to get the "Average user" which Microsoft has to both sell to and suffer with.
What do you mean? Apple has lots of novice users including the very young and very old attracted by their reputation for ease of use. How many people on this forum do you suppose convinced their grandparents or parents to get a mac?
When they do penetrate the "Average user" market and get into double digits of popularity then they attract attention they don't want.
There is plenty of motivation for hackers to attack OS X right now. The reason it does not happen is not the lack of motivation, but the difficulty/convenience of so doing. Smaller market share makes propagation more complex. Increased scrutiny makes exposures shorter. Many worm authors have a very windows-centric knowledge base. All of these factors may mean as OS X's market share goes up, worms become more common, but to attribute this to motivation is a mistake.
Do not under estimate the creativity and capability of the hackers out there.
I know people on both ends of the security spectrum. I'm not too worried about OS X becoming bug ridden as market share increases. In fact, I think both Windows and OS X security will increase as OS X's market share increases. The problem of security is one of motivation, but not of the motivation of malware authors, but of OS vendors. Apple needs to keep customers happy to maintain market share. Thus, if malware becomes a problem for their users they will fix it or lose money. Right now Microsoft has no such motivation, so their attention to security has been spotty at best. They don't significantly lose money when users suffer from security problems. Increasing OS X's market share might motivate them to improve security. Anyone who argues that MS or Apple is doing all they can has not been paying attention.
So why the hell is Slashdot participating with these dorks and posting their announcements? "Don't feed the trolls."
This is different from trolling in that it is a real problem. The bugs are real, the disclosure is real and we have to manage the situation. If terrorists did not get publicity for their acts, they would not be spreading terror and would thus be ineffective. That doesn't mean the media should not let you know the airport has been taken over. It is a real problem. These people are intentionally reducing the security of everyone using OS X. The reaction should be that LHM and Mr. Finisterre are regarded by the industry as irresponsible and shunned by responsible security people. They are the bad guys. They may not be breaking the law, but they are behaving unethically for their own profit.
The wireless exploit did apply to Airport cards;
It is my understanding that the vulnerability you reference as well as the other two they fixed were both the result of an internal audit of their wireless drivers and not the result of the exploit that was publicized. The issue is more than a little muddy, however, and I'd be grateful if you could provide a reference to show either way.
Wow, no way... The kernel won't just magically make your already-installed copy of Photoshop go four times as fast - Adobe would need to recompile, at the very least.
Actually, one of the announced features of Leopard is a way to take some existing OpenGL applications and spawn a second "feeder" thread for the graphics card which encompasses some of the functionality of the OpenGL libraries. Theoretically, this means and OpenGL application designed to run in a single thread could obtain up to double the speed on Leopard with a multi-core processor, provided it was CPU bound and exactly half the bottleneck was feeding the GPU. Realistically, this will probably result in some more modest benefits, if any at all for a given application. Still, it is incorrect to assume that the only way an application can benefit from multiple cores is through a recompile, rather than through OS improvements.
The reality distortion field you cite is warping your perspective. Apple is actually not particularly litigious compared to most companies their size. To my knowledge they've never sued anyone for publicizing bugs. They don't even normally go after publications that intentionally publicize their trade secrets unless they admit having obtained those secrets from an insider Apple does not know the identity of, and in the one case of that, they sued only for the name of the informant, not for any damages against the publication. The thing is, the litigation they do enegage in, is often highly publicized, making it seem as though they are very litigious.
So to answer your question, if they have a reasonable grasp on reality, no they aren't worried about being sued.
Black hats are interested in profiting from their knowledge of vulnerabilities. These guys aren't.
I disagree. Black hats are interested in illegally profiting from vulnerabilities. White hats are interested in legally and ethically benefiting from vulnerabilities. Grey hats are interested in benefitting from security exploits in ways that are unethical and questionably legal.
They want them to be fixed and know that even the deified Apple won't allocate resources to fixing problems that have a low profile.
No, these guys want publicity for themselves. Apple has been quite responsive to security researchers and most that I know think Apple has been doing a pretty reasonable job. If you're going to argue that bugs need to be publicly released because Apple won't fix them otherwise, you need to support that assertion. Even then, what is your justification for not releasing it immediately, but doling them out more slowly? That doesn't benefit anyone but these researchers for whom it provides prolonged media exposure they hope to gain from financially.
So they're out to raise the profile of each problem.
Raising the profile of a problem makes sense, if it is being exploited in the wild or if you've contacted the vendor and they're dragging their heels while people are at risk. Otherwise, it is simply harmful to everyone involved.
Much better than using the vulnerabilities to build Mac-based botnets...
Ahh, the classic "we're not as bad as China" argument. Doing something unethical isn't made any less unethical by the fact that someone else is doing something even more unethical. These guys obviously are interested in one thing, getting themselves in the news to make themselves money.
Apple has had poor relations with security researchers for years.
Actually, Apple has had pretty good interactions with security researchers in general, in my experience. Being a huge PR magnet, however, they also manage to attract showboaters trying to capitalize on the popularity they can get by behaving in a less than reasonable manner. The wireless exploit you cite, for example, turned out to be hype about a problem that affected no mac in its default state, but Apple responded to it even though they were never contacted with the details of the supposed exploit and did fix several issues they found during a review of the wireless drivers they ship. Apple has done a pretty reasonable job of patching easily exploitable/wormable problems very quickly and they don't seem to be ignoring problems reported to them. One of my coworkers found a local exploit (low risk) and reported it through Apple's Website. The fix was in the next security update and even credited him. It seems like pretty good relations with the security researcher community to me.
As for the month of Apple bugs. It is more of the same. Sure these guys could report Apple bugs to the normal channels and they'd be fixed fairly quickly and overall security would benefit. That, however, won't make the news. So instead of reporting bugs when found, these guys are intentionally delaying releasing that info to both Apple and the public. Apple isn't pressured to quickly fix bugs if they don't even now what those bugs are. The public isn't served by bugs being fixed more quickly. Users aren't served by bugs being released to the public for possible mass exploitation without Apple ever being given a chance to patch their machines. The end result is decreasing the overall security or computing. It serves no one except the researchers who are showboating and being irresponsible.
Didn't Google object having Microsoft put their own site as default search engine of IE7?
In that case it is leveraging a monopoly (Windows) to promote a search engine through bundling. This is illegal because it undermines the market. When and if Google monopolizes Web searching, this action by them will be illegal because it to will undermine the free market. Until then, I don't see as anyone has any reason to complain.
Drag-and-drop installations don't have dependency management.
They bundle the needed libraries and use dynamic linking. What's harder, always downloading from repositories and using a tool to manage dependencies, or just downloading and not worrying about it? This is a win for drag and drop, not a loss.
And Apple-style fat binaries waste space compared to more modern alternatives.
Yup, this is the only argument that makes sense, but even it is very weak. For a workstation, the disk space used is negligible. If it is a concern on a given platform, the OS can handle stripping out the unneeded binaries so you only lose that functionality if you have that constraint.
Well, here you fail to give a reason.
Part of OpenStep (within PDO I think) is the dynamic linking and object handling that makes both of these features default behavior. Doing the same thing with another set of APIs would require adding that functionality or writing it from scratch for each app. And don't get me wrong. I'm arguing in favor of this as a default, not for any given implementation that provides that functionality.
Yeah, better by having fewer features and by being harder to use.
GNUStep, Cocoa, and OpenStep are outdated APIs with inherent flaws. That is why people are not using them widely. Java and .NET are better in every respect.
Well, in every respect except they result in inferior programs with lesser functionality, right? Show me the OS + API combo I can use today that gives me both of the above features, for most applications. Gee, that would none of them. That is called "inferior."
The supposed "benefits" you list exist in all modern platforms, but developers don't usually use them because they are considered bad.
The benefits I list aren't included because they're hard, not bad. The reason they exist for most OS X apps is because the OS and dev tools are designed to provide that functionality easily. You can claim it is inferior all you want, but if the end result of one gives me more functionality than the other, then your claims lack any weight.
To me, that's a gift not a bribe.
Lots of companies do the same thing with review sites. Send them a free (often cherry picked) whatever. If they give it a good reviews, send them a new one of the next product, otherwise don't. Only a few companies refuse to accept these, and they are the ones who really care about their reputation, like consumer reports. To me it simply calls into question the impartiality of the reviews.
To me, that's a gift not a bribe.
I remember Apple shipping free machines to developers when they released a new version, but not to the media. This is not to say Apple doesn't do this, just that I haven't heard of it.
They're saying "thanks for the coverage", and that's that.
If they shipped out free laptops at a normal time, perhaps, but this coincides with their shipping new product that these people will be reviewing. That isn't a "thank you" that is a "I hope this will get us better reviews" marketing expense.
First, the two examples (drag-and-drop application copying, processor independence) you give have nothing to do with the *Step APIs, they have to do with other system issues in OS X.
Both of these functions are enabled by use of OpenStep-like APIs. With either Gnome or KDE it is very difficult to recreate this functionality.
Second, drag-and-drop installations and Apple's approach to processor independence are arguably bad designs;
Arguably, round rather than square wheels are a bad design.
the fact that you find them occasionally useful is far outweighed by the headaches they cause for many users.
What headaches? You can't just label something a bad design and then not mention a single, specific problem that that design has ever caused, especially when you're arguing against several specific benefits.
Third, none of those properties you like were pioneered by NeXTStep or OS X, and none are unique to them.
Who cares? I don't care if Adolph Hitler came up with the benefits. I just care which systems provide those benefits to me.
In fact, if you want drag-and-drop installation and processor independence, your best bet at this point is not an OS X app, but a Java .jar file or a .NET assembly.
OS X is an operating system that (usually) gives me these benefits. This is partly due to their use of OpenStep. So you think I should get those benefits instead by convincing all developers of all the applications I create to start developing in Java or .net and switch to whatever platform they use? And this makes sense in your little world?
It's your choice to make your KDE desktop inconsistent;
True, if I want to use the best application for each task, I choose to mix KDE and Gnome apps. That doesn't mean the choice I have to make is a good one.
...for some subset of tasks I want to do. Complete means I can do everything I want. That just isn't the case. I'm not arguing this is a major problem, just mentioning that my experience differs from that of the previous poster who claims most people only use one.
For developers, GNUStep is less mature than the alternatives, has limited language and tool support, is considerably more effort to program in than common alternatives, and a tiny developer community.
So GNUStep isn't commonly used and hence has less widespread support and maturity, so developers shouldn't use it? Doesn't that kind of thinking lead to everyone always using the same outdated APIs with the same inherent flaws, forever?
For users, GNUStep is wildly inconsistent with Linux desktop conventions.
Yeah, it is different than what is already being used. That's the point, because anything that is fundamentally better will be different, sort of by definition. I reject your, arguments because they boil down to the fact that OpenStep isn't what is being used now, so it is nonstandard. Almost all improvements require moving away from what is currently dominant. If people use the same thinking process it won't matter because no one will switch away from Windows to a nonstandard OS like Linux anyway.
The notion that Linux desktops are an inconsistent mix of different toolkits and interface styles is a myth.
Hm, My Linux install (KDE) has several Gnome apps I require.
There are several Illustrator clones for Gnome and KDE; what makes you think that GNUStep can deliver something that is better in any way?
The only argument against GNUStep I've ever heard that makes sense is that it adds bloat for servers. This is a very weak argument in my opinion. Here's my argument for GNUStep. A while back one of my remote coworkers needed an application I had been using. He didn't have a copy and the publisher had stopped distributing it. We were both using OS X. So I dragged the application into our chat session and he ran it. Problem solved. There was no searching for an installer that may or may not have been backed up somewhere.
Here's another argument for it. I upgraded my laptop from a PPC to an Intel and the installer automatically migrated my applications. Some of the applications it migrated already contained native binaries for Intel and they worked seamlessly without me having to download a new binary.
GNUStep/OpenStep is not perfect. It is better in several ways than anything else I've used. I'd like to see it extended even further so that packages may contain source, build instructions, licenses, and repository info for updates and registration info. I don't care about how pretty the windows are, just about real, objective benefits. I just wish people weren't so stubborn about rejecting real improvements because those improvements aren't ones they care about.
So all those *nix admins responsible for a few dozen, a few hundred, or a few thousand systems are doing what? Using their company-provided MacBook or Windows desktop to ssh into the server?
This is funny because I daily use my Macbook to SSH into three servers I use. I'm not sure, however, I understand your point.
Maybe you need to rethink your conclusion as "not interested in the desktop." I'd suggest the reality is that there is no overwhelming desire to write GUI applications to replicate what is traditionally done in a terminal window so that novice users will find things "easier".
I'm not talking about replicating CLI programs to make them more accessible to non-power users. I'm talking about everyday applications and functions of the OS that benefit pretty much all users. Using an OS X workstation I can use the same spellchecker on all those SSH sessions, in vi, in Word, in Adobe InDesign, in my mail program and Web browser. I can do the same with my grammar checker, and language translation service, and auto-bibliography citation, and dozens of other useful services. This makes it superior to my Linux and Windows workstations for the same task. It has nothing to do with making it more accessible to novices.
When I upgrade my Mac laptop I use as a workstation, it is basically one step. I plug in a firewire cable to my old laptop and it sucks all my settings, licenses, user accounts, programs, VMs, files, etc onto the new machine. It works across acrhitectures. When I come back from lunch, I can get to work. With a Linux or Windows machine this migration takes me days or weeks to get everything in the right state. This has nothing to do with me being unable to use a command line. It has to do with me having to do things, at all.
Those are just a couple of examples. That functionality could be replicated on another OS, but most people who care have already moved to OS X.
Unfortunate for some, maybe, but the reality is that *nix is designed around the concept of a terminal. Gnome, KDE and friends are mostly there to provide wallpaper.
Your conception of UNIX is pretty limited. Linux is no more UNIX than OS X or IRIX. The GUI provides a better way to accomplish some tasks. Try editing images for a living from the command line.
Many of us do use *nix as a "desktop". At the same time, most of us know there is no real distinction between desktop and server. Except for the wallpaper, perhaps.
While one machine can be both a desktop and a server, they are pretty distinct roles. Desktops provide a user with their interface to do work. Servers talk to other machines, including desktops. Very rarely does a user primarily access a server via the local console. I suspect you're trolling with your wallpaper comments. If so, good job. If not, you need to expand your world view.
So, us BSD license lovers are different people than GNU folks.
I'm a pragmatist. I think both GNU style and BSD style licenses are ideal for different circumstances and for different goals. I think Linux's ability to attract developers and gain popularity over FreeBSD is largely due to the licensing. A lot of people want to contribute to something, but they want more in exchange for their contribution than simply credit and getting the code out there. They want to be repaid with the contributions of others and they want to make sure that their contribution is not sold back to them. This makes the GNU style license work very well for end user applications and many other projects.
Sometimes it is more important to an author to get their code used, than it is for them to get contributions back. Implementations of new, standard protocols, for example. For these applications a BSD style license often provides more benefit.
I don't blame Apple for using BSD style code and closing it, nor for not opening their own contributions. So long as they aren't going against the wishes of the authors, more power to them. I merely mention that the code in an OS being GPL'ed as opposed to licensed with a BSD license or even being closed source, provides more benefit to me, the end user, rather than to developers. It is a feature. All things equal, I'd rather be using an OS that is GPL'd than one licensed the other ways. This is self-interest, not ideology.
Nonsense. The real issue here is not that Linux desktops need to progress anywhere. I use both Windows and Linux for hours a day and they both have their share of frustrations and joys.
I think you're trying to divorce two interrelated issues. Linux and Windows both have usability issues. For the average user it i hard to tell which is better. Because of the market situation, however, Linux is at a huge disadvantage. In order to overcome that, they need to not only be as good as Windows, but need to leapfrog Windows and be significantly better in multiple ways. I don't really see Linux as being all that far ahead on the desktop right now.
Mac has a devoted base of people willing to pay a premium price for Apple products, why I'll never know, since Apple's offerings have been an inferior price-to-value proposition since at least the release of Windows 2000.
Just because Apple products are an inferior price-to-value proposition to you, does not mean they are to everyone. The last time I upgraded my mac laptop I plugged in a firewire cable to my old laptop, selected the upgrade from and old machine option, and then walked away. That same task on Linux takes me about five hours of messing around and then an hour or two a day for the next week as I find things that aren't right, and then another hour or two a week for the next month. Add all that up and you get about 20 hours worth of work. My billable rate for contract work these days is $75/an hour. That's $1500 for one feature per upgrade. If I spend $1500 more on a Mac laptop instead of a different one, I've broken even for that one feature, not accounting any other benefits to OS X. It is actually my company's money, but I hope you get the point. Now I have a Linux install and a Windows install running in a VM, instead of needing a separate machine. How much money do I save by not having to dual boot and by having Windows divorced from the hardware and automatically working without wasting a week getting it into shape? How much money is saved by my having one integrated spellchecker for all my applications, including e-mail, terminals, and IM, rather than having to copy and paste text in order to spellcheck or having to train a dozen different spellcheckers to understand all the obscure terminology I use? What about the time saved by having a universal grammar checker? What about the time saved when I IM'd a program that is no longer available for download to a remote worker that needed it and it just worked, without me having to hope I'd archived an installer somewhere?
I'll stop singing OS X's praises now. I just wanted to make my point that unless you've used multiple systems, making assertions about the price-value of the system is pretty naive.
Apple is able to be profitable by serving a niche that is almost more fashion-driven than anything else.
Well, some of the guys at Defcon and Blackhat this year were "fashionable" but I don't think you could say most of them are... and there were an awful lot of mac laptops.
For the rest of the world there is only one choice: Windows. Linux isn't on the table.
There are two significant chunks of the desktop OS market. These are pre-installed (OS X and Windows) and large organization-managed. To win the former, Linux needs to leapfrog Windows by enough in some degree that an OEM is willing to bet the farm on it. It's unlikely to happen on a large scale. The real possibility is the latter market. Big companies and organizations and governments can save a lot of money if they move to Linux and gain a lot of flexibility and security. But big organizations are notoriously slow to move and easily influenced by big piles of cash. It is a hard market, but Linux can do it if it gets the right backing.
Until the consumer is informed that their hardware purchase includes a hefty charge for a Windows license and is offered Linux as an alternative (presumably at a different price point), they are not going to know or care about Lin
Right now OS X isn't as good an option for a lot of people.
Of course it isn't the best solution for everyone. It is just a better workstation than Linux for most people (in my experience).
The biggest thing is that the vast majority of Linux targeted desktop software (of which there is a vast range, even if you just restrict us to high quality and Free) either doesn't work or is horribly clunky.
This is sort of amusing. The vast majority of OS X targeted desktop software doesn't work at all on Linux. So that leaves us in a situation where one OS can run both sets of software (some of it not optimally) and the other OS can only run one set. Not exactly a win for Linux.
It's better than running on top of Cygwin but really not very much and *that means it's not UNIX, it's a pretty, closed bauble that effectively hides all of the good bits*.
You ideas seem pretty slanted. OS X is as much UNIX as Linux is, they're just different, partially incompatible, implementations of it. OS has some ability to run Linux software in a compatibility mode, that is not perfect. Linux can't run OS X software, pretty much at all.
If you don't believe me go and look at every OO.o release thread and see the Apple users asking for a better native port.
OpenOffice has come along way recently, but the important thing is it is almost 100% developed by Sun, which relies upon Xwindows. How well does Omniplan or Word for Mac work on Linux? You don't hear many people asking for it on Linux though, since most people using OS X, just don't care if it works on Linux.
In the mean time Linux has graphically caught up, application wise is only missing much, and is free. Why bother to switch at this point?
I'm a Linux on the desktop user and an OS X on the desktop user. For that matter, I run Windows too. My primary workstation has been OS X for quite a while because it has numerous wins over Linux. For starters, it runs a lot of really good software Linux does not. Photoshop, InDesign, Omnigraffle, iTunes, etc. Second the OS does a better job of handling those applications. The CLI and the GUI are integrated more smoothly than any Linux distro I've ever used. If I move a directory via the GUI, terminals that navigated into that directory update instantly. Applications and the OS share services smoothly. My Web browser, IM client, terminals, e-mail, word-processor, pro layout app, etc. all access the same spellchecker and grammar checker and language translation services and scripts and statistical package, etc. Third, the benefits of OpenStep mean I can use fat binaries that work on different systems and I can IM or e-mail them to friends, or transfer them when we don't have internet access and they work without any hassle. Fourth, with an OS X laptop I can run Linux and Windows in a VM to use any applications that don't have a port, or where the port is of poor quality. This means I have one machine instead of three and I can access all the OS's when I'm using my laptop at the coffee shop because I was too lazy to go to the office. Fifth, upgrading an OS X machine is years ahead of Linux. When I switched from a PPC mac laptop to an Intel mac laptop I plugged in a firewire cable and pushed a button. Then I went to lunch. All my user accounts, settings, authorization keys, applications, files, etc. migrated automagically. Migrating to a new Linux box and getting everything in its proper state usually takes me several days of messing around. And the best part is, since Linux and Windows are now in VMs, I never, ever have to to that again on any platform. When I get a new machine, I'll be taking a full Linux (Kubuntu) and Windows (XP) install with me, pre-configured and divorced from the hardware, with one button press. Until Linux distros duplicate that functionality, they'll have a hard time winning me back.
Now I'm not knocking Linux. It is an excellent server OS and a capable desktop. It beats OS X and Windows on a number of points. I'd lo
I think what people hate to admit is that in order to sell Linux to the masses, it's going to have to be dumbed down.
I don't think usability and power are diametrically opposed. You don't need to "dumb down" Linux to sell it to the masses, you just have to make the workflow easy by default.
The dumbed-down side of it is that there is no compiler... But then again, my mom doesn't want, or need, one.
Not having a compiler doesn't directly make Linspire any easier for your mom. The only thing it does is theoretically make developers that want to reach that market provide a binary, but I'd not wager even many of them to that, rather than let the distro do it themselves.
I'm not bringing this up to "bust your balls" but because I think this is a really important consideration that is often overlooked. You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see compilers used to improve the usability of Linux, rather than be removed to "dumb down" Linux. Here's my ideal software install/management system. Take a nice, package manager and integrate it with the OS. Have it set up with at least one nice repository of software by default, with the ability for users to add more repositories. This provides for finding and downloading a lot of software and keeping that software up to date. Combine this system with OpenStep so that all normal software is a contained package that can be installed globally or within a user account and can be installed and uninstalled via drag and drop. More than that, it is easy to store and move applications via thumb drives, CDs, e-mail, IM, etc. Augment OpenStep by adding repository information to it, so that even if you only have an application on a thumb drive, the next time you use it the system can look for updates. Further augment OpenStep's existing set of binaries for different platforms with a subdirectory for source code, licenses, and build instructions that let the OS build a customized binary at its leisure and without the user having to do anything. Use the compiler to make it faster and easier, rather than removing it. Build your toolset with an official software registration service to make ACLs a practical security solution.
So where does this get you? If you're thinking of Linux strictly in terms of a server OS, this gets you unnecessary bloat. That is why this will probably never happen. If, however, you're thinking of Linux as a server and desktop and possible embedded OS, then it gets you ease of use and flexibility. Disk space is cheap these days and the ability to drag and application onto a shared server, or automatically upgrade to a new laptop with a different architecture, or IM a program to a friend who uses a different OS, and have it just work... is a huge win, in my opinion. For servers or embedded applications where disk space counts and optimization is more important than ease of use, this same system can work fine and nothing stops the OS from stripping out and discarding unused portions of the package. There are already tools on OS X that go through and do just that for people with disk space constraints that want to recover the space taken up by Intel or PPC or 32 or 64 bit binaries. Even then, since it references the repository in the package, making a shared binary work is easy (but a bit slower) so long as you have an internet connection.
The problem with many linux users is that they fail to realize that your "normal" computer user is NOTHING like they are.
Actually, the majority of Linux users and contributors are pretty focused on Linux on the server, and are not all that interested in it on the desktop. Of the 20 or so regular Linux contributors in my office right now, only two I know of are running it on the desktop. A few are running a BSD, a couple are running Windows, and the remaining majority are running OS X. And that is one of the reasons I see Linux on the desktop having less support than it used to. While there are some great, motivated projects, like the OLPC project, a huge numb
Nice units you have there. I think those are even bit more obscure than mile, foot, etc.
Yeah if we just assumes the study meant 1 shot of scotch per drink it would be a lot easier. It would be wrong, but easier. The study used 10g of ethanol as their definition for a drink. The previous poster was just trying to convert that into something a normal person could understand.
So with a drink allowance of 4 drinks at 10g of ethanol each would allow you to have *almost* three Scotches, by American drink size standards.
Cool thanks. The article I read said three drinks for American drinkers, not four though, so that would be a bit more than two shots. Also, the original poster asked about tumblers, which are about 10 oz. by default, so we're talking a lot less than one tumbler of reasonably good scotch. Alas.