Of all of the honest to goodness metrics very closely mirror the ones of this site.
On the sites I run, the Mac went from 3% in 2002 to between 18% and 33%.
Vista hasn't reached that yet, but I guess it's hard to get web hits from gas pumps, cash registers, milling machines and everything else running "NT 6.0" (Vista).
An invasion of privacy? Oh puleeeez. May you should ask the NSA who is tapped into your phone. They'll tell you everything about your "plan" with your own tax money.
Consider the approach non-Apple users (particularly Windows users) have to Apple users. It's usually belligerent or assuming that whatever is wrong with the file/software/network is because of the Mac. It usually isn't but Apple users continually need to endure the narrow minded idiots who think Microsoft is the only available source of computer technology.
Do macs have means to prevent certain users from doing certain things? How does a mac sys admin keep so and so from installing/uninstalling/changing settings?
When setting up OS X for the first time, the first user defined is the Admin. The Admin account can do whatever they like, of course, but it's still one level below root.
The root account is disabled by default and the Admin may enable or disable root. You can, if you like, create a user account called "root" and that will be the root user.
The Admin may create new user accounts and grant (or deny) Admin rights to new users.
User account without Admin rights may be controlled with fairly granular settings which shows all Apps, Widgets and Utilities with a setting to allow/disallow their use individually, control of specific System Settings, CD-DVD burning, password changes, Dock modification, printer settings and others. Without Admin rights, installations are not possible. It is possible to launch some applications without "installing" them but the control list for applications will disallow anything not present there.
There are other settings to tightly control content found on the Internet, lists of sites to allow/disallow, Mail & Chat control lists, time limits and a host of other settings. You can also hide profanity found in the built-in Dictionary. It also keeps logs of activity and sends an email to you when someone attempts to circumvent controls.
There is a Guest user for transient users. Login as Guest and do whatever you can under the controls set for Guest. Logout and login to Guest again and the account will be reset completely - no files, logins, history or anything remains from the last login.
All of this can be managed directly on the OS X machine or remotely through Apple Remote Desktop.
Because Mac Users are trained to look past the flaws and defects in Apple products...
Most people with Macs at home have to use PCs at work. All the people I know in that category can't stand PCs through experience, not by training or brainwashing or propaganda. Most of them have also [fairly] recently switched to a Mac at home after having used PCs exclusively for many years. You can't even give them a PC anymore. It really is that different.
I don't object to the iPhone so much as to the people who use them with all the demonstrative gusto of a poodle with a new hat.
Love the visual - and you're right about not being big city. Around here (Northern Virginia) people just use the iPhone as phones and PDAs like any other - but there's still a perception they're flaunting the phone by the have-nots. No, they're just using their phone and it goes back in the shirt pocket when they're done. However, I recognize the dynamic of actual flaunting - remembering the early days of cell phones, pagers and whatnot. People would put garage door openers on their belt to look important.
Equally poodlish are people with one of the many iPhone wannabe devices with a crudely inferior facsimile of the UI and pathetic underpinnings. I don't know which is worse - the customer or the company that made the device.
Absolutely. There's a trust factor in keeping your WiFi open, rationalizing "oh, what could possibly go wrong" and you'd be largely accurate. It'll do the job for all the intended parties and another "visitor" in the next house or sitting in his car won't hurt a thing. That's true for practically all instances of open WiFi.
In this litigious society with prying law enforcement, recent laws written to nearly resemble entrapment and enormously stiff penalties, I've locked all my WAPs down against the casual driveby surfer. I don't want someone file sharing or surfing the rude corners of the Internet through my WAPs and have the RIAA SWAT team or FBI show up to arrest ME.
If I wanted to do those things, you can bet I'll park in front of someone else's house.
The users certainly aren't malicious - they're either clueless or don't see the harm. When [malicious] people start pulling into their parking lot to download kiddie porn or get all their TPB work done, guess who's gonna get dragged out into the street in the middle of the night by the Authorities? Some day, they're going to do that to the wrong person and all legal hell will break loose.
Something big has to happen before everyone realizes an open WiFi connection is the electronic equivalent of standing on the street corner bent over with your shorts down to your ankles. No thanks.
Not to be combative, most Mac users I know (about 70 out of 100) got rid of their Windows machines completely - and very few of those wish to ever see Windows again. Six of them have Windows on their Macs for specific applications but rarely launch it.
As to allowing OS X on generic hardware... anyone really interested in doing this has already built a hackintosh.
Although Vista has crushed itself, I'd also like to see a little cooperation from Apple to start migrating their OS to other hardware. Unless Apple plans on creating every possible form factor of computer, opening up the OS is the only way to sharply penetrate the rest of the market.
This doesn't make sense--I always thought Macs were impervious to the simple things that "plague" my Windows PC.
They are. Any script kiddie could write a VBS script that essentially said "replicate myself to the Outlook address book then delete everything on the local hard drive" and Windows would happily follow those instructions without question. Hell, you wouldn't even need to preview or open the email for it to kick in. At least OS X hacks take a few brain cells to figure out - and have a loooooong way to go before reaching 140,000 deadly Windows vulnerabilities. They might eventually get one to work.
MS-SQL databases killed by worms - IIS servers being infected and distributing self-propagating viruses through IE visitors - Outlook advertising millions of address books - zombie PC all over the world saturating the Internet with spam - Word documents infecting every Normal file it encountered... Not one human needed to respond to any of that. What we've got is a global Windows mess on our hands that's been going on for a decade. Shame on Microsoft.
Here, someone sees a set of theoretical vulnerabilities for OS X (and some very limited reported sightings) that mostly require someone at the keyboard with the administrator password to activate them. Not bad considering OS X has been out and exposed to the same Internet for nine years (yes, I used OS X 10.0 Server). As per previous posts, that's just stupid users. Far different from the dopy non-security of classic Windows. As an IT guy, I got paid a lot to endlessly fix Windows specific problems. That doesn't excuse their existence. Now that I'm old and lazy, I've deployed Macs everywhere I can because I DON'T NEED TO FIX THEM ALL THE TIME.
Slashdot Mirror
Of all of the honest to goodness metrics very closely mirror the ones of this site.
On the sites I run, the Mac went from 3% in 2002 to between 18% and 33%.
Vista hasn't reached that yet, but I guess it's hard to get web hits from gas pumps, cash registers, milling machines and everything else running "NT 6.0" (Vista).
Not only is it disingenuous, it's approaching fraudulent...
That ship has sailed. Why can a convicted monopolist avoid sanctions for this behavior? Microsoft = Fraud in many ways.
Idunno, Sergey. Ask Larry what he does.
..Windows Vista Open License costs in addition to a full support contract (!) from Microsoft..
Were you mooning us in the middle of that sentence? How appropriate.
It means we can all our dry cleaning real cheap on Mars!
Oh, wait... I don't dry clean my t-shirts.
An invasion of privacy? Oh puleeeez. May you should ask the NSA who is tapped into your phone. They'll tell you everything about your "plan" with your own tax money.
Consider the approach non-Apple users (particularly Windows users) have to Apple users. It's usually belligerent or assuming that whatever is wrong with the file/software/network is because of the Mac. It usually isn't but Apple users continually need to endure the narrow minded idiots who think Microsoft is the only available source of computer technology.
Do macs have means to prevent certain users from doing certain things? How does a mac sys admin keep so and so from installing/uninstalling/changing settings?
When setting up OS X for the first time, the first user defined is the Admin. The Admin account can do whatever they like, of course, but it's still one level below root.
The root account is disabled by default and the Admin may enable or disable root. You can, if you like, create a user account called "root" and that will be the root user.
The Admin may create new user accounts and grant (or deny) Admin rights to new users.
User account without Admin rights may be controlled with fairly granular settings which shows all Apps, Widgets and Utilities with a setting to allow/disallow their use individually, control of specific System Settings, CD-DVD burning, password changes, Dock modification, printer settings and others. Without Admin rights, installations are not possible. It is possible to launch some applications without "installing" them but the control list for applications will disallow anything not present there.
There are other settings to tightly control content found on the Internet, lists of sites to allow/disallow, Mail & Chat control lists, time limits and a host of other settings. You can also hide profanity found in the built-in Dictionary. It also keeps logs of activity and sends an email to you when someone attempts to circumvent controls.
There is a Guest user for transient users. Login as Guest and do whatever you can under the controls set for Guest. Logout and login to Guest again and the account will be reset completely - no files, logins, history or anything remains from the last login.
All of this can be managed directly on the OS X machine or remotely through Apple Remote Desktop.
Because Mac Users are trained to look past the flaws and defects in Apple products...
Most people with Macs at home have to use PCs at work. All the people I know in that category can't stand PCs through experience, not by training or brainwashing or propaganda. Most of them have also [fairly] recently switched to a Mac at home after having used PCs exclusively for many years. You can't even give them a PC anymore. It really is that different.
...do you think that those commercials are an accurate display of the Mac vs. PC world?
The ad with the cart full of sick PCs is occasionally pretty accurate.
I don't object to the iPhone so much as to the people who use them with all the demonstrative gusto of a poodle with a new hat.
Love the visual - and you're right about not being big city. Around here (Northern Virginia) people just use the iPhone as phones and PDAs like any other - but there's still a perception they're flaunting the phone by the have-nots. No, they're just using their phone and it goes back in the shirt pocket when they're done. However, I recognize the dynamic of actual flaunting - remembering the early days of cell phones, pagers and whatnot. People would put garage door openers on their belt to look important.
Equally poodlish are people with one of the many iPhone wannabe devices with a crudely inferior facsimile of the UI and pathetic underpinnings. I don't know which is worse - the customer or the company that made the device.
Now the iPhone interest seems to almost completely fallen off the radar.
The iPhone 3G has ten times the interest of iPhone v1 in the U.K.
Don't be too rough on the boy until he's actually used one and still says those things.
If it's true, however, our OPEC friends might need to acquire a taste for sand.
Absolutely. There's a trust factor in keeping your WiFi open, rationalizing "oh, what could possibly go wrong" and you'd be largely accurate. It'll do the job for all the intended parties and another "visitor" in the next house or sitting in his car won't hurt a thing. That's true for practically all instances of open WiFi.
In this litigious society with prying law enforcement, recent laws written to nearly resemble entrapment and enormously stiff penalties, I've locked all my WAPs down against the casual driveby surfer. I don't want someone file sharing or surfing the rude corners of the Internet through my WAPs and have the RIAA SWAT team or FBI show up to arrest ME.
If I wanted to do those things, you can bet I'll park in front of someone else's house.
The users certainly aren't malicious - they're either clueless or don't see the harm. When [malicious] people start pulling into their parking lot to download kiddie porn or get all their TPB work done, guess who's gonna get dragged out into the street in the middle of the night by the Authorities? Some day, they're going to do that to the wrong person and all legal hell will break loose.
Something big has to happen before everyone realizes an open WiFi connection is the electronic equivalent of standing on the street corner bent over with your shorts down to your ankles. No thanks.
When I read "This paper from Microsoft Research..." I thought... oh yeah, they're in Cupertino.
Making math errors at blazing speeds...
This is reminiscent of the car built by Messerschmidt after WWII. It was really an enclosed motorcycle with exactly the same form factor.
Food is becoming extinct as well. We're starting to burn everything we grow.
Wannabe internet
Really. You can get 56 kilobits-per-second at home now.
All Mac users I know dual boot Windows
Not to be combative, most Mac users I know (about 70 out of 100) got rid of their Windows machines completely - and very few of those wish to ever see Windows again. Six of them have Windows on their Macs for specific applications but rarely launch it.
As to allowing OS X on generic hardware... anyone really interested in doing this has already built a hackintosh.
Although Vista has crushed itself, I'd also like to see a little cooperation from Apple to start migrating their OS to other hardware. Unless Apple plans on creating every possible form factor of computer, opening up the OS is the only way to sharply penetrate the rest of the market.
Oh sure. NOW this comes out after I just finished that ugly job. Next year.
They are. Any script kiddie could write a VBS script that essentially said "replicate myself to the Outlook address book then delete everything on the local hard drive" and Windows would happily follow those instructions without question. Hell, you wouldn't even need to preview or open the email for it to kick in. At least OS X hacks take a few brain cells to figure out - and have a loooooong way to go before reaching 140,000 deadly Windows vulnerabilities. They might eventually get one to work.
MS-SQL databases killed by worms - IIS servers being infected and distributing self-propagating viruses through IE visitors - Outlook advertising millions of address books - zombie PC all over the world saturating the Internet with spam - Word documents infecting every Normal file it encountered... Not one human needed to respond to any of that. What we've got is a global Windows mess on our hands that's been going on for a decade. Shame on Microsoft.
Here, someone sees a set of theoretical vulnerabilities for OS X (and some very limited reported sightings) that mostly require someone at the keyboard with the administrator password to activate them. Not bad considering OS X has been out and exposed to the same Internet for nine years (yes, I used OS X 10.0 Server). As per previous posts, that's just stupid users. Far different from the dopy non-security of classic Windows. As an IT guy, I got paid a lot to endlessly fix Windows specific problems. That doesn't excuse their existence. Now that I'm old and lazy, I've deployed Macs everywhere I can because I DON'T NEED TO FIX THEM ALL THE TIME.