So there are more exploits against Windows than OS X because of OS market share, but fewer exploits against Apache than IIS causing Apache's greater market share. (On occasions when I've been involved, general reliability, ease of use, and price point all weighed heavily in Apache's favor. The usual assumption being that aggressive patching would nullify any differences in exploitability.)
Assuming your observation is accurate, the long-term effect on OS X sales vis a vis Windows sales is left as an exercise for the investor.
The difference here is that Apple has to be far more consumer savvy than Microsoft. A mistake that would cost Microsoft less than a billion in lobbying and lawyers could slice away the famed reality distortion field and kill 30 years of carefully crafted reputation.
For Steve Jobs, the nightmare is to wake up one morning with a street cred among consumers equivalent to Bill Gates. A genuine disadvantage.
Speaking of utterly unimpressive, Read TFA. InformationWeek != Macworld.
InformationWeek is a long standing IT periodical that is not editorially tied to any one vendor.
Macworld and the various Windows XXX publications can reasonably be expected to make a case for their own platforms, but will point out at times where the competition is doing something better.
The feature that TFA latches on to as the key failure of Vista is the implicit surprise in Vista that something the user tried actually worked. Plug in a USB device, get a dialog box. Connect to a network, get a dialog box. And my favorite, the Word button that wants you to stop everything to tell you what it does because there was absolutely no better way imaginable to convey the button's functionality. (You would think that whole dancing paperclip fiasco would made an impression on someone somewhere in Redmond. Perhaps the fact that they 1) haven't added a feature to Word in a decade worth paying for an upgrade and 2) have, thanks to 1), trained longtime users to simply catalog the breakage in new versions rather than explore new features which have proven to be of limited or negative value (like the grand unity between numbered lists and numbered paragraphs that rendered numbered paragraphs totally unusable in the 21st Century).)
If a bully is that easily "threatened," then he needs to reconsider his future as a bully.
In the range of hominid threat/response vectors, this is phenomenally mild, indirect response with a reasonable chance of resolving the threat without further escalation. In fact, the response is only discernible as such in the context of the bullying. No bullying, no implicit threat in the response. If the bullying persists, the bully can be fired or otherwise neutralized.
Attempts at a "therapeutic" approach can be much more problematic, interpreted as weakness or provocation, unnecessarily neutralize the bullying behavior, wasteful of company resources, and can extend the conflict and destroy team morale. Escalated territorialism and intimidation is a common result. The approach taken in the case should be determined by a serious assessment of all reasonable options, the individual in question, and the team dynamic.
The hard part for a manager comes when someone from a very aggressive environment (say, professional football) tries to transition to an office existence. The guy had a heart the size of Texas, knew his stuff technically, did good work and had leadership skills, but that aggressive personality just didn't play the same in an office context. I've worked on teams where he would click right in and I've worked on teams that would come apart very quickly with him in the mix.
If there is one, it will be downloaded and appear with the other album materials in your iTunes library. I have found that new albums are more likely to have the notes than back catalog items.
In Virginia, that last Senate race that tipped controlled hinged on votes cast in populous Fairfax County, a Washington, DC suburb and a pure digital jurisdiction where there is zero risk of detecting fraud. Counting for Fairfax didn't conclude until it was obvious just how many votes would be needed to switch the result. Pretty slow for an all digital county. I'm not saying the election (and the US Senate) was stolen in Fairfax, I'm saying that, it being an all-digital county, we will never know.
Ok, I'm not calling the PC crowd smart, but when they say the a PC cannot do anything that is remotly "entertaining" yes, spreadsheets can be made on macs too. And when they have to port Microsoft Office, because their software sucks.... its the irony. and anyone who chooses AOL, or MSN, needs to get a mac....
Yes, Steve worries about having Office available on his platform. But I've converted most of the home user crowd and some middle managers to OpenOffice on the PC or NeoOffice on the Mac. Not for everyone, but much better for those likelier to be victimized by Microsoft Automation than to profit by it.
I'm sorry, it's the classic marketing mistake. Apple's competitors make the same one when they market their "not-an-iPods". You don't build market share by capitalizing on the fact that you don't have market share. In other words, you don't insult your potential market. Macintosh has a lot of image they can sell, sell simply, and sell well, and yet they focus on the PC's problems?
Just because a large portion of Mac users seem to spend every waking hour mocking Windows doesn't mean that obsession is marketable (or is even what sensible Mac Fans do).
Secret of marketing: Nobody identifies with the butt of a marketing campaign, including the "PC" character in these commercial. The bald, plumpish, corrected vision types with their carefully engineered VBA-enhanced spreadsheet applications at work cheerfully latch on to iPhoto slideshows with musical accompaniment that work out of the box and make their wives and kids smile.
Only a few bitter "mom's basement" types actually latch on to loser-types in advertising.
How many Mac users even care at this point what the PC offers?
1) After being 0wn3d. Again.
2) After having to buy a desktop full of shareware to get the functionality Mac provides out of the box. Again.
3) After having their 6 year-old sign up for MSN/AOL because "it was on the desktop."
4) After the latest Microsoft updates started up all those insecure services. Again. For the seventh year running.
5) After being asked for the millionth time by PC users, "what did you use to put together that great slideshow of the cub scout soapbox derby?"
The Mac/PC campaign uses humor to deflate the Microsoft/Dell "juggernaut", and remind that there is an alternative. A humorous nod to their daily frustrations resonates pretty well with consumers, combining that with the implicit promise that Apple does it different seems like a pretty smart campaign to me.
Microsoft also, in keeping with their philosophy of empowering script kiddies recruiting zombie spambots, declined to implement the Applet "sandbox" architecture in their JVM. The sandbox prevents unauthorized access by Java applets downloaded from the Internet to files and tasks on the users' machine. Microsoft disdained such measures.
Yeah, and they don't work correctly. Just yesterday I was helping a person at work with their code. They had a Java program that was doing an LDAP query. It worked fine on other machines but not on one of the test machines. Turns out some JRE called Kaffe was in the path before the Sun JRE. Changing the path to the java executable fixed things.
Ya gotta stick to that bug-free payware, bud!!! Yeah, that's the ticket!!!
(In payware, your license agreement classifies that stuff as "features".)
Apple users are not encouraged to turn off the administrator account, indeed, as the system is configured by default, they're encouraged to use it as their main account. No warnings are given that this is bad practice, and no user manual that might document this is provided with the operating system.
Find a topic you know something about before posting. As every OS X owner on/. undoubtedly knows, Apple users are not presented with any option to run as an administrator/root/superuser/God and have to be knowledgeable in the ways of BSD-flavored UNIX to make an administrator account accessible (which is what they would have to do to mimic a Microsoft standard level of vulnerability on an OS X box). The initial "owner" account, and other accounts designated later as users are added, can be designated as "Admin" accounts, allowing them to add and remove users, install applications that require Admin access to install, etcetera. The system allows designated Admin accounts to perform privileged functions typically after a re-authentication step in which the user enters their password to empower a specific system task to execute a privileged function.
Unlike Windows, where outside of rarified, highly managed IT environments a user runs and usually must run only privileged tasks to operate effectively. BTW, unlike Windows the OS X security model and many best practices are well documented on the Apple site in the developer areas (ADC includes a free membership level that provides access to some wonderful papers on the OS X tasking model, security issues, etc.), and there is an excellent and surprisingly short piece by the US National Security Agency on OS X security issues and recommended procedures http://www.nsa.gov/snac/downloads_macX.cfm?MenuID= scg10.3.1.1.
A user is slightly safer running in a non-Admin OS X account than otherwise, and in a professional environment that may be a reasonable precaution for some organizations. Were Steve Jobs to suddenly dictate that his consumer-level customers must operate with knowledge, precision, and accuracy of IT professionals, maintaining and using a completely separate account for performing any administrative functions, to achieve an acceptable level of safety on what is already the safest consumer platform in the world, he would be an idiot. (And he is not an idiot.)
As far as the well-being of OS X users, they are better served by a serious and knowledgeable explanation of these issues and their real levels of risk than the usual FUD.
Actually, you make a good list there. Michael Crichton's Andromeda Strain, both the novel and the movie, combined a tight A-novel/A-movie sensibility with science fiction without completely losing the audience the way the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey did, helping science fiction overcome its B-Movie reputation in the mass culture. (Planet of the Apes and Omega Man were fine adventure vehicles for Charlton Heston, but Andromeda Strain was relevant in a more immediate way.)
Stephen King is a good enough writer to have convinced me to read Salem's Lot and the Shining long after I had lost interest in genre horror and fantasy, his realism was top-notch in Salem's Lot. His long suffering at the hands of screen adapters reputedly ended with the Stand, so perhaps I'll watch that some day.
L'Engle and Bradbury and Heinlein were the best of their day. "Great Works" is a game for academics trying to bring what they consider best forward, and it changes radically and routinely. In High School we read Moby Dick, the Scarlet Letter, and the Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The pantheon of literature changes some each year, but it is a messy and perverse process, not to be mistaken for a mechanism for personal validation. Every year something abominable slips in and something core and critical is lost. Literary fashion and clothing fashion both enjoy heights and valleys. In the 1950's, only a handful of academic specialists had spent any time on the Romantics for about a hundred years, their opus of incomplete works, their subversive hedonism in life and on page, the classicism/paganism. And fantasy was routinely disguised or passed off as science fiction to avoid giving offense to religious elements, with a fraction of the titles released per year that we see now. Suddenly pot, LSD, Stranger in a Strange Land, Lord of the Rings, were front and center and the Romantics were suddenly campus favorites.
Whenever you look at anyone's pantheon, ask the following:
1. Who picked the works? There is always an agenda. Take the Bible, take Catcher in the Rye, take Bug Jack Barron, take the Satanic Verses, why were these things included or excluded? What would you include or exclude?
2. What viewpoint do they represent? Are they trying to sell me something unsavory? (I have met too many narcissistic ideologues that cheerfully hijack a course to bully students into echoing a bankrupt position to achieve a passing grade. I believe in giving everyone a hearing, but forced conversions are Muhammed's folly, and the notion that the curriculum planned is of no import compared to their unapproved and uncataloged replacement requires some examination. A good literature teacher will draw out student debate on a literary position, and only reluctantly put a position forward themselves and only when the discussion has gone horribly wrong.)
3. What other competing pantheons are out there? What does Berkeley do? What does the University of Chicago do? What about Hitler, Stalin, Mao? What about C. S. Lewis, Maya Angelou, or Victor Davis Hanson? Do they align more closely with my core beliefs? Most people actually do have core beliefs, and any pantheon that is aggressively or subversively in opposition to those beliefs will find opposition in the engaged reader.
4. Most of all, people should read what they enjoy. I enjoy comic books and I have translated Chaucer hundreds of lines of Chaucer orally for a class as easily and accurately as one might read a passage from a Star Wars novelization. I have enjoyed treatments of Beowulf by John Gardner, Crichton, and Niven/Pournelle/Barnes. If you have acquaintances too rude and narcissistic to be polite on matters of literary conviction, you might want to consider changing friends. Some people you meet in life will be Hitlerites or Stalinists or Jihadists or Maoists, and it won't always be obvious which is which off the bat.
Before I concern myself with whether someone validates me in some ar
PurpleMonkeyDishwasher, isn't that KPMG's new name? SONY Corporation isn't likely to run away from the brand unless their customers come to understand what a gross violation of trust this moronic and dangerous DRM approach was. Most of the victims will likely never connect their outcome (stolen credit card numbers, mysterious bank wire transfers, pedophile targeting, spyware, zombie spambotism, etc.) to SONY. The.0001% that are/. regulars might make the connection, or an anti-corporation zealot with too much time on their hands, but the world at large is clueless about what a rootkit is and what it does. And that is why SONY thinks they can minimize and hand wave the whole episode away and EFF has helped them with a rushed and bogus "class-action" settlement. (EFF blew away a decade worth of good will and occasional contribution in my household with this one. I'm part of a family, and spend too much time protecting perfectly bright and accomplished friends and family members from the negligence and predations of "consumer" technology to "give a pass" to a company that schemes up new ways to help the black hats. That "settlement" serves SONY and EFF and noone else.)
But running away from the brand is not the only way to insulate other divisions and protect the brand. Scourging the rogue division would be a start. SONY Electronics issuing an explicit assurance that they are much to savvy and customer oriented to shoot themselves in the foot like that, and now that issues have surfaced are providing expert consultants to those doofus SONY-BMG people might also be a part of a sound get well policy. It is in the interest of all of the divisions to protect the name. And, yes, the CEO and CTO at SONY-BMG should be gone. It will only take a handful of discoveries of real victims that even "may" include Sony DRM as a contributing factor to drive a stake right through the heart of the SONY brand name. They can minimize the risk by executive firings or by selling the SONY-BMG operation to Rhino, or some other proven content provider. They can minimize the risk by moving proactively to mitigate the damage done.
As long as SONY takes the "They're too stupid to understand so we can slime out of this" approach I will cheerfully take the "educate folks at every opportunity in every venue" approach.
SONY is a brand name. Brand names carry with them reputation, that is their entire function. When Toshiba made a decision to sell US submarine propeller secrets to the Soviets in the late 70's, or Nestle launched a campaign to convince third world mothers that formula was better than breast feeding, those brands were tarnished and they stopped finding their way into my purchasing decisions. "Sony" could have decided to disassociate the brand from the rootkit decision in any number of ways, they have not. As for Sony-BMG, there are some wonderful training films available regarding the appropriate procedure for atonement that should resonate culturally for them. Search the Torrent under "John+Belushi+Samurai".
With this settlement, EFF has established itself as just one more shyster looking to serve "the little guy" by representing him, unasked and unwanted, to an abusive corporation. The real outcome, of course, is to muddy the waters for serious litigants and draw out their own cases with issues arising from sham class action settlements.
Neither EFF nor Sony will see another dime from this household.
Except that the "stupidity" just happened to improve the effectiveness of their DRM strategy at the expense of their customer's security and information safety. Anyone still buying the intent argument when they installed their software regardless of the customer response to their license agreement? The EFF settlement is a joke, a serious blow to any prestige that EFF has built up over the years, and any prosecutor worth a damn will be filing charges.
In any event, the last (of many) Sony brand products have been purchased by this household.
Given the huge variety of requirements and configurations in the field (and the reluctance of good security people to engage in public debate on/divulgence of their security measures) many and simultaneous competitions would be required. No vendor (other than Steve Jobs with his awesome Mark 20 Reality Distortion Field with Inverted Takeovers and Landings) would be viewed as a credible host for a competition targeting their own products, or anyone else's for that matter. By extension, an agent hired or otherwise compensated by the company would have credibility issues as well, requiring an awful lot of prestige points to overcome the whiff of chicanery. I've seen things of this sort in bake-offs associated with Federal procurements (usually around easily measured stuff like transaction processing database performance), and in big-deal trade studies commissioned by Fortune 500s. In a vendor on vendor competition the opportunities that arise for legal action are tremendous. And, of course, by the time you've worked through all the issues and staged something, your CIO shows up to work and shuts you down or some patent officer passes a slew of new patents on the use of binary algebras in electronic devices and a small Virginia company bilks the planet for trillions of dollars and requires all such devices to recite one hour of Vogon poetry per day. (Oops, I've overdosed on my/hype today, I need to take my/lithium and put my/feet up.)
Cool idea, though. So who can afford to take all that on and has the motivation and doesn't have a dog in the fight? Assuming that Bono turns us down, of course. (That whole red & black iPod thing, might be a problem, somebody might throw a chair or something, and Africa is on line 2...)
I don't have any quantitative data, but from my adventures with the Federal Government, open source UN*X OSes are well represented in the advanced technology systems I've personally encountered. Reliability, predictability, and modifiability being the key attractions cited.
The night editor apparently nicked the part in TFA where ninja hackers in Austin are working on a linux port. (I think his wife is a BSD bigot, the NetBSD port is way behind on their battlement device drivers.)
Develop? When they can just buy them from those thirsty nuke-happy desert dwellers for a few metric tons? Better still, hold on to those precious hydrogen reserves for that big clean fusion market that's about to crush the petrodollar flat. With ocean levels dropping from the overuse of water for hydrogen fuel, we'll need those massive land-based reserves to avoid drying out the Chesapeake and the Mediterranean before 2200. (In the new economy, unthinkable just five years before, we fuel up once a month from the garden hose and OPEC launches a massive marketing campaign on the virtues of classic cars. At the outrageous price of $5 a gallon, the high schoolers have nicknamed it "Evian Flambé" and use it to liven up their Independence Day celebrations.)
Strangely, you also only see Cutler as having worked with VMS, when he worked with a lot of *nix environments as well. Additionally you are discounting the rest of the entire NT development team at the time, that primarily DID come from the *nix world.
As for NT being derived from *nix I would argue the opposite. Cutler and his team very much had the go ahead to build a *nix framework for Windows at the time, this is why MS held the Xenix license in case that is the direction the NT Team decided to go.
Perhaps I can help clarify to you where previous responders may have become confused. In the first quoted paragraph above, argues that you never said NT was based on *NIX whatsoever. In the second paragraph you elaborate that the NT development team did primarily come from the *NIX world (presumably that experience making some sort of contribution). Then (third paragraph) you reverse direction again arguing that NT is not derived from *NIX, only to bring up the Xenix license and product line and engineering staff there. You are so all over the map that you've been sighted on six continents.
As a VMS and UNIX-experienced developer who managed the deployment of NT4.0 for a Government client back in the day, and as someone who has written more than the occasional kernel call, the product released was very much a next generation VMS and not at all UNIX-like. From the pessimistic file locking scheme to the interprocess communications to the heavy process model NT was heavily VMS-biased. (The single-threaded BSD network stack really showed up the new process model. After all, what user will ever need more than one network thread? One network hiccup and it was reboot time.) The NT command-line experience was far inferior, and VMS, which did very well with the security folks, was never saddled with "the registry," which all these years later still hasn't been matched with a workable security model to prevent users from having to run in admin mode so that their registry "smart" apps can function. (That was "right around the corner" in '97, next release, sure thing.)
I wrote the user orientation for the rollout. My management was quite concerned that I spent a page on disabling the dancing paperclip in the Office apps. A month after the first rollout, I got an attaboy from operations on that based on the number of help calls it resolved.
The bottom line is that NT was recognizably VMS influenced and was no more *NIX influenced than Mac OS7 or TOPS10, regardless of who worked on it. *NIX has not exactly stood still in the areas of kernel technology and security architecture. The NT successor platforms today can be secured to a very high degree by dedicated IT security professionals with access to vendor consultants and a sound network security strategy. And no developers inside the DMZ. No unsecured network jacks. No user operable Floppy/CD/DVD drives No wireless. Metal detector for splicing equipment (and any other equipment) at the door. Collect those "cell phones." Definitely no flash ROM drives. Oh, and none of that open source stuff. Our MS account manager says Linus Torvalds is Osama's son-in-law, but thinks that running ActiveX is A-OK.
Essentially, this whole herd immunity thing is going to exist on OSX until it becomes an issue. There was nothing that the Native Americans could have done to prepare themselves for smallpox, except wait for it to come. In the same way, there's nothing that OSX can do to reasonably protect themselves now.
Actually, there is no shortage of lower level "incursions" at the PUP (probably unwanted program) level on OS X. Fortunately, there are some pretty good tools available for catching and quashing them. My favorite comes straight from Apple. While I applaud overall the commitment that Steve Jobs and Apple have shown to security, iTune's nasty habit of feeding my listening decisions to a "2o7" address for capture and processing by a third part vendor represents a significant lapse in this area. Far from being an opt-in, Steve and Apple seem to think they have a right to this information without consultation. I blocked this for years without even knowing what it was. Currently, Little Miss Snitch is cheerfully quashing that bit of mischief, and I block the cookies in FireFox.
Omniture operates 2o7.net, and provides their defense with and opt-out here. iTunes attempts to send information to 2o7 whenever I open iTunes and whenever I play a song on iTunes, clearly exceeding the parameters of the 2o7 program as described in their defense. A recent security bulletin on 2o7 indicated that Omniture was transitioning their services to piggyback on the clients' domain name, probably leading me to replace iTunes and give up using the iTunes Music Store.
None of this can be compared to the mindless zombie spambot hell offered by some other vendors, of course, but this game of cops and robbers is still being played at some level on OS X. It is not quite time to canonize Steve as the patron saint of security and privacy.
I remember Steve announcing Safari, and assuring the assembled faithful that his engineers were working by arrangement with IE engineers to assure a high level of compatibility with the "industry standard". He has been good to his word, Safari security issues tend to remind one of IE. Imagine how hard it must be to be a good netizen while competing for compatibility with IE. Real Mac security relies on third party and open source replacement software like FireFox, but not to nearly the same extent. He also ships Tiger with a Microsoft Office trial edition, significantly increasing the number of known exploits available on his platform. Mac users can significantly improve system security by deleting such items.
Finally, the commercial vendor I was using for virus scan proved better at charging the credit card than delivering a working product license, bit ClamXav has proven a worthwhile way detect and eliminate the limited malware that actually finds its way to my system. The only time I notice a virus scan on my iBook is if I am playing a DVD. Nothing has shown up so far (that I have been able to detect) that represents a threat on an OS X system with no Microsoft products installed. I really don't mind using a platform that has too few security concerns to attract serious interest from all those vendors thriving on other platforms.
Folks who migrate to OS X for security reasons strike me as more likely, not less, to attend to these concerns. The unwary herd is happily playing the latest FPS blissfully unaware of their dual role as zombie spambot to the world while their credit card accounts accumulate mysterious charges and their life savings is wired to the Caymen Islands.
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So there are more exploits against Windows than OS X because of OS market share, but fewer exploits against Apache than IIS causing Apache's greater market share. (On occasions when I've been involved, general reliability, ease of use, and price point all weighed heavily in Apache's favor. The usual assumption being that aggressive patching would nullify any differences in exploitability.)
Assuming your observation is accurate, the long-term effect on OS X sales vis a vis Windows sales is left as an exercise for the investor.
The difference here is that Apple has to be far more consumer savvy than Microsoft. A mistake that would cost Microsoft less than a billion in lobbying and lawyers could slice away the famed reality distortion field and kill 30 years of carefully crafted reputation.
For Steve Jobs, the nightmare is to wake up one morning with a street cred among consumers equivalent to Bill Gates. A genuine disadvantage.
Speaking of utterly unimpressive, Read TFA. InformationWeek != Macworld.
InformationWeek is a long standing IT periodical that is not editorially tied to any one vendor.
Macworld and the various Windows XXX publications can reasonably be expected to make a case for their own platforms, but will point out at times where the competition is doing something better.
The feature that TFA latches on to as the key failure of Vista is the implicit surprise in Vista that something the user tried actually worked. Plug in a USB device, get a dialog box. Connect to a network, get a dialog box. And my favorite, the Word button that wants you to stop everything to tell you what it does because there was absolutely no better way imaginable to convey the button's functionality. (You would think that whole dancing paperclip fiasco would made an impression on someone somewhere in Redmond. Perhaps the fact that they 1) haven't added a feature to Word in a decade worth paying for an upgrade and 2) have, thanks to 1), trained longtime users to simply catalog the breakage in new versions rather than explore new features which have proven to be of limited or negative value (like the grand unity between numbered lists and numbered paragraphs that rendered numbered paragraphs totally unusable in the 21st Century).)
Big RTFA.
If a bully is that easily "threatened," then he needs to reconsider his future as a bully.
In the range of hominid threat/response vectors, this is phenomenally mild, indirect response with a reasonable chance of resolving the threat without further escalation. In fact, the response is only discernible as such in the context of the bullying. No bullying, no implicit threat in the response. If the bullying persists, the bully can be fired or otherwise neutralized.
Attempts at a "therapeutic" approach can be much more problematic, interpreted as weakness or provocation, unnecessarily neutralize the bullying behavior, wasteful of company resources, and can extend the conflict and destroy team morale. Escalated territorialism and intimidation is a common result. The approach taken in the case should be determined by a serious assessment of all reasonable options, the individual in question, and the team dynamic.
The hard part for a manager comes when someone from a very aggressive environment (say, professional football) tries to transition to an office existence. The guy had a heart the size of Texas, knew his stuff technically, did good work and had leadership skills, but that aggressive personality just didn't play the same in an office context. I've worked on teams where he would click right in and I've worked on teams that would come apart very quickly with him in the mix.
If there is one, it will be downloaded and appear with the other album materials in your iTunes library. I have found that new albums are more likely to have the notes than back catalog items.
In Virginia, that last Senate race that tipped controlled hinged on votes cast in populous Fairfax County, a Washington, DC suburb and a pure digital jurisdiction where there is zero risk of detecting fraud. Counting for Fairfax didn't conclude until it was obvious just how many votes would be needed to switch the result. Pretty slow for an all digital county. I'm not saying the election (and the US Senate) was stolen in Fairfax, I'm saying that, it being an all-digital county, we will never know.
And the other major carry-over characters are Gandalf, whose "age" is very, very, very old and Gollum, who is CGI anyway.
Ok, I'm not calling the PC crowd smart, but when they say the a PC cannot do anything that is remotly "entertaining" yes, spreadsheets can be made on macs too. And when they have to port Microsoft Office, because their software sucks.... its the irony. and anyone who chooses AOL, or MSN, needs to get a mac....
Yes, Steve worries about having Office available on his platform. But I've converted most of the home user crowd and some middle managers to OpenOffice on the PC or NeoOffice on the Mac. Not for everyone, but much better for those likelier to be victimized by Microsoft Automation than to profit by it.
I'm sorry, it's the classic marketing mistake. Apple's competitors make the same one when they market their "not-an-iPods". You don't build market share by capitalizing on the fact that you don't have market share.
In other words, you don't insult your potential market. Macintosh has a lot of image they can sell, sell simply, and sell well, and yet they focus on the PC's problems?
Just because a large portion of Mac users seem to spend every waking hour mocking Windows doesn't mean that obsession is marketable (or is even what sensible Mac Fans do).
Secret of marketing: Nobody identifies with the butt of a marketing campaign, including the "PC" character in these commercial. The bald, plumpish, corrected vision types with their carefully engineered VBA-enhanced spreadsheet applications at work cheerfully latch on to iPhoto slideshows with musical accompaniment that work out of the box and make their wives and kids smile.
Only a few bitter "mom's basement" types actually latch on to loser-types in advertising.
How many Mac users even care at this point what the PC offers?
1) After being 0wn3d. Again.
2) After having to buy a desktop full of shareware to get the functionality Mac provides out of the box. Again.
3) After having their 6 year-old sign up for MSN/AOL because "it was on the desktop."
4) After the latest Microsoft updates started up all those insecure services. Again. For the seventh year running.
5) After being asked for the millionth time by PC users, "what did you use to put together that great slideshow of the cub scout soapbox derby?"
The Mac/PC campaign uses humor to deflate the Microsoft/Dell "juggernaut", and remind that there is an alternative. A humorous nod to their daily frustrations resonates pretty well with consumers, combining that with the implicit promise that Apple does it different seems like a pretty smart campaign to me.
Microsoft also, in keeping with their philosophy of empowering script kiddies recruiting zombie spambots, declined to implement the Applet "sandbox" architecture in their JVM. The sandbox prevents unauthorized access by Java applets downloaded from the Internet to files and tasks on the users' machine. Microsoft disdained such measures.
We already have open source Java
Yeah, and they don't work correctly. Just yesterday I was helping a person at work with their code. They had a Java program that was doing an LDAP query. It worked fine on other machines but not on one of the test machines. Turns out some JRE called Kaffe was in the path before the Sun JRE. Changing the path to the java executable fixed things.
Ya gotta stick to that bug-free payware, bud!!! Yeah, that's the ticket!!!
(In payware, your license agreement classifies that stuff as "features".)
Apple users are not encouraged to turn off the administrator account, indeed, as the system is configured by default, they're encouraged to use it as their main account. No warnings are given that this is bad practice, and no user manual that might document this is provided with the operating system.
/. undoubtedly knows, Apple users are not presented with any option to run as an administrator/root/superuser/God and have to be knowledgeable in the ways of BSD-flavored UNIX to make an administrator account accessible (which is what they would have to do to mimic a Microsoft standard level of vulnerability on an OS X box). The initial "owner" account, and other accounts designated later as users are added, can be designated as "Admin" accounts, allowing them to add and remove users, install applications that require Admin access to install, etcetera. The system allows designated Admin accounts to perform privileged functions typically after a re-authentication step in which the user enters their password to empower a specific system task to execute a privileged function.
= scg10.3.1.1.
Find a topic you know something about before posting. As every OS X owner on
Unlike Windows, where outside of rarified, highly managed IT environments a user runs and usually must run only privileged tasks to operate effectively. BTW, unlike Windows the OS X security model and many best practices are well documented on the Apple site in the developer areas (ADC includes a free membership level that provides access to some wonderful papers on the OS X tasking model, security issues, etc.), and there is an excellent and surprisingly short piece by the US National Security Agency on OS X security issues and recommended procedures http://www.nsa.gov/snac/downloads_macX.cfm?MenuID
A user is slightly safer running in a non-Admin OS X account than otherwise, and in a professional environment that may be a reasonable precaution for some organizations. Were Steve Jobs to suddenly dictate that his consumer-level customers must operate with knowledge, precision, and accuracy of IT professionals, maintaining and using a completely separate account for performing any administrative functions, to achieve an acceptable level of safety on what is already the safest consumer platform in the world, he would be an idiot. (And he is not an idiot.)
As far as the well-being of OS X users, they are better served by a serious and knowledgeable explanation of these issues and their real levels of risk than the usual FUD.
Actually, you make a good list there. Michael Crichton's Andromeda Strain, both the novel and the movie, combined a tight A-novel/A-movie sensibility with science fiction without completely losing the audience the way the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey did, helping science fiction overcome its B-Movie reputation in the mass culture. (Planet of the Apes and Omega Man were fine adventure vehicles for Charlton Heston, but Andromeda Strain was relevant in a more immediate way.)
Stephen King is a good enough writer to have convinced me to read Salem's Lot and the Shining long after I had lost interest in genre horror and fantasy, his realism was top-notch in Salem's Lot. His long suffering at the hands of screen adapters reputedly ended with the Stand, so perhaps I'll watch that some day.
L'Engle and Bradbury and Heinlein were the best of their day. "Great Works" is a game for academics trying to bring what they consider best forward, and it changes radically and routinely. In High School we read Moby Dick, the Scarlet Letter, and the Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The pantheon of literature changes some each year, but it is a messy and perverse process, not to be mistaken for a mechanism for personal validation. Every year something abominable slips in and something core and critical is lost. Literary fashion and clothing fashion both enjoy heights and valleys. In the 1950's, only a handful of academic specialists had spent any time on the Romantics for about a hundred years, their opus of incomplete works, their subversive hedonism in life and on page, the classicism/paganism. And fantasy was routinely disguised or passed off as science fiction to avoid giving offense to religious elements, with a fraction of the titles released per year that we see now. Suddenly pot, LSD, Stranger in a Strange Land, Lord of the Rings, were front and center and the Romantics were suddenly campus favorites.
Whenever you look at anyone's pantheon, ask the following:
1. Who picked the works? There is always an agenda. Take the Bible, take Catcher in the Rye, take Bug Jack Barron, take the Satanic Verses, why were these things included or excluded? What would you include or exclude?
2. What viewpoint do they represent? Are they trying to sell me something unsavory? (I have met too many narcissistic ideologues that cheerfully hijack a course to bully students into echoing a bankrupt position to achieve a passing grade. I believe in giving everyone a hearing, but forced conversions are Muhammed's folly, and the notion that the curriculum planned is of no import compared to their unapproved and uncataloged replacement requires some examination. A good literature teacher will draw out student debate on a literary position, and only reluctantly put a position forward themselves and only when the discussion has gone horribly wrong.)
3. What other competing pantheons are out there? What does Berkeley do? What does the University of Chicago do? What about Hitler, Stalin, Mao? What about C. S. Lewis, Maya Angelou, or Victor Davis Hanson? Do they align more closely with my core beliefs? Most people actually do have core beliefs, and any pantheon that is aggressively or subversively in opposition to those beliefs will find opposition in the engaged reader.
4. Most of all, people should read what they enjoy. I enjoy comic books and I have translated Chaucer hundreds of lines of Chaucer orally for a class as easily and accurately as one might read a passage from a Star Wars novelization. I have enjoyed treatments of Beowulf by John Gardner, Crichton, and Niven/Pournelle/Barnes. If you have acquaintances too rude and narcissistic to be polite on matters of literary conviction, you might want to consider changing friends. Some people you meet in life will be Hitlerites or Stalinists or Jihadists or Maoists, and it won't always be obvious which is which off the bat.
Before I concern myself with whether someone validates me in some ar
PurpleMonkeyDishwasher, isn't that KPMG's new name? SONY Corporation isn't likely to run away from the brand unless their customers come to understand what a gross violation of trust this moronic and dangerous DRM approach was. Most of the victims will likely never connect their outcome (stolen credit card numbers, mysterious bank wire transfers, pedophile targeting, spyware, zombie spambotism, etc.) to SONY. The .0001% that are /. regulars might make the connection, or an anti-corporation zealot with too much time on their hands, but the world at large is clueless about what a rootkit is and what it does. And that is why SONY thinks they can minimize and hand wave the whole episode away and EFF has helped them with a rushed and bogus "class-action" settlement. (EFF blew away a decade worth of good will and occasional contribution in my household with this one. I'm part of a family, and spend too much time protecting perfectly bright and accomplished friends and family members from the negligence and predations of "consumer" technology to "give a pass" to a company that schemes up new ways to help the black hats. That "settlement" serves SONY and EFF and noone else.)
But running away from the brand is not the only way to insulate other divisions and protect the brand. Scourging the rogue division would be a start. SONY Electronics issuing an explicit assurance that they are much to savvy and customer oriented to shoot themselves in the foot like that, and now that issues have surfaced are providing expert consultants to those doofus SONY-BMG people might also be a part of a sound get well policy. It is in the interest of all of the divisions to protect the name. And, yes, the CEO and CTO at SONY-BMG should be gone. It will only take a handful of discoveries of real victims that even "may" include Sony DRM as a contributing factor to drive a stake right through the heart of the SONY brand name. They can minimize the risk by executive firings or by selling the SONY-BMG operation to Rhino, or some other proven content provider. They can minimize the risk by moving proactively to mitigate the damage done.
As long as SONY takes the "They're too stupid to understand so we can slime out of this" approach I will cheerfully take the "educate folks at every opportunity in every venue" approach.
SONY is a brand name. Brand names carry with them reputation, that is their entire function. When Toshiba made a decision to sell US submarine propeller secrets to the Soviets in the late 70's, or Nestle launched a campaign to convince third world mothers that formula was better than breast feeding, those brands were tarnished and they stopped finding their way into my purchasing decisions. "Sony" could have decided to disassociate the brand from the rootkit decision in any number of ways, they have not. As for Sony-BMG, there are some wonderful training films available regarding the appropriate procedure for atonement that should resonate culturally for them. Search the Torrent under "John+Belushi+Samurai".
Jeez, by this standard Microsoft owes me about $100K just in grandparent services, and Apple's in for at least an iMac.
With this settlement, EFF has established itself as just one more shyster looking to serve "the little guy" by representing him, unasked and unwanted, to an abusive corporation. The real outcome, of course, is to muddy the waters for serious litigants and draw out their own cases with issues arising from sham class action settlements.
Neither EFF nor Sony will see another dime from this household.
Except that the "stupidity" just happened to improve the effectiveness of their DRM strategy at the expense of their customer's security and information safety. Anyone still buying the intent argument when they installed their software regardless of the customer response to their license agreement? The EFF settlement is a joke, a serious blow to any prestige that EFF has built up over the years, and any prosecutor worth a damn will be filing charges.
In any event, the last (of many) Sony brand products have been purchased by this household.
Given the huge variety of requirements and configurations in the field (and the reluctance of good security people to engage in public debate on/divulgence of their security measures) many and simultaneous competitions would be required. No vendor (other than Steve Jobs with his awesome Mark 20 Reality Distortion Field with Inverted Takeovers and Landings) would be viewed as a credible host for a competition targeting their own products, or anyone else's for that matter. By extension, an agent hired or otherwise compensated by the company would have credibility issues as well, requiring an awful lot of prestige points to overcome the whiff of chicanery. I've seen things of this sort in bake-offs associated with Federal procurements (usually around easily measured stuff like transaction processing database performance), and in big-deal trade studies commissioned by Fortune 500s. In a vendor on vendor competition the opportunities that arise for legal action are tremendous. And, of course, by the time you've worked through all the issues and staged something, your CIO shows up to work and shuts you down or some patent officer passes a slew of new patents on the use of binary algebras in electronic devices and a small Virginia company bilks the planet for trillions of dollars and requires all such devices to recite one hour of Vogon poetry per day. (Oops, I've overdosed on my /hype today, I need to take my /lithium and put my /feet up.)
Cool idea, though. So who can afford to take all that on and has the motivation and doesn't have a dog in the fight? Assuming that Bono turns us down, of course. (That whole red & black iPod thing, might be a problem, somebody might throw a chair or something, and Africa is on line 2...)
I don't have any quantitative data, but from my adventures with the Federal Government, open source UN*X OSes are well represented in the advanced technology systems I've personally encountered. Reliability, predictability, and modifiability being the key attractions cited.
The night editor apparently nicked the part in TFA where ninja hackers in Austin are working on a linux port. (I think his wife is a BSD bigot, the NetBSD port is way behind on their battlement device drivers.)
Develop? When they can just buy them from those thirsty nuke-happy desert dwellers for a few metric tons? Better still, hold on to those precious hydrogen reserves for that big clean fusion market that's about to crush the petrodollar flat. With ocean levels dropping from the overuse of water for hydrogen fuel, we'll need those massive land-based reserves to avoid drying out the Chesapeake and the Mediterranean before 2200. (In the new economy, unthinkable just five years before, we fuel up once a month from the garden hose and OPEC launches a massive marketing campaign on the virtues of classic cars. At the outrageous price of $5 a gallon, the high schoolers have nicknamed it "Evian Flambé" and use it to liven up their Independence Day celebrations.)
Hey W., that would be a place in history!
I never said NT was based on *nix whatsoever.
Strangely, you also only see Cutler as having worked with VMS, when he worked with a lot of *nix environments as well. Additionally you are discounting the rest of the entire NT development team at the time, that primarily DID come from the *nix world.
As for NT being derived from *nix I would argue the opposite. Cutler and his team very much had the go ahead to build a *nix framework for Windows at the time, this is why MS held the Xenix license in case that is the direction the NT Team decided to go.
Perhaps I can help clarify to you where previous responders may have become confused. In the first quoted paragraph above, argues that you never said NT was based on *NIX whatsoever. In the second paragraph you elaborate that the NT development team did primarily come from the *NIX world (presumably that experience making some sort of contribution). Then (third paragraph) you reverse direction again arguing that NT is not derived from *NIX, only to bring up the Xenix license and product line and engineering staff there. You are so all over the map that you've been sighted on six continents.
As a VMS and UNIX-experienced developer who managed the deployment of NT4.0 for a Government client back in the day, and as someone who has written more than the occasional kernel call, the product released was very much a next generation VMS and not at all UNIX-like. From the pessimistic file locking scheme to the interprocess communications to the heavy process model NT was heavily VMS-biased. (The single-threaded BSD network stack really showed up the new process model. After all, what user will ever need more than one network thread? One network hiccup and it was reboot time.) The NT command-line experience was far inferior, and VMS, which did very well with the security folks, was never saddled with "the registry," which all these years later still hasn't been matched with a workable security model to prevent users from having to run in admin mode so that their registry "smart" apps can function. (That was "right around the corner" in '97, next release, sure thing.)
I wrote the user orientation for the rollout. My management was quite concerned that I spent a page on disabling the dancing paperclip in the Office apps. A month after the first rollout, I got an attaboy from operations on that based on the number of help calls it resolved.
The bottom line is that NT was recognizably VMS influenced and was no more *NIX influenced than Mac OS7 or TOPS10, regardless of who worked on it. *NIX has not exactly stood still in the areas of kernel technology and security architecture. The NT successor platforms today can be secured to a very high degree by dedicated IT security professionals with access to vendor consultants and a sound network security strategy. And no developers inside the DMZ. No unsecured network jacks. No user operable Floppy/CD/DVD drives No wireless. Metal detector for splicing equipment (and any other equipment) at the door. Collect those "cell phones." Definitely no flash ROM drives. Oh, and none of that open source stuff. Our MS account manager says Linus Torvalds is Osama's son-in-law, but thinks that running ActiveX is A-OK.
Speak of the devil, here is the latest on iTunes and Apple's latest change of direction.
Essentially, this whole herd immunity thing is going to exist on OSX until it becomes an issue. There was nothing that the Native Americans could have done to prepare themselves for smallpox, except wait for it to come. In the same way, there's nothing that OSX can do to reasonably protect themselves now.
Actually, there is no shortage of lower level "incursions" at the PUP (probably unwanted program) level on OS X. Fortunately, there are some pretty good tools available for catching and quashing them. My favorite comes straight from Apple. While I applaud overall the commitment that Steve Jobs and Apple have shown to security, iTune's nasty habit of feeding my listening decisions to a "2o7" address for capture and processing by a third part vendor represents a significant lapse in this area. Far from being an opt-in, Steve and Apple seem to think they have a right to this information without consultation. I blocked this for years without even knowing what it was. Currently, Little Miss Snitch is cheerfully quashing that bit of mischief, and I block the cookies in FireFox.
Omniture operates 2o7.net, and provides their defense with and opt-out here. iTunes attempts to send information to 2o7 whenever I open iTunes and whenever I play a song on iTunes, clearly exceeding the parameters of the 2o7 program as described in their defense. A recent security bulletin on 2o7 indicated that Omniture was transitioning their services to piggyback on the clients' domain name, probably leading me to replace iTunes and give up using the iTunes Music Store.
None of this can be compared to the mindless zombie spambot hell offered by some other vendors, of course, but this game of cops and robbers is still being played at some level on OS X. It is not quite time to canonize Steve as the patron saint of security and privacy.
I remember Steve announcing Safari, and assuring the assembled faithful that his engineers were working by arrangement with IE engineers to assure a high level of compatibility with the "industry standard". He has been good to his word, Safari security issues tend to remind one of IE. Imagine how hard it must be to be a good netizen while competing for compatibility with IE. Real Mac security relies on third party and open source replacement software like FireFox, but not to nearly the same extent. He also ships Tiger with a Microsoft Office trial edition, significantly increasing the number of known exploits available on his platform. Mac users can significantly improve system security by deleting such items.
Finally, the commercial vendor I was using for virus scan proved better at charging the credit card than delivering a working product license, bit ClamXav has proven a worthwhile way detect and eliminate the limited malware that actually finds its way to my system. The only time I notice a virus scan on my iBook is if I am playing a DVD. Nothing has shown up so far (that I have been able to detect) that represents a threat on an OS X system with no Microsoft products installed. I really don't mind using a platform that has too few security concerns to attract serious interest from all those vendors thriving on other platforms.
Folks who migrate to OS X for security reasons strike me as more likely, not less, to attend to these concerns. The unwary herd is happily playing the latest FPS blissfully unaware of their dual role as zombie spambot to the world while their credit card accounts accumulate mysterious charges and their life savings is wired to the Caymen Islands.