Frankly, I don’t like all the round corners and “breathing” lights, the flashy graphics and that half eaten apple should be mighty rotten by now.

Plus, I want to stab one of those Mac users in the eye with a lit cigarette or something…

I was at the talk in person. During the talk, the two researchers repeated, over and over, “We are not doing this because only Macs are vulnerable — we picked the Mac because mac owners are convinced of their own invincibility, and they have those dumb commercials”.

It’s irresponsible that “this scare is overblown”, when Intel released a giant patch for the Centrino to fix the same problem two days before their talk, and most people have not installed this patch.

I’m also really, really skeptical of any quotes/stories about the media about security professionals. For instance, the disclaimer cited in this story doesn’t say that there *aren’t* flaws in the wi-fi drivers of the Macbook — rather, simply that the one used in the demo used a third party card/drivers. Bear in mind that one of the issues with this attack is that it’s conceivably very easy to find a flaw in wi-fi drivers, but much harder to write the kernel code to exploit said flaw.

I would respectively advise that we don’t trumpet this story as being a vindication (or condemnation) of OS X, like Mac fans (or detractors) seem to be doing. Instead, just realize that this work was an important proof of concept of a class of attacks that may affect many (card,driver) versions, but has little to say as a statement about the security posture of any of the operating systems involved.

“R: Microsoft (Tech support) *suggests* a re-installation of the OS so they can get the pitiful person on the other side of the line off the phone. A re-install of the OS in my experience is extremely rarely required.”

That’s surprising considering this:
In a rare discussion about the severity of the Windows malware scourge, a Microsoft security official said businesses should consider investing in an automated process to wipe hard drives and reinstall operating systems as a practical way to recover from malware infestation…..there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit,” Mike Danseglio, program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft, said in a presentation at the InfoSec World conference.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1945808,00.asp

Then there’s this story:
MICROSOFT platforms vice-president Jim Allchin told a recent Windows Vista viewers conference that Steve Ballmer spent almost two days trying to rid a PC of worms, viruses, spyware, malware and severe fragmentation without success….He lumped the thing back to Microsoft’s headquarters and turned it over to a team of top engineers, who spent several days on the machine, finding it infected with more than 100 pieces of malware, some of which were nearly impossible to eradicate…If the man at the top and a team of Microsoft’s best engineers faced defeat, what chance do ordinary punters have of keeping their Windows PCs virus-free?
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,19345228%5E15865%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html

Those ‘poor pitiful’ people must be complete idiots when it comes to dealing with Windows and malware.

Mac folks: Don’t encourage PC people to switch, it just adds junk to our side. I love that we’re a minuscule percentage of the market. As long as Apple makes enough mula to stay alive, that’s all that matters.

I own & use PC but in my experience Macs process audio much faster than PC. I’m a musician and I use a laptop for recording, fx processing, as a drum/synth/sampler, everything. I’ve used both PC & Apple. I own a PC laptop w/ a 2.4ghz p4 & 1 gig of ram and for a time I played with another laptop musician who used a Mac (1ghz, 512 ram, osX). We ran the same program, with similar number of tracks, plugins, VSTs, etc. I had constant problems with latency (time between when you play a key and when it sounds) that made it unplayable at times. My friend’s running a machine thats half the speed & ram as mine and having no problems at all, latency or otherwise, as if it were an actual piano or drum. Then mine would start to overheat and run even worse, chopping up the audio and freezing, crashing and making noise through the PA. All that PC power, yet an old & slow mac is completely outperforming it.

As for people claiming that PC is just as stable as Macs, that may be true, however, the user MUST know how to protect and fix their system in order to do this. Most people don’t know their OS that deeply, and don’t have the luxury that corporations do of hiring a systems administrator or ITs. Macs “supposedly” avoid this by not having many of the possible vulnerabilities available to the user, who is expected to know nothing about computers, and for them it works but they are sacrificing the flexibility that PC can offer. I know very little about computers compared to my uber tech-geek friends, but I know far more than the average computer user I know. There has to be options for everyone in the market because we all need to use computers. That old DEVO song “freedom of choice is what you got, freedom from choice is what you want” should be Mac’s new jingle.

Anyway just look at benchmarks, the only pcs that really compete with a g5 for art & graphics apps is an Opteron64. But you can’t play games on macs, but if you wanna play games do it on a pc, but if you gotta WORK on art or music get a mac.

Diogenes: Xerox Parc?

Here we go again…

Both the Xerox machines and the Mac were designed by pioneers that had worked on GUIs years before on their own, at a time where everything had to be invented in this area.

Doug Englebart’s sure was a first step, but it was very preliminary and very confusing. It was some kind of mouse driven hierachical database with vector text (and some rare graphics) and commands to affect items in lists.

There wasn’t any windows in Doug’s interface, it was supposedly mainly driven by the five button chording device and the mouse to click on items and draw lines.

QuickDraw, the drawing APIs for the classic Mac, was imagined in a thesis in the 60’s by Bill Atkinson, and I doubt he had access to any similar concepts to copy from. People like Jeff Raskin also had previous extensive experience with designing GUIs.

The visit Jobs made to Xerox was paid, and there was some unofficial collaboration between the two companies, and some Xerox employees went to work for Apple as Xerox decided to downsize the project and didn’t seem to care much about it.

The late Xerox interfaces you can see with the icons on the desktop dates from after the Mac Finder was imagined. There was some “cross-polenisation” between the two companies, and that’s why the most recent Xerox OS looks more like the first Mac OS and the Lisa.

But there was no drag and drop manipulation of file icons. There was no menu bar or pull down menus in the Xerox GUI, the commands bellow the windows titlebars are not pull down menus. The scrollbars didn’t act like modern scrollbars, which are more simillar to the ones found in the Lisa and first Mac. Tons of little things like this that Apple had to invent by necessity, sometimes without knowing Xerox did something similar.

Apple didn’t have a direct access to Xerox devkits and was working on a completely different scale, so they didn’t copy the internal approach and had had to “invent” their own ways of making this work. They didn’t detailed information about how a windowed GUI should works and had to try to fit it all in 128k of RAM.

For Windows, it’s different. Microsoft, threathened Apple not to release Mac software if they didn’t get early access to the Mac devkits, which give them a detailed look on how a GUI OS would work.

They built Word, Excel on the Mac first, but keeping in mind to create a framework to port these programs on the x86 platform. So while writing Word and Excel on the Mac they reverse engineered the system and created an OS with very simillar APIs to the Mac so that they could port these more easily. In the first versions of Windows, you could even find APIs with very similar names to particular Mac APIs.

The first versions of Windows copied much more details of the APIs and overall internal structure of the Mac than when you compare the Mac/Lisa OS with the Xerox OS experiments.

Operand,

You got everything pretty much correct.

I’d add that it was Scully that allowed MS the keys to the house, as it were — and why Apple was not successful in the later GUI lawsuit. Scully was and is a spineless scumbag, who’s monumental greedy kept Mac prices TOO high for most.

I’d also add that if any of the MacHaters actually sat in front of a Xerox, a Lisa, and a 128k Mac they’d clearly see some similarities between the Xerox and Lisa and how the Mac is a completely different animal.

Finally, I’d like to remind everyone that Apple paid Xerox 1million shares of Apple for TWO visits to PARC — which Xerox sold in 1996-7 for $10M.

Of course it’s easier for the MacHaters to claim that Apple ‘stole’ the Mac GUI from Xerox, than to actually use Google. It might interest them to discover the truth, like how MS was basically given permission to steal from Apple the first time. And how when MS got caught lifting line-for-line code from QuickTime in 1997, Apple got an undisclosed (reports of $800M) settlement and a five year promise for MS Office. [FWIW, that $150M ‘investment’ was to have Apple change the already Gold-mastered MacOS8 discs/packaging to make MS IE the default browser,]

Criticism of Apple for the wrong things — like: hockey puck mice; marginalizing FireWire — is one thing, but atleast know why you don’t like them for REAL reasons. [Oh, FWIW the DRM in iTunes is the RIAA’s idea, not Apple’s]

I don’t like MS, not because they are a twice convicted, and illegal monopolist — but because they are predatory bullies.

I like trying new things in most aspects of electronics except for computers. One of the main reasons I haven’t tried Apple is because I am a gamer. This could change now once bootcamp comes out of beta. Besides gaming most of my computer time is spent doing graphics and videos which used to be Apples niche in the market. I don’t think I have seen an apple screen since their first notebook came out so it should be fun. It is time for something new and less buggy(hopefully) than windows.

I select this article off of google news because I thought there might be something interesting to read. I read part way down stopped. Back and forth back and forth, windows vs. mac. Give me a break! Why do you argue about something that matters.

Whether you chose a mac or windows is a totally based on the end-users’ need. Nothing more.

wow dont ya just love reading all the comments when ppl get riled up over PC vs Mac.

Mac’s will all be Intel based shortly, and will be dual booting with Windows. Whether its Mac or Windows, exploits will find the weakest link…

If Apples marketshare went up significantly though, then I’m sure we’d see more effort spent on finding real vulnerabilities. When it comes down to it its about how much bang for your buck. If you find a vulnerability in a Mac you can take the Moral Highground, whereas if you find a vulnerability in Windows, you take out half the world. I know which I would choose.

I’m a loyal mac user and I still want to to poke them in the eye.

The ONLY reason macs dont get viruses is because there arent enough of them for it to be worth while.

more like security demo that used apples rep to get more buzz