Posted on 05/27/2011 8:22:35 AM PDT by Tribune7
Why would we need educating on that? We mostly are all former Windows users, who have more experience of (lack of) security than we ever wanted in the first place . . .
Exactly. They are the windows users who didn’t know jack about security so they thought switching to a less used os would help then hide from the boogyman virus...now those some dumb users are getting hit using a Mac.
. . . except that we knew enough to think that Unix, which was designed as a multiuser system, was more secure than any system designed with the assumption that only a single trustworthy user would ever be able to communicate with the computer.Computers/OSes are so complex that it's naive to suppose that anyone actually understands them; Chaos theory gives a vague feel for the unpredictability of such a system.
But the principle that I do not want to allow separation of responsibility and authority is as true of computer security as it is government. I reject the Democrat premise that if life consists of a series of catastrophic failures of greedy people outside the journalist/Democrat complex, ameliorated only by the pure motives of journalists and their political acolytes. Actual results are what count, and whoever actually has the authority is responsible for those results.In the computer security field I don't care whether the malware got in because the antivirus software didn't recognize the vector, or whether the system should have defeated the vector in the first place. I want one organization to take responsibility for making it possible for me - me, not some geek with a post doctorate education in cyphers - to operate a computer online without being a sitting duck. So I am attracted to a system which has a better track record, and I am attracted to a vendor who takes system responsibility rather than providing hardware and blaming problems on somebody else's OS, or one providing an OS but recommending antivirus software be bought from yet another software vendor.Apple has, up til now, lived up to that system responsibility rather well. They have built recognition of some trojans into the OS. And I expect that they will continue to do so, until and unless someone comes up with a quantum computer capable of instantly cracking any and every password. As far as I'm concerned, if I never have to give up on Apple's ability to protect its customers itself rather than yielding over to third-party anti-malware software specialists, it will be too soon.
And the day when every computer on the shelf is adequately protected by a hard security layer can't come soon enough. Seems like Win7 may finally be up to snuff.
I highly doubt the dumb window user who know nothing about security would switch because he understands UNIX and the way it does security. If they understood that then windows would have been fine as well.
Well, I'm smart enough to know that Unix was designed more robustly than DOS and Windows - but, in my own experience, found that fear of the non-robust nature of Windows made me stupid when using Windows. I don't enjoy feeling stupid, so I bought a Unix box which wasn't designed for geeks. Which is what the OS X version of the Mac is, and what Linux would like to be. And apparently Win 7 is pretty much there too, finally. Which is good, because my daughter's husband wanted to get her a Win 7 box for her birthday and I chipped in to help buy it, confident that it was a workable computer.
I concur. Apple couldn’t write an os that was worth anything so they finally ripped one from UNIX. XP is still the number one os serving in a period that it truly isn’t meant for. That was some seriously good os for its day.
Bug win 7 is definitely the way to go for windows.
Steve Jobs commented at the time he left Apple that he was certain that Unix was the future of the personal computer. The problem was that the Apple II and the Mac and the PC date back to the time before microchip features were small enough to make it practical to run Unix on a personal computer. Anyone who so chooses can put a negative spin such as "ripped off" on the decision not to reinvent the wheel when Unix already served the purpose at hand, but it was always Jobs' intention and desire to use Unix.But win 7 is definitely the way to go for windows.
Yes. The pity is that it was so hard to get there without making too big a break from DOS compatibility at any one step.Maybe if Gates hadn't bought ("ripped off"?) DOS in the first place, things would have been different?
Huh? So you’re saying the previous version of Mac OS were good?
I'm saying that OS X would not have run on the 128K Mac with a hard drive rated in a handful of megabytes. The previous version of Mac OS was the best GUI they could do on an economical PC in the early 1980s, and although Unix would have been better, affordable PCs of that time couldn't run it and get anything done.
Really? Unix with xwindows wouldn’t run in the 90’s either? I think there are a ton of Linux heads that will dispute that.
If the question is whether Jobs would have done OS X in the nineties if he had been in charge of Apple over that decade, the answer is yes. Jobs proved that when he brought out the NeXT computer, which was a more immediate predecessor to OS X than the old Mac itself was.If it had been as easy as you make it sound, Jobs would have used Unix for the initial Mac - but that was a bridge too far at that time. The hardware it required was still too bleeding edge in 1988, which was why NeXT failed.
You could say that Linux has been the geek's NeXT.
When he returned to Apple, Jobs brought out OS X and delivered the whole commercial package - finished, well-integrated hardware and software, and marketing/advertising, sales, and support. Completing the Apple Store network is still a work in progress because you can live in a major population center without being close to one of the stores. Seems like that would be a good place to put some of that cash hoard Apple is known for . . .
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