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Gates takes swipe at Apple and Linux
Microsoft chief Bill Gates took the time to take a swipe at his closest rivals yesterday, as he reiterated the importance of security in Windows.
[blockquote]"To say a system is secure because no one is attacking it is very dangerous," said Gates, referring to operating systems that have a smaller share of the desktop market, such as Apple's Macintosh OS and the open-source software Linux. [/blockquote]
[link=http://news.com.com/2100-1002_3-5148058.html?tag=nefd_top]Read more[/link]
[blockquote]"To say a system is secure because no one is attacking it is very dangerous," said Gates, referring to operating systems that have a smaller share of the desktop market, such as Apple's Macintosh OS and the open-source software Linux. [/blockquote]
[link=http://news.com.com/2100-1002_3-5148058.html?tag=nefd_top]Read more[/link]
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Mac??? I thought they were'nt making them anymore? Hummmm.... What's their market share? Do they have a share? Do we really care? Not that I'm aware!!!!
Dexter...
Well no i'm not going there. Haven't got any good comments. Just felt like finishing the countdown.
To come and think of it, I have been running Windows 2000 Pro since it first came out, and have yet to get a virus or even an attack that I know of yet. The only people getting them are either unfortunate or not very good with computers. Take into account that most Linux users are 1337, you have a pretty low chance of any harm from the start cuase you know how to avoid them.
Microsoft has like 95% of the whole market, and when you think about it... maybe 90% of that market are a bunch of idiots running AOL. Need I say more?
I am not protecting anyone in the above statement, or attacking.
I stand behind my statements made in this thread.
To say that that a system is better becuase there are lesser viruses or attacks is pretty lame, I agree. But to say that a system is better designed when it comes to secutity features can be completely accurate. And in the case of Macs and Linux, both based on a Unix core, it is completely accurate. In the Windows world, ease of integration took precedence over security concerns, and that finally caught up to MS.
Here is one more example of a dumb, dumb thing that MS made default in Win XP. The current high-profile virus going around is spreading not only through e-mail, but through Kazaa. It copies itself to a user's Kazaa Shared File. This, and thousands of other virii, trojans and spyware are often unwittingly opened by users. Why? Because they are named xxxx.mp3.exe, or xxxx.zip.exe, or xxxx.doc.exe. Because XP has as a default setting the file extensions hidden for known file types, less savvy users see only xxxx.mp3, or xxxx.zip, or xxxx.doc. So they click on it, and KABOOM. Infected.
Given that the vast majority of users of XP wouldn't even have a clue where to look to shut off this "feature" :rolleyes2: , this means that the majority of users are at risk to be exploited by something very simple. Wouldn't it make much more sense to always show file extensions as a default, to protect users from their own ignorance??? And then let the 1337 users shut it off if they want too????
But why did MS make this a default in XP? To hide those annoying 3 letter extensions which remind them of their DOS roots? Because Macs have never had this problem? Macs have never needed extensions, all program associations are done through the file descriptor, which makes it much harder to hide the file type simply by adding an extra extension into the name. This means a "script kiddie" cannot make a virus as easily on a Mac, they have to understand more about the descriptor headers, and how to change them. And it is very difficult to make an executable Mac program look an MP3 for that reason.
Bill's speech is BS. He is trying to deflect criticism of his products by touting his market share. Windows was never a Better Product, just a Cheaper Product running on a Cheaper Platform. And now they are being forced to make it a Better Product.
Hey Bill, seeing how you have sold so many copies of your product, I would think you should have the money to make it better! If you have so many more users, shouldn't you give them a better product?? Or is it all about the numbers, don't spend money making the products smarter until the users demand it? Well, after this past year, they are demanding it all right....
Dexter...
Basically Mac, though it might have a great os, is still hampered by their stupid(IMO) leadership and attitude. If Jobs & Co. had opened up their os to other vendors, the Mac Arcitecture might have taken better and more widespread root, but I for 1 am not going to be held hostage to a system where there is just 1 source of supply for the core hardware. If Jobs had opened up the Mac to multiple vendors through liscensing, he would most probably have run into many of the same compatibility problems that Windows did with all the varied components for x86 machines, but he would also have gotten quite a bit more of the market share for the same reason; competition. Competition means better prices for the consumer, so more consumers can afford to buy.
Windows is like Walmart; it's everywhere and the machines for it are bargain priced. Jobs still wants to keep the Mac closed to the masses(again, my opinion) and just sell to the elite at elite prices. That model just don't float anymore and as you said, Billy-Boy is now focusing on making Windows more secure, which most probably drive another nail in Apple's coffin (more opinion here;) ). If Jobs would port OS10.x to the x86 architecture, I would seriously consider it as a viable alternative to Windows, because it has a slick, easy to use GUI, and I don't want to learn a bunch of command line crap to run Linux. But he will never sell me computer hardware in the form of a desktop machine not based on an open architecture like x86.
Gnome: read my link in my previous post. The 5 vs 500 infected systems is a chicken-and-egg argument. If Linux and Mac were less secure, there would be more viruses written for them. The fact that they are more secure protects them as much, or more, then their market share does. Virus writers want to see maximum reach for their trash, but if they could write a virus that reaches 100 % of computers, they would be god-like. Imagine a cross-platform version of Madblast? But can it ever be done? Probably not.
Windows OS boxes are more attractive targets because they are more widely used, but also because they are MUCH less secure. That part of the equation cannot be ignored, even though it can be argued either way, religiously. It is, as I said, a chicken vs egg argument. Both are factors. Heck, I'll bet that most virus writers have probably never touched a Mac, so they are only infecting what they know, and what they know has lots of vulnerabilities.
Dexter...
It's been my observation that Mac's are more difficult to hack, particularly ones running Classic. Part of the reason is because you have to be talking AppleTalk in the majority of cases just to get a network connection open. It won't do Samba (Windows File Sharing), and it will only do IPX if you install Novell. Secondly, AppleScript is turned off by default and it gives you a bunch of first time messages when a script is used for the first time. That's usually a red flag to anyone that's looking.
Of the nastiest two Mac virii I've ever heard of, one writes random data to the writable section of OpenFirmware (it's like a BIOS) and the other nukes the catalog B-trees that store information about what files are. Both are easily repaired. All the worms I've seen for the Mac exploit Microsoft Outlook and are actually Office worms.
On the flip side, Classic's file security measures are easily defeated by booting the machine with a boot disk or boot CD.
OS X is a whole 'nother can of worms. It's powered by Darwin, which I seem to remember being based on NetBSD. In any case, the core OS is pretty secure so it's much more likely to catch worms/trojans/viruses through insecure software than core OS exploits. It will be interesting to see whether or not anyone writes exploits for iTunes, since it has a wide following on both sides of the fence.
Windows XP on the otherhand has an insecure OS core. Messaging service is on by default, so you can get spam just by being connected to the Internet. The DCOM RPC virus flare back in August proved that you didn't need to be running insecure software to catch worms and viruses. Most of the reason it's vulnerable comes from the fact that it comes with a good deal of excess baggage most users won't use. Don't get me wrong, I use some of it but I'd rather it appear as an install option that's off by default.
I like computers, and given a choice between using a Mac and a PC in an open access computer lab, I'll go to whichever section is least crowded. The school Mac's, like the Mac's I own, have more than one button on the mice. Input peripherals are things that I can change easily for low cost. You don't need to buy specialized Mac mice, as just about any USB mouse will work with one of the many generic drivers on the 'Net.
As far as what Bill Gates said goes, I'd be a good deal happier if he'd shut his hole and pull the head of his Windows team out of it's collective <expletive deleted>. Steve Jobs can start by pulling his head out from his <expletive deleted> too, since he obviously isn't listening to the demands of the market. For the record, I hate Apple. They make my life twice as difficult as it needs to be. My favorite Mac that I own is a clone. They had those for awhile, you know, but they nearly put the hardware department at Apple out of business so Apple cut the licenses.
-drasnor
Bear in mind that almost any computer - PC, Mac or Linux, can be defeated by a boot disk.
But as far as network-spread virus/worms, PC is by far the most insecure. The Mac OS is just way more secure than Windows ever has been, at every stage of development. The ludicrous choices MS has made to default some services and features which are completely useless to most users, just baffles me. Then, they make such security enhancing steps as disabling attachments by default on Outlook Express.
Dexter...
Not if that Linux machine is on a Silicon Image 3114 controler. Jeez, I mean, you would think that someone would have a damn module for it, but noooo :rolleyes2
It seems like they're always on the right track, but never quite fulfill with their products.
Examples: iPod. Great idea, mp3 player with a hard drive. First generation has a nice, large battery, 1394, LCD, an awesome input system with the volume control wheel, and it doesn't look like butt. Then they made the software and interface proprietary, made a second revision that dumped the large battery for a smaller one, put it on a dock, and made the new firmware incompatible with the old.
What _I_ want is a portable music player that can handle any format I throw at it, behaves like USB or 1394 mass storage to any computer I hook it up to, has decent sound quality, a large disk, and a large conveniently-replaceable battery. A volume control wheel is also a big plus, since that's how I manage volume on my computer (Logitech Elite series keyboards are niiiiice). I don't like docks, since that means I have to lug the dock around in addition to a standard USB or 1394 cable in order to hook it up to something.
Power Macintosh, all of them: Stands out in my mind as being like Be or NeXT, "they could have been great if..." Apple builds a machine based on technology brought down from IBM servers, enterprise-level hardware like the PowerPC CPU's. Then they design the system so that the firmware isn't upgradeable to support future upgrades or even fix bugs that they found out about later (like the fact that my PM6500 doesn't work with PCI cards that have PCI-PCI bridges on them). Next they put these machines in chassis with limited space for upgrades and use bezels/fascia that are inconvenient to obtain and only work with a few select devices. Finding a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo that fits a beige Power Macintosh bezel is a royal pain, and I still haven't found one. Next they have customized hard drives and optical drives that contain Apple ROMs that identify themselves as Mac hardware to the Macintosh. PC hard disks and optical drives that don't have these ROMs are usually rejected outright unless you have a special 3rd party driver or a hacked version of Apple's driver and partitioning software. Never mind that the Apple SuperDrive DVD-RW is really the same drive as the Pioneer DVR-106D, Apple wants you to buy "their" version. The boxes generally ship with lousy RAM that they chrage outrageously for. I could see $150 a stick for Corsair, but when you open Apple's box it could be anything, and it's usually CAS2.5 or CAS3.
Note: I think they stopped doing the hard disk and optical drive ROMs with newer machines (>G3), though it's still a pain to find hardware that works with older Macs
If I'm going to drop $3000 on a prebuilt machine, that RAM had better be some BH5, that hard drive had better be a Western Digital Raptor 74GB, and the computer had better be silent and not give me any crap, ever. It had also better not be butt ugly, and if it is there had better be a way for me to fix that that doesn't involve my Dremel. When the latest and greatest processors come along two years away, I want to be able to flash my firmware to support them and drop them into my machine. The PowerPC architecture does not change THAT quickly.
This is why I like my S900. It has one issue with it that has to do with the way its PCI bus is implemented, but other than that it can be mounted in any chassis I want and upgrades from a 604e into my choice of a G3 or G4 processor.
OS X: Great OS. Problem is, Apple seems to want to tell me which machines I can and cannot install it on. My S900 has a 900MHz G3, but because it has Power Macintosh 9500 ROMs in it, it's identified as a PM9500 and thus pre-G3 and not supported by OS X. Never mind that it's only three times as fast as most G3's out there, it's just plain not supported by OS X. I have to use a 3rd party utility to override Apple's lockout to get OS X to install. If you weren't as dedicated as me, that would be one sale of OS X lost. That's bad business by any definition I've ever heard.
I'm not real happy with Windows or Linux for that matter either, but the main reason I'm typing this on my PC is because at least I have the comfort of knowing if there's something wrong with this machine it's my own fault, since I selected every component that went in it. Windows could be more secure and Linux could be more user-friendly. I got to figure out how hotplug works today in class, since nowhere is it documented which device corresponds to a USB mass storage device (it's left up to the system administrator to make an fstab entry). I just started mounting stuff from a bash prompt until I found one that didn't give me an error. There is absolutely no reason why the thing shouldn't auto-detect and auto-mount to an easy-to-find location like it does on Windows or MacOS.
These people all have stuff to work on. There's no need for them to waste time bashing each other.
-drasnor
Wow Drasnor, that's a mouthful!
All valid points, and indisputably, many of Apple's OS and hardware decisions are designed to make you want to just go out and buy the new box rather than upgrade the old. For an "elite" user, that's frustrating (and why I don't have a G4 at home.)
The OS X thing I can totally understand though. How many people installed Windows XP on systems that were under spec, then complained when it didn't work well? In order to ensure that doesn't happen with Macs, Apple locks you out of installing the OS on a sub-par machine. Then, they have fewer complaints of the OS running slow or flakey, and they don't have to invest a lot of money in authorizing or supporting the older hardware either. Sound business sense. But a bit frustrating for elite users who could do it and make it work if they weren't locked out of it.
Re, the iPod, one of the other problems with the early models was that you could not replace the battery in them. That caused some outrage, as I am sure you may have heard. Don't know what was up with that thought process, but it made them look bad until they found a way to do it.
Still, I wonder why no one is targetting Apple with a DoS attack.....?
Cheers,
Dexter...
-drasnor