Microsoft to offer 6 versions of Windows Vista system
Golly, imagine my excitement when my clients upgrade to six different versions of Windows. This opens whole new, er, Vistas of support nightmares, as now there will be multiple versions of Windows, all no doubt with different (and gaping) security holes, their own quirks, and of course the joy of converting from XP to the new OS.
What’s needed is one version of an operating system that just simply works.
Long time Mac user and City of Santa Monica Council member Kevin McKeown summed it up in a comment here.
Stability, security, and no spyware â┚¬â€ if only Mac was a form of government.
Alas, on the front page of the Marketplace section of the WSJ this morning (B1), there’s a story that worms have finally arrived on the Mac. Not nasty yet, but soon to be coming. The story credits Apple’s new-found popularity as having hit critical mass so that it’s worth the while for the virologists to start writing for the Mac. My impression is that the implementation of Unix in the new Mac program took a page from the MS-Borg and left some gaping security holes.
The braggadocia of the Mac users to me always sounded like the proprietary encryption programmers: we’re so obscure that nobody can guess what we’re doing. Naive in both cases.
One worm in, what, 20 years, ain’t bad at all. Unix appears to be inherently more secure than Windows, and while there’s way more Windows boxes out there, that no one has seriously attacked Macs or Unix/Linux in all these years can also mean they are harder to attack.
Some time back, Apple (or someone else) issued a hacker challenge to see if anyone could hack their web server software. No one succeeded.
The fact is that Mac has had such a small base for so many years that anyone hellbent on destruction didn’t have much of a base. Now that it’s increased, watch for the Macs to get hit just as hard as the PCs.