Quote:
Originally Posted by Joushou
I'm only aware of one or two viruses for Mac, one which was only bundled with a pirated version of iWork... But it's easy enough to make a virus for a Mac... Infecting the system without a users interaction is tricky, however... Their implementation of Unix BSD and Mach makes a pretty damn solid secure system, though it pulls a couple of points in speed...
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For reference, however, the first virus infestation I had to clean up was on MacOS. That's what Macs used to run before they ran Unix, more a fancy bootstrap loader with a UI, than an actual OS. No security at all to speak of, so it spread through the appletalk network from machine to machine, without user intervention.
That was about 1987. About a decade earlier, I created an experimental "virus", back before either the PC or Mac or any sort of personal computer, really (well, the MIT Lisp machines, and the early Xerox computers -- Alto and Dorado). This would attach itself to free consoles, and replicate to any free console. It was as polite as I could make it, and would disappear from any given console if you asked it, and had a back door to make ALL instances disappear simultaneously.
So it seemed a harmless experiment -- the idea was to see how hard it would be to eradicate.
It uncovered a bug in the OS, however, crashing the system in the middle of the day for everyone. Nobody yelled at me, but I felt bad enough... and indeed, it presaged future misbehavior by various viruses due to bugs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joushou
But, I couldn't care less about viruses... I never used antivirus on Windows, and I have no intentions of using it here... If something somehow managed to get in (Which so far haven't happened for me on any platform), I'm pretty sure I can remove it again.  |
Remind me not to look at your messages without my virus-proof sunglasses; I wouldn't want to get infected!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joushou
The reason I use Mac OS X, and not some other *nix, is that OS X seems more complete in it's UI, while most graphical environment for Linux and BSD tend to be held together with band aid, if you know what I mean. :P Also, there's more applications available.
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Yes, I definitely know what you mean. Although if you do enough configuration, you can make Linux sort of usable. I prefer Kubuntu for that reason -- not nearly as much PITA getting it usable.
As for your last point -- while that's a reason to prefer MacOS to Linux, it's also a reason to prefer Windows to MacOS, and in fact I suspect that's the biggest reason for the world at large. It amounts to a sort of inertia, that makes it difficult for the Mac to gain market share (and also for Linux, whose fans still dream of it taking over on the desktop). Apple does seem to be making headway on that, branching out from core areas where apps have always been plentiful, such as K-12 education, and graphic design.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joushou
The reason I use a Mac, is because the quality seems to be way higher than your average laptop... And, it's a heck of a lot slimmer and prettier!
Cons: PRICE.
(Sorry, I wrote this on my G1, so it may have a lot of typos ) |
It's not just that the hardware is high quality -- but also the drivers for that hardware actually work. I think the biggest single reliability problem overall for PCs is that there are more device drivers for PCs than there exist competent device driver programmers capable of creating them. (And QA engineers, managers -- the whole team needed to create a quality device driver).
As much as I dislike closed, proprietary systems, this is the benefit.