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If OSx is so great why does it have updates all the time?

OS X has never had a successful virus attack. Only a few Macs have ever been subverted into a botnet and it's likely they were only compromised because the owners were very reckless.

Care to contrast XP's record? At last week's world economic summit in Switzerland, they revealed that it is now estimated that 25% of all Windows machines are controlled by botnets. That means that their keystrokes are logged and mined for credit cards and password info and the info is sent to the real controller. And those machines are where over 90% of all the spam comes from. They're the machines that launch DOS attacks. They're the machines that are serving warez and porn all over the IRC channels. They could use those machines to close down major corporations and have already ruined a few companies. They also hire out their botnets to businesses to attack their web competitors, hitting them with over 20Gb/second DOS attacks. The cost isn't even very high. Just think of the havoc they can wreak upon our governent and financial institutions. These criminals have successfully blackmailed a number of companies to buy "protection" from their attacks. These criminals are now boasting that they could shut down Amazon and even Google if they wanted to. Think about it.

Last week, we had more reports on these "Free Wi-Fi" wireless hotspots in the airports and many other places. If you connect and aren't very secure, they'll bot your machine. If not, they'll just sniff all your traffic to grab financial info and passwords. WinXP allows this kind of crazy insecure grab-any-connection stuff as the default. It's the same throughout Windows. They leave the doors wide open and then ponder why those naughty burglars carry out a home invasion. It's just sick that they do this year after year. As for Vista, it's actually more insecure to the Free Wi-Fi attack because it's more difficult to discern what the access point really is. Again, incredibly stupid security flaw, entirely preventable.

OS X issues patches because that is policy. They fix any known issues promptly, much as the Linux and other BSD/UNIX folk do. Microsoft's performance is a joke by comparison, refusing to fix truly dangerous security holes for years on end. ActiveX, anyone? Welcome to hell.

If there are 20 people on this thread running Windows, chances are that 5 of them are not actually in control of their computers. You should have seen this laptop I had to fix recently. A nasty rootkit and an interlocking set of viruses designed to keep coming to life. The browser was hijacked and there were over one hundred spyware/malware infections. The damned thing could have starred in an Exorcist movie. The owner is just an ordinary guy but MS left him open to these kinds of attacks. He wasn't browsing the porn or warez sites. He is typical of what I consider to be the victims of Microsoft products. Computer techs shouldn't see this over and over and over for years and MS does nothing to fix the well-known and fixable problems in its products. And the cost of fixing Windows and keeping it secure can cost as much as the machine itself over a 3-4 year life cycle.

For OS X, yes, there have been more patches this last year. But then, Apple deployed a half-dozen new models with the new Intel processor and upgraded half of those models to higher-powered CPUs as well. Despite that, I would estimate that just the Critical Updates for my XP Pro are three to four times as many as OS X. For instance, I forced a friend to update his XP Pro last night because he'd been neglecting it since September. He had to do over 40 updates just for five months. That's probably more updates than for all the Mac products in the last year combined.

OS X isn't perfect. Nothing is. But it runs circles around anything Microsoft can produce. That's because OS X is just Apple's GUI layer on top of a rock-solid BSD Unix OS so it's to the credit of the BSD programmers working for decades that makes Macs more secure. BTW, Apple pays for their BSD license and other technology licenses too, unlike Microsoft which has a nasty habit of just stealing other people's technologies and using their legal team and honeypot contracts to then destroy the actual innovators and deprive them of a fair profit.

Now to all the Apple and Mac people out there, this may upset you a bit, but, yes, Apple operating systems = suck. All of them. Actually, it’s Apple itself that sucks. It shoves its terribly overpriced “froo froo” hardware down my throat to make me get the OS, and, quite frankly, I am just not buying it. For those of you that will label me as an “Apple hater,” I will staunchly wave my three iPods in your general direction. Give me the opportunity to buy Mac OS X Leopard for PC, and it will be getting some prime time on the home-built system under my desk. I have always wondered if Steve Jobs limits Mac operating systems to his proprietary hardware configurations for the cash or if he just won’t admit to the fact that if his OS powered 90% of the world's computers, its shortcomings would be more apparent and his snappy ad campaigns would fall flat.

Kyle Bennett [H]ard|OCP

'ol Kyle hits the nail on the head again...