Vanity: Should I switch to Mac (somebody else is paying)?

Vanity - Self | January 30, 2008 | Scoutmaster

[Swordmaker]

Word processing...

Use Microsoft Word... most people who use both the Windows and the Mac versions say the Mac's is superior. Alternately, if you don't need an A Bomb to smash a gnat, buy and use iWork '08... it will open and save Word documents with no problem.

... spreadsheets ...

Excel spread sheet files are the same on the Mac and Windows...

... loading new software ...

You've got to be kidding... 90% of Mac software installation is drag and drop from a Disk Image. I'll bet you just opened the Disk Image and double clicked on the icon you were supposed to drag to the Applications folder. The application would run from the Disk Image and then disappear when you restarted or dismounted the image. The other 10% use standard installer scripts. Double click the installer and follow the prompts. You probably will need to provide an Administrator user name and password on most installs. Sounds like ignorance of how Macs work rather than anything wrong to me. It is not Windows.

... attaching docs to email...

Drag and Drop. Can't be easier... or click on the Paperclip icon on the tool bar... or select Attach File under the File Menu on the menu bar and select the file.

opening some graphics in emails

What kind of graphics are you having trouble with? I haven't found ANY that will not open in the email. Apple's Mail program uses the same graphic engine as Safari... which can open everything except Windows DRM'd WMV files.

... the aforementioned music services that are unusable on the Mac.

Give us some names. If you are talking about the Zune Store... that was Microsoft's choice. Most of the others, if they sell or download standard music formats, will work fine with the Mac.

Give me some time and I’m sure I could come up with more. All it does better is play with photos, but that is more based on the embedded software (iPhoto) vs Adobe than the computer itself.

We've got all the time in the world. Keep listing.

Just because YOU and your spouse didn't bother to learn how to use your new Mac doesn't mean there's something wrong with it. If you continue expecting it to run like Windows, you won't get far. Learn the new paradigm.

[BlazingArizona]

There is a reason why 85% of the world runs on MS.

Two or so years ago, that figure was 96%. It's dropping daily.

[BlazingArizona]

The one thing I really like to do is email pictures to my family. On my windows machine, I would take the picture at 3+ Megs, then import it into Olympus, HP, or Photoshop Elements picture management suites.

Now that my camera image size is pushing 5 meg per picture, ataching pictures to e-mails has become near-mpossible on any platform. What I did was open a .Mac account. When I take a hundred pictures of the community group wingding, I use jAlbum to auto-format them into a platform-independent HTML slideshow, then copy them to my .Mac Web area, a function that now is built into Leopard Finder. Presto! I just circulate a URL to my group, and everyone, Mac or PC, can see the pictures right away.

[Turbopilot]

On the PC?? Your Mac buddies won’t like hearing that :-p

[Big Giant Head]

bookmarking

[redangus]

We have Office for Mac 2004 and it works nothing like Word for Windows. Excel does not work as well on the Mac. Even my stepson who has two Macs, an iPod and an iPhone uses a PC for his business spread sheets and word processing.

I have named the music services twice, but here I go again; Napster, Rhapsody, Yahoo Music. None of which are full service apps on a Mac. They can only be used as internet apps not stand alone programs which delete some of their features.

To install new software on a PC you just insert the cd hit install and away it goes, in seconds it ready to run. Didn’t say it was wrong just not as intuitive.

Finding the file to attach is the problem. On a PC you go directly to documents from the email app. on the Mac it takes you to photos first then you have to click on documents and then you can attach the file.

And finally why should I have to learn a “new paradigm” to use a computer. If I buy a Chevy after owning a Ford I don’t have to learn how to drive again. I have purchased 8 computers and built 3 more for my own use and have never had to learn a “new paradigm” to use them. I am happy you guys all like your Macs, but from my perspective it was a horrible purchase. As soon as I find someone I can snoocker into buying it, it will be gone and replaced by computer with a nice workable “old paradigm”

[redangus]

I have never been driven by having to be cool and hip so it doesn’t bother me. I have always gone with substance and functionality over style.

[Richard Kimball]

What kind of graphics are you having trouble with? I haven't found ANY that will not open in the email. Apple's Mail program uses the same graphic engine as Safari... which can open everything except Windows DRM'd WMV files.

I've used the flip4mac plug in to play the WMV files.

[redangus]

I don’t mind being a minority when I know I am right.

[vidbizz]

I don’t understand all these PC crashes either. I’ve had 6 desktops & 4 laptops in my computing life.
6 of these are still working.
2 got obsolete (upgraded them).
1 laptop fried via lightening thru the phone line (thunderstorm & it was plugged in to the phone line - was using a modem back then).
And the last I shipped it to hotel (needed it for Graphics work) & a screw got loose & short circuited the motherboard.
I’ve never had crashes where all my data is gone.

[Swordmaker]

Simply put you are wrong about the security flaws. A simple search on CERT, SANS or any other popular security website will yield a TON of OS-X advisories, not just trojans but buffer overflows too.... including Zero Day Exploits.... it’s just the way it is...

No, I am not. I have been tracking and following the security of Mac OSX for seven years... I am totally aware of the vulnerabilities and the exploits (or lack of exploits) for the Mac OSX platform. I read the advisories when they come out and investigate them. I've even reported a couple of vulnerabilities that I've found to Apple.

But, Mel, vulnerabilities are NOT exploits. There are at present ZERO OSX viruses in the wild and ZERO self spreading OSX spyware in the wild an ZERO self installing OSX Adware in the wild.. There are Trojans... that require much more user gullibility than most Trojans to install and run. They cannot install themselves.

There have been a half dozen or so Proof-of-concept worms and/or viruses that have only been seen in security company labs... none of them worked as advertised.

• OSX.Leap-A (also called OSX.Oompa-Lumpa-A) which supposedly spread over iChat required two security specialists from Secunia and two Apple software engineers as well as two Mac specialists from Macworld Magazine over six hours to get Leap-A to merely copy itself from one Mac to another... and then it failed to execute in the target Mac.

• OSX.Macarena, another reported OSX Virus Secunia reported, was so virulent that Secunia reported the number of systems affected as "0-49." This was only true, it later turned out, because that number range includes ZERO. OSX.Macarena was supposed to delete the files in the folder it was installed into... but OSX does not allow apps to do anything to files in the folder where it resides. OSX Macarena was just another well reported FUD attack instead of a viral attack. Macarena also had to be downloaded and installed by the user, giving proper administrator permissions. It also had to be approved for a first run. Really dangerous.

• OSX.Inqtana was a widely reported Mac OSX virus that was supposedly spread over Bluetooth... but the user had to accept the download of a file from an unknown user and then install it and run it... all things requiring permission. Another proof-of-concept that was never seen in the wild.

• OSX.Renepo-A,B & C, Opener-A widely reported as the first ever Mac OSX virus was actually merely a BASH shell script that did nasty things. Originally a really stupid proof of concept, it was weaponized and placed on a Mac forum... but affected no one. To get it, a user had to download it, activate ROOT (which is turned off by default in OSX), invoke the terminal, and then run Renopo. It was laughed out of the water. Renepo took no advantage of any vulnerability in OSX other than the fact that computers can run apps and scripts. At worst it was a Trojan.

• An early unnamed OSX Trojan (it gets the honor? of being the first OSX Trojan) did, indeed, wipe the user files of ONE, count him, 1 user. It was a 40K file placed on pirate board claiming to be a complete install of Mac OSX Office. An idiot user downloaded it, for some reason thinking that Office could exist in 40K, and installed it and ran it... and it erased his user files. No one can protect idiots from themselves.

• OSX.RSPlug.A Recently, a fake OSX Codec for a non-existent video format was actually found on some porn sites... it installed a DNS redirector. However, to get this Trojan, the victim user had to ignore the warning that the downloading codec contained an application, installed it, five it permission to run for the first time, and then giving it permission to modify the system files.

That pretty much exhausts the list of Mac Viruses...

They can choose to put out a hack that only has the potential to hit 10% of the possible target pool....or they can choose to put out a hack that has the potential to hit 90% of the potential target pool. It’s a no brainer which they are going to choose... it’s as simple as that.

No, it is not as simple as that. Most viruses hit less than 2% of the available targets (although some have been 100% virulent)... because the Windows community does hide behind firewalls and multiple levels of anti-this and anti-that. If you were writing a virus that could infect 100% of the totally unprotected Mac users which comprise almost 20% of all US computer users... you would have hit 20% of the available computers... TEN TIMES the number the most successful exploits hit. It hasn't happened. Why?

Mel, crackers have written viruses targeting far smaller installed bases than the 30,000,000 Mac users. Some of these have been as small as the 12,000 unpatched Blackice Routers a YEAR after the company released the patch fixed that the vulnerability that was exploited. Several months ago, someone wrote a virus that infected iPods that had been hacked to run Linux... all 200 -300 of them. Just last week someone released a virus that attacks only Jailbroken iPhones that have a specific third party application installed. These are ALL far smaller targets than the 30,000,000 unprotected Macs.

Last quarter Macs were 8.3% of all computers sold in the US... and a little over 4% of all computers sold in the world. If all things were equal, we should see at least 4% of the number of viruses in the Windows world being written for Macs. We don't. We haven't for over seven years.

[Swordmaker]

The whole cutesy names thing with Mac is very childish. Call a process what it is. The Photo Booth app is a perfect example of what I am say. Who needs a program that takes a picture, allows you to play around with it like being in a fun house and then email to your adolescence friends, I’ll pass.

What's wrong with occasionally having fun with a computer? That's what Photo Booth is for... having fun... and sharing your creations with other friends.

What other "cutesy names" are you referring to? iWork, iMovie, iDVD, iMovie-HD, Time Machine, Safari, Keynote? Are these childish? What are they, redangus?

[montag813]

I don’t understand all these PC crashes either. I’ve had 6 desktops & 4 laptops in my computing life.

I used Macs from the first release until 2001, so I consider myself very credible on this issue. I simply don't understand all the ridiculous propaganda about Macs being bulletproof and PCs being death traps of "bluescreens" and heartbreak. It simply is not the truth, like those silly Mac/PC ads which have no basis in reality. The latest one has Macs bragging about being able to restore themselves to a point before an install. HELLO! Ever hear of System Restore? Only been on PCs for like 6 years or more. Mac propaganda is quite silly. We are far more productive since moving from Macs to PCs, and we are not number crunchers, but creative media producers, from print to video to internet.

[Swordmaker]

Sword claimed that the only vulnerabilties that exist for OSX were a few trojans that required significant user interaction in order to achieve....

No, I didn't. Read what I said.

Uh, excuse me READ the advisories.... don’t just count them.

I have.

...including many buffer overflow style attacks and even some zero day exploits.

Please list the zero day exploits.

Or maybe we can hear from the guy that beat the Feb 22nd, 2006 “rm-my-mac” challange by getting Root of OSX in 30 minutes.

Please. Let's. This was debunked at the time it was fudded around. The Swedish Mac owner TURNED ON many ports that are OFF by default in a standard OSX installation. He also enabled ROOT, putting in a password... opened SSH ports... and allowed challengers to create their own user accounts. Every attacker was given local access! To make it even easier, the attackers were allowed to create Administrator Accounts for themselves. When they logged in, they could see the owner's user name!

Neither Gwerdna, the supposed Australian hacker, nor the Swedish Mac Mini owner would provide any details on how it was done. Since the hackers already knew the owner's name getting Root access may have been as simple as guessing his Root password. Further research showed the target computer had software had been modified from the standard OSX installation:

"Looking at the hacker contest link - it turns out that the machine's software was heavily modified, and much of Apple's standard software was replaced with non-standard versions (e.g. the Apache web server), and LDAP was wide open to allow anyone to add an account to the machine. So this test was totally bogus for purposes of evaluating security for the average Mac user."

This Swedish "contest" was so flawed that a week or so after it was widely hyped (read fudded) around the world, David Schroeder, an Assistant Professor of Information Technology at the University of Wisconsin, put a brand new, just out-of-the-box Mac Mini on a static IP address with the challenge to the world's hacker community to break into it and simply modify the web page it was displaying. The contest, original planned to last 72 hours, continued for 38 hours with thousands of attempts before the University IT department shut it down due to excess bandwidth usage - peaking at 30Mbps. None of the attempts succeeded.

... list of just one release of patches addressing 25 different vulnerabilties. Go ahead and read the description and tell me how well that matches Swords characterization.

Apple reports and lists improvement and security updates for all of the underlying UNIX applications. Being open source, ALL UNIX vulnerabilities are reported. Although many of these Unix applications are either turned off or not- implemented in OSX, Apple reports the vulnerabilities and provides the fixes and updates in any case. They are counted as OSX vulnerabilities. (Microsoft does NOT report hidden vulnerabilities in their proprietary applications until they are "discovered" and reported by someone outside Microsoft.)

You might also be interested in the fact that one of the most targeted websites in the world, the United States Army's, is run on a Mac OSX server... because they are so hard to hack. The US Army is also quietly incorporating Macs in other areas to increase security. Maybe they know a little more about it than you?

[Swordmaker]

Watching streaming video is a chore because some sites will work with WMP for Mac and others you have to turn on Flip-4-Mac.

Chris, I think you have done something wrong in installing your Flip-4-Mac... I installed mine and simply forgot about it. It works inside Quicktime and will play any Windows Media File (except for the DRMed files) transparently to the end user with one click. Which browser are you using for your streaming content or are you using Quicktime?

[Richard Kimball]

I used Macs from the first release until 2001, so I consider myself very credible on this issue

OS X wasn't released until 2001, so all your experience would have been with OS 9 and below, and the newest iMac you could have used is a G3. Your comments are based on systems over seven years old. I don't know how you can consider yourself credible on an OS X system with intel processors.

[jack_napier]

1) More and more programs are becoming multithreaded. Even the small shareware video apps on Mac will use any processors you have.
More are. Most aren't.
2) Running development instances of application servers can really use multiple cores. VMWare gives each instance the option of how many cores it wants to use.
Why are you talking about servers in response to a quoted question that says non-servers?

3) It can help even a single-threaded application. Accessing some OS X libraries, for example Core Animation, automatically spawns another thread even if the application doesn't know about it. 4) The cache is the key to the high performance of the Intel Core line. A Core 2 Duo normally comes with 4 MB L2 cache. The Xeon line in the Mac Pro comes with 12 MB L2 cache, 6 MB per pair of cores, 50% more cache. Even on a per-core basis it should be faster.
Assuming that the application you're running will generate sufficient cache hits. For some applications this performance gain is minimal.

Look, I'm not even sure what's being argued here. I'm certainly not saying that Xeons are slow. I'm just saying that in many applications, a system with with a slightly faster dual core will beat out a quad core or two quad cores. And I'm certainly not saying that these aren't beautiful machines. But I certainly don't think it's at all reasonable to say they compete in the 'bang for the buck' region in purely terms of hardware. And please, remember that I was talking most specifically about me, some joker who overclocks. For what the VAST majority of people do, even the baseline Core 2 systems are more than enough juice. You know, I do a compile of a huge application and it's not the compile that takes most of the time, it's the build I/O.

[Swordmaker]

We have Office for Mac 2004 and it works nothing like Word for Windows. Excel does not work as well on the Mac. Even my stepson who has two Macs, an iPod and an iPhone uses a PC for his business spread sheets and word processing.

Which Word for Windows are you using? I teach the use of Word to many of my clients on both platforms... and don't find that much difference between the two... until the latest version of the Windows Word. You mention earlier the Format toolbar doesn't come up automatically... turn it on. It's under View/Toolbars. You mentioned bringing up a blank document... click OK on the project gallery. Voila! One click.

I have several client SMBs using Macs with Microsoft Office... and Word... and Excel. They don't have any problems and new employees who've used Windows Word don't either.

What are you doing in Excel that doesn't work?

Finding the file to attach is the problem. On a PC you go directly to documents from the email app. on the Mac it takes you to photos first then you have to click on documents and then you can attach the file.

Gee... mine defaults to Documents. And there are a list of other file sources on the sidebar... Music, Pictures, Movies... etc. How hard is that?

And finally why should I have to learn a “new paradigm” to use a computer.

It is obvious that you want the Mac to work just like Windows... that's why. Once you do learn the new to you paradigm, you like most of the others on this thread may find it is a better paradigm than the one you've been used to.

[Swordmaker]

I've used the flip4mac plug in to play the WMV files.

I do to.... but MS has refused to release the Codec for their DRM to allow anyone other than Windows users to see their DRMed WMV files.

[Swordmaker]

I used Macs from the first release until 2001, so I consider myself very credible on this issue. I simply don't understand all the ridiculous propaganda about Macs being bulletproof and PCs being death traps of "bluescreens" and heartbreak.

First of all, since you dropped out of Mac use in 2001, you have absolutely no experience with a modern Mac on which to base your opinion. Experience with a 2001 Mac does not make you at all credible... your information is woefully outdated. The Macs you used, OS9 and earlier, have absolutely no relationship to modern OSX Macs. They are not the same operating system; OSX is not even descended from OS9. They share absolutely no code.

It simply is not the truth, like those silly Mac/PC ads which have no basis in reality. The latest one has Macs bragging about being able to restore themselves to a point before an install. HELLO! Ever hear of System Restore? Only been on PCs for like 6 years or more.

BZZZZT! The ad is not bragging about being able to restore themselves to a point before an install... Time Machine isn't intended for that purpose at all and is not at all similar to System Restore. I don't even bother to use it to back up system files. Time Machine is a startlingly easy to use back-up application built into the OS.

Time Machine backs up USER FILES... and allows you to go back sequentially until you find a deleted or damaged file or earlier version of an existing file. It lets you look for it in the GUI in the folder it was in... and you look at previous snapshots of that folder.

Mac propaganda is quite silly. We are far more productive since moving from Macs to PCs, and we are not number crunchers, but creative media producers, from print to video to internet.

Good for you. Maybe you should take a modern Mac for a test drive... you will be surprised.