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I am about to embark on a career as an Independent Contractor -- I am a computer consultant (37 years) in the ERP space. I have some pretty good laptops now but I really think I need a high-powered, high-performance Wintel laptop. I would like to keep it at 15" to take with me, although I have a Surface (which I like but has idiosyncrasies) I use for mobility. This is business, not gaming (which I eschew), so I don't think Alienware and its derivatives are what I am looking for.

Unknown to tens of millions of users, a hidden security vulnerability has been lurking on many Intel-based Windows PCs for the past six years. The vulnerability was found by researcher Rafal Wojtczuk from security firm Bromium. Wojtczuk announced his findings at the Black Hat security conference here in Las Vegas. According to Wojtczuk, the vulnerability he re-discovered was actually first exposed and patched six years ago, albeit only on Linux systems.The vulnerability involves the unsafe use of an Intel CPU instruction called 'sysret'. The risk is that if left unpatched, an attacker could have executed a user-to-kernel privilege escalation attack....

All Web browsers are insecure to some degree, because they all must work with flawed code in the operating systems. There are some indications of progress, such as frequent patches from Microsoft and Mozilla to close security holes. Still, these actions may be too little too late if a zero-day exploit is the attack weapon. Internet users are under attack -- and what's more, there's no bulletproof defense against hackers on the horizon Despite hype to the contrary from marketing departments at Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) , Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Mozilla, Web browsers themselves -- not just the operating systems...

"What drives the purchase of an Apple machine isn't the OS itself -- it's the packaging, the cabinet design, the quality of the graphics. I don't question that Mac OS is an easier operating system, but I don't think that alone drives Apple's sales anymore. A Mac is almost an appliance like a home entertainment center or a big-screen TV," said Charles Tatum II. In a recent column, I asked users of Windows-based PCs if they were tempted at all to switch to a Macintosh , as I am considering doing for my next home computer. As is often the...

Part I: Winn’s Recommendations Part II: Winn’s Total Cost of Ownership Analysis I’m now a 136-day-old Mac aficionado. (Or thereabouts.) Then again, here I am in Paris (no, St. Tropez... now Monte Carlo), moving my daughter here for a year of study at the Sorbonne, and every other person on the street asks me for directions or restaurant recommendations. I answer them all. (But that one obnoxious couple from Chicago is going to have a rude awakening when they try to eat in the sewers.) My French isn’t so bad, and fooling Les Americains est tres facile. Whatever. ; )...

10) Freedom. In the end, it's all about freedom. And while OS X's core is based on the open source and libre Darwin Mach/BSD derivative, very little else is - there is very little freedom within the Mac space. It's either Apple's way or the bye-way. 4) Expanding the Comfort Zone. I can't prove it, but gut-feel tells me that any user who migrates from Windows to the Mac will be far more comfortable in subsequently migrating from an OS X interface to a Linux interface (KDE/Gnome). It's fairly self-obvious really: if you've discovered that a Windows interface isn't the...

Thinking MacTel. On an airplane, over Montana perhaps? I read it too, and I knew about it as a rumor months ago. Hell, this is the Internet! REPEAT: 1. I do not hate Windows. 2. I do not hate Intel. 3. No one else for that matter. I just said that I felt that Mac was more security attuned than WinTel for all sorts of reasons that we are talking about here. One of the main reasons is that the Mac integration of OS, HW and BIOS provides additional security over the open architecture approach of many different vendors attempting...

Oddly enough: I am on my way from Whistler to New York. Been reading a book, “Hybrids”, by Robert Sawyer. (I swear this is purely coincidental.) Page 299, and I quote: “every time her Windows-based PC displayed that blue screen of death, she felt like throwing her support in with Linux crowd. And now it had happened again, for the second time today. Mary did the three-fingered salute but after sitting through its interminable wait for the system to reboot, she found that it stubbornly refused to reacquire its network connection.” The Basics are the Basics I’ve been in infosec...

This is my first column written on a Mac - ever. Maybe I should have done it a long time ago, but I never said I was smart, just obstinate. I was a PC bigot. But now, I've had it. I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore. In the coming weeks I'm going to keep a diary of an experiment my company began at 6 p.m. April 29, 2005 - an experiment predicated on the hypothesis that the WinTel platform represents the greatest violation of the basic tenets of information security and has become a...