The Very Best

(sigh) ..but my user experience is that none of these vulnerabilities have actually resulted in anything that has remotely bothered the computer on my desktop. I'm not naive enough to think it could never happen. I'm just reporting that it hasn't happened, which is different from the experience of 99% of PC users, and 99% is probably charitable.

I think we are comparing apples and oranges (no pun intended). You are talking about potentially exploitable security holes present in both OSs, which may or may not be higher in one case or the other; I don't know. The patches may be timely and effective or not; again, I don't know. And, I don't care, because I am talking about turning my computer on and having it work day in and day out without doing anything extraordinary to make that happen.

I really don't care why it works, it just works! End of story, until things change. When I start having to go through the rigamarole on the Computer Problem thread, CFB, I will personally call you and hire you as a consultant to set me up with the Very Best Computer (whatever the brand is they have in 2017  ;) )...
 
ladelfina said:
I think we are comparing apples and oranges (no pun intended).
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Your position seems to be that we are comparing apples and lemons (pun intended).
 
:LOL:  :LOL:

I'm already in enough hot water without calling PCs "lemons".. (gets back to the "if M$ made cars" adage). I'm sure they are adequate for people who think they are getting performance, who need to feel like they're getting a bargain by spending a couple hundred bucks less, who need particular apps, etc., and who don't mind spending the all the extra time and $ it takes to fend off malware and tinker under the hood.  I just personally don't need the hassle, nor does anyone else who doesn't fit the description above. You get what you pay for.

Poor OP.. will anyone ever give him his "one fund" answer?  :-\

Anyone else hearing (the great, underestimated) Dean Martin in the background?
"Onnne fund.. I have but onnne funnnd.."
 
I think the OP's question was well answered.

So although there are a lot of vulnerabilities, as long as they dont strike you, and as long as you arent aware of them (since you have no tools to detect whether they've effected you), they arent there?

Pretty much the same for me. With a standard broadband firewall/wireless router, my antivirus, firewall and spyware scanner have only detected threats in software that I've explicitly downloaded or installed from...well...lets say "questionable sources". No worms, trojans, or other exploits have hit me.

But we dance around the real points. I think there was a point that OS X was free of exploits and had no viruses "in the wild"; neither of those things is true and there is considerable evidence from a number of partisan and non-partisan sources to confirm that. There is an assertion that you really dont need a firewall or virus/spyware product on a mac because there are no threats...security through ostrich/obscurity approaches may be unwise. There is an assertion that nothing has effected your mac...but then again you wouldnt know if you had a trojan and six key loggers running on your system right now because theres no way to detect them!

Even Dean Martin, after tee many martoonis would probably be a little bit concerned...
 
And how do you know this is even me? And not some 'key logger' who swiped my ER board pw? You'll never know.. bwaaahaahhhaaa. >:D

Pretty much the same for me
So, your point is? We both "could" be vulnerable to things neither of us can see or check for? You spend time and $ and install stuff to get rid of your more constant and overt attacks, and I don't, but you end up in the same boat as I am? I'm having trouble seeing the big downside in my blasé approach at this particular point in time.
====

Feeling paranoid (now see what you made me do?!??), I ran ClamXav and found 2 e-mails with the Phishing.Auction thing.. But I would have had to foolishly click on those links to e-Bay or whatever to have suffered. They aren't things that affect the operation of my computer, as I understand them; they're things I choose to send out, not something that has actually gotten in. Plus, they weren't even in my OSX machine files; they were in my e-mail import in March 2005 from the PowerMac G4 machine that I had been running without any AV since I got it in 2000, so who knows what the original date was. (I didn't think to look, I just tossed.)

Am I glad I deleted those files? Sure, but they wouldn't have crippled or broken my machine. I did lose the morning doing the scan. Oh, well.. Three hours amortized over six years... ;)

Leave me in my little happy Mac world for now.. while it lasts!
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Because no mere key logger would have your brilliant wit and lovely charm!

But see, I dont 'spend time and $ and install stuff'. The s/w comes already installed, updates itself, and runs itself in the background.

And still, over many years, the only time its ever interrupted me to say something bad was going on was when I downloaded a file that I probably shouldnt have. I guess what i'm getting at is the mysterious invulnerable OS X vs the holier than swiss cheese Windows XP ends up at a level impasse. Both have vulnerabilities. Both are automatically updated to protect against newly discovered ones. As huge code bases with many addons, both can be subject to attack by a number of means. Both can be protected from these attacks by other very easy to use products which admittedly may carry their own issues in with them.

But to say that one is bulletproof or that its a good idea to use security via obscurity...well...truth of the mind cannot defeat the lies of the heart...

And by the by, I think OSX is a nice software product. We just need to separate you from that godawful motorola hardware platform... :D
 
a nice software product
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Finally, you are getting my drift.. Why do you think I've been an Apple 'evangelist' all these years..?

The software/UI, #1 by a long shot; #2 the plug and play (no days spent wasted on trying to hook up a hard drive or graphics cards.. "just plug it in and it works!"; #3 running double monitors which PCs couldn't really do 'til recently, I believe; a distant 4 the fact that the boxes are nice. 

The underlying chip/performance to me is secondary, though that's how everyone seems to evaluate computers. What good is an extra nano-second here and there, if you have to spend two hours installing a hard disk?

If you recall, I think I wrote that I started out using the Mac for drawing, and the PC for IBM Ventura Publisher, which I still miss. This was in the days when Pagemaker only had one page! I would have given a PC space in my office for many years, despite the pain, if Ventura had not bitten the dust. However, I get a twitch like Inspector Clouseau's boss when I think about dealing with clients and the stuff they wanted in Word/M$ Publisher/PowerPoint. M$ software is utter crap, except for Excel. That's where 80% of my PC bias comes from; the rest is the non-user-friendly things like drivers, editing WIN-INI files and other nonsense just to hook things up and get them to function. I know some of that is old hat by now, but once burned... Then throw in the level of invasiveness ("you don't want to do that, you want to do this") and what can I say? Just never a company I wanted to support.

So why didn't you go with the Intel Mac?  We need to separate you from that godawful M$ morass.. I can't tell you how often PC hubby drools over my machines (did I mention they are also more water-resistant than PCs?  ;) )

After I blow some serious bucks on this kitchen I have my eye on one of them cinemaah displays. 30".  8)
 
See, I just dont have these problems. I dont see anything in the UI on OSX that makes it really superior to XP. I've hooked up graphics cards and both internal and external hard drives and it takes a few minutes to install a card, but external devices hook up and just run. I've also run double monitors on PC's since the late 80's and run them easily more recently. Several ATI cards "dual head" and allow double monitor connections. You tell windows with one click that you want to extend your desktop, and voila. I havent had to edit any 'ini' files, or 'outi' files for that matter...in years.

A lot of these prejudices were true at one point, but are persisting well past their time. Certainly harsh, negative anecdotal evidence of problems exists for both platforms. I could tell you some grating horror stories about the first apple machines sold, because I sold them! Carrying the sins of IIe's frying up all of their spanking new dynamic ram chips, the Lisa debacle, the underpowered early imacs...now that wouldnt mean anything today. Neither does all the stuff that Windohhhs used to do or not do.
 
My experience was just that it was better to avoid the pain and horror. I'm glad things are better now, but that doesn't mean a whole lot of people didn't suffer a whole lot in the 15 or 20 years between the end of the "bad mac" era and the beginning of the "good PC" era. If you'd experienced that with a hotel chain, or a car company, it would probably take a good long while for them to earn your trust back. What I could never figure out was the desire to "standardize" on something that, at the time, was clearly inferior. If Mac people were fanatics, PC people were lemmings, and were driving the Yugos of their time. No wait, at least the Yugos had an intuitive interface.

Another thing that drove DH batty as a developer were all the myriad flavors of Windows OS.. the ME, the 2000, the NT, the "personal", the "professional".. that all led a painfully incompatible co-existence.

Again, I'm glad to hear you report things are better now. Not sure whether it's the Stockholm syndrome talking, but I'll take you at your word!
 
Well to be fair to both companies and their users, apple controlled their hardware platform while doing fairly limited layered application software development, while keeping some control over their developers. Microsoft had no control over the hardware at all, anyone could develop drivers, hardware and software products and pitch them to market.

Given the broad base of uncontrolled hardware to support and make its operating system and applications compatible with, I cant really fault microsoft for having a large number of problems to deal with. The advantage for them was rapid acceptance and broad based hardware and software products. That translated to solutions and sales.

Apple in the meanwhile, could control their offerings and the quality thereof and had few problems with hardware and software developed "on the cheap" or by less than competent 3rd parties. They havent managed to translate this controlled product space into any significant market share, however. Even with a perception of differentiated product quality and ease of use that frankly hasnt existed in years.

Maybe they'll have better luck now that they've loosened the reins on the hardware end of things.

As far as developers go, I think the Windows developer has had a relative walk in the park compared to folks who had to manage the powerpc transition from the 68k family, and then making their apps work reliably in the Mac OS compatibility box in OS X...
 
I'm more or less aware of the history, but during my working life I had to worry about #1.. me! What did microsoft really try to offer anyone after re-packaging Lotus 1-2-3? 20 years or more is a long time to sit on your laurels.

The buying public allowed it to happen, since, first, computers were really only used by geeks anyway, and what better badge of geekdom than to control a resource that no-one else can figure out? No one at any decision-making level wanted "computers for the rest of us". (I cannot emphasize this enough.) I would posit that many still do not want that. Get your PC-knowledgeable and Mac-ignorant tech staff in a room along with a purchasing manager, and, Bob's your uncle, PCs for everyone.! The quality-control issue was, as I have admitted, a risk that Apple took and lost. But I think the the prevailing MS approach has held personal computing back a couple of decades, 10 years minimum. Look at printing: I have always been able to print at a percentage.. always!!  PCs users can't/couldn't. Why put up with that kind of s**t?

Thank you for pointing out the fact that I can get all my Classic apps to run in OSX. MS couldn't even get their concurrent versions to play nice together, much less grandfather in fully-operative old ones. I'm willing to pay a premium to a company that, admirably, thinks about its users first.

I cant really fault microsoft for having a large number of problems to deal with.
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I can, since 1.) it was their decision to begin with, from which they profited greatly nonetheless, and 2.) they seem to have only started to come to grips with it recently, which is unconscionable given the wad of cash they've been sitting on.

You can make excuses for either company, but I have to look at it from the point of view of the poor user. Can I come in in the am, turn the thing on, do my work, print, hook things up without problems, go home at a normal hour. Mac: yes, almost always, since 1984. PC: no, almost never, until maybe lately.

I care about the market share of one: me!   :D

product quality and ease of use that frankly hasnt existed in years
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I think OSX is a nice software product
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Explain.  :confused:
 
You need slightly more context around the first quote. Its a nice software product, but I dont see any quality or ease of use differentiation between the current version of XP and OS X.

My bottom line, with my market share of 1 is that there is a perception of hardware and software product performance and quality that is associated with paying extra for an apple product. My personal experience is that the product performance and quality is really not that well differentiated...but the price sure is.
 
Sorry, I wouldn't trade my $500 mini for the most expensive PC you could configure, except with the idea of re-selling it to someone else and buying a g5 tower quad.

I can see it now.. with 2 cinema displays.. yum!
indexsharksdisplay20051018.jpg



Have to wait on an Intel duo until I see where the developers go with the Universal apps. Adobe seems to be dragging its feet, from what I hear.

watch it, bunny.. tonight for dinner we are having rabbit

img15420aa.jpg


(and just for fun, a weird fractal fluorescent broccoli).
img15395ew.jpg


(hey! what happened to my pix? They were there in the preview.) Edited links cuz the fractal broccoli is just too cool not to show. Hope they persist this time..
 
Ten years from now there will be an announcement that broccolli actually causes cancer. It will be known as "the silent green death".

Ick.
 
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