It's payback time: If the Vista team could write ad copy ...

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Research your claims before you post outright falsehoods.: "Actually, OSX is a GUI on top of a Linux kernel."

No, OSX has absolutely 0% of the Linux kernel. Zero. None. Zip. Nada. Zilch.

OSX is, among other things, a GUI on top of Darwin, which is Apple's own
open-source Unix (not Linux!) distro (which ran on even very cheap, very old
i386-or-later PCs long before the Intel Macs were announced, and can run on any
hardware for which suitable compilers exist) based on the Mach kernel, itself based
on FreeBSD. Get your facts straight.

Onto some of the other things: running on older Macs doesn't mean that you must,
or should, do so. But being able to do so means that the underlying OS is
much more efficient and doesn't require super-fast super-modern
hardware to run effectively without making snails look like Peregrine falcons in
mid-dive (try running Access 2007 [which uses the same coding techniques used
in Vista] in SQL Server 2005 .ADP Project mode sometime: on the very fastest
hardware available today, with a clean install, it is still slower by an order of
magnitude than Access 2003 [using XP coding techniques] is on a much older PC
with lots of other stuff running at the same time -- I've seen it take over a minute
to echo an alphanumeric keystroke into a text field or even a coding window!).

Other Office 2007 apps are also slower by severalfold over their 2003 equivalents,
though none quite as bad as Access 2007. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Part of it is .NET, which is managed code (like Java JiT-compiled JVM bytecode) and
so is always going to be slower than native code. But part is simply that Microsoft
doesn't bother to make their applications (and OS) efficient these days, since the
hardware itself is getting faster. But do we want faster PCs just to run newer
software so that it's not painfully slow, and seems kinda sorta almost a tolerable
percentage as fast as older software was on older PCs with a tiny fraction of today's
PCs' power? Or do we want faster PCs so that everything will be faster?

On viruses: while there have been a few for the Mac OS X, it remains true that more
new malware comes out every day (some estimates put it at every hour)
for Windows than has ever existed for the Mac in its entire history, going
all the way back to and including the original LISA. Also, malware for Windows
tends to be much worse than that for the Mac OS X. There has not been anything
even remotely approaching the devastation of, oh, say, the Storm Worm, for
instance.

The most widespread Mac malware I can think of in history was the WDEV A virus
from the late 1980s, and that one was not deliberately harmful in any way (its
author just wanted to see how widely it would spread, not cause any harm). Indeed,
it was discovered only because it depended on ROM addresses remaining the same,
and when the Mac IIci came out with a new ROM, the WDEV virus broke and caused
what appeared to be compatibility problems with other programs. So widespread
was it that for awhile everyone thought that it was the IIci itself that was making
apps break. I myself worked for a software company that at the time had
unwittingly released WDEF on one of our product disks. This virus was also
pathetically easy to remove, without needing any software other than the OS itself:
just hold [Command]+[Apple] on reboot or when mounting a suspected infected
floppy, and agree to have the Desktop file rebooted (which one should do
occasionally anyway in Mac OS Classic, for reasons similar to rebuilding the
Windows Registry from time to time).

On the cost: compare five licenses of any comparable version of Windows Vista
with Mac OS X Leopard Family Pack. Or how much would Windows Server 2003 or
2008 cost with unlimited client licenses?

Running multiple OSes? No, it's not the hardware (that could be said for the older
PowerPC G4-and-earlier-based Macs, but not the newer Intel ones nor even G5
ones -- the Motorolla PowerPC is much more efficient at emulating other CPUs
than the IBM PowerPC G5, and both are more efficient at doing so than any Intel
chip -- the PowerPC G4 and earlier could run in either little-endian or big-endian
mode, a capability removed by IBM in their G5 [but retained in the Motorolla G5,
which Apple never used]). It's Boot Camp, which is software, and is frankly little
more than a fancier version of the boot.ini file in Windows (assuming that the
poster you responded to was talking about dual-booting).

Running multiple OSes simultaneously? That's virtualization, which the Macs have
been doing for longer than the PCs, and indeed, Microsoft's virtualization software
was acquired (not developed in-house) by them buying out the company that
made the most popular virtualizer for the Mac (Virtual PC). Virtualization is cool
indeed, but also opens up a new malware attack vector (compromising the
hypervisor -- if this is done, no AV software running on the client OSes can ever
detect it, let alone remove it, by any means whatsoever).

Vista does deserve props for improved security, primarily for finally doing
something about the legacy software issue in which apps still in common use still
did things the Windows 95/98 way, where the OS let any app do anything it wanted
and no Administrator accounts were needed. The Vista solution to this problem is
indeed quite elegant, and I wish it had been done in XP SP2.; Posted by: Joel R Posted on: 11/07/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use