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A Pointless Rant
Monday 5th February, 2007 16:09 Comments: 0
I need to buy a new computer to run Vista

Not if you bought your computer recently. And by recently, I mean in the last couple of years. Anything before that and it might be a bit slow. The problem stems from people that bought a PC back in 2001-2002 that just about coped with running Windows XP and for some reason expect that it should still be able to run Windows Vista 5-6 years later. Unsurprisingly, my original Pentium 75MHz system that ran Windows 95 okay would never have coped with Windows XP. It was upgraded to an AMD 333MHz machine using an Evergreen CPU upgrade kit, and even when we'd upgraded the RAM from (I think it came with) 8MB to a whopping 96MB, it still took ages to boot up and you couldn't have more than 3 copies of IE running without the system grinding to a halt.

Vista is expensive

Okay, so the retail route isn't exactly cheap, but you do get support from Microsoft. Linux is free, but you don't get that support (unless you pay for a distro). OS X isn't cheap either: XP Home launched in October 2001 for around £170, all updates (including SP2) have been free. Apple, on the other hand, charged for OS X updates, as they added features (mostly mirroring Windows - DVD playback, better CD/DVD writing, DPI control, fast user switching). OS X 10.0 was £99, 10.1 was free, 10.2 was £84, 10.3 was £84, 10.4 was £89. So over 5 years that's a total of £356. More than twice the price of Windows XP. There will not be another large gap between releases of Windows, but if OS X continues its charge for point updates (which it seems to think of as major releases), it might not be that much cheaper than Vista. Plus you still need expensive Mac hardware for OS X. Although I do admit they do tend to look nice. If your PC is a bit old, you'll almost inevitably get Home Basic or Home Premium if you buy a new one from PC World or Dell or wherever you plan on going.

OS X / Linux is more secure

Maybe. Maybe not. Vista has been looked at in depth by the security community for a couple years, with very few problems being uncovered. If you try and do something silly like run as the highest privilege account, Vista will still prompt you (I gather so will OS X if something needs root, even if you're in the same group; there seems to be a slightly short-sighted campaign to remove this feature - at least Vista gives you the option of disabling UAC). For a comparison of security features, this nice chart demonstrates that the "defence in depth" approach appears to be better in Vista. Whether that translates to better security is another matter, but it should mitigate a lot of things, and probably forces malicious people to write very clever code in the future. If you look at the MoKB project, you'll see that only one thing affected Windows, and (IIRC) it didn't affect 2003 or Vista. Last month's MoAB should force Mac users to think about how secure their OS really is, and perhaps the length of time it's taking Apple to provide simple fixes should ring some bells.

OS X applications work well together, it's easy to do repetive things

Microsoft applications work well together too, so well that they've been sued and criticised for abusing their monopoly (e.g. Office 2007 and Vista). In fact some of their older products worked so well and seamlessly that it was very easy to script applications and write exploits that would email everyone in your address book and help propogate a virus. That's why, for example, Microsoft now prompt users if a web page tries to use their mail client to submit a form on a webpage, or why it verifies that you really did request to do certain things. I suspect Apple's AppleScript could potentially be abused if people were to target it. You can take control of applications which don't directly support AppleScript. You can query and control the menus, windows and dialogs of these applications via AppleScript's Graphic User Interface scripting architecture. "Your Mac can now become your alarm clock with a script that wakes you by playing your favorite iTunes playlist" oh, and it can probably send an email to your entire address book too. Don't believe me? Using "help" and "disk", malicious users could use a Web page that will either download a small disk image onto a Mac or mount it remotely, then execute an AppleScript on the mounted image, which could contain any Unix command - including ones to remove any file in the user's Home directory. The flaw works with any browser, including Safari, Internet Explorer, and Firefox. The first genuine OS X malware was an AppleScript application disguised as a demo for Word 2004. The malware was a simple 108KB AppleScript that took advantage of AppleScript's ability to execute Unix applications, running a command to erase the user's Home folder when opened.

Microsoft are evil

No they're not. Honestly.
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