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Fri, 20 Sep 2002

Apple Security Update 2002-09-20

Security Update 2002-09-20 is now available in the software update panel.

This update fixes a

potential vulnerability introduced in Terminal version 1.3 (v81) that

shipped with Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) which could allow an attacker to

remotely execute arbitrary commands on the user's system.



The Terminal utility is updated to version 1.3.1 (v82) with this

Security Update.

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Macintosh criticized on MSN

In this article on MSN, Kim Kommando dismisses the Mac, although she claims to be fair. "And just to set the record straight, I was not influenced one bit by the fact this column runs on a Microsoft-owned site. In fact, I started my testing months before I began contributing weekly columns to Microsoft bCentral.", she says.

The article starts out by mentioning the iMac's appearance & style, always the first target of the Windows-centric press. Similarly, when a PC manufacturer tries to copy the Mac, they only duplicate the style but always end up with a much less elegant system. Gateway's Profile 4 is a perfect example.



At least the Mac scores one point: "The first test was getting the iMac on the network. That was a piece of cake. Just a few entries were needed in System Preferences." No matter how much someone dislikes the Mac, you have to admit Mac networking is much less troublesome. I know from experience that Windows networking is a nightmare.



Her major complaint is the iMac's lack of speed. However, her benchmarks are Internet Explorer & MS Word, both of which are no speed demons. She could get a better feel for the machine's speed if she had used OmniWeb or Chimera, both of which are a lot faster than IE and don't suffer from its tendency to suddenly lock up while it's loading or rendering a page.



Surprisingly, she also says that Adobe PhotoShop filters are much slower on the iMac, and this is one area where the Mac always beats PCs in most benchmarks. She was using an 11Mb TIFF file, although she doesn't mention what version of PhotoShop she was using. If she was using an older version that runs under classic, this could explain the difference.



She also takes swipes at a few other common targets: the one-button mouse, 15-inch screen, and lack of a floppy drive, as well as the price.



Although the iMac ships with a one button mouse, multiple button mice are well supported, and the scroll wheel & right button on most mice will even work with no additional drivers in most applications. All manufacturers of Mac-specific mice include driver software, and USB OverDrive will work for almost any standard USB mouse. I use a Kensington Optical Mouse Elite on my main machine and a cheap no-name optical wheel mouse on my other machine. Both work flawlessly.



Of course a 17" iMac is available, but if she was comparing it against a desktop machine with a separate monitor, a much better comparison would be with a G4 tower, which lets you use almost any monitor or LCD display.



As for the lack of a floppy drive, this isn't even worth mentioning. Although I have an external floppy drive (actually a VST Tri-Media drive, which supports floppies, SmartMedia, and CompactFlash), I almost never use it to read floppies. A few days ago one of my neighbors who uses a PC asked me to scan a picture for him. Since neither of us had a floppy disk, I simply emailed it to him. With large graphic & multimedia files, floppies are much less useful than they were in the past. CD-R and CDRW media is almost as cheap as floppies and can easily handle large files. Since most models are capable of burning CDs, the lack of a floppy disk isn't even an issue any more.



Which brings me to the final point. Although she mentions the availability of multimedia software for the Mac, she says she didn't look at it and wasn't really interested. However, even most business users often have to burn CDs either for backup or for publishing. On a Mac, burning CDs is as easy as copying to a floppy. On PCs, you often have to deal with kludged-up third party hardware & software, with drivers that often cause conflicts.



One of my friends publishes a weekly community newspaper. He uses PCs for his business and refuses to even consider Macs. Every week I hear from him about the grief he's having trying to burn a CD to send to the printer.



Even if the Mac is slower, it lets you work faster. With PCs you can spend days debugging hardware or software conflicts, or trying to fix a network problem. While problems do occur on the Mac, they're less frequent and usually much easier to resolve.



No matter how they try to copy the Mac, Windows will never match its elegance. Windows in its current form, including XP, is a patchwork of kludges, bug fixes, and unnecessary layers of complexity.

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