In article ,
"Pete C." wrote:

Joseph Gwinn wrote:


I don't have any specific cites, but it was in the national news when it
occurred. Something along the lines of Intel's new CPU design infringing
on a number of HPaqDEC patents shortly after the Intel engineers had had
some sort of meeting with the HPaqDEC engineers. I guess it occurred
after HP was on the scene and Intel was able to con clueless Carley into
just selling them the whole Alpha thing instead of enforcing the patent
rights.

This has to have started long before Carly appeared. Do you recall the
timeframe?

I'm not very chronologically oriented. Had to be '98 - '00 range I
think.


While DEC may have alleged infringement, did the courts agree?

It didn't get to that point. The suit I believe was filed, but then
dropped after Compaq or HP sold out.

OK. So we will never know the truth of it.


That doesn't change the fact that *you* are individually responsible for
your own safety and security. The police may be there after the fact,
but if *you* expose yourself to a predictable threat i.e. walking down
that alley in the bad part of town, or running without adequate security
software, *you* will still suffer the consequences of *your*
carelessness.

Individual responsibility is great for young, strong, and well-armed
people. This may be 5% of the population, in a really good year.

More than that based on the stats, even in left leaning states.

But even they will become old and weak.

And better armed.

But slow and with poor vision.


One of the pillars of civilization is the idea, the realization that the
95% of the population that isn't young, strong, and well-armed can pay
~1% of the population to keep the criminal part of the population under
control. The ~1% are called cops.

Except that it doesn't really work very well. Indeed with the recent
examples in other parts of the world for inspiration, the criminal
element may begin to realize that the whole police / law structure can
collapse if it comes under attack.

It works pretty well in many countries, those with real governments. We
are fortunate to live in such a country, despite all our complaints
about that government getting too big for its britches.


By the way, MacOS 10.3.6 got CAPP EAL3 certification from NSA in
November 2004. See http://niap.nist.gov/cc-scheme/st/ST_VID4012.html.

No time to look at that at the moment.

It takes no time to read a one-page certificate.


Then claim that Macs benefit from their obscurity, not that they are
more immune / secure which they are not.

Even if you were to be correct, my point was that the average user
doesn't care why the Macs are secure. It's enough that they are secure,
and they are.

They are *not* secure, they are simply not targeted often. Not the same
thing and an important fact to understand.

They are secure in practice, and that's good enough for most people.
Tomorrow is tomorrow's problem.


They need security product if the user wants to help insure they do not
experience an attack of one sort or another. They may get along fine for
some length of time without security products, but they will eventually
suffer an attack.

Analogy fails. Macs simply don't need antivirus programs, very few have
them, and no infections result.

Very few attacks are made. Give them an attack and the user will see why
it was foolish to operate without sufficient safeguards.

Antivirus products are available for Macs. When the first real attack
happens, people will install such products.


A new and major Windows threat emerged last week, on 1 Jan 06. No patch
available until 9 Jan, according to my company's IT dept, so we have
been instructed to minimize our use of the Internet. The issue is with
WMV files, and perhaps JPEG and GIF. The notice I saw didn't get into
tech details, and I asked the IT folk if this was an ActiveX and/or
Internet Explorer problem, and they said that the problem was deeper
than that.

Yep, a threat came and went, woop-de-do. There was a patch from a third
party source before the official MS patch was released BTW.

They are getting better, but it took years, while all the while the Mac
and Linux/UNIX worlds were peacefully going about their business.


Cars did "just fine" for quite a while before seat
belts became the norm too. Of course now they try to force the asinine
airbags on the unsuspecting masses, kind of like security software that
formats your hard drive if it detects a virus it doesn't know how to
clean.

Car analogy irrelevant. See above.

What above?

I've lost the thread too.

A good mechanical analogy is locks. (Metal content!) No lock is
pickproof, average people can open many cheap locks with a bobby pin, an
average locksmith can pick an average lock in tens of seconds, while
only a handful of very skilled and focused locksmiths have ever managed
to pick a Medeco, and it took these expert locksmiths no less than an
hour per lock, and some locks took days.

Not a real good analogy since in the computer world, the picking can
happen at blinding speeds and unseen and neither Windoze not MacOS have
intrusion detection warnings to indicate an attack is in progress. It
makes no difference if it takes 1 minute or 10 minutes to compromise the
OS when it can be done undetected.

The point is that while everything made by man can be undone by man, not
all things are equally easy to undo. And the greater the required
skill, the fewer the people that can participate. This is universally
true.


Invalid data is *not* better than no data.

Consumer Reports published invalid data? That's a very strong
accusation, perhaps a libel. Upon what do you base this statement?

It is invalid because it is very often biased. We all know of their
rigged rollover "test", they may have escaped liability for that mostly
on first amendment grounds, but that in no way exonerated them. They are
frauds and I stand by that.

The first amendment? What does that have to do with it? The first
amendment does not protect one from a libel suit by an aggrieved
billion-dollar manufacturer, with a building full of lawyers to press
their case.


And still unanswered is what source you would instead recommend.

I'm afraid I don't recommend any source other than personal research
which is the only thing that can be relied on to be objective and if
biased, biased in a way that is acceptable.

Acceptable bias is only that which parallels one's own bias?


I looked and they only had the Jan issue.

The article isn't that long, so one could xerox the relevant part from
the public library's copy.

Haven't found the library yet.

As for reliability figures, it's hard to see how asking 80,000 people if
they have had a problem, and reporting the fraction that did have a
problem, could be biased, unless one claims that CR has it in for
Windows machines, and lied.


Indeed, but acquiring that expertise and just acquiring a ready-to-go OS
core are not exactly the same thing. Kind of like hiring a few mechanics
to help you build a race car vs. buying a race car and putting your
paint job on it.

Bad analogy. Apple bought NeXT the company, getting both NeXT the
operating system and the whole development team, both of which Jobs had
built from the ground up. It was a merger.

But NeXT didn't write the OS either. NeXT does not equal BSD.

NeXT the company took the BSD core (which is open source) and added the
stuff (GUI, OO development system, etc) needed to make an operating
system for general use. The unexpected thing was that a major market
for NeXT was the Financial world, where people used NeXT machines to
develop and run complex financial models.


Um, just about any of them. I've got a Linksys router plugged into the
cable modem, and plain old Norton Personal Firewall on the server. The
only this remotely "configured" is one port map on the router to map
port 80 to the address of the server. This is not brain surgery by any
means and it's worked just fine. The two lightning strikes that took out
two cable modems, two routers and a couple Ethernet ports are another
story.

I've had my share of engineers who had to ask me how to configure their
Linksys, so I'd venture that this knowledge isn't exactly universal.

Well, there is essentially nothing configured on it other than the port
map. What few other things I have configured aren't relevant to
security. Mapping port 80 to a web server is well documented on the
Linksys site, so anyone who can read and follow directions can set it up
in minutes.

I didn't claim that the problem was complex for those who understand
routers.


Nope, but it does appear that Windoze users may be better at keeping
work and personal machines separate.

Because they must?

Nope, just because more of them have separate work machines. They keep
their work and personal lives and machines separate.

Then why all the thunder about the necessity of keeping these separate?


Up until OSX they were more than just hidden.

I think this is circular. I knew where those controls were, even the
controls that nobody but a developer would dare to touch, even if they
did happen to know how to find them. Apparently, they don't teach
Windows gurus where the MacOS controls are, but it's a stretch to
conclude that such controls don't exist.

I don't claim to be a Windoze guru, I simply use it as a tool like
everything else. In Windoze, even during significant changes like NT -
95 - 2K - XP I never had a problem finding the settings I was looking
for within 1 minute. The few times I've worked on a Mac I've dug for
tens of minutes and still not found the proper settings.

I couldn't find them in tens of minutes either, when I first started.


MacOS 10 and later keeps all the good stuff under the UNIX rock.

Right, it is at least accessible without the need for any additional
software.

Yep. Again, people who do much of this will get specialized tools, for
convenience.

No, people who do much of this will be very happy with a CLI. To a tech,
a GUI is largely a hindrance, a CLI is fast, efficient and direct.

A CLI (command line interface) works best with config files that are
plain ascii, while the config files in MacOS 9 and before are binary.

MacOS 10 and later follow the UNIX rule, so CLI is back.


Right, and to emulate the CISC processor you need microcode calls to
produce the equivalent of the CISC instructions.

No microcode. RISK processors are hardwired to execute their small
instruction set, and anything more complex (like the CISC instructions
of yore) are implemented using lots of machine-code instructions.

Micro code would be machine-code instructions, just at a very low level
as a translation of a CISC opcode into the slew of RISC opcodes needed
to perform the same task.

No, microcode is at a deeper hardware level than machine code, although
many people use the term microcode loosely. Microcode is one way one
can design the CPU, and direct wiring is another. In both cases, the
CPU executes the machine code generated by the assembler and/or compiler.


And there are people that run multiple platforms.

Indeed there are, however I have not seen many people that run both PCs
and Macs for any length of time, generally one is abandoned because they
do not provide significantly different functionality for most people. Of
course for most specialized applications the PC wins since the apps
aren't available for a Mac.

After watching what the IT folk at work have to do to keep the PCs
working, I'm not interested in spending my life that way. I'd rather be
making chips. (Metal content!) So, I run only MacOS at home, because
they require essentially no maintenance. I will get a PC to run some
PC-only programs, but this PC will not be allowed out of the house,
hiding behind the firewall, and will certainly not be allowed any
internet and email access.

PC maintenance in a corporate environment and in a home environment are
vastly different. Don't get misguided trying to make the comparison as
there is none.

The difference is that at work, they have an entire IT department full
of full-time experts. At home, it's just me, myself, and I.


I only do email on one PC and that is the one with the AV software on
it, but all my machines have all the Internet access they need without
any issues. I readily surf out to lookup information from my CNC control
PC (not while CNCing of course) and have no problems. I pull my G-code
from the PC in the house where I run the CAD software and also Mach3 for
preview purposes.

You don't see too much 8051 stuff in CCI these days.

I don't know the current market shares, but I still see ads for 8051
tools in the back of electronic design and embedded programming
magazines. I think that the old Motorola 68040, now called ColdFire, is
a market leader, and it's a whole lot nicer to program than an 8051.

I don't pay a whole lot of attention as the PIC line covers what little
I need to do.

Actually, PICs are different from embedded CPUs like 8051 and 68040.
But yes, these appear only buried in disk drives and the like on the
computers of interest here.


I don't know. Appletalk on ethernet was used widely, and didn't cost
$400.

Dunno, getting the one Mac in the office at the old job onto Ethernet
did cost a bloody fortune compared to all the PCs. Think it was one of
the Macs that was a non-standard bus, perhaps nubus?

Perhaps. I don't recall when the transition happened, but Macs had
built-in ethernet long before the PCI bus slots appeared. Macs still
have the AUI connector (that connects to the external module that
interfaces to the coax-cable varieties of ethernet).

AUI has rather gone the way of the Dodo. With 10/100/1000 Ethernet
ports, an external fiber converter is about the only thing you might
want to add.

It's true that AUI ports are yesterday's story, but we were discussing
yesterday.


Also note that Macs had Appletalk and true networking from 1984, long
before PCs discovered any networking.

Mainstream PCs perhaps. Same with graphics since PCs were doing high end
graphics well before Macs even found color.

In a manner of speaking. The reason the Graphics Arts world went to
Macs in the first place was that only Macs handled text and pictures at
all well back then. Don't forget that the comparison was DOS; Windows
was many years in the future.

And the technical world went to PCs because Apple abandoned an open
architecture so they became useless to the tech world.

Huh? Apple never had an open architecture to abandon back then. It was
all closed; that was the complaint. Now, with MacOS 10, it is mostly
open, being based on BSD UNIX. The BSD core of MacOS 10 (called darwin)
is open source.


And Appletalk just worked. That
friend up the street had something like six machines networked in his
home in the late 1980s to early 1990s.

I had several PCs networked at home in that general timeframe as well.
Towards the tail end of that timeframe, but that corresponded to me
having more than one machine at home at all.

PC were not networked in 1984, while Macs came that way, straight from
the box, included in the original design. PCs really only got networked
when Novell came along. Eventually, MS wised up, and built networking
in, and crushed Novell. But this was far in the future.

Macs may have had some form of networking, but few people could afford
more than one making it largely irrelevant.

Oh, I don't know about that. My friend up the street had everything
networked. He is not a techie, but had no problem getting it all to
work. I never had to help him, and I lived about 0.5 miles down the
road.


At that point the whole
concept of why you might want more than one machine and a network
connection was still in it's infancy. Oddly enough, pre-PC I was
RS232ing stuff between a Vic20 and a C64.

Networking was happening in mainframes, but was pretty expensive. A few
companies developed low-cost but useful versions.



Still 100% problem rate for the small sample of Mac desktops I know of.

Maybe you need better friends? They seem to be very hard on computers.
Seriously, if this were representative of the failure rate of any
computer company's products, that company would soon disappear. But
Apple has not disappeared. This is an example of why one should not
generalize from anecdotal reports.

Like anecdotal reports of Macs that aren't being attacked not being
compromised? Or PCs requiring superhuman efforts to make secure?

One person's personal experience is anecdotal, as no single person can
see that much of the whole. The aggregated reports from many people can
achieve statistical significance, if there are enough people involved.


There have been alternatives to Windows for as long as there has been
Windows, hence no monopoly. Windows simply won the popularity contest
and is now attacked because of it.

You can't have it both ways. If all but Windows is insignificant, which
you have been insisting, and Windows' ~90% market share certainly
supports that conclusion, then Windows is a de facto monopoly. There is
no getting around it, and it makes no real difference how this position
was achieved. So, Microsoft will find itself unable to have the
freedoms of its youth.

All but Windoze is indeed insignificant in the desktop arena, but that
still does not make a monopoly. A monopoly requires a lack of options as
was the case with telephones up until recently. Just because one company
has 90% market share does not make it a monopoly when there are a dozen
alternatives available to anyone who chooses to adopt them, it only
makes the company successful.

In the Microsoft antitrust case, the Federal Appeals Court specifically
found that Microsoft was a monopoly, in law and in fact. This was an
explicit finding, not a passing inference.


I wasn't real involved in the computer world pre-midrange, not really
old enough at 36.

So you won't remember when IBM was taken to Federal Court for antitrust.
The case was eventually settled, but one school of thought holds that
the only reason that it was possible for the PC to escape IBM's control
(IBM invented the PC), or Microsoft was able to become the OS vendor,
was that IBM way paralyzed by the antitrust case. It may well be true.

Oh goodie, OS2 for all (ick!). I once had a voice mail system to manage
that ran on OS2, while it was reliable enough, it was a real POS to
manage.

OS2 and the Microchannel Bus were IBM's attempt to wrest control back.
Didn't work; people were on to them.


Joe Gwinn