We seem to have achieved the perfect cyclic debate. I will let you have
the last word after this.

In article ,
"Pete C." wrote:

Joseph Gwinn wrote:

In article ,
"Pete C." wrote:

Joseph Gwinn wrote:


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.

It works in those countries only because the vast majority of the
population agrees with the system. The examples we have seen however
make one wonder what would happen if even a few hundred people in on of
the "working" countries began actively attacking the police and
military. Not a pretty picture...

It happens from time to time. They are crushed.

I haven't seen instances that met the full scale guerilla war criteria
in one of the "working" countries. I suspect that those conditions would
cause a sizable reduction in the ranks of the regular police and the
military would have great difficulty operating among civilian
population. This fits what we have been seeing in Iraq and one of the
modern "working" countries would present an even greater challenge.

True enough, but the fact that some countries are ramshackle doesn't
prove that policing doesn't work. In fact, the US is pretty peaceful.
Watching the world news is pretty convincing.


"Apple Mac OS X v10.3.6 and Mac OS X Server v10.3.6 provides a moderate
level of independently assured security in a conventional TOE and is
suitable for a cooperative non-hostile environment." rather says it all,
it does ok in a non-hostile environment. That's pretty much what I've
said, it does ok because it isn't attacked often.

Standard posterior-protection boilerplate. But they did pass the CAPP
certification. That said, CAPP (and Orange book before it) is silent on
network security issues.

So basically all it's saying is that MacOS provides moderate protection
against a casual walk-up intrusion i.e. login username and password,
something that Windoze also provides.

That's not a fair summary of what I said at all. But I won't repeat the
arguments.


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.

Bad analogy, skill is not a requirement in the computer attack world as
evidenced by the script kiddies. Unlike the physical skill required to
pick that Medeco lock, the tools required to attack a computer can be
readily transferred to non-skilled users. One skilled user is all that
is required to identify a vulnerability and then disseminate the code to
exploit it to the script kiddies.

The same is true of mechanical locks, if the attack is really that
simple. Try googling on the exploit to open a kryptonite bike lock
using a bic pen barrel.

Still doesn't really compare to the ease of transfer to script kiddies
to launch large scale automated attacks.

True that automated attacks aren't so easy with mechanical locks (there
are automated safe-crackers), but this brings me back to my original
point, that script kiddies really cannot do that much with MacOS and
Linux/UNIX.


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.

Then how did they get off the hook? It was 100% clear that CR had rigged
the test to parameters outside real world conditions.

How can you be so sure that the allegation was true?

I watched their video of their tests and it was pretty obvious. One of
the CR spokespeople also made a passing semi admission that their test
was pretty extreme if I recall.

How did you know which video to believe?


The first amendment governs only the US Government, not ordinary
citizens and companies. And it confers zero protection against a libel
suit.

I think CR escaped liability by the thinnest of hairs due to the fact
that while their test was extreme and not really representative of real
world conditions, it was not physically rigged like the infamous gas
tank video from another source.

Extreme steering input by a professional driver, specifically designed
to roll the vehicle may be outside the region of what would reasonably
be expected in the real world from an average driver, but it is
theoretically possible I guess.

Bingo! By law, this is *not* a libel or a fraud, whatever one may think
of it. It wasn't even close legally.

But in any event, I don't see the applicability to a survey of their
subscribers as to their experience with various products, computers
included.


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?

Yes. When assessing products yourself, the only bias that can enter is
your own which is inherently acceptable to you.

Um. I would hope for better, to learn things I wasn't born just
*knowing*.

And that is what you'd get if your research skills are decent. The main
thing is that you will not fall victim to the biases of others in an
case.

Only to fall victim to ones own biases? This seems a bit pointless.

All humans are biased in one way or another. So, we must simply deal
with people as we find them.


They may or may not have lied, however their sample, while relatively
large only represents the responses of their readers which is not a
valid sampling of the computer user population as a whole. Not seeing
the report I also don't know if it made any attempt to validate actual
hardware problems vs. user error.

So, go see the report. It would take quite the conspiracy for all those
people to have told the same lie.

Different groups of people can and do have different experiences than
those of a truly random sampling of the population. It's not a lie, it's
simply a function of a non-random sample and a sample consisting only of
CR subscribers who took the time to respond is not a random sample.

With that size of a statistical sample, the biases and lies will cancel
out, unless there is a massive conspiricy, and yet 80,000 people managed
to keep the secret perfectly. Seems a bit remote.


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.

Dunno, I've been at a large bank the last 7+ years and I've not seen a
trace of anything NeXT, or anything Apple for that matter. Our server
counts are in the tens of thousands BTW.

Finance is not the same thing as banking. Think Wall Street and rocket
scientists.

A large bank includes those areas, retail, commercial, investment, high
value, trading, etc.

Yes, but the market was Wall Street rocket scientists, the sort of
people who will never work for a bank, with the possible exception of
Citibank.


Not exactly. You have proven only that you don't realize how much you
know. And I have to ask the gurus where to find various Windows
controls.

I perhaps don't realize how much I know, I seem to have a defective ego.
The point though is still that when the Windoze UI changed significantly
I still found what I needed quickly where I was not able to find what I
need quickly under the Mac UI.

It's not the lack of ego that's the problem, it's the lack of education.


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

Indeed, but MaxOS 10 and later *are* UNIX, with just a Mac UI shell, so
you may as well just run any of the UNIX variants with any of the
various shells, and save the cost of proprietary hardware.

If you like that rough a ride, yes.

I don't find the CDE shell or any of the others I've tried to be "rough"
by any means. The Mac UI is a little more cosmetically polished than
most, but not all of the shells, but I don't count cutsy stylized icons
as a feature that in any way improves function, any more than a cutsy
stylized case for the machine improves function.

Again, the issue is the likely experience of gurus versus ordinary,
non-technical users.


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.

They also have a company full of users trying to find the latest way to
screw up a machine. If they had a company full of Macs they would still
have the same headaches. It takes a dedicated IT dept to maintain a few
thousand desktop computers regardless of OS. It was only different in
the days of the "dumb" terminal.

Possibly, but what has this to do with the original question?

Dunno, it went a bit sideways, but the point still is that it is just
not possible to draw a comparison between the support needs of a
corporate environment and a home environment.

I don't know why it's different - in neither case does the user want
their computer crippled by an infection.



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.

Um, what about the then very popular II+? People built I/O cards for the
II+ and wrote assembler to control what they built. Apple abandoned the
open architecture with the Lisa and then Mac and to some extent the IIc.

People could build for the nubus too. The interface was fully
documented; I had the specs. Not many did, though. Probably because the
nubus was too complex for small companies and homebrew folk to handle.

Probably because the tech world abandoned the Mac well before nubus came
along and didn't look back. Homebrew folks are doing PCI these days
which is at least as complicated as nubus was.

What is this "tech world"? Macs lasted where I worked well past the
nubus days. IT only managed to drive them out when Apple went throught
the bad patch, just before Jobs returned, bringing NeXT. IT was gunning
for a single platform for years, so Apple's problems were the excuse,
not the reason.


And DEC was developing Ethernet along with who was it? They were also
developing DSSI which became SCSI and oddly enough came full circle with
SCSIs return to differential connections like DSSI had to begin with.

Xerox and Intel, if memory serves. Didn't realize that SCSI came from
DEC, though. They did their level best to cripple it in their own
computer line, mainly because it threatened their control of disks on
VAX systems. DEC disks cost twice the market price.

Not sure about that last part, the DEC disk controllers (HSD/HSJ/HSG)
have uses SCSI disks for quite a while. The direct DSSI disks and the
SDI stuff was quite a ways back. There was good reason for not using
SCSI directly for quite a while until SCSI came back around to a
differential bus. Any of the non-desktop machines really need the bus
length afforded by the differential DSSI or other busses like CI in
order to connect to their storage and storage controllers.

In the 1980s I was on a radar project that was considering VAXs as the
main computer. But we got nowhere because the only SCSI controller
available for this computer was for the PDP-11 bus, with two adapters,
one to get to the BI bus, the other to get from BI to the system bus
(whose name I forget). The max theoretical bandwidth of this SCSI
controller was 100 kilobytes/sec (on the PDP-11 bus). My home machine
of the day, a Mac SE, did 600 kilobytes/sec. We planned to interface
the radar hardware by making it look like a big SCSI tape drive. I
looked at this Rube Goldberg setup, and decided that I would never
manage to get it to work. We never did figure out how to hook the VAX
to the radar, and gave up, instead using Harris computers. With a SCSI
interface to the radar.


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.

They can, but it takes more than just volume. A large sample from one
specific population only shows their impressions and may not reflect the
truth.

Well, when one gets to 80,000 people, it gets pretty close to truth, as
close as one can get.

Only with a random sample. Sample size alone does not guarantee an
unbiased result. Ask 80,000 people of religion X if they believe in god
X and you'll get a 100% positive response. Ask 80,000 people sampled at
random from the worlds population if they believe in god X and you'll
get perhaps a 20% positive response.

Somehow, I don't think this analysis is relevant to the subscribers of
Consumer Reports.


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.

Well, I disagree with them and as I've noted courts are not as much
about finding the truth as they are about finding what is acceptable in
the political climate. It is my belief and contention that there can be
no monopoly when there are alternatives.

Ah, well, they don't care - they are the law.

Still doesn't make them correct. I recall American Express complaining
that the big M/C / Visa monopoly was shutting them out, this at a time
when AmEx didn't even offer a comparable product. How the hell can a
monopoly be shutting you out of a market when you don't even offer a
product for that market?

Whatever. They are the law, and they have the sword.

You might wish to read the appeals court ruling. It's quite
informative, and can be read by a non-lawyer. The judges had to have
known that their ruling would be widely read outside of the legal world.
The ruling is on the web, and can be downloaded for free.

Here is one source: http://www.esp.org/misc/legal/USCA-DC_00-5212.pdf.

Here is another, in plain ascii text:
http://pacer.cadc.uscourts.gov/common/opinions/200106/00-5212a.txt.


Joe Gwinn