I currently have a two year old package of Eset Nod 32 running on my PC and I've yet to get a virus. I'm also not your average user who just checks their email so have an even bigger chance of getting infected. It's all about how careful/careless you are.

Windows for work, as in work work.

Mac at home.

I switched from XP to Windows 7 Pro 64-bit this summer. I got hold of a RTM way before it was released to the general public through school. I had some problems finding stuff at first due to the new GUI but now I've found that I miss certain features on my laptop that still runs XP. The new search feature is great. Only thing I miss is the ability to move the quick launch menu from the task bar. I prefer to have it all along the left side of the screen for easy access to software but that is no longer possible sadly.

As for the stability of Mac, it's a product of Apples greatest strength and at the same time greatest drawback. Apple are no where as open when it comes to hardware and software as Windows is. Apple guarantees that it will work well on some hardware and only sells that. Windows has a much harder task of being able to work with a much wider market of hardware. Same goes for software.
Many computer crashes are not directly caused by the OS itself but by other software.
The 10% market share is probably another factor that keeps the viruses away. Why build something that will only work on that 10% of the worlds computers when you can more easily do something that hurt 90%?

Well, again, Apple has a crushing lead in market share with computers over 1K. That's where the real margin is, and that's where their profits come. There's a reason Apple barely competes in the sub-1K computer market.

Read more about that here: http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-has-91-of-market-for-1000-PCs-says-NPD/1248313624

Mac for my photo work. Ubuntu Linux for everything else. Have my Mac home machine and laptop set up to dual boot between the different operating systems (using rEFIt which is awesome).

At work I use Windows along side Linux and MacOSX. Never cared much for MS or Windows but recently got Windows 7 and I must say, it is pretty nice ... though it is very bloated and needs powerful hardware to run well. Windows 7 isn't as nice as Mac and Linux but definitely better than anything else MS has put out (in my opinion) and I don't mind using it for software development work in the office.

Jammy, 75 million is impressive... until you see that OS X has just a sliver of world market share.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/chartfx62/temp/CFT1031_0319512B0BA.png

Security through obscurity is definitely not a moot point when you look at the numbers. It is common sense to understand what will have the most impact when a hacker chooses a system to target. This is why any CISSP will tell you that also security through minority and security through diversity are valid tactics to use in a strong security model.

Also, Apple recommends that anti-virus be run on their OS. You can find that recommendation on their website.

And since I am talking about security through obscurity, I cannot go out and tell you that XP no longer counts because it is old as dirt in the tech world. It is still extremely prevalent throughout the entire world. It is nice to know though, Windows went ahead and fixed up their OS post XP to ensure that users were not running opening up their back door by granting unlimited administrative access by default.

In the end, I have never had a virus ever, using either Mac, Windows, Linux, or Unix. You really do have to be acting rather foolishly on your system to actually execute a nasty virus or worm. Malware is a different story, but that is not generally a problem to identify and fix with free programs. I would say that phishing is the biggest threat nowadays, and any one on any OS is capable of being phished.

Malware that requires an .exe file is still out of luck on OS X. I've seen malware try to install itself on my desktop and it just sits there impotently.

Windows Vista 64-bit - Main PC
Windows Vista 32-bit - Secondary PC
Windows 7 32-bit - Dell XPS M170 laptop

ShadowWalker wrote:
Mac for my photo work. Ubuntu Linux for everything else. Have my Mac home machine and laptop set up to dual boot between the different operating systems (using rEFIt which is awesome).

At work I use Windows along side Linux and MacOSX. Never cared much for MS or Windows but recently got Windows 7 and I must say, it is pretty nice ... though it is very bloated and needs powerful hardware to run well. Windows 7 isn't as nice as Mac and Linux but definitely better than anything else MS has put out (in my opinion) and I don't mind using it for software development work in the office.
Windows 7 bloated? Yes you'll have to turn some of the visual stuff off if you have an old computer but it's not a huge loss. I've turned a bunch of the "eye candy" off already because it was annoying.

I also get annoyed at Mac users who use Apples slogan "it just works". It doesn't and I've seen it for myslef many time that Macs have troubles. A couple of weeks ago me and some friends we're giving lectures for a small group of people. 2 computers with Vista, one XP and one OSX. Guess who had the most problem getting his presentation to work with the projector?

Furthermore I've had a lot more problems with Ubuntu and Red Hat than with my Windows installations.

Just upgraded to Windows 7 Pro 64 bit on the desktop from XP Pro x64. Never switched to Vista (a waste), but the switch to 7 was becoming near essential as software support for XP x64 increasingly limited (adobe, for example). 7 isn't bad, the UAC pop-up boxes are pretty annoying. it seems to boot-up faster than XP x64.

How can many here say the OSX is more secure unless there is some secret I'm not aware of? The darn thing is pretty much wide open if you choose. Many if not most of the bad stuff running about these days are looking to install spammers on people’s home machines. They want the 90% market share guys and that's what they go after.

What in the world about MacOS that makes it secure? It's basically Berkley's UNIX and Carnegie Mellon's Mach kernel. UNIX is an old old OS. Nothing special at all. It does a pretty bad job of garbage control. RAW sockets. The list is endless. Check out their site and see the constant security patches available all the time. For that matter, head over to the GNU site and check out the Linux patches. Endless. Do you now why the internet is not such a safe place? It's basically a massive UNIX network. No name authentification. Absolutely horrible with respect to security. Take a forum like this and see if you can actually ban someone. Everyone is anonymous. What is email? Unix messaging? Text streams? Mime types? How can we say all this and think we have a secure system? Even file name extensions mean nothing.

Why did Apple choose Berkley’s version of UNIX? It wasn’t because it was particularly stable or secure. It was because it was free, as in no cost or very cheap. All they had to do is to add the GUI. UNIX is not secure nor particularly stable anyway. It was written by a couple of guys wanting to play a game. They couldn’t take Multics home so they wrote a simpler version. AT&T snapped it up and people re-wrote the history a bit so it looks like AT&T and/or Bell Labs actually designed it instead of two fired employees. Same with the language C which is now ANSI C.

There is no UNIX in capital letters like I’m spelling it. It really ought to be unix. The reason is because there is no big blue box of UNIX you can pick up at the computer store. It’s a conglomerate of variants, each different and many not compatible among each other. It was never particularly stable or secure. I remember back in the day we had to boot nightly at the unix labs at the U of Minnesota to clean up the garbage. We’re talking the late 1960s and early 1970s and it really hasn’t changed that much.

Microsoft needed something a bit more robust and client server capable. They basically bought the SCO Unix people who wrote NT as a joint venture with IBM. NT means new technology which is wasn’t. But at least they fixed some of the issues with regards to security like adding name authentification. At least garbage clean up got better, but it still was the basic structure of SCO.

Now Apple comes along and snaps up BSD Unix and everyone suddenly thinks it has miraculously become stable and secure just because most hacker types (don’t get me started on code kittens) are more acquainted with Windows systems and would rather target what they know and what they can see the vast percentage of.

The same folks that buy into this secure and stable concept are the same people who bought into the concept of RISK systems and who thought Steve Jobs knew what he was talking about when he claimed the Power PC (G4 and G5, etc) were RISK chips. When he got on stage and tried to sell the faithful the idea that they were so much faster than Intel x86 stuff. Then he switches to that slow x86 stuff and sells the faithful on how much faster that is. Bunk! Most of it.

Like I said, an OS is just a stack that opens applications. The part you see is just the lipstick on top of the OS. It’s the GUI. That’s the 1% that means anything to 99% of the users. The 99% that is important to the 1% of the users is mostly all the same between Macs, PCs and Linux users. Again, why pay one cent extra for one GUI over another, since you don’t interact with it very much. Mostly you’re interacting with applications like your Web client or email client or Photoshop and on and on, but not the OS.

When you purchase an Apple Mac, what are you getting than if you purchase a Sony PC? What is it? What makes a Mac a Mac? I’ll tell you. IMO, the only thing left is the graphical user interface. That is absolutely it.

I’ll throw in another Myth: Macs are better at graphics. Right. Why would that be? Why is it that many professional level graphics programs have not been written for the Mac? Until Mac switched in x86 Intel their video sub-system was so bottle necked they couldn’t handle an open AL robust video board. There is a bit of truth to this mostly myth. That is that Apple had hardware based color calibration you could purchase called Colorsync that many Service Bureaus demanded. That’s why I have a couple of Macs on a Windows ripper.

Oh well, I ramble. I think this Mac / PC thing is just silly, I suppose. I wrote this a bunch of years ago, but most still holds true today.

http://www.guidenet.net/resources/os.html and

http://www.guidenet.net/resources/win_vs_mac.html

http://www.guidenet.net/resources/security.html

Internet Security by a friend of mine from years ago, http://www.grc.com/default.htm

@ Guidnet

There doesn't have to be anything 'special' about an OS to make it a good one. If it's efficient, stable, and supports and suitable file system then everything else is on the user interface and the software it runs. That UI is an integral part of the OS experience. The comparable G3's & G4's were much more capable than their x86 counterparts at the time. Times have changed.

If you are going to suggest that the various *nix's are not secure, then by all means what do you suggest as a more secure platform?

Sorry guys, gotta bow out of this one. I'm a gettin married tomorrow (sun) and won't have time to continue this fabulous discussion. Cheers!

Wow, big time stuff, Jammy. Congratulations!

I hope you have a good photographer .

There's absolutely no need to pay a premium for OS-X. Sorry, hardware's the same or worse on Macs. Mac Pros are nice but total overkill if all you want to do is photoshop. For some reason Apple won't sell a desktop with internal expandability for less than $2200.
Photo programs are the same unless you love Aperture for some reason. Paying a lot more for nebulous benefits is fine if that's what makes people happy but it's hardly necessary.

Well, based on the evidence, it seems like their business model is working out just fine for them .

Hrm, it didn't take a genious to see where this thread was headed.
----

My take on it all:

If you've had problems with XP, Vista, or 7, your hardware sucks. Seriously. Stop buying 3rd-rate hardware with hacked-up drivers from companies that barely support the product and buy quality stuff.

I've been running XP (and Vista, and 7) since the RC1 days and never, ever have had the woes people like to whine about on the 'net. I've run through more hardware than I'd like to care. The denominator? It was good hardware.

I think the only time I've had major system problems was when a sound card I had was going belly-up and it took me a few days to troubleshoot it.

No malware because I'm not an idiot and I don't open every email given to me. I keep my virus scanner actually updated, not like these buffoons that use their computer with a trial version of Norton AV that they got on the thing two years ago and still think it's somehow updated.

I also don't have a teen kiddo (yet) that installs every illegal piece of software known to man That's a huge problem for a great majority of "Windows" problems I've seen - it's not Windows at all, it's the user.

------------

Apple fans - Hackers target the majority, admit it. 90% > 10%.
Nothing against OSX, but you really can't compare an almost closed OS with very strict hardware support to one which offers about 100x the hardware compatibility.

I'd love to play with a Mac, I just don't see myself buying one, as I'd have to buy a Mac Pro to be even reasonably satisfied (I'm an aging power user), and I don't have that kind of cash for a computer I don't really need.

-------
Linux - Incredible OS - Have fun getting your PhD in learing how it really operates.
Installation is cake - Kudos, it only took 10 years to get it mostly smooth. Now actually have something go wrong (like your Windows manager not automatically boot up because you ran an update). I hope you remember startx.!

Guidenet wrote:
How can many here say the OSX is more secure unless there is some secret I'm not aware of? The darn thing is pretty much wide open if you choose. Many if not most of the bad stuff running about these days are looking to install spammers on people’s home machines. They want the 90% market share guys and that's what they go after.

What in the world about MacOS that makes it secure? It's basically Berkley's UNIX and Carnegie Mellon's Mach kernel. UNIX is an old old OS. Nothing special at all. It does a pretty bad job of garbage control. RAW sockets. The list is endless. Check out their site and see the constant security patches available all the time. For that matter, head over to the GNU site and check out the Linux patches. Endless. Do you now why the internet is not such a safe place? It's basically a massive UNIX network. No name authentification. Absolutely horrible with respect to security. Take a forum like this and see if you can actually ban someone. Everyone is anonymous. What is email? Unix messaging? Text streams? Mime types? How can we say all this and think we have a secure system? Even file name extensions mean nothing.

Why did Apple choose Berkley’s version of UNIX? It wasn’t because it was particularly stable or secure. It was because it was free, as in no cost or very cheap. All they had to do is to add the GUI. UNIX is not secure nor particularly stable anyway. It was written by a couple of guys wanting to play a game. They couldn’t take Multics home so they wrote a simpler version. AT&T snapped it up and people re-wrote the history a bit so it looks like AT&T and/or Bell Labs actually designed it instead of two fired employees. Same with the language C which is now ANSI C.

There is no UNIX in capital letters like I’m spelling it. It really ought to be unix. The reason is because there is no big blue box of UNIX you can pick up at the computer store. It’s a conglomerate of variants, each different and many not compatible among each other. It was never particularly stable or secure. I remember back in the day we had to boot nightly at the unix labs at the U of Minnesota to clean up the garbage. We’re talking the late 1960s and early 1970s and it really hasn’t changed that much.

Microsoft needed something a bit more robust and client server capable. They basically bought the SCO Unix people who wrote NT as a joint venture with IBM. NT means new technology which is wasn’t. But at least they fixed some of the issues with regards to security like adding name authentification. At least garbage clean up got better, but it still was the basic structure of SCO.

Now Apple comes along and snaps up BSD Unix and everyone suddenly thinks it has miraculously become stable and secure just because most hacker types (don’t get me started on code kittens) are more acquainted with Windows systems and would rather target what they know and what they can see the vast percentage of.

The same folks that buy into this secure and stable concept are the same people who bought into the concept of RISK systems and who thought Steve Jobs knew what he was talking about when he claimed the Power PC (G4 and G5, etc) were RISK chips. When he got on stage and tried to sell the faithful the idea that they were so much faster than Intel x86 stuff. Then he switches to that slow x86 stuff and sells the faithful on how much faster that is. Bunk! Most of it.

Like I said, an OS is just a stack that opens applications. The part you see is just the lipstick on top of the OS. It’s the GUI. That’s the 1% that means anything to 99% of the users. The 99% that is important to the 1% of the users is mostly all the same between Macs, PCs and Linux users. Again, why pay one cent extra for one GUI over another, since you don’t interact with it very much. Mostly you’re interacting with applications like your Web client or email client or Photoshop and on and on, but not the OS.

When you purchase an Apple Mac, what are you getting than if you purchase a Sony PC? What is it? What makes a Mac a Mac? I’ll tell you. IMO, the only thing left is the graphical user interface. That is absolutely it.

I’ll throw in another Myth: Macs are better at graphics. Right. Why would that be? Why is it that many professional level graphics programs have not been written for the Mac? Until Mac switched in x86 Intel their video sub-system was so bottle necked they couldn’t handle an open AL robust video board. There is a bit of truth to this mostly myth. That is that Apple had hardware based color calibration you could purchase called Colorsync that many Service Bureaus demanded. That’s why I have a couple of Macs on a Windows ripper.

Oh well, I ramble. I think this Mac / PC thing is just silly, I suppose. I wrote this a bunch of years ago, but most still holds true today.

http://www.guidenet.net/resources/os.html and

http://www.guidenet.net/resources/win_vs_mac.html

http://www.guidenet.net/resources/security.html

Internet Security by a friend of mine from years ago, http://www.grc.com/default.htm

That was a good read but I think you missed one thing that Apple does rather good and that's design. Many who buy Macs do it because of the sleek, sexy, white design.

Furthermore, the GUI's seem to be converging more and more. Apple took some stuff from different Linux dists and Microsoft picked up a bunch of stuff from OSX. The end result looks more and more alike and now that's the hardware is the same will there soon be no difference?

Gustaf Lindber wrote:
That was a good read but I think you missed one thing that Apple does rather good and that's design. Many who buy Macs do it because of the sleek, sexy, white design.

Furthermore, the GUI's seem to be converging more and more. Apple took some stuff from different Linux dists and Microsoft picked up a bunch of stuff from OSX. The end result looks more and more alike and now that's the hardware is the same will there soon be no difference?

I certainly agree with you there. That is why people often pay so much for a Mac and why I prefer a plain beige box with lots of ventalation. I don't consider my tools to be furniture. They don't sit on end tables for guests to see. I'm not sure I want to pay so much more for stylish looks to the cases.

I have some computers for submission of layouts. Two of those are Macs,one an old 9500 AVID unit that's been CPU upgraded and has 6 PCI slots and one is a Yikes upgrade. I have a Linux box that serves as my main network server with DHCP software and six NICs. That's my router and holds a parity array of drives for backup. It also serves as a place to test application code meant for clients with unix systems. I also have a Free-BSD box for that. I run an old Windows advanced server as the ripper for the two Macs. I need those old Macs less and less and will probably dismantle that setup soon. I may add a new Mac for fun.

Then I have several Windows PCs, my main working one which is a quad core running Vista, most of which is disabled and made to look XP Pro-ish. It includes two small Raptors striped and a 650 gb photo drive. Theres a Core 2 Dell Laptop and my guest house where my elderly mother lives where her XP Home machine resides. Most of the GUI is hidden on it to make is very very simple. One last Windows box for work, mostly loaded with Borland and MS applications development software and that BSD box with application dev software. Various complilers on each including an ADA compiler where I make a living. There has to be tow or three others not hooked up around the workshop in various condition of being pulled apart and various rare issues. I'm a bit of a packrat.

I used to have a small dev firm. Now I work for a huge company and am a couple of years from retirement. I'll probably continue freelancing ADA and occasional C++ work until I kick the bucket. When I say C++, it's for when they demand OOPS and source. Otherwise I revert back to old school structured work in my jury-rigged C but compiled in ++. I don't think as well in OOPs and love my lowly pointers.

Like others here, I've not been compromised in years and years. No malware nor trojans or even 3rd party cookies much. I've not seen a crash in years except for two months ago when a power supply failed. That supply was at least five years old and left on 24/7. I did have some kid attempt to access via my wireless access point. I use an HTML page swiped from a Netgear router as a GUI on the Linux server for accessng the DHCP. It was funny. My Windows and Mac boxes are all pretty secure from the outside. You want to make your stuff secure, just add a NAT router even if you have only one machine. That beats most any soft firewall you can have PC or Mac.

As far as Macs having superior designed hardware, I'd really have to disagree. That might have been true back in the day of beige boxes, but ceased with the iMac lines. Even Mac monitors have come under fire. Only the 24 inch or better are IPS design. The 20 inch iMac is of the cheapest twisted neumatic type and not capable of "millions of colors," not to mention that they color shift with the slightest shift in viewing angle. Not good for graphic development or photography and nearly impossible to calibrate effectively. Don't believe, Google "apple, monitor, law suite." They are mostly made in China with not the best QA. Many of the part for PCs are also made in China, but are assembled here, though the QA isn't much better.

The quad core box I'm typing on right now is the first machine I've not built myself since they 80286 days. They have become so cheap and I'm getting to the point where's it's just not worth it to me. This box was purchased less than 2 months ago and then modified for my purposes. It's an HP Pavilion I bought from CompUSA for only $369. It has 4 gigs of DDR2, an AMD Phenom x4, 500 gig SATA drive, DVD/CD burner with lightscribe. USB 2.0 built in card reader and several other thingies. $369, unbelievable! I added a good Open GL video board, the two striped Raptors, and a 640 SATA, removing the 500. I reinstalled the OS, not putting in the junk, added a 24 inch Samsung cheapy monitor and some better speakers and this box is great. It's way way cheaper than a similarly configured Mac and plenty fast though not bleeding edge. My days of clocking the heck out of CPUs, Vid boards and storage sub-systems are over. I would imagine that this cheapy HP that's been modified will smoke most Macs under the Xenon powered pro models and even them if they don't include striped drives, and at what cost?

As far as the OS is concerned, I don't care if it's XP, Vista or Windows 7. Under the lipstick they aren't really enough different to make me jump. I'd have installed an old XP copy on this new box except it came with Vista and I kind of wanted 64 bit so I could address over 3 gigs of memory. I didn't have an old 64 bit XP pro copy. The downside was that the Vista Home Premium didn't have support for drive arrays and so I had to upgrade. Waste of money and should kick MS. Pain in the butt.

Again, the point is what price you're willing to pay for any perceived benefit a particular brand or OS might provide, and what myths you might be willing to believe. If you like Aperture over Lightroom II, get a 24" iMac. They are a pretty nice box, but expensive. You do get a nice IPS monitor. If you want security, buy a NAT router. The wired ones are cheap and wireless ones aren't bad either, but remember to turn off the wireless if you only have one machine and don't need that part.

Now back to photography which is fun and interesting. Computer stuff is really boring to me. It absorbs my whole working day when I could be out taking images.

OS wars are fun and all, but they don't always bring out the best in people. I'd like to just observe that half the stuff said in this thread is worth exactly what y'all paid for it.

Jammy, congrats on the marriage. Hope today goes well!
(Do we get to demand photos? )