From Apple eNews, June 1, 2006:
It’s really sad that so many people have to be wary about opening email, visiting websites, chatting with presumed “buddies,” or downloading music, photos, movies or other files over the Internet.
No one should have to zealously guard their computers against spyware, viruses, trojan horses, or various other types of malware. Or run a bewildering assortment of (quickly obsolete) virus-protection apps. And no one should have to run a computer to a nearby computer store, so it can be “cleaned” on a routine basis.
Do you know why people put up with that? If their cars didn’t drive where they wanted to go; their TVs didn’t play what they wanted to watch; or their phones didn’t connect to the party they called, how long would they keep using them?
Apple provides more info online about Mac’s lack of viruses here.
By the end of 2005, there were 114,000 known viruses for PCs. In March 2006 alone, there were 850 new threats detected against Windows. Zero for Mac. While no computer connected to the Internet will ever be 100% immune from attack, Mac OS X has helped the Mac keep its clean bill of health with a superior UNIX foundation and security features that go above and beyond the norm for PCs. When you get a Mac, only your enthusiasm is contagious. – Apple’s “114,000 viruses? Not on a Mac.” webpage.
Subscribe to Apple’s free eNews: http://www.apple.com/enews/subscribe/
Read Apple’s eNews online: http://www.apple.com/enews/currenteissue/
MacDailyNews Take: Finally, Apple’s gloves are off. Let’s go!
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Related articles:
Apple Macs and viruses: Fact vs. FUD – May 26, 2006
Mossberg: Is there a virus threat for Apple Macs? – May 11, 2006
Macs and viruses: the true story – May 02, 2006
FUD Alert: Viruses don’t catch up to the Mac – May 01, 2006
Gartner: Boot Camp won’t expose Mac OS X to Windows viruses or worms – April 13, 2006
The Idiot’s Guide to Mac Viruses For Dummies 101 – February 24, 2006
Atlanta Journal-Constitution asks: Is ‘Mac virus’ all just propaganda from Mac haters? – February 20, 2006
FBI: Viruses, spyware, other computer-related crimes cost U.S. businesses $67.2 billion per year – February 01, 2006
Microsoft apologists and why Apple’s Mac OS X has zero viruses – October 24, 2005
Hackers already targeting viruses for Microsoft’s Windows Vista – August 04, 2005
Finally. People will know the truth. That the weakness for viruses comes from the OS, Winblows!
hahaha…YES…Let the games BEGIN!
the thing is – the average user is told day in day out that all sorts of things from windows to internet access are ‘safe or secure’ so why would they believe anouther company saying it. there used to being let-down.
Unfortunately that message is via Apple E newsletter. They are preaching to the choir. This needs to be the core of a print ad campaign in PC magazines.
Stupid, Apple.
A lot of hackers have never HEARD of a Mac or how secure their design is. But now, if they are on Apple’s mailing list, they will get taunts like these. They would just love the challenge of breaking a secure design instead of the leaky bucket of Windows.
I know Apple doesn’t want to bow down to fear and hackers, but seriously, is selling more Macs worth the risk of appearing on hackers’ radar?
BTW, I know Macs are more secure by design. I’m not afraid of any big problems like Windows has. But if we can avoid even SMALL occasional problems, all the better.
It’s ON!
I’ve had people look at me with bewilderment whenever I tell them that my Mac is virus free and will continue to be virus free without any sort of anti-virus program loaded on to it.
It’s like reliving Plato’s (or Socrates) Allegory of the Cave all over again….
Spark,
Try clicking the link MDN provided… Oh, here:
http://www.apple.com/enews/2006/06/01enews1.html
eNews is also online.
And on the next page http://www.apple.com/getamac/macosx.html Apple has a link to Where Vista Fails!
Ow.
But that’s the direction Apple should be taking. Attack Microsoft, not hackers. Microsoft won’t retaliate like hackers might try to do. (MS would love to but it would be illegal.)
I tell Windows using friends that I don’t use virus protection, never have adware or spyware/virus worries and they Do Not Believe me. Honestly, people are just brainwashed to think this is the way things are and they’re prepared to live with it.
Ophah, Good Morning America and Regis and Kelly need to get the word out to the public.
So sad, but sooo true.
It burns!!!!: A lot of hackers have never HEARD of a Mac or how secure their design is.
Really? You don’t actually believe this, do you?
Do you really believe that this was a “stupid” move by Apple — that by saying this they’re going to draw a lot more attention (and hacking attempts) from hackers?
MW: “want”
As in “I want PC users everywhere to see this.”
It burns – please note that “security through obscurity” is not the reason that Macs are safe and virus free. It’s the design. I don’t think that there is a hacker in the world that “never heard of Macs”. I have no doubt that there are hackers out there that have never tried to hack a Mac, or create a Mac virus. Yeah, maybe more will start. But that doesn’t mean they’ll succeed.
I agree that this is a great move for Apple, but as mentioned above, they really need to get this into print, onto TV, onto radio, in tattoos, billboards, cereal boxes, newspapers, comics, and anything else that people will read.
114,000? no there is one more now
New kind of virus, extortionware.
It encrypts your files, makes you buy drugs online in which you get the password to unlock your files.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5038330.stm
Um, this is Apple eNews not CNET. They are preaching to the choir. This message needs to get beyond those ALREADY using macs!
Advertisers, advertisers, advertisers, advertisers, advertisers, advertisers, advertisers, advertisers, advertisers, advertisers…
Notice how this was released about the same time Windows Vista beta 2 stated making waves?
A little late uh Apple?
“Notice how this was released about the same time Windows Vista beta 2 stated making waves?
A little late uh Apple?”
You’re talking about Vista and saying APPLE is late? *chuckles politely*
So, It Burns, “A lot of hackers have never HEARD of a Mac or how secure their design is,” eh? Please . . . run, DO NOT WALK, to your nearest community college and enroll in some kind of programming course, OK? Perhaps Coding 101 will help you realize how absolutely ludicrous such a statement is.
There’s not a hacker on this planet or any other in this solar system that hasn’t worked with–OR AT LEAST HEARD OF–the UNIX operating system. And with that code base lying at the very heart of OS X, an evil-doer discovers all too quickly how much more difficult the Mac OS is to bust open without user assistance.
Jeez, It Burns, think before you write, OK?
My Dad (who is in his seventies) was given a PC laptop from his company for emails and sending P.O.’s, sending quotes, etc.
He barely knows how to use the thing.
He has to send it to his Corporate IS Dept. to get it “CLEANED” every couple of weeks…sereiously. It’s hard to teach a 74 year old to be on constant vigilance AND how to use virus protection, etc.
I wonder what the productivity for that company would be if ALL the outside sales force were using a MAC.
Instead, the sales team SENDS in their laptops for CLEANING on a regular basis.
Boggles the mind.
Macs are as vulnerable to viruses as Dells are.
There, I said it.
But wait… before you jump all over me screaming and shouting, let me finish.
It’s not the Mac that is free of viruses, it’s Mac OS X that is free of viruses. Run Windows on a Mac (it’s still the same hardware) and you are wide open to Viruses.
Oh, by the way, didn’t Microsoft just announce it’s protection ware? Where you pay them to protect you from their lame software?
BTW.
I remeber the days of OS 7.
I would run NORTON anti-virus or DISENFECTANT (remember that form Northwestern U?) and they would hardly EVER find a infected file…and this was in the 80’s and 90’s when the MAC had viruses.
I think I recall finding a TROJAN HORSE once on my MAC.
I use to use DISENFECTANT to find corrupt fonts. It was GREAT for that.
Looking back, I probably didn’t need virus protection back then either.
DJ,
“I would run NORTON anti-virus or DISENFECTANT (remember that form Northwestern U?) and they would hardly EVER find a infected file…and this was in the 80’s and 90’s when the MAC had viruses.”
Yes, me too. Occasionally something was found, but I don’t recall any of the found viruses reeking any havok, even when they had resided on the Mac for quite some time. Good ‘ole System 7.6.1
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“When you get a Mac, only your enthusiasm is contagious.”
Well, o.k., that and the open sore on your face. But that’s it. Oh yeah, and the neighbor’s kid who hasn’t learned how to wipe his nose with anything but his sleeve. And that’s it. Oh, and Katie Couric’s infectious smile. And your enthusiasm and that’s it. Promise.
LOL Ampar!
Static Mesh said: “Notice how this was released about the same time Windows Vista beta 2 stated making waves?
A little late uh Apple?”
Put down the your crack pipe!
Now back to our regularly scheduled program…
Thorin:
“Good ‘ole System 7.6.1”
Yep! AND illustrator 5 had just come out…it let you work in PREVIEW mode. Wow! How old am I?
Nevermind.
Thanks, Thorin! <bow>
DJ:
I still have floppies for Illustrator 88 around here somewhere. Yikes. At one time, I thought of re-tiling my bathroom with AOL floppies. Only practical use.
Ampar:
Wow! IL ’88. That was a GREAT program.
So we are destined for the MAC old folks home. Imagine, sitting around in chairs saying:
“Phooey! In MY day you had to HAND CRANK a computer to get it running. We didn’t use NORTON we took viruses like a MAN!”
“Stupid, young whipper-snappers with their fancy-schmancy Intel chips! We used Motorola chips…and we LIKED it!”
: )
Where is the $100,000,000 advertising budget for the TV and print marketing campaign? That is what Apple needs.
And it is good to see Apple’s written recognition of the Unix community that is largely responsible for the designed in security robustness of all Unix based operating systems, including OS X and Linux.
BTW, Another coup for Apple would be to provide virtualized support for Windows, including Vista and previous versions, which can protect files from being corrupted — unlike dual booting, e.g., Boot Camp. This would be absolute dynamite in IT departments. Since most surveys show that corporate IT take up of Vista will be a long slow process, this gives even the Windows only shops a compelling reason to buy Macs. Of course those Macs do contain a sort of virus from a certain perspective — Mac OS X. I would love to see Apple either create such a system or buy it (Parallels, perhaps?) and not have to wait for Leopard to get this capability. Apple could put it out like Boot Camp, as a beta.
DJ, you are going to make me pee my pants.
“Stupid, young whipper-snappers with their fancy-schmancy Intel chips! We used Motorola chips…and we LIKED it!”
Dude, check out me new Mac IIfx. It has a 68030 at 40mhz WITH a math
coprocessor! It only cost me $5000.00
it burns: that’s total rubbish. anyone who calls themself a ‘hacker’ who has never heard of a mac is a scriptkiddy. the ‘security through obscurity’ thoery is a myth: os 9 had a ton of viruses, and it had far fewer users than os x.
Thorin:
Wow! Imagine what that 5G’s get’s you today!
The IIfx was a tricky machine if I remember. Don’t get me wrong…good machine…but something about the logic board.
My OLD memory is failing me.
It burns!!!! wrote
<Stupid, Apple.
A lot of hackers have never HEARD of a Mac or how secure their design is. But now, if they are on Apple’s mailing list, they will get taunts like these.>
Uh, if they never heard of a Mac, why on Earth would they be on an Apple email list? Thinking is not just for breakfast anymore, try it all day long
I bet a lot of virus writers use a mac. They don’t have time to be dealing with down time (especially from there own virus). And they certainly don’t want to pay for virus protection.
Viuses lack critical mass on the Mac.
Virus writing isn’t just a hobby anymore, it’s an industry. Virus writers have gone professionnal. They have a purpose and an income source. (spam bots, DoS attacks, data collection, etc.). All of these require that a large number of machines run the (virus) program.
Installed base and automatic propagation are key to hitting that critical mass. Viruses are a perishable good. They have to spread and produce their effect before a patch is widely available and installed. Propagation that requires every user to perform an action will just not cut it. That’s a first major hurdle in developing Mac viruses. It would take much too long before enough idiots are caught (even if almost half the population is below average — and dare I say those who buy Macs aren’t representative of this statistics at this moment).
The second hurdle is the number of potential targets. Even if all connected Macs could be hit, that would still not be enough infected machines to be profitable. It’s not obscurity that’s the issue here it’s simply a question opportunity, facility and critical mass. Why go for a three ricochet shot to hit a bee in mid-flight when you have an unprotected target as big as a mountain that you can’t miss even with your eyes closed.
So, in short, Mac viruses are much harder to create and would hit much fewer people. Not a winning combination for a (professionnal) virus writer.
Does this mean that when more Macs are out there, the virus writers will start to take notice. I don’t know but if I were in their shoes and the market was up to a 50/50 split between Macs and PCs, I would still go for the easier target that is Windows. I would get a much better return on investment (cause the investment would still be much smaller). Remember that it’s not a one-shot thing but you have to be able to produce new viruses regularly for the thing to be lucrative.
We’re still a very long way off from the point at which virus writers, in desperation of a crumbling Windows market, start to reluctanly go for the tough target (Mac OS X) or simply find something else to make a buck out of (which, given the lazy nature of such criminals is the most likely outcome).
Now, you might say how about the hobbyist writing viruses. My answer is simply to look at what virus programs are doing today. These hobbyists are a rare and dying breed. Cutting the problem down to just these guys would be heaven compared to the current outbreaks.
DJ,
You are right, the IIfx was tricky. I used to do board level repairs on them when I worked for a major reseller. If I remember correctly, it had a convoluted chipset that handled memory management and the NUBUS slots concurrently. It was a tad messy. I mentioned it because it was the “big performer” before the Quadra 700, 900, 950 came out.
THORIN:
YES! That was it. (gag…cough…NUBUS SLOTS…hee hee)
ALTOS:
Well stated and sound logic.
Altos,
Very well said, and I completely agree.
Re: Mac Nostalagia
Well, when I was young electricity hadn’t been invented yet. I had to write Hypercard stacks by the light from the fireplace. And I had to walk twenty miles in the snow, uphill both ways, to the local BBS just to get ASCII porn.
Kids these days . . .
“Nostalagia”
And apparently the aged Mac users also stubbornly refuse to use TIger’s built-in spell checker.
AMPAR:
LOL!!!
ASCII PORN? I missed something….damn!
DJ
I would misspell words too if I had ASCII porn on the brain.
“Come on, baby. My BBS is 9600 baud. Dial me up tonight!”
“These hobbyists are a rare and dying breed“
Well, here’s good news. A tiny snowflake landing on a very hot stove has a better chance of surviving than a hobbyist hacker has of breeding.
MW: image
Where are all of the “security through obscurity” trolls?
Aldus PageMaker. That was the best.
Real Hypercard stacks? You were lucky.
All we had were a cardboard box with a picture of Hypercard stacks drawn on it!
Our dad used to make us write us names, in HyperText, 500 times with one finger before we could have supper. When I say supper, I mean a handful of cold binary bits that he found on a spare 400K floppy.
Then he made us polish the square mouse with our tongues. We were so poor we couldn’t afford a phone so he made us run to the nearest BBS to collect that ASCII porn, which we couldn’t always see because we only had 1 MB of RAM.
And we thought ourselves lucky!
<>Static Mesh said: “Notice how this was released about the same time Windows Vista beta 2 stated making waves?
A little late uh Apple?”</i>
Meaning: WHAT THE FSCK TOOK YOU SO LONG!!!
hahaha got you
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The reformed MacDude.
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(it’s me really! I’m cured!)
Ampar & DJ…
You *are* the young whipper snappers!
Back in the day before punch cards caught on, my first real computer task was decoding computer punch tape. Then we got the new fangled keypunch machine with those neat new cards! Wow, 80 characters per card, and we could crank them out using the teletype derivative after coding everything on those 11×17 coding sheets (one line on the page per card, about 40 lines per page IIRC). Next came terminals with paper print outs… 8″ wide yellow paper on large rolls that we tore off when the printer/teletype was done clattering away.
Ah but then we graduated to glass terminals… my first one literally was a modified TV monitor with real wood sides and back — and it had enough tubes in it to keep my underground office warm.
Yes, I remember well the days of 8″ floppies that were single sided and had to be soft sectored at the factory. I still have a bad reaction when remembering coding in one of DEC’s first shipping languages: it only allowed a total of 286 arithemetic variables and 26 string variables so variable reuse was required and done vary, vary carefully wasting precious compute cycles on clearing the memory location before assigning a new value/use to the old designation. It made FORTRAN IV look like it was a gift from the gods.
Then the huge leap to the Apple ][ and simplified file locking really meant placing non printing characters into the file name. Just ad a “^p” or a “^h” or “~c” somewhere within the file name to make the file very difficult to access. And BASIC. Simplistic but not bad for quick and dirty coding of test projects.
The Internet? Just a mish/mash of different nets not yet joined together. Fun days on BIX and GENIE and SAABRE. And Ethernet? How about 3B5 (3 megabit over thick coax with vampire taps). None of that 40 Gbps Ethernet stuff for us!
I still remember seeing my first SONY word processor with that strange 3 1/2 inch floppy drive (though some people wanted to call it a “flexy drive” because of the disks’ hard case). Little did I know that within a year or so Apple would be coming out with a computer with that drive in it.
We later graduated to the Mac and Pascal. The world was much, much better. Printing with an Imagewriter at quad density (288 dpi) made things look close to what they should — and, no more using those noisy band printers or those flakey daisy wheel printers! Just think, I only had to send something to those huge offset printers when I absolutely had to.
I think I still have my original AOL 0.93 disk around here somewhere. And Guy sending a note with my “real” AOL 1.0 disks. Back then AOL members were counted in hundreds not millions and we knew where the service was started (hint: Think Apple and AppleLink and for a while it was ONLY on the Mac). You could actually send emails to Steve Case back then and expect to get a response — long before he got a big head and didn’t return emails from virtually anyone, including his VPs sometimes.
Then the fat Mac came out followed shortly by hacks to add an internal hard drive. Oh and don’t forget MacCharlie, a hardware add on which included a limited IBM compatible PC in it with a 5 1/4″ floppy drive. I’ll never forget the 8″ Bernoulli drives by Iomega.
But what really caught me was Absoft’s FORTRAN 77 on the fat Mac. Truly windowed programming (probably the first windowed IDE I ever used). I could step through programs and watch the variables change step by step. It increased my programming productivity by a factor of 100.
Finally, Pagemaker and the LaserWriter came out … everyone was buying Macs. There went our uniqueness. We were now mainstream.
Being part of a very small core that is different by design rarely lasts…
we all grow old and very often join the mainstream…
Someday Ampar and DJ you’ll make it into the “Old Hacker’s Home” (using the term as it was meant back in the day, not as it is often thought to mean now). When you get there some of us will have been there long enough to still call you “young whipper snappers”!
But more on topic…
For several years there was a rallying cry that no Mac web server had ever been hacked. There were even several challenges out there (with prizes ranging from a Pizza to US$10,000). Finally someone actually hacked a Mac web server (not through the Mac System software or through the web server software, but through a third application called Lasso — and Blue World, IIRC, issued a fix in less than 24 hours.
Apple has effectively issued a similar challenge. However, the only prize is fame this time. How long before a true virus gets set out into the wild? Clearly none of us know, but my guess (purely a guess) is that it will happen before 1 January 2008.
Aldus PageMaker. That was the best.
ARE YOU FRIGGING DRUNK?
Pagemaker was the worst pagelayout software ever!
It was slow, it couldn’t open more than a few pages at a time and was buggy.
Even Ready Set Go! was better at the time.
With Quark I was able to have 6 entire newspapers open at the same time and switch between any of them instantly. That combined with printing buffering software I was 20x as more productive than a person using Pagemaker and printing each typeset page at a time.
Now fast forward to the present and Quark is crap compared to InDesign. But I don’t like the idea of Adobe owning the whole show, we all know happens when that occurs.
Microsoft.
Nice, shadowself!
A few notes: I used graphite card readers in high school to run math programs in BASIC. Keeping cards in order was a pain not to mention encoding them. I had a TRS-80 and an early Timex Sinclair. I also used GENIE and CompuServe for a while. And a hint as to how long ago I used AOL, my e-mail address was mdg@aol.com. I used to haunt the Mac help boards eons ago.
Good times.
How to lose the text ads, paste sudo pico /etc/hosts, arrow down and add (don’t delete nothin) 0.0.0.0 macdailynews.us.intellitxt.com, press control x, then y, then return. All done.
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Altos,
An interesting — and for the most part accurate, IMHO — assessment. However, there is one striking counter example: the fact that there was a virus in the wild for Windows Vista less than 10 days after it was shipped to only 10,000 developers.
Let’s see how the Mac obscurity theory stacks up to that…
Windows Vista:
10,000 users * 10 days = 100,000 user days with one virus.
Mac OS X:
5,000,000 users (conservative, linear average over 5 years) * 5 years = almost 9 billion user days with no virus so far.
Some might counter that the Vista virus really did not do anything so it does not really count. That does not matter any more than saying that the Mac OS X Trojan that was in the wild did not do anything. It still existed and was in the wild.
So the count is 100,000 man days for one virus versus almost 9 billion user days with no viruses. Sounds to me like Vista was really the more obscure target. Yet it got hit.
Shadowself:
Thanks. I feel young again.
(BTW: I remeber Bournelli drives, too….ahh and SyQuest…if I can find one of those in my attic I might use it as a coaster)
Bernoulli not “Bournelli” sorry.
DJ
I remember my boss getting a new Quadra. We had a little network set up in the office and would send instant messages back and forth. I had a great setup at home — a II something with a Radius monitor. I had the kind that had a letter sized screen and you physically could rotate the monitor from portrait to landscape. It was awesome!
And I loved Pagemaker! I was using it on a school SE/30 long before Quark was introduced. Ah, the good old days…
Aaah, removable media.
I used at one time or another:
Graphite encoded cards
Cassette tapes
10 inch, 5 1/4 inch and 3.5 inch floppies
SyQuest 44, 88, and 200 mb cartridges
SyQuest SyJet cartridges
Iomega Jaz and Zip disks
– all SCSI (hated assigning IDs and terminators) except Zip was last used as USB. Thank heaven, for cheap CD-R and DVD-R and faster burners!
Oh yeah, and I caught a harmless Word macro virus once. That was it.
” . . . a Radius monitor. I had the kind that had a letter sized screen and you physically could rotate the monitor from portrait to landscape.”
The Radius Pivot. It was pretty cool. As I recall it had a mercury switch that sensed rotation to trigger the portrait to landscape change or back.
AMPAR:
Talk about living on the edge…I would use a blank SyQuest when I need additional scratch-disk space when using PhotoShop 3 I think it was.
Top that!!
: )
The Radius Pivot. It was pretty cool. As I recall it had a mercury switch that sensed rotation to trigger the portrait to landscape change or back.
Yep, I miss that monitor, made broadsheet layout a breeze.
Wow…
Old Mac User’s day!
Don’t forget that the Mac Plus had a non standard SCSI interface and in order to boot from an external hard drive the drive had to support the Mac Plus’ variant of the SCSI standard. (Most people had Jasmine hard dirves back then with the pretty little flower on the fron — but I liked my Photon 30 by Warp 9 Engineering!)
And another Apple SCSI variant was on the “Wicked Fast” (according to Scully) Macintosh IIfx. It had to have a terminator which was different from every other Mac.
But SCSI wasn’t so bad.
There was a group out of Berkeley that even wanted people to refer to it as “sexy” rather than “scuzzy”.
Besides, I loved the “SCSI disk mode” of my old 180c.
Ampar, I never used 10″ floppies. What was that on? I’ve used 14″ (DEC), 8″ (DEC and various others), and 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 (too many machines to even think about), but never 10″ (unless your talking about those removable hard drive platters in the sealed cases used on some IBM mainframes, DECSystems 10 and 20, and some PDP and VAX machines, but I don’t think I’d refer to those as floppies).
The RadiUS Pivot was interesting, but IIRC didn’t it have a pixel density of close to 120 pixels per inch? (Maybe I’m thinking of a different RadiUS monitor. They say the memory is the second thing to go.) That was a bit too high density for my tastes.
DJ,
Want some more of those Syquest disks (and a dual SCSI Syquest drive)? I’ve got the drive and about two dozen disks sitting in my closet.
Talk about living on the edge…I would use a blank SyQuest when I need additional scratch-disk space when using PhotoShop 3 I think it was.
Top that!!
I still got chemical burns and damaged brain cells from processing photo’s the real original way, by hand in the dark-room.
In fact desktop publishing output was so bad we shot down all that was laserprinted 50%!
Forget about dropping out text on a photograph in software, we did that manually.
So don’t blame me because I’m nutz, it’s the chemicals!
DJ,
I just have to respond to that challenge…
How about front ending a Cray XMP4/4 with a Mac Plus over a fractional T-1 from over 1,000 miles away — and going real time on the Cray to do nuke symulations analyses.
Now there’s both versatility of the Mac platform AND derring do at the same time.
Static Mesh:
I started out (like yourself) doing PASTE-UP.
I used to work for a newspaper, and we would take turns using the STAT CAMERA.
We had to shout out what percentage of reduction/enlargement we were gonna shoot, and if anyone else had shots needed that were anywhere close we would have to do their shot(s) as well.
And then there was RUBY-LITH.
Anyone remember cutting RUBY.
Wait…wait….remember waiting for a galley of text to come from the typesetter (type house) only to find it was wrong or didn’t rag the way you wanted?
Good times.
The “Classic” Mac System software was around for 15 years and there were only 50 or 60 viruses ever written for it. This does NOT include Word macro viruses. Macs were NEVER as susceptible as DOS and Windows OS machines.
I saw a Mac virus once. I think it was in 1991 when a friend called to tell me that her kids brought one home on a floppy and infected their Mac LC. I dropped by, ran SAM virus software… Yep, it was a virus… and killed it.
I continued to religiously ran virus software for years. I never saw one again.
From the webpage:
In order for software to significantly modify Mac OS X, you have to type in your password. You’re the decider.
The “decider”? LOL! Looks like GWB has created a meme!!
Shadowself:
Not sure I understand a word of what you posted, but I think you just spanked me!
DJ
Shadowself:
You’re probably right. I think it might have been 8 inch. It was for a long dead, proprietary data entry/database system from twenty years ago? My memory is at times as fuzzy as a partially degaussed disk. SCSI had its upside. It was convenient to run a chain and the speed was o.k. with a fast and wide card.
DJ:
A SyQuest for PS scratch space? That IS living dangerously! But creative. I’ve had my share of weird workarounds to get peripherals to work. And I always had a paperclip handy. You know why.
yea DJ remember them well,
I guess you recall CompuGraphics and having to do all your type calculations beforehand ?
We used to hand sketch the ads, remember all the paste up rolls of lines, corners etc?
How about waxing machines? Remember the smell? The Xacto knives and light tables?
Damm computers didn’t sit well on the angled tables either. We had to sit at desks to use their tiny 9 inch screens and felt demeaned.
I used to create material for years manually, even when computers were somethingthat only existed in research labs.
We knew our type too. Every part of it.
There was no such thing as a computer geek in my day because computers were not even created yet.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are young punks to me.
And don’t forget Letraset sheets for lettering. That’s how I learned patience.
This is the closest thing to a computer we had.
Ahhh yes the Letraset sheets for display type and headlines.
Now that’s typesetting!!
Linotype machines too.
We used to bitch that Mac’s would lower our pay because it made it too easy for smucks to produce crappy material.
It was true. We cursed Apple too.
It was either adapt or die, but one thing kept me alive. Talent.
The newbies on computers were horrible designers.
Static Mesh:
I’ll give you a dollar if you can still remember how to spec this type for me:
Apple rules. Microsoft sucks.
I want it in 36 pt. Helvetica Bold. : )
Yeah, Apple put a lot of TypeSetters out of work. Some of them embraced the MAC and survived.
To this day I still see young kids buy a MAC so they can “become” a designer….makes my skin crawl.
Any designer worth his salt can sketch and draw FIRST! The best designers I know ALL have drawing skills.
Static Mesh:
Sound like you are working in the creative field. What do you do? Do you have a web site?
DJ
Oh yes, rubylith, letraset, mac plus. mac II, 2fx, Quadra 900, several others that I don’t even remember the names of.
I even had a Powerbook 100, loved it, I think you could drive a truck over it, and it worked great also as an auxiliary hard drive with SCSI.
110 baud acoustic-coupling modems. That’s as far back as I go. I’m in diapers compared to shadowself.
@Static Mesh:”New kind of virus, extortionware.”
—> Yeah, just heard about that. I have to given them credit for their level of sophistication though.
It burns!!!!:
“A lot of hackers have never HEARD of a Mac or how secure their design is. But now, if they are on Apple’s mailing list, they will get taunts like these.”
Yes, all those hackers who never heard of a Mac yet somehow manage to find themselves on Apple’s mailing list…
“#8. More fun with photos.”
As a professional photographer let me just say. . .
It’s just more fun . . . period!!!
Sound like you are working in the creative field. What do you do? Do you have a web site?
Ahh not, left it long go. Can’t even draw worth a darn anymore.
But creative in a different way, improving my real estate so it’s worth more and decorating my boat with “bow bunnies”
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The Mac forced me to apply myself elsewhere to make more money.
Thank god for Apple I guess now.
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Returned to be a big fanboi, god I’m old.
Yeah, but will Winblows readers read it? Can they read at all? That’s 97 hits from the Mac search link and 50,533 returned from ‘Search Microsoft.com! LOL.
If you want a safe World Cup Tracker, the <a href=”http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/hinx/wc2006guide/”>Ultimate Couch Potato World Cup 2006 Guide</i> was made on a Mac (requires Excel) and is better than any tracker made on Winblows.
And still Apple market share falls…
“The Radius Pivot. It was pretty cool. As I recall it had a mercury switch that sensed rotation to trigger the portrait to landscape change or back.”
Hm, I have still one in working condition, attached to my 15 years old IIci working as mail server in the home office. Somebody mentioned $5000 for IIfx, well, IIci (5 MB RAM, 120 MB hard drive) with Radius Pivot cost me that much.
Was hoping the new Apple metal displays would pivot with some neat special effects, like the screen ‘pouring’ into the new position.
Who cares what Apple says in an emailed “news” propaganda sheet to the party faithful? What Windows user would read that? What Windows user even cares? What Windows user would believe the no-virus claims, anyway?
And MacDailyNews says, “Finally, Apple’s gloves are off. Let’s go!”
Oh, please. It’s a frickin’ house organ.
Get Real – so true.
Apple writes this stuff to keep the faithful from defecting over to Windows.
It does not help Apple to on one hand to say Windows is full of viruses then the next thing rig Apple computers to run Windows. If Windows sucks why let it on a Mac?
Comment that stuck with me most from a friend that put Windows on his Mac: “Sheesh – I didn´t realize how fast Windows was compared to OSX.”
18 futura medium flush left
Macs rule, M$ sucks
36 futura medium bold on 33.6 picas flush left
Underwood goes way of Studebaker
Those who keep saying they’re preaching to the choir: iPOD USERS get the Apple eNews… that’s a potentially big market. DUH!
Now, hopefully the editor of Macworld got the e-mail. I was never so disappointed in a magazine as I was of the Macworld that came yesterday. First their editor writes a “the sky is falling” editorial, telling me to run VIRUS software on my Mac and that things are just SOOOooo bad right now. Then I have to flip through several pages of virus checker software reviews, etc. My renewal was up, and it clinched it: I’m not renewing. It’s fine to put the reviews and things in. But when the EDITOR of Macworld is fueling the “Macs don’t have viruses because of low market share” myth, you’ve lost my respect.
Who cares what Apple says in an emailed “news” propaganda sheet to the party faithful?
Uhm, it’s not just in an email. You did read the thread, didn’t you?
What Windows user would read that? What Windows user even cares?
Ladies and gentlemen, the operational definition of “Stockholm syndrome”.
What Windows user would believe the no-virus claims, anyway?
Never mind that pesky thing called reality, I have my illusion to keep up! Macs get viruses tooooo, right? In other words, this is Bizarro-world justification for continuing discomfort. It’s like the slave saying to the free man, “Massa tells me the world is so bad out there. How can you handle it?”
Let the TV commercials tell the Virus story now!
We want more TV exposure–OSX! iLife!
i hate to bust all your bubbles – i was windows only now have a mac, too. i never had a virus on my windows computer. neither have my parents.
sure its more possible to get it with a windows computer, but if you have a firewall and virus software and don´t use internet explorer (i use firefox – it is good at stopping stuff coming to one´s computer) it is not going to happen.
the virus thing ain´t a reason to switch to macs…sorry guys.
Even most PC users will contend that Windows is awful. The problem is that they think there isn’t an alternative.
This is a good start, but it needs to be shouted from the rooftops!
DJ, ah, but do you know *exactly* how many points per inch are in type specs? (Almost everyone always assumes the approximate 72 points per inch is exact. It’s very close, but not exact.) Unless you’re spec’ing type thats two or more inches tall it probably doen’t matter — 72 points per inch is fine.
©,
110 baud (the TTY33 standard)… that was OK. It was much better than the Baudot “standards” of 50 and 75 baud which it effectively replaced. I was happy when I could do 300 baud at half duplex, and it usually kept up with my typing.
Oh yes, remembering the days of asynchronous connections. That’s why was able to use the Mac Plus to front end that Cray. I could hook it up directly using the RS-422 capable connection (synchronous and long distance communications capable) on the back. All the IBM clowns (er, I mean clones) at the time had RS-232 connections (typically asynchronous capable only and the synchonous variants weren’t stable enough for long distance, “high speed” connections) or some weird proprietary setup.
An acoustic coupled modem with an RS-232 cable still sits on my desk today. Don’t, use it, but it sits there in an attempt to remind me that 8 Mbps at home and an OC-3 at work really aren’t THAT slow. (Doesn’t really work. I still complain when I have to wait for multi gigabyte files to transfer at work!)
Shadowself said: DJ, ah, but do you know *exactly* how many points per inch are in type specs?
Ooo, ooo! Mr. Kotter! I know. I know! 72.27!
Shadowself said: “Back in the day before punch cards caught on, my first real computer task was decoding computer punch tape. Then we got the new fangled keypunch machine with those neat new cards!”
Whippersnapper!
I had to wind up paper punch tapes for Linotype machines. Molten lead!
Wire stories were punched onto the half-inch-wide paper as it unravelled from a huge two-foot diameter spool of yellow half-inch-wide paper feeding through the punch mechanism. Each story was separated by a punched-hole number that could be read by hooman beans. Each story on tape had to be torn from the following story, and wound up on a clockwork wheel with four pegs like a film take-up spool in a camera. So don’t give me none of them modern-as-tomorrow punch-card yarns.
Kids today. Don’t know nuttin.
If someone says they were there the day the first Gutenberg press was running I’m gonna scream. ; )
>@shadowself: “An acoustic coupled modem with an RS-232 cable still sits on my desk today. Don’t, use it, but it sits there in an attempt to remind me that 8 Mbps at home and an OC-3 at work really aren’t THAT slow. (Doesn’t really work. I still complain when I have to wait for multi gigabyte files to transfer at work!)
—->Yeah, I have to remind myself to….Running 8 Mbps at home as well. I could READ faster than 110 could display – that goes for 300 too. The iPod generation is spoiled rotten
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>No virus here:
You should market your idea and then retire. Just think of all the millions of Windows users you could save who already have viruses, and you could also sell your idea to businesses who have already lost billions due to down time and repair.
Oh wait. Microsoft beat you to it. They’re coming out with their own security software to sell.
Funny thing though, the XP upgrade box I have from 4 years ago already states that XP is dependable and secure. And I don’t see any instructions about using a firewall, security software, or using a third party browser in place of the pre-bundled Internet Explorer.
Please. Don’t even pretend to know what you are talking about.
“The newbies on computers were horrible designers.”
The symptom of that disease is something I call “font vomit.”
Multiple typefaces: throw in San Francisco, Nuptial, and Bodoni together for no apparent reason. Throw in some dingbats and webdings because they are cute. Widows, orphans, accidental bleeds, PMS 185 at 20% with orange type, no gutters, “random italicized headers” with “lots” of “quotes”. Drop shadows on all graphic elements, photos and copy. The boss bought his assistant a computer and loaded it with Publisher and FrontPage.
Why do they do it? Because they can. Why pay a pro when my assistant can churn out our brochures?
Some time in the future…
“Dad, what’s a computer virus? They were talking about it in school today.”
“Oh, those are bad programs for computers. They do bad things to computers.”
“What happened to them?”
“People got fed up and companies got fed up, so everyone switched from Vista to a Mac.”
“What’s a Vista?”
“Oh, that was an operating system from Microsoft.”
“Microsoft?”
“Oh that’s right–they changed their name to XBox.”
“Ok, I know–they make games for Nintendo.”