Originally Posted by
Marko
ZDNet has far too much invested into the whole Microsoft thing that they can hardly be taken as an objective observer. Take the following quote from that article:
"The only thing which has kept Mac OS X relatively safe up until now is the fact that the market share is significantly lower than that of Microsoft Windows or the more common UNIX platforms.… If this situation was to change, in my opinion, things could be a lot worse on Mac OS X than they currently are on other operating systems, regarding security vulnerabilities"
Mr. Archibald has it right in the first part of the quote, insofar as BSD Unix could be considered less common 'Nix, but the second part of it is pure bull, pardon my bluntness.
Let me rephrase the part you quoted me on: Windows as an operating system is a patch of a patch originally built to sit on top of another patch of a patch, DOS, a Disk Operating System. It's vulnerability stems directly from the fact that it was built to accomodate as much backward compatibility as possible. Being essentially still a Disk-oriented system, real security is much harder to obtain than is the case with Account-oriented system like Unix.
Yes, Unix is vulnerable too, and yes, as Apple's market share increases, it will begin to get targeted as well. But the difference will be on an order of a magnitude at least, due to the differences in the operating systems.
My bottom line remains: it's not the hardware that matters in this matter, it's the software. And Microsoft - both Windows and Office - remains the Emmentaler of the bunch.
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