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Mac OS X Server, a Safe and
Intelligent Move?
by Erik Hansen
Bill Gates has been preaching like a televangelist for a year now
how security is Microsoft's main concern, but his released security
fixes continue to fix nothing. Bill's wife isn't named Tammy
Faye Gates, is she?
The computer world is starting to get fed up with Gate's promises,
and are starting to switch over servers to Macs. Other than
Word macro viruses, there are over 20,000 PC viruses, yet only about
40 Mac ones. The Mac has gotten the reputation lately as
unhackable. Contrary to Microsoft, this
isn't just effective advertising, the results have spoken for
themselves. A private firm, VirTech Communications, set up a
Mac server and offered $15,000 to anyone who could gain unauthorized
access. No one could ever. The site was running for two
years and had over 140,000 attacks (NY Times, 12 April 97).
In 1999 the US Army decided to switch their main servers from
Windows NT to MacOS and WebSTAR server software, after being hacked
and infiltrated for the nth time by a 19 year old in Wisconsin.
The government organization was tired of being made to look like
fools and made the switch in hopes of securing their sites for good.
One year later, in 2000, a pair of men from Brazil hacked the army's
site and changed pages to display different graphics. However,
the part of the site they were effective in infiltrating was the few
Windows NT servers. The hackers were unsuccessful with the main part
of the site because of it running on the Mac OS. Now four
years since the switch over, they have not suffered any break-ins or
web page defacements on the Mac run servers. Not bad for such
a high profile organization.
Administrators concerns have not just been about hacking. The
stability of their operating system has been a topic of concern for
many years now. Microsoft has admitted on one of their own web
pages that Windows NT has more than 10,000 bugs, and Windows 2000
has over 32,358 bugs reported so far (the page has since been
removed, go figure). The average user spends between 50 and 60 hours
each year troubleshooting their computer, while the average Mac user
spends less than 5 hours. With stability like that, a lot of
IT Professionals could be out of jobs. Gulfstream, a company that
manufactures jets, has 1 administrator for 450 Mac workstations.
When NASA
switched from Mac to Windows, help desk calls grew consistently from
68,000 calls to 142,000 in two years. I don't know about you
but all these numbers are pretty compelling.
TRUE FACTS!!!!
The architectural firm that designed Bill Gates' $50 million
residence, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson in Seattle, is a Mac shop, and
Bill bought his mom a new iMac, because he said it was too hard for
her to understand computing and the Mac is so much easier for a
novice to use. Gates says his mom doesn't bother him so much with
computing questions now. The high-tech electronics inside Gates'
mansion are Windows-based. The first evening at home, his
drop-from-the-ceiling big screen TV would not shut off -- Gates had
to throw a blanket over it to get to sleep.
(Barbara Walters 20/20 interview)
Bill Gates couldn't get Windows 95 to boot up at its official launch
celebration. He threw a tirade then asked jokingly if anyone had a
Mac.
Intel's advertising agency is an all-Apple shop with over 600 Macs
used to create ad content.
The Navy missile cruiser USS Yorktown suffered a crippling systems
failure when its Windows NT operating system tried to divide by
zero. "Even a $3 calculator gives you a 'zero' and doesn't stop
executing the next set of instructions", said an engineer with
the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support
Center. The ship ultimately had to be towed into the Naval base at
Norfolk, VA.
PC World's "Best of '99" award for Best (PC) Operating
System is... "NONE". Microsoft can't even place in a field
of one! The setup routine for Windows 98 deliberately disables files
used by
competitors' software and installs different versions of those files
("for the use of Win98"). (ZDNet)
Just 6 weeks before its release, Bill Gates demonstrated Windows 98
at the Comdex98 computer show in Chicago. As soon as his assistant
plugged in a scanner, Win98 crashed. (C/Net)
"(People ask me) 'There are many PCs that are less expensive
than a Mac. Isn't it smarter to buy the cheaper one?' You know, that
same argument was used to sell a lot of Yugos and Hyundai's in the
1980s, but nobody was calling for the death of Mercedes-Benz."
(Don Crabb)
When technology reporter Don Crabb visited the COMDEX '98 computer
show, he noticed that a substantial number of booths were running
their Windows product movies and slideshows on PowerMacs. "When
I asked some of these vendors why, the answer was always, 'because
we don't have much setup time and little time to fix it if it
crashes. So we run on a PowerMac and have
done with it.' In a half-dozen Pentium-based presentations I sat
through, the crash rate was a spectacularly bad five out of
six."
(ZDNet Tech News)
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