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9 Responses to "Mac on Intel: Viruses?"

1. | Reply Jesper
   Posted 10 Jun 2005 at 1:24pm #
   

   If that's only "among" the dumbest things you've heard today, I pity you.

2. | Reply Chris McElligott
   Posted 10 Jun 2005 at 1:50pm #
   

   I knew people were dumb and ignorant but jeez thats pathetic. On the same topic but drifting slightly has it occured to anyone that there might not ever be a Mac OS X virus?

3. | Reply Steve Streza
   Posted 10 Jun 2005 at 2:10pm #
   

   Maybe he meant that since the market share of Apple is probably gonna go up, more people will attack the Mac platform.

   I love it when PC people understand the truth. </sarcasm>

4. | Reply William Wu
   Posted 10 Jun 2005 at 4:06pm #
   

   With Macs using X86, it would be easier to take advantage of a buffer overflow, simply because there are more people familiar with how to this on x86 arch.

   With the switch, it may be harder to distribute a worm (at least for a while) the fragmented CPU types will make it harder. As initially there will be very few x86 Macs, making finding them to hit with a x86 coded exploit. The PPC Mac population will reach its peak and start to decline, again making them harder and harder to find to and hit with a PPC exploit.

5. | Reply Ralph Scheuer
   Posted 10 Jun 2005 at 4:13pm #
   

   On the day of the keynote, they even said something along those lines in the news on German television. This is so incredibly moronic that you have to read it twice in order to believe that anybody could be so dumb to say this. The same kind of "mainstream media" reports that many companies switch to Linux because of the smaller security risk - but what is it worth to come up with reasonable arguments when you're dealing with morons who search for the news story of the day or (as it happened to you) the next best flamewar... *sigh*

6. | Reply Caleb Jaffa
   Posted 10 Jun 2005 at 5:50pm #
   

   It's quite funny. I am surprised at the comments and discussion going on in the general clue less public and more especially the places were the average Joe of the audience should know better. However people just don't get what exactly this switch means. The CPU does not equal the OS, if x86 is vulnerable then were are all the Linux viruses?

7. | Reply Timen Swijtink
   Posted 11 Jun 2005 at 5:21am #
   

   What's even worse is that the supposedly clued-in people, the people we rely on, are also spreading misinformation. Like, for example, on Your Mac Life (a show I love), Shawn King was saying things like that this switch will give Apple the ability to go back to PPC anytime if Intel were to perform badly, which is entirely not true because once the switch has been made, it's too frustrating to turn back again. He also said some other things that sounded a little sketchy at best, because there was no information out there supporting it, and it didn't really always make much sense in my mind.

   Shawn is only but an example of the misinformation out there- Apple should start providing some answers very soon or this misinformation will cause unnecessary damage.

8. | Reply Ralph Scheuer
   Posted 11 Jun 2005 at 6:53am #
   

   Timen: I wouldn't say that it's completely unrealistic that Apple has the option of even going back if they get a good deal and interesting CPUs from IBM and / or Freescale. Look at it this way: Openstep is the ancestor of OS X and has a long history of being perfectly multi-platform. Openstep developers were used to targetting multiple platforms and once Mac developers have taken care of cross-platform aspects in their code, universal binaries will be the order of the day for years to come. As I understand it, this will be really easy once people have cleaned up their project and know what they need to take care of. Why is that, you might ask - well, the answer is quite simple: on the day when the first Intel Mac is in store, the market share of PPC Macs will be 100%. Moreover, Apple will then still sell PPC Macs. It will take two years until the last new Macs are equipped with Intel CPUs. With the Mac market being as small as it is by itself, I just cannot imagine that any developer will leave a segment of the market behind, and there is absolutely no reason to exclude a segment of the existing market unless you are developing really performance-hungry multimedia stuff that needs to take advantage of partial assembler optimization. Just think about that for a moment and also consider how long the average Mac is being used. Who would want to exclude potential customers from his software offerings without a really good reason?

9. | Reply jeff
   Posted 12 Jun 2005 at 10:38pm #
   

   hahahhahahha

   that's pretty good.