My friend John Scalzi got hit by adware on his PC, and has an entertaining rant about it at the linked address.
The comments host yet another Mac versus PC argument, to which I couldn’t help but contribute. I might as well throw it in here, though I’m sure you all are tired of my broken record by now.
Apologies for continuing the Mac/PC thread, but count me on the Mac side. (This is a “rant” after all.)
-I’m a heavy user, I use all sorts of software I download off the web (tho mainly VersionTracker, which checks for viruses itself). I’ve never had a virus on my Mac. In 20 years. Never. Never had spyware or adware. And I’ve NEVER NEEDED VIRUS PROTECTION SOFTWARE. Beyond this, I still have data I created 20 years ago because I’ve never had my Mac totally crash and die so I couldn’t retrieve the data. This is worth tens of thousands of dollars to me. I consider all data on Windows to be disposable unless I have a recent backup, because who knows what evil is coming down the line tomorrow. It truly amazes me that there hasn’t been an effective widespread assassin virus that wipes out people’s data irretrivably – but one day soon there will be.
-Purchase price of a Mac is nearly identical to that of an identical Windows PC. I built a PC recently, a Shuttle (for work); it cost around $1000. I can get an iBook for around $1000 with equivalent performance, in a laptop with an OS that doesn’t suck. A high-end PC or Mac is around $2000. As mentioned earlier, buying a new Mac actually makes me happy. Buying a new Wintel PC is another several thousand dollars down the toilet for questionable gains and another ugly grey box.
-I don’t even use Windows XP at work – I’m still stuck on W2K, because XP isn’t a technical improvement, and the OS itself spys on me – they don’t trust that I didn’t steal it! Outlook is the single most offensive program I have to deal with daily, and it’s a massive unprotected target for viruses! Did you know that a lot of the email we get comes from hijacked outlook machines? And yet people are afraid to load Microsoft updates, because who knows what evil DRM or new vulnerabilities it’ll contain?
-Apple does a better job considering user needs than Microsoft. The OS, the browser, the email program – what I use the most – are all better at filtering spam and malware on MacOS. I honestly believe that Microsoft doesn’t give a shit about anything but making money; Apple is working to make quality products and hoping the money will follow, someday. No doubt a worse business strategy. Sure, someday someone could write a virus for Mac – I’d think it’d be fairly easy. But I trust Apple to come up with a solution quickly, that I would trust to download and install the day it came out.
-The biggest difference to me is that I get to actually use my Mac for productive work, and I don’t have to spend time dicking with it. I know there are a lot of computer folx whose raison d’etre (side note: http://www.dogfish.com/beer/raisondetre.cfm is my favorite beer, try it!) is messing with cards and irqs and dlls and shareware. I just want to use my computer to get work done.
Aside from rants like this (more of which are available on my website), I’ve given up on trying to “convert” people. And at the same time I refuse to help people with Windows problems, because I know how bad they can get and I tend to take it personally that there’s no way to really fix them. (shrug) “Don’t know, it’s Windows. There’s always something wrong. Good luck.”