One more cup of coffee

Knowledge can be a wonderful thing

One of the easier things to find on the web is someone extolling the virtues of the Macintosh and why it is more secure than Windows. Every list that I see of the 'top 5 reasons Mac is safe and Windows sucks' includes some variant of this item:

"No Macintosh e-mail program automatically runs scripts that come attached to incoming messages, as Microsoft Outlook does."

Hmm. Sounds very dire.

I would now like to state a reason why Windows is more stable than Macintosh:

The Macintosh doesn't have protected memory, so a small bug in a single program will cause the entire computer to crash, unlike Windows.

Wait -- what's that you say? That's out of date? You say that any version of the Mac OS in the last three years has had protected memory?

You mean, just like how every version of Outlook for the last three years has blocked all executable file types? Or, even more broadly, even older versions of Outlook that have had any security patches installed in the last three years?

This is a lot like the Slashdot morons that mention in every third post that Windows sucks because you get a Blue Screen Of Death about 47 times a day. This was arguably true with older versions of Windows, but since using Windows XP, I have seen that a total of less than ten times. In almost three years, using numerous different machines. And about eight of those times were all from one specific video capture driver. But, hey, it used to be true that Windows crashed all the time, and it's just so hard to update the tired old arguments.

Learn something, people. When one of your primary arguments is years out of date, it makes it impossible to take anything else you say seriously.

Posted by Mike at March 26, 2004 10:56 PM