Worth the Trouble?
Yet another article from a disgruntled Wintel user. This one, in Fortune Magazine, about a maddening invasion of pop-up-generating spyware and the inability of the hardware and software sellers to eradicate it:
It started about a month ago. A blue window appeared on my screen. It was flashing, which is always a bad sign in Cyberville. The alert stated that my system was possibly invaded by spyware and that I should click on the ok button to scan for problems. I’m not a fool. I did not click. I am aware that viruses, like vampires, must be invited across the threshold to gain entry.Over the next few days the blue window kept reappearing. I ignored it. But you can’t wish this kind of thing away, any more than you can keep an upper-respiratory infection from striking you on a flight full of coughing travelers. …
I went to Best Buy and purchased Norton Internet Security and something called Spy Sweeper, which promised to help eradicate cookies, sprites, wafers, and tidbits that gum up your system. The Norton was clunky and slow and inscrutable to me—it kept presenting windows that offered choices I did not understand. The Sweeper, on the other hand, was lean and nimble. It scanned my friend and pronounced that he was suffering from more than 250 viruses and some 2,000 traces of spyware seeping through my innards. I expunged them all, and felt much better.
Then up popped Mr. Window again. And then another. Hmm, I thought, and ran the fix-it program again. Whoops. It found 25 viruses and 350 or so footprints of associated dreck. Blew those off. Back they came. I had now spent the best part of a day cursing, yelling, damning the morons—wherever they were, whoever they were—who had caused this disaster. …
There are lots of people I guess I could blame—Microsoft, for leaving a back door into Explorer that made this all possible; Best Buy, for giving me back a box that still had issues—but I don’t. They, too, must be counted among the victims of the walnut brains who are out there wreaking havoc. If I could air out their skulls with a ball-peen hammer, I would. But I can’t. All I can do is my little part to make this kind of thing less likely.
I’m getting a Mac.
Perhaps you see this writer as being uneducated about how to use a computer–but then, so are most users. And certainly, a regimen of prevention (which would include spyware and virus blockers from the beginning) in addition to wise usage to avoid viral email and spyware-ridden ‘freeware’ would make using a Wintel box much less hazardous. But the problem is, most users are not savvy enough to know how to do these things, so a Mac would certainly be a better choice for them in that respect.
And for those who do know how to do ‘safe computing,’ is it really worth all the trouble just to avoid using a Mac? Seriously, I’d like to know what makes a Mac so less attractive than a Wintel?
Oft-stated reasons include: the Mac costs too much. My answer to that would be, they used to, but not any more. Yes, the prices are maybe 10% higher for comparable systems, but then on the Mac you don’t have to buy anti-virus software, and the machines tend to last longer than cheaper PCs. Another comment: Macs don’t have software. Granted, if you like computer gaming, the Mac is definitely not for you. But for most everything else, while there may not be as many titles available as there are for Windows, there are enough for every category to satisfy most people.
Another gripe about Macs is that they are not compatible. That strikes me as strange, as I find Macs to be very compatible. Any removable storage device I can read on a PC, I can read on a Mac. Any major software format from the PC, I can open on the Mac. Any MS Office document is cross-platform, and many say that MS Office for the Mac is even better than MS Office for Windows. And connecting to PCs on a network is a snap–in fact, it’s easier for me to connect to a Windows network on my Mac than it is to do the same on a PC! And for anything else, I can run Virtual PC on my Mac if I want to. Yep, it’s slow, but it’s much closer to having the best of both worlds.
However, most of the PCs-are-better-than-Macs arguments are not about why PCs are better; they tend to be pot-shots at the Mac, at either misconceptions about the Mac (“you can’t use a 2-button mouse”), exceptions (“the design sucks–look at the flower-power iMac”), peripheral claims they disagree with (“Apple claims to be ‘Your own digital entertainment center,’ but Windows can do the same thing”), or PC-centric subjectivity (“after using a PC, the Mac is too hard for me to use”–generally, it’s bad because it’s not exactly like Windows).
So I’d like to ask, while you may prefer Windows, is the Mac really that bad as to make it a lesser choice?
It all comes down to software in my case. I’m a gamer and, even though the Mac supports more games than ever, it doesn’t have the library yet that is extensive enough for me. I’d like a mac just for my business usage (email, documents, photoshop) but I don’t have the resources (or the space for that matter) for 2 separate computers. If the Mac saw release dates for all software, especially games, at the same time as Windows machines, then macs would definately be a great alternate solution. You are right about what you said, if you like gaming, macs are not for you.
I count myself so lucky to be content running Linux on my generic “IBM compatible” PC. This ‘spyware’ and such seems to be so prevalent these days for Windows users, and yet I barely know of its existence.
I understand the foolishness of running an executable for fear of it harbouring a trojan, but how can does a Windows PC get infected via simple browsing? Is Internet Explorer set by default to execute … javascript? ‘Active X’ (which I know of only in that it was the Microsoft anti-java competitor)? Why is it I seem to be completely safe running Mozilla under Linux?
I’m a computer type but quite naive of some of the issues on the web side. Just curious as to the basic flaws in Windows that opens up one’s PC to all this. I’d be *horrified* if my PC (my baby!) was vulnerable like so many people seem to be.
On the Linux side, Luis, you should consider propounding Linux as a solution also. Uses the cheaper Windows hardware, so no replacement costs; you can set it up so the same machine can boot into Windows for games or other things, while leaving Linux for web browsing and office work; the software is all free, and has much – most? – of the functionality of the common Windows applications. But I’m sure you’ve had heaps of Linux droids suggesting same.
Brad
Brad: From what I’ve heard, Linux sounds great–but also much too complicated for the average user to handle. Never used it myself, so I don’t know first-hand. But one test would be, could your elderly aunt get a Linux box and work with it without serious assistance? How would the average know-nothing-about-computers user fare with the system? What kind of support can you get with Linux if there’s a problem? Most of the people I’ve heard saying that Linux is not too difficult are not talking about the majority of users who just want to buy a computer and have it work. I’m not sure that that majority would be able to handle a Windows/Linux dual-boot or how to fish around for open-source apps and handle cross-OS compatibility issues that derive from that.
I’m also interested in how Linux can run Windows apps without cross-booting into Windows; I understand it does so in emulator mode. But is that of equivalent speed as a Windows environment, or is it in slow-down mode like with Virtual PC on a Mac? And wouldn’t that allow malware from the Windows world a way into a Linux system?
Mr. BlogD,
Several Questions:
1) What do you read on a regular basis?
2) Do you mind publishing your Favorites list,
so that we can get ideas for sites to visit?
3) Are folks in Japan who are learning english
encouraged to go to your site to practice
english?
4) Have you ever encouraged students to practice
their writing through your comment system?
5) What do your fellow teachers think about
your blog thing?
1) What do you read on a regular basis?The Internet.2) Do you mind publishing your Favorites list, so that we can get ideas for sites to visit?See the LinkBoard at the top right of the main index page.3) Are folks in Japan who are learning english encouraged to go to your site to practice english?Not really; I don’t write to the non-native-level speaker.4) Have you ever encouraged students to practice their writing through your comment system?No, but I do have them begin their own blogs using Blogspot and comment to each other’s blogs.5) What do your fellow teachers think about your blog thing?They know about it, but do not really read it so much, from what I am aware. I’ve not heard any real compliments or complaints about it from colleagues.
Luis,
Have you had a bad windows experience recently? You’ve been posting about mac vs wintel quite fervently in the past week.
Anyway, let me give you a couple of my MAC peeves.
1. I don’t like the MAC default keyboard layout. When I do copy paste the CMD and C key are too close and feels uncomfortable.
2. I don’t like the anti-aliased fonts in general and prefer crisp fonts when typing email or programming or reading webpages in general. Yeah, I know I can turn them off..
3. Chat software for MAC like Yahoo Msg or ICQ lack all the features that are available on Windows versions, e.g. voice calls..
4. When I use cross platform storages like portable harddrives, MAC always puts all kinds of weird files into the directory that appear when viewing that directory in windows. This doesn’t happen in reverse.
5. The default Japanese input on MAC always chooses weird Kanji when trying to do the conversion from hiragana to kanji. Not as intelligent as I would expect although I have not tried to configure this to any extent.
I’m a devoted MAC user but to be honest really prefer to do most of my work on my IBM thinkpad, probably out of habit. I use my MAC mainly for multimedia, music, video, surfing the web etc.
Have you had a bad windows experience recently? You’ve been posting about mac vs wintel quite fervently in the past week.No, nothing about personal experience–it’s just that I’ve seen quite a bit of Mac news out there and that inspired comments.3. Chat software for MAC like Yahoo Msg or ICQ lack all the features that are available on Windows versions, e.g. voice calls..Yeah, I’ve noticed this, too. I used voice calls on my PC without much trouble, but I haven’t been able to make any voice calls with my father using our Macs. It may have to do with security, though…4. When I use cross platform storages like portable harddrives, MAC always puts all kinds of weird files into the directory that appear when viewing that directory in windows. This doesn’t happen in reverse.Yeah, the “dot-underscore” files (I call them “Mac droppings”). However, that’s a sometimes-thing: It happens at one school network I use, but not at a different school network and not at home. Also, I have yet to test this, but I think 10.4 may have fixed that.
Other Mac problems include the infamous “FTFF” (“Fix the Effing Finder”) complaints, like windows not maximizing properly, or the default for Finder options between “This Window Only” and “All Windows” being randomized; the lack of native support for most AVI formats; and for me, inconsistencies with screen resolution when changing back and forth between native and Video-out modes. I could probably name other stuff, too, but most of the complaints I and most others have are relatively minor. My own complaints about Windows are on major points, such as consistency, ease-of-use, customizability, security, stability and style. In other words, most Mac gripes are about minor bugs, most Windows gripes are about systemic shortfalls–and Windows has its own minor bugs as well.
Luis,
> From what I’ve heard, Linux sounds great–but also much
> too complicated for the average user to handle. Never used
> it myself, so I don’t know first-hand. But one test would
> be, could your elderly aunt get a Linux box and work with
> it without serious assistance?
Well, I’m a computer bod and I deliberately use an old distribution of Linux that requires me to ‘tinker under the hood’, but I’ve really been impressed of late with some of the modern Linux distributions. Fedora, Ubuntu … I couldn’t have said a few years ago that Linux could replace Windows at the desktop, but now I honestly think I can. Just the common applications – web browsing, the equivalent of Microsoft Office, etc. But yes, those distributions really *are* as simple to install and use, I think, as Windows. You just put a CD in the drive and answer some simple questions, and after it all you’ve got an excellent GUI with all the common applications you need a click of the mouse away. Really impressive how far they’ve come over the past decade.
> What kind of support can you get with Linux if there’s
> a problem?
No idea; being a computer type I’ve never known anyone who has actually signed up with someone for support. I think some of the major names do offer Linux support – HP, maybe Dell? – but I’d have to accept it’s a lot more sparse than the support available for Windows.
> I’m not sure that that majority would be able to handle
> a Windows/Linux dual-boot or how to fish around for
> open-source apps and handle cross-OS compatibility
> issues that derive from that.
Even the dual-boot stuff is easy if you install Linux *after* Windows. The last Red Hat distribution I installed auto-detected the Windows partition and said “Do you want to have a boot option to boot into Windows?” as part of the Linux install. As simple as that. And using it – booting into one or the other – is then trivial.
Doing it the other way might be more difficult, if you don’t have the Linux installer – which is deliberately written to make the installation of Linux dead simple to the layman – to help you. But there would be lots of people out there who are using the latest Linux distributions (some of them seem to live to install the most recent versions just for kicks) and they would know if there are ‘wizards’ to do things around the other way.
> I’m also interested in how Linux can run Windows apps
> without cross-booting into Windows; I understand it does
> so in emulator mode.
Ah, I was suggesting cross-booting. I explored the (free) emulators a couple of years ago – Wine, some others – and yeah, they’re a bit buggy, and awfully slow. I got what I wanted to work functioning, but – at the time anyway – that sort of thing definitely WASN’T for the average user.
‘vmware’ I gather is *much* better, but it’s a commercial product which you have to pay for.
You were suggesting the Mac as a ‘safe’ platform to use, safe from spyware and viruses, but acknowedged disadvantages – higher cost of different hardware, software releases come out later, some others. Plus some software applications wouldn’t work on the Mac, like some games.
Someone who was sick and tired of the spyware/virus situation could – for practically zero cost – using the SAME hardware, no replacement cost – install Linux and use it for the pedestrian stuff, like web browsing, office applications, etc. No spyware/virus fears. And cross-boot into Windows for the games, on the same PC. Seems to me to have the advantages of your Mac transition with less of the disadvantages.
But I don’t use Microsoft Office much, and whereas I find the Open Source/Linux equivalent of that package – Star Office, or Open Office – to be just as good, there’s no doubt functionality that a power Word/Excel/etc user might find missing in the Linux software.
Brad
Luis, while I’m here, got a quick question – it’s always seemed to me that it takes a loooooong time once I’ve clicked POST to submit a comment on your site before the web page updates. Does the super-duper software you use over there to keep out the spam vermin (which has been fascinating to read about in your blog) – doing whatever it does, accessing blackspot sites, analysing words/phrases – slow things down a lot?
Just curious.
Brad
Brad: I suppose it depends, but I think that it only takes the engine up to 10-20 seconds to register the change; for some reason, the spam-blocking software I use (MT-Blacklist, which I couldn’t blog without) will delay the return notification by a longer amount of time–which sometimes results in people posting 2-4 copies of the same message, believing that the message did not take. Sometimes, the page reloads but the message does not show. You just have to hit reload/refresh (F5 on a PC) to see the changes a few seconds later. Sometimes when I’m eradicating spam, the MT-Blacklist interface takes minutes to inform me the spam has been cleaned out–but if I go to my main MT page and check just seconds after starting the process, the spam is shown to have been taken out already, even though MT-Blacklist still grinds for a minute or two more.
So it’s a bit of a bug, but it is far preferable to letting the massive waves of spam (hundreds every day) litter the site.
Sometime soon (I’ve been promising this for a while now) I’m changing over to MT-3 and MT-BL 2, and that includes extra security. Tell me, would you be deterred from commenting if you had to log in or type out word strings for verification?
BTW, my brother is probably starting to post his newest Harry Potter story–his third book, the newly-titled “Phoenix Intuition” (takes place about 4 years after book seven), on the fanfic sites. If not now, then in the next few days. He’s asked me to hold off publishing here until all the chapters are up there. Just thought you might want to know.
I’ve ALWAYS had to reload the page to check that my posted comment has ‘taken’; it’s NEVER shown the post off its own bat after its own refresh. I’ve often wondered (every time I’ve posted a comment!) why the thing wasn’t organised synchronously so the page would only finish loading/updating after your MT-Blacklist stuff finished doing its thing. While I myself have never double-posted – your instructions are quite clear – I guess it’s still understandable how some people have.
(3-4 copies, though? Wouldn’t they see the first after posting the second?)
Logging in with a password would be a slight pain, but I’d hope it would be a standard CGI form whose values Mozilla would remember for me after the first time. I juggle so many user names and passwords now … I think I’d have a slight preference for the human-decipherable word string, that’s simple and part of the whole flow of submission, no having to remember user name/password stuff. But it’s only a slight preference.
Excellent news about Phoenix Intuition. I think I’m starting to really obsess over Harry Potter fan fiction … how many filing cabinets would you say I need to fill up with printouts of fan fiction to be classified as an obsessive fan boy? Anyway, in all my reading, your brother’s two stories are pretty much the best I’ve ever read. And that’s not just a subjective assessment … I can stand back and just ask myself “how many times have you *re-read* a story this past year?”. And his two books *easily* win that contest … and I only came across them a few months ago. Amazing how he got the whole flavour/balance of his work so *right* (for me, anyway. Some of the elements of his writing satisfied my own personal prose predilections perfectly).
So thank you for the heads-up on that!
Brad
I’ve ALWAYS had to reload the page to check that my posted comment has ‘taken’; it’s NEVER shown the post off its own bat after its own refresh.Interesting. You know, I almost never experience that anymore since I switched over to Safari; it might have to do with the internal workings of the browser, for all I know. (3-4 copies, though? Wouldn’t they see the first after posting the second?)Apparently not. Doesn’t happen very often, but I can imagine someone being very impatient that the screen does not refresh immediately, and so they click the “Post” button several times in succession, and possibly even leave the site thinking that the message did not post at all…Anyway, in all my reading, your brother’s two stories are pretty much the best I’ve ever read. And that’s not just a subjective assessment … I can stand back and just ask myself “how many times have you *re-read* a story this past year?”. And his two books *easily* win that contest … and I only came across them a few months ago. Amazing how he got the whole flavour/balance of his work so *right* (for me, anyway. Some of the elements of his writing satisfied my own personal prose predilections perfectly).Yes, I feel the same way. I mean, this is my brother we’re talking about. When he first told me that he’d written a Harry Potter book, my reaction was, “my brother can write a book?” And then when I read it, my thought was that the quality of the story and the writing were, in my opinion, on par with JKR herself, that I could easily imagine this being an authentic story (though my brother did vary from JKR’s cardboard characterizing of the Dursleys as cruel buffoons; he abandoned such less-realistic elements of the JKR universe in favor of more serious, adult themes).
“Phoenix Intuition” (which I read for proofreading purposes) is a somewhat different kind of Harry Potter story. It takes place after Hogwarts, so it is not a student-centered novel. It is a shorter work, in that it is about as long as JKR’s novels instead of being the thick tomes my brother created in the previous two stories (this one is half the length, which my brother did purposefully). But most importantly, it is not written from Harry’s perspective, a JKR rule that my brother followed strictly in his prior two works. This one follows each of the characters and see from a more omniscient point of view. Despite its differences, though, you’ll find that it still lives up to my brother’s standards (although “Veil” will always be my favorite of the series).
> Yes, I feel the same way. I mean, this is my brother
> we’re talking about. When he first told me that he’d
> written a Harry Potter book, my reaction was, “my
> brother can write a book?”
Who knows, Luis; you share the same genes, maybe you can write Harry Potter fan fiction as well! Have you tried, hmmmm? Or you may have totally different skills currently unrealised – like tap dancing, or making childrens’ balloon animals, or …
Brad
Just a quick comment as I stumbled across this blog by accident.
I have been using different versions of Windows since back in the 3.1 days, however I have recently moved over to Linux. I tried a couple of different versions before I tried Ubuntu. I’ve found it very user friendly, and it has great support via a forum on their site. You can ask questions, and they are usually answered within 24 hours.
With regards to getting software on Linux, I read before I installed that it was the Achiles Heal of Linux, however Ubuntu contains a program called Synaptic Package Manager. This lists a whole host of programs available for the system. It’s just a matter of clicking a checkbox next to the prog you want to install. You click ‘apply’ and it will download and install the program for you. Putting a little icon into the correct section in the applications menu.
While I doubt that this contains every program in existence, it contains most things you would need – OpenOffice (which installs as standard with this version of Linux anyway), a HTML editor, C++ IDE package, VoIP software etc.
I did find that this version of Linux has no native support for mp3 or DIVX which I was quite suprised about as other versions I had tried did. It was a simple matter of following the step by step instructions on the forum to get all of this set up though.
While I don’t believe that Linux is yet mature enough for ‘the masses’ I don’t think it will be long before it is a very real alternative to Windows. Of course, with more people using the OS, there will be more people who decide to write virii and spyware for it. It should be interesting to see how Linux would cope if the number of people who write virii and spyware for Windows were turn their attention to Linux.