[LINK] Animated cursor flaw in All Windows

Rick Welykochy rick at praxis.com.au
Wed Apr 4 18:09:37 AEST 2007


Adrian Chadd wrote:

> The way to gauge security of a platform isn't its public security history -
> its by auditing the thing. The month of apple bugs showed Apple is capable
> of the same kinds of bugs that pop up in Windows software.

And I will be the first to point out that there have been heaps of
Apple security upgrades lately.

Out of curiosity, I do read up on some of them. They don't worry me
much, since often they concern subsystems I never use (I don't print or
fax since I am paperless - which may be a topic for Link soon!), or the
level of exploit is often so difficult or requires user stupidity that
I am confident it just wouldn't have happened to my system before the
update was applied.

That said, Apple is becoming very concerned about style over substance
lately. In each of the last two Mac OS X release, I have disabled
parts of the eye-candy:

(1) Mac OS X 10.3 introduced Spotlight, kinda like a google desktop that
     searches everything so you can find it. I've been using computers
     longer than Apple has and have no trouble organising and indexing
     digital information according to my needs. I disabled it once it
     started gobbling my CPU and eating through my hard drive. Sweet!

(2) Mac OS X 10.3 introduced Desktop Widgets. The moment I found these
     little Javascript gremlins gobbling up 100% CPU they were toast.
     I know how to get the information I need without a little goblin
     doing the job for me in the most inefficient manner known to mankind.

And I continually ask myself (and Apple a few times) ... why haven't
they fixed even the most basic problems with the Finder? It still
crashes and reloads itself when I move large directories around.
And it still cannot remember the structure of a directory tree,
in spite of depositing unwanted .DS_Store files ALL OVER THE HDD!

Did you know their command-line ftp client still gets stroppy
when transferring a file above 2 GB in size? On a 64-bit file system?

I could go on, but why bother. I'd rather live with idiosyncrasies
I can understand and work around than other systems I've used where
breakdowns in service and downright bugs leave me baffled and quietly
weeping in a corner.


cheers
rickw



-- 
_________________________________
Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services

People who enjoy eating sausage and obey the law should not watch either being made.
      -- Otto von Bismarck



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