The Mac is like a modern day Betamax 1733

Gactimus

this thread reminds me of a meeting once that went on for hours and hours with all the experts not coming up with a decision. finally an old-timer blurted out "if somebody will please just tell me the question, i'll tell you the answer".

i don't know much about M$ Windows other than Win9X puts all user programs in the same 'address space' which seems pretty risky to me. if people will pardon my ignorance, i have to ask how my machine can get infected on the WWW if all it does is answer questions?

ie. if the PC-MAC, BSD, Linux, server or whatever is essentially just 'output' from the WWW's point-of-view, never 'executing' incoming messages, just answering them (sort of like separating metadata to my way of thinking).

i've got infected lots of times, for example because i wanted to see what would happen if i 'opened' one of these spam *.scr messages in M$ Windows, but buttuming i never do that and buttuming my browser or Web or database server never does its analogue of same without asking me first and i don't have a bunch of drivers waiting for anything old thing that comes in on any old port, what's the problem?

sometimes i look at these security bulletins and all they really say is 'buffer overflow vulnerability'. can't anybody be a little more precise? i'd rather we could just quarantine the guilty code bits forever rather than have to innoculate the whole world. send them to breastan or somesuch. i knew how to clobber a SYSRES 30 years ago - i don't need outsiders to help screw up my machine, i can do that myself!

(sorry for the windy question). pc