Why I use a Mac, anno 2006 3708

Peter Bj¿rn Perls¿

I find it somewhat odd that you cross-post this utterly OT junk to a.f.c.

However in the spirit of a.f.c, I will offer you my hypothesis as to why you use a Mac in 2006.

OpenBSD is hardly obscure, it has been around for a nigh on a decade, and it has been discussed and held up as an example in security circles for many years. If you took adequate interest in security you should be aware of OpenBSD through the various security advisories for cross-platform stuff like ASN.1 and OpenSSH for example.

Security can't be that much of a concern to you if you aren't even paying attention to your risk exposure, or keeping up to date with patches.

The most basic precaution is physically removing the network cable(s), network adaptor(s) and keeping removeable media away from the machine. It's a cross-platform solution that just about anyone can implement themselves. Anyone posting to AFC should know that. :)

OS-X viruses have been found in the wild already. Following your comments on "Security" I surmise that you might not actually feel the need to have one because you don't actively track the advisories, therefore it appears that you don't actually care if your machine is at risk or not.

My IBM Thinkpad which is loaded with in excess of 30 applications (and AVG) hasn't crashed in 22 months. Maybe you just bought bad hardware, there is plenty of bad hardware out there at the moment. Mac's are not immune to bad hardware and software either. ;)

I very much doubt that any Mac has come close to the average PDP-11's uptime yet. ;)

I have used Mac OS-X as recently as May, it was OK, but the *userland* app I was trying to run slayed the machine. So much it's much vaunted stability and security. I think that you'd find it far harder to crash my OpenBSD machine by plugging in a USB drive. :