Mac OS and WindowsXP

While I was using Miro (I discussed it few posts ago) I saw that Harvard Extension School’s Computer Science E-1 and it interested me. So I downloaded its podcasts and started watching’em.

As I’m watching the second lecture something pulled attention and made me think of what’s the instructor is telling his students. Which is “a discussion about WindowsXP and MacOS”

The conclusion of what the instructor said is the following (the way I concluded it):

1- Mac is MORE Secured and Stable than windows BECAUSE its less famous and available than windows, therefor the more it becomes available and famous the more vulnerabilities and exploits will float to the surface. When you think about it, if you want to target a huge number of victims you wouldn’t strike MacOS because its less famous and available than WindowXP. That doesn’t mean that both systems aren’t vulnerable or Mac OS is better than WindowsXP FUNDAMENTALLY.

2- Mac OS isn’t as simple as it seems as Instructor David J. Malan pointed. He used Mac and ditched’em in 1997 re-used’em again sometime in the near past and complained about the complexity and poor layout that Mac has. And personally, I used Mac OS for like few hours to fix some Wireless connection issue and had hard time dealing with it because the OS is new to me and I wanted to access its console (shell, cmd, command whatever you call it) but couldn’t. And because of its “Airport” access-point I had hard time configuring it out because I had to click on some shortcut placed in the system instead of actually connecting to the access point and configuring it. I’m not telling its a bad method, maybe its easier for some people but its not for me.

3- Mac OS has the ability to run WindowsXP because of the Virtual Machine that runs WindowsXP. Using Virtual Machines reduces the performance because you’re not depending on the hardware itself. Though you can use it if you’re like “I’m getting Mac OS since it runs WindowsXP” just go for tha. Personally, I agree with the instructor’s opinion about not being a permanent solution. If you want both of’em just buy both of’em separately.

Then I browsed Engadget as I daily do, and found out that interesting report which goes like:

“Microsoft: Vista has fewer first-year vulnerabilities than any modern OS” with a graph showing the vulnerabilities count for few OSes.

Quite interesting. Actually I got shocked. So I gave it a shot and actually read the article and almost everything (I’m lazy I know). And it made sense.

Piece of view of my own:

I don’t think its too bad to have an OS with vulnerabilities as long as few of’em remains unfixed (which means most of’em are fixed, if not all). Which shows that Ubuntu TLS (6.06) got good score since it covered MOST of its vulnerabilities.

I know the Ubuntu thingy doesn’t apply here. So comparing WindowsXP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X 10.4, you can see that Windows Vista got less vulnerabilities and even less amount of non-fixed vulnerabilities than all of’em.

Related Links:

Microsoft: Vista has fewer first-year vulnerabilities than any modern OS

Computer Science E-1: Understanding Computers and the Internet (See,Hear or Read the Transcript of Lecture 2)

I’d like to get as much complains and corrections as possible since my knowledge of Mac OS is nothing.