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Originally Posted by Ravenflight
As for viruses and worms, i can't help but feel microsoft has some responsibility for not designing it more securely.
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The chief architect of Windows NT was a guy called Dave Cutler, who was the chief designer of DEC's VMS operating system, an operating system famed for being secure and reliable; NT's security architecture is based on that of VMS.
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Why are they just now including a firewall? OSX has had that for years.
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I'm not sure what you mean by "just now"; a firewall has been standard with Windows since XP SP2 which has been around for what? 3 or 4 years? I suppose that firewalls didn't really become necessary as "standard" system software until the majority of people were on-line. 5 years ago, only a relatively small percentage of people were on-line.
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As for viruses, I don't even have antivirus software- and I have yet to meet a mac owner who does. Why are there so few worms and viruses for the mac? Is it because nobody knows how or because UNIX is inherently more secure?
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Heavens - Unix certainly isn't "inherently" more secure than NT. The only reason that it gets "targetted" by the criminal scum who write viruses is
because of its market dominance. There have been plenty of Unix viruses and worms over the years - remember the original "internet worm" in the late 70s which pretty much brought down the internet? (Perhaps before your time?) That exploited a buffer overrun vulnerability in the Unix "sendmail" application.
XP is extremely secure if you set it up correctly and use reliable device drivers. As I said, I'm a software developer, and none of my XP machines have ever "Blue Screened", whereas I have managed to crash my Mac
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I'm no "fan boy" for either Windows or Mac; I just use whatever the best tool is for the job at hand; sometimes that's Windows, sometimes the Mac. It's useful to have both.