5. May 2008 by Winn Schwartau.

IBM is giving Macs a shot in the enterprise.
Hackers at DefCon: 50% Mac-OS X, 40% Linux. The rest from Redmond.
As a security guy, I threw a huge hissy-fit in April of 2005. I was sick and tired of the hassles with Windows on my machines, my wife’s machines – the whole house of WinTel boxes – some 20 of them.
I marched down to an Apple store, spent gobs of money on a wall full of machines and came home, assuming I would have a couple of all nighters ahead of me. But I was sorely wrong!
It was pure plug’n’play. I dumped the crappy Apple browser Safari for Firefox. Loaded MS Office for Mac and ftp client and I was done.
I neglected to add anti-virus software, a personal firewall, spyware detectors, or any of the litany of boot-reboot installations I had been accustomed to for so many years.
In short: since April 29, 2005, I have run zero security on my Macs – all 14 of them. Is that smart? It was an experiment and I published the results of it in my Mad as Hell Mac series, along with TCO, a Total Cost of Ownership study. (LINKS, etc.)
Perhaps the greatest benefit to me was totally avoiding Vista. But that’s another story.
So, yes, I am a firm convert to Mac for a couple of reasons:
-    My life is easier. A migration from one Mac to a new Mac, with all the bits and pieces is a one button affair. No more “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights.”
-    Users need email, a browser, Word and some methods to manage pictures, music and videos. Enterprise users are vastly integrated to web-enabled applications, obviating need for Windows and its concomitant security issues.
-    I like simple. Simple works. Simpler is securer.
-    Users do not need to become security experts. Security problems are simply a non-issue for a reasonably aware and non-technical user. The ‘Don’t’ list is short.

Result: There is no earthly reason for the vast majority of computer users to ever have to use, touch or breathe the same air as a WinTel box.
But Apple is a pain in the gluteus maximus. Arrogant. The Closed System Approach is not my favorite, but when you read the Mad as Hell series, you can appreciate awesome engineering for what it is. But so arrogant at the same time.
The Apple EULA (End User License Agreement) is pretty arrogant, too. “Thou shall not run OS X on any equipment not made by Apple.” So, arguably the most friendly, stable, and interoperable OS in the world is Apple hardware locked. There’s that arrogance again… sort of like the U.S. being the only country in the world that does not use the metric system.
To battle Darth Mac, the community at large (hacker, geek, researcher….) said to hell with the EULA, and to hell with Apple… “we are going to make OS X available to the world” and escape the Apple-hardware hegemony.
The OSX86 Project (http://www.osx86project.org/) took the lead to make OS X Intel-Generic-PC compatible. After all commodity PCs are a lot less money and OS X is not as much of a resource hog as (especially) Vista.
Running OS X on a WalMart PC is not a no-brainer. I played with it for a while, bricked several machines in the process (that’s why I call it an experiment) and gave up 40 hours later. Reports of OSX86 success are sketchy and currently not for the faint of heart and definitely not for Ma & Pa.
That’s why I have begun the Mac Clone Experiment.

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5. May 2008 by Winn Schwartau.

My Mac Clone showed up on the front porch. My wife hollered down to my studio, “you next computer just arrived…” as though I need more she is undoubtedly thinking.

Will document the process as a USER… not as a semi-smart guy.

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