On Friday 11 August 2006 07:35, Pikidalto wrote:

You cannot be in "offline" status when you try to browse in Service Discovery.

That's just Windows in general. It also suffers from poor user permission defaults (everybody runs as Administrator by default), and that leads to bad programming habits (like demanding Administrator privileges to play something that has nothing to do with system maintenance like games or MS Office), which reinforces the bad habit of running as Administrator all the time. The reason this is a problem is normal users can't write or delete system files or install/remove software, but administrators can. Using normal users instead of Administrator users dramatically reduces the damage a compromised account or virus infected file from spreading. For example, normal users can't write or delete other users files, either, so if one user gets a virus, it's usually a little more difficult for it to spread between normal users.

Unixes like Linux have had good privilege separation for decades now. Compromising one account is generally not going to get you full access to a system, and viruses don't tend to spread because it's much more difficult to get a method to spread if a virus doesn't have full access to the machine.

Even if you run Windows Update, you aren't necessarily protected, because that only covers the bugs that Microsoft has discovered and acknowledged. This doesn't include updates for security holes that Microsoft has been informed about and refuse to acknowledge, or security holes Microsoft has found but isn't going to do anything about on the assumption nobody else will find them, or the gaping security hole caused by programs asking for ridiculously broad permissions that shouldn't need it. Games and office productivity software should not ever need Administrator privileges to run.

Fire up a terminal in MacOS X and you'll be greeted by an xterm and a csh prompt. Try typing bash to get a friendlier command interpreter. Commands will be similar to what you find in Linux (since both MacOS X and Linux are kinds of unix). In fact, xterm, csh and bash have been available on Linux a lot longer than in MacOS...