by Playfuls Staff |
6th February 2007
Apple has come up with a new advertising campaign for its Mac products, in which Windows Vista’s security feature- the UAC- is considered a bad implementation.[more]
The UAC (User Account Control) is a technology and security infrastructure introduced with Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. It aims to improve the experience of using Windows as a standard user.
With UAC implemented in Windows Vista, actions that can affect the security and stability of the operating system require the input of an administrator name and password before they are executed. If the user is an administrator, no password is needed; instead, a dialog is shown with the choices to allow or deny the action.
In the “Get a Mac” ad posted on Apple Inc.’s site, the communication between the PC and the Mac is hindered by a “security officer” that keeps repeating what the “PC” says, while at the same time asking for the PC’s permission to execute simple tasks.
Actually, what the commercial is trying to say is that the UAC is more of a barrier than a helper to the regular user. But in fact, Linux OS has the same type of feature: when somebody using Linux tries to upgrade to the latest version (for example, the newest patches for a particular software), the OS requires the password to apply the new changes.
In a recent interview with Newsweek, Bill Gates has commented on the Get a Mac ad campaign, specifically about the security and upgrade criticisms.
“Are you bugged by the Apple commercial where John Hodgman is the PC, and he has to undergo surgery to get Vista?I've never seen it. I don't think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are.”In the same interview he also attacked the security of the Mac OSX, saying that it is not as indestructible as Mac-fans claim.
"Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine."Gates also added that Vista is better at
"letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done.""And I don't know why [Apple is] acting like it's superior. I don't even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you're really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There's not even the slightest shred of truth to [the ideas about Vista upgrades presented in the Apple commercial he said he had not seen]."The Mac vs. PC ad also underlines that the Mac OSX does not suffer from 114,000 viruses that target the Windows OS every year; it also says
“it isn’t plagued by never-ending security dialog boxes like those in Vista.”In response, Bill Gates said that
"You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, 'Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along,' that's fine. If you're interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it's fascinating, maybe we shouldn't have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done."
