This is my first rant written on a Mac. Ever.
Maybe I should have done it a long time ago, but I never said I was smart; just obstinate.
Here's the deal. "I'm Mad! And I'm not going to take it anymore." Of course I am talking about the WinTel world. Before anyone in Redmond or Inteland freak out… well maybe you should. I have had it.
Brief history. I grew up an analog geek. Tubes -- valves. Built an analog computer in 1961. Programming in 1966 and on. First home machine in 1974: SWTC with binary switch encoding on the front panel. [Boooooring…] PET in 1977. Trash, too. Compaq, 1981 was it? DOS 1.0 and Lotus 1,2,3 1.0 and I still have the disks. CPM and pip.
Things used to work.
And this is exactly why I am coming to subscribe to the view that indeed, the WinTel hegemony is a threat to the national economic security of any organization or nation-state that relies up it.
In the coming weeks I am going to keep a diary of an experiment that I began in my company at 6PM GMT-5, April 29, 2005.
An experiment predicated upon a hypothesis that the WinTel platform represents the greatest violation of the basic tenets of information security and has become, indeed, a national economic security risk. I do not say this lightly, and I have never been a Microsoft Basher, either. I do not and will not dis any one company without a fair bit of explanation, justification and supportive evidence or experience.
So bear with me as I attempt to document
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the results of my experiment and I will attempt be fair to myself, my company, our clients and the computing public at large. I am coming to the belief that there is a much easier, more secure way to use computers. Since I have spent several years focusing my security work on Ma, Pa & The Corporate Clueless, I have also come to the conclusion that if I and my kind [reasonably fluent] are having such problems, what about the other 98% of humanity who merely want a computer for e-mail and multimedia [porn].
MacIntosh vs. Windows: Choosing to take a bite of the Apple
Disgusted by security issues and poor performance, Winn Schwartau makes the switch from Windows to the Mac and details the bumps in the road along the way in this exclusive intro to his "Mad as Hell" series.
About the author
Winn Schwartau is one of the country's leading experts on information security, infrastructure protection and electronic privacy. Schwartau is president and founder of Interpact Inc., The Security Awareness Company, which develops information security awareness programs for private, public and government organizations.
This was first published in May 2005