Actually Jason, I think a lot of the hacking these days falls into two categories: Those who are highly organized and out to make money, those who like to play with toys easily available on the internet to cause mayham.

Either way, windoz makes a much more appealing target because there are so many poorly protected machines out there. Its a numbers game.

I did a bunch of reading on av software 6 months back and its hard to get a good read on what works and what doesn’t. Many of the tests have bias built into them.

Strangely, Norton is getting good marks, not just for detection rates, but also for the very low numbers of false positives.

Computer savvy Mac users? I could see that being a reason not to write a Linux virus... but Mac users? Nothing against the Mac-types here, but... Mac users are so far removed from anything tech-related to do with their OS or hardware that I find that an odd, odd hypothesis.

I would say much more likely that with a bigger install base of Windows machines, that makes them a more likely target. Like if you had to create hardware to allow you to steal cars, would you build it to steal the more plentiful gas engine or the less plentiful diesel?

Bren R.

I think that might be a fair evaluation about 5, 10 years ago. But now we have a *NIX OS, and a horde of propeller heads to go with it. Not to mention some of us Mac geeks that have evolved to be *NIX geeks.

Funny, years ago when I worked for a Nix-head company the brightest developer (in a very bright bunch) loved to write code on his mac because it had a vastly superior development environment.

Its funny how Unix variants are cropping up in the oddest places; on Macs, on cellphones...

What, they still using OS 9 up in Canada?

I've been a Unix sysadmin for 20 years. I've been using an OS X desktop for the last 5 for several reasons:

o Sun stopped being even remotely competitive bang/buck on desktop systems
o I tired of the effort required to maintain desktop-y tools for Solaris, as the stuff Sun ships tends to be old, bloated, and poorly-chosen
o ... so I want my desktop these days to Just Work. OS X gives me that, but on a Unix platform with a real shell that lets me do what I need to do.