Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 25th Oct 2006 19:29 UTC
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says that Apple did not need NeXT, the company that provided the foundation for Mac OS X; he argues that System 7 wasn't nearly as bad as it was made out to be. Wozniak also says that Mac OS 9 was more secure than OS X is now: Mac OS X is built in Unix and is therefore more prone to attacks because people are familiar with the holes in Unix, explained Woznaik. "Some of the holes in Unix are well known. So keeping Firewalls on is more important. And we keep announcing, even our own security fixes, not as many as Microsoft but still we never really had those in the OS 9 days."
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Wirth only says that it memory protection "should" have been superceded by safe languages and correctly implemented compilers.
While creating a safe language is certainly possible (if you're prepared to pay the cost in flexibility and/or performance), ensuring a correct implementation that is safe not only from accidental bugs but also from malicious exploits is a huge problem.
Meanwhile, hardware memory protection may not be as fain-grained as compiler-based schemes, but it costs very little in performance and one can be fairly certain that it's correct.