Surveying, Mapping and GIS

Slashdot is carrying some discussion about "smug Mac users"- essentially amounting to ignorance about security, pointing to the high-profile viruses and attacks on Microsoft-based operating systems, as opposed to Mac (and Linux). I think the article didn't completely get to the heart of the matter, as I tend to think that it's a combination of things- the "Get big Corporate Microsoft" mentality of hackers, "script kiddies" and virus coders, along with market share issues and developer support- there's frankly a lot more market share and developer tools available for the Microsoft platform. While the article mainly focused on Mac, with OS X based on *nix-type platforms, it points to the difference between Wintel and other platforms, where with OS X, the virus compile has to be specifically targeted to the OS X and PowerPC platform, (or one of a great many Linux incarnations)... Add to this the aforementioned Commercial versus Open Source issues. The Wintel platform on the other hand tends to be a lot more ubiquitous and predictable, essentially making the hackers' and virus developers' jobs simpler from an economy of scale standpoint.