a convenient truth

John Gruber, over at Daring Fireball, wonders why there’s no malware for the Mac.  I think they’re mostly there with the reasoning, but they’ve missed a bit.

The reason malware can function so successfully on Windows is because they’re so damn much of it.  Just like diseases that infect humans, there’s a vast range and our antibody system has to be appropriately complex to deal with it.  Virus checkers in windows are pretty complex beasties, and they still only spot 40% of malware.  In effect there is a strong network effect on that platform, encouraging others to join the happy malware ecosystem.

Writing malware for a Mac, right now, would be a no-win situation.  You’d get slapped down so hard you’d probably end up not only with your virus failing to work, but there’d be a worldwide hunt by the mac community to find you.

Being the first virus writer for the Mac has absolutely zero benefits.

Last.FM have announced that they will be providing a huge amount of their catalogue available for free, streamed from their site, with artists paid from advertising and possibly some sort of subscription model.

This is part of a worldwide trend anticipated by many of us for a very long time. Several mobile phone networks are in the process of releasing “music plus” packages, where you get pretty much any music you like, for free, at any time. Again, artists are paid from the phone subscription package.

Obviously streamed music can be copied. Over at Rogue Amoeba, who produce Audio Hijack Pro, they’re an interesting post on this, wondering if this is going to be a problem for the free-streamed model Last.FM have developed.

I don’t think it matters. You won’t bother keeping a copy for yourself for much longer in any case. Why have copies of all those CDs, or MP3s, when it’s all available from the Internet, all the time, at zero cost and effort? The only reason to keep a copy yourself was an artifact of the primitive method of packaging and distribution - not because there being millions of individual copies of a piece of music is inherently useful.

So, in ten year’s time, I reckon the kids won’t have a single copy of mainstream music themselves. Their record collection will consist of a set of bookmarks only - and the whole “music business” as it currently stands will just be a brief “blip” in the history of music, from it’s origins in live-only performance to it’s future as a ubiquitous cultural service in the cloud.

I had to get this off my chest.

Over at alistapart there is a post about a new proposal for getting around the complete failure of the IE dev team to produce anything other than dogfood. In summary it pushes the burden of future IE compatibility onto us web developers, rather than onto the IE dev team, who are the people who can actually fix it.

I work at a software development shop. We build a varied lot of software, but pretty much all of it has a web interface somewhere.

When those web interfaces go beyond helloworld we end up paying the IE Tax, just like all the other web developers out there. We develop for proper browsers, then we have to make a succession of tactical changes to try and make IE work with what we’ve developed. I think it adds something like 5-10% to the cost of everything we do.

Multiply that across all the developers in the world and it’s quite a lot of money - more than enough to pay for a really big scaffold from which to suspend the IE developers by their necks until dead. Amen.

But enough about my fantasies. Supporting the failings in IE is a painful issue for everyone in this business, and there are two real answers.

1. Everyone stops using IE. There’s no real need for anyone to use it after all. This is the dream solution.
2. IE8 actually conforms to standards. You’d think this would be trivial these days - all the code to do this is Open Source, they could just incorporate the Gecko or Webkit engines and be done with it. Cheap and easy. If they want to be all proprietorial about it they could even hire a few developers from somewhere and build their own that actually works.

But Nay! Nay, nay and thrice: nay! For the problem it seems is that lots of web developers are dumb as rocks, and built broken websites that work in IE6 and 7 - and they will be incapable of fixing their broken websites!

This really is a prize excuse for Microsoft not fixing their own mess, and it comes from the Web Standards Project themselves:

Now sure, you could just shrug it off and say that since IE6’s inaccuracies were well-documented, these developers should have known better, but you would be ignoring the fact that many developers never explicitly opted into “standards mode,” or even knew that such a mode existed.

Diddums. Poor ickle developers. I can tell there is a tear of pity rolling down your cheek at this moment.

This is such a feeble excuse I am left panting in amazement. Because a load of historical web developers may have been dumb - and I’m happy to accept this is possible, although I’ve seen no analysis - the entire future of web development has to conform to this lame ass suggestion? EPIC FAIL.

In reality, this is just a feeble excuse to stop Microsoft from having to admit to all their users what the rest of us know. They suck. If they release IE8 and it actually works it’ll break a load of websites. Then they’ll have to own up finally to how bad IE6 and 7 really are. They are temperamentally incapable of any such thing - any discussion of IE6 differences has to be couched in doublespeak. Scientology levels of brainwashing are required to keep the typical Microsoft employee in line. Admission of mistakes is NOT an option!

If this was just typical Microsoft lameness it would hardly rate a blog post, but they have managed to get the Web Standards Project to float this particular balloon for them. Which says a lot for their PR nous at least, but not much for the author of the piece — who even now is probably trying to get onto an FBI witness protection programme to escape the web developer lynch mob currently collecting in his comment stream.

It’s true.