Which brings up a serious love/hate relationship with laptop computers, in that it’s rather difficult to build your own from scratch, especially if you lack a rather well stocked workroom, a static-free environment and a crapload of patience.

I love the portability and flexibility of laptops (especially since they’ve long since moved on from the 20 pounds per machine days), but given the choice between them and desktops, I’ll almost always choose the desktop.

External SCSI disk arrays. Mmmm, toasty!

I mean it’s kinda fun to be in a leet minority, but even that prestige is strained by the extremely low user count.

Actually, you have totally missed the point.

Thank you for responding. However, I have to say that it is you, sir, that have missed the point.

It doesn’t matter how large SafeFunds’ attack surface is — which is what you’re referring to when you make the Windows/Linux and OSX/Vista comparisons. What matters is trust.

Imagine SafeFunds said “we’re using 128-bit SSL and TLS to secure our links, and all confidential data is secured using AES-256 with Diffie-Hellman for key exchange”. Those algorithms and protocols have been widely reviewed, and have a proven track record of resisting attacks. If SafeFunds is lying about actually using these things, they can be sued if people lose money. Therefore, I don’t have to trust SafeFunds very much to trust my money to them — I have a high degree of confidence that they’re using secure technology.

However, since they don’t say what they’re using — and in fact strongly suggest that they’ve built something themselves — I have to trust them a lot more. Not only do I have to trust their intentions, I have to trust that their programmers and engineers knew what they were doing, and I have to trust that their “non-standard protocol” works as advertised. And, I have to do this with no data except “well, it hasn’t been hacked yet.”

Don’t take my word for it, I’m not the only security professional out there. Instead, go research what people like Bruce Schneier — people with dozens of years of security experience — have to say about “secret” and “proprietary” security solutions. In nearly all cases, these “proprietary” approaches turn out to be snake oil.

I by no means like to over generalize large groups of people. There are too many unique people in all age groups. And regardless of age, we can have technophobes and technophiles. I consider myself a visionary yet I can cite numerous occasions where I’ve missed the boat. I recall belittling a friend because this thing called “Mosaic” could graphically find and download a file in 3 minutes. Shoot! I could do that with Gopher in 30 seconds. Why in the world would anyone want to use Mosaic? Boy did I ever have my blinders on that day!

I love Twitter; although when it came out, I questioned why anyone would ever use it.

Go IM!!

No, I won’t do homework for you. Figure it out on your own…

thanks
Chonny