Understanding Guitar

One Beginners’ Efforts

I’ve been discussing with my wife whether or not to purchase a Mac Mini. The reason I’d like the computer is for Garage Band. Garage Band is an included application. It functions like a multi-track editor and song composition tool. It is neat, easy to use and just the ticket to help me evolve my Wife’s Song.

Additionally I recently got my hands on to an iPhone (I love the little thing) and Apple released the Software Development Kit (SDK)… I had some ideas on Guitar related applications that I could write for the iPhone. As some might know, professionally I’m a software developer, and I found out the hard way that you need an “Intel Based” Mac to utilize the SDK. I currently have all windows base machines for development or otherwise.

I became a windows developer because that is what I had access to. And let be honest, a majority of businesses use Windows over Mac for whatever reason. I’ve always developed for Windows and it is what I ended up specializing it.

Why do I share this at this time? Well, I recently learned that a Mac was the first computer to be hacked in a Hacker’s contest!

What is a hacker’s contest? A hacker’s contest, a term I just coined (maybe), is a contest that security companies (often) hold to “test” and learn about particular operating systems - mainly security vulnerabilities. Basically they pay prizes to people who can break in to a given system - in this case the prize was $10,000.00 (US).

This contest that I’m referring to used a Windows Vista, Linux (not sure which flavor) and a Mac OS X based computers. They, as always, invited participates to “hack away.” Of course when money is involved there are specific rules on routes that a given hacker can take.

For all the details see: http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/03/27/Gone-in-2-minutes-Mac-gets-hacked-first-in-contest_1.html

Long story short, after relaxing the rules a bit on the 2nd day of the competition, the Mac was hacked within two minutes of that day’s contest start!

I just wanted to share this since I’ve been looking at getting a Mac for music production and now software development. I thought it was interesting.

Would this stop me from buying a Mac? No.

As a developer I know the complexity of software and I know companies like Apple and Microsoft are always struggling with themselves to add features without opening security holes. And when they do open a hole they plug it as fast as they reasonability can.

Besides, I wouldn’t be a target to a high-level computer hacker.