From the Dark Side--Wintel News of Interest

We haven't posted our column that usually takes jabs at the Wintel world for some time. Here are items of interest to Mac users.

Unpatched Wintels Get Compromised in Under 20 Minutes--Place a vulnerable PC on a network with internet access and several studies have shown that it gets attacked and compromisd in 20 minutes or less. This is less time than it takes to download and install the necessary patches. It is down from about 40 minutes of just a year ago. So far, Mac life is free of this frustrating problem. [CNet]

AMD is Making 90-nm CPUs--Both IBM, which makes the G5, and Intel are having manufacturing problems with their 90-nm processes which produces a smaller, lower-power consuming and cooler chip than the 130-nm process allowing for use in laptops and for faster clock cycles (or GHz). For Apple, this has meant not only a delay in getting to the 3-GHz clock speed originally projected for this summer but in having even a sufficient supply of newer 2.5 GHz CPUs to meet demand for the high-end Power Mac G5. AMD is making 90-nm CPUs for budget PC laptops. [CNet]

M$ Delays Windows XP Service Pack 2 Update Automatic Distribution--Again--The delay is aimed at the XP profesional edition. This time Microsoft is delaying delivery of the update focussed heavily on security enhancements by nine days to give corporate IT managers a chance to disable the auto-update feature of their Wintels. Why? You'd think they would want to install the security stuff soonest but they need time to test the update to see if it conflicts in any way with corporate applications. What are the chances of this happening? Pretty good, we think. [CNet]