The difference for me is that MacOS/Linux look to be far less susceptable to the virus/drive-by issues that Windows has been plagued with over the years. There's a big difference between running a random app from the internet to get infected, and happening to stumble across a dodgy site exploiting a buffer overrun in IE. It's certainly getting a lot better with Win7, but things like MS's desire to support the huge range of legacy apps on Windows mean that there's likely to be many more security holes to come in the Windows space.

Not sure who's been doing the lying about MacOS being 100% secure (it clearly isn't), but it it far, far safer for the average user than Windows is. The "running random application you've downloaded and typing in your password" threat is pretty much the same for any OS out there (except for the IOS-style walled gardens), and is only smaller on MacOS and Linux due to there being less users to target, and potentially the level of intelligence of the average user. The virus/drive-by malware threat, OTOH, is much lower on MacOS and Linx than on Windows - both due to the smaller target, but also due to there being far less exploitable holes - or at least far less that have ever been discovered.

The only platforms where this kind of attack would be extremely difficult are the locked-down ecosystems, like (unjailbroken) iOS or most games consoles. Whilst I'm sure that iOS isn't 100% guaranteed malware free (there's always going to be something exploitable somewhere), it's going to be a whole lot more difficult to do that than simply writing a noddy "Run Me" app that wipes all your data.

Does Linux do anything (or at least anything more than MacOS) to protect against this type of attack?

There are laws (or at least mandatory standards laid down by Visa and Mastercard) for the protection of credit card data - PCI DSS. If there's any way that the hackers could have got access to card data in any useful way, they Sony are likely to be failing miserably in their obligations under this.

There's not a great deal about China that I would class as left wing. Socially, there's quite clearly a ruling elite, and they abandoned any pretence of economic equality quite some time ago.

Yes it's better here, but that doesn't mean we should be gloating, given the £3K fine that the UK hasjust imposed for a silly tweet about wanting to blow up an airport.

Seems to be mostly "Sys Admin Geek IQ Test".

As far as the consumer is concerned, it's not even there.

A bit like the entire Windows Phone platform...

I hope you're not British, otherwise you may be getting a knock on the door pretty soon...

Samsung for a start.

Doing any action with the primary purpose of manipulating share prices is illegal, and that's what it sounds like was going on here. They sold stocks with the intent of making that system behave stupidly.

Whether it should be illegal is another matter...

And I've done similar with my iPhone. The fact that some large-screen phones sometimes survive hefty drops doesn't really show that they aren't more likely to break in those circumstances.

Not many people were buying Apple II games, and Amiga is a little after when I first started buying games (82/83). If you were into games in the UK, the chances are that you had a Speccy.

Check out the Crash software catalogue http://www.crashonline.org.uk/cat01/index.htm from 1983. Vast majority of prices in the £5-£6 range. There's a few up to around £7 and The Hobbit at £14.95, but that included the book.

£6 in 1983 is (according to the BoE inflation calculator) equivalent to £15 in today's money, far cheaper than the £30-£40 that most of top sellers go for today.

Again, I understand why this is the case, but the point remains that it is the case, - most popular commercial games were a lot cheaper when I first started buying them than they are today, at least in the UK.

I'm not talking about "Indie" games. I'm talking about the biggest releases from the biggest companies of the mid-80s gaming scene (at least in the UK). Companies like Ocean, Imagine, Activision, Ultimate etc. I understand that there's more cost involved in producing todays games. But that's not the claim in the article. The claim is that game costs haven't risen,and they quite clearly have.