MAC OS-X: The Greatest Operating System Ever?

I dont know...whether it is the superb interface, or the next-gen technology behind it; The constant innovation, or the rapid imitation of its features among other competitors, the user experience, or the very discovery of what defines user experience...

Here another justification to just that..enjoy.

A recent paper on "Secretly Monopolizing the CPU Without Superuser Privileges." demonstrated how normal non-administrative programs could steal more clock cycles from the CPU than the scheduler normally allocates.

The researchers presented a proof-of-concept program that allows a specified task to "cheat" and consume more CPU cycles than the operating system would normally permit. The program was designed for Unix-based systems, though it could theoretically be altered to affect any multitasking operating system(Probably also includes our old buggar M$ Windoze). The program in the paper, called "cheat," can run as a regular non-administrative user.

How is it done? Simple. A task could hide itself by arranging for its process to run immediately after the CPU interrupt "tick," and stop running right before the next tick.
By avoiding the ticks, the standard operating system would never notice the task is running. Without any modification to an operating system, all methods of monitoring tasks would not display the cheating task.

Seven different Operating Systems were tested and guess what? only Mac OS X was immune to the cheat attack!

The explanation was that it uses a slightly different scheduling algorithm for its timers. Isnt it analogous to saying that it uses a superior scheduling algorithms? (Atleast in respect of this particular anomaly under consideration :)).

The researchers say they doubt cheat-like attacks will become common because while they could be used to avoid detection, using most of a computers CPU would noticeably slow the computer and raise suspicion. However, programs could be written to cheat a little bit, and would be extremely difficult to detect and remove. The researchers say it is possible to protect the operating system against cheat attacks, but performance suffers as a result.

So say it. Mac rules. End of story.