Great. As if increased back trouble, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and weight gain from a sedentary job wasn’t enough for us programmers and network admins (and many other computer-heavy desk jobs), now there is a new illness that has been found frequently among computer users: An increased risk for Glaucoma.

Read about it at The Register: Computers make you blind.

This disease can lead to blindness, so it is serious stuff. So make sure you get tested for Glaucoma when you get your eyes tested, and take a test regularly! I recommend doing it annually.

When you are the developer of an OS, you have to be conscious of the strengths and weaknesses of your system. Granted, if you have a good developer base, any weaknesses in the way of absence of certain widgets will be overcome by the community; but when do you decide to incorporate such widgets into your system, killing the work of the developer and thus feasibily fostering ill will?

This discussion was catalyzed by the article eWeek: Mac ‘Widget’ App Set to Make Windows Debut. The author of Konfabulator, a much acclaimed Mac app that allows on-screen “widgets” to be developed, has recently developed the app for Windows, understandably out of frustration due to Apple’s planned inclusion of Konfabulator’s features in Tiger via what Apple is calling Dashboard.

And as the article pointed out, this isn’t the first time Apple has done this. An application named “Watson” was recently shoved aside by enhancements included in Sherlock 3, and the updated application switcher in Panther ripped off the features of “LiteSwitch X”.

Frankly, you can go further back into history and see this phenomenon occur several more times. It might almost seem ridiculous to mention them, because the included features that obsoleted certain third-party apps are so common in modern operating systems. For instance, back before Mac OS had these functionalities built in, there were apps or system enhancements for (a) putting a clock in the menubar, (b) having hierarchical menus in the menubar, (c) screensavers, (d) email clients, (e) 2-button mouse support, and other enhancements.

Is Apple wrong for incorporating enhancements into its system that have already been developed by third-party developers? To consider the answer to this question, think about what people said about the Mac OS before Apple adopted some of these enhancements. For instance, before Apple provided built-in support for 2-button mice or screensavers, many Mac critics would argue the deficiency of the Mac because of the absence of these features. The fact that these features were available externally as third-party add-ons was irrelevant to the critics. To their credit, that was understandable; a particular platform could appear underdeveloped if features that are common in competing platforms must be searched out and installed, rather than being present and available out of the box. Far be it from us to impute Apple’s ill will toward developers when it takes some of the most simple and innovative enhancements and incorporates them into the Mac OS. Indeed, this really is a necessary part of Apple’s survival as it maintains the “modernness” of its OS.

Mac OS X and BSD Unix topped a recent security survey with the honorable acclaim of being the “world’s safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environments.”

An article announced the report here: MacWorld: Mac OS X, BSD Unix top security survey. The actual report by mi2g is here: mi2g: The world’s safest computing environment.

The report indicated that security breaches on Mac OS X systems (and other BSD flavors) consisted of less than 5% of total breaches among all computer systems. This is serious business when mi2g estimates that the total economic damages from such breaches just in 2004 ranges between $103 to $126 billion dollars.

That’s great news, but an ugly cloud of reasonable doubt continues to loom over Apple’s shining moment: Is Apple’s success simply a result of what has come to be known as “security through obscurity”? In other words, since the market share of Mac OS X systems is so small, it simply isn’t a target for most hackers and malware authors.

The most painful part of such conjectures, of course, is that there is certainly some undeniable truth behind them. Mac OS X systems do benefit from obscurity. This does not mean that if Mac OS X systems and, say, Windows systems had their roles reversed, that Apple’s systems would necessarily experiece security breaches as bad as Microsoft’s recent debacle. Unfortunately, however, this cannot be proven, and the reasonable doubt remains.

On a positive note, emphasis has been removed from Apple’s reasonable doubt of obscurity as attention has focused on Microsoft’s horrid failure to establish security that should be considered acceptable on a professional level. This is a positive shift, since more and more individuals in the industry are seriously considering a platform shift–not so much because any other platform is more secure, but because any platform must be better than what has been going on in the Windows platform.

After all, if they’ve cracked from the stress of the environment, don’t you replace your Windows with stronger materials? ;-D