While it is pretty serious, how many people here are likely to get this? It's not quite like the situation on Windows where you can get malware by opening the wrong windows (just yet), but I'd imagine that most would only download from sites they'd trust.
I'd say the best advice to the whole Mac user community is just to exercise a little caution over the sites they download things from, rather than just blindly visiting every web site believing that they're invulnerable to every bug out there.
In fact, that just applies to any OS period...
I'm just graduating, and on my course they mainly used Visual Basic 6 and Mathematica. I have no beef with Mathematica at all - it's one of the nicest pieces of software I've ever used.
But teaching VB6 was a rather dumb move - it was dying at the time, it's slow as hell when dealing with equation solvers (as I can attest when running the Metropolis method on it), and the most important thing is that it's not portable in the slightest. Also, it's not easily available - I found I had to give everyone VB6 copies for them to be able to do the coursework, as the newest version,.NET was completely incompatible with anything we were doing!
I remember one of my professors saying they were proud they had taught us to code, but most of the stuff I know is from before college when I was messing around with C++!
They are getting a bit better, though - we have a new department head who realizes VB6 sort of sucks and is changing to pure Mathematica...
Slashdot Mirror
While it is pretty serious, how many people here are likely to get this? It's not quite like the situation on Windows where you can get malware by opening the wrong windows (just yet), but I'd imagine that most would only download from sites they'd trust. I'd say the best advice to the whole Mac user community is just to exercise a little caution over the sites they download things from, rather than just blindly visiting every web site believing that they're invulnerable to every bug out there. In fact, that just applies to any OS period...
I'm just graduating, and on my course they mainly used Visual Basic 6 and Mathematica. I have no beef with Mathematica at all - it's one of the nicest pieces of software I've ever used. But teaching VB6 was a rather dumb move - it was dying at the time, it's slow as hell when dealing with equation solvers (as I can attest when running the Metropolis method on it), and the most important thing is that it's not portable in the slightest. Also, it's not easily available - I found I had to give everyone VB6 copies for them to be able to do the coursework, as the newest version, .NET was completely incompatible with anything we were doing!
I remember one of my professors saying they were proud they had taught us to code, but most of the stuff I know is from before college when I was messing around with C++!
They are getting a bit better, though - we have a new department head who realizes VB6 sort of sucks and is changing to pure Mathematica...