There are two reasons to have antivirus on a Mac. One, as you point out, is to catch Windows viruses to prevent a Mac from being a sort of Typhoid Mary. This has happened in our network. A Mac user receives a virus (especially a Word macro virus) from a Windows user by email and then sends it on to another Windows user.
The other reason is to have the infrastructure in place to combat a Mac virus if and when it comes out. It is true that viruses tend to be out for a while before there is a definition available and some of them do significant damage while the security firms are still working on it. Nevertheless, experience with Windows shows that the antivirus software is still useful.
For example, we recently got hit with one of the Windows 2000 pnp worms and we had to manually delete files and edit the registry on infected machines before our antivirus software started taking care of machines we didn't get to (yes, we are understaffed). This particular worm will even edit the hosts file to block antivirus software from updating (sends the vendor URL to 127.0.0.1). Fortunately for us, this measure (taken by the worm) fails with our setup because we have our own mirror of the vendors update server inside our LAN and clients are set to update from that. Some infected machines received definitions and were able to clean themselves days after being infected. In theory, the same thing could happen with Macs.
We do, by the way, strip attachments from email at the server level (actually we just scramble the extension,.exe to.xex, etc. and insert a notice) and that has saved our bacon several times. This is useless against the kind of worms which just spread over the network and don't depend on email, but, your general point (about other measures besides antivirus) still holds because what we really need to do on the anti-worm front, IMHO, is put together a decent policy on firewalls (bureaucracy sucks).
I work at a large University with about 40% Macintosh, just like the university in the article, and we have standard security requirements that have come from experience with Windows exploits and a few incidents with Linux (recently, MySQL exploits) as well as regulations like HIPAA. Macs are not exempt from these rules. All machines, including Macs, are required to have properly managed user accounts, auto updates, antivirus, anti spyware, a firewall of some kind, etc.
It's interesting that, because of the equal application of rules like this, and the media's insistence that things like Renepo pose a security risk, when in fact it doesn't, people think there are real threats to security on a Mac when there isn't. I have had many calls where a user thinks there is a virus on their Mac when it is really just a basic troubleshooting issue or user error. What I am saying is that I have observed the opposite to what the author says. It amounts to a false sense of insecurity.
In other words, security really could be improved if we moved more users to Macintosh but the prevailing opinion is that, once you do that, Macs will be just as vulnerable as Windows. It isn't true for two reasons. First, Mac OS does have features and development practices which make it inherently more secure than Windows. Second, the point is not to move 100% of users to Macintosh. The point is to move the industry to where there is some healthy competition between OS developers and where there is no longer a monoculture of computers which all have the same vulnerabilities.
I agree, such a card is a great upgrade for an older G4 tower. Several of the users I support have G4 towers with the Sawtooth motherboard and I have upgraded them with various brands of USB 2.0 cards. These cards are as cheap or cheaper than a USB hub, they give you the faster speed and are much better at powering external devices. Many of the newest USB flash drives will give a low power warning if you plug them into the built-in USB of a Sawtooth.
I think another aspect of this is that Microsoft has been having a little bit of trouble recently supporting their own formats. Here at my workplace we have sometimes had to post different versions of template files (expense reports, travel reports, etc.) for different versions of Word -- like one for Office 2000 and another for Office XP (one or the other will usually work on a given Mac version of Word, but not always). With all the versions of Office out there, Microsoft has got to be having trouble figuring out all the bugs. XML should make this kind of troubleshooting easier in the future.
They're not so stupid as to miss the fact that the reason most businesses use their products is the perception that they will be readable anywhere and any time in the future, as long as you stick with Microsoft products. The reality can only get so far from that perception before people start to look for alternatives. In some cases they have. Microsoft must realize that they have been loosing some market share to Adobe Acrobat. PDF is an open (but convoluted) file format and you can download a free viewer. They must also realize that it's only a matter of time before something more open and better designed than Acrobat comes along (Im talking in terms of business perception).
No offense to OO but I actually prefer Abiword for this kind of purpose (if I could only convince the PHB). It has the same advantages as OO in being GPL'd and having a clear XML based file format but it also (at least in recent versions) has good slick, high performing versions on all major platforms (including OS X Cocoa) and is even smaller to download than Acrobat Reader. I feel comfortable telling people to download it to read files I send them -- it's small, it's free. OpenOffice is a bit too big to tell dialup users to download, and a bit too slow to run on older hardware.
BTW, I do use and like NeoOffice for spreadsheet stuff.
I don't want to be too negative about this but I have to say that I rue the day when I decided to recommend Netscape Navigator over NCSA Mosaic to end users. Mosaic was open source but I didn't understand the importance of that back then. The Netscape experience has a lot to do with why many of us are so militant in the Free/Open Software movement today.
Here's my (bitter) memory of the events. Netscape released their software and it lowered the bar for what level of quality was considered OK to release to the public. Lots of companies started releasing buggy software after that. It was a fad. You felt like you were on the bleeding edge of technology if the thing crashed every few minutes. For Mac users, that was the time we started having to run Norton Utilities on a regular basis. It seemed like every day for a while.
Then, Microsoft decided to compete (or anitcompete) with Netscape and Netscape decided to try and beat Microsoft at their own game. They tried to keep ahead of standards so that web pages written for Netscape Navigator would not work with Internet Explorer. They made Microsoft look like a standards advocate by comparison. We are still cleaning up the mess this made of the WWW.
I can vouch for this. My mother does k-8 substitute teaching and, therefore, sees the situation in a lot of different schools. I recently asked her about a particular school system (in a wealthy area) and she said that they use Dell exclusively. Since I have some experience here at work having to go around and clean spyware off of Windows boxes and having to keep them up to date with system updates, antivirus and such, I asked how the schools handle that kind of thing.
The schools have computers in two different sorts of areas. They have a few computer labs and they have four or five computers in each classroom. The computers in regular classrooms are a lost cause - they are down most of the time. In the labs, they do manage to keep a majority working but that's still at more effort than schools had to spend in the past.
Apple has never had such a real advantage in the school environment as they do now. The problem is that, even in a wealthy area like I mentioned above, the schools will do without rather than spend money on new equipment. It will take them a very long time to change direction and switch to, or back to, Apple.
As I remember from back at around the time that the OS X public beta was released (spring 2000), Steve Jobs said that they were going to develop Cocoa for Windows but this still hasn't happened. There is GnuStep for Linux, however, which is based on OpenStep but I gather that it is not 100% Cocoa compatible at this time.
The File Vault feature of Mac OS X is an example of what the Anonymous Coward said is missing from Unix/Linux/MS Windows, if I understand his comment correctly. File Vault deals with the possibility of a lost person/key by having a master password, separate from root. It's also a stronger encryption than what is used for authentication as root to the OS.
This is like the behavior where you typo your login password after the eighth character. You get into your account because the OS, like other BSD based OSes, only uses an eight character password, but your keychain won't unlock until you provide it the full, correct password.
I would say that NeoOffice is much closer to ready for non-technical users than OpenOffice.org is. You don't have to install a bunch of separate packages to get it to work. Most importantly, it supports cut and paste with the rest of the Mac environment.
There are some other little things too, from the perspective of a non-technical user. For example, you start, switch to and open files with a single icon in the dock for NeoOffice/J. With OpenOffice.org, you start it with the "Start OpenOffice.org" icon and open files by dragging to that same icon but you have to click on X11 icon when switching programs.
Note that the main purpose of the article is actually not so much to just set up OpenOffice as to get it working with Acrobat Distiller. When I get a chance, I think I will reread the article and see if I can do the same thing to set up NeoOffice/J with Acrobat. I know a few people who may be interested in that in the near future.
As I read this article on my Mac, I also have a Windows notebook next to me which I am preparing for someone. I have a three page checklist of things which the IT department requires me to do before putting a Windows machine on the network. It involves installing patches, installing antivirus and firewall software and changing various settings.
BTW, I can plug a Mac into the network out of the box. They're safe.
The question is not whether life on Earth can survive human generated global warming. It will adapt. There's little question that life can even adapt to post-nuclear war conditions but that doesn't mean that humans would do well. We can survive the conditions of global warming, as hypothesized, but only at a cost to quality of life. That's the real issue at this point.
The VT machine was put together with dual 2 Ghz desktops. The current top end desktop G5's are 2.5 Ghz. Xserves top out at dual-2 Ghz according to The order page on Apple's web site right now but I'm sure they will be upgraded soon. Maybe the Army is anticipating implementing this with dual 2.5 Ghz Xserves rather than the current model.
I just checked and you're quite right. I was mistaken about that. It has a UI which resembles X11 more than Aqua which is why I thought so.
> I'm not sure that OO.o's slowness has anything to do > with Java or X11, it's just slow. It's slow under Linux > and under Windows and was slow when it was StarOffice > and had nothing to do with Java. I suspect over time > the code is going to be reviewed and this particular > issue resolved.
There's probably more than one reason for the slowness. I was just pointing out that The GIMP is an example which shows that X11 apps don't have to be slow on OS X.
The NeoOffice/J version of OO is much more OS X integrated than the main OO.o. It is still dependent on x11 but it allows cutting and pasting with other applications outside of x11 and runs much faster.
The reason for OO.o's slowness is not x11, it's JAVA. Try out The GIMP in x11 on OS X. It's quite snappy, even on my 400 Mhz G3 PowerBook (Pismo). In fact, it seems faster than Photoshop 7 for some operations.
I suppose that it would be better not to depend on x11 because it would allow for a UI more familiar to the average Mac user and because of the extra install but NeoOffice/J is quite usable.
There are a number of things which contribute to usability but I think one of the most important is consistency. Historically, Apple's human interface guidelines have made Mac applications more consistant from one developer to another than what you find on other OSes. This principal not only applies to the GUI, where you want common commands to always be in the same menu, with the same keyboard shortcut, from application to application, but it also applies to the command line where you want arguments to be formulated in the same way from one program to the next.
Achieving such consistency is a matter of top level management. You need as many developers as possible to follow the same guidelines as each other. Ideally, you want someone or some group to review all the many development efforts and see that they follow good practices consistently. Such management would not only look for consistency but also look for common programming mistakes like buffer overflows. Linux developers are implementing some top level management (in a decentralized sort of way) but perhaps they should consider more.
In a nutshell, good programming practices improve usability and security at the same time.
The article says that, when all was said and done, and the terrorists had been tracked despite having bought the SIM cards anonymously, the Swiss responded by passing a law to prevent people from buying SIM cards anonymously. Isn't this sort of stupid for two reasons. First, the terrorists wouldn't have fallen into the trap if they had to provide ID to buy the cards. Second, this only makes it hard for people who have a legitimate reason to want privacy.
I'm not worried about attracting the attention of the NSA and international intelligence agencies because I'm not doing anything illegal, much less terrorist related. I do want to be able to buy anonymous SIM cards, however, to prevent the telecom companies from keeping my call history and selling it to marketing agencies. I don't really trust their privacy policies and it's questionable how legally binding they are anyway if the company is sold to another company and they're bought by someone else...
Fear of government invasion of privacy is certainly a concern and always has been (lots of laws already exist) but the new trend is much more invasion of personal privacy by big business then was ever possible before. This is where we really need to look at new laws and policies.
I have always used command-left arrow for back and command-right arrow for forward. I guess the right-click thing is fine if you are are used to that way of doing things but it's not a traditional Mac way. The keyboard shortcuts work well with one hand on the mouse and one hand on the keyboard. That's probably the style they are going for in the Safari design.
Having said that, it does make sense to add the feature you are looking for since it's one of those little things (like the bit about the delete and backspace keys) which mean a lot for people who live in between Windows and Mac. It wouldn't take away from other user's experience.
I have seen Finale and it is a good product but has always been expensive compared to the alternatives. I used to use Professional Composer and now use Melody Assistant ($15 shareware. see Versiontracker.) Melody Assistant is being regularly updated and improving all the time.
It does an exeellent job at handling a wide variety of different musical styles. It's approach to bagpipe music (that's what I play) is the best I have seen. In other words, It's better than Finale for my purposes.
It's too bad that colleges don't believe that they can have "common carrier" status as they provide internet access for students. It means that students actually have fewer rights than people who pay a regular ISP for service.
I work for a major university and I have thought about threatening to bring in an outside ISP for my department for technical reasons. I believe that the university ITS provides poor service and charges too much for it. Yes, they charge us per machine for network access. Now I have another reason to go outside for internet access - a political reason.
Faster Than Light Newsfeed 07/OCT/2004: Shares of beleaguered Sun Microsystems rose slightly from a 52-week low on rumors of a buyout offer from UNIX-powerhouse Apple Computer.
I think that a lot more people would be willing to pay for porn if they could do so anonymously. There have been attempts to make digital cash but, last
I heard, no one had succeeded. Such a technology would be a great help to anyone who wants to sell small bits of copyrighted material on the net. It isn't just porn either, It's all the trivial purchases which people would rather not have spammers and governments with TIA programs keeping track of.
...I know an old lady who swallowed a dog. She swallowed the dog to catch the cat. She swallowed the cat to catch the bird. She swallowed the bird to catch the spider. She swallowed the spider to catch the fly. I don't know why she swallowed the fly. Perhaps she'll die.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two reasons to have antivirus on a Mac. One, as you point out, is to catch Windows viruses to prevent a Mac from being a sort of Typhoid Mary. This has happened in our network. A Mac user receives a virus (especially a Word macro virus) from a Windows user by email and then sends it on to another Windows user.
.exe to .xex, etc. and insert a notice) and that has saved our bacon several times. This is useless against the kind of worms which just spread over the network and don't depend on email, but, your general point (about other measures besides antivirus) still holds because what we really need to do on the anti-worm front, IMHO, is put together a decent policy on firewalls (bureaucracy sucks).
The other reason is to have the infrastructure in place to combat a Mac virus if and when it comes out. It is true that viruses tend to be out for a while before there is a definition available and some of them do significant damage while the security firms are still working on it. Nevertheless, experience with Windows shows that the antivirus software is still useful.
For example, we recently got hit with one of the Windows 2000 pnp worms and we had to manually delete files and edit the registry on infected machines before our antivirus software started taking care of machines we didn't get to (yes, we are understaffed). This particular worm will even edit the hosts file to block antivirus software from updating (sends the vendor URL to 127.0.0.1). Fortunately for us, this measure (taken by the worm) fails with our setup because we have our own mirror of the vendors update server inside our LAN and clients are set to update from that. Some infected machines received definitions and were able to clean themselves days after being infected. In theory, the same thing could happen with Macs.
We do, by the way, strip attachments from email at the server level (actually we just scramble the extension,
I work at a large University with about 40% Macintosh, just like the university in the article, and we have standard security requirements that have come from experience with Windows exploits and a few incidents with Linux (recently, MySQL exploits) as well as regulations like HIPAA. Macs are not exempt from these rules. All machines, including Macs, are required to have properly managed user accounts, auto updates, antivirus, anti spyware, a firewall of some kind, etc.
It's interesting that, because of the equal application of rules like this, and the media's insistence that things like Renepo pose a security risk, when in fact it doesn't, people think there are real threats to security on a Mac when there isn't. I have had many calls where a user thinks there is a virus on their Mac when it is really just a basic troubleshooting issue or user error. What I am saying is that I have observed the opposite to what the author says. It amounts to a false sense of insecurity.
In other words, security really could be improved if we moved more users to Macintosh but the prevailing opinion is that, once you do that, Macs will be just as vulnerable as Windows. It isn't true for two reasons. First, Mac OS does have features and development practices which make it inherently more secure than Windows. Second, the point is not to move 100% of users to Macintosh. The point is to move the industry to where there is some healthy competition between OS developers and where there is no longer a monoculture of computers which all have the same vulnerabilities.
I agree, such a card is a great upgrade for an older G4 tower. Several of the users I support have G4 towers with the Sawtooth motherboard and I have upgraded them with various brands of USB 2.0 cards. These cards are as cheap or cheaper than a USB hub, they give you the faster speed and are much better at powering external devices. Many of the newest USB flash drives will give a low power warning if you plug them into the built-in USB of a Sawtooth.
That was their motto, wasn't it?
I think another aspect of this is that Microsoft has been having a little bit of trouble recently supporting their own formats. Here at my workplace we have sometimes had to post different versions of template files (expense reports, travel reports, etc.) for different versions of Word -- like one for Office 2000 and another for Office XP (one or the other will usually work on a given Mac version of Word, but not always). With all the versions of Office out there, Microsoft has got to be having trouble figuring out all the bugs. XML should make this kind of troubleshooting easier in the future.
They're not so stupid as to miss the fact that the reason most businesses use their products is the perception that they will be readable anywhere and any time in the future, as long as you stick with Microsoft products. The reality can only get so far from that perception before people start to look for alternatives. In some cases they have. Microsoft must realize that they have been loosing some market share to Adobe Acrobat. PDF is an open (but convoluted) file format and you can download a free viewer. They must also realize that it's only a matter of time before something more open and better designed than Acrobat comes along (Im talking in terms of business perception).
No offense to OO but I actually prefer Abiword for this kind of purpose (if I could only convince the PHB). It has the same advantages as OO in being GPL'd and having a clear XML based file format but it also (at least in recent versions) has good slick, high performing versions on all major platforms (including OS X Cocoa) and is even smaller to download than Acrobat Reader. I feel comfortable telling people to download it to read files I send them -- it's small, it's free. OpenOffice is a bit too big to tell dialup users to download, and a bit too slow to run on older hardware.
BTW, I do use and like NeoOffice for spreadsheet stuff.
I don't want to be too negative about this but I have to say that I rue the day when I decided to recommend Netscape Navigator over NCSA Mosaic to end users. Mosaic was open source but I didn't understand the importance of that back then. The Netscape experience has a lot to do with why many of us are so militant in the Free/Open Software movement today.
Here's my (bitter) memory of the events. Netscape released their software and it lowered the bar for what level of quality was considered OK to release to the public. Lots of companies started releasing buggy software after that. It was a fad. You felt like you were on the bleeding edge of technology if the thing crashed every few minutes. For Mac users, that was the time we started having to run Norton Utilities on a regular basis. It seemed like every day for a while.
Then, Microsoft decided to compete (or anitcompete) with Netscape and Netscape decided to try and beat Microsoft at their own game. They tried to keep ahead of standards so that web pages written for Netscape Navigator would not work with Internet Explorer. They made Microsoft look like a standards advocate by comparison. We are still cleaning up the mess this made of the WWW.
I can vouch for this. My mother does k-8 substitute teaching and, therefore, sees the situation in a lot of different schools. I recently asked her about a particular school system (in a wealthy area) and she said that they use Dell exclusively. Since I have some experience here at work having to go around and clean spyware off of Windows boxes and having to keep them up to date with system updates, antivirus and such, I asked how the schools handle that kind of thing.
The schools have computers in two different sorts of areas. They have a few computer labs and they have four or five computers in each classroom. The computers in regular classrooms are a lost cause - they are down most of the time. In the labs, they do manage to keep a majority working but that's still at more effort than schools had to spend in the past.
Apple has never had such a real advantage in the school environment as they do now. The problem is that, even in a wealthy area like I mentioned above, the schools will do without rather than spend money on new equipment. It will take them a very long time to change direction and switch to, or back to, Apple.
As I remember from back at around the time that the OS X public beta was released (spring 2000), Steve Jobs said that they were going to develop Cocoa for Windows but this still hasn't happened. There is GnuStep for Linux, however, which is based on OpenStep but I gather that it is not 100% Cocoa compatible at this time.
The File Vault feature of Mac OS X is an example of what the Anonymous Coward said is missing from Unix/Linux/MS Windows, if I understand his comment correctly. File Vault deals with the possibility of a lost person/key by having a master password, separate from root. It's also a stronger encryption than what is used for authentication as root to the OS.
This is like the behavior where you typo your login password after the eighth character. You get into your account because the OS, like other BSD based OSes, only uses an eight character password, but your keychain won't unlock until you provide it the full, correct password.
I would say that NeoOffice is much closer to ready for non-technical users than OpenOffice.org is. You don't have to install a bunch of separate packages to get it to work. Most importantly, it supports cut and paste with the rest of the Mac environment.
There are some other little things too, from the perspective of a non-technical user. For example, you start, switch to and open files with a single icon in the dock for NeoOffice/J. With OpenOffice.org, you start it with the "Start OpenOffice.org" icon and open files by dragging to that same icon but you have to click on X11 icon when switching programs.
Note that the main purpose of the article is actually not so much to just set up OpenOffice as to get it working with Acrobat Distiller. When I get a chance, I think I will reread the article and see if I can do the same thing to set up NeoOffice/J with Acrobat. I know a few people who may be interested in that in the near future.
As I read this article on my Mac, I also have a Windows notebook next to me which I am preparing for someone. I have a three page checklist of things which the IT department requires me to do before putting a Windows machine on the network. It involves installing patches, installing antivirus and firewall software and changing various settings.
BTW, I can plug a Mac into the network out of the box. They're safe.
The question is not whether life on Earth can survive human generated global warming. It will adapt. There's little question that life can even adapt to post-nuclear war conditions but that doesn't mean that humans would do well. We can survive the conditions of global warming, as hypothesized, but only at a cost to quality of life. That's the real issue at this point.
The VT machine was put together with dual 2 Ghz desktops. The current top end desktop G5's are 2.5 Ghz. Xserves top out at dual-2 Ghz according to The order page on Apple's web site right now but I'm sure they will be upgraded soon. Maybe the Army is anticipating implementing this with dual 2.5 Ghz Xserves rather than the current model.
> NeoOffice/J doesn't need X11.
I just checked and you're quite right. I was mistaken about that. It has a UI which resembles X11 more than Aqua which is why I thought so.
> I'm not sure that OO.o's slowness has anything to do
> with Java or X11, it's just slow. It's slow under Linux
> and under Windows and was slow when it was StarOffice
> and had nothing to do with Java. I suspect over time
> the code is going to be reviewed and this particular
> issue resolved.
There's probably more than one reason for the slowness. I was just pointing out that The GIMP is an example which shows that X11 apps don't have to be slow on OS X.
The NeoOffice/J version of OO is much more OS X integrated than the main OO.o. It is still dependent on x11 but it allows cutting and pasting with other applications outside of x11 and runs much faster. The reason for OO.o's slowness is not x11, it's JAVA. Try out The GIMP in x11 on OS X. It's quite snappy, even on my 400 Mhz G3 PowerBook (Pismo). In fact, it seems faster than Photoshop 7 for some operations. I suppose that it would be better not to depend on x11 because it would allow for a UI more familiar to the average Mac user and because of the extra install but NeoOffice/J is quite usable.
There are a number of things which contribute to usability but I think one of the most important is consistency. Historically, Apple's human interface guidelines have made Mac applications more consistant from one developer to another than what you find on other OSes. This principal not only applies to the GUI, where you want common commands to always be in the same menu, with the same keyboard shortcut, from application to application, but it also applies to the command line where you want arguments to be formulated in the same way from one program to the next. Achieving such consistency is a matter of top level management. You need as many developers as possible to follow the same guidelines as each other. Ideally, you want someone or some group to review all the many development efforts and see that they follow good practices consistently. Such management would not only look for consistency but also look for common programming mistakes like buffer overflows. Linux developers are implementing some top level management (in a decentralized sort of way) but perhaps they should consider more. In a nutshell, good programming practices improve usability and security at the same time.
The article says that, when all was said and done, and the terrorists had been tracked despite having bought the SIM cards anonymously, the Swiss responded by passing a law to prevent people from buying SIM cards anonymously. Isn't this sort of stupid for two reasons. First, the terrorists wouldn't have fallen into the trap if they had to provide ID to buy the cards. Second, this only makes it hard for people who have a legitimate reason to want privacy.
I'm not worried about attracting the attention of the NSA and international intelligence agencies because I'm not doing anything illegal, much less terrorist related. I do want to be able to buy anonymous SIM cards, however, to prevent the telecom companies from keeping my call history and selling it to marketing agencies. I don't really trust their privacy policies and it's questionable how legally binding they are anyway if the company is sold to another company and they're bought by someone else...
Fear of government invasion of privacy is certainly a concern and always has been (lots of laws already exist) but the new trend is much more invasion of personal privacy by big business then was ever possible before. This is where we really need to look at new laws and policies.
I have always used command-left arrow for back and command-right arrow for forward. I guess the right-click thing is fine if you are are used to that way of doing things but it's not a traditional Mac way. The keyboard shortcuts work well with one hand on the mouse and one hand on the keyboard. That's probably the style they are going for in the Safari design.
Having said that, it does make sense to add the feature you are looking for since it's one of those little things (like the bit about the delete and backspace keys) which mean a lot for people who live in between Windows and Mac. It wouldn't take away from other user's experience.
I have seen Finale and it is a good product but has always been expensive compared to the alternatives. I used to use Professional Composer and now use Melody Assistant ($15 shareware. see Versiontracker.) Melody Assistant is being regularly updated and improving all the time. It does an exeellent job at handling a wide variety of different musical styles. It's approach to bagpipe music (that's what I play) is the best I have seen. In other words, It's better than Finale for my purposes.
It's too bad that colleges don't believe that they can have "common carrier" status as they provide internet access for students. It means that students actually have fewer rights than people who pay a regular ISP for service.
I work for a major university and I have thought about threatening to bring in an outside ISP for my department for technical reasons. I believe that the university ITS provides poor service and charges too much for it. Yes, they charge us per machine for network access. Now I have another reason to go outside for internet access - a political reason.
Faster Than Light Newsfeed 07/OCT/2004: Shares of beleaguered Sun Microsystems rose slightly from a 52-week low on rumors of a buyout offer from UNIX-powerhouse Apple Computer.
I think that a lot more people would be willing to pay for porn if they could do so anonymously. There have been attempts to make digital cash but, last I heard, no one had succeeded. Such a technology would be a great help to anyone who wants to sell small bits of copyrighted material on the net. It isn't just porn either, It's all the trivial purchases which people would rather not have spammers and governments with TIA programs keeping track of.
Of course, Microsoft will try to make it sound like they invented it just as they did with symlinks.
...I know an old lady who swallowed a dog.
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat.
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird.
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
I don't know why she swallowed the fly.
Perhaps she'll die.
Now play nicely.
I think that what they ought to do is create an open source package from OpenOffice code that will function in a similar way to MacLinkPlus.