Henri, you are too generous with spreading your knowledge. What a help!. Unfortunately i don't have four-pence, only some sixpence coins left over from my long ago yearly trips to England. You are probably too young to know that you needed sixpence for everything, to start a warm shower in your bed-breakfast accomodations, to make your little stove in your room work, the teakettle only came to life if you had enough sixpence - and then the telephone! I had the coins stacked in the phone booth as the operator would tell me how many more to put in.- The only place I got to phone free was in Harwich, before taking the Avalon Ferry back to the Hook of Holland, but you needed to take the English ferry, not the Queen Juliana, because the Dutch would not let you get off the ferry anymore once you were on, but the British did, if you smiled at them and told them you needed to make a call to remind your family you were coming. By the time everybody was on the ship, everybody had made a phone call and the machine in the phone booth was full and --- open! You could call all over the globe for nothing. It was a blast! I can't recall when I found out for the first time, but it worked every year. I even had the fortune to call my husband once from Salisbury market square as I went to Stonehenge- open channels. I suppose the phone people were not so eager at those days to travel around to empty the telephones- No such luck today in a coinless society. I guess the web has other avenues. The only thing thus far I have been able to do with iTunes is, when they tell me I already had made 5 copies and that was all I was allowed to do, I changed the name of the CD and made it a playlist and all went well. Marta -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Dom old view.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 10410 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.math.louisville.edu/pipermail/macgroup/attachments/20041207/272b822a/attachment.jpg -------------- next part --------------
On Dec 7, 2004, at 15:53, Henri Yandell wrote: > > You're welcome :) > > While OS X comes from one company, and Windows comes from one company, > Linux comes from many companies in the form of what are called > distributions. You can build your own distribution from scratch if you > want and distribute it without cost (ignoring cds, marketing, > bandwidth etc). > > SuSE are a German distro who were just bought by Novell, I've long > been a fan. While SuSE is a for-profit business, much like Apple, > Debian is a volunteer organisation with many ideas on freedom. It's > also one of the best mainstream distros out there with many advantages > over the commercial equivalents. > > Linux is not alone in this world though, there's another popular UNIX > clone called BSD (which Darwin, the guts of OS X is a variant of). The > most common variants (until Darwin) are FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. > > Now I'll get back to the subject of the thread, security. There is a > certain amount of security in being different. I used to happily run > SuSE boxes next to Red Hat servers (American distro of Linux) and > while the Red Hat boxes dropped like flies from attacks, mine were > fine. Nowadays SuSE gets hit easily too. > > I find it very tempting to advise ignoring the virus programs and just > not using the mainstream programs. I go to extremes on this by using > mid-80s non-GUI tools to check my email (though there are other > advantages), but if you chose something like Firefox instead of > Safari, and Thunderbird instead of AppleMail, I'd suspect that you'd > happily survive the first problems on OS X. They may even be too > popular and you'd need to choose something else (OmniWeb?) :) > > On Windows this approach makes a lot of sense. Outlook and IE are the > two main holes when it comes down to viruses, and just not using them > is the best way to be safe, sod the virus checkers. You also need to > make sure the user has a certain level of education in terms of > computer-use+paranoia. Nothing we've not heard on the list before: > > * Don't open attachments unless you're expecting them. > * Distrust email from strangers. > * Don't agree to things that popup; instead hit the X or use Alt-F4 > (Windows). > * etc etc. > > For years, my home has been virus-free by following this mentality. > The only bad time we've had is when I joined the company VPN to do > work and was infected by the company computers (VPN's are bad m'kay). > > At the moment, it's not an approach you'd need to worry about too much > in the Apple world. All of OS X is 'something different', so no > worries for now, but I still have a healthy distrust of using Safari > and Mail. > > That makes it four-pence now :) > > Hen > > On Tue, 7 Dec 2004, Marta Edie wrote: > >> Henri, now there is what I call an explanation! Thanks ever so much. >> Now, don't >> get me wrong, I hardly grasp what it means to change from SuSe to a >> Debian ..... etc. ,, but your explanation gave me a better picture on >> hackers and viruses in general and how they are generated and how >> they differ.- >> And this to Harry : I don't take things personal, I am much too old >> for that! I simply meant that the upgrading issue had actually been >> at the beginning of the thread on viruses, and your post somehow out >> of sequence. >> And my answer on the reason why we would need Virex or some such >> thing as an insurance was meant for Jeff who brought up the question >> why Virex would even be needed if Apple thinks Macs are so safe.-- >> Jeff, we know how much you love your PCs. >> Marta > > > | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will > | be January 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. > | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> > | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
