On Thu, Feb 13, 2003 at 08:30:20AM -0800, Julie Alipaz <jalipaz at stanford.edu> wrote: > ><Snip> > >> > Hope this clears everything up :-) > >> Not exactly. Then what was it that I deleted? > > > Its absence will not cause your PC to stop > > > > > working or interfere with your applications > Smirk - Us Mac user just don't have these problems Sure you do. Every computer system out there has an "uninformed user at the keyboard" problem. If you think Macs are immune to viruses, you would be wrong -- while OS X is a significant improvement in that area, before then the Mac was even more wide open than Microsoft's software. Even under OS X, a poorly written program (like, say, Microsoft's Outlook equivelent on the Mac) can accept viruses just as easily as on windows. And while it may only be your individual user account that gets infected, rather than the whole system, there's not much difference when it's a single-user machine and Apple hasn't given you the root password. It remains to be seen whether OS X is less secure than the UNIX system it is based on, but even UNIX systems have viruses and worms... the system is designed to contain them rather than let them spread rampant, but they still hit the inattentive sysadmin occasionally. If you think I'm coming at you from the Mac-hating perspective, I'm not. I used an Amiga for years, and was in pretty much the same situation -- 99% of the viruses flying around just didn't have any relevance to me. But there are viruses for the Amiga, too, and lots of them; they just aren't as popular a platform, and virus writers follow platform popularity just like anyone else. So, Steve, does Dzur Mountain run Linux? -- Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org) Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp Politics: http://www.triggerfinger.org/index.jsp