Al Hoang

This is just too strange. You have to read it to believe it (or even fathom it).

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MacSlash had a link to an article at the Mac Observer which covered one person’s hunt to find information on Mac Viruses. After searching Network Associates and Virex’s Database using a simple search for the word ‘Macintosh’ and subtracted out all of the viruses that were Word or Excel based Macros (ah the joys of scripting gone bad) he came up with a fat total of……. 26. Yep 26. Then he looked for OS X specific ones from that list and found a grand total of 0. That’s quite amusing.

However, being powered by many tools from UNIX land, Mac OS X must watch the security watches for many of the same exploits that are found in UNIX land but from what I’ve seen Apple has been very good at moving forward with those updates.

While that’s assuring, personally I expect to see more Mac specific viruses in the future if the platform starts picking up. Also, if we add back in the Office based viruses the number jumps up… dramatically. If we add back the Word and Excel based viruses we get around 579 which is quite a few. Just because they come from Word and Excel you can’t wave a hand and say ‘Gee that’s Microsoft’s problem’ since it affects the Mac as well which is bad. But at least 579 is a lot smaller than 71,000.

The Press Herald has a story on New Hampshire following Maine’s lead on a laptop program for school. Interesting perhaps but also sad in some ways that they need to give away basically expensive toys to get students interested in education. I agree that the public school systems in the U.S. need work. Yes, I do agree that technology can help.

I’m warily skeptical of the laptop program being a gigantic resounding success. I think it does bring many good things to the table. I’m just wary of many of the bad things it brings to the table.

This type of stuff is really cool. The story is someone did a rebuild of the Apple I and tried contacting Apple about information if he could sell the replicas. They never responded. The person then went to Woz and asked Woz’s permission. Survey says:

Thumbs Up!

Way cool! I always thought Woz was the cooler Steve of Apple fame.

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