Friday, July 11, 2003

PC Viruses 625 Times More Likely than on Macs Virus consultancy and software firm Sophos states in a Marcworld UK report that just 0.16 percent of the viruses reported to the company were Mac-specific. According to Ron Carlson of "Insanely Great Mac" and the Sophos story, that makes PCs 625 times more likely to become infected by a virus. "The greatest inconvenience for Macintosh users is likely to be receiving harmless email-attached viruses from infected PC users," Macworld UK writes. "The only other viruses that are generally found on Macs are Microsoft Word macro viruses ... [and] these are a minor annoyance rather than the catastrophic PC viruses, such as the Bugbear-B and the slammer virus." Read the full article here. IMHO, many of the things people think are viruses are just computer glitches. That's not to say you shouldn't protect yourself (I occasionally let Virex run automatically on startup). But if something happens to your computer (and it's a Mac), unless you have solid evidence, chances are it's something besides a virus. Click here to see my entry titled "Hackers Offered Most Points to Hack a Mac" for some thoughts and experience I have along these lines. Article found at IGM, Insanely Great Mac. The smiley Mac image came from the The 68k Mac Revival Computer Museum.

Holland's 1000 Foot Blogger Adam Curry's making use of the latest technologies. See him here taking a picture on the job, from a helicopter, with his Nokia 3650 phone. He apparently makes entries to his blog via the phone, in the helicopter, from time to time. He writes: After a plea on my dutch blog I've got several people now sending me sms messages on my cellphone when something worthwhile happens. I can receive those in flight reliably. I wonder if he wrote this particular entry in the air? Though I'm admittedly new to the blogging world, I haven't yet ever heard anyone refer to themselves as a "bogger" (missing an "L"?), as he does in the title of this entry, "Thousand foot bogger". Not Too Shabby Regarding the picture-taking quality of these new phones: (I know there are lots of people that have them, but I don't yet), it looks pretty good. Click on the photo, or here to take a closer look. Here are some other pictures taken from the air on Adam and his partner's helicopter outing yesterday (in Breda, Netherlands), though I'm rather certain these were taken using the Nikon camera shown in the above photo, not the Nokia phone. Also, click here to see pictures taken yesterday above Rotterdam, Netherlands. Read this entry of Adam Curry's weblog here.