Dark side of the Net (they re spying on your computer - and you)

Livewire ^ | June 12 2002 | Nathan Taylor

[ProudEagle]

Adaware does a pretty good job of identifying and removing Spyware.

Yep, and a good personal firewall helps too. www.zonelabs.com. It's free to home users, and a reasonably priced upgrade if you want to.

[Knitebane]

I agree that the dispute can be tiring.

It is terribly frustrating to see otherwise intelligent people cling desperately to outdated legacy systems and to a company that really isn't interested in fixing the problems that it has.

Linux is not the end-all and be-all of operating systems. I, myself, have recently built a Windows98 SE box for gaming. Of course, I don't put it on the Internet.

My servers are generally built on FreeBSD with a few Linux boxes here and there) and my security devices (firewalls, NAT, intrusion detection) are built on OpenBSD. I run Wine on my desktop to access proprietary Microsoft filetypes such as WMA, and I run Windows2000 under VMWare on my laptop to access proprietary Microsoft Word, Excel, Visio and PowerPoint files.

Windows and Microsoft will be with us for a long time. But the ability of Microsoft to force it's ideas upon the public (such as arm-twisting licensing, proprietary document formats, "extended" protocols) is beginning to weaken, and that's mainly due to the ability of people to use something else that is as good as the Microsoft version and often better.

In other words, the days of people thinking that Windows will "do everything but solve the problems in the middle-east and cook breakfast" is over.

Although some people haven't figured it out yet.

[Denver Ditdat]

Sounds like a good reason to switch.

Note to Apple: Replacing the spiky hired guy in Salvation Army duds with a more photogenic MacUser (Cheney Chick comes to mind) would probably be a smart advertising move.

IMO, Apple builds some sexy hardware. I could easily (and happily) do all of my normal drudge work on a Mac.

Unfortunately, when the work is finished the kind of entertainment software I want to run is almost non-existant for the MacOS. I like flight sims - monsterous, cycle-burning, cpu-hogging, eye candy-laden flight sims. They simply don't exist for Macs. Soft PC and the like are fine to migrate Wintel office apps over to the Mac, but not torender the smooth framerate I need to fly any recent sim.

If the equivalent to FS2002, IL2 Sturmovik, Jane's F/A-18, Talonsoft's Battle of Britain, and B17 II - The Mighty Eighth were available for Macs I'd seriously consider the switch.

Till then I'll stick to my dual boot WinME / Mandrake 8.2 box.