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To Quote HH56

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Isn't that because the Windows PC world outnumbers the Mac world by 100 to 1 or more? My unsolicited opinion is that the people that get off by spreading viruses and worms get more bang for their effort/buck going after PC's rather than Mac's. There's more of them and more of the corporate world use Windows. Just a thought after reading about the Commodore 64 for instance, Why would anyone bother to write code to corrupt maybe one Commodore 64 when the same effort could corrupt the world.

Just a thought.

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No, it gasped it's last breath many, many moons ago.

Bob51, tis true there are many more windows machines but as far as I know there are no known viruses that affect OSX. There were some for the old operating system however. As far as the return on effort, you may have a point but I think there are other factors involved as well.

Because it's unix based, it's a little harder to write a virus for OSX that actually does damage because nothing the virus can get to runs at root level--unless the operator has allowed it. I'm sure it's not because of trying either. Think of the prestige some hacker would have to be the first to do it. There have been exploitations at various hacker conferences and another starting in the next week or so with an iPhone as well as a Mac as the main targets. The last successful one took most of the default OSX settings turned off to do it. The fellow took 3 days of solid work and each day more of the defaults were turned off--finally got in through a program included with the operating system but won 10K and the hacked laptop for his efforts. That's not to say it won't eventually happen for real though.

There are a few known worms or trojans as I'm sure you've heard, but so far they take a conscious effort on the operators part to run them such as saying yes to the warning that tells you something you downloaded & thought was a music or picture file is really a program and do you want to run it.

Load *,8,1 launches the software on the disk

Mine was an 8K 1401 and I wrote the program in SPS.
Autocoder was a bit later(LOL)

The first thing I started out with about ten years ago wasn't a computer. In 1999 I bought a WEBTV machine to start cruising the internet. I went that route for a couple of years until I bought a HP computer in 2003, which I kept until about two years ago. Then I gave that computer to my brother in-law. He let us know the other day in a letter that I finally bit the dust.

About a year and half ago I bought another computer which started giving me troubles. Then in January I bought a new Dell computer. There has been some young students at our local high school that have been trouble shooting my old computer and have finally found the problem with it and they seem to have fixed it. I get the old computer back next week.

I guess the next thing I will have to do is get a router
and put the old computer upstairs. Since I know little about computers I will continue to stick with using a pc and for now I guess a MAC isn't in the cards.

John F. Shireman

John, maybe someday, if you are very good, you can get yourself a mac.

New iMacs today and more features for same $ so effectively a nice price drop to go along with them.

An article came out about the perception that Apples are expensive. I believe they are very competitive & if you absolutely must, can run windows too.

http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/03/03/oppenheimer-new-imac-a-better-deal-than-dell-hp/

Last year the MacPro was compared with Dell & HP professional workstation type systems & won and new Pros also announced today.

This thread made me smile. I grew up on Basic (1970s), graduated to FORTRAN via keypunch/cards (1980s) and had a Timex Sinclair as my first "PC" as an undergrad. I coupled it to a B/W Panasonic TV (9" screen) and Panasonic cassette recorder/player for my tape-drive memory. Programming was a bear, and extremely unforgiving. It did work, until it disappeared. I have absolutely no memory of throwing it away... it just vanished from my dorm room, or somewhere between grad school and my first job. Then it was all about DOS, and finally Windows 3.1.

Now, what this MAC thingy?

Jeff

It's beee-utiful!

My favorite part was submitting a batch job, waiting 2 or 4 or 6 hours for output, and picking up a 5 pound box of green-stripe paper, only to find a fault in first If-Then-Or routine... grrr.

My children understand my current desire for speed, not why it is so imperative.

To think of all those lovely Packards, designed entirely by hand and paper and pencil. (just trying to tie this to on-topic...)