David Czepanski's Profile

Links are to Apple but the numbers they quote are from Sophos. So am I to understand that we should be skeptical of anyone touting vulnerabilities of your computer system who might have a motive for selling you a solution? Not at all. You missed my point about the company selling a "solution". It's sort of like selling a bicycle to a fish, a vaccum cleaner to someone that only has wooden floors, a car alarm to a motorcyclist (or insert appropriate analogy here). The key part is "touting vulnerabilities". McAfee and others can tout all they want but they need to make sure that they're telling the whole story and not just generating a market for their product. What vulnerabilities, I wonder, do they tout? As for the FUD, well, everyone's 100% biased; the sites you name are evidence of that.

"Being “up-to-date” is a pointless exercise, designed to keep managers looking good and the computer/software industry execs rich" Aurora77, to a large degree I agree with you but it's hard to convince others, especially IT-centric clients of your point. They are largely swayed but marketing hype and flashy sales demos. The fact is that we can *say* what we like but we *do* what we believe - and I am writing this to you on Tiger! How about you? What OS did you write from? Well done if it was anything other than Tiger or XP. Chris, I face the similar problem daily in my job. Thankfully, as I work mainly with schools, deals have been struck with both Microsoft and what can loosely be called Apple here in NZ and these deals help immensely. This deal means that OS upgrades are free for schools and iLife 04 was part of the deal as well. This is a great deal for the schools! But you'll notice that it's now 2006 = and some people wrongly assume that they can just put iLife 06 on their old machines because of the deal made a couple of years ago. Not only is that outside of the agreement of the licence (read illegal) but it's also a pretty bad decision to run iLife 06 on a two year old mac with the RAM it came with! Of course the deal applies only to software and NOT hardware! The problem really shows up when I visit clients that aren't schools. They have to pay for every new version of OS X or iLife that comes out and so generally don't bother. Compare the schools (where the upgrades are free) to the businesses and you'll find that the schools have a much more unified feel across (sometimes) hundreds of computers where as small and medium businesses are running everything from OS 9 to Tiger.

And, Luke, how's your Italian (I think?) Check out these links for what other people are doing to record Skype interviews. It looked like this was going to be the ticket..... http://www.rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/ But they claim what you want to do is not really supported (might be with a plug in). But there in the forums was this link to a site in Italian.... http://www.caymag.com/index.php?p=73 Hope it works out.

I can't take a phone call while I am working on a 1st generation Xserve - callers can't hear me! Macs certainly aren't immune to noise and heat problems but I think that Apple have (had - up until now with the intel chip??) managed the problem better than the folks in the PC world. Having said that, there have been times when our iBook is anything BUT a laptop - it's too hot to have on your lap! There's the rub - heat/noise/performance.

Thanks for all the work around advice - some I know but others are new to me..... While there may be an answer to the problem in all of this, I have to agree with Bad Beaver; it sends out the wrong message. A letter to the bank is preferable and then go from there. To be honest we'd happily leave any bank over something like this (if they refused to budge) but there's slim pickings over here and so people tend to put up with such things. Nice to see that others feel the same!

"How long will it take before there is a layman’s way to do all of the hard work for an XP dual boot?" Boot Camp released this week.... spooky.

Toadkicker - I have done the same with a bus powered firewire drive and it works well. Of course the new iPods are USB only aren't they??? Probably can't easily boot off those. Thrakar - thanks for the heads up on BootCD. I saw it as I was looking around but haven't used it. I'm guessing that Charlessoft is trying to avoid copyright and legal issues by offering a means to assemble your own boot CD rather than offering the finished product. Perhaps that's what toadkicker was meaning when he said that an OS X cd would have to come from Apple? Charlessoft may still be treading on dangerous ground though, huh? The 15 minute boot time is a little off putting! Most macs have more than enough RAM (!) to power a simple GUI OS. Where's the mac version of PuppyLinux?! 8(