Macking 83

The New eMac and Micro$haft
With perfect timing, Apple releases a new all-in-one computer targeted to the education market just as Microsoft's BS Alliance launches a protection scheme against the Portland school district and 15 other districts in Oregon and Washington.
The criminal enterprise referred to as Microsoft (in the ongoing court proceedings - remember that they were convicted of illegal monopolistic practices) decided to pick the time of the year when the schools are busiest, preparing for graduation and all the mandatory testing, to declare that the BSA would give them 60 days to prove compliance with all software licenses or face million$ in law$uits.
There are over 25,000 computers in the systems, many of them donated Intel boxes with M$ software on them. Remember that all Intel/AMD hardware has been sold with Windows preinstalled but by now it would be virtually impossible to unite each machine with its proper paperwork and all the CD-ROMs, if any, that accompanied it. This is a task that would take more than 60 days if all the teachers and administrators did nothing else.
Of course benevolent Microsoft offered to do the audit with their own personnel for free, but if any computers were found with apparently unauthorized software, then the lawyers would start flying until the system was buried ten feet deep in them.
The protection racket part? Oh, yeah. M$ offered a site license for everything that they make, on every computer in the system, for a mere $500,000. Per year. Did someone say that the school district was $35 million short on budget? Something like that.
It's ironic enough that M$, through the Gates Foundation, is giving away many millions more than that to certain specified high-tech schools that they favor. The courts, meanwhile, are considering fining M$ a billion dollars to be given to the schools (and M$ offered a self-serving method of doing that: handing out that $1 billion in Microsoft products, valued at full retail price, of course. Fortunately, the judges would have none of it.
Which leads to the new $999 eMac. Here is a new computer, just in time for next year's budgets, that offers all the desired design features that educational institutions have been wanting: G4 processor, large hard drive, CD-ROM burning, 17" monitor, three USB ports, 10/100 Ethernet, and a selection of software to get it all going.
I don't know whether consumers can even buy this. It is, after all, a CRT display which Apple wants to phase out completely - but can't because flat-screen displays are still more expensive. Yet the schools have real and specific needs so Apple's marketing department made a very wise choice.
Oh, and the extortion scheme from Microsoft? Nope, that didn't come from their legal department, it came from their marketing department.
Schools with AMD/Intel boxes have already been seriously considering Linux; now they have an even better reason to make the jump. Since Linux and MacOSX are both flavors of UNIX, then students working with either platform will gain useful knowledge for future employment. Best of all, another maggot will be added to the festering hulk in Redmond and the day it will be consumed marches one step closer.
The strangest part of this story is the fact that it was announced in mid-April in Steve Duin's column in the Oregonian, and there has not been a peep in the letters section or a follow-up story anywhere (as of Bits' deadline). However, a contact within Multnomah ESD said that after M$ was informed that there was no money for such an audit, and that any computer found to be containing unauthorized Microsoft code would be immediately reformatted and Linux installed, M$ backed off for 6 months on its demands, if not forever. There was quite a hue and cry, even if it never made the papers.

Replacing internal drives
A friend sent me this info from the Usenet group comp.sys.mac.portables. IBM makes a series of hard drives all marketed under the name "Travelstar." There are many differences in size and speed between them. The quietest drives are the ones made with fluid dynamic bearings. They are a lot quieter than the ones that come with the original Powerbooks. When you are looking for a replacement drive, make sure that they have fluid dynamic bearings. Other things to look for: RPM, which is important for getting data on and off the drive quickly. On a desktop Mac you should never get less than 7200 RPM. Laptop drives don't go that fast because that speed puts an excessive drain on the battery. However, a 5400 drive is an acceptable compromise between efficiency and speed. As for capacity, always buy the largest drive you can afford.

Running OSX? Don't buy an HP printer
I was alerted to a serious security hole accompanied by an idiotic design decision in a recent posting to BugTraq. You should go read the article, skipping over the parts you don't understand to get to the meat, part of which I excerpt here:
"...the user may notice that the printer is not working when hp_imaging_connectivity has been subverted. Well, not really. For some reason, and I have not found out why, the printer does not work if the user who installed the driver is different from the user who tries to use it. Consequently, the printer is not working by default!
So if a user wants to be sure she can print, she will have to install the printer driver anew, and she will have to be an administrator. All printer users must therefore be administrators, the root compromise is thus entirely trivial.
There are of course some other issues with HPs somewhat misguided approach: as the printer driver is an application tied to the user's desktop, it's impossible to print on the printer unless logged in on the console. And while the printer is spitting out pages, it is impossible to log out!
My guess is that hp_imaging_connectivity was ported from a single user system without any security (like Mac OS 9 or Windows). Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a workaround other than not buying a HP inkjet printer for use with Mac OS X.

Fighting Spam
For some reason, the amount of spam I have been receiving increased exponentially in the last few weeks so I went in search of something to fight with. I found through the Macintouch site a product called SpamFire, a shareware program that scans your email to separate out the spam before you even check your email.
Spamfire comes as a 15-day demo, which was enough to get me the experience I needed to decide that it indeed works. But the best part for me was when I called their phone line at 6:30pm (7:30 in New Mexico where the company is) and got live tech help! I had made some important mistakes in configuring the filters and the guy helped me fix things.
The way it works is simple: It assigns point values to certain key markers common to all spam and when the count reaches a chosen threshold, it loads the spam into Spamfire and then sends the legit messages off to your regular mail program. Spamfire works with all Mac email programs (except, of course, AOL) including under OSX.
The list of messages marked as spam appear in a window in Spamfire, along with the points assigned and the categories. When mail that is legitimate is flagged you can add the sender, domain, or mailing list to your filter as okay to pass through. Over time, the program spots only the spam and it takes no more than a cursory glance at the filtered list to ensure no legitimate mail was caught.
Spamfire, like most email programs, can be set to filter at timed intervals, or simply set to filter manually. The latter setting is what those connecting via modem will use, with timed mail checking preferred by most of the DSL, cable and LAN accounts. Me, even though I have DSL, I prefer to check manually. The only change in your behavior will be to check mail with Spamfire first, then read your mail in your regular program.
Spamfire comes in a personal and pro mode, at $20 and $30, with the Pro version able to sort through multiple POP accounts. If you have only one account, you don't need the Pro version.
There are other products out there, for all platforms, but this time I hit on a good one with the first try.
Spamfire issues periodic updates too, adding new known spam servers to your filters so if you have it update every couple of weeks you can keep your Inbox pretty clean.
My only desire would be a plug-in that would allow me to send the spam back up the line to the originator, carrying a worm that would nuke their hard drive and zero out their BIOS. 99% of spammers use Windows and they CAN be traced but it takes a lot of work. Even if you can't wreak vengeance, you can still slow down the spam.

Eudora for X
On April 16, Qualcomm released the last beta version of Eudora for X and it works just perfectly, as have the previous two releases. This time, however, there is no expiration date for the beta, which means that the final, official release must be imminent and you can take your time going back to get the official final version.
The X version looks and works exactly like the older versions, which is great if you love the program, not so good if you like all the pretty aqua buttons, sliders, chromium fender skirts and fuzzy dice found in the other mail clients. And while I have been called on by customers to rescue damaged or lost mail in Netscape and Outlook, to this date I have seldom even seen problems with Eudora, and none that could not be fixed.
Eudora Pro is free if you put up with a little ad in the corner (it's little if your display is 1024x768 or greater) and so is the Lite version of Eudora. No ads, but also no filters, spell checker, and other useful features. If you want Pro with no ads, it's $39.95 on their website. To get the beta version, go to http://www.eudora.com/betas/ and download the one you want. If the final version is out, you will find it on the home page.

Macs on a cruise
Jon H. Thrift writes, "We went on a snorkel trip in Hawaii and the whole trip was run by Macs. When you book your trip you go into the system and then anything you might buy on the trip is accounted for on a Zip disk for that trip. Complete inventory control of items rented, drinks and other snack bar items. A series of iBooks do the work. The type of iBook you used to have and the type my children have at school. I think she said it was done with File Maker? When you book the trip you go into the system. When your group goes onto the boat a Zip disk goes with you to the snack bar. Everything you buy is listed or accounted for and at the end of the cruise the snack bar person physically inventories all of the snack bar items, totals everything on the Zip drive and it should balance. She said it always does. She walks off the boat with a bag of money and a Zip disk in her hand. Inside the office the put the Zip disk in another iBook and re-provision the boat for the next group based on the information on the disk. Slick system. The snack bar person said she had been working there for three years and has never had a computer problem. Good record."

Pacifier Now Local Again
Pacifier Online, once a local Vancouver ISP but in the hands of the St. Louis company Millenium Digital Media (referred to on the Pacifier web page as US Net) since 2000, has been bought back by the previous owner, Doug Palin.
Longtime subscribers had been noticing a drop in the quality of service, especially Mac tech support. Palin intends to restore the former level of personal customer service while managing a company that quadrupled in size during his absence. Pacifier Online, along with the other companies acquired in the buyback, has 50,000 customers from Seattle to Los Angeles, becoming the largest independent ISP on the West Coast. Also included in the transfer: Portland's Europa, another ISP that had been independent and then suffered under the control of St. Louis.
It's always good news when an independent can thrive in a sea of megacorporations. Welcome back, Doug.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)