News from PANUG/BizNix - July 24, 2002
http://panug.org - http://biznix.org


WORD VBA CLASS

Payne Consulting Group (Seattle, WA) is offering both an Introduction
(October 7-9, 2002) and Intermediate (October 10-12, 2002) Word VBA
class taught by Payne senior developer, Leah Matthews.  The classes will
be hosted at the offices of Dunn Carney et al, 851 SW Sixth Avenue, #1500,
Portland OR.  This class is for those who have little or no programming
experience but want to learn to create automated user forms and learn a
good fundamental amount of VBA knowledge.
 
Full detailed information can be obtained at http://www.payneconsulting.com


APPLE SURVEY

A few weeks back, we conducted a survey about the Apple Computer ads
on television. Too few of you responded to make the results meaningful
so we won't publish any results. Of those that did respond, the reaction
to Apples TV ads was generally lukewarm. It appears that PANUG and
BizNix members have a preference for sticking with the PC platform and,
if changes need to be made, change the operating system, not the hardware.


BUGGY SOFTWARE

In response to the article BUGGY SOFTWARE COSTS $59.5 BILLION by Ed Sawicki,
Ken Barber writes:

 While Mr. Clarke's efforts to secure cyberspace are commendable, I don't
 think he's going to make any significant progress until the business
 practices of a certain Big Contributor to his boss' political campaign get
 reigned in....

 I would like to see a change in the laws that would expose software vendors
 to some reasonable liability for the consequences of their "ship early and
 fix bugs through endless patches" practices.

 Any such legislation would have to contain provisions stating that
 supplying (or at least making available) the source code to one's product
 is one way of meeting the legal definition of "due diligence." That would
 protect the Open Source movement from death-by-litigation.

It seems that at least one magazine columnist agrees with you Ken. Lorraine
Renard points out this article that proposes legal reforms that would make
software vendors liable for damage caused by security flaws in their
products:

http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/management/opinion/story/0,10801,72336,00.html
 

WINDOWS HAS A LONG WAY TO GO...

Forbes has a series of articles on using Linux in business. You can find
them at http://www.forbes.com/2002/07/16/linuxintro.html
Note that one of the articles says that Linux "has a long way to go"
but the author is referring to running Linux on a corporate desktop.
Linux does not have a long way to go as a server. In fact, Linux is the
leader in cutting-edge, server-side features, such as IPv6, IP multicasting,
virtual servers, inexpensive clustering, stateful-inspection firewalls,
a secure architecture,  etc.

Windows has a long way to go to catch up with Linux servers.


CIFS

Patrick Corrigan sent in this link to an article about how Microsoft
bans open source software from using CIFS:
http://swpat.ffii.org/patents/effects/cifs/index.en.htm