News from PANUG/BizNix - October 21, 2003 http://panug.org - http://biznix.org PDXTEX MEETING TONIGHT Tonight is the October meeting of the PdXTeX group. It starts at 7:00 pm and is held at Novell's office. Anyone can attend meetings and membership is free. The group focuses on document processing using tools based on Donald Knuth's TeX, such as LaTeX and LyX, which run on Windows, Linux, and virtually all other popular operating systems. Some PdXTeX members are authors that use these tools professionally. At each meeting, new members are brought up to speed on the technology at the start of the meeting. More advanced presentations and demonstrations follow. LINUX TRAINING We have one or two seats left for the Linux Boot Camp on November 19-20. See: http://alcpress.com/training/schedule.html MORE ON MONOCULTURE Raymond L. Robert Marcus Ranum responded to Dan Geer's recent paper warning about the Microsoft Monoculture. See http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/index.html. The gist of it is that the "monoculture" argument is more analogy than science, and that the analogy is flawed. The danger he sees is that it's easy for the argument to devolve into mere Microsoft bashing. As he notes, "For virtually everyone who had a clue about security ..., most of the worms in the last 5 years have been non-events except for the clutter that their victims caused." Ed Sawicki: I was unimpressed with Ranum's rant. Who cares that he has never been hit by a virus, worm, etc. Many people have. The monoculture argument is _both_ analogy and science. It's an analogy only because the computer industry has not invented a name for the concept yet. I see no reason why the term can't be used just because we're applying it to silicon-based organisms that have different properties than biological organisms. The fundamental concepts and premise set forth by the Geer's paper are still sound in my view. WHEN YOU'RE BEING SCAMMED Paul Rogers has written a lengthy article about how to recognize spam. You can find it here: http://panug.org/news/rogers1.html FEEDBACK Regarding the "Linux for Newbies" article in the last broadcast, Wendy Gleason has this to say: Ken Barber and Ed Sawicki were RIGHT ON about this Windows user's message. There are many reasons I read the PANUG newsletter religiously, and this interchange is one of them. I like the new format, where you've gathered multiple comments to post together. For the same article, Andy Freed had this to say: I'd like to know who this law firm is, and what their problem is. Afraid of bio-diversity? Maybe the IT person is just worried that if people see one person seamlessly use a mac in their PC environment, everyone will want one. :) Regardless, I think an Apple laptop is an excellent option for business, but the weakness of open source office products [on the Mac] is a limiting factor. Star/Open Office for Linux and Windows is still far better than the Mac port. Acrobat? Since the GUI in OS X is like one big PDF, there's that problem solved. As far as Access? Who knows... And Patrick West said this: Someone tell Ray that not only do Word 6 and Excel 5 work on newer Windows systems, they are also MORE secure because the current crop of Macro viruses won't run on them. DISCLAIMER PANUG and BizNix welcome contributions from all members. Member contributions do not necessarily represent the official positions of PANUG or BizNix. The views of members that contribute frequently may appear to be the official position of the group(s). If you contribute, you'll be adding vital diversity of opinion and outlook to these broadcasts.