Has anyone else noticed the attitudes regarding security on a Unix machine
versus MPE?

For example, when adding your home directory to your path, on MPE we put it
in the beginning and don't give it another thought. On Unix, we are
*strongly* advised to put it at the end, or Bad Things will happen!
("Someone will put a file named 'ls' in your directory, and it will contain
'rm -r *'. The next time you list a file (similar to :LISTFILE), poof! --
all is lost!")

This reminds me of a situation on desktop machines. There are roughly 40
known viruses for the Mac, but *thousands* for the PC! You can probably get
away with scanning for viruses on the Mac every month or so, but on the PC,
you're taking serious chances if you don't have something checking
*constantly*!

Unfortunately, with the new breed of "macro" viruses (mostly in Word), Mac
users who run Word 6 (note to all three of you: WHY??) are subject to this
lunacy as well.

An anecdote: Eight years ago, I bought a PC to replace my original Mac, and
contracted the Jerusalem-B virus before I blinked! In my case, it was
probably the Mac gods being angry with me. At the time, the cheapest colour
Mac was SERIOUS cash, and I just couldn't afford it. Since then, of course,
colour Macs have become quite reasonable, and I am very happy with my
3-year-old machine. (Price example: a 180 MHz PowerBase 603e [MHz-for-MHz,
comparable to the Pentium] from Power Computing can be had [sans monitor]
for about $1500.)

--Glenn Cole
  Software al dente, Inc.
  [log in to unmask]  <-- client site
  [log in to unmask]      <-- always