Friday, November 25, 2005

My time with a Mac

From time to time I get a chance to spend a few minutes using a Mac. Today I had 20 spare minutes in which I wanted to check my Gmail account.
I would like to state that, despite the fact that the Macs I get to play with, are incredibly slow, (900 MHz G4 iMac even comparing to 1 GHz Pentium 4 in our computer labs) the still have their appeal. It feels good working on a Mac, but...
Getting back to Gmail. For complete usability with Gmail you need IE 5.5+ Mozilla Firefox 1.0+ or Safari 1.2+. This Mac has OS-X 10.2 and Safari 1.06. I didn't want to install Firefox on that computer, but I tried to upgrade the existing Safari to the latest version (the only version I saw available). Instead I found out that I couldn't upgrade, since it requires OS-X version 10.3 or newer. I tried to look for a solution but didn't find any. So my question to any Mac'ies out there: Is it a way for Apple to make you upgrade your OS, or simply I wasn't looking in the right places?

Friday, November 04, 2005

Why McAfee Viruscan is a bad antivirus software

I'm looking for a good antivirus software for a windows machine. One of my options was McAfee Viruscan. I tried to enter their online store, but instead of getting to the store I got "Incompatible browser" notice and an invitation to download Microsoft Internet Explorer. I contacted their customer support team. To their defense, it is quick and offers a live chat with a human representative. From the representative I learned that McAfee probably will not support anything but IE in the near future, and what is worse, if you are using a different browser you would not be protected by McAfee Viruscan. Therefore I can conclude without any shade of a doubt that McAfee Viruscan is a bad antivirus software.

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Football Fatwa

According to the Guardian, the Saudi newspaper Al Watan recently published a fatwa setting out new rules for football. It looks like a joke, but most likely its not.