There's one thing to be said for living your computing life as a constant battle against infection by viruses, worms, spyware, and other nasties: not much fazes you anymore. Inform a Windows user that there's a new virus on the loose that will delete all of his files, email his credit card data to the Russian mob, slash the tires on his car, and then loot and pillage his hometown leaving it nothing but a smoldering, blackened husk and he'll probably say, "and this changes my life from three minutes ago how, exactly?" Because those guys are under attack all the freakin' time, so most of them are so jaded about virus attacks that they'd consider swimming ten laps in a pool of Ebola soup to be, at worst, "mildly offputting."

In contrast, tell a Mac user that a Mac OS X-native virus has finally been spotted in the wild that lowers an infected Mac's volume setting by two notches, and he or she may well burst into flame and plunge screaming through the nearest plate glass window because the apocalypse is upon us and may a higher power take pity upon the wretched, twisted wreck that will soon be our lives.

Well, if you're the nervous type, prepare for flaming defenestration, because faithful viewer manu chao (and if one of you guys went all the way to Switzerland to swipe his AtAT t-shirt from his mailbox, that was seriously uncool) tipped us off to a MacInTouch report that begins with a reader's assertion that "there's now a real virus out there for Mac OS X that can do some real damage." Merely dubbed "Opener" for now, this puppy may well be the hardest working virus in show business: it records keystrokes, installs and enables hidden VNC and Timbuktu servers to enable remote access, steals your registration numbers from a whole slew of applications, grabs a ton of personal stuff like your instant messaging logs and software preferences, installs and runs a password-cracking app to try to decrypt your Mac OS X account passwords, and more more more.

There's just one thing, though: it's not actually a virus at all, or a worm, or even really a trojan for that matter. You may notice that, among its many impressive tasks, we didn't list anything like "emails itself to everyone in Address Book" or "infects all network-shared files in the Public folder" or anything else than might lead it to spread. In fact, the comments in the script itself make it clear that "to install this script you need admin access or physical access" or "write access" to various directories that are admin-only by default, or you'd have to "trick someone who has an admin account into installing it." So, okay, sure, it may be "malware" that does a whole lot of nasty stuff similar to what real Windows viruses and worms like to do, but at least as of yet, it doesn't self-propagate and an admin user has to manually install it before it can do anything in the first place. Honestly, you could tell an admin user that he can triple the speed of his Mac by typing "sudo rm -r /*" in a Terminal window (don't do that, by the way), and that's pretty much a "virus" to the same degree that this "Opener" script thing is.

That doesn't mean it couldn't be turned into a virus, we suppose, or more likely, a slick trojan. But for now, at least, you can postpone the whole flaming-leap-through-plate-glass routine, because this thing is essentially just a bunch of stuff you most definitely don't want to install on your Mac unless you want the full-on Windows experience. Well, okay, for the real full-on Windows experience you'd also have to strap on a pair of Ugly-Ray Spex and resign yourself to a life of bitter frustration and despair, but at least it'll cover the Total Lack of Security side of things. Enjoy!

Heads up, people; the Father of the Macintosh is getting all crotchety again. Actually, we take that back; Jef Raskin's always crotchety, and we can't remember ever seeing him quoted anywhere in the past half-decade when he wasn't trash-talking the modern Mac. So it's really just the status quo that he's mouthing off to The Guardian (as noted by faithful viewer David Poves) about how "the Mac is now a mess" and "there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine." While the gulf between the original Mac's point-and-click interface and the DOS command line has narrowed considerably with Mac OS X and Windows XP, we personally would never have thought to classify the difference between "elegant and empowering computing experience" and "wanting to shoot oneself in the head" as "little," but hey, to each his own.

Jef, for the uninitiated, is commonly attributed as the "Father of the Macintosh" because it was he who started the original Macintosh project to create what the marketing folks would eventually call "a computer for the rest of us"-- easy for non-techies to use, and more like a household appliance than a computer in the traditional sense. For that the Mac community certainly owes him a debt of gratitude, but before you get too deeply into the hero worship, it's worth noting that what Jef wanted to be the Macintosh was nothing at all like the Mac turned out to be. For instance, according to Apple old-timer Andy Hertzfeld at Folklore, Jef was "dead set against the mouse" and wanted to ditch it in favor of "dedicated meta-keys called 'leap keys' to do the pointing." (Think a one-button mouse is restrictive? Try playing Quake with "leap keys" sometime.) Because of idea clashes like that one, Jef left the project completely by the middle of 1981, before the team had even really started, so from a Mac-shaping perspective, he's not exactly all that and a bag of chips.

At least he has the sense to admit that his "original vision is outdated and irrelevant," and it's nice that he still feels that "the principles of putting people first and designing from the interface to the software and hardware are as vital today as they were then," but then he goes bagging on the iMac G5 for being "the unfoldable portable-shaped box on a stalk" (you can get a foldable one without the stalk, Jef-- it's called an iBook) and actually claims that "some programs [he] wrote in Basic on an Apple II ran faster than when written in a modern language on a G4 dual-processor Mac with hardware 1,000 times faster." So he's either stoned, nuts, or exaggerating, and if he's exaggerating, someone should tell him that anyone who sounds as pompous as he does really can't pull off hyperbole.

But hey, the world just wouldn't be the same without Grumpy Uncle Jef complaining endlessly about how the Mac isn't living up to its potential without ever offering a single concrete suggestion to make it better. And please don't tell him to "put up or shut up," because if he does the latter we'll be forever deprived of his pearls of unspecific wisdom-- and if he does the former all we'll have is a sequel to the Canon Cat.

In this week's installment of Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day, we give you-- Apeman Logic! Well, technically, we don't give it to you; Steve Ballmer does. But we're pleased as punch to act as the conduit linking you up to the finest rational thinking a rudimentary ganglionic brain-like mass of greyish matter can squeeze out without causing injury to the host. Are you ready, kids? Then strap yourselves in for a wild ride!

Here's the set-up: Steve Ballmer is speaking to a pack of tech execs at a conference last week, and somehow he gets onto the subject of software piracy, which he claims is a bigger headache to him than Linux, security holes, and tying his own shoes combined. Piracy, as you know, runs rampant in so-called "emerging countries" because people barely have enough money for the computers, let alone this invisible, intangible stuff you add to them to make them do things. Luckily for them, unlike hardware, software is infinitely replicable at no physical cost, so they copy the software ad infinitum and everybody lives happily ever after-- except for the software developers, of course.

So what's the solution? Stand back, kids, because Ballmer had an epiphany, and the first three rows may get wet: since people copy software because they spend all their available money on the hardware, all we need to end piracy overseas is (drum roll please) really cheap computers. How cheap? Try $100 cheap. Saith the Ballmer, "there has to be... a $100 computer to go down-market in some of these countries." Because if people can pay $100 instead of $400 for the hardware, then they'll have $300 left over, which they'll gladly give to Microsoft for the privilege of running Windows and Office. They certainly wouldn't pocket the cash and pirate the software anyway.

Meanwhile, what manufacturer is going to produce a PC capable of running current versions of Windows-- even cut-down ones-- that it can sell for $99 apiece without going broke in twelve minutes? Suppose Microsoft is volunteering? It's not totally out of the question, we suppose; the Xbox is close in specs and price at $149.99, although Microsoft takes a serious bath on each unit sold in hopes of making the money back on game sales. So far it hasn't worked; last quarter, the Xbox's division's operating loss "shrank by 47 percent" since last year, but it's still a loss. (We're not going to dig too deeply, but the loss for fiscal 2004 was apparently $1.2 billion, "slightly larger than its loss in the previous year." Must be nice to have pockets that deep just to try to crush a competitor.) So if Microsoft did go the $100 PC route, it'd be losing real money on hardware in hopes of losing less potential money on software; now that's a strategy for the ages.

Oh, wait-- never mind. Apparently it doesn't matter what poor sap would make these $100 computers just to pad Microsoft's software revenue, because the Ballmer then pointed out that poor people aren't blowing $400 on the hardware in the first place: "PCs are not selling to the lower end of the population in China and India. People buying machines are relatively affluent." So if the poor people don't have computers, it sounds just a leetle unlikely to us that they're pirating software. And if it's the richer people who are pirating warez for their computers, how exactly does a $100 computer help? Answer: it doesn't. The Man with the Plan says: "So... should the prices be lower? Not really. Until government and situational factors reduce piracy... those people... don't pay."

So why was he blathering on about $100 PCs in the first place? We have no idea. Don't think about it too hard; just smile and back away slowly.