Schneier on Security

It’s rare to find two people who configure their Macintosh the same way. Some users swear by System 7; others won’t touch it. Some machines run QuickTime; others – The Talking Moose.

For those in charge of hundreds of machines, it’s a potential nightmare. “Trying to manage several hundred Macs is, well, [almost] impossible unless you maintain coherency and consistency across them,” said Roy Roper, assistant director for network information technologies at the School of Life Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“We try to create nearly the same look and feel: utilities, software, network resource access across as many Macs as possible,” said Roper, who has defined a standard set of software for every machine. “We have centralized ordering, configuration, delivery and training. We install everything before the user sees the Mac.”…

San Francisco – When you consider commute hours and the expense of travel, as well as traffic and its accompanying stress and pollution levels, there’s a strong case to be made for telecommuting as beneficial to workers. The advantages for business may be just as compelling.

The Department of Public Works in both San Diego and Los Angeles County reported productivity increases of 34 percent among some telecommuters. Tom Peters devoted an issue of his newsletter On Achieving Excellence to telecommuting. In it he called telecommuting “the ultimate bureaucracy-bashing tool.” He suggested managers seriously consider it because “you can find unexpected labor sources – the handicapped, your own people on sick or maternity leave [who you might otherwise lose], etc. – by allowing them to work at home.”…

Cupertino, Calif. – Programmers will be able to use a new computer language called Dylan to build applications on the Newton Personal Digital Assistants. While this language incorporates numerous advances from the world of academia, many developers wonder how well it will perform in the real world.

Dylan is an object-oriented dynamic language – one that makes it possible to modify programs, at the source-code level, on the fly. (In fact, the name Dylan is short for dynamic language.) It retains much of the basic syntax of LISP, the language from which it is derived, but it offers far more power, its developers say…

If you’re not looking at telecommuting yet, you soon might have to. The 1990 amendments to the Federal Clean Air Act require states to enact strict clean-air policies, and by 1996 all businesses with more than 100 employees at sites classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as “severe” or “extreme” will be required to reduce the number of cars commuting to their locations.

Regulation XV, enforced in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties in California, is the most aggressive air-quality legislation in the world, imposing fines of up to $25,000 a day for violators. In Northern California, the San Francisco Bay area is drafting Rule 13, which promises to be just as stringent…

Observers are predicting a massive increase in the demand for remote LAN access, fueled by the convergence of several trends. High-speed links have become available through standardized, low-cost modems, making it easier to perform complex computer tasks via a dial-in connection. Portable computers are becoming more powerful. And more companies are downsizing, moving applications to personal computers and making LANs a significant part of their computing system.

“As the LAN becomes a central part of the information infrastructure, access to it becomes more important,” said Dan Schwinn, president of networking vendor Shiva Corp. of Cambridge, Mass…

The advantages of computer-aided software engineering tools running over a LAN can be spectacular, according to users, but such Mac-based tools are rare.

For developers on Macs, sharing programming results and communicating with each other is getting easier. CASE analysis, modeling and prototyping are easier when personal computers can share resources as well as merge results. Even code generation can be sped up through multiprocessing. For the most part, LAN-based CASE tools have been limited to networked DOS environments, but they are starting to migrate to the Mac. Here are four:…

Cupertino, Calif.—The Mac developer community has been bubbling with speculations, questions and, in some cases, fear since Apple last month gave its blessing to Symantec Corp.’s Bedrock cross-platform development framework.

Not surprisingly, developers who have followed Apple’s often-repeated advice and adopted its current application framework, MacApp, have the most questions.

“There is a lot of concern” among MacApp developers, said Jeff Alger, a Palo Alto, Calif., consultant and former chairman of the MacApp Developers Association (now MADA). “Apple is being secretive about Bedrock in ways that they haven’t been [with MacApp].”…