From The Sarasota Herald-Tribune website:
A computer virus crippled parts of the Herald-Tribune’s production equipment Thursday night, forcing the newspaper to print Friday’s editions without several of its local news, sports and editorial pages. The technical problems also caused papers to be delivered late.
We apologize to our readers and advertisers. Our technicians are working diligently to fix the problems that the virus attack created and to ensure that they are not repeated.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “No Squirt For You” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: Their technicians are going to ensure that virus attacks are not going to be repeated? What are they doing, upgrading to Apple Macs?
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I had a virus once.
I work for a newspaper company. Everything is Macintosh…(well…we have two PC’s for the accounting department)…While there are little problems …it’s usually nothing big…It just works.
It is nice being on the virus-free end of things!
Serves them right, IMO.
Use Windows PCs in a production environment connected to the internet, and you frankly get what you deserve.
I should add that the reason you deserve that is you should know better, it’s not like the problems with Windows PCs and security issues (ie viruses, worms, etc) is not well known and well documented.
I think once they Amp up their use of Macs they will be on Par
Use Windows PCs in a production environment connected to the internet, and you frankly get what you deserve.
What’s really scary is all the banks that handle the accounts with PC’s using Internet Explorer on the same machine.
I told my bank I only want two accounts (with little funds) to be accessed by ATM/bank online services. The rest of my accounts I wanted my mug shot used as verification for any access/transfer, so I would have to appear in person to access these accounts. I use a small balance debit card online.
This way if any of my large funds are stolen, it’s completely the banks fault.
Compartmentalized security. Use it. And use Mac’s too.
virii.virii.virii…
As I’ve mentioned before, the US Navy supposedly uses a “hardened” version of Doze for all of its warship’s on-board combat information centers. (garbage in, missiles out?) Now THAT’S scary.
I’m sorry, but they should know better. Way better.
Ha-Ha!
Artist for 24 years…
Adobe Illustrator 1.1, photoshop later, both from the start…
From hand cut film and photo-electronic typesetting to the Apple Mac…
Only an idiot (or low cost bean counter management) would put a graphics production department
on Non-Apple Mac machines.
You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you PLAN and pay for!
Chasing low cost is NOT a PLAN it is a personal/professional weakness!
Wait…Here’s my surprised look… : o
TowerTone:
P.S. Have you guessed the others?
This sort of thing happens regularly in daily newspapers across the country. Usually, it is the newsroom PCs running Windows XP, Windows 2000, or Windows NT that grind to a halt from viruses, worms or spyware. Often, it is the e-mail systems that go down, or cause the problems. So, the computers all must be shut down and the reporters and word editors must stop working, sometimes for hours. This happens a couple of times each year at The Sacramento Bee, for instance.
Newspaper publishers are notoriously frugal and back in the late 80’s, many installed their first, PC-based publishing systems using the cheapest Windows-based desktops they could find, because they were less expensive than Macs. Of course, the photo and art departments (most of which are Mac-based) usually remain unaffected, but only because many graphics department heads held their ground and refused to move to Windows back in those days. At the time, Windows just wasn’t up to the task of professional color publishing. This type of short-sighted decision-making is precisely why newspapers are losing readership to the Internet, another historical sfhift that industry executives missed or ignored until it was too late.
Aw Tex you didn’t pull the old Illustrator 88 out of the hat? I’ve been doing this as long as you and agree there is no way I would do any graphics for print on a PC with widows..
I also work for a newspaper…. total Mac environment, except for the one Windoze machine for Accounting.
Accounting person would love to go Mac, but the software she uses won’t allow for it… poor girl! LOL!
Never had a virus, never had any problems whatsoever…. IT JUST WORKS!
Can it be? Is Ampar stalking these pages once again? This site used to be his playground, and I miss his (presumably a he) sharp and twisted wit.
I also had a virus once. I also had a PC once. Coincidence?
Illustrator 88 on a Mac eh?
First company I worked for in 1984 had Linotype terminals spooling out paper tape which was run through the imagesetter to output on bromide paper.
Then in late 1984/early 1985 we got three Xenotron XVC 3 and 4s terminals (FormsMaster/AdMaster and ArtMaster stations) with A0 sized graphic tablets, a flatbed scanner (B&W only, with avacuum pump baseplate) and a Lasercomp MK.IIi imagesetter. Cost about £500,000 at the time.
In early 1985 we got a Mac Classic (or something?) in to assess if we could use it for anything, but it was too small and underpowered at the time.
You could probably get the Mac equivilant of the Xenotron system for about £15,000-20,000 today.
It wasn’t more than a year or two ago that the local schools served by this paper were dumping Macs for PCs and the reasoning was that they wanted the kids to use the computer most used in the workplace. The paper thought it was a fine idea. How about a field trip to the non-functional local paper that is stupid enough to put mission critical computing on the least stable and secure OS ever sold in the commercial market? That would be an education in itself.
There are several Mac based newspapers that I know of including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I worked there and I had a close relative that just retired. Obviously, they enjoy a virus-free environment. Some get it, others suffer needlessly. What a shame.
aka Christian: I’ll pass along your compliment to him. To wit, thanks.
Don’t blame the virus, blame the OS. Would you blame a pathogen for infecting your body if you ingested products that destroyed your immune system?
I worked for the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi, and it had not missed a delivery since the Civil War. What did it run on? Solaris was the backbone and Windows for word processing and Quark, and Macs for advertising and photos. With Windows in such a minor role (using a proprietary pagination system running on Solaris) things went well most of the time. And whent here were glitches, it was either Windows, or Windows interacting with another OS that caused the problem.
We’ve run a 40 computer publishing dept and started with Macs in 1985 with just a few.
In ALL those years. We had ONE worm come in on a Zip disk from a printer in OS9. Easily removed, only hit 2 comptuers.
Other than that OS9 thing we’ve had zero—yes ZERO compromised, infected, whatever systems. Even home computeres running NO protection at all. Nothing in OSX.