PS I don't think this has anything to do with Rendezvous.

It would be more accurate to say that port 548 is AFP (the appletalk filing protocol) over TCP. AppleShare is an old term that refers to the sharing servers that existed prior to personal file sharing, and is basically deprecated. AFP refers to the low-level protocol itself.

AppleTalk historically can refer to either the family of protocols or to DDP (datagram delivery protocol) that is used for non-TCP AppleTalk communication. In the context of pretty much everything but the network pane in Mac OS X, AppleTalk refers to the protocol family. In that single case, it refers to DDP binding to a particular interface, and the less-descriptive use of the word "AppleTalk" is retained for historical reasons to avoid confusion, AFAIK.

In other words, you're both right, kind-of.

so your dad's mac is visible to his neighbour - big deal. assuming it's set up using the default permisions all your neighbour will be able to do is log in as a guest and drop files into his drop box. (/Users/${yrdad}/Public/Drop\ Box/) - now sure the neighbour could start filling that drop box with p0rn or whatever but if that'sa real concern then change the perms on the drop box. on the other hand yr dad could just be a good neigbour and make a shared volume of system upgrades, has equiv access to the neighbours drop box and they can both share itunes/ichat/iconquor/etc etc and get the some benefit out of having nice seamless integration with the neighbour. for what it's worth i always leave a "whoseMacIsThis.txt" file in my drop box so strays who happen to wander into my mac can quickly work out who i am and contact me if needs be.

on the topic of open macs hwoever, if you happen to be in central london someday with some spare time, just sit down at bar italia on frith street soho, pop on yr wifi and see how many drop boxes you can visit. i found at least 5 open wifi networks and each one of those exposed lots of macs. didn't find any ichat users tho... but plenty of rendesvous (or liberty connector as i hear you merkins prefer nowadays) shared web sites (99% default index pages).

oh and if you really wanna get into closed wifi networks remeber there is always KisMAC [versiontracker.com].

enjoy

At work and at school, I'm surrounded by new mac users. I start to wonder if to make the stats work out, there are huge swaths of the country where no one buys macs at all.

I'd say in the last year, 10 people I know have switched to mac, and none of the mac users have switched away from it. Almost everyone I know uses a mac as their main computer. Primarily they seem to be motivated by reason 2, with a handful of technical people motivated by reason 3. Also, everyone loves the design of the portables and the iPod integration w/ iTunes.

Gropo's dad again. The earlier mail got truncated, so you can see how my antediluvian geekness has deteriorated. Don't know what happened to it (the mail that is). I was also unable to establish an account on this site (a further measure of my ineptness).

The reason my computer showed up next door was due to the LAN created by my (cable) ISP. I share this with the neighbor. My computer was identified as "my-names-computer", so it is no mystery how my neighbor recognized it.

He is a dentist and even less Mac knowledgeable than I, but he knows how to dial the phone, so he gave me a call.

My latest problem is that Mail doesn't seem to allow me to set up an account that uses one site for sending (my cable isp) and another for receiving (another POP server). Outlook express was quite happy with this arrangement ,but it is not obvious how to accomplish this using the control panels for Network setup and/or Mail Account setup.

Thanks for all the suggestions for resolving my other problem. I changed the "name" of my computer and turned on the firewall, so I feel relatively secure here in my bucolic surroundings.