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Technology Stocks : Red Hat Software Inc. (Nasdq-RHAT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (1522)	11/8/2000 11:49:00 AM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 1794

The numbers viruses references to Windows is from data fellows. The Linux virus reference is from a Linux programmer. He was referring to Melissa and the like. But I have seen that in the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) too. I don't have an exact authority, sorry. The process of file/program executiuon is different in Linux and so is the program delivery. i.e. source code. I suppose it would be possible to write a predatory program for Linux but to alter the root filesystem it would have to be root owned. This makes it much harder to get past a savvy user. With source code it would not be too long before some code cowboy would discover its innards. Somehow viruses that reveal their source code do not have the same cachet. I am not sure on boot sector or partition table destroyers as to whether a program can alter them under Linux with impugnity. A user program would have problems but a root program perhaps could do what it wanted. Trashing user space would appear to be possible, but backup would get around that. Writing a web page (how did you figure out that was I? come one!) with all sorts of gifs is expensive in time to write and to load. Some kind of idea separation could be used. I avoided soft backgrounds but went to offwhite text to reduce glare. All text and not frames was for speed loading. Bad thing is colour to links for all black background as it is netscape specific circa 1997. I don't know if IE has adopted that stuff! (vlink, link color). I still think web pages on the net should be simple and clean. GIFS where gifs are the messages. Text where it is paramount. Background is important and colour helps though. Some graphical web pages are good. Others like many company grafik logo ad-heavy pages suck. You can tell that non-verbal grafik types designed them. Links are not self- explanatory. No suggestive indexes. Trying to sell you and lead you. Can't find eff all. the more the company thinks it is some BIZ ENTERPRISE the sillier and more INFORMATION OPAQUE their website gets. You know the blank logo dominated page with CHANNELS, PARTNERS and PRODUCTS as their only links. Where is the beef? is the cry. When are they gonna have a links: "How the CRAP this company foists on the public ACTUALLY WORKS and HOW to FIX it. THE COMPLETE REFERENCE and IT'S ALPHABETICALLY INDEXED, CLICK HERE. IF YOU WANT TO SEARCH SOME PIECE OF JUNK WE HAD MADE IN A CHINESE PRISON CAMP TEN YEARS AGO BY WEN FONG, WHO SPIT ON THE SIDEWALK IN CANTON ON JULY 10 1973, YOU CAN ENTER THE ACTUAL PRODUCT NAME OR (GASP!) PART OF THE MODEL NUMBER AND OUR 2000 HORSEPOWER SEARCH ENGINE WILL ACTUALLY FIND THE PRODUCT REFERENCE IN THE FIRST FIND, AS THE MAILROOM GUY THOUGHT TO HAVE THEM INDEXED THAT WAY IN A DATABASE, AND BEFORE WE COULD FIGURE OUT A WAY TO REMOVE THE CODE, IT GOT ON THE NET. " If your blood pressure rises some one will phone you" If people wrote books like people designed web pages no one would ever learn to read. E-bay's home web page is straight html, no Java. Smart. It is a trifle large. I would make it 80K max to get in. Straight text and a little bit of colour, some simple bar colour gifs and one or two logos. Until the web gets a lot faster and animated pages of 1 meg are trivial, I would stay away from special effects except where it is what you want to show per se. (Daniel Laliberte's HypreNews is an example of how to design a web page info site with mini gifs. hypernews.org I wanted a separate color area for different paragraphs and to index the ideas in columns like an encyclopaedia. In order to add stuff in order I would have to write a program to make and break the database in linked list fashion. Lead in to text suffers a bit here. It is not like a book. You may lose the surfer. Separate backgrounds per paragraph without frames or spearate pages is hard to do. I will figure its somehow. If you go to frames a guy cannot link the page position. netlinux.dynip.com EC<:-}