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Technology Stocks : LINUX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: g_m10 who wrote (664)	12/1/1998 12:11:00 AM
From: SteveG	Respond to of 2615

Linux Telephony (under construction and looking for contributions): linuxtelephony.org

To: g_m10 who wrote (664)	12/1/1998 8:08:00 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2615

Confirms my suspicions that B. Gates and company are the writers of this software worm. Early in his career Gates campaigned against software piracy and free software. In the eighties there was period where every software manufacturer complained about software cloning in India and other places. Lotus would say they only had market penetration of 200,000 items and them the pirates would take over and sales would drop like a stone. Then out of the blue, 5 years into the PC's history came attacks against the PC's system in the form of rapidly multiplying viruses. Then shrink wrapped sales leapt ahead. People shunned disk from all kinds of people. FUD had gripped the software world. Where did these viruses come from? To write a virus you have to have intimate knowledge of an undocumented program, DOS. Viruses are not simple programming. They imply a highly technical knowledge of the disk operating system of a computer. They have to be stealth code that evades easy detection by the OS. In other words goons don't write this stuff, pro programmer or people at that level do. So who? Tech college kids? 2nd year programming students? That is where the finger points? Why would the Pakistani Brain Virus have come from Pakistan where pirate software was an industry? I don't think so. Everything about college kids I know and knew tells me two things.. their programming skills were primitive. For the most part they knew squat about OS's. And they had zero interest in tearing them apart and killing an industry they might depend on to get term projects done or kill the industry that allowed them to buy software more cheaply. Doesn't make any sense. People do not routinely shoot themselves in the butt. So who had the skills and who had the interest and above all the money at stake to create these overrated monsters? Electronic Freedom Foundation? I say follow the money trail. The only people to benefit from Viruses were Lotus and Micorsoft. And they said scant about them. MS had the weakest slackest lagging-ist virus protection. Why? Did they know something? Once I wandered into a chain computer store and started reading a technical product advisory sheet. It was about disabling certain viruses. This was about 1985. A salesman rushed out and snatched the book from my hand and told me I should not be reading it! Strange. California has a new software industry in rip-offs that has resurged. I don't like software piracy as I am a programmer. And I think free software has limited life span too. I dislike overpriced vapourware that is unsupported after scant months too. But why this new resurgence of piracy? I not MS has taken to after the fact patches of "bugs" in software. Obviously a strategy to prevent this sort of thing. If there software was more bug free, cheaper, had less feature bloat, more support and better manuals this would not be necessary. EC<:-}