[balug-talk] Good Letter in San Francisco Chronicle Today

[Bill Kendrick]

On Mon, Oct 09, 2006 at 03:32:27PM -0700, Jeffrey Siegal wrote:
<snip>
> (Not to mention viruses, crashes, filesystem corruption, etc. that are
> a really, really big problem for Windows 95, even when compared to new
> versions of Windows.)

What the heck are you talking about, "new versions?"

Oh... right:

  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5414502.stm

    "If every hour a burglar turned up at your house and rattled the
    locks on the doors and windows to see if he could get in, you might
    consider moving to a safer neighbourhood. And while that may not be
    happening to your home, it probably is happening to any PC you connect
    to the net. ... When we put this machine online it was, on average,
    hit by a potential security assault every 15 minutes. None of these
    attacks were solicited, merely putting the machine online was enough
    to attract them. The fastest an attack struck was mere
    seconds... Often once a machine has fallen under someone else's
    control, a keylogger will be installed to capture information about
    everything that the real owner does -- such as login to their online
    bank account."

;^D


> Second of all, when someone is processing a towed car or a parking  
> ticket, they're interacting with the (user interface component of)  
> the operating system at all.  They're using some kind of custom  
> application, generally a pretty thin layer on top of a database.  It  
> makes no different in that case what operating system their data  
> entry station happens to be using.

I remember how mind-boggling it was to see all of the brand-new shiny
expensive iMacs at UC Davis's student medical center... considering the
ONLY app they were running was some kind of ANSI-like terminal emulator.

YIKES. :^(

-- 
-bill!
bill at newbreedsoftware.com
http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/