[seul-edu] ILuvYou worm, Windows bashing and misc (was answer to David)

[jm <giem@free.fr>]

Hi all,

Dan Kolb wrote:
 >The ILOVEYOU worm. What more can be said for not using a Windows solution?

I know it's off-topic, but the ILOVEYOU worm is more an illustration of people
lacking of any "simple" paranoia (or call it computer common sense) than a 
reason not to use windows.
You click on an attachement, you can potentially harm your computer. Even 
on linux...

>It costs nothing (maybe a couple of dollars for a CD) and you can
>install it on as many computers as you want. Likewise with Sun's
>Staroffice.

Except Staroffice is soooooooooo slow. Make me like word 97.
Use Abiword as a cool Word Processor, (http://www.abisource.com)
Gnumeric as a cool Spreadsheet (http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric/)
and  Magic Point as a "presentation"tool  (http://www.mew.org/mgp/)

or give a try to Koffice http://www.koffice.org/


>It's got almost every programming language you can think of available,
>except fancy GUI ones like Visual Basic. Borland should, however, be
>working on porting Delphi to Linux.

Borland is. It's called Kylix and should be out "soon":
check http://community.borland.com/linux/0,1419,4,00.html

 >"We should be teaching what people will be using in the office." Another
>fallacy. Almost every office uses Win95/98 now. Win95 didn't exist even
>5 years ago. The length of most university courses is 3 or 4 years. So,
>unless you were in the last year(s) of school in 95/96  or didn't go to
>University, chances are you'll be using a different system to the one
>you were taught in school.

Yeah, teach the essence of computing instead of "one instant tool" that 
will be obsolete in a few years is the key of success for computing lesson.

And if you REALLY have to teach MsOffice and Win 9x,
there are still the solution provided by VmWare (www.vmware.com)
that is having a virtual "windows" inside of your linux...
Advantages:
    + all the PC are the sames
    + users can do what they want, next time, you just copy all over again 
the "OS" disk image.

The same solution (unless a bit more "not legal") is available with 
Basilisk for Macintosh
(the legality problem is to get the Rom, since you need ONE real mac for 
every ROM image you use...)  (check 
http://www.uni-mainz.de/~bauec002/B2Main.html for Basilisk)

In the 80s, there were a large number of 'bedroom' programmers coding
>games to sell/give away for their C64s, BBCs, Apples, etc.. At schools
>(at least where I went) they taught programming, and that's what a lot
>of people had to do to get anything interesting out of their computers
>(I had to program from when I got my very first computer, as it didn't
>come with much great software). Now, it seems, schools don't teach
>programming any more, it's only how to use MS Word and MS Excel (and
>perhaps Access).

Well, the things is that in real life, "normal" people (ie the ones that 
doesn't sleep on the keyboard :)) are usually not using programming except 
for some macro works (like in Word, Excel or ILOVEYOU).
So yes, programming is fun, but maybe not everyone needs to be a full C 
/perl hacker...

See the effort of the python community to have python teached to everyone:
http://www.python.org/cp4e/
(and Python is one of the langages you can use to write macro in Gnumeric)


>At home, people don't program any more, they'd rather
>have a game of Unreal Tournament, or similar.
Well, I guess there is still the same number of ppl hacking around,
but since there is much more computers users, it gets diluted.

And may be programming now is a bit more frustrating (in the old day, a 
crappy command line game was FUN... now it's just "what, no 3D acceleration 
? no Dolby Stereo sound... And who cares about a story anyway: people want 
Quake-like, not a game where they should think...)
Plus, if you look at the magazines now available, there are no hacker magazine,
just "consummer" ones.

For example, do you think a game like "Robot Odyssey" could be made today ?
or is it a "too smart" game ?
(http://members.aol.com/Fractal101/odyssey.htm)

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