As the duty Latinist in this conference, it is my duty to update the terminology. The word virus, slime, not to be confused with forms of vir, male human, is defective. It has no plural forms. Another defective noun, but with more forms, is faex, whose plural, faeces is often used in the late form, feces. Have never seen fex as the singular. The Romans didn't see any need for a plural of virus -- it was all slime, poison, or what we now call a virus.
I agree that we'll see more kinds of virus as the writers get tired of playing with MS Windows. What makes writing a Windows virus so easy is Visual Basic and the various scripting languages. We'll see a few script nasties for Linux, too. Unix has some protection that Windoze lacks, particularly ownership and permissions. It is much easier to set up a Linux/Unix sandbox than under Windows. In his current column, John Dvorak wonders if the Klez virus is a prototype for a two component virus, with an apparently harmless first part which sets computers up for the second whose payload would, perhaps, take control of the computer for DoS attacks. Choppy At 02:14 PM 7/4/02 -0500, you wrote: >There is a long standing notion that Unix is immune to virii, which i >think we all know is BS. I think it's a combination of unix users being >just a little too smart to fall for the traditional virus infection >tricks, and the virus writers being just a little too dumb to write a >good unix virus.
