On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 02:56:33PM -0400, [email protected] wrote: > On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 02:00:19PM -0400, Mark Wallace wrote: > > Buying Microsoft won't get you fired until you get a virus into your > > mainframe. My nephew runs the computer systems for a university and > > they had a lot of data wiped out and oh, brother! > > Care to try again? > > Mainframes don't run windows. > > They also don't run intel processors. > > There is no virus which windows could "get onto a mainframe". > > -m
Long ago I read about a low-level virus (probably a boot-sector virus) that was designed to be "non damaging" on the intended microcomputer platform, but which had unintended damaging consequences when executed on a mainframe. [There was no discussion about how the virus got onto the mainframe, though.] The reason the same virus was damaging on the mainframe supposedly had to do with the difference in how the mainframe interpreted the assembly instructions. The author was intending to indicate that writing even a seemingly undamaging virus could have unintended consequences because it is impossible to know every place that the code could execute. I've never seen an actual instance of such a thing happening in practice, and I doubt I ever will, but it stuck in my mind as an interesting quirk to contemplate. -- Chris Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Aug 4 - Samba Sep 1 - BOINC Oct 6 - Creating Firefox Extensions
