> Wow, that's really going to cripple your system isn't it. What are you referring to - the Phage virus? Yep, once you run it, all applications that are in the RAM just stop working - because it overwrites them all. That's one of the reasons why it never became widespread - a virus that immediately kills the host has no chances of surviving. That's true for both computer viruses and for the biological ones. A successful virus needs an incubation time at least as long as the time it needs to spread to a new host.
> I think your flogging a dead horse, the PalmOS is dying whatever > we like to think about it. Yup, that's very likely the case. My reasons for doing what I'm doing are the following: 1) I'm doing it for fun. I recently bought a Tungsten E device for my mother and until I meet her in about a month and give it to her, I get to play with it. I wanted to learn to program for it. The best way to do that is to write a real program for it. And, during the last 17 years, I've been writing mostly anti-virus programs - so this is what I started writing. When it is ready, the company I work for will give it out for free. We don't think that there is any money in it. 2) The virus writers *have* started targeting the mobile devices and the mobile devices with some kind of connection *are* starting to become really widespread (including devices based on PalmOS), so there *is* some chance that we'll start getting lots of viruses for this platform. So, it won't hurt being ready. > MS is gaining ground and PalmOne have failed to release anything > good in a long time. Look at the latest PPC models which have > WiFi, Bluetooth, multiple SD Slots, VGA screens etc etc. Ah, but they have one big flaw - they're running Windoze. :-) OK, just kidding - I do realize that this is actually an advantage for both the users (who are familiar with the Windows user interface) and for the developers (who are used to Windows programming). It's just that Windows (for any hardware platform), well, *sucks*. :-)) On a more serious note, they are still a bit too expensive to become really widespread. The price needs to drop to the $200-$250 range. > Add to this the number of SmartPhones on the market, and it's > going to be an uphill struggle for PalmOS. Going to? It already is. They used to have 80% of the market. They have about 6% now. > Virus writers always target the majority platform, not the > underdog, which Palm is rapidly becoming. Virus writers target any *popular* platform - not necessarily only the majority one. It's still possible that PalmOS becomes popular enough in the smart phone business to catch their notice. But I agree with you that it is becoming unlikely. > They will target PPC and SmartPhones because it's easier to hit > a larger audience. They *already* target Symbian big time. There are just a couple of viruses for PPC - that platform isn't popular enough, because the devices are still rather expensive. Regards, Vesselin -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
