My PLplot testing effort with Wine has clearly benefited from the Wine
developer philosophy that _any_ difference from Microsoft Windows
behaviour is a Wine bug.  But that philosophy does extend
uncomfortably far. For example, see
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/zerowine-tryout/index.php?title=VirusDB
which keeps track of which Windows viruses "work" properly on Wine.

I was first amused, then appalled by this work, but my final attitude
was accepting because indeed it is not Wine developer's job to
implement a more comprehensive security model for Microsoft Windows.
Instead, they focus on mimicking Windows exactly including its bad
current security model.  Of course, if/when that security model is
improved by Microsoft, I am sure the Wine developers would be more
than happy to update Wine accordingly.

Meanwhile, those like me who run Wine should be just as cautious as
Microsoft Windows users concerning the sources of the downloaded
Windows apps that we run.  For example, the above URL came up during
the discussion of a sad tale on the Wine development list where a user
had inadvertently been running a virus-infected app on Wine with no
consequences until a Wine update from Ubuntu.  That update improved
Wine compatibility with Windows so much that the virus started to
work, and he ended up infecting all Windows machines on his network
with the virus!

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________

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