>>since users of Microsoft Word already *have* viruses on their system --
>>W95, W98, Word, Office, etc. :)
>
>I see the smiley, but just have to point out: they're not viruses, because
>they don't replicate themselves. Maybe they'd qualify as trojan horses?
(Pretty much all viruses turn their hosts into trojan horses, right?)
I was referring to the fact that these products manage to insinuate
themselves into standard channels -- like email (SMTP), the web (HTTP),
and so on -- in the "embrace and extend" fashion that results in my
getting ugly-looking "MIME-encoded" emails, mostly from AOL users,
and not being able to access many web sites due to their "viewable
only by MSIE and Netscape" status.
It's a stretch, of course, but the viral nature of that behavior is
that people without the backbone/stubbornness/laziness of someone
like me tend to think "well, I've got to get the same software -- I guess
that makes sense" and help create more copies of the software.
(And, oh, the annoyances of trying to explain to people, who don't
realize they've become such conformists, that "why don't you just switch
to MS products [so I don't have to learn to properly configure *mine*
to play nice with the entire Internet]?" is *not* going to get a
positive response from me!)
Ah, perhaps I can somehow join in and help out convincing thoughtful
people of the joys of properly, and *ethically*, engineered products,
like qmail, which are designed to do one thing very well, instead of
several things adequately so as to capture an audience.
tq vm, (burley)
