So there's too many people Karma Whoring for 5s and your solution is to raise the bar to 10? Why? To seperate the truelygood whores from the mediocre ones?
I understood the poster's comment to mean that moderators should be given ten moderation points to work with, not that posts should enjoy an upper limit of ten points.
The problem is not the posts that get moderated up, it's the posts that don't and the moderators that blow their load on the first 30 posts.
There should be no negative moderation, it's pointless. Start all posts at zero by default, adding a point or two for merits, then allow the good posts to accumulate positive moderation points.
"Yeah, but what about crappy posts that get moderated up?" Get a clue. A post might get one or two mods you think it doesn't deserve, but if four or five moderators think the post merits a bump, that's a pretty good indication that it deserves the increased exposure.
Dumbass moderators, again (was Re:I give up.)
on
Java Rocks On Linux
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· Score: 2
Add to my list of complaints that dumbass moderators, who have knocked my original post from a +2 to 0 with several "offtopic" mods (shrinking my karma in the process, of course), have seen fit to give MrBogus' post a rating of +4, even though it appears in a thread underneath my post and deals with the same material, which is supposedly offtopic.
I have always expected that if Microsoft were ever to follow through with an Office Linux port, they would bundle it with their own distro with a proprietary window manager and GUI library.
Ostensibly, the wm/GUI would be there to make the port easier, but it could also be used to make it more difficult to use a non-Microsoft distribution.
I used to know a lot of people in college who were fanatical about Ayn Rand. Then they grew up. I've yet to meet a Randite who thought they were anything short of exceptional.
I've read a lot of posts on slashdot and elsewhere from pompous Rand naysayers, who almost always seem compelled to throw in gratuitous ad hominems and a generous sprinkling of "Randite." These posts usually amount to one or two anecdotal references to "people I knew in college." I've read only a few that even attempted a real argument--most attempted to use logic to prove the non-existence of logic.
Real live humans are much more diverse and complex than Rand's caricatures, and the difference really does matter. The simplistic half-solutions offered by Rand share a fatal flaw with earlier simplistic solutions inspired (ironically) by Marx, which is that they work only for cartoon characters. Bill Gates is the closest real-life approximation to a Rand "hero", and I don't think we need more of him.
Rand's fiction is Romantic, and she made no pretense otherwise. Her heroes were intended to present the ideal, not real life.
If you think Bill Gates is anything like one of Rand's heroes then you've missed the point of all her work. If Gates is anything like any of Rand's characters, he's a Peter Keating or Gail Wynand--a "second-hander," not a hero--whose wealth has been created by selling inferior technology with slick marketing and heavy-handed tactics. A monopoly does not an Objectivist hero make.
I'm not saying that some programs you want to run don't work, I'm just saying that sometimes I get tired of having to install forty-eleven new packages just to get a damned ICQ client to run.
Maybe this is part of the reason why viruses find Linux such an inhospitable environment. Most Windows boxes have a common set of code running on them. On a Linux box, a virus can't assume anything--there are many kernel versions, many different shells, mail clients, etc. Libraries vary from machine to machine, if a virus needs a certain lib to work, that lib may not even be installed, or it may be the wrong version.
For what it's worth, if you can't get a package (RPM, whatever) to install because of dependencies, you can always download the source and build the program yourself. Package managers expect to find specific library versions, but the build system included with most GNU and other OSS does a little bit more work to find the libraries the code calls for. Often, when you run the configure script, if you don't have a required library, or if you have the library but it's too old to work, you'll get a nice message explaining that the lib needs to be a certain rev or later, and maybe even a URL for the latest version.
I rarely use RPMs anymore, simply because it's much easier to build the programs I need myself. Try it, you might like it.
Read the whole article, or read it again. On S/390, Linux is a tool that runs in a partition under the native OS. The article isn't advocating ditching VM, he's talking about adding Linux to the S/390's toolset. Need a webserver, DNS, etc? Set up a partition, allocate DASD, copy a new Linux image over, set it up.
As the article states, $400 a seat for mainframe power and reliability is pretty cheap, and you're soon going to see IBM offering end-to-end Linux server solutions, featuring S/390, RS/6000s, PC Servers, and probably AS/400 in the near future (I know there's a third-party port in the works, but IBM will probably beat them to market). IBM shops will be able to come close to Write Once, Run Everywhere, and in the case of S/390, on a machine that almost never falls down and can handle an insane volume of I/O. Don't think that won't appeal to the bean-counters.
Some of the sites that aren't rendering correctly may be using non-standard HTML to make them render correctly on non-standard browsers--IE and Netscape. The goal of Gecko is a high level of standards compliance. When/if mozilla goes for bugwards compatability, the non-standard stuff will begin to render better.
If you want to be standards compliant AND compatible with non-standard implementations, it would seem wise to aim for compliance first, then try to accomodate the broken stuff.
Right you are--I didn't mean to imply that E was part of GNOME, just that E and GNOME may not be the most optimal combination if you're looking for speed. I should have written "...if you're using E..."
FWIW, I'm not slamming Enlightenment--E is what gets folks drooling over my Linux desktop, so I fully intend to maintain my E configuration and keep installing the latest cool E themes and stuff. When I set up my new laptop I'll probably use the same configuration so when I'm out and about I can grab folks' interest with E, then show them how flexible the "Linux GUI" (the term I use for their benefit since they usually assume that every OS has an integrated GUI) can be by switching to sawmill, WM, etc.
I used to hold the same opinion of GNOME, but after updating all the modules to the latest stable versions it became pretty solid.
Part of the problem with GNOME may be Enlightenment as the wm. I love E, don't get me wrong--it's the sexiest wm out there IMO, but it's just too much for my everyday use. I just recently built and installed sawmill, and the result is a smaller, quicker desktop that is very clean and configurable. With E, my 128 meg machine was consitently using about 40 MB swap, with most of that being X. The GUI was syrupy and just didn't feel right (prob. just some stupid configuration decision on my part). With sawmill, I'm using about 5-10 MB swap and everything's snappy. Now if I want to show off to friends, I use E, but when I'm working it's sawmill all the way.
No, the story wasn't ridiculous. The original post and yours both have it wrong. Read it for yourself, it says that of the 63,000 items in the list, 20,000+ (IIRC) were what we would consider bugs, mostly long-forgotten issues, etc., in other words, the result of sloppy programming and project management. The story stated that those list items that weren't bugs were requests for improvements and other feedback items.
Face it, when you make big promises, can't deliver, have to dump a number of promised features because they're impossibly broken, then still deliver late, you're Microsoft.
Not true, you can still buy readers. We bought one a couple of years ago to dump a bunch of Harvard survey cards (uses IBM-style cards with slightly different punch codes) for a customer. Since the automated testing outfits are still using cards that are the same size as the IBM cards, it's an easy mod for the manufacturer to make the optical scanner look for holes, rather than splotches of #2 pencil graphite.
For what it's worth, these cards had been "folded, spindled and mutilated" and we still managed to read them, although some extra effort was required. They had been stored in a sub-tropical climate since the sixties, and several of them were bundled with rubber bands--most of the rubber bands had dissolved and crystalized so that we had to scrape the residue off the outside cards to get them past the key slot on the reader. Overall, I'd say the punched cards survived pretty well, despite having been so poorly treated. They did much better than any oxide-coated media would have.
Expect to see price hikes in other IBM Operating Systems as these get smaller market shares. Who knows, they might even Open Source some of the marginal Operating Systems, like OS/2.
Unless I'm mistaken, IBM can't Open Source OS/2 because Microsoft still have a firm claim on much of the code. A lot of folks have been trying to get them to release the WPS code, but for all I know, it's subject to the same problems as the OS.
What will be interesting to watch is how IBM treat AIX during the next year. If they begin porting all the enterprise goodies to Linux, I expect we'll see the other UNIXs climbing over each other to get their stuff ported. This could be enough to convince Sun to come clean and get serious about Open Source.
Wouldn't you like to be a fly on the wall in Microsoft's board room today?
What bothered some of us...
on
Apocalypse Not
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· Score: 2
I think what bothered some of us was the initial response to our warnings about the problem. Government seemed to respond with a collective shrug at first, the corporate boneheads couldn't grasp it either. We knew that it was a big mess to clean up and that there wasn't time to waste.
I think that if it weren't for the Gary Norths stirring up Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, things might not have been fixed as soon as they were.
Then there is the whole opensource argument that I wont even go into... why should companies opensource their drivers and specs? Do you expect Coca Cola to give you their recipe. No, I think not.
I think ESR has already made a pretty good argument in favor of hardware vendors opening their source and specs (LINK) .
Companies who spend their time replicating other companies' products, there are many, are limited to selling cheap knock-offs. You can't hope to stop them by hiding your specs and driver code, because they'll just hack away until they figure it out on their own, but why should you stop them in the first place? They're exactly where you want them--selling cheap knock-offs of old technology, while you design and market the cutting edge stuff.
The OS that runs on the S/390 supports multiple virtual machines. As I understand it, Linux will run in one or more VM partitions (?)--it will not be the primary OS.
As the article points out--the point of the software is just to alert a security droid that someone is doing something "out of the ordinary." It's up to the droid to stare at the screen for a few seconds to see if mischief is afoot. Having been a security guard when I was a young man, I can tell you that it will probably take more then a blinking red light on a panel to get most guards off their asses.
No doubt, there will be poor implementations and poorly trained security personnel and this will lead to a few circumstances where folks will be collared "because the computer says you're a criminal!" Picky shoppers who like to take time browsing, picking things up and looking them over, etc. will probably be among the first victims. Nevertheless, used properly, this could be a useful tool.
I'm waiting for a handheld implementation--this system, coupled with a voice stress analyzer and an integrated cattle prod would come in very handy when dealing with salesmen. Hmm...I think I just had a great idea for a Springboard module.
The SN may not lead investigators to your printer, but if you're already a suspect and the good, er bad guys (it's so hard to remember which one the cops are these days) have your printer, they can prove that some insidious document was printed on your unit, then all they have to do is try to convince the nice folks on the jury that you were there when the document was printed.
Should we worry that someone has already come up with a universal printer make/model ID that appears on all color copies and that this little detail has remained a secret? How likely is it that ABC Copier Company would say "No" to a court order demanding the name, address, phone number of the customer on the warranty registration for a particular printer?
If I understand the "micropayments" concept, it's a way to whack you with a small charge for every page view. A nickel here for a sports page, a dime there for a web search. A really braindead idea, in my opinion, a relic from the old days.
Some of these corporations just haven't figured out that the Internet is The Great Commoditizer--information has become like network sitcoms, no one's going to pay for the privilege of watching Everybody Loves Raymond ('cept me) but they'll tolerate a few bad TV commercials as long as they have a mute button on their flipper.
No doubt, this is a braindead move on management's part--e-commerce is just an added convenience as far as I'm concerned, and even if I find something on the web I usually buy it at the local brick-n-mortar if possible, especially if it's a big-ticket item that could be damaged in shipping or that I may need to be able to exchange in a hurry without a hassle.
With that said, this move is no violation of First Amendment rights. The First Amendment applies to Congress, not shopping malls.
It would be useful to know how much control the lease agreements give the mall over signs and displays. I'd be willing to bet that the agreements stipulate that the the mall management have to right to veto any signs or displays they don't like.
can opener with small screwdriver 3 mm (also for Philips 2 or 3)
cap lifter with screwdriver 6 mm
wire bender/stripper
reamer/punch
key ring
tweezers
toothpick (Yeah, baby!)
bit key with 5 mm inner hexagonal for the D-SUB push-in connector and 4 mm inner hexagonal to take 4 double-bits: Pozidrive or Philips 0 and 1, bit slotted 4 mm, bit Philips 2, bit Hex 4 mm, bit Torx 8, 10 and 15
swing-out holder
push-action ballpoint pen (ideal for adjusting DIP-switches)
Those of you who think you're going to use these regulations to sock it to your "evil" employer, think again. You're going to pay for the new chairs, the nice monitors, etc., not your employer. Employers consider more than salary or wage when calculating what it costs to employ someone. Things like new chairs, tables and ergonomically-designed keyboards cost money, and those costs are factored against the employee. The higher the cost related to furniture, better equipment, etc., the higher the cost of keeping your ass in the seat. Think about that next time you go to your boss to ask for a raise--he will, I guarantee it.
Either way, no amount of virus protection will stop all virii.
From the davie is a Pedantic Weasel Department:
Found this interesting tidbit yesterday. The plural form of virus is "viruses". viri is the nominative plural form of the Latin vir , which means man. See: http://doriath.perl.com/misc/virus.html
From the referenced URL:
The crucial problem here is that, classically speaking, there appears to be no recorded use of virus in the plural. It was a 2nd declension noun ending in -us, which is rather common, but it was also a neuter, which is rather rare. I could only come up with three such 2nd declension neuters: virus (some poison), pelagus (the sea, usually poetically), and vulgus (the crowd). None appear to admit plurals. Perhaps this is because they are mass nouns, not count nouns. [3]
FWIW, maybe Dell should consider using Linux or BSD boxes to do their installs from now on. No guarantee against transporting infected files, but at least there's a smaller chance (near-zero?) of infection of the actual host machines.
Slashdot Mirror
I understood the poster's comment to mean that moderators should be given ten moderation points to work with, not that posts should enjoy an upper limit of ten points.
The problem is not the posts that get moderated up, it's the posts that don't and the moderators that blow their load on the first 30 posts.
There should be no negative moderation, it's pointless. Start all posts at zero by default, adding a point or two for merits, then allow the good posts to accumulate positive moderation points.
"Yeah, but what about crappy posts that get moderated up?" Get a clue. A post might get one or two mods you think it doesn't deserve, but if four or five moderators think the post merits a bump, that's a pretty good indication that it deserves the increased exposure.
Add to my list of complaints that dumbass moderators, who have knocked my original post from a +2 to 0 with several "offtopic" mods (shrinking my karma in the process, of course), have seen fit to give MrBogus' post a rating of +4, even though it appears in a thread underneath my post and deals with the same material, which is supposedly offtopic.
You can't have it both ways, meatheads.
I have always expected that if Microsoft were ever to follow through with an Office Linux port, they would bundle it with their own distro with a proprietary window manager and GUI library.
Ostensibly, the wm/GUI would be there to make the port easier, but it could also be used to make it more difficult to use a non-Microsoft distribution.
I used to know a lot of people in college who were fanatical about Ayn Rand. Then they grew up. I've yet to meet a Randite who thought they were anything short of exceptional.
I've read a lot of posts on slashdot and elsewhere from pompous Rand naysayers, who almost always seem compelled to throw in gratuitous ad hominems and a generous sprinkling of "Randite." These posts usually amount to one or two anecdotal references to "people I knew in college." I've read only a few that even attempted a real argument--most attempted to use logic to prove the non-existence of logic.
Real live humans are much more diverse and complex than Rand's caricatures, and the difference really does matter. The simplistic half-solutions offered by Rand share a fatal flaw with earlier simplistic solutions inspired (ironically) by Marx, which is that they work only for cartoon characters. Bill Gates is the closest real-life approximation to a Rand "hero", and I don't think we need more of him.
Rand's fiction is Romantic, and she made no pretense otherwise. Her heroes were intended to present the ideal, not real life.
If you think Bill Gates is anything like one of Rand's heroes then you've missed the point of all her work. If Gates is anything like any of Rand's characters, he's a Peter Keating or Gail Wynand--a "second-hander," not a hero--whose wealth has been created by selling inferior technology with slick marketing and heavy-handed tactics. A monopoly does not an Objectivist hero make.
My local PBS station isn't showing it either. Instead, we'll be treated to Adventure Divas - Cuba: Paradox Found . Must see TV! Not.
PBS blows.
I'm not saying that some programs you want to run don't work, I'm just saying that sometimes I get tired of having to install forty-eleven new packages just to get a damned ICQ client to run.
Maybe this is part of the reason why viruses find Linux such an inhospitable environment. Most Windows boxes have a common set of code running on them. On a Linux box, a virus can't assume anything--there are many kernel versions, many different shells, mail clients, etc. Libraries vary from machine to machine, if a virus needs a certain lib to work, that lib may not even be installed, or it may be the wrong version.
For what it's worth, if you can't get a package (RPM, whatever) to install because of dependencies, you can always download the source and build the program yourself. Package managers expect to find specific library versions, but the build system included with most GNU and other OSS does a little bit more work to find the libraries the code calls for. Often, when you run the configure script, if you don't have a required library, or if you have the library but it's too old to work, you'll get a nice message explaining that the lib needs to be a certain rev or later, and maybe even a URL for the latest version.
I rarely use RPMs anymore, simply because it's much easier to build the programs I need myself. Try it, you might like it.
Read the whole article, or read it again. On S/390, Linux is a tool that runs in a partition under the native OS. The article isn't advocating ditching VM, he's talking about adding Linux to the S/390's toolset. Need a webserver, DNS, etc? Set up a partition, allocate DASD, copy a new Linux image over, set it up.
As the article states, $400 a seat for mainframe power and reliability is pretty cheap, and you're soon going to see IBM offering end-to-end Linux server solutions, featuring S/390, RS/6000s, PC Servers, and probably AS/400 in the near future (I know there's a third-party port in the works, but IBM will probably beat them to market). IBM shops will be able to come close to Write Once, Run Everywhere, and in the case of S/390, on a machine that almost never falls down and can handle an insane volume of I/O. Don't think that won't appeal to the bean-counters.
Some of the sites that aren't rendering correctly may be using non-standard HTML to make them render correctly on non-standard browsers--IE and Netscape. The goal of Gecko is a high level of standards compliance. When/if mozilla goes for bugwards compatability, the non-standard stuff will begin to render better.
If you want to be standards compliant AND compatible with non-standard implementations, it would seem wise to aim for compliance first, then try to accomodate the broken stuff.
Right you are--I didn't mean to imply that E was part of GNOME, just that E and GNOME may not be the most optimal combination if you're looking for speed. I should have written "...if you're using E..."
FWIW, I'm not slamming Enlightenment--E is what gets folks drooling over my Linux desktop, so I fully intend to maintain my E configuration and keep installing the latest cool E themes and stuff. When I set up my new laptop I'll probably use the same configuration so when I'm out and about I can grab folks' interest with E, then show them how flexible the "Linux GUI" (the term I use for their benefit since they usually assume that every OS has an integrated GUI) can be by switching to sawmill, WM, etc.
I used to hold the same opinion of GNOME, but after updating all the modules to the latest stable versions it became pretty solid.
Part of the problem with GNOME may be Enlightenment as the wm. I love E, don't get me wrong--it's the sexiest wm out there IMO, but it's just too much for my everyday use. I just recently built and installed sawmill, and the result is a smaller, quicker desktop that is very clean and configurable. With E, my 128 meg machine was consitently using about 40 MB swap, with most of that being X. The GUI was syrupy and just didn't feel right (prob. just some stupid configuration decision on my part). With sawmill, I'm using about 5-10 MB swap and everything's snappy. Now if I want to show off to friends, I use E, but when I'm working it's sawmill all the way.
No, the story wasn't ridiculous. The original post and yours both have it wrong. Read it for yourself, it says that of the 63,000 items in the list, 20,000+ (IIRC) were what we would consider bugs, mostly long-forgotten issues, etc., in other words, the result of sloppy programming and project management. The story stated that those list items that weren't bugs were requests for improvements and other feedback items.
Face it, when you make big promises, can't deliver, have to dump a number of promised features because they're impossibly broken, then still deliver late, you're Microsoft.
Not true, you can still buy readers. We bought one a couple of years ago to dump a bunch of Harvard survey cards (uses IBM-style cards with slightly different punch codes) for a customer. Since the automated testing outfits are still using cards that are the same size as the IBM cards, it's an easy mod for the manufacturer to make the optical scanner look for holes, rather than splotches of #2 pencil graphite.
For what it's worth, these cards had been "folded, spindled and mutilated" and we still managed to read them, although some extra effort was required. They had been stored in a sub-tropical climate since the sixties, and several of them were bundled with rubber bands--most of the rubber bands had dissolved and crystalized so that we had to scrape the residue off the outside cards to get them past the key slot on the reader. Overall, I'd say the punched cards survived pretty well, despite having been so poorly treated. They did much better than any oxide-coated media would have.
Expect to see price hikes in other IBM Operating Systems as these get smaller market shares. Who knows, they might even Open Source some of the marginal Operating Systems, like OS/2.
Unless I'm mistaken, IBM can't Open Source OS/2 because Microsoft still have a firm claim on much of the code. A lot of folks have been trying to get them to release the WPS code, but for all I know, it's subject to the same problems as the OS.
What will be interesting to watch is how IBM treat AIX during the next year. If they begin porting all the enterprise goodies to Linux, I expect we'll see the other UNIXs climbing over each other to get their stuff ported. This could be enough to convince Sun to come clean and get serious about Open Source.
Wouldn't you like to be a fly on the wall in Microsoft's board room today?
I think what bothered some of us was the initial response to our warnings about the problem. Government seemed to respond with a collective shrug at first, the corporate boneheads couldn't grasp it either. We knew that it was a big mess to clean up and that there wasn't time to waste.
I think that if it weren't for the Gary Norths stirring up Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, things might not have been fixed as soon as they were.
Maybe this would help.
Then there is the whole opensource argument that I wont even go into... why should companies opensource their drivers and specs? Do you expect Coca Cola to give you their recipe. No, I think not.
I think ESR has already made a pretty good argument in favor of hardware vendors opening their source and specs (LINK) .
Companies who spend their time replicating other companies' products, there are many, are limited to selling cheap knock-offs. You can't hope to stop them by hiding your specs and driver code, because they'll just hack away until they figure it out on their own, but why should you stop them in the first place? They're exactly where you want them--selling cheap knock-offs of old technology, while you design and market the cutting edge stuff.
The OS that runs on the S/390 supports multiple virtual machines. As I understand it, Linux will run in one or more VM partitions (?)--it will not be the primary OS.
As the article points out--the point of the software is just to alert a security droid that someone is doing something "out of the ordinary." It's up to the droid to stare at the screen for a few seconds to see if mischief is afoot. Having been a security guard when I was a young man, I can tell you that it will probably take more then a blinking red light on a panel to get most guards off their asses.
No doubt, there will be poor implementations and poorly trained security personnel and this will lead to a few circumstances where folks will be collared "because the computer says you're a criminal!" Picky shoppers who like to take time browsing, picking things up and looking them over, etc. will probably be among the first victims. Nevertheless, used properly, this could be a useful tool.
I'm waiting for a handheld implementation--this system, coupled with a voice stress analyzer and an integrated cattle prod would come in very handy when dealing with salesmen. Hmm...I think I just had a great idea for a Springboard module.
The SN may not lead investigators to your printer, but if you're already a suspect and the good, er bad guys (it's so hard to remember which one the cops are these days) have your printer, they can prove that some insidious document was printed on your unit, then all they have to do is try to convince the nice folks on the jury that you were there when the document was printed.
Should we worry that someone has already come up with a universal printer make/model ID that appears on all color copies and that this little detail has remained a secret? How likely is it that ABC Copier Company would say "No" to a court order demanding the name, address, phone number of the customer on the warranty registration for a particular printer?
If I understand the "micropayments" concept, it's a way to whack you with a small charge for every page view. A nickel here for a sports page, a dime there for a web search. A really braindead idea, in my opinion, a relic from the old days.
Some of these corporations just haven't figured out that the Internet is The Great Commoditizer--information has become like network sitcoms, no one's going to pay for the privilege of watching Everybody Loves Raymond ('cept me) but they'll tolerate a few bad TV commercials as long as they have a mute button on their flipper.
No doubt, this is a braindead move on management's part--e-commerce is just an added convenience as far as I'm concerned, and even if I find something on the web I usually buy it at the local brick-n-mortar if possible, especially if it's a big-ticket item that could be damaged in shipping or that I may need to be able to exchange in a hurry without a hassle.
With that said, this move is no violation of First Amendment rights. The First Amendment applies to Congress, not shopping malls.
It would be useful to know how much control the lease agreements give the mall over signs and displays. I'd be willing to bet that the agreements stipulate that the the mall management have to right to veto any signs or displays they don't like.
The slashdot article: http://slashdot.org/articles/99 /10/07/1442218.shtml
Features:
See the Cybertool.
Corrado Cutlery on Yahoo has the Cybertool for $60.00 US + shipping:
http://store.yahoo.com/corra docutlery/cybertool34.html
Those of you who think you're going to use these regulations to sock it to your "evil" employer, think again. You're going to pay for the new chairs, the nice monitors, etc., not your employer. Employers consider more than salary or wage when calculating what it costs to employ someone. Things like new chairs, tables and ergonomically-designed keyboards cost money, and those costs are factored against the employee. The higher the cost related to furniture, better equipment, etc., the higher the cost of keeping your ass in the seat. Think about that next time you go to your boss to ask for a raise--he will, I guarantee it.
Either way, no amount of virus protection will stop all virii.
From the davie is a Pedantic Weasel Department:
Found this interesting tidbit yesterday. The plural form of virus is "viruses". viri is the nominative plural form of the Latin vir , which means man. See: http://doriath.perl.com/misc/virus.html
From the referenced URL:
FWIW, maybe Dell should consider using Linux or BSD boxes to do their installs from now on. No guarantee against transporting infected files, but at least there's a smaller chance (near-zero?) of infection of the actual host machines.