Yeah, I see the kind of thing you're getting at. Like I say, there are several systems that can do this sort of thing already. I'm thinking primarily of GGI, but AVISynth is Windows software that can do this sort of thing too.
There don't seem to be any real standards for this, unless you consider Window's DirectShow filters, which can kind-of do this sort of thing, and you can use AVISynth as a scripting language for them, I think.
The moderators are hoping he'll preempt everyone else who was going to drag those arguments out. Of course, it won't work, the people who always drag the same arguments out again don't actually read what anyone else has said...
Its a reference to the fact that the bitmapped fonts are only available in those resolutions and might have to be scaled for other ones. Chances are, you aren't actually using any bitmapped fonts any more (most modern apps don't bother, the only one I ever use that does is xterm), so it shouldn't actually affect you. Give it a go and see.
How does not doing a thing first suddenly equal to "light years behind"?
Well, I guess not doing something first means doing it (at least) second, at which point for the period of time between the first person doing it and the second (or whatever) they will be behind.
I don't know about the original poster, but I don't have that much video memory. 16Mb is, I think, about average these days. Many people still only have 8.
X already supports funny shaped windows. Have you never run xeyes?
The only problem with it is that almost all toolkits other than Xlib don't actually support it, so you have to hack around at a low level to use it, but its there, and if toolkit implementors bothered, it would probably become easy to use, too:-)
And then we can start hoping for something similar to the venerable pipe, but allowing easy use for graphical / media components!
You mean some kind of graphical pipeline, where one application transforms the graphical output of another one, and so on? There are graphic libraries available today that allow this kind of operation, but generally they don't operate well with GUIs (i.e. they run with one window that all of their output goes to). My only question is: what would you do with it? I can see that an ability to shrink or enlarge a window might be handy, but that's a much simpler task than the possibilities of what you're suggesting allow for...
We returned a new 19" monitor the other day because it was native 1600x1200. The text was unreadable at that resolution and lower resolutions simply looked like crap. We replaced it with a 1280x1024 bit but that is still on the small side.
My experience of running X on 1152x900 on a 17" monitor suggests that this is an appropriate resolution that doesn't cause too much issue; 1280x1024 should be more than fine.
I've driven 17" at 1280x1024, and depending on your applications everything works OK. X is a lot more customisable than MS Windows: you can actually change almost any screen font in use in most situations.
The biggest problem I have with high DPI displays is viewing web sites, which will need browser technology to change in order to be useful.
Longhorn will take a big step forward in this area. They will be rendering the window system and applying it as a texture so that the DPI of the monitor is irrelevant. X will be light years behind if it doesn't do this first.
Scaling text up generally produces hard to read results, so this can't actually be used to solve the web browser problem I mention above. All other problems can be solved in a much simpler way. But it needs application co-operation, which probably means that it won't happen. Oh well. Guess we should be supporting this kind of thing.
(Incidentally, I saw a demo program for one of the many miscellaneous graphics libraries that did something like this; it was an X server that rendered onto the surfaces of a 3D cube you could move, scale and rotate as you wanted. Can't remember where this was, though...)
Eg. Makumba TagLibrary is DB independent - can work with MySQL, Informix, PostgreSQL, DB/2, Quadcap embedded DB...
Sure, it's quite possible to be DB independent if your usage of the DB is as simplistic as Makumba's appears to be (note: I've just had a quick read of the documentation to get a feel for what it does, I haven't actually used it, as its a JSP thing and I tend to avoid JSP whenever possible...)
There doesn't seem to be any usage in this system of the following features, all of which are horribly unstandardized and can cause sever headaches when moving from DB to DB:
- stored procedures (not supported by MySQL yet, many variations in language used to define them elsewhere) - foreign key constraints (i.e. ensuring that a column in inserts or updates references a valid row in another table, also not supported by MySQL) - triggers (hell, I've never used these myself, but folks tell me they can be very handy, and are also not supported by MySQL) - date arithmetic (OK, I'm lacking in experience, but I find it rather tricky to write SQL queries that can cope correctly with automatically producing date ranges that work in both MySQL and MSSQL, the 2 DB servers I do have more than brief experience with).
Another thought. I ain't a lawyer, but I think 'deny' in this context probably doesn't have the same meaning it would have in normal speach; I think it may instead mean 'does not admit'. They've certainly used it this way in other parts of the document, and have explicitly explained that they have done so, usually due to not having adequate information to determine the point one way or the other; this can't be argued in this case, which may be why they haven't said so here, but they're under no obligation to admit P28 even if it is true, I believe.
I am not a lawyer, but it appears to me that SCO has admitted in a court document (quoted above) that they did not accept the GPL
I don't think so. A possible interpretation of your quote is that that at least one of the clauses of paragraph 28 is not true. I quote it again for convenience:
28. SCO accepted the terms of the GPL by modifying and distributing Linux products. By distributing Linux products under the GPL, SCO agreed, among other things, not to assert -- indeed, it is prohibited from asserting -- certain proprietary rights over any programs distributed by SCO under the terms of the GPL. SCO also agreed not to restrict further distribution of any programs distributed by SCO under the terms of the GPL.
First of all, I would say that SCO didn't accept the terms of the GPL by modifying and distributing Linux products. This action was almost certainly performed by employees who do not have the authority to bind the company to a contract like the GPL; the decision to accept the GPL would have to have been made at a management level. This is poor phrasing on behalf of IBM's lawyers. Better would have been 'By modifying and/or distributing Linux products, SCO indicated that they have accepted the terms of the GPL.' This same criticism applies to the second sentence also; the act of distribution is irrelevant, the GPL must have already been accepted before it happened.
Also, if SCO believed when they accepted the GPL that certain portions of it were not enforceable, they may believe that they didn't accept those portions, while accepting the remainder. It is up to a court to decide if this is a reasonable action for them to have taken (at a guess, the court will decide that it wasn't...).
This makes perfect sense for SCO to do. Their whole claim stands on the GPL being invalid.
Actually, SCO could win the IBM case without having the GPL declared invalid.
They could rely on either of these, or many other strategies. This is just what I can think of off the top of my head, I'm sure SCO's lawyers are better at this than I am...
1. IBM's actions were unuathorised right up until the moment somebody from IBM first downloaded the code from SCO. This could have been quite a long time, and they would be entitled for compensation over this time.
2. IBM may have violated non-disclosure agreements, or other contracts, resulting in SCO incurring losses.
The GPL invalid route is only one of many that I'm certain they're pursuing independently.
That wouldn't stand up. Only a very small portion of the class would be responsible for any infringing code that may or may not be in there, hence the court would throw out a countersuit PDQ.
You are not required too accept this licence (they don't, they claim it is contrary to the us constitution, us copyright law yada yada yada).
My understanding of the situation is that they do accept the licence, but claim parts of it are unenforceable. Probably most of the parts that you quoted in your message.
Now, as to why those parts should be unenforceable, that's an entirely separate matter, and yet another one they haven't made clear...
Also, the question of whether or not parts of the license being unenforceable would void the entire license are far from clear.
If GPL holds water, then you may only redistribute under the terms of the GPL. If the GPL doesnt hold water, then I keep copyright.
The GPL is a contract between the copyright owner and anybody who wants to accept its terms. There is a legal concept that if part of a contract is deemed by a court not to be unenforceable, in some (but not all) cases, the remainder of the contract stands with the unenforceable parts removed.
SCO's argument is (probably) that the section of the GPL that states that derivitive versions, etc, must be licensed under the GPL is unenforceable. However, they contend, the section of it that allows you to make copys, derivitives, etc., is a straightforward grant of IP rights and is therefore not unenforceable.
This will probably fail, largely because there is no reason that I have heard of that makes sense of the idea that the licensing restrictions are unenforcable. Also, even if they were, the court would probably deem a modified contract to be unfair on the copyright holder and void the entire thing - but this is not a certainty, it is at the discretion of the court.
Its like a tenant saying to a landlord - "there is a technical mistake which makes the tenancy agreement void - so I can now live in your house rent-free forever.."
Actually, I don't know about the USA, but here in the UK that can almost happen. Not rent free, but if you make a mistake in a fixed-term letting contract you can end up not being able to regain posession at the end of the term...
(NB: IANAL, my legal knowledge is UK specific, but I think what I've said applies in the USA also, our contract laws are broadly similar...)
Furthermore, writing accuented text in plain HTML is such a pain in the ass it's not even funny. You have to type stuff like "é" instead of a sole key on a French keyboard
There are a large number of text editors that will let you just type in what you want, highlight and choose an option (like mine has, 'Text to HTML entities') that will convert anything that needs converting to the right format. Really, there are many tools besides WYSIWYG editors that can solve most of the problems with hand coding HTML.
Isn't the code itself a watermark? Sure, you can change things here and there, but ultimately the similarities are going to be far to much to be pure coincidence.
A lot of code is very generic. Much code could easily be reimplemented as a new implementation that produces almost identical object code just by starting with the same specification and compiling with the same compiler.
How then do you tell if the code was copied?
(Actually, the answer's easier than watermarking - use a non-obvious, unlikely, but otherwise equivalent solution)
The case would have been clouded by the publication of the code in an instructive book.
A programmer could easily hold up a copy of your book, and say "I learnt how to do this kind of thing from this book. It says to do it this way, so I did". This would be a fairly convincing argument.
I'm not saying that Intel were right to take the code, but rather that:
a) the lawyer was probably right not to take the case without an advance payment. I'd say there was at best a 30% chance of winning (based on my experience with how the UK courts handle such things, I have no experience with the US judicial system).
b) Intel probably didn't realise they had done anything wrong. Example code in textbooks is usually considered fair game by most programmers. It is there to be instructive - they were instructed by it.
(nb - I've just realised I might have misunderstood you here, was the code printed in the book as an example, or was it included in a companion CD or something like that? If its just the latter then ignore my comments)
Quite possibly, depending on how long ago this happened. Intel's compilers have only recently become compatible enough with MS's to be able to readily integrate code compiled with one into the other. They probably produced versions for various different compilers, the MS one was the one this guy got hold of.
And I'm not sure what you'd mean by "if it *does* become legal"...surely there'd be no legal problems with running something like this.
Hard to be certain. In order to operate, it would have to create a temporary copy of the program being analysed in memory. This may or may not constitute a copyright infringement, depending on your particular jurisdiction and how the judge / jury / evil fascist dictator (delete as applicable) is feeling on that particular day.
Many countries have specific provisions to allow reverse engineering, which would probably get you off the hook. However, I don't believe the USA is one of them, which is probably the primary area in which the program would be used. If the code is obfuscated in any way and your program strips away this obfuscation, that could be argued to be a circumvention measure of a copyright protection device, thus bringing the DMCA into play.
For example, if the installed fonts on the two computers differ, the document will either look very different, or be unreadable on the recipients machine
If you use embeddable fonts, they can be stored in the document, therefore removing this obstacle.
There is another related one, though: because word is WYSIWYG and uses the currently selected printer's font metrics to determine page layout, changing the type of printer you have selected can radically alter the layout of the document.
You are still missing the point. "[A] language that supported more advanced variable manipulations than the shell" - such as perl - still has to do the same stuff. It has to execute exactly the same instructions, and it has to do that whether or not it starts a new process. If starting a process has serious overheads, then that is a fundamental problem at the OS level - one would expect that the kernel would have the absolute best task-scheduling and resource-apportioning; and if some other application that needs to do these things managed to do so better than the kernel, then the kernel would get updated to reflect the state of the art.
I don't think I am missing the point - it doesn't matter whether the ability to perform things like regular expression search and replace are performed by an external program (e.g. sed) or by an object (eg a string manipulation object) that is loaded from a libary.
And starting a new process is an inherently more complicated and slower operation than loading a library and calling some functions in it.
I'm not arguing that all software should do everything itself. I'm arguing that, fundamentally, while Windows and Unix take different approaches, those approaches are equivalent. The languages provided by windows scripting host are not actually that much more complicated than the Unix shells. They are slightly harder to parse, and they have garbage collected object oriented variables, but above that, there is little difference. And I haven't heard of any of those scripting languages failing in these areas. Yes, they are more complex, but that complexity is well within the bounds of what is acceptable for 99.9% of uses.
And note that these languages are actually much simpler than PERL, because they do not, in general, provide their own library of functions beyond the very simple, but use external, independent objects to provide most functions. PERL is a do-everything tool, in many ways. WSH is a tool to allow the programmer to put external objects together, like the Unix shell, just slightly more advanced.
Theres an API that loads you default virus scanner to examine the contents of the document after it has been decrypted.
Yeah, but what about server side scanning? That's the only effective way to prevent viruses from being run. There are plenty of users out there who will ignore their desktop virus warning. "Oh, there's a virus in the document. But I really need to know what's in it, so I'll just look at it quickly...", or whatever...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I see the kind of thing you're getting at. Like I say, there are several systems that can do this sort of thing already. I'm thinking primarily of GGI, but AVISynth is Windows software that can do this sort of thing too.
There don't seem to be any real standards for this, unless you consider Window's DirectShow filters, which can kind-of do this sort of thing, and you can use AVISynth as a scripting language for them, I think.
The moderators are hoping he'll preempt everyone else who was going to drag those arguments out. Of course, it won't work, the people who always drag the same arguments out again don't actually read what anyone else has said...
Its a reference to the fact that the bitmapped fonts are only available in those resolutions and might have to be scaled for other ones. Chances are, you aren't actually using any bitmapped fonts any more (most modern apps don't bother, the only one I ever use that does is xterm), so it shouldn't actually affect you. Give it a go and see.
How does not doing a thing first suddenly equal to "light years behind"?
Well, I guess not doing something first means doing it (at least) second, at which point for the period of time between the first person doing it and the second (or whatever) they will be behind.
Not ultimately clear, but I got what he meant.
I don't know about the original poster, but I don't have that much video memory. 16Mb is, I think, about average these days. Many people still only have 8.
X already supports funny shaped windows. Have you never run xeyes?
:-)
The only problem with it is that almost all toolkits other than Xlib don't actually support it, so you have to hack around at a low level to use it, but its there, and if toolkit implementors bothered, it would probably become easy to use, too
And then we can start hoping for something similar to the venerable pipe, but allowing easy use for graphical / media components!
You mean some kind of graphical pipeline, where one application transforms the graphical output of another one, and so on? There are graphic libraries available today that allow this kind of operation, but generally they don't operate well with GUIs (i.e. they run with one window that all of their output goes to). My only question is: what would you do with it? I can see that an ability to shrink or enlarge a window might be handy, but that's a much simpler task than the possibilities of what you're suggesting allow for...
We returned a new 19" monitor the other day because it was native 1600x1200. The text was unreadable at that resolution and lower resolutions simply looked like crap. We replaced it with a 1280x1024 bit but that is still on the small side.
My experience of running X on 1152x900 on a 17" monitor suggests that this is an appropriate resolution that doesn't cause too much issue; 1280x1024 should be more than fine.
I've driven 17" at 1280x1024, and depending on your applications everything works OK. X is a lot more customisable than MS Windows: you can actually change almost any screen font in use in most situations.
The biggest problem I have with high DPI displays is viewing web sites, which will need browser technology to change in order to be useful.
Longhorn will take a big step forward in this area. They will be rendering the window system and applying it as a texture so that the DPI of the monitor is irrelevant. X will be light years behind if it doesn't do this first.
Scaling text up generally produces hard to read results, so this can't actually be used to solve the web browser problem I mention above. All other problems can be solved in a much simpler way. But it needs application co-operation, which probably means that it won't happen. Oh well. Guess we should be supporting this kind of thing.
(Incidentally, I saw a demo program for one of the many miscellaneous graphics libraries that did something like this; it was an X server that rendered onto the surfaces of a 3D cube you could move, scale and rotate as you wanted. Can't remember where this was, though...)
Even better, make one side of the phone all display, and put a keypad on the other side.
That's a daft idea. How would you see the keys and what you're typeing at the same time?
Nah, I'd go with a chord keyboard. Might take a while to learn, but they are really nifty once you get going with them.
The only way all the other companies would be able to compete against Microsoft Office is to adopt a common document standard
I think they have. It's called 'MS Word Document', every office app I've used in the last few years supports it.
Eg. Makumba TagLibrary is DB independent - can work with MySQL, Informix, PostgreSQL, DB/2, Quadcap embedded DB...
Sure, it's quite possible to be DB independent if your usage of the DB is as simplistic as Makumba's appears to be (note: I've just had a quick read of the documentation to get a feel for what it does, I haven't actually used it, as its a JSP thing and I tend to avoid JSP whenever possible...)
There doesn't seem to be any usage in this system of the following features, all of which are horribly unstandardized and can cause sever headaches when moving from DB to DB:
- stored procedures (not supported by MySQL yet, many variations in language used to define them elsewhere)
- foreign key constraints (i.e. ensuring that a column in inserts or updates references a valid row in another table, also not supported by MySQL)
- triggers (hell, I've never used these myself, but folks tell me they can be very handy, and are also not supported by MySQL)
- date arithmetic (OK, I'm lacking in experience, but I find it rather tricky to write SQL queries that can cope correctly with automatically producing date ranges that work in both MySQL and MSSQL, the 2 DB servers I do have more than brief experience with).
Another thought. I ain't a lawyer, but I think 'deny' in this context probably doesn't have the same meaning it would have in normal speach; I think it may instead mean 'does not admit'. They've certainly used it this way in other parts of the document, and have explicitly explained that they have done so, usually due to not having adequate information to determine the point one way or the other; this can't be argued in this case, which may be why they haven't said so here, but they're under no obligation to admit P28 even if it is true, I believe.
I am not a lawyer, but it appears to me that SCO has admitted in a court document (quoted above) that they did not accept the GPL
I don't think so. A possible interpretation of your quote is that that at least one of the clauses of paragraph 28 is not true. I quote it again for convenience:
28. SCO accepted the terms of the GPL by modifying and distributing Linux products. By distributing Linux products under the GPL, SCO agreed, among other things, not to assert -- indeed, it is prohibited from asserting -- certain proprietary rights over any programs distributed by SCO under the terms of the GPL. SCO also agreed not to restrict further distribution of any programs distributed by SCO under the terms of the GPL.
First of all, I would say that SCO didn't accept the terms of the GPL by modifying and distributing Linux products. This action was almost certainly performed by employees who do not have the authority to bind the company to a contract like the GPL; the decision to accept the GPL would have to have been made at a management level. This is poor phrasing on behalf of IBM's lawyers. Better would have been 'By modifying and/or distributing Linux products, SCO indicated that they have accepted the terms of the GPL.' This same criticism applies to the second sentence also; the act of distribution is irrelevant, the GPL must have already been accepted before it happened.
Also, if SCO believed when they accepted the GPL that certain portions of it were not enforceable, they may believe that they didn't accept those portions, while accepting the remainder. It is up to a court to decide if this is a reasonable action for them to have taken (at a guess, the court will decide that it wasn't...).
This makes perfect sense for SCO to do. Their whole claim stands on the GPL being invalid.
Actually, SCO could win the IBM case without having the GPL declared invalid.
They could rely on either of these, or many other strategies. This is just what I can think of off the top of my head, I'm sure SCO's lawyers are better at this than I am...
1. IBM's actions were unuathorised right up until the moment somebody from IBM first downloaded the code from SCO. This could have been quite a long time, and they would be entitled for compensation over this time.
2. IBM may have violated non-disclosure agreements, or other contracts, resulting in SCO incurring losses.
The GPL invalid route is only one of many that I'm certain they're pursuing independently.
That wouldn't stand up. Only a very small portion of the class would be responsible for any infringing code that may or may not be in there, hence the court would throw out a countersuit PDQ.
You are not required too accept this licence (they don't, they claim it is contrary to the us constitution, us copyright law yada yada yada).
My understanding of the situation is that they do accept the licence, but claim parts of it are unenforceable. Probably most of the parts that you quoted in your message.
Now, as to why those parts should be unenforceable, that's an entirely separate matter, and yet another one they haven't made clear...
Also, the question of whether or not parts of the license being unenforceable would void the entire license are far from clear.
IANAL, too...
If GPL holds water, then you may only redistribute under the terms of the GPL. If the GPL doesnt hold water, then I keep copyright.
The GPL is a contract between the copyright owner and anybody who wants to accept its terms. There is a legal concept that if part of a contract is deemed by a court not to be unenforceable, in some (but not all) cases, the remainder of the contract stands with the unenforceable parts removed.
SCO's argument is (probably) that the section of the GPL that states that derivitive versions, etc, must be licensed under the GPL is unenforceable. However, they contend, the section of it that allows you to make copys, derivitives, etc., is a straightforward grant of IP rights and is therefore not unenforceable.
This will probably fail, largely because there is no reason that I have heard of that makes sense of the idea that the licensing restrictions are unenforcable. Also, even if they were, the court would probably deem a modified contract to be unfair on the copyright holder and void the entire thing - but this is not a certainty, it is at the discretion of the court.
Its like a tenant saying to a landlord - "there is a technical mistake which makes the tenancy agreement void - so I can now live in your house rent-free forever.."
Actually, I don't know about the USA, but here in the UK that can almost happen. Not rent free, but if you make a mistake in a fixed-term letting contract you can end up not being able to regain posession at the end of the term...
(NB: IANAL, my legal knowledge is UK specific, but I think what I've said applies in the USA also, our contract laws are broadly similar...)
Furthermore, writing accuented text in plain HTML is such a pain in the ass it's not even funny. You have to type stuff like "é" instead of a sole key on a French keyboard
There are a large number of text editors that will let you just type in what you want, highlight and choose an option (like mine has, 'Text to HTML entities') that will convert anything that needs converting to the right format. Really, there are many tools besides WYSIWYG editors that can solve most of the problems with hand coding HTML.
Isn't the code itself a watermark? Sure, you can change things here and there, but ultimately the similarities are going to be far to much to be pure coincidence.
A lot of code is very generic. Much code could easily be reimplemented as a new implementation that produces almost identical object code just by starting with the same specification and compiling with the same compiler.
How then do you tell if the code was copied?
(Actually, the answer's easier than watermarking - use a non-obvious, unlikely, but otherwise equivalent solution)
The case would have been clouded by the publication of the code in an instructive book.
A programmer could easily hold up a copy of your book, and say "I learnt how to do this kind of thing from this book. It says to do it this way, so I did". This would be a fairly convincing argument.
I'm not saying that Intel were right to take the code, but rather that:
a) the lawyer was probably right not to take the case without an advance payment. I'd say there was at best a 30% chance of winning (based on my experience with how the UK courts handle such things, I have no experience with the US judicial system).
b) Intel probably didn't realise they had done anything wrong. Example code in textbooks is usually considered fair game by most programmers. It is there to be instructive - they were instructed by it.
(nb - I've just realised I might have misunderstood you here, was the code printed in the book as an example, or was it included in a companion CD or something like that? If its just the latter then ignore my comments)
Quite possibly, depending on how long ago this happened. Intel's compilers have only recently become compatible enough with MS's to be able to readily integrate code compiled with one into the other. They probably produced versions for various different compilers, the MS one was the one this guy got hold of.
And I'm not sure what you'd mean by "if it *does* become legal"...surely there'd be no legal problems with running something like this.
Hard to be certain. In order to operate, it would have to create a temporary copy of the program being analysed in memory. This may or may not constitute a copyright infringement, depending on your particular jurisdiction and how the judge / jury / evil fascist dictator (delete as applicable) is feeling on that particular day.
Many countries have specific provisions to allow reverse engineering, which would probably get you off the hook. However, I don't believe the USA is one of them, which is probably the primary area in which the program would be used. If the code is obfuscated in any way and your program strips away this obfuscation, that could be argued to be a circumvention measure of a copyright protection device, thus bringing the DMCA into play.
IANAL, etc.
Hey, thanks. I've never been rated in the gigaquad range before, even fractionally...
All very good points. I do note this however:
For example, if the installed fonts on the two computers differ, the document will either look very different, or be unreadable on the recipients machine
If you use embeddable fonts, they can be stored in the document, therefore removing this obstacle.
There is another related one, though: because word is WYSIWYG and uses the currently selected printer's font metrics to determine page layout, changing the type of printer you have selected can radically alter the layout of the document.
You are still missing the point. "[A] language that supported more advanced variable manipulations than the shell" - such as perl - still has to do the same stuff. It has to execute exactly the same instructions, and it has to do that whether or not it starts a new process. If starting a process has serious overheads, then that is a fundamental problem at the OS level - one would expect that the kernel would have the absolute best task-scheduling and resource-apportioning; and if some other application that needs to do these things managed to do so better than the kernel, then the kernel would get updated to reflect the state of the art.
I don't think I am missing the point - it doesn't matter whether the ability to perform things like regular expression search and replace are performed by an external program (e.g. sed) or by an object (eg a string manipulation object) that is loaded from a libary.
And starting a new process is an inherently more complicated and slower operation than loading a library and calling some functions in it.
I'm not arguing that all software should do everything itself. I'm arguing that, fundamentally, while Windows and Unix take different approaches, those approaches are equivalent. The languages provided by windows scripting host are not actually that much more complicated than the Unix shells. They are slightly harder to parse, and they have garbage collected object oriented variables, but above that, there is little difference. And I haven't heard of any of those scripting languages failing in these areas. Yes, they are more complex, but that complexity is well within the bounds of what is acceptable for 99.9% of uses.
And note that these languages are actually much simpler than PERL, because they do not, in general, provide their own library of functions beyond the very simple, but use external, independent objects to provide most functions. PERL is a do-everything tool, in many ways. WSH is a tool to allow the programmer to put external objects together, like the Unix shell, just slightly more advanced.
Theres an API that loads you default virus scanner to examine the contents of the document after it has been decrypted.
Yeah, but what about server side scanning? That's the only effective way to prevent viruses from being run. There are plenty of users out there who will ignore their desktop virus warning. "Oh, there's a virus in the document. But I really need to know what's in it, so I'll just look at it quickly...", or whatever...