Yeah, but we are in Europe so we should be using the Standard Belgium Unit (or its full name, the Standard (in terms of the treaty of Utrecht 1996 (sub paragraph 26(a)) Belgium (as defined by the agreement of Mainz, March 1993 (later confirmed by the Cork Treaty April 1996)) Unit (or "le Unit Belgique de Standarde").
One Belgium is.346 of a Texas in standard notation, (if following the Mornington rules) although can be.347 in high season.
Damn right. I got one of those Sony Network Walkman, which uses the damn MagicGate memory cards. The prices (in the UK) are still at the £1 per mb range. But then again, it weighs absolutely nothing and never skips, unlike the heavy iPod and its competitors.
It's a nice piece of kit but sometimes I wish I could put all my music on a unit the size of a pack of chewing gum...
Well, yes and no. I've been using MS products for years and sometimes what they lose in stability they make up for in ease of use. I've had hours of fun trying to do simple tasks in Unix (Solaris 2.6) and wondered why finding such simple settings as where an IP address is set has to be so tough, when in NT all I have to do is right click on "My Computer" and find the network settings there.
I've also just started using Linux and am baffled as to why things like updating video drivers has to be such a pain, when with Win98 all I do is double click on an.exe file, click on a few "Ok"'s and reboot and all is well with the world.
MS have made computers easy to use for the average Joe. Unix and Linux haven't. All that lovely stability means nothing when an average user can't carry out a simple task.
Sure, I agree that the stability and security of MS products suck. The stability issue could have been fixed in XP, but wasn't (far too much XP rests on top of all those old bugs in NT). The security problems could be fixed with better coding, but we all know that there are also plenty of bug in other OS's, and protocols (SMTP anyone?).
Don't get me wrong, I love Unix for the control and stability I get from it (and where I work, all the serious back-end stuff runs Unix), but for users who need decent apps with consistent front ends, it's got to be MS. And I say that with sadness in my voice, because this stuff could be done so much better, but isn't.
As an aside, let's also not forget that many problems we see on MS OS's is partly due to dodgy programming of third party apps. Of course, these problems shouldn't result in a BSOD, but blame where blame's due...
Now, this is funny for me because yesterday I sent my girlfriend an email, and then sent one to some colleagues. Unfortunately I signed the business one like I sign the ones to my girlfriend.
I've made a whole load of new friends at work...damn....
1. Don't think such a thing exists, but a PC Firewire card is only $30 or so. And the new Creative Labs sound cards have Friarwire ports. 2. Not sure either.
Me, I've got one of them little Sony Network Walkmen. Sure, small capacity but it never jumps and it absolutely tiny. Great if you travel a lot.
No, you're still talking about perception. Time exists in a cosmic sense. It has nothing to do with the age of things that experience time; it exists as a dimension in exactly the way that the three spatial dimensions exist.
Saying what you've said is exactly the same as saying "we can measure the "size" of something, but size does not exist in a cosmic sense, it's merely our perception of how big things are".
But unless moankey is a very bad flamer, the mod on this post is wrong. Espresso 2 Go is a mission in GTA3 that is a ballache. Took me quite a few goes. And obviously some other people had problems with it too.
So like I said, it's either a flame that is rather unflame-like (er, a black body post? Ahem...) or it's modded badly.
Drive round the city to get the location of all stands before you hit the first stand. Then make sure you do it in a fast or strong car. The Bulletproof Cheetah rocks...if you haven't got that, you can do it in the Bulletproof Patriot, that Ray whatsisname gives you.
I can't see EA missing out on all the potential sales of their software from Xbox users. All twenty of them.
Ok, joking aside, MS have sold millions of these things so that's a fairly nice market for EA. Consider that it's reasonably easy to port a PC game to the XBox, EA will have a licence to print money. They know this, and they are trying to force MS to play their way. Fair enough really, this is business after all, and EA knows that MS needs big sports games, because these are huge sellers. MS can't afford to miss out on having such huge franchises as the NFL and FIFA games, not only for the licencing fees but the additional consoles these games sell.
This story does have a whiff of Ockham's razor about it - or rather the opposite. It's looking for a hugely unlikely solution to a problem, when there's a fairly simple one. Which is that earthquakes can happen on opposite sides of the planet within seconds of each other, and still be discrete events. It looks like some grad students trying to make names for themselves....but it's certainly an interesting paper and not as ill-thought out as many posters on/. think (I've got a geophysics degree so understand the process behind earthquake detection).
I'm not worried about nuclear weapons either, but it does go to show that even the difficult to obtain parts are available to anyone with the intelligence to seek them out. Enough countries have made fairly effective bombs that it's worth thinking about. But as 9/11 showed, you don't need technology to kill thousands. You just need to use your enemy's technology effectively.
As for moderation - I know what you mean. I don't bother using the filters because sometimes the best posts are posted anonymously (because the poster doesn't want to be identified). It's a fundamental problem with this style of moderation, but still, it's better than nothing. But there are some very strange mods being made lately which I simply can't fathom - for example, people who have not read the/.'d article still get a +5 (insightful). As the Yanks say, what gives?
Nice answer, clear, informative and correct. And no mod points. Nice to see the moderation system working so well....
To add to this conversation, bombs have become far more efficent and require less fissionable material to produce a very powerful weapon. In order to do this, special timing devices (the name of which escapes me right now) are required. In the late 80's, a British firm tried to export some to Iraq. Not really a very bright idea and thankfully most of the shipment was caught by Customs, but it is thought that some slipped through the net. No-one's quite sure what this firm was doing. Scared yet?
Actually, I don't mean to scaremonger. It's a big step from having the timing devices and the plutonium, since there's still a hell of a lot else to do, to make a decent nuclear weapon. And as soon as you try testing, everyone knows what you are up to.
Going back to the original post, if the strangelet can release enough energy to cause two magnitude 6 earthquakes (one at entry, one at exit - well, if you read their paper, it's more like one long earthquake at each point), then it's obviously having enough of an effect on normal matter to cause a human some problems. If it is indeed strange matter at all, and not just coincidence, given that these guys looked at data for a million or so unexplained earthquakes. What are the chances that you have two earthquakes happening within 30 seconds of each other?
Proof? We've not had an email virus hit us in 30 months. This is a company with 20,000 users.
Block all external mail that has.js,.vbs etc attachments, and not by just looking blindly at the file extension. Stop people from being able to open any type of file used with Wscript by changing file associations. Educate people that there are viruses out there, and that by being careful they can stop the spread of viruses. And remind them that if they aren't careful, they can lose alot of money if their systems are down. Patch Outlook and IE so that the vunerabilities are minimised. Don't let users have admin rights on their machines. Although this does not stop the spread of a worm (at least, not a well written one) it does stop any harm being done on the local machine. Only give people the network accesses they need. Again, this minimises damage rather than prevents it totally. If you have to use Windows in a business, don't even think about using 95/98/ME.
The two points about admin rights point to another reason why these viruses are more widespread on Windows than on Linux/Unix. Many NT admins give everyone admin rights, whereas no Unix admin worth his/her salt would do that. (another poster touched on this) But good luck to you - it does take time and some trouble, but it is possible.
And to reply to the chap who said "Outlook is given away with the OS"... no it isn't. You buy Outlook with Office. Now, Office is sometimes packaged with an MS OS by an OEM but you do pay for it.
I will spell this out again. People use Outlook because it is the best unified mail/calendar/contacts/journal app around. There is nothing else near it. This isn't saying Outlook is actually any good, but that there is no real competetion. If someone released a Linux based variant that could link into Exchange and offer all the functionality that Outlook does but with added security and stability (Note to anti-MS people, Outlook is rather more than a mail client), then there are many companies around that would look seriously at it. But there isn't. Anyone out there fancy writing one, instead of whining feebly about how MS suck?
Hmmm. Suspect this is a troll, but I've only had one coffee today so dammit...
"Has anyone been at 30,000 feet lately to see just how tiny man's domain is compared to nature?"
The relative proportions of humans to nature doesn't mean a thing. Bacteria are tiny compared to humans but they quite easily kill us. Viruses are even smaller (in essence, they are small chunks of DNA or RNA) and they also kill us. Just because we're small in relation to the rest of nature doesn't mean we cannot cause a huge amount of damage.
"I keep hearing about global warming..."
Global warming IS happening. The global climate has shown an average temperature rise every year for the past 10 years. Before that was Mt Pinatubo, which caused a small drop in global temperatures thanks to the effect of aerosols (which cause sunlight to be reflected, hence cooling the atmosphere).
"Having lived through some hoaxes already"
What hoax? In the mid-70's OPEC DID massively raise the ppb (price per barrel) of oil, which DID cause a crisis. Were you alive then? Did you read the news? Have you done a search for this on Google? Are you a troll?
"...sky-is-falling craze."
No-one is saying that the sky is falling in. Climatologists are trying to determine a. what is causing global warming, and therefore what we can do to stop it and b. what effects global warming will have on the planet (will the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps melt? Will the North Atlantic currents move, causing cooling in N Europe? etc).
"Ozone Hole, the Bermuda Triangle"
The Ozone Hole DOES exist. Simply look up skin cancer stats for Australia in the past 50 years and look at the rather disturbing correlation with the spread of the Antarctic ozone hole. As for the Bermuda Triangle, there is no statistical evidence that there is a higher rate of shipwrecks etc there. There is some evidence though that it is susceptible to submarine landslides, which cause the release of methane from sediment. This has the effect of decreasing the buoyancy of the water, and this can cause ships to sink. I've seen videos of this and it ain't nice.
Oh, and what does "Did anyone think to notice that the measuring stations over the last 100 years have become increasingly surrounded by the city's concrete?" mean? One minute you're saying we don't effect the environment, the next you say we do...
YHBT....
Oh and as a reply to many, many posts. Just because climate is chaotic, doesn't mean that small changes in initial factors will have huge effects on the result. It means that small changes in initial factors CAN have huge effects. Very often, even large changes in initial factors can have very small result. This is the huge misunderstanding of chaos theory - the butterfly effect is possibly the most misunderstood scientific statement of all time.
I'm mainly talking about Corporate users, so I should qualify my statement with "Anyone using Outlook in a company where the tech guys haven't patched Outlook". I always preach safety, don't open a file that you weren't expecting without checking it first.
My proof? I got Loveletter pretty early on in the infection, and had the sense to open it up in Notepad before even previewing it. Saved me (and the company I was in) a world of pain.
MS have screwed up, but like I said in the original post, so have many other companies. MS provided a fix for the "previewing emails" problem a year ago, and not patching it is akin to not getting the Firestones changed on your Ford Explorer. Or was it Bridgestones? I forget;-)
It was a Word Macro virus that would search all open documents for the word "Thatcher" and add "is an evil bitch". Lots of people didn't notice until it was too late.
I believe there may have been a variant that said something about Bush.
A patched copy will NOT run js or vbs unless you Double-click on it. Even then, you should change your own file associations to open these types of files in Notepad (or some txt editor of your choice) rather than run them using Wscript.exe.
An unpatched copy will run it, which is what I said in the original mail. I believe I called people with unpatched copies "Morons". What part of "morons" didn't I make clear? The ONLY way to get most of the worms around to run is to double click them, end of story.
And "if you press keys really fast" on a Unix system you can quite happily delete everything. Any system, come to that (if you have the access rights).
What MS have tried to do is take computing out of the hands of the geeks and into the hands of the rest of the world. Nothing wrong with that, but people must realise that computers are rather powerful and that there are some stupid buggers around who like messing up peoples lives. Add those two together and you have widespread viruses.
Now I dislike MS as much as the next man, but let's not blame them for all virus emails.
Most (but not all) email virus/worms are Javascript, Visual Basic or.EXE files that are sent by email. Clueless users double click on these because they are...well...clueless, and think that they are games/pictures/nudey photos of Kournikova, whatever. This activates them, and allows the worm to read the address book and either use Outlook or its own SMTP routine to send itself to all the people in the address book.
MS put the "double click" functionality in to make people's lives easier, and on the whole, they have. Outlook is very easy to use and this is one of the reasons it's so widespread (another being that it's very powerful, but that's going off topic). Combine this ease of use with how common MS Outlook is, and you'll see why virus writers write viruses for it. If some new Mail client became as popular, don't think for a minute that it wouldn't have similar viruses.
All that it takes to stop viruses like Klez is for the mail administrator to block attachments with.exe,.js and.vbs extensions (plus some other little tricks) and this kills 99.9% of viruses stone dead. Either that, or get your user base educated enough to not blithely double click on everything they see.
I'm not talking here about some of the rather more ominous security holes in Outlook - those that allow code to run by previewing the message - because anyone who hasn't patched that yet is a moron. And there are a couple of holes which MS should be hauled over hot coals for, but they aren't exactly the only software firm to produce insecure software.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but we are in Europe so we should be using the Standard Belgium Unit (or its full name, the Standard (in terms of the treaty of Utrecht 1996 (sub paragraph 26(a)) Belgium (as defined by the agreement of Mainz, March 1993 (later confirmed by the Cork Treaty April 1996)) Unit (or "le Unit Belgique de Standarde").
.346 of a Texas in standard notation, (if following the Mornington rules) although can be .347 in high season.
One Belgium is
"Bite my shiny metal ass"
That robot would probably be better than Emile Heskey. Bring on Brazil!
And I'm not suprised the robot tried legging it. You ever been to Rotherham?
Maybe he meant "poke of stupidity". He must have spent FAR too much time hacking Sinclair Spectrums.
Damn right. I got one of those Sony Network Walkman, which uses the damn MagicGate memory cards. The prices (in the UK) are still at the £1 per mb range. But then again, it weighs absolutely nothing and never skips, unlike the heavy iPod and its competitors.
It's a nice piece of kit but sometimes I wish I could put all my music on a unit the size of a pack of chewing gum...
Well, yes and no. I've been using MS products for years and sometimes what they lose in stability they make up for in ease of use. I've had hours of fun trying to do simple tasks in Unix (Solaris 2.6) and wondered why finding such simple settings as where an IP address is set has to be so tough, when in NT all I have to do is right click on "My Computer" and find the network settings there.
.exe file, click on a few "Ok"'s and reboot and all is well with the world.
I've also just started using Linux and am baffled as to why things like updating video drivers has to be such a pain, when with Win98 all I do is double click on an
MS have made computers easy to use for the average Joe. Unix and Linux haven't. All that lovely stability means nothing when an average user can't carry out a simple task.
Sure, I agree that the stability and security of MS products suck. The stability issue could have been fixed in XP, but wasn't (far too much XP rests on top of all those old bugs in NT). The security problems could be fixed with better coding, but we all know that there are also plenty of bug in other OS's, and protocols (SMTP anyone?).
Don't get me wrong, I love Unix for the control and stability I get from it (and where I work, all the serious back-end stuff runs Unix), but for users who need decent apps with consistent front ends, it's got to be MS. And I say that with sadness in my voice, because this stuff could be done so much better, but isn't.
As an aside, let's also not forget that many problems we see on MS OS's is partly due to dodgy programming of third party apps. Of course, these problems shouldn't result in a BSOD, but blame where blame's due...
"Man ends business call with 'I Love You'".
Now, this is funny for me because yesterday I sent my girlfriend an email, and then sent one to some colleagues. Unfortunately I signed the business one like I sign the ones to my girlfriend.
I've made a whole load of new friends at work...damn....
1. Don't think such a thing exists, but a PC Firewire card is only $30 or so. And the new Creative Labs sound cards have Friarwire ports.
2. Not sure either.
Me, I've got one of them little Sony Network Walkmen. Sure, small capacity but it never jumps and it absolutely tiny. Great if you travel a lot.
And that reminds me of the great Onion headline "Sub-Orbital Propulsion Engineer not precisly a Rocket Scientist".
No, you're still talking about perception. Time exists in a cosmic sense. It has nothing to do with the age of things that experience time; it exists as a dimension in exactly the way that the three spatial dimensions exist.
Saying what you've said is exactly the same as saying "we can measure the "size" of something, but size does not exist in a cosmic sense, it's merely our perception of how big things are".
Britney doesn't suck. That's why Justin Timberlake dumped her. Muah ha ha ha ha! Sorry...
I would like to see a return to being able to edit the landscape before you start building the city. Maxis took this out of SC3000 for some reason.
And yes, there is a full day/night cycle and weather, but then again there was weather in SC3000 (heavy rains would cause floods along riverbanks).
Ok, so I'm posting to the same thread twice. Bah.
But unless moankey is a very bad flamer, the mod on this post is wrong. Espresso 2 Go is a mission in GTA3 that is a ballache. Took me quite a few goes. And obviously some other people had problems with it too.
So like I said, it's either a flame that is rather unflame-like (er, a black body post? Ahem...) or it's modded badly.
Yep, it's a very dangerous worm that has destroyed my work, my social life, my career, my love life.....
Damned game, it's up there with the greats...CivII and Elite...
***SPOILER***
Drive round the city to get the location of all stands before you hit the first stand. Then make sure you do it in a fast or strong car. The Bulletproof Cheetah rocks...if you haven't got that, you can do it in the Bulletproof Patriot, that Ray whatsisname gives you.
You mean, there's someone carrying out illegal activity in Las Vegas?
And the Police aren't doing anything to stop it?
And a large company appears to be in the hands of mobsters?
Whatever next?
Before you know it, there will be stories about corporations buying influence in the US Government...but that could never happen...
I can't see EA missing out on all the potential sales of their software from Xbox users. All twenty of them.
Ok, joking aside, MS have sold millions of these things so that's a fairly nice market for EA. Consider that it's reasonably easy to port a PC game to the XBox, EA will have a licence to print money. They know this, and they are trying to force MS to play their way. Fair enough really, this is business after all, and EA knows that MS needs big sports games, because these are huge sellers. MS can't afford to miss out on having such huge franchises as the NFL and FIFA games, not only for the licencing fees but the additional consoles these games sell.
Give it a few weeks, they'll kiss and make up...
This story does have a whiff of Ockham's razor about it - or rather the opposite. It's looking for a hugely unlikely solution to a problem, when there's a fairly simple one. Which is that earthquakes can happen on opposite sides of the planet within seconds of each other, and still be discrete events. It looks like some grad students trying to make names for themselves....but it's certainly an interesting paper and not as ill-thought out as many posters on /. think (I've got a geophysics degree so understand the process behind earthquake detection).
/.'d article still get a +5 (insightful). As the Yanks say, what gives?
I'm not worried about nuclear weapons either, but it does go to show that even the difficult to obtain parts are available to anyone with the intelligence to seek them out. Enough countries have made fairly effective bombs that it's worth thinking about. But as 9/11 showed, you don't need technology to kill thousands. You just need to use your enemy's technology effectively.
As for moderation - I know what you mean. I don't bother using the filters because sometimes the best posts are posted anonymously (because the poster doesn't want to be identified). It's a fundamental problem with this style of moderation, but still, it's better than nothing. But there are some very strange mods being made lately which I simply can't fathom - for example, people who have not read the
Nice answer, clear, informative and correct. And no mod points. Nice to see the moderation system working so well....
To add to this conversation, bombs have become far more efficent and require less fissionable material to produce a very powerful weapon. In order to do this, special timing devices (the name of which escapes me right now) are required. In the late 80's, a British firm tried to export some to Iraq. Not really a very bright idea and thankfully most of the shipment was caught by Customs, but it is thought that some slipped through the net. No-one's quite sure what this firm was doing. Scared yet?
Actually, I don't mean to scaremonger. It's a big step from having the timing devices and the plutonium, since there's still a hell of a lot else to do, to make a decent nuclear weapon. And as soon as you try testing, everyone knows what you are up to.
Going back to the original post, if the strangelet can release enough energy to cause two magnitude 6 earthquakes (one at entry, one at exit - well, if you read their paper, it's more like one long earthquake at each point), then it's obviously having enough of an effect on normal matter to cause a human some problems. If it is indeed strange matter at all, and not just coincidence, given that these guys looked at data for a million or so unexplained earthquakes. What are the chances that you have two earthquakes happening within 30 seconds of each other?
Proof? We've not had an email virus hit us in 30 months. This is a company with 20,000 users.
.js, .vbs etc attachments, and not by just looking blindly at the file extension.
Block all external mail that has
Stop people from being able to open any type of file used with Wscript by changing file associations.
Educate people that there are viruses out there, and that by being careful they can stop the spread of viruses. And remind them that if they aren't careful, they can lose alot of money if their systems are down.
Patch Outlook and IE so that the vunerabilities are minimised.
Don't let users have admin rights on their machines. Although this does not stop the spread of a worm (at least, not a well written one) it does stop any harm being done on the local machine.
Only give people the network accesses they need. Again, this minimises damage rather than prevents it totally.
If you have to use Windows in a business, don't even think about using 95/98/ME.
The two points about admin rights point to another reason why these viruses are more widespread on Windows than on Linux/Unix. Many NT admins give everyone admin rights, whereas no Unix admin worth his/her salt would do that. (another poster touched on this)
But good luck to you - it does take time and some trouble, but it is possible.
And to reply to the chap who said "Outlook is given away with the OS"... no it isn't. You buy Outlook with Office. Now, Office is sometimes packaged with an MS OS by an OEM but you do pay for it.
I will spell this out again. People use Outlook because it is the best unified mail/calendar/contacts/journal app around. There is nothing else near it. This isn't saying Outlook is actually any good, but that there is no real competetion. If someone released a Linux based variant that could link into Exchange and offer all the functionality that Outlook does but with added security and stability (Note to anti-MS people, Outlook is rather more than a mail client), then there are many companies around that would look seriously at it. But there isn't. Anyone out there fancy writing one, instead of whining feebly about how MS suck?
Hmmm. Suspect this is a troll, but I've only had one coffee today so dammit...
"Has anyone been at 30,000 feet lately to see just how tiny man's domain is compared to nature?"
The relative proportions of humans to nature doesn't mean a thing. Bacteria are tiny compared to humans but they quite easily kill us. Viruses are even smaller (in essence, they are small chunks of DNA or RNA) and they also kill us. Just because we're small in relation to the rest of nature doesn't mean we cannot cause a huge amount of damage.
"I keep hearing about global warming..."
Global warming IS happening. The global climate has shown an average temperature rise every year for the past 10 years. Before that was Mt Pinatubo, which caused a small drop in global temperatures thanks to the effect of aerosols (which cause sunlight to be reflected, hence cooling the atmosphere).
"Having lived through some hoaxes already"
What hoax? In the mid-70's OPEC DID massively raise the ppb (price per barrel) of oil, which DID cause a crisis. Were you alive then? Did you read the news? Have you done a search for this on Google? Are you a troll?
"...sky-is-falling craze."
No-one is saying that the sky is falling in. Climatologists are trying to determine a. what is causing global warming, and therefore what we can do to stop it and b. what effects global warming will have on the planet (will the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps melt? Will the North Atlantic currents move, causing cooling in N Europe? etc).
"Ozone Hole, the Bermuda Triangle"
The Ozone Hole DOES exist. Simply look up skin cancer stats for Australia in the past 50 years and look at the rather disturbing correlation with the spread of the Antarctic ozone hole. As for the Bermuda Triangle, there is no statistical evidence that there is a higher rate of shipwrecks etc there. There is some evidence though that it is susceptible to submarine landslides, which cause the release of methane from sediment. This has the effect of decreasing the buoyancy of the water, and this can cause ships to sink. I've seen videos of this and it ain't nice.
Oh, and what does "Did anyone think to notice that the measuring stations over the last 100 years have become increasingly surrounded by the city's concrete?" mean? One minute you're saying we don't effect the environment, the next you say we do...
YHBT....
Oh and as a reply to many, many posts. Just because climate is chaotic, doesn't mean that small changes in initial factors will have huge effects on the result. It means that small changes in initial factors CAN have huge effects. Very often, even large changes in initial factors can have very small result. This is the huge misunderstanding of chaos theory - the butterfly effect is possibly the most misunderstood scientific statement of all time.
Not if you've been cooling your juice in the fridge ;-)
I'm mainly talking about Corporate users, so I should qualify my statement with "Anyone using Outlook in a company where the tech guys haven't patched Outlook". I always preach safety, don't open a file that you weren't expecting without checking it first.
;-)
My proof? I got Loveletter pretty early on in the infection, and had the sense to open it up in Notepad before even previewing it. Saved me (and the company I was in) a world of pain.
MS have screwed up, but like I said in the original post, so have many other companies. MS provided a fix for the "previewing emails" problem a year ago, and not patching it is akin to not getting the Firestones changed on your Ford Explorer. Or was it Bridgestones? I forget
There was one, years ago...
It was a Word Macro virus that would search all open documents for the word "Thatcher" and add "is an evil bitch". Lots of people didn't notice until it was too late.
I believe there may have been a variant that said something about Bush.
A patched copy will NOT run js or vbs unless you Double-click on it. Even then, you should change your own file associations to open these types of files in Notepad (or some txt editor of your choice) rather than run them using Wscript.exe.
An unpatched copy will run it, which is what I said in the original mail. I believe I called people with unpatched copies "Morons". What part of "morons" didn't I make clear? The ONLY way to get most of the worms around to run is to double click them, end of story.
And "if you press keys really fast" on a Unix system you can quite happily delete everything. Any system, come to that (if you have the access rights).
What MS have tried to do is take computing out of the hands of the geeks and into the hands of the rest of the world. Nothing wrong with that, but people must realise that computers are rather powerful and that there are some stupid buggers around who like messing up peoples lives. Add those two together and you have widespread viruses.
Now I dislike MS as much as the next man, but let's not blame them for all virus emails.
.EXE files that are sent by email. Clueless users double click on these because they are...well...clueless, and think that they are games/pictures/nudey photos of Kournikova, whatever. This activates them, and allows the worm to read the address book and either use Outlook or its own SMTP routine to send itself to all the people in the address book.
.exe, .js and .vbs extensions (plus some other little tricks) and this kills 99.9% of viruses stone dead. Either that, or get your user base educated enough to not blithely double click on everything they see.
Most (but not all) email virus/worms are Javascript, Visual Basic or
MS put the "double click" functionality in to make people's lives easier, and on the whole, they have. Outlook is very easy to use and this is one of the reasons it's so widespread (another being that it's very powerful, but that's going off topic). Combine this ease of use with how common MS Outlook is, and you'll see why virus writers write viruses for it. If some new Mail client became as popular, don't think for a minute that it wouldn't have similar viruses.
All that it takes to stop viruses like Klez is for the mail administrator to block attachments with
I'm not talking here about some of the rather more ominous security holes in Outlook - those that allow code to run by previewing the message - because anyone who hasn't patched that yet is a moron. And there are a couple of holes which MS should be hauled over hot coals for, but they aren't exactly the only software firm to produce insecure software.