o a particular event or sequence of events. Virus: a program that spreads by making copies of itself from program to program or disk to disk Vaccines search for viruses and remove them. Worm: a program that travels independently over computer networks, seeking uninfected sitesBy Ted Bridis The Associated Press W A S H I N G T O N, Aug. 5 Mark Alberding, a college student in San Francisco, was perplexed: His computer running Windows 95 was working fine until he installed some popular multimedia software called QuickTime. Suddenly, whenever he double-clicked to look at any of the hundreds of digital photographs on his hard-drive, his machine launched the new QuickTime software from Apple Computer instead of a rival Microsoft program he had been using to view pictures. But what had been a common and fairly esoteric technical annoyance is a new focus in the landmark debate over whether Microsoft unfairly uses its enormous influence to stifle competition in the high-tech indu Alberding suspects that in his case, Apple's QuickTime established itself as the default software to view his pictures, supplanting the viewer programs from Microsoft and other companies. http://www.abcnews.de/sections/tech/DailyNews/software980805.htmlComputers are revolutionizing education, sometimes in surprising ways. Now there's software that can teach kids how to cuss like a drunken stevedore," writes Robert Cwiklik of the Wall Street Journal. (See http://rtmark.com/faq.html for full press reports.)The software, a Panasonic Interactive Media (http://www.panakids.com/) product called "Secret Writer's Society," is meant to help seven to nine-year-olds learn to write by reciting their compositions back to them in a computer-generated voice. Instead, the program spews obscenities at very predictable times, according to Andrew Maisel, the editor in chief of SuperKids (http://www.superkids.com/aweb/pages/reviews/writing/1/sws/merge.shtml), a website that evaluat...
