THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, May 8, 1995 TAG: 9505060228
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Doubleclick
SOURCE: Richard Grimes and Roger Grimes
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines
Doubleclick authors Richard and Roger Grimes of Virginia Beach happen to be twin brothers and computer authorities. Their discourse on life in the computer lane appears every other week in Hampton Roads Business Weekly.
Richard: Okay, people, brace yourself. Roger's mad at me. Well, only technically. Last week, Roger grabbed his wife and two daughters, packed their bags and jumped on an airplane. Their destination? Disney World. Now, while Roger was spinning in teacups, my job was to make sure the column made it into the paper.
Roger: Which it did, sort of.
Richard: For those of you who didn't nod off during the last column, we spent lots of space telling you not to bother with SX computers. Then, at the end, we displayed a box recommending the lowest configuration computer that you should buy. What did our list recommend you buy?
Roger: An SX computer. And it included the wrong clock speed. Richard meant to recommend a 486 DX computer running at 50 mhz. It's not a terrible error, but it's important. I'm not sure if it happened because of a misunderstanding or because Richard was still mad because I didn't take him to Disney World, too.
Richard: Hakuna matata, Roger. It's a problem free-philosophy. Anyway, I'm pretty sure the mistake was the result of a virus.
Roger: What computer virus?
Richard: The Magic Kingdom virus. It strikes your computer whenever the anal-retentive half of a writing duo goes on vacation.
Roger: Computer viruses, for people who don't know, are small programs designed to copy themselves, or replicate. Some don't do damage, but most are intended to affect the host machines in some way.
Richard enjoys joking about viruses because it's trendy to blame them for computer malfunctions. If you lose a file, blame it on the Michelangelo virus. If your hard disk crashes and you haven't backed up work, tell the boss it was the Stoned virus. The truth is that the Windows operating system has killed more data than every computer virus combined. And some problems are caused by operator error, Richard.
Richard: Roger's obviously still dealing with the anger one feels after spending $4,000 to stand in lines all day and be harassed by college students dressed as huge rodents. He does have a point, though. Most computer viruses are overly hyped and easily avoided. The famous Good Times virus is a good example, because not only is it over-hyped, it doesn't even exist.
Roger: Computer users around the world are falling for this hoax. According to the hoax, some crafty bad person is sending a virus disguised as e-mail to people connected to the Internet. In place where the subject is listed, the phrase ``Good Times'' appears. If the receiver proves dumb enough to open the e-mail and activate the virus, his hard drive is turned into a paperweight and his data is destroyed.
Now people spooked by this non-existent virus are spreading the word to watch out for the Good Times virus.
How can I sum up the chances of this actually happening? Nope. Never. Nuh-uh. Nyet. Ain't gonna happen.
Computers use two types of files: data files and executable files. Executable files run the computer and do the physical things like erase files or reformat hard drives. E-mail is a data file and can't be used as a executable file.
Richard: This is one of those stories that geek children tell around the fire at computer camp. All they need to do is add an escaped convict with a hook instead of a hand to the story. It also reminds me of the computer monitor virus hoax a few years ago.
Roger: If you got the computer monitor virus, it supposedly concentrated the pixel power at one place on your screen until it actually burned through the screen and the monitor exploded. There's supposedly another virus that causes your hard drive's read/write heads to bang themselves against the sides of its case, until the drive flies apart in a furious typhoon of metal and circuitry.
Richard: Nice imagery.
Roger: Thank you. I almost fell for this hard-drive hoax myself, because Richard's computer often makes noises like it's flying apart internally. Once I realized that everything Richard owns makes this sound, I relaxed.
Richard: If everything goes as usual, we should get a gig of mail telling us that we're boneheads and that these viruses are real.
We'll try to work through the pain. In any case there are enough real viruses to worry about without imagining new ones, and next week, we'll tell you how to protect yourselves from them. MEMO: The Line King can be reached at groger(AT)infi.net The guy with the
shake-n-bake hard drive can be reached at rgrimes(AT)infi.net
by CNB