Ahhh...the piece of technology that everybody seem to cannot live without... the often forgotten and neglected piece of object that has aided humans while navigating in the digital world of a computer system, the peripheral with a tail extended to either a PS/2 or a serial or USB port -- I am talking about, the mouse. Why such a topic? You might wonder. But it's becoming a nuisance to me. When such a device is used alone at home at a workstation, the mouse often becomes a best friend. But that doesn't mean mice can be 100% friendly when they come in a pack, or a herd, or whatever you want to call them as a huge group. The problem is, I often visit the computer lab at my school, and whenever I spend my time there I am subjected to a very unsuspecting sound pollution -- the collective combination of clicking sounds which seem to bounce off the wall and echo in my ears. In clearer terms, imagine having 20 people around you using the mouse at the same time clicking rapidly. The sound is relentless! Sometimes, I think I have headaches because of this condition. The problem is, everybody just keeps on clicking their way; to the point that i actually wonder if they did it on purpose, but they're not obviously. The point here is, are people relying more and more on the beast-under-the-mouse-skin peri device and that people are becoming more lazy and lazy to use their fingers and type instead of just pointing and clicking? I wonder. It's funny to know that the only noise you'd hear in a computer lab is not the noise made by the user themselves, but the noise of clicking mice. Ironically, the keyboard is neglected, forgotten, unappreciated. Probably because of all this, I purposefully refrain myself from using the mouse whenever possible, in a seemingly futile attempt to reduce the rate of mouse-clicks sound pollution in the computer lab. I'd rather use the tab key more often to navigate around web pages and only access certain links with the mouse whenever i had to. I miss text-based web browsing. It's truly blissful to be in a text-only environment, like 'emacs -nw'; it's just elegantly simple to have a familiar interface to interact with the system, without the bells and whistles of so called modern GUI-interface oriented computing "experience".

The answer to your question, Melvin, regarding the possibility of viruses attacking *nix systems, is a big NO. IT is just not possible to attack a *nix system. From the early days of computing when Unix and its variants were the *only* computing systems available, until today, there are no viruses attacking *nixes that's worth mentioning. Sure, there were a few countable attempts, but they were useless and died almost immediately at the moment of conception. You see, the key feature of a *nix system is file modes and permission system. Simply said, everything in a *nix system is guarded with file permissions and almost every single device (they are fundamentally files) is owned by someone using the system. Thus, viruses couldn't exist in *nix systems because the one thing that makes a virus , a virus, -- propagation and replication, cannot be achieved under a *nix system. Even if a virus is released in the home directory of a regular user, all the virus could do is replicate among the files in *that* directory and it couldn't go anywhere else. That's it. Other portions of the system such as the root filesystem, system devices, and other vital system files and libraries, are perfectly *intact*, untouched.

Microsoft platforms, on the other hand doesn't employ file modes and permissions which enabled a regular, slightly above average system coder to weave a clever malicious program to wreak havoc in Win systems. Because, in essence, virus replication is infinitely possible in a system where all files, every single ones are bare and unprotected by the kernel. In fact, a 3 year old with virtually no knowledge in computers could wipe out a MS system by just simply deleting files under the c:\Windows directory and voila, damned system, no viruses required. Simple as that.

With that simple education on why viruses couldn't exist in a *nix system, i hope you're slightly enlightened as to why *nixes are considerably more secure than MS systems that everybody seem to love so much. At the end of the day, *nixes still stands tall and shining with absolute computing power.

P/S - For the past fortnight when everybody in the whole damned world was so worried about MS Blaster and Welchia and the other variants, I was feeling like I was invincible and as a matter of fact, i was totally oblivious to the viruses even after a week it was propagating on the net. I only got to know about Blaster about last week, while watching a news report on TV, even then, i was so bloddy ignorant about it cuz i know it just affects stupid wimpy low graded ms platforms. You get the picture. ;-)