Misc ideas & comments

[P. T. Withington]

On 3/28/98 06:57, Paul Prescod wrote:

>P. T. Withington wrote:
>> 
>> And, no LispM was ever infected by the Internet Worm.  The day of the
>> worm the SMTP logs showed some invalid transactions that were ignored.
>> Nothing more.
>
>Well, the worm was specifically targeted at a *unix* bug. It wouldn't
>bother a Lisp Machine, but it wouldn't have bothered a DOS machine
>either. That doesn't prove anything interesting!

On 3/28/98 08:04, Chris Bitmead wrote:

>In a way, that's nothing to be proud of. The internet worm was
>designed to exploit weaknesses in the most popular machine
>architectures. The fact that the Lispm wasn't one of them is more
>an indication that it wasn't popular enough to be bothered
>hacking.

It proves that it is a good idea not to "bet the farm" on a single strain 
of a particular crop.  Think Irish potato famine.  Think heirloom seeds.  
Think about how the big US seed companies would like to get their hands 
on primitive seed stocks from third world companies, because they have 
bred too many useful things right out of the seed stocks they own.

Think different.