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Letters, Addenda, Errata

Translation: Christian Hennecke

If you have any comments regarding articles or tips in this or any previous issue of the VOICE Newsletter, please send them to editor@os2voice.org. We are always interested in what our readers have to say.

I went to the bank yesterday. In the middle of the transaction the teller said "It froze up again. That's the 4th time this has happened to me today. We just have to wait." So we waitied. And we waited. It took about five minutes before she could continue processing the transaction. (Other tellers had randomly been experiencing the same thing. This is a good-sized branch with longer lines and about 8 to 10 tellers receiving customers at any given time.)
I said to her, "XP, huh?"
"How'd you know that?" she said.
Actually, it's too easy -- you don't need to be one of the sharper contestants to guess that one. I don't ever recall an incident like this one in all the many years the banks were running OS/2. If the system ever was down, it was clearly some kind of hardware or network failure.

Just received a strident email warning allegedly from the security department of my ISP. I say "allegedly" because there's a much better than 50-50 chance it is just another of those Phishing lures, dressed up a bit more cleverly than most. It warned of a devastating new worm called 'Gaobot,' which could severely compromise anyone running NT through XP, and urged immediate updates of AV [Anti-Virus] software and new security patches for Win (as you know, a not uncommon occurrence), or else. "If you become a source of infection, due to not heeding this advice, the ISP might have no choice but to terminate your account."

As soon as they took that turn, the whole thing became very suspicious. Given how clueless so many Win users are, the idea of an ISP policing this with their customers is simply laughable. The icing was that they provided links for WidowsUpdate and Symantec AV -- which everyone already knows how to find on their own -- and when you pass your cursor over the links, you see a long, labyrinthine URL reported for them. A lot of people will fall for this because it's the sort of thing they have come to expect from Windows. It is a continuing pleasure to be running something else -- something so much better -- that allows you to regularly ignore such things.

"Maybe we can run a class on using the GCC compiler"

Give me a break. . . just a couple articles as to which GCC setup to use!!! Innotek, Netlabs, or UX2BS???? Yes, please!!! Start from the setup.

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