The Long and Winding Road wrote: > > ""Priscilla Oppenheimer"" wrote in >> > > > Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are very smart people, but when > they champion > > software that thinks it's smarter than the user, most users > just get > > annoyed. ;-) > > > I disagree with your implication here.
You didn't understand my implication. > The whole point of the > PC revolution > was to make computing easy for the end user. I think apple and > eventually > mircrosoft have done wonderful things in that respect. I'm not talking about computers being easy to use; I'm talking about artificial intelligence and expert systems. I'm talking about spam filters that learn what you consider spam, for example. Both Mac OS and Microsoft have a lot of this type of software built into their operating systems and applications. In some cases it works well. For example, I think the Microsoft Word spell checker is a beautiful piece of software unparalleled by any other spell checker I've used. What makes it superior is that it learns about the current user. But I think Internet Explorer deciding that it should hijack your ability to play video or music is awful. It decides to do things on its own, sometimes without user input. That's not a great example, but if I gave it more thought I could come up with lots of cases where Microsoft (and Apple) software does things behind your back, in some cases because expert-system-type software is making decisions without your input. Sorry that this is way O/T and even off-topic from what we were discussing and not really related to the off-topic point you are trying to make about unintended consequences. :-) Priscilla > however, > as with > anything else, the law of unintended consequences comes into > play. they made > it easy for businesses to develope templates to make employees > more > effective in their work. the unintended consequence is they > made it easy for > malicious people to use those tools to create maco viruses. > they made it > easy for you and I to send dfocumnets or pictures to our > friends and > relatives, and for those people to pen the docs and see the > content. the > unintended consequence is that they made it easy for malicious > people to > spread their wickedness. > > to bring this back into the Cisco realm, Cisco NBAR ( network > based > application recognition ) I believe was intended to provide > another > dimension to the QoS classification process. now it can also be > used as a > filter against certain virus / macro virus attacks. > > > > > > Priscilla > > > > > > Howard C. Berkowitz wrote: > > > > > > At 6:09 PM +0000 1/3/03, Priscilla Oppenheimer wrote: > > > >Hopefully you trained her not to open attachemnts in the > > > future unless she > > > >knows the sender and is expecting an attachment from that > > > sender. It's an > > > >obvious point, but nobody had brought it up yet! :-) > > > > > > > >Priscilla > > > > > > May all such attackers get a personalized virus. There's a > > > wide > > > range of choices of gastrointestinal ones. Somehow, such > > > people > > > remind me of a baby's alimentary tract: a loud voice at one > end > > > and > > > no sense of responsibility at the other. > > Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=60243&t=60114 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
