virus

VRML

virus
For sheer, mindless evil, there's little in the computer industry to compare with the computer virus. It's a program that can hide anywhere a computer stores information: a floppy disk, PC Card, hard disk, network, or various parts of memory. They can travel across any means of connecting computers, like modems and networks. And, depending on its developer's intent, it may do any number of things, such as reformat your hard disk (destroying all your data) or corrupt the activities of your operating system (making your system act as though it's gone crazy). There are even viruses that change the way they hide their presence from anti-virus (AV) software with every replication from computer to computer (these are referred to as "polymorphic viruses"). The one way that viruses cannot propagate, however, is through e-mail messages (at least not yet). If you get an e-mail warning you of a virus your computer can catch if you simply read a piece of e-mail -- such as the notorious "Good Times" virus hoax -- disregard it.

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VRML
Say "vermal." VRML is a way by which programmers can design and create 3-D places on the Web. Using VRML, a programmer can design a room or a landscape through which you can move around and look at (and touch!) things much as you do in the world outside your computer. Usually in a VRML space you have an onscreen representation of yourself, called an "avatar," that you control. You (that is, your avatar) can move around and look at things, see other avatars, and just generally hang out. (Think of DOOM or one of those other videogames where "you" walk through rooms.) This means that instead of clicking on buttons and links to get to this page as you just did, I could have created a VRML room with a library, and you could have had your avatar pull a dictionary off a shelf to look up this definition. Needless to say, VRML is a good way of presenting some kinds of information, but other things are easier to handle as regular readable Web pages. To see VRML pages you need special software, or additions to your usual browser. VRML stands for "Virtual Reality Modeling Language."

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