Ping-Pong virus

The Ping-Pong virus (also called Boot, Bouncing Ball, Bouncing Dot, Italian, Italian-A or VeraCruz) is a boot sector virus discovered on March 1, 1988 at the University of Turin in Italy. It was likely the most common and best known boot sector virus until outnumbered by the Stoned virus.

Replication method

Computers could be contaminated by an infected diskette, showing up as a 1 KB bad cluster (the last one on the disk, used by the virus to store the original boot sector) to most disk checking programs. Due to being labelled as bad cluster, MS-DOS will avoid overwriting it. It infects disks on every active drive and will even infect non-bootable partitions on the hard disk. Upon infection, the virus becomes memory resident.

Effect

The virus would become active if a disk access is made exactly on the half hour and start to show a small "ball" bouncing around the screen in both text mode (the ASCII bullet character "•") and graphical mode. No serious damage is incurred by the virus except on '286 machines (and also V20, '386 and '486), which would sometimes crash during the ball's appearance on the screen. The cause of this crash is the "MOV CS,AX" instruction, which only exists on '88 and '86 processors. For this reason, users of machines at risk were advised to save their work and reboot, since this is the only way to temporarily get rid of the virus.

Table tennis

Table tennis, also known as ping pong, is a sport in which two or four players hit a lightweight ball back and forth across a table using a small paddle. The game takes place on a hard table divided by a net. Except for the initial serve, the rules are generally as follows: Players must allow a ball played toward them to bounce one time on their side of the table, and must return it so that it bounces on the opposite side at least once. Points are scored when a player fails to return the ball within the rules. Play is fast and demands quick reactions. Spinning the ball alters its trajectory and limits an opponent's options, giving the hitter a great advantage. When doing so the hitter has a better chance of scoring if the spin is successful.

Table tennis is governed by the worldwide organization International Table Tennis Federation, founded in 1926. ITTF currently includes 220 member associations. The table tennis official rules are specified in the ITTF handbook. Table tennis has been an Olympic sport since 1988, with several event categories. In particular, from 1988 until 2004, these were: men's singles, women's singles, men's doubles and women's doubles. Since 2008, a team event has been played instead of the doubles.