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To: hiredhand

BTTT.


18 posted on 07/03/2009 8:41:18 PM PDT by Squantos (Be polite. Be professional. But have a plan to kill everyone you meet)
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To: Squantos
IF Microsoft didn't have such deep pockets for marketing their shitty products, the AV industry simply wouldn't exist... at least not to the degree that it does now.

I use the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) screen saver set on my main Linux box at the house. It's funny to watch people who are over visiting who see it go into screen saver mode. :-) They'll start telling me about all the grief they're currently having with Windows and how the system crashes at very inopportune moments, and how after a couple years you simply have to reload the OS, and how the registry gets "fat". The screen saver always starts with the Windows NT BSOD, so it's familiar to them. But it only stays there for a couple of minutes. Then it switches to various other crash screens from Sun-OS, Solaris, AIX, Mac, DOS... and then they wonder what's going on with my PC! I just tell them that it's a Linux system and that IF it crashes then something very wrong indeed has occurred! As for AV, there really aren't viruses "per-se" for Linux. The truth is that there ARE viruses for Linux. But with a zillion people who have access to source code and the large base of developers for Linux, it's a lot more difficult to design something effective before somebody catches it and obviates it via an improvement. MS has a very small development staff (relatively speeking) and nobody knows what in the hell their vile little OS does under the covers. :-) I've had to program in both environments (Windows and UNIX), and programming on a Windows system is like doing heart surgery on somebody through their butt! You're pretty much STUCK with the APIs for whichever language you want to use and if you ever want to find out WHY some very detailed function is providing strange results, you simply can't do this with Windows. Not so with an OS where the source code is available! Not only that, remote exploits on user-only-machines are pretty boring. Quite a contrast from Win-XP where everybody on the planet promptly makes their own account equal to "administrator".

I'm not complaining though... part of my AOR at work involves threat assessment including current virus threats. I've told them too many times to count that they should dimply ditch Windows. We intercept 300 viruses on the web alone each 30 days, and 1500 via e-mail...none of which would affect a Linux system or a Mac. :-)

You can probably relate to this since you run both OSs as I do... but I think of my work Windows system as a "toilet"....which gets flushed when it's full of stinky stuff. :-) There's nothing important on it, and I don't depend on it for any of my critical functions. It's got applications on it only...which can be reloaded in a very short time. But my Linux systems don't let me down...so far! I store the actual data ON my Linux systems! :-)

UCS is based on Linux! :-)
38 posted on 07/04/2009 9:22:39 AM PDT by hiredhand (Understand the CRA and why we're facing economic collapse - see my about page.)
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