PC antivirus software question

My system? I currently oversee a citywide network including government, schools, Utilities, and Libraries. Lots of Servers of many flavors and about 3500 desktops. This is my "retirement" job.

I've seen more than just a few invasions. There are many ways a virus can enter a system, even with a firewall in place. An example is that for schools and libraries to function, students and the public save their work on thumb drives they bring from home. They can bring trouble from home, and no firewall can prevent it. A good anti-virus can stop it, and prevent spreading it. It can also keep a log of what gets caught, so we know that viruses DO get into systems. Once one desktop is infected, it "can" spread to the other 3500 desktops on the same network. That's why we also run virus protection on servers. One desktop with a virus can bring a large piece of the network to it's knees by a flood of packets sucking up bandwidth.

Reply to
salty
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Good advice.

Right. Switch to a knock-off of a 40-year old operating system designed by a money-losing division of your local telephone company and enhanced my geeks who think the DOS command line interface is insufficiently cryptic.

By so doing, you might raise the percentage of desktops using Linux from its

0.86% level to something beyond the "barely detectable" designation.
Reply to
HeyBub

Salty Dog,

I. for one, put quite a bit of value on Consumer Reports and their reviews. Since I have been working as a electrical engineer in hardware design since the 1960s, and have been subscribing to their publication since the early

1970s, I have found their testing approach to be, for virtually all things I am professionally aware of, scientifically sound, not ":completely laughable" as you state. Their journalism is also fair and balanced. They have a substantial testing organization staffed by many engineers, a large set of laboratories, and a total willingness to go to outside testing firms including the one I was employed by, to have specific testing done which exceeds their in-house staff or facilities.

I do not always agree with their outcomes, and also do not always agree with their metrics or discriminants, since I may personally put a much higher value on some feature or performance than they do. Such is the nature of making comparisons. I do, however, find their results often correlate with my own experiences, and have used them as a buying guide for many major purchases.

Dismissing Consumer Reports entirely is a very narrow and unreasonably dismissive attitude in my opinion. For antivirus software, I put a great deal more value in their opinions than I do of those computer publications which often have their own advertising agendas, and favor products which pay their bills. PC Magazine and others would have you believe that Trend Micro PC-Cillin is a great product, yet both me and the original poster found out exactly the opposite after spending $50 or $60.

Smarty

Reply to
Smarty

And their

I entirely disagree. They gather annual reliability data from 100's of thousands of readers through a 4 to 6 page survey form, and publish an analysis of the results. You may call their ratings "meaningless", but I will take them any day as a lot better reference than any other source I am aware of. Can you name a better database of reliability info for consumer products? For that matter, can you name "ANY" other source of reliability data on consumer items other than your typical anecdotal opinions of a salesperson or neighbor?

Smarty

Reply to
Smarty

You mean besides J.D. Power & Associates?

Reply to
J. Clarke

Good for you. I don't. YMMV

Reply to
salty

So, in absense of a good and valid source for this information from somewhere else, you choose to rely on an extremely faulty one, containing erroneous conclusions, based on faulty methodology, just because it's the only one you can find? Brilliant!

Reply to
salty

"Steve Barker DLT" wrote in news:Kd6dnYHp26zqqD_VnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

formatting link

Reply to
TaskProperties

Salty Dog,

I entirely andf totally disagree with your premise that their reliability data is inherently "extremely faulty" since it is merely a statistical compilation of 100s of thousands of readers experience. How would a "brilliant" person gather and report on reliability data differently, if I might ask?

You have a true blind spot, and no basis to make such an unsupportable claim. Your "scientific approach" is clearly the one lacking any basis, not theirs.

Smarty

Reply to
Smarty

John,

Hardly!! They have no reliability data whatsoever I am aware of. Any by the way, can you show me the link to their comparison of PC antivirus software products? No you can't, because there isn't any such review. They are profoundly smaller in scope compared to Consumer's Union. They deal much more heavily with 'Consumer Satisfaction', a very useful metric for sure, but they are not in the same engineering, publication, or investigative reporting business as Consumer's Reports / CU at all.

Smarty

Reply to
Smarty

Let me guess... Folks call you "Smarty" for the same reason they call a fat guy, "Tiny"

Reply to
salty

Well, now we know that your research skills are on a par with those of Consumer Reports.

Would you provide one credible link to support the contention that PC antivirus products suffer mechanical failure?

The issue was determination of reliability via consumer polling, not "engineering, publication, or investigative reporting".

Reply to
J. Clarke

On 8/13/2008 4:57 AM HeyBub spake thus:

Heh; good one. I happen to agree with you here. However, don't let's forget that Mac's OS X, which is on a significantly larger number of desktops than any of the *nixes, is also Unix, but with an elegant front end that doesn't require any command like geek knowledge.

Something all the Gnu, Linux, etc. folks never seem to grasp. "It's so much better, so of course everyone's going to start using it. Someday."

Reply to
David Nebenzahl

Salty Dog,

Now I know my point has been made properly. You no longer have an intelligent or logical argument so yo decide to attack my name.

As a grandparent, I know very well how children behave when they have nothing meaningful to say to defend themselves. Since you are apparently also a retired person based on your earlier comment, what is your logical argument? Or are we stuck at childish name-calling?

Smarty

Reply to
Smarty

You are just plain stuck.

...and wrong on too many counts to itemize them.

HAND

Reply to
salty

John,

JD Powers makes no claims to measure reliability, a standard engineering metric used and quantified throughout the engineering world. Instead they coin their own "dependability" measure, a term they chose which is totally unused in any quantifiable engineering way. Reliability talks in terms of specific failure rates, failure modes, time between failures, and other very concrete and universally accepted engineering measurements and terms used for at least the 40+ years I have been a professional engineer. It has specific and consistent meaning to anyone with a technical education in engineering. Dependability is a phrase which a lot of companies hang their hats on because it deliberately escapes precise and consistent usage and meaning. No doubt JD Powers has chosen this to avoid explicit and concrete definition of terms. Just as Maytag did in the desparate attempt to convince people they still make 'dependable' appliances.

I have no idea what your point is regarding mechanical failures for PC antivirus software. Clearly JD Powers is by no means nearly as comprehensive in their scope of product reviews as Consumers Union. If you are trying to argue to the contrary, please do so.

I agree with you that the point is determination of reliability via consumer polling. I again ask you "Can you name a better database of reliability info for consumer products"?

Smarty

Reply to
Smarty

Salty Dog,

Well, I'm delighted we have returned from the little name-calling hissy-fit. How about just itemizing one or two points where I am wrong so we can intelligently discuss / debate them?

Smarty

Reply to
Smarty

No it's not. It's not any better than his "Linux will give your cats warts" junk. Linux hasn't relied on the command line interface for a long time now.

Might as well defend Bell Labs while I'm at it. If you don't like the stuff that came out of that money losing division, maybe you should turn off your computer.

Nothing wrong with AAPL except the proprietary interfaces. If you go for slick front ends, OSX and Linux have Vista beat.

Personally, I want my computer to work the way I want it to. I want to be in control of every aspect of the interface. There, Linux is king.

Oh, that's clear enough, but who cares.

Nope, better doesn't seem to matter. Well, except in the case of Vista vs. XP.

I'm only reading this thread because of the humor content. Anti Virus software...what a joke.

You guys really pay for that stuff?

Reply to
Dan Espen

I see. And so Consumer Reports in their owner surveys determines "specific failure rates, failure modes, time between failures, and other very concrete and universally accepted engineering measurements and terms"?

I'm sorry, but you're quibbling over a point of nomenclature.

You stated that on other organization uses owner surveys to collect reliability data. That is the point being addressed. When antivirus software suffers "specific failure rates, failure modes, time between failures, and other very concrete and universally accepted engineering measurements and terms" then I will look for someone to be publishing reliability information for antivirus software.

Can you name _any_ such that measures reliability using _your_ definition?

Reply to
J. Clarke

On 8/13/2008 1:36 PM Dan Espen spake thus:

Probably true, but what about XP? (Please don't mistake me for a Micro$oft partisan, but so far as I'm concerned, XP is plenty good enough for most of us.) By the way, does "AAPL" mean "the NYSE symbol for Apple"? That's an abbrev. I'm not familiar w/.

Sure, but again, that's sometimes the wrong argument for the wrong audience. Like how all the open-source geeks are always raving about how superior things like Firefox and Thunderbird are (both of which I use, by the way) for just that very reason: that the user has full control over lots of aspects of the program's behavior.

Problem is, a vanishingly small proportion of the population is 1) able to and 2) wants to control their software at this level. To most folks, dealing with Firefox and Thunderbird's hundreds of cryptic configuration variables (with no good comprehensive documentation to boot, unless you root around the web and happen to come upon some guy's partial compilation by accident) is just a gigantic headache and a pain in the ass that's just not worth the trouble. But I guess we should blame

*them* for not being computer-literate enough, right?
Reply to
David Nebenzahl

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