OT: Antivirus and other antimalware stuff

[Andy Champ]

I dare say that somewhere there's an app that hits a Linux resource leak of some kind, and doesn't cause problems on Windows.

Did the kernel memory recover if the process was killed?

Andy

[The Natural Philosopher]

Early windows certainly did not.

[The Natural Philosopher]

malloc was part of C and Unix from the word go.

>

[The Natural Philosopher]

There are no known *kernel* memory resource leaks. It might be possible to have a buggy driver that pulls kernel memory indefinitely, but its likely it would get fixed PDQ.

No. That was the point.

[Steve Walker]

Agreed, most people default to MS.

However, the vast majority of business PCs are only used for wordprocessing, spreadsheets, email and browsing. It doesn't matter what OS is underpinning that as long as the software can read and write the default standard of Microsoft formats.

Training for a different system is often mentioned as a large cost, but if it's only the apps that matter, that's all most people need and Openoffice is closer to what most people already know from Microsoft than the newer version of MS Office, with the "ribbon."

Windows is necessary for some things though. I have software, such as Autocad that I would need to replace if I moved away from Windows.

SteveW

[John Rumm]

Don't forget the tons of corporate in house business critical software that was developed in visual basic, or worse, as IE ActiveX controls.

Can make moving away from "legacy" systems very expensive and painful.

[Tim Streater]

And doubtless the internals are not documented either.

[Nightjar]

As I mentioned elsewhere, more than 98% of businesses in Britain have fewer than 20 employees. They will almost certainly have accounting software as well. The accounting / stock control programme I used for many years was Windows specific. The developers, with whom we spoke quite often in the early days, said the potential return simply wasn't worth the time needed to develop it for different platforms.

While the e-commerce software I used, Actinic, would run on Windows, UNIX or Linux at server level, the user interface was again Windows specific.

Colin Bignell

[Nightjar]

Or, from a customer's point of view, whether the customer's IT consultant takes it as a personal affront if someone manages to get a virus onto a system he is responsible for, as ours did.

Mind you, we had a software firewall at the remote server, a hardware firewall on the incoming line, another software firewall on our server, and some seriously paranoid anti-virus software on the system. It was also only used by people who were very virus risk aware and were very careful about what was put on any of the machines.

Colin Bignell

[Steve Walker]

Certainly legacy software may dictate perticular hardware and operating systems, but not for the vast majority of business users. As a contractor I have moved around dozens of companies (Engineering) and although there are particular packages that do require windows, easily

90% of the PCs could be running anything, as they never use specialised software. Word, Excel and Outlook are the only software that most of them ever run. Indeed the licence costs of specialised software often mean that users have to move to machines dedicated to it anyway!

SteveW

[Tim Streater]

Indeed, so for most purposes they could just as well use Macs. But that would never do - they'd have to lay off 90% of the IT staff.

People are mesmerised by the fact that Macs look more expensive upfront. They overlook the lifetime costs.

[John Rumm]

Indeed - each operation will be different. But to an extent if you are tied into one system, for some things, then adding other different ones will up your support costs.

I have one client that relies on one semi web based application for 90% of their business, and alas its tied into IE, and MS Word - so they get no choice in OS or software stack.

[Clive George]

One thing I find interesting is the number of vendors who do server based offerings which are windows only. Pain, because I much prefer doing stuff with the *nix servers, but the business wants those apps.

I think a few of the vendors do offer *nix support, but it's often not nearly as good as their windows support, simply because the majority of their customers are on windows.

And, much as I may dislike them, our windows servers do actually seem to work.

[The Natural Philosopher]

In the bigger sites those windows servers are now virtualised onto Blades running Linux or another hypervisor.

At least that way they are remotely bootable when they crash.And can be backed up properly.