Flawed McAfee update paralyses corporate PCs

I don't know, I dual boot between both Vista and Ubuntu, and I like both for what I can do with them. Vista is for gaming, cause I'm a PC gamer but hate screwing around with WINE trying to get my Microsoft compatible games to work. Ubuntu is for web-surfing, watching movies, listening to music, so on and so forth. Each system has it's upsides and downsides, in my opinion. I do like that I can use my Ubuntu OS to debug the Vista OS if necessary. Also, I use AVG free home anti-virus, and thus far have been very happy with it. Haven't been virused yet, but part of that may be my internet habits in avoiding sites that seem suspect.

 

I downgraded my Vista install to XP. Games run much better. Vista is the biggest bloated piece of garbage ever to come out of Redmond. I have a few Windows first person shooters.. that actually run better in Linux under WINE than they do in Windows. And I have a few games that only want to run in Windows. I'm with you. I NEVER open up a browser in Windows.

 

Well you obviously have a lot of money invested in Windows software, so there'd be no incentive for you to change. As for the list of programs above, with the exception of Driver's Daily Log, which would run fine in Ubuntu with WINE, there are free, open source alternatives for each and every one of them, and most of them even have Windows versions.
They do make a version of Ubuntu that focuses on audio and video production that has most of these installed out of the box. Ubuntu Studio.

But anyhow, I was talking about the average work computer in an office environment. A computer using not much more than Office and a web browser, in a room full of cubicles. In that environment, if I had to maintain all those computers, I'd put some version Linux on them, and not necessarily Ubuntu, but something like Oracle's Enterprise version.http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=oracle

 

Windows is no better or worse than any other OS out there. Windows is the main target of hackers because that is were the money is.

I have 2 machines running Win7 now, I like it haven't had any problems yet. If you build a quality machine with quality name brand parts you won't have hardware issues with windows. If you cheap out, using generic parts your run a higher chance of having hardware issues. I have been home building my machines for over 10 years, started with a Win95 machine. As long as I have not tried to cut cost with generic parts, everything has worked. When it didn't work, I ended up replacing the generic with a quality part and the problems went away.

For the most part, unless you game, do 3D rendering, or photo and video manipulation you never use the pull power of your system. Very few office type programs are a drain on your system.

As for viruses and such, roadkill has said it. Personnel behavior is the problem. I really don't remember the last time I had a virus or spy-ware problem.

Mark

 

The big down side to business using Linux is tech support. For corporate customers MS offers great support. There is a major difference in the level of support a retail customer vs a large corporate customer. Mack Trucks until 2 years ago was running Win95 (upgraded to WinXP) and still had tech support, including updates from MS long after retail customers where cut off. They are still running office 2003, they are just now thinking about upgrading to office 2010.

The average office computer running windows is very easy to maintain. All info and data is stored on a central drive, only info kept on local drive is the OS and applications. If local drive goes bad, gets a virus or spyware or what ever, they remove old drive install a new cloned driver with OS and applications. All this is done in 15 mins, old drive is taken back, formatted, repaired then cloned and put on shelf until needed.

Mark

 

I can do all that better, easier, and with zero expense going to software. That's all I'm saying. The fact that a major corporation was running Windows 95 up until 2008 speaks volumes to me.

Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu, provides tech support for a fee, if you want it, that's how they make their money. Red Hat is a commercial product aimed at businesses, servers mostly, and provides tech support as well.
http://www.ubuntu.com/support/services

 

I actually searched the net for data yesterday for a reliable study on the "causes for infection" prior to my post, but was unable to find anything I trusted enough to quote. So I went with our own data internally (dealing entirely with truck drivers and not the general public) based on infections over the last 6 months or so and those that we were able to trace back with the driver to the approximate time and behavior that initiated the attack.

So, I didn't find anything definitive stating that lack of Windows updates is the "#1 cause" of infections, HOWEVER YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY CORRECT that my post is incomplete without adding the Windows Update component. Microsoft plays a constant game of closing exploit avenues as hackers discover them, and those Windows updates are very important in that fight. Thanks for adding that.

 

Look, I'm not putting Linux down. I run ubuntu on an older thinkpad t23 with a 1GHz PIII chip. But, there are lots and lots of software that was custom written for the customer to run under Windows OS. One of the big reasons Mack stayed with Win95 was there custom software. It's big money and lots of time to have software recoded, in most cases it's cheaper to start over.

Photography is a big hobby for me, to run Lightroom and Photoshop I need to use either Windows or OSx. I have not found a good replacement for either in Linux, the only thing close is GIMP and it's around 10 years behind the capabilities of Photoshop, there is no Lightroom replacement for Linux.

Mark

 

I think in a lot of cases it's the other way around. MS finds the holes and the hackers take advantage of them. It's not a coincidence that most Windows computers that get infected do so in the days prior to a patch coming out from Microsoft. When they plug a security flaw, the malcontents reverse engineer it and see what hole MS is patching, and write their code to take advantage of it, knowing there is going to be at least a week or two of lag time before everyone gets the patch.

 

Yes there is!

blueMarine

http://bluemarine.tidalwave.it/

Has Windows and Mac versions as well. The price? FREE.

As for Gimp, are you aware that someone altered it to have the same interface as Photoshop? That's the beauty of open source. If you know how, you are legally allowed to alter it. GIMPShop is a clone of Photoshop, the only difference is that it doesn't support Photoshop plug-ins, only Gimp plug-ins.

http://www.gimpshop.com/


Regardless any OS your running, it's a good idea to check and see if there are open source alternatives out there for the application you are wanting to buy. Here is a great place to find good, free software.

http://sourceforge.net/