Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> __/ [ BearItAll ] on Wednesday 21 June 2006 10:09 \__
>
>> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>
>>> AVID: A Trend In Motion; Firefox Rocks; IT Without Gates
>>>
>>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>> | I was asked last week why I keep changing the D-word in AVID e.g.
>>> | Antivirus Is Dead, Doomed, Dying and Dysfunctional. To be honest,
>>> | it's a cheap and obscure trick; here's a tortuous explanation.
>>> |
>>> | I am running a campaign to bring down the $3.7 billion AV industry...
>>> `----
>>>
>>> http://www.it-director.com/article.php?articleid=13337
>>
>> Thats a little unfair I thought. The likes of Norton and McAfee were
>> essential at one time for the MS and there fore the business world, as
>> well as home users.
>
>
> Microsoft created an opportunity for an industry to emerge, but the
> programmers could have earned a living doing something that would further
> advance society rather than fix or compensate for some other vendor's
> bugs. From a scientic point-of-view (rather than industrial), this is sad.
>
Thats not fair Roy, the programmers took the jobs available at the time.
Goodness knows it was needed, because MS weren't doing anything about it.
Plus by default programmers like *new* areas so that they can develope
properly, the whole job from scratch, so anti-v was bound to be attractive.
I did a lot of programming that I'm not particularly proud of now, but
needed the contracts at the time so I did them. But other times I did them
because they were new, not caring at all how the product would be used, I
was satisfying a need that is in all developers in all fields.
>
>> But it wasn't totally unfair either.
>>
>> There are free or much cheaper products available now, those weren't
>> there when MS were first hit with wave after wave of virus's. But they
>> have learnt from the mistakes of the big names in MS protection.
>>
>> The big names are shooting themselves in the foot by splitting the
>> protection into tiny modules and charging stupid prices for each. So you
>> can buy anti-v, anti-spam, firewall, a daft cookie protection thing and
>> so on. Plus they have built such a monster that MS users are likely to
>> stop using them just to get some of the speed of the machine back.
>>
>> I did a Symantec on a reps PC just the other day, it was the Internet
>> protection suite, after Windows has started they are a few minutes where
>> all resources are taken up while the protection sets itself up. I thought
>> it was crashed at a couple of points. But when I started it while
>> watching resources it was just part of the startup sequence. No wonder MS
>> is wanting to do their own on this one. Symantec have been a good aly to
>> IT for a long time, but they surely can't expect users to put up with
>> this nonsense.
>
>
> Symatec is currently working with IBM on Linux storage and backup systems.
> This has been cropping up in the news for over a week. This relates to
> your reference to Ghost (below).
>
Oh blast, this has all the makings of a bad direction, I hope IBM don't make
the mistake of bringing bloatware into their available products.
However, anti-v in windows is heavily bloated by the very fact that it is
visible to the virus, it has to self check a lot just to make sure it is
who it thinks it is. On UNIX/Linux it works much better, much smaller foot
print anti-v and much less resources used.
Ironic really, the place that doesn't need the anti-v is the best place to
run it :)
>
>> I know this is seperate but that Ghost and a machine recovery thing came
>> with the suite, they are the biggest pile of crap of the lot, slowing
>> down the whole system for very long periods. But they haven't given you a
>> way to get rid of them without getting rid of all of the suite. I have
>> tried to recover using that recovery program before and found that it
>> couldn't read it's own files so I know it isn't actually doing anything
>> usefull. Ghost I'll admit could be usefull, but not as a live mirror
>> creation thing, it is far too heavy handed for that. Instead ghost should
>> be a tool, not a service.
>
>
> There are several tools for Linux that achieve the same things as Ghost.
> They are free, too. And why discuss recovery in the first place? The mind
> boggles as Linux machines can sustain long uptime and never be formatted
> (with the exception of hardware issue, e.g. bad sectors).
>
Windows needs recovery, it would be nice to use a one button recovery thing
to do that, including all the apps etc, but I've never known it work. So
although the idea of Ghost is good, it doesn't quite do it.
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