(no subject)

At the small telecom company that used to employ me, we had marketing/sales people using Windows and engineers/software developers using UNIX (either Solaris or Linux). The amount of time and trouble caused by Windows worms was crazy - at least from my point of view. In one case we had an outbreak, but there was also a lot of time and effort spent to establish preventative measures - and that's not considering the cold, hard cash that was spent on anti-virus software, etc.

The amount of time lost to worms and virii for UNIX was nil. All problems for the UNIX/Linux machines were network- or hardware-related.

So I'm not surprised to see that we've just lost $1.5-million fighting a worm that spread through a federal department. If the government had bought any other type of product or service that had cost that amount of money to fix, you can bet that there would be legal action to recoup some of the lost money and productivity. Not so with Windows. They'll just grin and bear it.

Why do people continue to accept this kind of stuff? I've had conversations with many Windows-using people about my Linux machines and one in two (roughly) always ask: "What kind of anti-virus software do you run?" Me: "Um, I don't need to run any."

* thebookpile - Windows-free since 1997 (and, consequently, worm+virus free since then, too).