Performance shock

[david]

On Mon, 2005-04-25 at 23:33 -0400, Ed Sutherland wrote:
> I'm far from a Windows fan, but I've never experienced much slowdown or 
> wasted much productivity due to security scans or MS patch installation. 
> I schedule any anti-virus scans for early in the morning, when I'm off 
> grabbing a cup of coffee anyway, or late at night before I shut down the 
> system. In today's world, we don't normally look upon keeping the door 
> locked or not talking to the local sex offender as tasks that waste our 
> time or degrade our productivity; such actions are simple precautions we 
> take while living in the real world.
> 
> Ed
> 
> 
> baza wrote:
> 
> > Tab Gilbert wrote:
> >
> >> I just wish some Mac folks would chime in. 
> >
> > I run a mac, iBook G4, and Windows, for games. But to be honest I 
> > don't care if Windows is sniff faster, after all, how much time is 
> > wasted running spy ware killers, installing MS security patches, 
> > scanning for virus??.
> >
> > Linux wins for all the above reasons, not to mention free software.
> >
> > Baza
> >
> 


I use the only Linux machine at the place where I work. All the rest are
Windows, consequently the IT dept gets piles of Windows based IT
magazines. I was looking through one yesterday. It bore some title
that's designed to make the reader/buyer feel important - "Mega IT
Professional" or equivalent (slight exagerration).
It began to occur to me that about 80% of the magazines content were
advisories on how to deal with the fact that Windows is basically
insecure and effectively non-securable and the rest was adverts.
Article after article on spyware, anti-virus solutions, cleaning up
after stupid users, how to tell when you've been hacked.
IT professionals who deal with Windows have been conned into accepting
this crap.
I mean, it's not as if there aren't alternatives out there...


Let's transfer this to a different sphere.
Imagine if Microsoft sold boats!
Here's your boat user magazine with article after article on how to keep
your "guaranteed to sink" boat afloat for longer than a few hours. How
to deal with the holes that the boat maker couldn't be bothered to sort
out when he sold it to you. Articles on how to deal with defective
equipment in the boat, broken masts, sails with holes in, leaky keels,
broken radar and so on and so on.

Buy a boat, sail out into the harbour, start sinking.
Return to boatyard, have it explained to you that if you were stupid
enough to actually put your boat into the water then it's your own
fault. Buy a new boat.
Repeat.

Unbelievable.

When I pointed out to the head of IT what most of the content of these
magazines was he just laughed. 
Talk about manufactured consent.

I don't know which is worse, a company selling a fourth rate pile of
crap as a technical solution or the idiots that buy into the idea and
keep going back for more despite 10 years of overwhelming evidence of
what will happen.

Who would accept such levels of indifference, incompetance and outright
deceitful greed from any other company in any other area of life?

nux