[LINK] Ruminating about viruses

[Howard Lowndes]

On Fri, 25 Oct 2002, Craig Sanders wrote:

> btw, speaking of screensavers and related toy programs....have you ever
> noticed that windows is many times more stable when the user DOESN'T
> install such programs, when they don't fiddle with it (aka "personalise"
> their machine).
>
> follow that thought some more and you'll notice that that is one the
> main underlying reasons why end-users prefer to stick with windows
> rather than switch to a linux desktop.  they can fiddle with the guts of
> windows, even though they have no idea what they are doing, just by
> clicking on a download button on a web page...whereas linux doesn't
> allow them to install stupid toys unless they have root access.

<war story>
Around about the time of the Olympics one of my clients who
had a small office network of 6-7 PCs called to say that they were getting
"Insufficient memory" errors when they fired up M$ Word and complained
that I had not put in sufficient memory when I did a hardware upgrade a
few months prior.

When I got on site I discovered that the "boy" in the office who "knows
all about computers" had installed an Olympics screen saver downloaded
from the Channel 7 web site that was Java driven and very flashy.
Needless to say it leaked memory like a sieve and eventually there was
insufficient contiguous memory to load M$ Word.

I ripped it off all of the computers and informed the client principal
about the situation.  3 months later I lost the client.
</war story>

You can personalise Linux very nicely, but it will only affect your own
little sandbox thankfully.  Mind you, if you do insist on running as root
then that is a very big sandbox.

-- 
Howard.
LANNet Computing Associates - Your Linux people
Contact detail at http://www.lannetlinux.com
"Flatter government, not fatter government." - me
 Get rid of the Australian states.
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If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?


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