On Monday 26 Mar 2007 18:12:34 jtd wrote:
On Sunday 25 March 2007 21:21, Mrugesh Karnik wrote:
Oh give me a break and be practical for once. I've not had a single virus or spyware on my Windows box for over 3 years. We've had Rony on the list who had to reinstalled Windows after a considerable amount of time. If you use it properly, its pretty manageable. Yeah every customer in the cafe might not, but then in the cafe I converted, the owner would run anti-spyware and anti-virus scans thoroughly every night before he left. He hadn't had a problem even once.
Neat solution no. Run av on all machines all night pay for bijlee, pay for AV pay for man all night and continue blowing your profits. Not to mention the frequent registry and dll corruptions and inevitable reinstall. Ahh one can always automate the process.
There was a long thread a few years back on hardware compat, prices, etc for cyber cafes. It will cost you substantial money to maintain the doze poisons strewn all over the os and cyber space. Further the cyber cafe software cost is priced at Rs.100. Policeman is proly going to add a zero to that per month. If u think cyberbhai's going to buy licences (or pay you for maintaining linux boxes) just forget it.
I don't get this. Why are you guys always thinking one dimensional? In this case, just viruses and spyware. My friend never had to pay a single paisa for any of those problems. And no, he didn't use any pirated versions. He had a license for Windows and used free versions of AVG anti-virus and some other free anti-spyware tools. Also, he ran the scans when he was nearing the closure and the computers were free. He'd do his calculations while the scans ran. They ran for some 15-20 minutes. I wonder how much money that cost him. He STILL switched his server to Linux because he found certain advantages with it - none related to any kind of freedom - beer or speech.
And who talked about me being paid for maintaining Linux boxen? You just conjured that up out of the thin air! And what policeman?
And seriously, if you're going to offer a virus free system in exchange for losing customers, you've lost already. I don't understand why there is this almighty urge to get everyone to switch to FOSS. If you think you're freeing all those souls, think about this. You can't even raise a vote of no confidence against an `aamdaar' or a `khaasdaar' or any blah blah person you've elected who isn't doing his job. The only power you have in your so called freedom and democracy is to vote once every few years. What other freedoms do you really have? You can't even choose to watch movies uncensored. Whether you want to or not is another issue. But why can't you choose when you want to? Why are you to be sensored for saying `I hate blah blah' on Orkut? Why? Is that freedom? These issues are more important than software in cyber cafes.
This seems to be like the religious wars people fight. I believe in something. You MUST believe in it too. If you don't, we'll make you believe. Soon it becomes.. You don't have a right to exist because you don't adhere to what I believe in.
P.S. If you do succeed with this (and contrary to what you might believe by now, I don't have a problem with Linux getting into cyber cafes), since freedom matters so much to you, use one of the absolutely free distros mentioned on the GNU site.