On Friday 26 December 2008 10:13:27 Surya Pratap wrote:
Rony wrote:
Windows is quite a PITA to maintain especially with viruses and its affinity for corrupting the file system,
Windows has as many viruses because of its popularity, security, no matter the OS is actually up to the user, think of, what a nasty program can accomplish if it is given root access in linux.
It is a misconception that windows has virus because it is most popular. 85% of the servers run on Unix, and most of them GNU/Linux and also since they are servers they are exposed. They do not get infected, though they are popular. Desktops are usually behind the firewall so well protected. M$ machines get infected despite that. The possibility of virus in a Unix machine is possible in only one condition: all the applications are running as super user. But, this situation actually defeates the very idea of a multi-user design. Therefore, it is correct to say that Unix OSs are practically immune to virus problem, and M$ machines have virus problem not due to their popularity but due to bad design choices.
M$ is not using a known invention (25 year old, even before their company is born) for the benifit of human kind. Therefore they a are actually liable to be sued for the crime they are committing for not providing the benifits of computer science to their customers.