Today, you can get an HD-DVD player and a whole bunch of movies for virtually nothing, although no new movies are going to be coming out for it the existing ones are dirt cheap as are the players.
We the consumer may potentially hold massive power, unfortunately in order to wield that power you need to teach a sufficient proportion of the consumer base why something like DRM is bad...
Unfortunately, it is the media companies who control the most efficient methods for getting the message out, and they will be using their considerable resources to tell consumers the opposite message. Only people who care enough to do their own research, or who have been bitten by DRM themselves and are clued up enough to work out why they got screwed, will actively seek out the information or believe it...
Most people will just lap up the mass market oriented propaganda they see on tv and if they do hear someone complaining about DRM, assume that they're insane.
Consumers may have the power, but media companies have power over consumers.
Firefox seems to use more ram if it's available... Thats why that guy with the old panasonic laptop which probably doesn't have much ram, isn't using very much for firefox.
Memory for modern machines may well be very cheap, but memory for older systems is not because it's no longer mass produced, and many older machines have very low limits on the amount of memory they can accept. For example, i have a dell latitude c610 laptop which is perfectly fast enough for general use, but doesn't support more than 512mb of ram.
Linux apps are perfectly familiar, the differences are not so huge especially when compared to differences between different versions of the same app (eg msoffice 2003->2007, xp->vista)...
And users are perfectly used to minor differences between things, no two brands of TV have exactly the same controls, tho all have a very similar basic set there are many differences for more advanced controls. Same with any other appliances people use, or even vehicles. Even the most non technical of users are willing to accept that different brands produce different products for performing the same tasks.
The difference is that people don't realize linux exists, don't realize that anything other than ms exists... Users need to be educated (via advertising/promotions) that linux exists, what advantages it has over windows and where it's most suitable.
The existing linux netbooks were poorly advertised and poorly implemented, they had stripped down installs which made it difficult to install apps (package management is one of the biggest advantages of linux, neutering it is very bad)... They were also very badly advertised, they were touted as being cheaper than the windows based ones but were also made out to be inferior because of this... With better promotion and better implementation, linux netbooks would sell a lot better... Something like an eee running ubuntu netbook remix and with good advertising would do very well.
The fact that an AV is widely used actually means it's more likely to be worse, because the chances of malware authors having a copy too and testing their evil goods with it are much higher. If you use an AV that few other people to use, chances are the people writing these nasties haven't bothered checking to make sure it doesn't pick up their stuff.
Yes, it's effective but too complicated and therefore difficult to manage... A lot of the problem with windows security features is that the more useful ones are far too complex and therefore very rarely get used.
A much better approach, is the trusted path execution implemented by the grsecurity patch for linux.. This works by only allowing binaries owned by root and inside of directories which are also owned by root, to be executed. Something similar could be applied to windows, only allowing binaries installed by the admin to be run and not anything owned by unprivileged users. Ofcourse if you want complicated, linux also implements selinux. Some degree of protection can also be achieved simply by mounting any user writable areas (/home,/tmp etc) with the noexec flags.
X is not the big performance hit it was in the days when workstations had 4mb of ram and isa videocards, and you could run a stripped down version on a small device which removed the network transparency and other such featured.
Open source applications are also CPU agnostic, they can be and usually are compiled for all different kinds of CPU.
The app store is basically a copy of the repositories like apt which Linux has had for years, they could do with a better interface and some promotion so that users know they are actually there, but it's the same functionality.
The ability of authors to update their apps in an app store can easily be replicated to a distro repository, and third party repositories are easy to set up... Maemo (nokia's tablet platform) seems to handle it quite well, you can click on a link in the browser and it will add a repository then install the package for you.
Repositories can also handle closed source apps, tho obviously this is discouraged because of all the disadvantages of not having the source available.
I never saw the point of using Android or WinCE for netbooks... Android because it's new and designed for phones, and would be rather crippled for a laptop.
CE seems to sell to people who think it's the same as desktop windows, only it's not and those users who bought it thinking that will end up seriously disappointed... You end up with a very limited set of often crippled apps. The only sensible choice for ARM based netbooks, is a decent linux distribution (not the crippled versions that shipped on x86 netbooks), so you have a full selection of software available in an easy to use repository (if you do the repository well people will lap it up, see the iphone app store)... Getting extra apps onto the eee version of xandros was painful, make it easy like apple has and people will love it.
Linux had ibcs years ago which did exactly that, back when linux was relatively new, sco was the unix of choice for x86 systems and all the closed source apps (like netscape and wordperfect) were only available for sco. See http://www.jaggycraft.co.uk/linux/ibcs/
This tax is probably getting evaded constantly (intentionally or not), and brings in comparatively little revenue... It probably costs more to police it than it actually brings in.
What about users who get hit by drive by infections on websites that should be trustworthy (because the sites got owned, or malware is delivered through third party ads)? What about users who open pdf files or msoffice documents containing exploit code and malware? What about users who simply insert media infected with autorun malware? How about malware emails coming from trusted senders (either because those people are infected themselves, or because the mails are spoofed)
There are plenty of infection vectors which don't involve users doing things they're not supposed to be doing.
As well as windows update, don't forget to keep all the other applications on your workstations up to date... WSUS will handle msoffice and other ms apps, but you'll need to buy an expensive management application if you want to keep things like adobe reader updated (which makes them a perfect malware target)... You can't use the update functions inside these third party apps, you have to manage it centrally.
Firefox is all well and good, except that a lot of malware these days targets other apps, like msoffice files, trojan pdf files etc... Most users will happily open pdf or msoffice files without thinking and firefox won't help you. Ditto for infected removable media, especially with autorun.
I've not found any other AV to really be much better, i've seen machines installed with up to date mcafee which are spamming the users with ads... went through the box manually to find what was doing it and uploaded the binaries to virustotal.com, less than 10% of the av engines detected it even tho the programs hooks itself into ie and displays unwanted popup ads constantly (for typical spamvertised things like penis enlargement pills etc)
OSX is supposedly getting exchange support, on the other hand is Apple really the problem?
We have a similar situation where i work, exchange doesn't interoperate with the increasing number of linux and mac workstations... The problem is exchange not interoperating with anything else (as well as having a whole host of other problems and hidden costs), which is why it's being replaced.
heuristics won't help either, malware authors will have pirate copies of all the latest av products and will tweak their malware until the heuristics no longer detect it before they start deploying it.
AV is inherently a flawed idea... As you've found out, not every AV picks up every *known* piece of malware, and none of them will pick up new malware that has only just been developed (and people are developing new stuff all the time)...
Take some of the files that avast found and upload them to virustotal.com, and see just how many other AV products don't find it... You will also find that there is plenty of other malware out there which avast won't find... Anything that's missed by both avast and avg could potentially still be sitting on your machine.
Also, malware authors don't just sit still, malware is big business and the people writing it are constantly looking for new ways to avoid detection, and that often involves specifically targeting the most popular types of AV in order to find effective ways to bypass them. AV by it's very nature will always be one step behind the authors of malware... AV will always just be a low hanging fruit exercise, it will never be able to get anything... The only place i use AV is on my email server, not because i'm especially concerned about the actual malware itself, but because malware detection works as another method to remove some unwanted junk mail.
Plenty of organizations stuck with netscape 4.x for years too, they will be forced to update if the sites they need to use don't support their crufty old browsers any more.
Firefox i imagine you can just recompile... I don't think there are official 64bit builds of firefox for linux either, but i was running firefox and its predecessors on 64bit linux machines many years ago (alpha cpu)...
Flash, and to an even greater extent Silverlight are proprietary technologies controlled by someone else... It is never in the best interest of a company to promote someone else's proprietary technology and have their own products dependent on it, that's putting their fate in the hands of a potential competitor.
The financial benefit of an open standard, in this case HTML5, comes from the fact it's an open standard and therefore they are in the same boat as everyone else. With a proprietary tech, you are at the mercy of the owner of that technology and will always be several steps behind and seen as a second rate supplier.
A friend of mine won a year's supply of a chocolate drink... In July he got 365 bottles, so enough for one a day... However, the expiry date on them was September, so had he actually tried to just drink one a day they would have been rather rancid by the time next June rolled around.
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It's not the background apps, the windows version running under wine actually outperforms the native linux version too.
Today, you can get an HD-DVD player and a whole bunch of movies for virtually nothing, although no new movies are going to be coming out for it the existing ones are dirt cheap as are the players.
We the consumer may potentially hold massive power, unfortunately in order to wield that power you need to teach a sufficient proportion of the consumer base why something like DRM is bad...
Unfortunately, it is the media companies who control the most efficient methods for getting the message out, and they will be using their considerable resources to tell consumers the opposite message. Only people who care enough to do their own research, or who have been bitten by DRM themselves and are clued up enough to work out why they got screwed, will actively seek out the information or believe it...
Most people will just lap up the mass market oriented propaganda they see on tv and if they do hear someone complaining about DRM, assume that they're insane.
Consumers may have the power, but media companies have power over consumers.
Firefox seems to use more ram if it's available... Thats why that guy with the old panasonic laptop which probably doesn't have much ram, isn't using very much for firefox.
Memory for modern machines may well be very cheap, but memory for older systems is not because it's no longer mass produced, and many older machines have very low limits on the amount of memory they can accept. For example, i have a dell latitude c610 laptop which is perfectly fast enough for general use, but doesn't support more than 512mb of ram.
Linux apps are perfectly familiar, the differences are not so huge especially when compared to differences between different versions of the same app (eg msoffice 2003->2007, xp->vista)...
And users are perfectly used to minor differences between things, no two brands of TV have exactly the same controls, tho all have a very similar basic set there are many differences for more advanced controls. Same with any other appliances people use, or even vehicles. Even the most non technical of users are willing to accept that different brands produce different products for performing the same tasks.
The difference is that people don't realize linux exists, don't realize that anything other than ms exists... Users need to be educated (via advertising/promotions) that linux exists, what advantages it has over windows and where it's most suitable.
The existing linux netbooks were poorly advertised and poorly implemented, they had stripped down installs which made it difficult to install apps (package management is one of the biggest advantages of linux, neutering it is very bad)... They were also very badly advertised, they were touted as being cheaper than the windows based ones but were also made out to be inferior because of this... With better promotion and better implementation, linux netbooks would sell a lot better... Something like an eee running ubuntu netbook remix and with good advertising would do very well.
The fact that an AV is widely used actually means it's more likely to be worse, because the chances of malware authors having a copy too and testing their evil goods with it are much higher.
If you use an AV that few other people to use, chances are the people writing these nasties haven't bothered checking to make sure it doesn't pick up their stuff.
Yes, it's effective but too complicated and therefore difficult to manage... A lot of the problem with windows security features is that the more useful ones are far too complex and therefore very rarely get used.
A much better approach, is the trusted path execution implemented by the grsecurity patch for linux.. This works by only allowing binaries owned by root and inside of directories which are also owned by root, to be executed. Something similar could be applied to windows, only allowing binaries installed by the admin to be run and not anything owned by unprivileged users. Ofcourse if you want complicated, linux also implements selinux. /tmp etc) with the noexec flags.
Some degree of protection can also be achieved simply by mounting any user writable areas (/home,
He works for a computer manufacturer (note the r, you forgot to correct that), his native language is probably some dialect of chinese.
X is not the big performance hit it was in the days when workstations had 4mb of ram and isa videocards, and you could run a stripped down version on a small device which removed the network transparency and other such featured.
Open source applications are also CPU agnostic, they can be and usually are compiled for all different kinds of CPU.
The app store is basically a copy of the repositories like apt which Linux has had for years, they could do with a better interface and some promotion so that users know they are actually there, but it's the same functionality.
The ability of authors to update their apps in an app store can easily be replicated to a distro repository, and third party repositories are easy to set up... Maemo (nokia's tablet platform) seems to handle it quite well, you can click on a link in the browser and it will add a repository then install the package for you.
Repositories can also handle closed source apps, tho obviously this is discouraged because of all the disadvantages of not having the source available.
I never saw the point of using Android or WinCE for netbooks...
Android because it's new and designed for phones, and would be rather crippled for a laptop.
CE seems to sell to people who think it's the same as desktop windows, only it's not and those users who bought it thinking that will end up seriously disappointed... You end up with a very limited set of often crippled apps. The only sensible choice for ARM based netbooks, is a decent linux distribution (not the crippled versions that shipped on x86 netbooks), so you have a full selection of software available in an easy to use repository (if you do the repository well people will lap it up, see the iphone app store)... Getting extra apps onto the eee version of xandros was painful, make it easy like apple has and people will love it.
Linux had ibcs years ago which did exactly that, back when linux was relatively new, sco was the unix of choice for x86 systems and all the closed source apps (like netscape and wordperfect) were only available for sco. See http://www.jaggycraft.co.uk/linux/ibcs/
This tax is probably getting evaded constantly (intentionally or not), and brings in comparatively little revenue... It probably costs more to police it than it actually brings in.
What about users who get hit by drive by infections on websites that should be trustworthy (because the sites got owned, or malware is delivered through third party ads)?
What about users who open pdf files or msoffice documents containing exploit code and malware?
What about users who simply insert media infected with autorun malware?
How about malware emails coming from trusted senders (either because those people are infected themselves, or because the mails are spoofed)
There are plenty of infection vectors which don't involve users doing things they're not supposed to be doing.
As well as windows update, don't forget to keep all the other applications on your workstations up to date...
WSUS will handle msoffice and other ms apps, but you'll need to buy an expensive management application if you want to keep things like adobe reader updated (which makes them a perfect malware target)... You can't use the update functions inside these third party apps, you have to manage it centrally.
Firefox is all well and good, except that a lot of malware these days targets other apps, like msoffice files, trojan pdf files etc... Most users will happily open pdf or msoffice files without thinking and firefox won't help you. Ditto for infected removable media, especially with autorun.
None of them have a perfect detection rate...
The more popular ones are likely to be explicitly targeted by authors of malware...
So cost, convenience and performance become very important...
I've not found any other AV to really be much better, i've seen machines installed with up to date mcafee which are spamming the users with ads... went through the box manually to find what was doing it and uploaded the binaries to virustotal.com, less than 10% of the av engines detected it even tho the programs hooks itself into ie and displays unwanted popup ads constantly (for typical spamvertised things like penis enlargement pills etc)
OSX is supposedly getting exchange support, on the other hand is Apple really the problem?
We have a similar situation where i work, exchange doesn't interoperate with the increasing number of linux and mac workstations... The problem is exchange not interoperating with anything else (as well as having a whole host of other problems and hidden costs), which is why it's being replaced.
heuristics won't help either, malware authors will have pirate copies of all the latest av products and will tweak their malware until the heuristics no longer detect it before they start deploying it.
AV is inherently a flawed idea... As you've found out, not every AV picks up every *known* piece of malware, and none of them will pick up new malware that has only just been developed (and people are developing new stuff all the time)...
Take some of the files that avast found and upload them to virustotal.com, and see just how many other AV products don't find it... You will also find that there is plenty of other malware out there which avast won't find... Anything that's missed by both avast and avg could potentially still be sitting on your machine.
Also, malware authors don't just sit still, malware is big business and the people writing it are constantly looking for new ways to avoid detection, and that often involves specifically targeting the most popular types of AV in order to find effective ways to bypass them. AV by it's very nature will always be one step behind the authors of malware... AV will always just be a low hanging fruit exercise, it will never be able to get anything...
The only place i use AV is on my email server, not because i'm especially concerned about the actual malware itself, but because malware detection works as another method to remove some unwanted junk mail.
That's cool, resembles wolfenstein 3d...
Works nicely on Safari 4 (default version supplied by Apple update), seems to work just fine on highest.
Plenty of organizations stuck with netscape 4.x for years too, they will be forced to update if the sites they need to use don't support their crufty old browsers any more.
Firefox i imagine you can just recompile... I don't think there are official 64bit builds of firefox for linux either, but i was running firefox and its predecessors on 64bit linux machines many years ago (alpha cpu)...
Flash, and to an even greater extent Silverlight are proprietary technologies controlled by someone else... It is never in the best interest of a company to promote someone else's proprietary technology and have their own products dependent on it, that's putting their fate in the hands of a potential competitor.
The financial benefit of an open standard, in this case HTML5, comes from the fact it's an open standard and therefore they are in the same boat as everyone else. With a proprietary tech, you are at the mercy of the owner of that technology and will always be several steps behind and seen as a second rate supplier.
A friend of mine won a year's supply of a chocolate drink... In July he got 365 bottles, so enough for one a day... However, the expiry date on them was September, so had he actually tried to just drink one a day they would have been rather rancid by the time next June rolled around.