**************************************** * LUG meet on 12 Jan. 2003 @ VJTI ****************************************
On Sat, Jan 04, 2003 at 08:41:14PM +0530, Nikhil Joshi wrote: > > initial capital cost by orders of magnitude (now u know why M$ is trying to > > change it's bussiness model). This is true for any user. The hassle of > > keeping out worms and preventing random crashes is what will turn the shop > > owner and home user to GNU/Linux. > > > I guess you are assuming 3 things: > > 1. Worms/viruses are impossible under Linux Why allow any program to access almost any part of the file system and then use antivirus software to guard against it? Let every access to a file be authenticated by the kernel according to the privileges of the program, thus making it very difficult to write a virus (except for the security holes that might be present in the kernel). But having some security holes (getting constantly fixed) is definitely better than having no security at all at the file system level. Viruses/Worms could exploit the holes in the various protocol standards. But that problem is not specific to some operating system and hence also possible on GNU/Linux and irrelevant to the comparison between the security or stability in different OSs. > 3. Random crashes are impossible in Linux > > IMHO *all* these assumptions are misleading and incorrect. Almost nothing can be considered impossible; except something that is strictly forbidden due to some law of physics. Considering quantum mechanical effects, there is always a possiblity, though extremely small, that a bit in the memory contained in an important data structure of the kernel toggles and causes the system to freeze. So even if the software is perfect, the possibility of a system crash cannot be ruled out. So the question is not whether a crash occurs or not, but how often does it occur. It is observed that systems running GNU/Linux crash much less often than those running Windows OSs. -- Abhir Joshi http://education.vsnl.com/abhir/ -- _______________________________________________ http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
