Is Windows A Virus?
Black_Viper
Join Date: 2003-12-08 Member: 24157Members
Join Date: 2003-12-08 Member: 24157Members
in Off-Topic
No, Windows is not a virus. Here's what viruses do:
* They replicate quickly - okay, Windows does that.
* Viruses use up valuable system resources, slowing down the system as they do so - okay, Windows does that.
* Viruses will, from time to time, trash your hard disk - okay, Windows does that too.
* Viruses are usually carried, unknown to the user, along with valuable programs and systems. Sigh... Windows does that, too.
* Viruses will occasionally make the user suspect their system is too slow (see 2) and the user will buy new hardware. Yup, that's with Windows, too.
Until now it seems Windows is a virus but there are fundamental differences:Viruses are well supported by their authors, are running on most systems, their program code is fast, compact and efficient and they tend to become more sophisticated as they mature.
So Windows is not a virus.
It's a bug.
* They replicate quickly - okay, Windows does that.
* Viruses use up valuable system resources, slowing down the system as they do so - okay, Windows does that.
* Viruses will, from time to time, trash your hard disk - okay, Windows does that too.
* Viruses are usually carried, unknown to the user, along with valuable programs and systems. Sigh... Windows does that, too.
* Viruses will occasionally make the user suspect their system is too slow (see 2) and the user will buy new hardware. Yup, that's with Windows, too.
Until now it seems Windows is a virus but there are fundamental differences:Viruses are well supported by their authors, are running on most systems, their program code is fast, compact and efficient and they tend to become more sophisticated as they mature.
So Windows is not a virus.
It's a bug.
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
edit: from my point of view, lemme explain.
Replicates quickly: did you even try Linux? The average person will just be lost and end up erasing his system. I'm not even saying what will happen to those who barely ever touched a computer. Windows at least is user friendly which is what most people look for.
uses system resources: mine isn't hogging up that much, I can still do whatever I want.
carried along: you must be blind not to notice the windows boot screen. Everyone uses Windows and everyone knows it.
too slow: booting up windows takes me nearly half the time than firing up linux + graphic interface. I also experience no slowing down whenever I'm using my computer.
well supported by their author: I think they're making a mighty good job at it. The only reason it has so many updates (which is a good thing believe it or not) is because, well, they actually CARE enough to not let you with a thousand security holes.
run on most systems: point to me a PC sold in the market without Windows.
More sophisticated: go compare 3.1 to XP. Seems to me they get better.
If Cars Were Like Computers
What if cars really were like computers? You'd have a helpline to assist in solving problems as they came up... Now just imagine if the same people that answer the phones at Microsoft had to answer the General Motors helpline...
HelpLine: "General Motors HelpLine, how can I help you?"
Customer: "I can get in through the driver's side door just fine, but I can't open the passenger's side."
HelpLine: "How did you try to open the passenger's side?"
Customer: "I pulled up on the handle, just like on the other side."
HelpLine: "People are always making that mistake. You have to push on the passenger's side. Remember, you're always moving the handle toward the left of the car. It's more consistent that way."
HelpLine: "General Motors HelpLine, how can I help you?"
Customer: "How do I turn my windshield wipers on?"
HelpLine: "There's a little button on the radio console . . ."
Customer: "Radio console??"
HelpLine: "Yes, it's more efficient to have all the controls in one central position. Look for the one with a shape like a piece of pie on it."
Customer: "And that's the windshield wiper button? I was always wondering what that did."
HelpLine: "People are always asking that. You'd think they'd be more familiar with the principles of graphic design."
HelpLine: "General Motors HelpLine, how can I help you?"
Customer: "My car will go forward, but when I put it in reverse, nothing happens."
HelpLine: "What model do you have?"
Customer: "It's a brand new 1994 Mongoose."
HelpLine: "Yes, but it is a 1994R with a big R or 1994r with a small r?"
Customer: "I don't know. Let me find out and I'll call you back."
HelpLine: "Alright, but let me tell you you've probably got the small r model. You'll need to upgrade to the big R version to go in reverse."
HelpLine: "General Motors HelpLine, how can I help you?"
Customer: "I just called about the car that wouldn't go in reverse."
HelpLine: "Well, yes, we get a lot of calls about that."
Customer: "It turns out I have the small r model. But I bought the one with the 'Reverse gear option'."
HelpLine: "Yes, that's the option to upgrade to a reverse gear."
Customer: "Why don't they all just come with a reverse gear in the first place?"
HelpLine: "Well, that's very difficult to do, even for our world-class engineers, and not everyone may want it. Also, it makes the car more complicated to drive. So we offer it as an option to our 'power drivers'."
Customer: "How come all the Jupiters have had it standard since 1974?"
HelpLine" "Ahem. Well, yes, they're not a market leader, they're just for people who really like working on cars. If you really want to get involved in those kind complicated details, go right ahead . . ."
But really, we're leaving out an important part:
HelpLine: "General Motors HelpLine, how can I help you?"
Customer: "My car just caught fire."
HelpLine: "I see. And what model was it?"
Customer: "1994r Mongoose."
HelpLine: "Big or small . . ."
Customer: " . . . small r."
HelpLine: "And your registration number?"
Customer: "426917-woof-271828-arf-314159-spam."
HelpLine: "And where did you buy your car?"
Customer: "Fast Eddie's Sports-o-rama in Glendale."
HelpLine: "And what was the name of the salesman?"
Customer: "I don't remember."
HelpLine: "I see. Are you sure you didn't steal this car?"
Customer: "Of course I didn't steal it!"
HelpLine: "And would you be interested in purchasing our extended service contract?"
Top 20 Ways Microsoft Would Change The Auto Industry
20. The radio would be computerized, but you'd need to install 64 Meg of RAM, a new sound card, a game card, a new video driver, a CD drive, and type C:\radio\talk\rush*.* to get it to play.
19. The entire engine wouldn't be in the bay at once, and the car would have to keep stopping and starting to load in the relevant parts.
18. The speedometer would read 70 even though you are only doing 50.
17. You would have to have a full service every 500 miles.
16. Your car would refuse to start with a message "Abort, Retry, Fail?"
15. For some reason the engine controller would need a 1G hard disc and would take 5 minutes to boot up.
14. The steering wheel would be replaced with a mouse and you'd need to memorize the keyboard short-cut for "Brake".
13. A particular model year of car wouldn't be available until after that year- instead of before it.
12. They wouldn't build their own engines but form a cartel with their engine supplier. The latest engine would have 16 cylinders, multi-point fuel injection and 4 turbos, but it would be a side-valve design so you could use Model-T Ford parts on it. There would be an "Engium Pro" with bigger turbos, but it would be slower on most existing roads.
11. The air bag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off.
10. New seats would require everyone to have the same butt size.
9. We would all have to switch to Microsoft Gas.
8. The U.S. government would be forced to rebuild all of the roads for Microsoft cars; they will drive on the old roads, but they run very slowly.
7. The oil, alternator, gas and engine warning lights would be replaced by a single 'General Car Fault' warning light.
6. Sun MotorSystems would make a car that was solar-powered, twice as reliable and five times as fast, but would run on only 5% of the roads.
5. You would be constantly pressured to upgrade your car.
4. You could have only one person in the car at a time, unless you bought a Car95 or CarNT -- but then you would have to buy ten more seats and a new engine.
3. Occasionally, your car would die for NO apparent reason and you would have to restart it. Strangely, you would just accept this as normal.
3a. Occasionally, executing a maneuver would cause your car to stop and fail to restart and you'd have to re-install the engine. For some strange reason, you'd just accept this, too.
2. Every time the lines of the road were repainted, you would have to buy a new car.
1. People would get excited about the new features of the latest Microsoft cars, forgetting that these same features had been available from other car makers for years.
Man your no fun. Find a joke and try to share it, and BAM, Shot out of the sky.
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actually, Bill Gates once criticized the car industry for not going as fast as the computer one..
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1000 miles to the gallon."
In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating (by Mr Welch himself):
If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. For no reason whatsoever your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept this, restart and drive on.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn, would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought "Car95" or "CarNT." But then you would have to buy more seats.
6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five percent of the roads.
7. The oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single "general car default" warning light.
8. New seats would force everyone to have the same size derriere.
9. The airbag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off.
10. Occasionally for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grab hold of the radio antenna.
11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need them nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car's performance to diminish by 50% or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.
12. Everytime GM introduced a new model car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
13. You'd press the "start" button to shut off the engine.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
3. Occasionally, your car would die for NO apparent reason and you would have to restart it. Strangely, you would just accept this as normal.
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mine already does that
Actually, its quite hard to kill the system...when you arent root. But if you are a nub and messing around as root, youre asking for it <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo--> And there are user-friendly Linux distros, no one is forcing you to use Slackware or Gentoo.
On the other hand, people dont really give Windows the credit it deserves. Modern windows (2000, XP, 2003) can actually run quite well on old hardware (P1's). The crashes and performance problems are mostly due to the user.
Finally, the man didnt compare it to Linux specifically. Look at Mac OS X. User-friendly, powerful, and has something like 1 (non-destructive) virus in its whole lifetime.
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linux.. does anything you want it to if you know how, it can be superfast or super featured. unfortunately its so freaking non-intuitive that newbies have no ability to learn anything.
Why hasn't this been locked yet? I made a thread like this, except it actually required brainpower, because you had to tell me why Windows was so bad, and it got locked.
So please, if you wanna say Windows sucks, tell me why. I haven't once lost my hard disk on it. In fact, none of those things have ever happened to me, except it taking resources- and its a OS, thats what it does, then it hands those to whatever program your using. So guess what: It doesn't use that much.
Just shut it. You people are like flamers. Annoying.
-Windows got were it is by doing stuff in a way that pleases the public, that's really all there is to say. It works for the common user and works well enough. I find that most all of it's errors can be attributed to whoever is using it. I know a good deal about computers and have only ever run into one problem with my computer, and that was my fault. As mentioned before, as long as you don't download truck loads of crap and not follow the simplest of rules, stuff works just fine.
OS fanboyism is even more retarded than Console fanboyism. Or any fanboyism. JUST. SHUT. THE. ****. UP.
I think people have a distaste for Microsoft because of its monopolistic policies and the way it's the only major non-noobish OS. Consumers like to have a variety of equally viable options (although, honestly, having one main OS makes it much easier to develop software and hardware).
I'd rather have just Windows (I like 98 best - maybe 3.1... but that's just me <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo--> ) than have to have seperate operating systems on boot-up depending on the game I want to play (because you know, if there were more varied OS market share, like 40% Windows, 40% Linux and 20% Other various OSes, each of the OSes would manage to get exclusive programming to their OS (that'd be if Linux wasn't really free in most cases). It'd be like console exclusives...except on computers....
...or something.
I'm actually good with whatever people want to support.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->9. The airbag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Now, that's funny.
I'd also like to know what Windows is apparently replicating to gain this threads 'virus' status?
Word.
Ya, just harmless jokes. I'd start a Linux/unix/solares/mac joke thread, but they're isny many real good ones.
Man your no fun. Find a joke and try to share it, and BAM, Shot out of the sky. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Shot down by Doctah Shaggy.
Burrrrrn.
You do know that Linux is intended to be a command line interface right? Not GUI.
Man your no fun. Find a joke and try to share it, and BAM, Shot out of the sky. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yep. Some **** trolls, not mentioning any names *Cough Quaunaut Cough* just can't take a joke on these forums. I'm finding myself agreeing with Testament here. If your going to be a pissy **** about it then shut the hell up, dont post ****.
you mean dont run internet explorer? yeah as if in the windows manual it says - this version of windows cannot access the internet safely because of the browser we are using. please get a friend with osX to download a safe browser, put it on a floppy or cd and bring it home for installation.
Last time I checked, members aren't required to view each and every thread that's being posted. If you are bored by one, there's 14 others on the frontpage, so why exactely do you feel the need to post and complain in here?