Indeed. The one with the money wins.

Yep!

I'm curious, what are the "MicrosoftS" and "OracleS" that the OP is referring to? AFAIK there is only one of each of those companies.

I was just up in Berkeley where they installed these things everywhere. They are awful. Totally user hostile.

At least in Berkeley some enterprising constituents will neutralize these things. They'll disappear, or all somehow stop working. Amazing how that happens.

These things are obviously the brain child of some MBA twit who's only responsibility was to show the ROI to the city, or in the case of Chicago, the investor.

Parking on public streets is a public resource and must be managed as such. As it is now, it's seen as a revenue center. You know what bureaucrats; "They're OUR friggin parking spaces! Get out of our way, out of commerce's way, let us use them. and do your job of keeping the spaces rotating, period.

I've been testing AV solutions for the same setup; Windows clients, samba server, no AD or domain. AVG worked great for the first couple years, but sometime in 2008 they took a huge turn for the worse. Their support, even enterprise, is abysmal and absurd (email only!) Their more recent products are such huge resource hogs that most of my users just uninstalled it as it made their workstations unusable. Month's of round and round with email support and no solution.

I've tested most of the products mentioned here, nod32, Avast, Kaspersky, etc. I finally stumbled on a pretty new entrant to the space, Vipre, by sunbeltsoftware, http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/ . Support has been fantastic, and I'm just using a trial version. The admin interface is modern, quick, and well thought out. Most of the other admin interfaces seem like an afterthought or an engineering prototype. The test users are happy so far. And it's cleaned up a few severe threats that were not found by AVG.

Disclaimer - I am not affiliated with these guys at all. I am just a happy trial user, so far.