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Day by Day: Do we really need anti-virus applications?
Mon, 17 Mar 2008

Certainly, it has been a crazy month. We've been setting up to sell our house, meaning week after week of packing and moving to storage, repainting this or thats, posing like Stallone while using a caulking gun, and so on. All of these things take precisely 6.348 times longer with a toddler around. We set a date to receive offers on (obviously in the hopes of getting more than one and inducing fisticuffs in the front yard), so hopefully tonight we actually do get an offer and can stop living in a museum..

Oh, our little girl is more than one year old now, and her birthday party (out at a restaurant since our house is trying to be preserved) was awesome :)

Anyway, things will continue to be busy here for a few weeks I'm sure.

A question comes to mind as McAfee notifies me that it is time to renew. (And with them one must be very careful to check if it really is time .. they are highly predatory and nearly evil in their customer relation practices in my opinion. But thats another topic..) The question is -- do we really need to run an A-V application all the time? Obviously, kiddies (or parents of) heading to their favourite .ru pr0n site need many kinds of protection. Computer newbies.. yep. Corporate machines.. check and check. But I'm talking about myself -- I'm not eyeballing bukkake sites, and don't use a GUI mail reader that auto-explodes virii, and know enough about which files to open or not open.. and usually do that sort of thing on a unix box anyway. A-V applications tend to kick up and burn cpu/network at the most annoying times, and certainly blow away a lot of RAM all the time. I don't recall seeing McAfee pop up in the last 2-3 years and report that its intercepted anything bad on its way to my disks.

But of course with security its always advisable to post your guards, since the enemy only needs to attempt to get in once.. you need guards all the time. But.. really, in this environment of Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt that the retailers emit we should use our brains to evaluate our needs, rather than our gutt instincts. I'm naturally a little cautious and paranoid especially with all my source code and so on.. but still. I hate these extortionist A-V companies.

And its a Monday and I can't type for crap.

Oh, and for a great read about the origin of the Atari ST, hit this up

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