This blog is primarily concerned with NIS 2007 (and a bit on NIS 08). I have nothing to say about more recent versions.

This blog is more or less dormant (except for occasional comments on related news), and is being left on-line as a historical record and perhaps as a warning to future generations of anti-virus coders.

2007-11-21

Dial-up versus High Speed

Within the past few days, we finally got high speed Internet access. Instead of dial-up access at maybe 33kbps, we can now access the Internet via a cell-phone EV-DO data network at about 1Mbps. The reason we got high speed now is that the EV-DO carriers just started offering an affordable (well, barely affordable) unlimited plan.

Anyway, the relationship to this blog is the following:

With a high speed Internet connection, you don't really have as much time to notice some of the Symantec errors. The errors are still there, but you might not notice as many. This might explain why some people think that there's nothing wrong with Symantec software (high speed access combined with them overlooking the remaining can't-miss defects).

So I would recommend to Symantec (if they're reading along with the rest of us), that perhaps they should have at least some of the QA personal (assuming that they have any at all) test their products using only a slow dial-up connection. They'd need people with something called 'attention to detail'.

And I'd reiterate that Symantec software is a really bad choice for dial-up users (and is poor quality software no matter what speed access you have).

It's important to note that 'dial-up versus high speed' is quite often not simply a financial decision. It is often a case that there is no other reasonable choice than dial-up. There are many neighbourhoods where DSL, Cable and WiMax simply do not reach.

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