HouseofMike

Friday July 28 is System Administrator Appreciation Day.

This is the day you give thanks to your System Administrators.
Give thanks for keeping the network up, for doing upgrades during your vacation and at night so your work is not affected and for answering all those questions that could have easily have been answered if you had just clicked on help.

Food seems to be the best way to show your appreciation.
Just remember….

While I have had houseofmike.com for several years today is the 1 year anniversary of houseofmike running WordPress. At some point I got bored with the previous CMSs I ran, geeklog, xoops and whatever else I played with. I got bored or couldn’t figure out how to do something with it got pissed and dumped it.

I have been very happy with WordPress and the available plugins for it.
Hopefully the site will make it to 2 years.

Yeah thats good.

Kids these days might not even know what vinyl records are.
Its been years since I have actually had a record player.

There’s been plenty of debate lately that maybe with the release of Windows Vista, we might be able to get away with not using antivirus on our computers. Well I’m about to make an even bolder assertion, that running antivirus or even additional third party security software such as firewalls on your computer makes you even less safe! Now before you start the flaming, hear me out first. [.continue.]

I am not that familiar with this so called expert George Ou, but I must take exception to most of his rambling. First Ou starts by saying antivirus programs are bad since ‘virtually every Antivirus vendor had their share of remote exploits’. This seems to be true with the link he gave. Curious as I am, I checked out the McAfee exploit since that is the product I use. There it is on March 17, 2005 a Library Stack Overflow for the engines prior to version 4400. The thing is version 4400 had been available since December of 2004. So yeah McAfee had an exploit and you would be vulnerable to it if you didn’t keep the software up to date. I really don’t know a piece of software where this would not be the case. Would this make all software programs bad that had exploits? If so, your choice of OS and programs would be rather limited.

The software firewalls are also bad because they also at some point had exploits. I have not seen any data but I am sure just with the antivirus programs that these programs have helped a hell of a lot more than they have hurt. This continues to be the case in my organization. You know seatbelts save lives, but they have also been the cause of deaths in accidents. Should we also stop using seatbelts because of a miniscule percentage of deaths? Read the rest of this entry »