🚀 go-pugleaf

>From:    Y. Radai <RADAI@HUJIVMS.BITNET>

>... after three
>years of existence FSP still has no provision for checking the
>partition record (master boot record) ...

Well, yeah: you're right, there.  I've been busy with Virex-PC, but it
probably *is* time for that feature to be added.

> plus the fact that for any
>given file, FSP gives the same checksum for all users, which (imho) is
>a security hole.  (At least, these were true the last time I looked.)

Well, it is a single user system, after all....:-)

No, I know what you mean and that you feel it should give different
"seeds" for each system.  I recall that discussion and that I felt
(and still feel!)  it's a good idea, but a tech support nightmare.

> Since the vast majority of users
>don't check for weaknesses like these before they buy a program like
>FSP, high sales figures do not prove that the software is good.

Actually, I think that very high sales figures causes inertia in a
product: I really can't simply change the functionality of FLU_SHOT+
(or of Virex-PC) without pissing off a lot of people or adding in
extra layers of backwards compatability.  There are a buynch of things
I'd love to change in each of the programs to make them far better
programs, but that would break > 75K current users of the products.

>  You didn't react to my
>statement that if the correlation were high, "we could completely
>dispense with all the quality comparisons that are continually being
>made in the literature, and simply quote sales figures."  Is that what
>you're suggesting?

Not quite.  However, a real dog of a product that simply doesn't work
is, eventually, gonna be found out and will have zero sales volume.
So, it would be safe to say that -- after enough time has passed --
sales volume would indicate that a bunch of people are happy with the
program, and that this *may* be an indication that the product is of
high quality (Hmmm, maybe this is turning into a submission for
RISKS...)

It's tough to decide on what determines the relative quality of a
product, though: if a scanner does 500 viruses and scans your disk in
two minutes and another scanner does 600 viruses and scans your disk
in three minutes, which one is a "better" product? Does making it
pretty, with a cool/spiffy GUI make it a "better" product?

I would think that using the sales volume of a product along with
*other* factors could help to decide what products to take a look at.
But the quality *comparative* reviews are what makes a product's
quality easy to see -- and relative to boot.  It is this relativeity
that changes, making quality a moving target.

High sales figures indicates that what somebody is offering, somebody
is buying.  This must be taken into account in the equation, no?

Ross