McAfee - sorry our systems are down

So it's too expensive for McAfee to twiddle around with their database and either insert an extra field or amend a field and put a conditional statement for its use.

If that's to difficult for them, makes you wonder how they're managing to work out new definition tables and keep systems 'secure'. Oh that's right, they're only pretending.

Last time I used McAfee was... that long ago. Its either ZoneAlarm and AVG, or Avast and ZoneAlarm, or Comodo. Dependent on which becomes inoperable during an update.

Well if people out there are still buying stuff from McAfee, hope this gives them very great pause for concern.

There are plenty of good free security programs out there, which don't need a degree in astrophysics to operate. Be bold, be brave and give them a whirl.

Notables:

AVG - www.grisoft.com (free antivirus/spam)

Zonealarm - www.zonealarm.com (free firewall)

Comodo - www.comodo.com (free internet security suite)

Avast - www.avast.org (free home edition with daily updates)

UPDATE
As of a couple of hours after this went up, mcgaff did an about turn, saying they would pass on the percentage cut.

This should be enough for those who (why?) buy it, to go out and celebrate. Their - approx. - £1.12475p saving can be used towards a pint (or half) of beer, in any happy smoke free, bodily malodorous pubs; that are still out there serving the things.

Firefox 3.0.4 update tweak

Not quite sure whether it's me or the code on the pages i usually visit have been cleaned up, or the guys & gals beavering away behind the scenes on ff3 have at last sorted out the memory issues.

But, for the first time in ages ff no longer claws its way through all the available memory, until it either falls over or slows everything else down.. 

Up until today, it had reached the stage where the the browser would after a short period of time need  restart. Once response times became sluggish and ff easily chomping its way to nearly 1GB nothing else would work except a restart. 

It's been open for nearly half an hour with my usual windows tabs open and it's hovering contentedly around the 70MB mark.

So far, a hearty thumbs up!

Vorbis Theora

I remember the ogg vorbis player from way back when which also happened to be the best player at the time.  So coming across the video codec release Theora 1.0, i unhesitatingly and unashamedly, had to copy and past this plug.

"Are you tired of constantly being prompted to download proprietary software and plugins to play the videos and listen to the music you want?

Are you fed up with seeing new gadgets that only use incompatible and restrictive audio and video formats?

Did you know that it's not a lack of technological know-how that causes this, but software patents and other legal restrictions?

Increasingly proprietary software companies like Microsoft, Apple and Adobe are pushing video and audio formats that restrict access and restrict software developers, but there is an alternative that can be played on all computers without restriction—Ogg.

Ogg provides professional grade multimedia formats. Ogg is used extensively by free software projects, artists and a growing number of music and video distributors.

Soon over a million children and their families will be receiving the One Laptop per Child XO computer designed to play and create Ogg files. By advocating now for Ogg we can help ensure that those children will gain access to, and not be unnecessarily restricted from thousands of educational resources and materials on the web.

Join us in advocating for Ogg right now by taking 4 Easy Steps:

1. Install VLC multimedia player,
2. sign-up for the PlayOgg advocate mailing list,
3. find and share Ogg friendly sites, and
4. put PlayOgg Buttons on your web site or blog.

After all that, if you are still looking for more to do, consider encouraging others to do the same."