I have been a loyal customer of Norton AntiVirus (NAV) software for many years, largely due to factors other than the primary function. More due to luck than skill, I have experienced very few virus issues. When asked for recommendations, I typically would suggest NAV as a 'safe bet'.
A few years ago, I began to run into an increasing number of issues, ranging from incompatibility with other security software (specifically ZoneAlarm), performance impacts, LiveUpdate failures, difficulty upgrading NAV to current levels, and, the last straw, NAV failures that would block Internet access. Often, recovering from these problems was time-consuming because NAV would end up in a state where it could neither be uninstalled nor repaired. In the end, I had enough and looked for alternatives.
I settled on avast! based on high marks from antivirus rating services, user reports, reasonable pricing (free is always nice) and Vista support. Installation and configuration was painless, guided by the tutorial How to Install, Configure, and Use Avast Antivirus. A minor incompatibility with ZoneAlarm Pro was easily resolved. A Pro version of avast! is available at a reasonable cost, providing a few additional features like scheduled scans.
I recently had an opportunity to compare avast! and NAV in terms of function. A few months ago, I was asked to diagnose a PC with intermittent performance issues. NAV 360 had recently been installed on the PC and a full scan did not show any problems. Based on other reports of NAV 360 performance issues, I removed NAV 360 - the performance issues disappeared. During the install, avast! reported and quarantined three files flagged as adware or trojans. Last week, I helped clean up a PC that had been infected with a variety of trojans. Again, NAV neither blocked them nor found them during a full scan. On the other hand, avast! found and quarantined 16 files as malware.
A very selective sample and Your Mileage May Vary, but I think you can guess how I will respond if anyone asks for a recommendation on antivirus software.
Starting with SETI@home in 1999, numerous distributed computing applications using spare cycles of PCs and other computing devices have been able to inexpensively tap massive computing resources. According to Wikipedia, SETI@home can tap 424 TeraFLOPS (Trillion FLoating point Operations Per Second), compared to a sustained rate of 478 TeraFLOPS for IBM's Blue Gene, one of the world's fastest supercomputer. Folding@home hit 1000 TeraFLOPS in 2007 by tapping into the power of PlayStation 3 clients and Graphics Processing Units of video cards.
Technology Review's Biologists Enlist Online Gamers discusses the Rosetta@home project that attempts to predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins. Although genome analysis has helped identify the molecular sequence of proteins, how the amino acid sequences in proteins are folded significantly affects protein function. Even simply proteins have many possible structures - finding "best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today".
Rosetta@home displays the 3D protein structure on a screensaver - some users reported that they could see opportunities to improve on the 'fit' of the structure. This led David Baker to work with Zoran Popović (a game designer at the University of Washington) to develop Foldit, which "attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans' puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins." It combines the ability of computers to sift through many alternative structures and visually represent form and function with the human ability to recognizing patterns.
As a game, the design is challenging since neither the goal nor the path is well understood, and in fact is developed by the users as they use Foldit. Analysis of player interaction with Foldit may reveal strategies that can then be incorporated into Rosetta@home, an interesting form of co-operative competition between silicon and biology.
