On the data migration project I'm currently involved, the desktops being used belong to the peoject sponsor and therefor I do not have administration privelidges. I'm a somewhat power user but I'm not abble to install everything nor I'm abble to configure Windows nor McAfee.
The anti-virus, McAfee, consumes over 150Mb, almost as much as Windows itself, of my 1GB RAM and takes control of the processor in such a way that it's a true anti-productivity tool! Every task performed takes too much time, to many times I can see the screen being, literally, drawn line by line.
The system administrators were kind enough to reconfigure the anti-virus rules in order to skip .jar files, since almost all work is performed in Java and in Java developed applications.
This helped a bit but did not solved the problem.
Why is that the worst thing than a virus is the anti-virus?
And why is that anti-virus are, currenlty, anti-productivity tools? Anti-virus should protect the system, they should not consume a considerable part of its resources.
And finally, why is that Windows system administrartors don't know how to correctly configure these tools? The anti-virus companies default configuration also sucks.
It doesn't make sense to scan files like .jar, .java, .class, .c, .cpp, .obj, .py, .h, .csv, .ini, .xml, .js, .html, .swf, .zip, etc..
Yes, I do know that there's dangerous stuff as .vbs scripts, but scanning a local .css file? What sence does that make?
By know, Windows system administrators are saying, "ah, thoes are all just small files, it takes a couple of seconds to scan"... Well, to those I ask, "how much time is a couple of seconds times over 700 .jar Eclipse files"?
And why is that .zip files are scanned twiced? Why scan the .zip file and not the files only when, and if, they are unzipped?
Some years ago I was working for a company that configured the anti-virus in such a stupid way that it scanned everything.
My system became so slow that I've actually measured the productivity lost for the company developers.
Each developer was loosing aproximately 4 hours per week, i.e. 2 working days per month, 24 days per year. At the end of the year, the company was loosing one entire month of work per developer! Hey, stop the anti-virus and give me that moth as extra hollidays, the company productivity would be the same!
The company had 6 developers at that time, which means 6 months of productivity loss. Half an year.
I would like to know how many company CEOs, CTOs, etc. and share holders out there know how much they're loosing because the entire organization is being affected by such anti-productivity tools.
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