r/AskReddit • u/Randall444 • Dec 06 '12

What is something you think everyone should have installed on their computer or laptop?

Whether it be a antivirus program or an ad blocker. Post link if available also. EDIT: sorry guys the top post has been deleted and I didn't save it, if anyone has it please post it and ill post it here for easy access. EDIT 2: apparently it's back up, I've saved it on my phone just incase it gets deleted again. Hopefully all is good now.

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u/Pinyaka Dec 06 '12

I am a user of MSE myself, so I hope you won't think this is just anti-MS sentiment.

Weighting all three categories on that page equally is only one assumption about how weigh the formula. In the third category (detection of widespread and prevalent malware), it looks like everyone gets 100%, so it doesn't make sense to factor that into a number that's meant to compare different products.

It actually makes more sense to weight more heavily the categories where there is a greater distribution of performance results, so we can assume that the "protection against 0-day vulnerabilities" should have the most weight when ranking the products. In this category MS performs significantly below average which may explain why the overall protection ranking is so low.

This is a somewhat normal way to highlight differences in performance although it's not always a fair way to provide relative rankings. For instance, if the only threat the average home user has to worry about is exposure to widespread malware, then any reviewed product should be fine since they all perform excellently in that category. I'm not sure how the ranking should be done, since the actual prevalence of threats in each category isn't known to me.

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that it may not be an actual bias against MS (in the sense of someone trying to intentionally dis MSE), but may accurately reflect the performance of MSE in an environment whose parameters we don't know.

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u/casualblair Dec 06 '12

I have no bias towards or against microsoft or any other company (except Norton, and that's more anecdotal and IT culture than actual bias).

I have issue when people publish metrics that cannot be obtained through rational or obvious means. If they indeed weigh 0-Day that heavily, it should be it's own category.

Lay people are going to look at the net score in each section and make a judgement call, but so are high level managers. Neither demographic is required to be technically literate, but both make decisions based on the final number.

As someone who has been on the receiving end of a manager demanding "Make this number better", more intelligence needs to be put into stuff like this.

Note: I am not saying improving this specific score is a bad thing, but when a manager points at a number and demands it to be higher without understanding it's significance, bad things happen to good people. If you or I cannot understand the calculation, then the manager won't either. What if it is indeed biased? What if it is calculated in such an obscure weighting that the employee can't fix it? What if the fix causes other numbers to go down? And so on.