The second AV program you installed found things that the first one missed. But that would be true for any pair of AV programs you looked at. 2 AV programs are bound to be more effective than one.

I bet that if you had been running Avast, and later downloaded AVG to see what it was like, you would have had exactly the same experience... it would have caught a whole bunch of stuff that Avast had missed, and you'd be here preaching the benefits of AVG instead.

Until researchers "do something useful"? You mean like, uh, release information to antivirus software developers who in turn release tools to detect and remove the virus? Oh, wait, they already did that. What else do you expect the researchers to do? Personally go door to door, offer to come in and check your system for you? If a million people are still infected because they're too stupid to take advantage of any of the tools that (thanks to the researchers) are available to help them, there's not much else the researchers can do about that. They may be smart, but they're not magical.

Indeed, the DailyTech link you sent is not just confusing, but wrong. It mis-interprets the study and clearly states the opposite of what you argued. :) You're right about the actual study though: it found no bathtub curve at all. Specifically: "Replacement rates... nearly double from year 1 to 2, or from year 2 to 3.... This is an interesting observation because it does not agree with the common assumption [of a bathtub curve]."

I've been saying for the last year (since I learned how much of corporate America works) that IBM is sitting on a goldmine if only they'd have the vision to open-source Notes/Domino. Thousands of small startups could start using it for free, and buy support contracts as they got bigger. Larger companies who want the flexibility of the system as compared to Exchange, but don't want to be locked-in with the underdog's product, could rest assured that as long as there are users, development will continue. And of course, the marketplace for apps that run on Domino would skyrocket, and IBM would be at the center of it all. A goldmine, I tell you! To address an earlier comment, this could succeed where OpenSolaris failed because OpenSolaris had to compete with multiple established open-source operating systems. IBM wouldn't have to deal with anything like that. (And I'm not sure that OpenSolaris _has_ failed, anyway... give it time!)

Uhh, dude, it's only 25 years. That's not a long time; barely a third of a lifetime. It's probably not nearly worth the cost to etch a metal disk and design a machine to read it in 25 years. Now, if he wanted to read it in 10,000 years, you might be on to something...