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A new horse is in the race.

John McAfee, founder of McAfee Software has tossed his hat in the ring. Though he says that he really wants someone smarter than he to get in the race.



John McAfee Just Put Out A Very Strange Official Presidential Campaign Announcement | TechCrunch

You Know What This Presidential Race Needs? John McAfee | WIRED

It could be a very interesting year.

It is indeed interesting. It is nice to see that the mental health challenged are so well represented in this field of candidates. I would presume, if elected, he will not be making any trips to Belize or Guatemala.

I think Mr McAfee's problems are far fewer than the mass media makes out, other than living in the USA. Were I him my first move would be to permanently emigrate to a cultured environment. His real problem, I suspect, is altruism and an inner need to improve the lot of his fellow citizen, even at the expense of his own long-term comfort.

Socially non-functional geekdom is far better represented by Mr Reiser, though at least he's not running for office.

I did once spent an afternoon in the company of Dr Solomon, and a more personable chap would be hard to find.

LarsMac;1486067 wrote: John McAfee, founder of McAfee Software has tossed his hat in the ring. Though he says that he really wants someone smarter than he to get in the race....It could be a very interesting year.I heard or read nothing about this on the mainstream media.

Crackpot presidential candidates have been around a long time longer than I've been alive, which is a long, long time.

As I recall, a retired senator from Minnesota, Harold Stassen, ran every four years for the rest of his life.

By the way, can anyone tell me the difference between McAfee computer protection and no computer protection at all? I've never noticed any difference.

Mark Aspam;1486100 wrote:

By the way, can anyone tell me the difference between McAfee computer protection and no computer protection at all? I've never noticed any difference.


I've never noticed a difference. Interestingly, in a relatively recent interview, John McAfee was asked if he used the project. He said "no" and that he deleted it from his computers because it was "annoying".

Once upon a time, McAfee was a good, reliable piece of A/V software. Now you find "Free Trials" getting installed as bloatware - essentially as a virus in itself.

Any software that installs itself subversively is, in my opinion, one to be avoided like the plague.

Mark Aspam;1486100 wrote: By the way, can anyone tell me the difference between McAfee computer protection and no computer protection at all? I've never noticed any difference.I'm doing this from memory, so every claim is merely "alleged" and very likely false.

The first DOS PC came out around 1983 and was aimed at business use, it had floppy drives and retailed at around £5,000, it was an IBM monopoly. Then, 1984/5-ish, Microsoft licenced DOS to firms making IBM PC clones and all hell broke loose, prices rocketed down and millions of people bought them. Malware appeared within a couple of years, spreading on floppy disk bootstraps. By 1994, after Windows 3 took the bulk user market and the almost-unusable Word 6 pushed WordPerfect DOS out of offices, malware started spreading in swapped .DOC files.

There were two mainstream malware-cleaners back in the 80s, MacAfee's and Dr Solomon's. Both, like Peter Norton and his Commander utility, were (or in Norton's case hired) ace programmers. All three sold out for millions to corporations who bought the right to their personal and trade names in perpetuity. Symantec had an anti-virus package but they bought MacAfee's name and his more popular product, relabeled their own package MacAfee and bloated what people thought of as MacAfee's AV out of all recognition. They destroyed the elegant crafted tool, just as Norton AV did with everything Peter Norton had marketed. All three were rich overnight but their names were tarnished. Here we are, twenty years later, and people still swear at Norton and MacAfee for slowing their PC to an unusable wreck just because their names are still on a product they never wrote a line of code for, or had any design input into.

That's all myth, but it's what I reckon.

Because DoS was an IBM branded name. Other systems by different names preceded it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS

FourPart;1486118 wrote: Because DoS was an IBM branded name. Other systems by different names preceded it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS


It's just an acronym standing for Disk Operating System, I used to work under IBM360/DOS long before IBM ever heard of Intel's 8086 chip and designed the IBM PC. Even the TRS-80 called its operating system DOS before the IBM PC came out. I didn't much like programming the TRS-80.

I obviously over-abbreviated. Where I said "The first DOS PC came out around 1983", it came out with Microsoft's MS-DOS which was relabeled PC-DOS by IBM, as the article says. Where I said "Microsoft licenced DOS to firms making IBM PC clones" I should correctly have referred to MS-DOS again.

We were, I thought, discussing Mr MacAfee and his fitness for the office of President of the USA. I was setting the background for his AV product.

I remember seeing a media interview where he was laughingly describing how he snuck out of Belize when the police wanted to talk to him about illegal drug manufacturing in his house and the murder of a neighbor that complained about his armed guards. He said he snuck into Guatemala and when he got caught there and was facing extradition, he faked two heart attacks so he could go to the US.

Just the way he was telling the story gave me the impression that he had a screw (or several) loose.

Well, it looks like we are bound to have a lunatic in the Oval Office after this next election. I reckon he'll do as well as any of the others.

He has, at least, the best bumper-sticker campaign slogan of all time: "Install MacAfee".

I like that

Extremism in politics has gotten as bad as extremism is religion.