Explorer09 wrote:
Your newspaper analogy is a bad one.
No, it's not. Part of the news are misinformation (that should be corrected ASAP). Part of the news will have follow-ups the next day(s), and part of the news will not have follow-ups. But the words and paragraphs are still part of the history of the newspaper. Yet, the next day you want the updated "current" news.
Similarly, most of old computer virus (at least the ones that are relevant to our database case) and their corresponding antivirus code in the databases, are still there. But the antivirus database is mostly relevant if it is frequently updated, to confront new malware.
Furthermore, I don't think there is a need to look where the analogy goes apart from the original issue. I just took a simple (limited) analogy so to help me explain my point about usefulness and cost. I don't pretend it to be a perfect analogy of antivirus against virus wars or methods or whatever.
Anyway, this is not the first time I try to present my opinion regarding the inclusion of dozens of MB of antivirus database in the official release of UBCD. Having the update scripts and the GUIs to update the databases are more-than-adequate methods for the official release of UBCD, IMO. I have additional concrete and practical reasons for this opinion, but I'll spare the discussion (at least in this post).