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Intel Buys McAfee
Several readers have noted that
Intel has agreed to buy McAfee, the computer antivirus software maker, for about $7.7 billion in cash. There is also a press release available if you are into that sort of thing.
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Pretty please? Just give all their victims - I mean customers - their money back and just kill it off already. McAfee has no right even existing.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
That junk is worth $7bn?
Couldn't they have bought something that's actually worth the money?
McAfee is finally in the hands of someone qualified to figure out how to completely uninstall it.
You could buy a cross country railroad for that kind of money!
WTF are they thinking. Granted they're sitting on a pile of cash, but this is silly.
If I were an INTC shareholder I would be pretty pissed off.
If they were looking for something to do with the cash, they should have just paid out a nice dividend.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
Intel plans to release a final update to all Mcafee users that will force uninstall the software from their machines, increasing the performance of Intel systems by 300%.
I can see it now 10 years from now, just like Lycos, "McaFee purchased for $7.7 billion in 2010, sold for $200 million in 2015 has just been sold again today for $34 million to some company in Vietnam." Seriously, has anyone personal or enterprise had good experiences with their products?
-- taking over the world, we are.
100% marketing fluff. I really, REALLY want to know what happened under the table, what's still happening under the table, what McAfee has that 15 cheap startups don't, and how this is going to affect Intel hardware in the future.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Just diversifying their portfolio or are there other objectives at work?
They're gonna add even more bloat, sucking more CPU cycles, forcing people to upgrade, and therefore buy more Intel CPUs.
A list of better things you could do with $7b:
1. Fill a swimming pool with $100 bills and go nuts.
2. Buy several sky scrappers and blow em up, just for shits and giggles.
3. Buy Kaspersky.
4. Nothing. Absoluetly nothing. Ever again.
Any other suggestions?
As most slashdotters already know, nothing slows your computer down more effectively than Mcafee AV--even if you have the latest and fastest Intel CPU. Optimizing Mcaffe's code would probably add more real horsepower to Intel's processors and be less expensive than designing a new generation of chips.
Intel needs people to think they need these faster multi core CPUs they keep cranking out.
And who is better at slowing Windows down to the point of uselessness then Mcafee?
It's a perfect fit. We'll see you slow, bloated software, then also sell you CPUs to make your computer usable.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Does McAfee offer other products of significant value
They have encryption software -- making those less CPU intensive (especially for cell phone and other mobile use) might actually be moderately useful.
Seems like this is the logical goal. Integrate AV at the hardware level and you should see a significant performance increase, plus tasty vendor lock-in.
Assuming they were classy and used $100 bills (volume: 0.69 cubic inches), it would occupy about 4,427,500 cubic feet. Anyone care to take a swing at the weight? d:
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
"I've got a quarter we can flip to see if this is a good or bad thing."
Yep, welded software is way stronger.
It's just a research venture. Intel is trying to figure out how McAfee can use up so much of a CPU that it should be put out of its misery.
Nah, Intel actually bought HP - McAfee just came bundled.
Wow, I'm really surprised at this announcement and that Slashdot still has my account on profile. Good jobs on keeping that database!!!
But seriously folks. Bashing McAfee? Are you ignorant to exactly what McAfee is? The largest AV player in the Government/Military sector. They have very large banks as customers too. But, I know it is more fun to joke about their AV performance, which is in fact on par with most AV products.
So let me get to the business of trying to decide what this means? It is without a doubt a huge plus for Intel. They have entered into SaaS/cloud email arena with MxLogic, now have a viable FW in the Sidewinder. Can be knocking on checkpoint's gate with a EndPoint Encryption product, is the DLP solution going to rival RSA? Intel gains other network based tools such as IPS/IDS (reconnex), Network Behavioral Analysis, Foundstone, etc.
I say the deal doesn't go through. At least, getting this past federal regulators will be quite an interesting test.
"Work" is not a stressor. It is the "perception" of work that is the stressor.
Why in the name of timecube are you running Oracle on an architecture that McAfee can even run on?!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Lots of comments and jokes here about the worth of McAfree ...
And you've got it almost completely wrong. The value of McAfree isn't in their software, its in the fact that it comes preinstalled on a massive amount of computers, it has a subscription model for recurring revenue and LOTS of people use it.
The fact that their flagship product is a pile of crap is irrelevant because people buy it anyway, without hesitation.
McAfee Antivirus might suck and be next to worthless, but McAfee the company is worth a lot of money because people are too ignorant to get the first part.
Second, as far as system slow down, and this one hurts as I hate defending such shitty products ... but ...
ALL ON-DEMAND SCANNERS KILL PERFORMANCE. They open and scan every file (EVERY file, not just exe and dlls) before passing the result along to the actual program.
There is no way around this, the data must be check before it can be used in order to be safe. Well, no matter how fast you right code, it takes a while to scan all the files that go into making even a simple program run. There are thousands of files that get openned when an app like Firefox for Photoshop starts running, and all of those files get read into memory and checked ... BEFORE they are passed along to the app calling them. Unless you invent time bending or something, this will always end up taking a very noticeable amount of time, making your computer seem slow.
Want your computer with McAfee to not run slow? Turn off on-demand scanning. Want a middle ground? Change the on-demand settings to be less agressive, but its probably not going to make much difference since the speed issue is mostly opening and reading the files in the first place.
You won't find anyone with an on-demand scanner that doesn't have these problems.
You also won't find an anti-virus company worth more other than symantec.
So yes, this was a good deal for Intel, even if most of slashdot is too blind to see the logic in the move.
I like slashdot a lot more when it was just real geeks with a clue, you know, before all the angsty idiots who happened to be socially inept and own a computer started calling it home as though they were geeks too.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Yeah, I need to disagree. It slows things down on my work laptop. I so want to replace Mcaffee on this machine and use MS Security Essentials like I have at home. Microsoft actually put out an AV scanner that doesn't feel like a lead weight.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Oh come on, no more McAfee, and Norton will just step into their shoes.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Yeah. No unnecessary SVChost.exe http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/04/21/1735211/McAfee-Kills-SVCHostexe-Sets-Off-Reboot-Loops-For-Win-XP-Win-2000
Given that McAfee "Oopsie" actually shutdown Intel operations for a day, maybe they do want to take it out back, and put it out of its misery?
20 years ago when I got my first modem (wow it's been that long, I feel old) McAfee was *the* virus scanner. Sysops used it to scan uploads and users used it to scan downloads. Of course back then it was a small command line app that fit on one floppy and ran in 256KB (yes, K) of memory, not the massive piece of bloatware it is now. It was also free... paid versions didn't appear until Windows took over IIRC.
Never would have guessed that they woulda end up developing into a software giant worth $7.7B. And sold to Intel of all companies.
Heard a guy on the business channel speculating that Intel might be wanting it to develop on-chip virus scanners. Sounds like a promising application if it'll speed it up. As it is now scanners as no faster now as it was 20 years ago, but back then we only had 30MB drives to scan so it ran a full scan in under 30 seconds. Now we have 300GB or more and it takes about 3 hours... no wonder people hate virus scanners.
Instead of giving Dell cash to stay away from AMD (which is frowned upon), they will give away McAfee licenses. It's that simple.
Anti-virus imbedded into CPU functionality? I'm sure they won't include all the extra crap that causes the "CPU bloat" but the underlying antivirus technology alone could be embedded into the CPU to protect against viruses.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
But it's only a trial version. After 60 days Intel will have to pay again to keep McAfee for a year.
I don't think either would be a wise choice if you're looking for a swift anything.
I guess I've never used McAfee from a home end user perspective, but from a corporate perspective it is a pretty solid product. The client-side agents are extremely resilient, you could have a box powered off for a year tucked away in some dark corner of the office, fire it back up, and it would check in and update just fine -- that is hugely important. Yeah, [full] system scans eat up a lot of CPU, thats why you effectively set your policies (which are pretty damn granular) to scan at certain times, disregard certain file types, etc... so that it doesn't impact the business. Schedule full system scans during the week ends and during scheduled maintenance windows. On-Access scanning is enabled, and I'll admit you can see it chews up a decent amount of proc for compressed file types. But I feel McAfee (again,from a corporate perspective) delivers a pretty nice suite of products. From my experience, the only thing that is a bit lacking (which is seemingly because it's in its infancy stages) is the Endpoint Encryption. Integration with fingerprint readers is somewhat lacking, many common biometric co-processor models are not yet supported, also, even if they are supported, managing the tokens and linking them to user accounts on the server-side is pretty manual. It's a bit silly... but they are making progress in that area.
Either way, there's no denying that McAfee is a major player in the AV scene... and since Intel already damn near has the market cornered on CPU/Motherboards/etc... Imagine how much integration can be done at the hardware level between AV/provisioning/inventory/imaging/etc using TPM/IAMT. I don't see how any of this is a bad thing.
Home computing is not the bigger market here.