In the apartment building I live in, there is a policy to frequently test the fire alarm. If I am right, they test it monthly, and every year they test each unit's alarm individually. The testing is done so frequently that I have been conditioned just like the boy who cried wolf, by having heard approximately 150 fire alarms in the past 3 years always due to testing, to ignore them. No matter what. If I have 150 false positives and 0 true positives, you filter it out.

So what will happen the day the fire alarm is real? I will ignore it and burn to ash. Too much testing can be a bad thing.

Every now and again I stumble across some long forgotten memories. This time it was triggered by my daughter's quest to learn more advanced mathematics. She was busy playing on a web site where they ask for answers to equations like:

I agree, security updates are necessary to continue protecting us from hackers and viruses. I understand and acknowledge that software will continue to have security related issues in the foreseeable future. I do NOT agree that software have to have as many security issues as they do. I firmly believe most software is written not from sound engineering principals. If it was, then security would have been a prominent part of the SDLC and software would have been much more secure - not impenetrable, but much better than now.

I digress. The issue I have with security updates is when this happens:

Recently I decided to change my whole network infrastructure. One part of this project was to replace my existing Windows machine, a Core i7 950 LGA 1366 based machine, with a new Core i7 3930K LGA 2011. Since enough things changed, I decided to sell my existing Windows machine and build a new one.

I did however decide to keep my Adaptec 3805 PCIe x4 RAID card that used to run in the existing Windows machine (3 x 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm SATA II HDD's in RAID5, and 2 x 1TB Seagate Barracuda ES.2 7200 rpm SATA I hard drives in RAID1). I needed this space and since hard drives are so expensive with the floods in Thailand, it just made sense to keep it.

So on the new system I have this configuration: