They’ve come up with a virus that can jump back and forth from Windows to Linux. It randomly changes its size to make it harder to identify.

Great.

I’ve been wondering for a couple years what the killer app is for these new high-speed processors. Surfing the net and word processing don’t require a two-gigahertz Pentium. The only thing that I’ve been able to see that a home user might want these new supercomputers for is gaming.

But if virii are getting more sophisticated, and more intensive analysis is required to identify and block them, then it may be that, as they become more complex and sophisticated, much of the CPU time may start to become dedicated to doing nothing but security and defense, so you’ll have to have a lot of processing power just to have enough left over for the actual tasks you’re trying to accomplish.

In fact, if I were the paranoid type, I might wonder if Intel is covertly funding virus development…