I knew we wouldn't hear much about the usual suspects -- Symantec, McAfee, etc. -- when I set up this week's poll. But it's still interesting to see just how little these products matter to you : Out of about 100 votes so far, just one person says they use proprietary anti-virus sotware on their open-souce desktop system.Actually, even that vote might be a mistake. Someone -- I assume the same person who cast this vote -- left a comment stating that they use McAfee Security Suite. This makes sense if they meant the McAfee VirusScan Security Suite, which supports both Linux and Solaris. If they really did mean the McAfee Security Suite, then a): they're actually Windows users, since this collection of dubious security gimmicks doesn't run on any other platform; and b): need to RTFD.

Also, as you can see, four percent (three votes) use proprietary spam-killing or spyware-blocking tools. And since I set up this poll so you can select multiple choices, one of those votes is probably our misguided McAfee user.

I'm getting a kick out of this poll. The average Windows system measures its unmolested networked life-span in minutes; my wife's new Dell laptop looks lik a Christmas tree with all of the security updates, warnings, and advice blinking furiously on it.

On the other hand, most of you seem to be living happy, normal lives without the benfit of "protection." We could have these smug grins wiped off our faces tomorrow, of course. Yet it seems like we've already been waiting a very long time to get what's supposedly coming to us.

And if Linux or OS X really do get slammed by a malware outbreak at some point, all of the the product marketing folks at Symantec are going to want cigarettes.