So can you embed this into a Browser? I spend all day browsing the Internet anyway... I'd hate for my boss to figure out that I'm actually doing my job!
One could always get a gig working at Playboy, where it's basically mandatory that you have a PB Calendar hanging in your cube...I can't imagine it's a bad thing to check out the competition.
I tend to agree with your assessment. My college professors (way back when) seemed to have this impression of PC O/S's in their infantcy. It is quite ironic now that many of them still hold their die hard beliefs that Windows are just bells and whistles. For example, the professor who teaches Intro to Object Oriented Programming doesn't believe in Objects. Another professor teaching Assmebly needed to write IO libraries for the assmebler in pascal, because doing that in assembly was "below" him. This guy went on to make us implement advanced data structures like graphs and trees in assmebly instead of teaching what assmebly was really about...doing low level crap that higher level languages can't do, or don't do efficiently.
From my experience with college professors, I have a hard time believing that this guy has actually written real software. At best he's got a couple of whacked out ideas, and is making graduate students implement them. None of my professors ever wrote anything that could be considered software. There's a lot more to writing software than programming an algorithm that calculates the day of the week for any given date.
Personally, I would rather play on a console for most games. I'm not of the financial persuasion to be able to spend the $$ on the latest hardware for a PC to make a cool game playable. My PC is a 5-6 year old dual processor Pentium Pro workstation...running Linux, it's a work horse and I like it.
I hope in the near future, with the coming of Xbox Live and the PS2 network kit, that we'll see a shift from platform specific games to platform independant games. I'd love to be able to play Halo (or whatever) over then net on a server from my xbox against people playing it on PCs, Macs, xboxen, and PS2s.
For people like me, a console levels the playing field...Spend $200-$300 on a console every couple years or spend $1000-$2000 on the latest PC tech every couple of years...I'll take the console and spend the rest of that money elsewhere. I don't need a high end PC for my wife and I to read email and surf the web. I really like playing games, online and off, but when you even the middle ground of current PC tech looks really pricey for what one spends 90% of his time using the PC for, the console just levels the playing field.
No more worries about performance, tweaking, overclocking just to remove that last bit of doubt that the reason I just got fragged was because my PC is just too damn slow!
I think Dookoo's disclosure of the plan was really part of the plan... I mean we saw Palpatine baiting Anakin in a couple of scenes. I believe Dookoo's real motivation was to "turn" Obi-Wan in hopes that Anakin would follow, and perhaps create a shortcut in the timeline of the overall plan.
The point he's trying to make is that the warrants were obtained while Reno was in the USAG's office, not Ashcroft. The Post article clearly misleads the reader implying that it is Ashcroft and Bush's fault. There is a story on this in the LA Times which clearly states at the end of the article that there the Judge who made the ruling is pleased with the way that Ashcroft has cleaned up the problems that Reno left behind. The only reason this is in the press now, is because we're closing in on the 60 day limit cutting off paid advertising, read: choking out free speach, on broadcast media regarding political candidates under the new campaign finance reform. The liberal, misleading, press is trying to help the liberal, misrepresenting, politicians to get elected in Novemeber. If you haven't figured it out, Reno is running against Bush in Florida...that is why no mention of her or Clinton is made anywhere regarding this issue. The media puts this out now, hoping get the people thinking Bush/Ashcroft bad, Democrats good. Before groups are not aloud to put advertising out for their favored candidate.
If a hack causes death the hacker can never be the only one to blame IMHO.
Maybe so, but read some of L0pht's papers about the widely insecure remote access to power grids, city works (traffic controls, etc.), and other such things which are probably very hackable and not connected to the internet.
I think the premiss of this law is probably correct. If you commit a robbery and someone gets killed during the commision of that crime the law regarding that crime says you may be held accountable for that death. I don't think this law is much different.
If I hack something like a city's traffic control system and start playing around, only to leave the busiest intersections lights green in both directions, then unbeknownst to me some Soccer mom and her 5 kids get killed by a 18 wheeler driving through said intersection, I'm the one liable for their deaths. The people responsible for maintaining the traffic system may also be liable under either criminal or civil matter for neglegence or something like that, but they can't be held responsible for my actions. Just like, going back to the robbery, if that store owner pulls his gun and shoots and me but hits a customer, I'm still on the hook for the customer's death.
I am not a lawyer, nor a gynocologist, but I play both in my back shed.
Linux Journal of August 2001 did their cover on Shrek. According to that article, the rendering farm for Shrek had over 1000 processors, with about 80% of those processors running Linux and 20% running Irix. The Article also says they used more than 200 Linux desktops and 400 Linux servers.
Generally most Laptops can do this, but I think what the poster is going for is a tool which will hibernate a single process. I think this is a very useful idea.
For instance, what if your company runs 1 shift, and you're sitting there thinking, now what could I use this IBM zSeries Linux server for at night...how about trying to factor the RSA-2048 number?...but your implementation of the General Number Field Sieve algorythm consumes massive resources, so you want to hibernate the process during business hours and wake it up at night when the boss goes home with out having to start all over. Then 50 years later when the process is finished you'll have your $200,000 prize from RSA.
As a NASA Contractor, I see the philosophy clash between the Get it Done'ers and the slower blinder's on folks daily. I must say though that as contracts start up, come to term and get rebid the status quo is that a new contractor will maintain the cream of the crop from the incumbent contract staff. This creates a very stable employment environment.
Combine that stability with the growing government staffing budget (nearly 14% increase this year), one begins to see a very sweet, stable job market available. Most of the time, we never do any more than is required. That means 8am to 5pm, with perhaps some off hours maintenance on occassion...and that time is easily comp'd. You won't find 8-12% raises each year, stock options, or pinball and billiard tables at the office, but you won't be asked to devote your life to your company either.
There isn't a day that goes by where my wife doesn't send me a job posting that she thinks would pay more or get me into something I'd like to do more, but the reality is that each time I have to blow her off becuase there aren't very many positions out there which offer the flexibility, stability and competitive salary that this contract job offers, that won't require a 50-60 hour week.
I'm considering a Masters at ACCIS. It's a web based accredited college offering computer science degree's. The online part sounds great because it's all self paced, plus you can get up to 30 credit hours for work experience.
When I was in college we did this same sort of thing (I think). I was once a physics guy, doing research for NASA, trying to build a temperature sensing device with no electrical components with in the sensor. Ultimately we found that using a sapphire fiber optic we could measure the temperature variance by relating the change in optic signal frequency to the diameter of the fiber, and then calcualting the temperature. Anyway, long story short, we needed percisioning devices for our testing. My main part of this project was the electronics and software to get data from them, so we bought up some CD players (specific ones which had lasers that had wavelengths with of something like.5 micrometers) got the scematics from the companies and started ripping them up to grab the laser and focusing electronics. CD lasers at the time used some interesting stuff which allowed the electronics to move the lense of the laser to maintain focus within a certain range of distance (read can focus on a wobbling CD). This made the cd laser perfect to measure percision of our systems, we knew that the laser's wavelength was half a micron so that was a rather exact margin of error, once the laser was focused on a target, we measure the signals on the electronics side and could develop our margin of error based on the movements of the lense with an accuracy of half a micron. KEWL! It was a fun project, and the use of CD's kept us on budget as opposed to buying research lasers for the same thing which could have been thousands of dollars.
Later that year, I used my project for that research to develop a rudimentary surface topology scanner, which made really kewl 3D computer images of pennies, dimes and quarters at a microsopic resolution. Not bad for 1993...
"All of our development work for the new MSN.com is...W3C standard," said Bob Visse, the director of MSN marketing, referring to the World Wide Web Consortium, which is developing industry standards for Web technologies. "For browsers that we know don't support those standards or that we can't insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the" standards.
Within this is the real story...that M$ doesn't believe that these other browsers support W3C Standards. Pardon me, but isn't Opera's modus operandi that it only supports Standardized Technologies?
Couldn't have said it better myself. People are too quick to forget that we had to fight and shed blood to get to where we are today... when the futures of things like pgp and online gambling are in limbo.
Why are you asking GW Bush? The President always catches the flak for the idiots we vote into congress, and the lobbyists who write this kind of shit into laws.
Albeit sneaky to put a gambling item into an anti-terrorism bill,/.ers should look into exactly who wrote this bill and who's voted for it and against it. Keep in mind that with the way congress works, had this bill been voted out in committee, it could take quite some time for a new bill (with the good parts of this one) to get back into committee and pushed throught the house and senate. Many of your representatives may vote to push a bill through a committee looking to get it out there for it's good parts, thinking that the good outweighs the bad.
Do you think that just because this nation is in the midst of a war and crisis, that the lobbyists are any less active than they would normally be? Absolutely not. Remember most of the law voted into existence in this country is written part or in whole by lobbyists who are trying to obtain some political or corporate advantage by getting the law passed.
Back in the day, I used to run Doom from a ramdisk on my 486, since I had worked a configuration that supported 16MB simms on my motherboard.
Perhaps this would be a good way of utilizing the speed of the current RAM technologies to increase the speed of one's computer. Much like technology has created a single purpose bus for graphics (AGP) perhaps a single purpose bus for RAMDisk usage could be made as well. Thus creating a place to store (perhaps only temporarily) the binary and datafiles that your system uses like a cache...read once from disk at boot then read from ramdisk forever more. Write the changes to the cache back to disk when the system is shutdown. This sacrifices startup/shutdown times for inline performance. Another thought comes to mind about the way we use databases to track the usage of our MP3s and other such things, this kind of thought could be applied to determine what initially gets loaded into the ramdisk, for instance.
Of course there are flaws in what I've concieved here, but I'm not an engineer, I'm a lowly *nix and windows luser/admin.
Try NASA... I'm always amazed at the Computer oriented Civil Servants who've been working in the same position for the last 10 years coming in and asking for the O'Reilly Learning Vi book.
I once worked for a company that had customized an editor (this was on a VMS system and I can't remember the name of the editor). The editor was tied into a source control system which required a username and password. So when you fire up the editor it prompts for the uname/password and logs you into the cvs-like system. You put in the source file you wanted to work on and the editor checks it out. Then as you make changes (in what looks like the original file) you actually make changes in a tmp buffer. When you write the changes so you can compile and run them, it takes the tmp buffer and makes special comment tags showing the user and date/time stamp for the change. It also was setup to make a special comment tag around any code that was directly changed or removed (as opposed to new code added). This way there's a history of the code's evolution...not only the who/when aspect, but the what aspect as well.
Personally, as a college intern who hadn't programmed the language before, I thought this was awesome. I mostly worked bug fixes so it was great to be able to see what the original coder had done and to know who he was, or what he might have changed that created the bug.
Considering that there are only 11 NASA Centers, and they reside in 7 states, I find it surprising that NASA gets as much money as it does. I work at Glenn Research Center in Cleveland Ohio, our budget for FY02 will be cut from $582mil to $532Mil...roughly 10%. That's quite a chunk for a single year. Tax cut or no tax cut, these numbers were "decided" (they are not exact) long before the tax cut was signed in. The bottom line is that there just isn't enough of a lobby for NASA to get it what it needs.
Privatization could be the answer...
I just got off the phone with Telocity.com, my DSL ISP. They stated to me that they will be handling are already working to find a vendor for their Northpoint customers.
DSL has been one wild ride for me, I finally found an apartment which was close enough to a CO to get DSL, so I contracted with PhoenixDSL.com as my ISP, within two months of installation PhoenixDSL was bought by Megapath, who in turn sold off all of PhoenixDSL's residential customers to Telocity, my service was just cut over to Telocity last week, and now my Northpoint DSL line may be disconnected with in the next 60 days.
My fiance and I met in a local chat room almost two years ago, we'll be married in June. The one thing that made it work for us more than anything else is that we met in person shortly after we met online. We didn't spend a lot of time doing the late night chats and email correspondence. So shortly after we met online we dispatched with the whole online courting thing and went straight for the gusto.
You're assuming the cost of the system admin is the only cost we care about....
If the question is how much does it cost a company, one would have to look beyond the sysadmin. The last company I worked for was hit by "I love you" they were running MS Exchange, Outlook, and the rest of the M$ software. Email is email and it's not all that important right? Wrong. One person opens the wrong email, BAM, your server is sending so many emails that within minutes it will have crashed. Anyone else who logs into that client system will start that process over. Any person who logged into the infected system and logs into another system will start that process over.
Hopefully, none of your customer's email addresses were stored in the address book of that infected system. The PR nightmare that occurred because we sent "I Love You" to several customers was horrible. We lost one, and another who was one of our biggest supporters, decided not to let our prospective customers call them for referral.
In all we system admins only spent about 32 hours cleaning up the virus and the resulting email server crashes.
The cost the company assumes when a virus hits can be huge. Workstation downtime, Server downtime, Sysadmin/firefighter work, Customer Relations and Image issues that result. In all it can be very expensive.
Some of those costs are difficult to mathematically account for. Especially when it comes to the value a single customer has.
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So can you embed this into a Browser? I spend all day browsing the Internet anyway... I'd hate for my boss to figure out that I'm actually doing my job!
One could always get a gig working at Playboy, where it's basically mandatory that you have a PB Calendar hanging in your cube...I can't imagine it's a bad thing to check out the competition.
I tend to agree with your assessment. My college professors (way back when) seemed to have this impression of PC O/S's in their infantcy. It is quite ironic now that many of them still hold their die hard beliefs that Windows are just bells and whistles. For example, the professor who teaches Intro to Object Oriented Programming doesn't believe in Objects. Another professor teaching Assmebly needed to write IO libraries for the assmebler in pascal, because doing that in assembly was "below" him. This guy went on to make us implement advanced data structures like graphs and trees in assmebly instead of teaching what assmebly was really about...doing low level crap that higher level languages can't do, or don't do efficiently.
From my experience with college professors, I have a hard time believing that this guy has actually written real software. At best he's got a couple of whacked out ideas, and is making graduate students implement them. None of my professors ever wrote anything that could be considered software. There's a lot more to writing software than programming an algorithm that calculates the day of the week for any given date.
Personally, I would rather play on a console for most games. I'm not of the financial persuasion to be able to spend the $$ on the latest hardware for a PC to make a cool game playable. My PC is a 5-6 year old dual processor Pentium Pro workstation...running Linux, it's a work horse and I like it.
I hope in the near future, with the coming of Xbox Live and the PS2 network kit, that we'll see a shift from platform specific games to platform independant games. I'd love to be able to play Halo (or whatever) over then net on a server from my xbox against people playing it on PCs, Macs, xboxen, and PS2s.
For people like me, a console levels the playing field...Spend $200-$300 on a console every couple years or spend $1000-$2000 on the latest PC tech every couple of years...I'll take the console and spend the rest of that money elsewhere. I don't need a high end PC for my wife and I to read email and surf the web. I really like playing games, online and off, but when you even the middle ground of current PC tech looks really pricey for what one spends 90% of his time using the PC for, the console just levels the playing field.
No more worries about performance, tweaking, overclocking just to remove that last bit of doubt that the reason I just got fragged was because my PC is just too damn slow!
I think Dookoo's disclosure of the plan was really part of the plan... I mean we saw Palpatine baiting Anakin in a couple of scenes. I believe Dookoo's real motivation was to "turn" Obi-Wan in hopes that Anakin would follow, and perhaps create a shortcut in the timeline of the overall plan.
The point he's trying to make is that the warrants were obtained while Reno was in the USAG's office, not Ashcroft. The Post article clearly misleads the reader implying that it is Ashcroft and Bush's fault. There is a story on this in the LA Times which clearly states at the end of the article that there the Judge who made the ruling is pleased with the way that Ashcroft has cleaned up the problems that Reno left behind. The only reason this is in the press now, is because we're closing in on the 60 day limit cutting off paid advertising, read: choking out free speach, on broadcast media regarding political candidates under the new campaign finance reform. The liberal, misleading, press is trying to help the liberal, misrepresenting, politicians to get elected in Novemeber. If you haven't figured it out, Reno is running against Bush in Florida...that is why no mention of her or Clinton is made anywhere regarding this issue. The media puts this out now, hoping get the people thinking Bush/Ashcroft bad, Democrats good. Before groups are not aloud to put advertising out for their favored candidate.
If a hack causes death the hacker can never be the only one to blame IMHO.
Maybe so, but read some of L0pht's papers about the widely insecure remote access to power grids, city works (traffic controls, etc.), and other such things which are probably very hackable and not connected to the internet.
I think the premiss of this law is probably correct. If you commit a robbery and someone gets killed during the commision of that crime the law regarding that crime says you may be held accountable for that death. I don't think this law is much different.
If I hack something like a city's traffic control system and start playing around, only to leave the busiest intersections lights green in both directions, then unbeknownst to me some Soccer mom and her 5 kids get killed by a 18 wheeler driving through said intersection, I'm the one liable for their deaths. The people responsible for maintaining the traffic system may also be liable under either criminal or civil matter for neglegence or something like that, but they can't be held responsible for my actions. Just like, going back to the robbery, if that store owner pulls his gun and shoots and me but hits a customer, I'm still on the hook for the customer's death.
I am not a lawyer, nor a gynocologist, but I play both in my back shed.
sure it's all in one, but it's just another slashdit.
Linux Journal of August 2001 did their cover on Shrek. According to that article, the rendering farm for Shrek had over 1000 processors, with about 80% of those processors running Linux and 20% running Irix. The Article also says they used more than 200 Linux desktops and 400 Linux servers.
Generally most Laptops can do this, but I think what the poster is going for is a tool which will hibernate a single process. I think this is a very useful idea.
For instance, what if your company runs 1 shift, and you're sitting there thinking, now what could I use this IBM zSeries Linux server for at night...how about trying to factor the RSA-2048 number?...but your implementation of the General Number Field Sieve algorythm consumes massive resources, so you want to hibernate the process during business hours and wake it up at night when the boss goes home with out having to start all over. Then 50 years later when the process is finished you'll have your $200,000 prize from RSA.
As a NASA Contractor, I see the philosophy clash between the Get it Done'ers and the slower blinder's on folks daily. I must say though that as contracts start up, come to term and get rebid the status quo is that a new contractor will maintain the cream of the crop from the incumbent contract staff. This creates a very stable employment environment.
Combine that stability with the growing government staffing budget (nearly 14% increase this year), one begins to see a very sweet, stable job market available. Most of the time, we never do any more than is required. That means 8am to 5pm, with perhaps some off hours maintenance on occassion...and that time is easily comp'd. You won't find 8-12% raises each year, stock options, or pinball and billiard tables at the office, but you won't be asked to devote your life to your company either.
There isn't a day that goes by where my wife doesn't send me a job posting that she thinks would pay more or get me into something I'd like to do more, but the reality is that each time I have to blow her off becuase there aren't very many positions out there which offer the flexibility, stability and competitive salary that this contract job offers, that won't require a 50-60 hour week.
I'm considering a Masters at ACCIS. It's a web based accredited college offering computer science degree's. The online part sounds great because it's all self paced, plus you can get up to 30 credit hours for work experience.
When I was in college we did this same sort of thing (I think). I was once a physics guy, doing research for NASA, trying to build a temperature sensing device with no electrical components with in the sensor. Ultimately we found that using a sapphire fiber optic we could measure the temperature variance by relating the change in optic signal frequency to the diameter of the fiber, and then calcualting the temperature. Anyway, long story short, we needed percisioning devices for our testing. My main part of this project was the electronics and software to get data from them, so we bought up some CD players (specific ones which had lasers that had wavelengths with of something like .5 micrometers) got the scematics from the companies and started ripping them up to grab the laser and focusing electronics. CD lasers at the time used some interesting stuff which allowed the electronics to move the lense of the laser to maintain focus within a certain range of distance (read can focus on a wobbling CD). This made the cd laser perfect to measure percision of our systems, we knew that the laser's wavelength was half a micron so that was a rather exact margin of error, once the laser was focused on a target, we measure the signals on the electronics side and could develop our margin of error based on the movements of the lense with an accuracy of half a micron. KEWL! It was a fun project, and the use of CD's kept us on budget as opposed to buying research lasers for the same thing which could have been thousands of dollars.
Later that year, I used my project for that research to develop a rudimentary surface topology scanner, which made really kewl 3D computer images of pennies, dimes and quarters at a microsopic resolution. Not bad for 1993...
"All of our development work for the new MSN.com is...W3C standard," said Bob Visse, the director of MSN marketing, referring to the World Wide Web Consortium, which is developing industry standards for Web technologies. "For browsers that we know don't support those standards or that we can't insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the" standards.
Within this is the real story...that M$ doesn't believe that these other browsers support W3C Standards. Pardon me, but isn't Opera's modus operandi that it only supports Standardized Technologies?
I want to work for a company that does this...
Kinda sounds like a good way to win the Drug War.
Well....
Couldn't have said it better myself. People are too quick to forget that we had to fight and shed blood to get to where we are today... when the futures of things like pgp and online gambling are in limbo.
Why are you asking GW Bush? The President always catches the flak for the idiots we vote into congress, and the lobbyists who write this kind of shit into laws.
Albeit sneaky to put a gambling item into an anti-terrorism bill, /.ers should look into exactly who wrote this bill and who's voted for it and against it. Keep in mind that with the way congress works, had this bill been voted out in committee, it could take quite some time for a new bill (with the good parts of this one) to get back into committee and pushed throught the house and senate. Many of your representatives may vote to push a bill through a committee looking to get it out there for it's good parts, thinking that the good outweighs the bad.
Do you think that just because this nation is in the midst of a war and crisis, that the lobbyists are any less active than they would normally be? Absolutely not. Remember most of the law voted into existence in this country is written part or in whole by lobbyists who are trying to obtain some political or corporate advantage by getting the law passed.
Back in the day, I used to run Doom from a ramdisk on my 486, since I had worked a configuration that supported 16MB simms on my motherboard.
Perhaps this would be a good way of utilizing the speed of the current RAM technologies to increase the speed of one's computer. Much like technology has created a single purpose bus for graphics (AGP) perhaps a single purpose bus for RAMDisk usage could be made as well. Thus creating a place to store (perhaps only temporarily) the binary and datafiles that your system uses like a cache...read once from disk at boot then read from ramdisk forever more. Write the changes to the cache back to disk when the system is shutdown. This sacrifices startup/shutdown times for inline performance. Another thought comes to mind about the way we use databases to track the usage of our MP3s and other such things, this kind of thought could be applied to determine what initially gets loaded into the ramdisk, for instance.
Of course there are flaws in what I've concieved here, but I'm not an engineer, I'm a lowly *nix and windows luser/admin.
Try NASA... I'm always amazed at the Computer oriented Civil Servants who've been working in the same position for the last 10 years coming in and asking for the O'Reilly Learning Vi book.
Perhaps something like this would work:
I once worked for a company that had customized an editor (this was on a VMS system and I can't remember the name of the editor). The editor was tied into a source control system which required a username and password. So when you fire up the editor it prompts for the uname/password and logs you into the cvs-like system. You put in the source file you wanted to work on and the editor checks it out. Then as you make changes (in what looks like the original file) you actually make changes in a tmp buffer. When you write the changes so you can compile and run them, it takes the tmp buffer and makes special comment tags showing the user and date/time stamp for the change. It also was setup to make a special comment tag around any code that was directly changed or removed (as opposed to new code added). This way there's a history of the code's evolution...not only the who/when aspect, but the what aspect as well.
Personally, as a college intern who hadn't programmed the language before, I thought this was awesome. I mostly worked bug fixes so it was great to be able to see what the original coder had done and to know who he was, or what he might have changed that created the bug.
Considering that there are only 11 NASA Centers, and they reside in 7 states, I find it surprising that NASA gets as much money as it does. I work at Glenn Research Center in Cleveland Ohio, our budget for FY02 will be cut from $582mil to $532Mil...roughly 10%. That's quite a chunk for a single year. Tax cut or no tax cut, these numbers were "decided" (they are not exact) long before the tax cut was signed in. The bottom line is that there just isn't enough of a lobby for NASA to get it what it needs. Privatization could be the answer...
I thought M$ only cared about money...isn't this supposed to be about piracy not privacy?
I just got off the phone with Telocity.com, my DSL ISP. They stated to me that they will be handling are already working to find a vendor for their Northpoint customers.
DSL has been one wild ride for me, I finally found an apartment which was close enough to a CO to get DSL, so I contracted with PhoenixDSL.com as my ISP, within two months of installation PhoenixDSL was bought by Megapath, who in turn sold off all of PhoenixDSL's residential customers to Telocity, my service was just cut over to Telocity last week, and now my Northpoint DSL line may be disconnected with in the next 60 days.
What a bummer.
My fiance and I met in a local chat room almost two years ago, we'll be married in June. The one thing that made it work for us more than anything else is that we met in person shortly after we met online. We didn't spend a lot of time doing the late night chats and email correspondence. So shortly after we met online we dispatched with the whole online courting thing and went straight for the gusto.
You're assuming the cost of the system admin is the only cost we care about....
If the question is how much does it cost a company, one would have to look beyond the sysadmin. The last company I worked for was hit by "I love you" they were running MS Exchange, Outlook, and the rest of the M$ software. Email is email and it's not all that important right? Wrong. One person opens the wrong email, BAM, your server is sending so many emails that within minutes it will have crashed. Anyone else who logs into that client system will start that process over. Any person who logged into the infected system and logs into another system will start that process over.
Hopefully, none of your customer's email addresses were stored in the address book of that infected system. The PR nightmare that occurred because we sent "I Love You" to several customers was horrible. We lost one, and another who was one of our biggest supporters, decided not to let our prospective customers call them for referral.
In all we system admins only spent about 32 hours cleaning up the virus and the resulting email server crashes.
The cost the company assumes when a virus hits can be huge. Workstation downtime, Server downtime, Sysadmin/firefighter work, Customer Relations and Image issues that result. In all it can be very expensive.
Some of those costs are difficult to mathematically account for. Especially when it comes to the value a single customer has.