The latest viruses are getting pretty creepy. On the public network where I work, we recently plugged a Windows XP laptop in that had just been installed without anti-virus. There are apparently so many viruses going around on our network that within 10 minutes, the computer had 12 viruses that were picked up just through viruses that connect in remotely through ports that have not been "firewalled".
Sounds like your problem isn't the PC, Windows or your network, but your network practices. We're pretty good about stripping attachments, filtering spam and having firewalls in place, but the extra yard is taking a PC off someone's desk and making sure many people around them know just who was doing what to bring the beastie in.
I was having trouble with a connection, last December and disabled my firewall. Within 40 seconds something had already got in. The firewall went back up and I sorted the problems out with it in place.
First MySpace and now IGN.. They're really wanting to get that Pro-Bush message out to all them young people!
Which is a bit like running up hill with rollerblades on, at the moment. Maybe Slick Dick Cheney can do a better PR job in the south than George. I don't think they can outsling anyone else online though, as we've seen for years that people are either very fickle or choosey when it comes to the internet and tend to gravitate away from BS. The bar for me to start my own pro or anti-somebody website is pretty low, mostly my expense is bandwidth, which I could foot for a short while if I really had heavy demand (and of course if I had heavy demand I could get web advertising to pick up some of the cost, right?)
We'll see if they're any better at this game than AOL, which seems to be rotting away.
Well, becoming a megamedia empire didn't work for AOL/Time-Warner, but Ruper Murdoch, against many
wagers in the past has made things work, even stealing tired old NFL football from CBS and kicking some
life back into it when pundits said it was doomed to failure.
Still, there's always that first big failure. Maybe he has in mind a MMORPG Simpsons game in mind.
Online ads?
To purchase your very own Mystical Maul of Debugging from The Franklin Mint click HERE
Market analysts say (and market analysts are never wrong) that skype "could help eBay quickly improve customer service"
Anyone who's used Paypal know how important "customer service" is to ebay:-)
OK, I see the smiley, but I seriously wonder if eBay will just further bloat already bloated pages with voice mail.
"you've been outbid"
If you don't think their pages are fat, you've got a very fast connection. Those of us on 56K dialups get used to waiting a full minute to get to our My Ebay page. Whatever happened to less is more?
Then, it could be they're just buying it as an investment and will unload it later.
though there are plenty of bots there they can't fleece people like poker bots because it's impossible to work out accurate odds for, say, Liverpool coming back from 3-0 down at half time to win the Champion's League.
Even the bookmakers couldn't figure those odds right, and when they gave 100-1 at half, many took them up on it, including one punter who bet 50 pounds. That result did to the bookmakers what Katrina did to Biloxi.
With all the poker-bots and it being morally indefensible to allow suckers to keep their money, it stands to reason
there is only a finite number of suckers, and even if there's a new one every minute, it takes suckers longer than
a handfull of minutes to scrape togther enough money to get taken to the cleaners often enough to prop up such an industry.
My money's on the really big gambling:
What I bought on eBay is what I actually get
Living on top of a fault line
Hope against evidence that the price of gas will actually go down with the increase in available crude (actual crude price increase in past year 66%, gasoline price increase over same period 132%, source BBC)
One day my comic book collection may approach in sticker price value
My donation to Katrina relief won't go into some fat-cat's pocket.
Besides, with the price of gas being so high who has money left to gamble?
You now have a concrete example of "lawful evil", for anyone who asks.
Someone using bureaucracy to bring the entire process down to a slow enough crawl that by the time it's resolved, it's no longer relevant, thus allowing the company to get away with whatever they want.
While twirling their long waxed moustaches.
Actually, what immediately came to mind, while reading your post, was the Crud Puppy in User Friendly, Snidely Whiplash doesn't quite measure up to this kind of legitimized and organized evil.
So in a nutshell, it's Microsoft's business as usual: Lock down proprietary formats to ensure future revenue streams.
Not surprising, this is why they want their pwn XML standard. They actually demonstrate very little faith in the merits of their products, such as MS Office, by such acts.
Counsel: We get signal.
European Commission: What!
Counsel: Main screen turn on.
European Commission: It's you!!
Gates: How are you gentlemen!!
Gates: All your base are belong to us!
Also according to the USGS, the Long Valley complex is the site of the largest eruption in (known) geological history.
So there's yet another reason not to live in California.
Now you make me sorry I didn't post pictures of one of my trips through the state a couple years ago. There are huge areas of lava beds throughout the state. No cinder cones, no obvious spot this stuff gushed through to the surface, but absolutely huge fields of dark red lava. California is a truly a geologists dream come true. I was fascinated to see how Death Valley was actually formed, a long plane rotated, like 45 degrees, thrusting up the Funeral Range and exposing all manner of mineral seems (hence all the borax and other salts in considerable quantities in the valley, it has to be seen to be believed.) The actual bottom of the valley is about 10,000 feet below ground level and has filled it over millenia from erosion of the Funeral Range. Very cool place to visit.
I have a sunrise shot as the wallpaper on my 1280x1024 screen at home.
I like Oregon a lot. I just wish it were easier to get to.
Which is possibly the way people in Oregon prefer it, which reminds me of a couple Lightbulb jokes, which underscore sentiments felt by some in Oregon, regarding all the Californians who feel all in touch with nature, etc. while gadding about in the neighboring state:
How many Californians does it take to change a lightbulb?
4. One to change the lightbulb and 3 to share in the experience.
How man Oregonians does it take to change a lightbulb?
5. One to change the lightbulb and 4 to chase off the Californians who came to share in the experience.
To put things into perspective here's recent
quakes throught the US, notice the activity in the state of California, to the south.
Back in the late 90's there were swarms of minor earthquakes around the
Long Valley Caldera,
the vicinity of California where Mammoth Lakes and Mammoth Mountain are located. Swarms of
earth quakes, 4.0 (Richter) and lower, most lower than 2.0, were up to 600 per 24 hours for a
period of about two weeks, and
ground elevations were observed changing (similarly to those in Oregon) slightly, but as you
can see all is quiet and nothing happened.
Long Valley is the caldera of a very large, dormant volcano.
State secrets? Then how did Yahoo get to them? HOW?!?! Either Yahoo writers are hackers (possible), or those aren't really "secrets" just things that the government would like to be secrets.
State Secrets is pretty much a generic umbrella for many charges. Effectively there's no real appeal process so it could be for malicious lingering, offside, or not having the right friends in the right places. You could in theory be accused of spreading state secrets by openly speculating.
PRC is a country which practices the death penalty for theft.
Why not, the Chinese have more human rights violations than Iraq ever did. Less oil though...
Yeah, but they have something else we all can't live without, eh?
Most consumer electronics, computers, tools, clothing, etc. There's even a China Motors in Capitola, CA and though I haven't dropped in to see what they're selling, I bet it's a chinese brand of car.
OTOH, I suspect that the true power usage for this laptop will be zero.
Oh, I wouldn't say that. I see Windows running on it and the one thing I have learned over the years is that Windows can suck the power out of anything.
For every advance in processor, disk and memory technology, a new release of Windows follows which ties more of it up. Heck when this thing starts up Windows probably fills up half the available memory (like it does on my 1.25GB desktop system) with DLLs and whatnot, whatever it can't find on the system disk it'll probably create just to meet expectations.
I shudder to think what Longhorn will demand of systems for minimum hardware.
What's more is they didn't even want you to know that sneaking under the radar without being caught was their goal. Seems they failed on that account miserably. So what's the lesson here? Have a virus/worm with a limited life span? After the first n machines have been infected cease spreading?
Sure as there's imagination there'll be more tactics to come.
For what it's worth, 50 years ago, the Army Corps of Engineers had to do quite a bit of work to keep the Mississippi River flowing past New Orleans.
Seriously, they built the city in a swamp. They recovered as much land as they could to do so, but you know nature is persistent. Another famous city build upon a swamp is St. Petersburg, Russia. Problem is the wooden pilings are rotting beneath the city.
I've heard of Meijer Thrify Acres, which is a large warehouse-type supermarket/general store around the Great Lakes region. But I can only imagine that Meiji Thrifty Acres is some kind of Japanese knock-off.
I meant Meijer, but typed Meiji (Emperor of Japan, 1857-1912) by force of habit.
"Thrifty" wore wooden shoes (clogs) and had a page-boy hair cut. I don't think you see him associated with the retailing giant anymore. Probably would have been available to stick his finger in the levee in New Orleans, though as I recall there were two breaches separated by some distance.
Interesting that Chicago, near Lake Michigan, used to flood and if you drive around a bit you can find entrances to the under city. IIRC elevators in many of the buildings close to Lakeshore Drive reflect this.
I noticed another NYT story on lost cities, which would be interesting to the 'abandon New Orleans' camp:
Somewhere out there there's an article about Iran offering 20 million barrels of petroleum to help out the energy hungry americans. Remember when Saddam Hussein offered assistance to the US after 9/11?
Oh, and Bob Denver has died. Gilligan has finally been delivered.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like your problem isn't the PC, Windows or your network, but your network practices. We're pretty good about stripping attachments, filtering spam and having firewalls in place, but the extra yard is taking a PC off someone's desk and making sure many people around them know just who was doing what to bring the beastie in.
I was having trouble with a connection, last December and disabled my firewall. Within 40 seconds something had already got in. The firewall went back up and I sorted the problems out with it in place.
For the full bore, whole hog, bull moose /. effect it's best to post these articles in the morning EST/EDT.
It would be amusing if of all presences on the internet, Cisco couldn't take it.
When you lock caps, num or scroll, does a little black light light up in black to tell you you have the lock on?
Want to do something more practical? Get a Braille keyboard and learn that while typing. It's a skill, right?
Which is a bit like running up hill with rollerblades on, at the moment. Maybe Slick Dick Cheney can do a better PR job in the south than George. I don't think they can outsling anyone else online though, as we've seen for years that people are either very fickle or choosey when it comes to the internet and tend to gravitate away from BS. The bar for me to start my own pro or anti-somebody website is pretty low, mostly my expense is bandwidth, which I could foot for a short while if I really had heavy demand (and of course if I had heavy demand I could get web advertising to pick up some of the cost, right?)
We'll see if they're any better at this game than AOL, which seems to be rotting away.
This post about a dupe is a dupe.
Still, there's always that first big failure. Maybe he has in mind a MMORPG Simpsons game in mind.
Online ads?
Anyone who's used Paypal know how important "customer service" is to ebay
OK, I see the smiley, but I seriously wonder if eBay will just further bloat already bloated pages with voice mail.
"you've been outbid"
If you don't think their pages are fat, you've got a very fast connection. Those of us on 56K dialups get used to waiting a full minute to get to our My Ebay page. Whatever happened to less is more?
Then, it could be they're just buying it as an investment and will unload it later.
Even the bookmakers couldn't figure those odds right, and when they gave 100-1 at half, many took them up on it, including one punter who bet 50 pounds. That result did to the bookmakers what Katrina did to Biloxi.
My money's on the really big gambling:
- What I bought on eBay is what I actually get
- Living on top of a fault line
- Hope against evidence that the price of gas will actually go down with the increase in available crude (actual crude price increase in past year 66%, gasoline price increase over same period 132%, source BBC)
- One day my comic book collection may approach in sticker price value
- My donation to Katrina relief won't go into some fat-cat's pocket.
Besides, with the price of gas being so high who has money left to gamble?Actually, what immediately came to mind, while reading your post, was the Crud Puppy in User Friendly, Snidely Whiplash doesn't quite measure up to this kind of legitimized and organized evil.
curses, Dooright!
Not surprising, this is why they want their pwn XML standard. They actually demonstrate very little faith in the merits of their products, such as MS Office, by such acts.
Counsel: We get signal.
European Commission: What!
Counsel: Main screen turn on.
European Commission: It's you!!
Gates: How are you gentlemen!!
Gates: All your base are belong to us!
Now you make me sorry I didn't post pictures of one of my trips through the state a couple years ago. There are huge areas of lava beds throughout the state. No cinder cones, no obvious spot this stuff gushed through to the surface, but absolutely huge fields of dark red lava. California is a truly a geologists dream come true. I was fascinated to see how Death Valley was actually formed, a long plane rotated, like 45 degrees, thrusting up the Funeral Range and exposing all manner of mineral seems (hence all the borax and other salts in considerable quantities in the valley, it has to be seen to be believed.) The actual bottom of the valley is about 10,000 feet below ground level and has filled it over millenia from erosion of the Funeral Range. Very cool place to visit.
I have a sunrise shot as the wallpaper on my 1280x1024 screen at home.
Which is possibly the way people in Oregon prefer it, which reminds me of a couple Lightbulb jokes, which underscore sentiments felt by some in Oregon, regarding all the Californians who feel all in touch with nature, etc. while gadding about in the neighboring state:
To put things into perspective here's recent quakes throught the US, notice the activity in the state of California, to the south.
Back in the late 90's there were swarms of minor earthquakes around the Long Valley Caldera, the vicinity of California where Mammoth Lakes and Mammoth Mountain are located. Swarms of earth quakes, 4.0 (Richter) and lower, most lower than 2.0, were up to 600 per 24 hours for a period of about two weeks, and ground elevations were observed changing (similarly to those in Oregon) slightly, but as you can see all is quiet and nothing happened. Long Valley is the caldera of a very large, dormant volcano.
Here is a good example of a swarm of aftershocks.
State Secrets is pretty much a generic umbrella for many charges. Effectively there's no real appeal process so it could be for malicious lingering, offside, or not having the right friends in the right places. You could in theory be accused of spreading state secrets by openly speculating.
PRC is a country which practices the death penalty for theft.
Yeah, but they have something else we all can't live without, eh? Most consumer electronics, computers, tools, clothing, etc. There's even a China Motors in Capitola, CA and though I haven't dropped in to see what they're selling, I bet it's a chinese brand of car.
Tune in, turn in, drop out of sight...
Oh, I wouldn't say that. I see Windows running on it and the one thing I have learned over the years is that Windows can suck the power out of anything.
For every advance in processor, disk and memory technology, a new release of Windows follows which ties more of it up. Heck when this thing starts up Windows probably fills up half the available memory (like it does on my 1.25GB desktop system) with DLLs and whatnot, whatever it can't find on the system disk it'll probably create just to meet expectations.
I shudder to think what Longhorn will demand of systems for minimum hardware.
Yeah, and Microsoft has been so restrictive, only offering shared source. How's a virus/worm author to make a living under those conditions?
they could start by writing a thank-you note to Bill Gates for spreading the most fertile ground for worms/virii throughout the world...
Sure as there's imagination there'll be more tactics to come.
Seriously, they built the city in a swamp. They recovered as much land as they could to do so, but you know nature is persistent. Another famous city build upon a swamp is St. Petersburg, Russia. Problem is the wooden pilings are rotting beneath the city.
Folly is truly the domain of mankind.
I meant Meijer, but typed Meiji (Emperor of Japan, 1857-1912) by force of habit.
"Thrifty" wore wooden shoes (clogs) and had a page-boy hair cut. I don't think you see him associated with the retailing giant anymore. Probably would have been available to stick his finger in the levee in New Orleans, though as I recall there were two breaches separated by some distance.
Interesting that Chicago, near Lake Michigan, used to flood and if you drive around a bit you can find entrances to the under city. IIRC elevators in many of the buildings close to Lakeshore Drive reflect this.
Somewhere out there there's an article about Iran offering 20 million barrels of petroleum to help out the energy hungry americans. Remember when Saddam Hussein offered assistance to the US after 9/11?
Oh, and Bob Denver has died. Gilligan has finally been delivered.