Any application that is on any merit that runs on Linux will also be available on Solaris, *BSD, and Windows.
That's true, and it's a good thing, not something us Linux advocates need to fear.
What Linux needs to gain marketshare is to be able to run all of Window's "killer apps", not to have its own. If every app and game that a user wanted worked on both Windows and Linux, then they'd be free to choose their OS on other merits such as usability, stability, and price.
As it stands now, even non-techies may be aware that Linux is a better system, but aren't willing to give up their "killer apps". I'm a Linux nut, but still have a Windows box for games, office, photoshop, quicken, and tax software. (And yes, linux has competent equivalents for all but the games, but they're just not yet as polished as the commercial versions).
It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, as the major commercial developers won't spend the time and money porting their apps to Linux until there's a sizeable market, and there won't be a sizeable market until Linux can reliably run those apps.
But I'm confident that given time, the alternative apps will be as polished and supported as their commercial equivalents, and will slowly steal their marketshare. The commercial dev's will need to respond by porting to Linux in order to compete, or lose out. Either way, Linux wins.
I hope they get funding or donations to beef up their web serving capability, since if it becomes successful, I'd imagine nearly every slashdot story (and other mass-media coverage) concerning big vulnerabilities will link to their site.
I'd go a step further - have multiple "standard" stylesheets that authors should use, and leave the choice up to the browsing public. Modern web browsers support multiple alternate stylesheets (eg. Firefox, lower-left hand corner for pages with multiple stylesheets). And even if the unfortunate user is stuck with IE, the choice can still be availabe using some clever DHTML code.
For a decent example, see BluesNews.com (Under the "customize" header, left-hand side).
This way you can default to the fancy bells-and-whistles layout, but offer an alternate, plain-jane for those who prefer it (or really, as many different styles as you feel like maintaining).
But twitchers can be fun, too - and more and more FPS's are tending towards a healthy mix of stealth and adrenaline-pumping action instead of an all-out constant frag-fest (see the most-excellent FarCry for a perfect example, but also Thief, original Deus Ex, System Shock 2, even Call of Duty and other war shooters).
And although it's more expensive to keep your hardware current in the PC gaming market (FarCry's recommended specs are basically the state-of-the-art right now), the added resolution and eye-candy are truely breathtaking. I still chuckle at my friends when they're playing their XBox or PS2 games - they look like crap! Not that graphics alone make the game, but they sure do add to the immersion.
And I just can't seem to grasp why people like playing FPS's on consoles - the tiny little joystick is quite plainly no match for a mouse/WASD configuration. Plus the ultra-low resolution of a TV makes long-distance combat nearly impossible (assuming the console can even handle a large map).
I recently played Time Splitters with some buddies on the XBox in a 4-way split-screen match, and I was utterly disappointed. You'd have to get within 20 virtual feet before you'd even see a guy, and since he looked like a stick-man running by, it was very hard to tell if he was friend or foe.
Consoles excel at other types of twitchers - side-scrollers, fighting games, sports games - where super-tight control, accuracy, and resolution isn't necessary. But those controllers are hell for those of us used to the mouse, at least for FPS's, RTS's, and RPG's.
Personally, I can't wait for the day they make a cross-platform shooter (say XBox/PC) that allows the two clientiel to match up against each other. The poor console boys will get head-shotted from afar before they have time to turn around. As an added bonus, they won't be able to reply to the "lolol!!1! u sux0rs, n00b!! 1 Pw3nd j00!" heckles.
I wholeheartedly agree, more apps should put forth more effort to autodetect and autoconfigure as much as they can, to present the fewest number of options.
However, it's equally as import to still allow experienced users to bypass any settings with whatever they feel, because try as we might to code perfect autodection routines, there will be times when it is wrong and the user will know better. Bury it behind an "advanced" button or some such, but don't blindly assume the autodection can't possibly be wrong.
There's nothing more annoying than knowing something is there and working, yet the program refuses to acknowledge it and offers no way to force the issue.
Yes, assuming they don't intend to defraud their stockholders, a sale like this would be accrued over the entire term of the subscription.
But there are really two kinds of accounting - "proper" ie. the balance sheet & income statement, where everything is balanced out, expenses are recorded when they're used (regardless of when they were paid), and revenues are recorded when they're earned (regardless of when they're collected). Hence "accounts receivable" and "accounts payable".
And then there's the "cash"/operation type of accounting, which most managers feel is far more important (ie. the cash-flow statement). This is where cash is recorded when it arrives and when it leaves, regardless of when a service is due or actually earned. A company's "cash position" or "liquidity" (what they have in the bank or can easily get into the bank) is often far more important to short-term survival than a proper balancing of accounts.
This is why most service companies offer up-front discounts for long-term subscriptions - the cash they bring in *right now* is more important than the loss they take in the long run. The idea is kind of like "earning interest" on that money, except it doesn't need to be invested in the market - it gets invested in their own company. It can be spent to grow the business *now*, which in theory will bring in more money down the road.
And of course when a company is hanging on by a thread, huge or ridiculous promotions like this can be a quick way to buy themselves more time to live, where they'll hopefully be able to come up with other revenue sources (the alternative being bankruptcy).
Personally, I've never understood the folks who are worried about space junk/clutter. Consider:
it's three dimensional space (different sat's orbit at different altitudes)
the imaginary "surface area" for any given orbital altitude is much larger than that of the Earth (and the Earth is really incredibly large, especially when you include the 70% that's the oceans, and the fact a typical satellite or other "space junk" is smaller than a yugo).
that all sats' orbits will decay over time, either inward or outward (and really, any sat with a normal decay rate typically won't be around longer than 10 years, sometimes all it takes is a few days or weeks if they can intentionally alter its speed). It's actually quite hard (ie. takes a lot of small course corrections) to keep a sat in perfect orbit.
that it's really expensive to put stuff up there, so as a result there really isn't that much physical man-made junk currently in orbit.
When you visit a site that tracks the orbits of various satellites, it can appear to a layman that there's a whole bunch of stuff up there, but that's usually because each sat is shown as a big blinking dot over a tiny map of the earth. If viewed to scale, of course that dot wouldn't be visible until you zoomed the map in to where you could see cars on the street.
The only problem is that the space junk can be traveling a few hundred mph relative to each other, so it can make for some pretty spectacular collisions should it ever happen (and its been speculated that certain impressions and chips in the Hubble, for example, were caused by "paint chips", although I'd speculate it's just comet dust or other natural space debris).
But really, the odds of two bigger-than-a-breadbox man-made objects colliding in orbit has to be astronomically small (forgive the pun).
I just don't get what the big fuss is about.
The original bomb was supposed to be both words (litigious bastards), but enough people made links to their site that both litigious and bastards point to SCO as the first hits.
Two more examples of successful google bombs are French Military Victories (especially funny if you use Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button, like this), and Miserable Failure (this one used to have Bush as the first hit, but pro-bush folks seem to have pushed Michael Moore to number 1).
I agree with most of your critque, except for "The background should be just slightly out of focus".
The problem here is that you can't know at which part of the screen the player's eyes are focused. In real life, if you were staring at the railing, then everything behind it would be out of focus. But if you were staring at the ground behind the railing, the railing would be out of focus.
Just a standard problem when trying to render a 3D scene to a 2D surface.
If you just assumed everything out a certain distance should be slightly blurry, then it would get quite annoying when aiming at distant objects, and wouldn't really be realistic (at least not to people with 20/20 or better vision).
For people that have never experienced socialized medicine, it's like any other government service. Imagine those ladies at the DMV providing health care.
[On working at the DMV.] Patty: Somedays we don't let the line move at all. Selma: Yeah, we call those WEEKdays.
I also heard (although this is likely just a coincidence) that since typewriter salesmen where unlikely to be touch-typists, they wanted it to be easy to type the word "typewriter" when they were demoing the products. Note that all those letters are on the top row.
Unfortunately, some (most?) sites are dynamic in nature, especially concerning advertising. By using the freecache service, a static version of the page gets cached and the same ad would _may_ appear if the site owner is using his own advertising code and not some remote service like google or doubleclick, likely going against the wishes of the website. Or perhaps the content itself requires dynamic code to work properly.
Although this would be very useful for tiny sites like those hosted on cable connections, but it's hard to tell in advance which sites will be slashdotted.
And either way, the choice should really be up to the web site owner. I'm sure most would prefer that people see their content versus having their server crushed, but you never know until you ask.
Am I the only one who thinks she just _has_ to be bulimic. Most episodes show her stuffing her face from the fridge at the end of the episode. I just assume after the cameras stop she's immediately running for the can to heave it all out.;)
Right... So the rest of the home owners on my block who didn't or can't afford to pay for their "fire-fighting" insurance get to watch their houses burn to the ground, while mine in the middle is miraculously unharmed by the fire, since I'm willing to pay for it? Do they just watch my roof and walls and put the hose to any sparks that touch down?
Emergency services just don't work that way, I'm afriad, especially when they can spread like a fire does.
Go check out the prices of PC100 or older memory chips. I have plenty of non-poweruser friends and family who want a little boost to their ancient machines, but don't want to buy a new machine outright. I was expecting it to be drop-dead-dirt cheap, but if you can even FIND it available, it's typically priced way higher than it was a few years ago. Buying used can be an option here, however, since you can buy an entire old box at a garage sale for probably cheaper than a couple still-wrapped PC100 memory.
Same thing happened to 9- and 18-gig SCSI drives - damn hard to find now (and I certainly don't want to buy USED drives, since they age poorly with use), but I need some 18-gig's (160-pin) to replace some dead drives in my RAID box. Used to be priced at ~$200 CDN locally, but I can't find them for less than $350 now. I'm better off just paving the box and reconfiging the logical volume with the drives that are left.
The solution, available as default in any semi-modern distro (and even base KDE or Gnome (or MacOS X for that matter) installs), is to ask the user for the root-password only when they go to install a system-wide app or patch or config change. A little pop-up appears, they type it in, that single program runs as root, whilst the user is still logged in their own non-root account.
It's one extra semi-annoying step, but I doubt most SixPacks will encounter it very often, as they don't typically tweak a system every few hours like us admins do.
Now of course, a trojan or worm that exploits a user-level hole to get executable priviledges could do the exact same thing to escalate itself, and most Joe SixPacks will unwittingly enter the root password without a moments hesitation, but that's a problem common across ALL operating system.
I agree. But here's an inadvertant use of their google toolbar I hadn't put enough thought into when I initially installed it:
It has the "page rank" feature, where it dials home for every page you view to retrieve that page's ranking, which I though was a pretty neat feature. And google's very forward about the privacy implications with a nice, hard to miss warning saying as much. But I figured who cares, so they know a few sites I visit - I don't have my tin-foil hat on enough to care if they're collecting usage stats on my browsing patterns. Besides, I use Firebird (er, Firefox) as my primary browser, and use IE sparingly, typically only for testing pages I've worked on.
This is, until I was doing some dev work and saw a bunch of hits from a google-bot to sensitive URLs on the system I was working on - a dev box that no one should have known about. And since I had all my form's as GETs (typical to do when developing, to make seeing the arguments a little easier), the google-bots where passing those as well (!), which caused a bunch of weird database entries to get inserted and various other mayhem on my test box.
I hadn't up to that point realized the full breadth of the privacy concerns, especially when the google-bot is going off to retrieve those URLs shortly after I had visited them. Thankfully it doesn't yet appear any of those pages were archived on their end, but it's disturbing nonetheless.
I know, stoopid me. Laugh all you want, but I'm sure there are thousands of people even less concerned with privacy who like that feature, and busy visiting their bank/retailer sites where CGI-arguments may be passed back to google, rife with account numbers and who knows what else.
I agree, and I'll expand on your (y) category a bit with a personal example:
I've been known to play with high-end graphics and sound packages for kicks. I'm certainly not a professional artist by any stretch, but do enjoy seeing what these packages can do. So instead of paying hundreds or thousands for them just to play, I downloaded them from a p2p app.
Now a bit later, the small start-up I worked for needed some graphic work done for their web site, and I recommended they pick up a copy of the same program, since I had some semblence of familiarity with it and found it quite powerful.
So, my company buys the product whereas they may not have, and I most certainly wouldn't have bought it for myself (too pricey). One sale because of piracy.
That was my point in the original post - after it's resent itself to all the email addresses it has found, and basically has no other way to spread, it proceeds to nuke the system it's on.
In the case of service-exploit worms, then a time delay would be necessary. But I imagine something as short as 4 hours would still cause unheard of damage. CodeRed spread rather quickly: 250,000 in 9 hours, and that's only for machines running MS's SQL Server. If the exploit was in the OS, the spread could be a hundred or a thousand times that.
And it'd be tough for most people, especially laymen to react quickly enough - by the time they heard about it on the evening news, it'd likely be too late.
What confounds me is that there hasn't been a major virus with a real nasty payload, say a virus that spreads like MyDoom, but after sending itself out to all the email contacts found, it proceeds to nuke the drive by writing random junk through it all (preventing any way of recovering the data).
All the major email-bourne worms we've seen to date have had very benign (IMO) payloads, typically a minor DDoS and/or backdoor. These have caused extra load on the Net, and could cause more spam or the harvesting of CC's, but their damage could be far, far worse.
Of course, a lot of script-kiddies use these viruses as bragging-rights (I 0wn 6421 zombie machines), so it's perhaps against their interests to do true damage, but it won't be long until someone does. And then the typical media figure of $X billions just may be legit, as I suspect the people who get infected are the same ones who never backup their systems.
Re:Something I learned from Martin Gardner...
on
The Golden Ratio
·
· Score: 1
That is cool! Makes me want to crack open my old math texts and see if I can understand anything this time 'round.:)
For those who want to try this at home, here's a quick & dirty one-liner to run on the command line.
perl -e '$num=shift||1; for(;;){print ++$i,"\t",($num=1/$num+1),"\n";}' 5678 | more
(replace 5678 with whatever number you want to try.
Seems that you hit the golden ratio to 15 significant digits in just under 40 steps, at least for the few numbers I threw at it (1, 20, 2000000, 0.00001).
Actually, I see it as an economic boon - thousands of sys admins and consultants around the world are called in to "fix" or patch these various viruses, which means more money to tech jobs.
Sure, the money isn't spent directly towards a value-add product, meaning it's ultimately likely to increase the cost of whatever end-product said company is producing, but that means just more money changing hands == good for the economy.
Ok, a little simplistic, and perhaps misguided, but my point is that the millions/billions spent on each of these doesn't just evaporate - it's just spent in a different spot than it would have.
Slashdot Mirror
What Linux needs to gain marketshare is to be able to run all of Window's "killer apps", not to have its own. If every app and game that a user wanted worked on both Windows and Linux, then they'd be free to choose their OS on other merits such as usability, stability, and price.
As it stands now, even non-techies may be aware that Linux is a better system, but aren't willing to give up their "killer apps". I'm a Linux nut, but still have a Windows box for games, office, photoshop, quicken, and tax software. (And yes, linux has competent equivalents for all but the games, but they're just not yet as polished as the commercial versions).
It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, as the major commercial developers won't spend the time and money porting their apps to Linux until there's a sizeable market, and there won't be a sizeable market until Linux can reliably run those apps.
But I'm confident that given time, the alternative apps will be as polished and supported as their commercial equivalents, and will slowly steal their marketshare. The commercial dev's will need to respond by porting to Linux in order to compete, or lose out. Either way, Linux wins.
I hope they get funding or donations to beef up their web serving capability, since if it becomes successful, I'd imagine nearly every slashdot story (and other mass-media coverage) concerning big vulnerabilities will link to their site.
For a decent example, see BluesNews.com (Under the "customize" header, left-hand side).
This way you can default to the fancy bells-and-whistles layout, but offer an alternate, plain-jane for those who prefer it (or really, as many different styles as you feel like maintaining).
And although it's more expensive to keep your hardware current in the PC gaming market (FarCry's recommended specs are basically the state-of-the-art right now), the added resolution and eye-candy are truely breathtaking. I still chuckle at my friends when they're playing their XBox or PS2 games - they look like crap! Not that graphics alone make the game, but they sure do add to the immersion.
And I just can't seem to grasp why people like playing FPS's on consoles - the tiny little joystick is quite plainly no match for a mouse/WASD configuration. Plus the ultra-low resolution of a TV makes long-distance combat nearly impossible (assuming the console can even handle a large map).
I recently played Time Splitters with some buddies on the XBox in a 4-way split-screen match, and I was utterly disappointed. You'd have to get within 20 virtual feet before you'd even see a guy, and since he looked like a stick-man running by, it was very hard to tell if he was friend or foe.
Consoles excel at other types of twitchers - side-scrollers, fighting games, sports games - where super-tight control, accuracy, and resolution isn't necessary. But those controllers are hell for those of us used to the mouse, at least for FPS's, RTS's, and RPG's.
Personally, I can't wait for the day they make a cross-platform shooter (say XBox/PC) that allows the two clientiel to match up against each other. The poor console boys will get head-shotted from afar before they have time to turn around. As an added bonus, they won't be able to reply to the "lolol!!1! u sux0rs, n00b!! 1 Pw3nd j00!" heckles.
However, it's equally as import to still allow experienced users to bypass any settings with whatever they feel, because try as we might to code perfect autodection routines, there will be times when it is wrong and the user will know better. Bury it behind an "advanced" button or some such, but don't blindly assume the autodection can't possibly be wrong.
There's nothing more annoying than knowing something is there and working, yet the program refuses to acknowledge it and offers no way to force the issue.
But there are really two kinds of accounting - "proper" ie. the balance sheet & income statement, where everything is balanced out, expenses are recorded when they're used (regardless of when they were paid), and revenues are recorded when they're earned (regardless of when they're collected). Hence "accounts receivable" and "accounts payable".
And then there's the "cash"/operation type of accounting, which most managers feel is far more important (ie. the cash-flow statement). This is where cash is recorded when it arrives and when it leaves, regardless of when a service is due or actually earned. A company's "cash position" or "liquidity" (what they have in the bank or can easily get into the bank) is often far more important to short-term survival than a proper balancing of accounts.
This is why most service companies offer up-front discounts for long-term subscriptions - the cash they bring in *right now* is more important than the loss they take in the long run. The idea is kind of like "earning interest" on that money, except it doesn't need to be invested in the market - it gets invested in their own company. It can be spent to grow the business *now*, which in theory will bring in more money down the road.
And of course when a company is hanging on by a thread, huge or ridiculous promotions like this can be a quick way to buy themselves more time to live, where they'll hopefully be able to come up with other revenue sources (the alternative being bankruptcy).
- it's three dimensional space (different sat's orbit at different altitudes)
- the imaginary "surface area" for any given orbital altitude is much larger than that of the Earth (and the Earth is really incredibly large, especially when you include the 70% that's the oceans, and the fact a typical satellite or other "space junk" is smaller than a yugo).
- that all sats' orbits will decay over time, either inward or outward (and really, any sat with a normal decay rate typically won't be around longer than 10 years, sometimes all it takes is a few days or weeks if they can intentionally alter its speed). It's actually quite hard (ie. takes a lot of small course corrections) to keep a sat in perfect orbit.
- that it's really expensive to put stuff up there, so as a result there really isn't that much physical man-made junk currently in orbit.
When you visit a site that tracks the orbits of various satellites, it can appear to a layman that there's a whole bunch of stuff up there, but that's usually because each sat is shown as a big blinking dot over a tiny map of the earth. If viewed to scale, of course that dot wouldn't be visible until you zoomed the map in to where you could see cars on the street.The only problem is that the space junk can be traveling a few hundred mph relative to each other, so it can make for some pretty spectacular collisions should it ever happen (and its been speculated that certain impressions and chips in the Hubble, for example, were caused by "paint chips", although I'd speculate it's just comet dust or other natural space debris).
But really, the odds of two bigger-than-a-breadbox man-made objects colliding in orbit has to be astronomically small (forgive the pun). I just don't get what the big fuss is about.
The original bomb was supposed to be both words (litigious bastards), but enough people made links to their site that both litigious and bastards point to SCO as the first hits.
Two more examples of successful google bombs are French Military Victories (especially funny if you use Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button, like this), and Miserable Failure (this one used to have Bush as the first hit, but pro-bush folks seem to have pushed Michael Moore to number 1).
The problem here is that you can't know at which part of the screen the player's eyes are focused. In real life, if you were staring at the railing, then everything behind it would be out of focus. But if you were staring at the ground behind the railing, the railing would be out of focus.
Just a standard problem when trying to render a 3D scene to a 2D surface.
If you just assumed everything out a certain distance should be slightly blurry, then it would get quite annoying when aiming at distant objects, and wouldn't really be realistic (at least not to people with 20/20 or better vision).
Patty: Somedays we don't let the line move at all.
Selma: Yeah, we call those WEEKdays.
I also heard (although this is likely just a coincidence) that since typewriter salesmen where unlikely to be touch-typists, they wanted it to be easy to type the word "typewriter" when they were demoing the products. Note that all those letters are on the top row.
Although this would be very useful for tiny sites like those hosted on cable connections, but it's hard to tell in advance which sites will be slashdotted.
And either way, the choice should really be up to the web site owner. I'm sure most would prefer that people see their content versus having their server crushed, but you never know until you ask.
Am I the only one who thinks she just _has_ to be bulimic. Most episodes show her stuffing her face from the fridge at the end of the episode. I just assume after the cameras stop she's immediately running for the can to heave it all out. ;)
and/or
AMaViS
Emergency services just don't work that way, I'm afriad, especially when they can spread like a fire does.
Same thing happened to 9- and 18-gig SCSI drives - damn hard to find now (and I certainly don't want to buy USED drives, since they age poorly with use), but I need some 18-gig's (160-pin) to replace some dead drives in my RAID box. Used to be priced at ~$200 CDN locally, but I can't find them for less than $350 now. I'm better off just paving the box and reconfiging the logical volume with the drives that are left.
It's one extra semi-annoying step, but I doubt most SixPacks will encounter it very often, as they don't typically tweak a system every few hours like us admins do.
Now of course, a trojan or worm that exploits a user-level hole to get executable priviledges could do the exact same thing to escalate itself, and most Joe SixPacks will unwittingly enter the root password without a moments hesitation, but that's a problem common across ALL operating system.
Actually, he was right - I sent them a cheque for $349.50 just last week. ;p
It has the "page rank" feature, where it dials home for every page you view to retrieve that page's ranking, which I though was a pretty neat feature. And google's very forward about the privacy implications with a nice, hard to miss warning saying as much. But I figured who cares, so they know a few sites I visit - I don't have my tin-foil hat on enough to care if they're collecting usage stats on my browsing patterns. Besides, I use Firebird (er, Firefox) as my primary browser, and use IE sparingly, typically only for testing pages I've worked on.
This is, until I was doing some dev work and saw a bunch of hits from a google-bot to sensitive URLs on the system I was working on - a dev box that no one should have known about. And since I had all my form's as GETs (typical to do when developing, to make seeing the arguments a little easier), the google-bots where passing those as well (!), which caused a bunch of weird database entries to get inserted and various other mayhem on my test box.
I hadn't up to that point realized the full breadth of the privacy concerns, especially when the google-bot is going off to retrieve those URLs shortly after I had visited them. Thankfully it doesn't yet appear any of those pages were archived on their end, but it's disturbing nonetheless.
I know, stoopid me. Laugh all you want, but I'm sure there are thousands of people even less concerned with privacy who like that feature, and busy visiting their bank/retailer sites where CGI-arguments may be passed back to google, rife with account numbers and who knows what else.
Quagmire: Good thing we swore off women so we wouldn't be distracted and unable to accumulate this vast amount of wealth.
Peter: Yes. You watch the ticker. I'm gunna go microwave a bagel and have sex with it.
Quagmire: Butter's in the fridge!
I've been known to play with high-end graphics and sound packages for kicks. I'm certainly not a professional artist by any stretch, but do enjoy seeing what these packages can do. So instead of paying hundreds or thousands for them just to play, I downloaded them from a p2p app.
Now a bit later, the small start-up I worked for needed some graphic work done for their web site, and I recommended they pick up a copy of the same program, since I had some semblence of familiarity with it and found it quite powerful.
So, my company buys the product whereas they may not have, and I most certainly wouldn't have bought it for myself (too pricey). One sale because of piracy.
In the case of service-exploit worms, then a time delay would be necessary. But I imagine something as short as 4 hours would still cause unheard of damage. CodeRed spread rather quickly: 250,000 in 9 hours, and that's only for machines running MS's SQL Server. If the exploit was in the OS, the spread could be a hundred or a thousand times that.
And it'd be tough for most people, especially laymen to react quickly enough - by the time they heard about it on the evening news, it'd likely be too late.
All the major email-bourne worms we've seen to date have had very benign (IMO) payloads, typically a minor DDoS and/or backdoor. These have caused extra load on the Net, and could cause more spam or the harvesting of CC's, but their damage could be far, far worse.
Of course, a lot of script-kiddies use these viruses as bragging-rights (I 0wn 6421 zombie machines), so it's perhaps against their interests to do true damage, but it won't be long until someone does. And then the typical media figure of $X billions just may be legit, as I suspect the people who get infected are the same ones who never backup their systems.
For those who want to try this at home, here's a quick & dirty one-liner to run on the command line.
(replace 5678 with whatever number you want to try.Seems that you hit the golden ratio to 15 significant digits in just under 40 steps, at least for the few numbers I threw at it (1, 20, 2000000, 0.00001).
Sure, the money isn't spent directly towards a value-add product, meaning it's ultimately likely to increase the cost of whatever end-product said company is producing, but that means just more money changing hands == good for the economy.
Ok, a little simplistic, and perhaps misguided, but my point is that the millions/billions spent on each of these doesn't just evaporate - it's just spent in a different spot than it would have.