This has nothing to do with Microsoft antispyware being a beta product.
Microsoft antispyware used to be a functioning antispyware product put out by Giant. MS bought it and modified it - so as far as being beta, how much modification did they need to do? Change the logos? Add some additional features? Redo the automatic update to use their servers? So why does this impact the signature analysis?
This was a signature database update - not a program update. They deliberately put a bad signature in to damage Norton = it's that fucking simple.
And if any of these business had any brains to begin with, they'd realize that it is fully possible to migrate away from ANY APPLICATION - as long as you have a PLAN to migrate TO something.
The fact is you WILL migrate away from EVERYTHING you're currently using sooner or later. The difference is whether you PLAN to do it and when.
The problem is most management buys something, then forgets about it until it's a problem.
There is no IT planning in ANY corporation - it's all politics and salesmanship from vendors. Have the vendor get you a blowjob or even just a nice lunch and he gets a two million dollar contract that will end up costing your company five million over five years. The boss wants less downtime? Run out and buy a "system management package" for five million.
That's how it's done. Most of these morons are so out of date with the technology it isn't funny. And they NEVER understood any principles of corporate IT infrastructure design because they came up through the ranks of programmer to systems analyst to team leader to IT head - or they came in directly as IT head from some MBA program.
NONE of them can make a rational decision to save their lives. And if they could, they'd be overruled by senior management.
It has NOTHING to do with the technical merits of OSS vs proprietary or the cost of conversion or lack of applications or any of that red herring crap.
I just had a client a week or so ago whose spyware disabled Norton AV (they had dumped their Norton firewall previously because it "interfered with their network" - but that was likely end user error.) I had to first defeat the spyware, then download the Norton removal utility to strip Norton out of the system, so I could reinstall it. I also installed the Microsoft antispyware beta.
Now I've had to call them and tell them to disable the automatic update of the Microsoft antispyware for a week or so until MS fixes this problem. They've got Spybot and SpywareBlaster as well, so they should be okay.
Fortunately I've only recently standardized on installing the Microsoft antispyware for my clients, so I don't have too many to call who also run Norton.
I've seen McAfee at work have a problem shutting down when Windows XP shuts down.
Never had a problem at home with Avast shutting down when XP shuts down.
This isn't related to the resource consumption issue, but it does indicate that some of these supposedly more powerful products are TOO tightly integrated into the OS or that the companies making them can't keep up with constant Windows automatic updates or the more complicated security policy settings one sees in corporate environments.
One hopes that the Windows AV suite will at least be kept up to date whenever new service packs or updates come out. Unfortunately for the AV vendors, I suspect Microsoft will be slow in letting THEM now when things need to be changed. Witness SP2 which caused significant problems for AV vendors. Now that Microsoft is their competitor, expect this sort of thing to accelerate.
According to some antivirus studies - and I'm not proclaiming them necessarily correct or anything (there are lots of flamewars on Usenet about this) - NAV is marginally better at detecting viruses than AVG or most of the other free products. In other words, where AVG or Avast might detect 97-98% of viruses, Norton and McAfee are likely to hit even higher percentages.
For home users who don't get tons of viruses, this is not really a problem. I've used the free versions of AVG and Avast on my Windows side for several years with no problems. And I recommend AVG and Avast to all my home clients over Norton for exactly the reasons NAV is criticized.
However, depending on the corporation size and amount of infected emails they get, this could be a factor for corporations in deciding whether to use Norton, or McAfee or another AV product over AVG.
Of course, NAV's inefficiency could also be a factor on the negative side given that a lot of corporations desktop machines are not fast, state-of-the-art machines, so the impact on productivity could offset the perceived additional security offered by NAV.
I mean, C'MON! You mean to tell me that NAV has any sort of signature that matches some malware? (I'm not talking about their signature database! Anybody writing malware detecters should have enough brains to be able to handled a competitor's signature database! Get serious!)
This comes RIGHT AFTER MICROSOFT ANNOUNCES THEIR NEW SECURITY PACKAGE DUE THIS SUMMER?
Jesus Baron Von Christ! If this isn't obviously anticompetitive behavior on the part of Gates, I don't know what is!
Now everybody will tell me, "How can this be? Microsoft will be the one blamed, not Norton!"
Oh, contraire, mon frere! How many end users will know WHY their Norton stopped working? Unless they call in a techie to TELL THEM, they won't know. They'll just assume Norton sucks (which it does, but for other reasons) and dump it - just in time to hear about Microsoft's new AV suite via Update or some other means.
This is straight fucking monopoly behavior. Good luck trying to get the Bush administration to even look at it!
"But they do have a moral imperative and a duty not to promote dictatorship."
Given the US support for dictatorships, monarchies and repressive regimes around the world for the last century - not to mention a repressive regime just installed in Iraq - this is hypocritical in the extreme.
The Net companies are in China to make money. Are they supposed to tell the Chinese government to fuck off if they asked to comply with the laws of that country? Are they supposed to write off millions, scores of millions, or hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in that country if the result of such a refusal is a yanking of their license to operate in that country?
"Morality" has nothing to do with it. Obviously any employee on the spot for such a situation has to make a personal decision as to whether he will comply with either the government's or management's request. That has nothing to do with the overall question of whether the company should accede to such requests.
At best, the only legitimate question is whether a company should decide to invest in such a country, given the possibility that some such situation could arise. And given that ANY company involved in China could face a similar situation, it's disingenuous to single out the Net companies.
I smell a rat. I smell an attempt to use the Net companies as a means of smearing China for the administration's own demonization purposes, irregardless of whatever China is responsible for.
I don't think I've ever had a client with LESS than 20 pieces of spyware.
I fully believe that almost every user not using antispyware products = and using IE on a regular basis - has at LEAST that many pieces of spyware.
The latest total bitch to get rid of is SpyStrike. You have to use a custom removal tool AND at least two anti-trojan (not anti-spyware, although you need those, too) to get rid of it.
I'm getting to the point where it might be better just to tell clients to wipe the machine, reinstall the OS and install the antispyware stuff rather than try to clean it. It's just not worth the hours to the client (although it is to me, since I get paid for this - but even then it's hard to justify billing for four to eight hours or even more to get rid of something you can get rid off in less time by reinstalling.) I mean, just to run two to four antispyware and antitrojan scans takes two to three hours if the machine is slow and there are a lot of files to scan. Then you have to dig out and get rid of the ones the scans didn't detect - which is why you have to use at least two or three utilities of each type. It's pathetic. It's so easy to own Windows it's just pathetic.
At least, they did up until a couple years ago when the company involved got caught selling wiretap into to drug dealers.
The company is run by Israelis, gets financial assistance from the Israeli government - and also sells mass transit video surveillance systems - including the one in the London Underground - which gives them unrestricted access to the video records and the Underground.
Convenient.
Israel has figured out how to spy on everybody - be the country with the companies manufacturing the hardware and software every other country uses to spy on each other. Sheer genius.
It's no wonder that master Israeli spy Raefi Eitan was involved in the DoJ theft of the PROMIS database mining software from the INSLAW corporation. The DoJ gsve it to the NSA, who "modified" it. Later, a copy supposedly ended up in the hands of - wait for it - Osama bin Laden.
There is no crime of "intent" - only crimes of action. Anything else is "lurking with intent to loom."
There is no "crime" of terrorism - only crimes of which terrorist acts are composed.
You're actually agreeing with me. What I said is that you don't punish someone for an OPINION, you punish him committing the crime, and you punish him more for INTENDING to commit the CRIME - not his REASON for intending to commit the crime. In other words, the distinction is between commiting a crime unintentionally and doing so intentionally.
WHY he committed the crime is not relevant to his punishment. To make it so makes it a "thought crime" which is, as usual, a slippery slope in which anybody who is in power can define virtually anything as a crime by speculating that it "might" lead to an actual criminal act.
This covers more ground about the background to this and makes it clear that factions of the Danish government (we're not talking about all Danes here) and supporters of neocon fanatics like Daniel Pipes are to blame for this provocation.
That's not the issue - the issue is whether you should get more time for intentionally killing someone because of your OPINION rather than the mere fact that it was intentional.
Doing so means punishing someone for an opinion, not an intention.
The issue is that the Danish newspaper culture editor who commissioned the drawings is in fact a devotee of Daniel Pipes, the rabidly anti-Muslim Zionist. The cartoons were commissioned specifically as a psyop to generate trouble.
Many Muslims, including "moderates", are upset because the cartoons demonstrated that the West is indeed against their entire culture and religion. They were just one more example of the neocon and Zionist determination to dominate and suppress the entire Middle East.
In fact, the Queen of Denmark issued a statement some time back explicitly stating that "we need to show our opposition to Islam."
Three years ago, the exact same paper REJECTED images of Jesus that the editor at the time claimed were offensive. And now that Iran has suggested running cartoons of the Holocaust, the current editor first said he would run them - and has now been overruled by the paper, which said yesterday they would NOT run them.
Double standards, anyone?
Meanwhile, Rice is using the opportunity to attack Syria and Iran as part of the neocon buildup to attacking Iran for the phoney "nuclear crisis" which doesn't exist and would be irrelevant to the US if it did.
The suckers in the US and elsewhere are being lead like lemmings right down the garden path all over again, just like Iraq.
Only this time the war will be much more serious and more destabilizing to the entire Middle East. It will have serious consequences on the US economy, kill tens of thousands of US troops rather than a "mere" two thousand, hundreds of thousands of civilians, and unite the Muslim world - and perhaps others - against the US. The sole beneficiary of an attack on Iran will, as usual, be Israel. Once again, Israel will have suckered the US population in fighting its conflicts for it. The other beneficiaries will be the neocon cronies lining their pockets with war profits from a war which will ultimately cost the US probably a trillion dollars more than even the war in Iraq.
Morons.
The fact that Muslims can be suckered into making fools of themselves should not blind us to the way in which we are being suckered into making fools of ourselves.
I doubt that's true now. I read an article about all the stuff the Corrs drag around. You'd have to know a dozen different highly customized digital sound and lighting systems to keep up. Obviously the roadies get to know the gear since they use it a hundred times a year, but somebody new coming in from the outside would have a long learning curve.
And then there's the problem of making it work in a hundred different venues with different acoustics, electrical systems, architecture. Must be a nightmare.
I noticed at the Corrs show at the Warfield here in San Francisco back in August, 2004, that between their opening act and their appearance, their techs went over every single thing on the stage with their measuring instruments - checked out every mike, every speaker, every musical instrument - even Sharon's violin. Very professional operation.
That just happened, IIRC. I think it was Spielberg over in Europe for one of the film festivals. The movie review samples they were distributing failed to work on the reviewers' machines because of the DRM. They had to order a whole new batch without the DRM.
Many bands are pissed off that their fans can't play their music on their iPods or whatever. A couple of them have stood up to their labels and said, "No DRM on our stuff!"
Actually bands have a tremendous amount of high-tech crap they drag around with them in their semis. But that stuff is set up by techs who work with it daily and know every bit by heart. And probably none of it is comprehensible to the average PC tech support guy.
I once read an article about all the electronic crap the Corrs drag around. It sounded like they had a dozen different systems: sound, lighting, mixing, computers, all sorts of stuff. They probably needed a semi to carry it.
I think one valid point is that if you are the geek a celebrity calls for help, and you play your cards right, it could lead to much more interesting and higher paying work.
Hanging out with celebrities is potentially much more valuable than hanging out with the Mom-and=Pop store down the street that just needs their DSL modem rebooted.
Why do you think Adnan Koshoggi always kept celebrities and babes hanging around? Because it made business people want to do business with him, that's why. He made hundreds of millions of dollars off that celebrity crap. He's no dummy.
The one time a client of mine called in Geek Squad, they turned out to be wrong. Dude said the NIC card was bad. I doubted it mightily - too fucking convenient that it dies in the middle of a Linksys router install. Turned out reinstalling Windows XP solved the problem - typically Windows had hosed itself all on its own after (or perhaps the uninstall of McAfee's AV and firewall did it, most likely). Nothing wrong with the NIC card at all. My client was not happy with Geek Squad and only a little more happy with me that I didn't catch them screwing up earlier.
It's worse than that. He was recently at some "prayer conference" where he got to pray with a bunch of neocons and corrupt Republicans. Absolutely disgusting.
What he probably didn't tell us was that Andrea Corr was there, too. Andrea and Bono are close friends.
If true, THAT'S why it was cool. Who cares about Bono unless you're gay? Andrea is another story. She is definitely worth salivating over - and celebrity has little to do with it.
Andrea just learned to do email a few months ago. She admitted it during an interview, whereupon sister Caroline told her, "Don't tell people that!"
I could have been the one to teach her! Unfortunately, the only result would have been that she would have been able to email her much younger boyfriend, Shaun Evans, more easily.
Plus, they seriously need to comprehend the possibilities of digital downloads, since their manager, John Huges, is an old music war horse who apparently thinks all downloads are piracy. Given their lack of penetration in the US market, they need help understanding the Net.
Not relevant to the point, however, which was about Craigslist, not the Guardian. Shooting the messenger is not relevant.
I only read the thing during my laundry, anyway, and then mostly to find out what's going on in town and what movies are playing. Occasionally they do publish an interesting main article as well. OTOH, I only use Craiglist for posting ads for my tech support service and occasionally browsing the computer gigs, job ads, and things for sale. This is hardly comparable to an actual newspaper with actual written articles. If this is what Craig refers to as "community building", well, fine. It didn't impress the Guardian critic and it doesn't impress me.
Slashdot Mirror
This has nothing to do with Microsoft antispyware being a beta product.
Microsoft antispyware used to be a functioning antispyware product put out by Giant. MS bought it and modified it - so as far as being beta, how much modification did they need to do? Change the logos? Add some additional features? Redo the automatic update to use their servers? So why does this impact the signature analysis?
This was a signature database update - not a program update. They deliberately put a bad signature in to damage Norton = it's that fucking simple.
And if any of these business had any brains to begin with, they'd realize that it is fully possible to migrate away from ANY APPLICATION - as long as you have a PLAN to migrate TO something.
The fact is you WILL migrate away from EVERYTHING you're currently using sooner or later. The difference is whether you PLAN to do it and when.
The problem is most management buys something, then forgets about it until it's a problem.
There is no IT planning in ANY corporation - it's all politics and salesmanship from vendors. Have the vendor get you a blowjob or even just a nice lunch and he gets a two million dollar contract that will end up costing your company five million over five years. The boss wants less downtime? Run out and buy a "system management package" for five million.
That's how it's done. Most of these morons are so out of date with the technology it isn't funny. And they NEVER understood any principles of corporate IT infrastructure design because they came up through the ranks of programmer to systems analyst to team leader to IT head - or they came in directly as IT head from some MBA program.
NONE of them can make a rational decision to save their lives. And if they could, they'd be overruled by senior management.
It has NOTHING to do with the technical merits of OSS vs proprietary or the cost of conversion or lack of applications or any of that red herring crap.
Fuck that!
Give me a medium all-meat topping pizza! Five meat toppings - none of the vegetarian shit for me!
And NO anchovies! NO ANCHOVIES! You put anchovies on that thing and you're in big trouble, dude!
I just had a client a week or so ago whose spyware disabled Norton AV (they had dumped their Norton firewall previously because it "interfered with their network" - but that was likely end user error.) I had to first defeat the spyware, then download the Norton removal utility to strip Norton out of the system, so I could reinstall it. I also installed the Microsoft antispyware beta.
Now I've had to call them and tell them to disable the automatic update of the Microsoft antispyware for a week or so until MS fixes this problem. They've got Spybot and SpywareBlaster as well, so they should be okay.
Fortunately I've only recently standardized on installing the Microsoft antispyware for my clients, so I don't have too many to call who also run Norton.
I've seen McAfee at work have a problem shutting down when Windows XP shuts down.
Never had a problem at home with Avast shutting down when XP shuts down.
This isn't related to the resource consumption issue, but it does indicate that some of these supposedly more powerful products are TOO tightly integrated into the OS or that the companies making them can't keep up with constant Windows automatic updates or the more complicated security policy settings one sees in corporate environments.
One hopes that the Windows AV suite will at least be kept up to date whenever new service packs or updates come out. Unfortunately for the AV vendors, I suspect Microsoft will be slow in letting THEM now when things need to be changed. Witness SP2 which caused significant problems for AV vendors. Now that Microsoft is their competitor, expect this sort of thing to accelerate.
I would add only one caveat to this.
According to some antivirus studies - and I'm not proclaiming them necessarily correct or anything (there are lots of flamewars on Usenet about this) - NAV is marginally better at detecting viruses than AVG or most of the other free products. In other words, where AVG or Avast might detect 97-98% of viruses, Norton and McAfee are likely to hit even higher percentages.
For home users who don't get tons of viruses, this is not really a problem. I've used the free versions of AVG and Avast on my Windows side for several years with no problems. And I recommend AVG and Avast to all my home clients over Norton for exactly the reasons NAV is criticized.
However, depending on the corporation size and amount of infected emails they get, this could be a factor for corporations in deciding whether to use Norton, or McAfee or another AV product over AVG.
Of course, NAV's inefficiency could also be a factor on the negative side given that a lot of corporations desktop machines are not fast, state-of-the-art machines, so the impact on productivity could offset the perceived additional security offered by NAV.
I mean, C'MON! You mean to tell me that NAV has any sort of signature that matches some malware? (I'm not talking about their signature database! Anybody writing malware detecters should have enough brains to be able to handled a competitor's signature database! Get serious!)
This comes RIGHT AFTER MICROSOFT ANNOUNCES THEIR NEW SECURITY PACKAGE DUE THIS SUMMER?
Jesus Baron Von Christ! If this isn't obviously anticompetitive behavior on the part of Gates, I don't know what is!
Now everybody will tell me, "How can this be? Microsoft will be the one blamed, not Norton!"
Oh, contraire, mon frere! How many end users will know WHY their Norton stopped working? Unless they call in a techie to TELL THEM, they won't know. They'll just assume Norton sucks (which it does, but for other reasons) and dump it - just in time to hear about Microsoft's new AV suite via Update or some other means.
This is straight fucking monopoly behavior. Good luck trying to get the Bush administration to even look at it!
"But they do have a moral imperative and a duty not to promote dictatorship."
Given the US support for dictatorships, monarchies and repressive regimes around the world for the last century - not to mention a repressive regime just installed in Iraq - this is hypocritical in the extreme.
The Net companies are in China to make money. Are they supposed to tell the Chinese government to fuck off if they asked to comply with the laws of that country? Are they supposed to write off millions, scores of millions, or hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in that country if the result of such a refusal is a yanking of their license to operate in that country?
"Morality" has nothing to do with it. Obviously any employee on the spot for such a situation has to make a personal decision as to whether he will comply with either the government's or management's request. That has nothing to do with the overall question of whether the company should accede to such requests.
At best, the only legitimate question is whether a company should decide to invest in such a country, given the possibility that some such situation could arise. And given that ANY company involved in China could face a similar situation, it's disingenuous to single out the Net companies.
I smell a rat. I smell an attempt to use the Net companies as a means of smearing China for the administration's own demonization purposes, irregardless of whatever China is responsible for.
I don't think I've ever had a client with LESS than 20 pieces of spyware.
I fully believe that almost every user not using antispyware products = and using IE on a regular basis - has at LEAST that many pieces of spyware.
The latest total bitch to get rid of is SpyStrike. You have to use a custom removal tool AND at least two anti-trojan (not anti-spyware, although you need those, too) to get rid of it.
I'm getting to the point where it might be better just to tell clients to wipe the machine, reinstall the OS and install the antispyware stuff rather than try to clean it. It's just not worth the hours to the client (although it is to me, since I get paid for this - but even then it's hard to justify billing for four to eight hours or even more to get rid of something you can get rid off in less time by reinstalling.) I mean, just to run two to four antispyware and antitrojan scans takes two to three hours if the machine is slow and there are a lot of files to scan. Then you have to dig out and get rid of the ones the scans didn't detect - which is why you have to use at least two or three utilities of each type. It's pathetic. It's so easy to own Windows it's just pathetic.
At least, they did up until a couple years ago when the company involved got caught selling wiretap into to drug dealers.
The company is run by Israelis, gets financial assistance from the Israeli government - and also sells mass transit video surveillance systems - including the one in the London Underground - which gives them unrestricted access to the video records and the Underground.
Convenient.
Israel has figured out how to spy on everybody - be the country with the companies manufacturing the hardware and software every other country uses to spy on each other. Sheer genius.
It's no wonder that master Israeli spy Raefi Eitan was involved in the DoJ theft of the PROMIS database mining software from the INSLAW corporation. The DoJ gsve it to the NSA, who "modified" it. Later, a copy supposedly ended up in the hands of - wait for it - Osama bin Laden.
Gee, I wonder how that happened...
There is no crime of "intent" - only crimes of action. Anything else is "lurking with intent to loom."
There is no "crime" of terrorism - only crimes of which terrorist acts are composed.
You're actually agreeing with me. What I said is that you don't punish someone for an OPINION, you punish him committing the crime, and you punish him more for INTENDING to commit the CRIME - not his REASON for intending to commit the crime. In other words, the distinction is between commiting a crime unintentionally and doing so intentionally.
WHY he committed the crime is not relevant to his punishment. To make it so makes it a "thought crime" which is, as usual, a slippery slope in which anybody who is in power can define virtually anything as a crime by speculating that it "might" lead to an actual criminal act.
Read this:0 04/
Denmark and Jyllands-Posten: The background to a provocation
http://www.asiantribune.com/show_article.php?id=3
This covers more ground about the background to this and makes it clear that factions of the Danish government (we're not talking about all Danes here) and supporters of neocon fanatics like Daniel Pipes are to blame for this provocation.
that this government - and every government - couldn't care less about "terrorists". What they care about is OPPOSITION - by ANYBODY.
/.
Oops, anyone with a brain - oh, wait, this is
Never mind.
That's not the issue - the issue is whether you should get more time for intentionally killing someone because of your OPINION rather than the mere fact that it was intentional.
Doing so means punishing someone for an opinion, not an intention.
Big difference, actually.
Idiotic though ALL religions are.
The issue is that the Danish newspaper culture editor who commissioned the drawings is in fact a devotee of Daniel Pipes, the rabidly anti-Muslim Zionist. The cartoons were commissioned specifically as a psyop to generate trouble.
Many Muslims, including "moderates", are upset because the cartoons demonstrated that the West is indeed against their entire culture and religion. They were just one more example of the neocon and Zionist determination to dominate and suppress the entire Middle East.
In fact, the Queen of Denmark issued a statement some time back explicitly stating that "we need to show our opposition to Islam."
Three years ago, the exact same paper REJECTED images of Jesus that the editor at the time claimed were offensive. And now that Iran has suggested running cartoons of the Holocaust, the current editor first said he would run them - and has now been overruled by the paper, which said yesterday they would NOT run them.
Double standards, anyone?
Meanwhile, Rice is using the opportunity to attack Syria and Iran as part of the neocon buildup to attacking Iran for the phoney "nuclear crisis" which doesn't exist and would be irrelevant to the US if it did.
The suckers in the US and elsewhere are being lead like lemmings right down the garden path all over again, just like Iraq.
Only this time the war will be much more serious and more destabilizing to the entire Middle East. It will have serious consequences on the US economy, kill tens of thousands of US troops rather than a "mere" two thousand, hundreds of thousands of civilians, and unite the Muslim world - and perhaps others - against the US. The sole beneficiary of an attack on Iran will, as usual, be Israel. Once again, Israel will have suckered the US population in fighting its conflicts for it. The other beneficiaries will be the neocon cronies lining their pockets with war profits from a war which will ultimately cost the US probably a trillion dollars more than even the war in Iraq.
Morons.
The fact that Muslims can be suckered into making fools of themselves should not blind us to the way in which we are being suckered into making fools of ourselves.
Well, are you?
You sounded like one.
I doubt that's true now. I read an article about all the stuff the Corrs drag around. You'd have to know a dozen different highly customized digital sound and lighting systems to keep up. Obviously the roadies get to know the gear since they use it a hundred times a year, but somebody new coming in from the outside would have a long learning curve.
And then there's the problem of making it work in a hundred different venues with different acoustics, electrical systems, architecture. Must be a nightmare.
I noticed at the Corrs show at the Warfield here in San Francisco back in August, 2004, that between their opening act and their appearance, their techs went over every single thing on the stage with their measuring instruments - checked out every mike, every speaker, every musical instrument - even Sharon's violin. Very professional operation.
That just happened, IIRC. I think it was Spielberg over in Europe for one of the film festivals. The movie review samples they were distributing failed to work on the reviewers' machines because of the DRM. They had to order a whole new batch without the DRM.
Many bands are pissed off that their fans can't play their music on their iPods or whatever. A couple of them have stood up to their labels and said, "No DRM on our stuff!"
Actually bands have a tremendous amount of high-tech crap they drag around with them in their semis. But that stuff is set up by techs who work with it daily and know every bit by heart. And probably none of it is comprehensible to the average PC tech support guy.
I once read an article about all the electronic crap the Corrs drag around. It sounded like they had a dozen different systems: sound, lighting, mixing, computers, all sorts of stuff. They probably needed a semi to carry it.
I think one valid point is that if you are the geek a celebrity calls for help, and you play your cards right, it could lead to much more interesting and higher paying work.
Hanging out with celebrities is potentially much more valuable than hanging out with the Mom-and=Pop store down the street that just needs their DSL modem rebooted.
Why do you think Adnan Koshoggi always kept celebrities and babes hanging around? Because it made business people want to do business with him, that's why. He made hundreds of millions of dollars off that celebrity crap. He's no dummy.
The one time a client of mine called in Geek Squad, they turned out to be wrong. Dude said the NIC card was bad. I doubted it mightily - too fucking convenient that it dies in the middle of a Linksys router install. Turned out reinstalling Windows XP solved the problem - typically Windows had hosed itself all on its own after (or perhaps the uninstall of McAfee's AV and firewall did it, most likely). Nothing wrong with the NIC card at all. My client was not happy with Geek Squad and only a little more happy with me that I didn't catch them screwing up earlier.
It's worse than that. He was recently at some "prayer conference" where he got to pray with a bunch of neocons and corrupt Republicans. Absolutely disgusting.
What he probably didn't tell us was that Andrea Corr was there, too. Andrea and Bono are close friends.
If true, THAT'S why it was cool. Who cares about Bono unless you're gay? Andrea is another story. She is definitely worth salivating over - and celebrity has little to do with it.
Andrea just learned to do email a few months ago. She admitted it during an interview, whereupon sister Caroline told her, "Don't tell people that!"
I could have been the one to teach her! Unfortunately, the only result would have been that she would have been able to email her much younger boyfriend, Shaun Evans, more easily.
Plus, they seriously need to comprehend the possibilities of digital downloads, since their manager, John Huges, is an old music war horse who apparently thinks all downloads are piracy. Given their lack of penetration in the US market, they need help understanding the Net.
I agree, the new Guardian layout sucks.
Not relevant to the point, however, which was about Craigslist, not the Guardian. Shooting the messenger is not relevant.
I only read the thing during my laundry, anyway, and then mostly to find out what's going on in town and what movies are playing. Occasionally they do publish an interesting main article as well. OTOH, I only use Craiglist for posting ads for my tech support service and occasionally browsing the computer gigs, job ads, and things for sale. This is hardly comparable to an actual newspaper with actual written articles. If this is what Craig refers to as "community building", well, fine. It didn't impress the Guardian critic and it doesn't impress me.