How do they get any work done 233

Snip...

As you and everybody but the fscking pointyhairs realize, they don't.

I watched MS-Blaster clobber EVERY SINGLE Dozetoy on our corporate site a few years ago; it basically shut us down for days. Lost productivity just in engineering and customer services alone probably ran into the millions of dollars. Plus, remediation costs (likely in the same ballpark).

I was never able to find out anything about those costs, to prepare white paper material on replacing selected critical *engineering* PCs with some FOSS alternatives. That speaks volumes: it was probably enough to justify giving the CIO-CTO walking papers, if it was widely known.

Did the PHBs learn anything? Hell no. They were still going for breakfast every morning as site PCs wasted this time you describe when I left those halls of bedlam. Not to mention the daily reboots, license snafus, driver incompatibilities, copyright police, BSA audits, etc., ad nauseum.

I have decided nothing's going to change until every penny of this effort fixing M$ malware starts coming out of Monkey Boy's hide. Meanwhile, this is the future for anybody who insists on PAYING for M$ abuse:

Prosecutors called the case the first to target profits derived from use of "botnets," large numbers of computers that hackers commandeer and marshal for various nefarious deeds. The "zombie" machines' owners are unaware that parasitic programs have been installed on them and are being controlled remotely.

Botnets are being used increasingly to overwhelm Web sites with streams of data, often by extortionists. They feed off of vulnerabilities in computers that run Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system, typically machines whose owners haven't bothered to install security patches.

I'm sure some botnet mafioso in Bulgaria is quaking in his boots now.

As I said elsewhere, Unca Bill's Trusted Computing is a load of cowpies.

More:

-- Regards, Weird (Harold Stevens) * IMPORTANT EMAIL INFO FOLLOWS * Pardon any bogus email addresses (wookie) in place for spambots. Really, it's (wyrd) at airmail, dotted with net. DO NOT SPAM IT. Kids jumping ship? Looking to hire an old-school type? Email me.