I paid my Bill Gates tax today. A virus drove right in thru Window's wide open barn door and set up shop on Blackbox, my Compaq desktop. This one turned the screen black and issued an alarming series of messages indicating hard drive failure, RAM failure, file system meltdown, and urged me to download a "fix" program. It turned off TaskMgr, and hide all my files.
I was able to use the Start menu's run option to start up Firefox and go out to www.BleepingComputer.com. Wonder of wonders, good old Bleeping Computer had a fix for this baby. I printed out seven pages of detailed instructions for killing this sucker off. Too bad the instructions only worked halfway.
Step 1 is to download and run a program (rkill.com) to kill the active virus out of memory. While running, this virus keeps throwing up whole bookcases of scary error messages that sit on top and make in difficult to run anything else, cause the damn error messages (all false) block your view of the screen. Rkill reported the filenames of the two programs it kills.
You ain't done yet, Rkill just zaps the virus out of memory. The sucker is still alive on disc and will load and execute next time you boot. What you should do as soon as rkill finishes, is use Windows Explorer to zap the two filenames rkill reports, clean off your disk.
Bleeping Computer's seven pages of kill instructions don't mention this. They direct you to download and run antivirus "Malwarebytes". This baby spends 2 hours scanning your disc for bad stuff, finds a few, but doesn't find the damn virus.
So reboot and the "System Fix" virus comes right back to life. Repeat the rkill run to zap it, and then use Windows Explorer to delete all the files and Regedit to zap all the keys the virus planted in the Registry. This works.
Total virus zap time, 6 hours.
Thanks Bill, so glad you gave us WindowsVirusMagnet XP.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Go Newt
Newt is getting hammered over his stand on immigration. He said that married couples who have been in the country long time, have kids, have jobs, pay taxes and keep out of trouble with the law ought not to be thrown out of the country.
I agree. These are model citizens, and we need more of them.
Plus, I cannot stand the thought of sending black uniformed SWAT teams to seize them, cuff them, drag them from their homes, throw them and their children into paddy wagons, and dump them at the border.
I agree. These are model citizens, and we need more of them.
Plus, I cannot stand the thought of sending black uniformed SWAT teams to seize them, cuff them, drag them from their homes, throw them and their children into paddy wagons, and dump them at the border.
Friday, November 25, 2011
Words of the Weasel Part 24
"Call upon the IMF to play an enhanced role." What an artful way of saying "Give us some money 'cause we are broke."
The sky is warming.
"CO2 may not warm the planet as much as thought" is the title of an article in New Scientist magazine. Groovy, I like it, maybe we can get off this economy killing war on carbon. I was going to post a link to the article but Blogger is feeling ugly this morning and won't make the link. You can get to it from Instapundit.
Of course, there are a few caveats:
"Schmittner plugged the atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations that existed during the Last Glacial Maximum into a climate model and tried to recreate the global temperature patterns. He found that he had to assume a relatively small climate sensitivity of 2.4 °C if the model was to give the best fit."
And how do we know what the CO2 levels were during the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago? There has been some work done testing bubbles of air trapped in Greenland glacier ice, but I never heard of an ice core going back 10,000 years. Best I ever heard of was a core going back 5000 years. And we are sure that a few tiny air samples are representative, and haven't changed over the millennia.
And he plugged questionable data into a computer model. Computer models are nothing special, they are just computer programs, and as such, subject to all the problems of computer programs, like bugs. Plus, when a computer model fails to give the desired answer, it gets reprogrammed until it does. You cannot trust computer models. Especially models written by someone else.
So here we have a fairly reputable magazine reporting a scientist feeding questionable data into an equally questionable computer program and thinking the result is meaningful.
GIGO, Garbage in Garbage out. Old computer business acronym.
Of course, there are a few caveats:
"Schmittner plugged the atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations that existed during the Last Glacial Maximum into a climate model and tried to recreate the global temperature patterns. He found that he had to assume a relatively small climate sensitivity of 2.4 °C if the model was to give the best fit."
And how do we know what the CO2 levels were during the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago? There has been some work done testing bubbles of air trapped in Greenland glacier ice, but I never heard of an ice core going back 10,000 years. Best I ever heard of was a core going back 5000 years. And we are sure that a few tiny air samples are representative, and haven't changed over the millennia.
And he plugged questionable data into a computer model. Computer models are nothing special, they are just computer programs, and as such, subject to all the problems of computer programs, like bugs. Plus, when a computer model fails to give the desired answer, it gets reprogrammed until it does. You cannot trust computer models. Especially models written by someone else.
So here we have a fairly reputable magazine reporting a scientist feeding questionable data into an equally questionable computer program and thinking the result is meaningful.
GIGO, Garbage in Garbage out. Old computer business acronym.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Double Negative again
According to a review in today's WSJ, the double negative was proscribed by Bishop Lowth (never heard of him before) in 1762 in a short book " Short Introduction to English Grammar". I mention this tidbit because I posted about double negatives a couple of months ago and was intrigued to find a time and a book that first put the hex on them.
It's snowing for Thanksgiving
We got 4 inches last night and it's still coming down. It's warm, above freezing, so it isn't accumulating much more. Town plow went by at o'dark thirty, Ken King's boys did my driveway by 9:30.
Dexia Bank failure will cost France it's AAA rating?
Dexia, a big European bank based in Belgium and France failed a couple of weeks ago. Presumably (the newsies didn't say) Dexia ran out of money to pay bills and depositors and no one would lend to it any more 'cause everyone thought they were broke. At least that's what happened to Lehman Bros, and Merrill Lynch, and some other late lamented Wall St brokerages.
Belgium and France were going to bailout Dexia, but now it seems that isn't gonna work. An internet post speculated that Dexia's failure and non-bailout, might be enough to knock France's bond rating down from AAA.
What the post did not say was what the bailout plan was. Dexia, of course, wants the Belgian and French governments to just give them money (grants or loans, they will take anything) to continue in business, and avoid laying everyone off. I have no idea how much money this might need, but it could be big. On this side of the pond, AIG sucked up $140 billion.
What would be cheaper, is to pay off just the depositors, and let the bond holders, the stock holders, and the idiots that lent to Dexia go whistle for their money. This would impose some economic discipline, and put the idiots who drove Dexia over the cliff out of work. Europeans need to learn that lending money is risky, it is not a guaranteed never-loose-a penny sinecure. The hard part of banking is predicting if the borrower will be able to pay off the loan. Predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future.
Belgium and France were going to bailout Dexia, but now it seems that isn't gonna work. An internet post speculated that Dexia's failure and non-bailout, might be enough to knock France's bond rating down from AAA.
What the post did not say was what the bailout plan was. Dexia, of course, wants the Belgian and French governments to just give them money (grants or loans, they will take anything) to continue in business, and avoid laying everyone off. I have no idea how much money this might need, but it could be big. On this side of the pond, AIG sucked up $140 billion.
What would be cheaper, is to pay off just the depositors, and let the bond holders, the stock holders, and the idiots that lent to Dexia go whistle for their money. This would impose some economic discipline, and put the idiots who drove Dexia over the cliff out of work. Europeans need to learn that lending money is risky, it is not a guaranteed never-loose-a penny sinecure. The hard part of banking is predicting if the borrower will be able to pay off the loan. Predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future.
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