So as fortune would have it, after grabbing a shot of FixMyDead PC on the corner, I come home to my daughter's HP desktop under vicious viral attack.We've got one of those panicky wallpapers saying we're hosed, a system shutdown, changed partition... really gnarly.
A dweeb would push the panic button (handily supplied) and dig in even deeper, like Uncle Sam would have done (until the recent IQ boost anyway).
What to do?
Given AVG was blocked and subsequent boots don't even materialize the desktop, I went for a bootable XP on CD, but now have the infernal license to enter, who knows what green box goes with what CD, or where those green boxes even are right now (did some sweaty work in the garage, Hercules in the stables...).
I'm glad Rose is coming over. They'll go to the park.
Tara is already making up lines like "all those hours of Spore, never downloaded Hotel California to my iPod, spent a buck 99!" i.e. psychologically disconnecting, good bye HP Pavilion.
I notice president Obama is appointing a new CyberCzar to counter all the malicious malware out there, presumably aimed at the military but of course that means Joe Sixpack with a flag tattoo. Banning Windows outright, because of its lack of file permissions (easy to just thwack a DLL, get away with murder) would seem too Draconian, kinda fun to fight spam artists, wit against wit.
On the other hand, if you're letting government contracts, you have a right to insist on open source secure solutions, no hanky panky, no closed doors. I could see various branches going Linux-only, recall NSA's doing a distro not so long ago. Makes sense.
Quick switching to local politics (we're watching The Simpsons now, damn the dead PC), I'm making headway explaining our strategy. It's DM vs. CM where DM stands for Digital Mathematics (lots of computer stuff) and CM stands for Continuous Mathematics (that calculus snake oil, makes your hair grow back).
Keiko and I sorted through some confusions, like I said a placid morning. I'm not going to let this Microsoft stuff destroy my quality of life, Tara's either.
Anyway, Microsoft had no way of knowing that plans to charge cash cow prices for a state of the art OS would be subverted by brave engineers, was doing its best to play within the rules, work as a profiteer. I'm not a Microsoft basher, use WinXP on several desktops, just suggested to NM she try going with Win7. Windows hosts many open source languages and projects no problemo, CPython, IronPython and Google Python (through the browser).
Postscript: Yes, next week I'll take Tara's box to the experts at FixMyDeadPC why not. I need to get back to marketing CSN, geeking out, other heroics.
