rant ranT raNT rANT RANT RANT!

OK, so I'm a Macintosh user, and generally free from viruses... So why did I spend four hours today cleaning and patching computers? Well it would seem that PC's catch viruses like Britney changes clothes. Yes, I know this is probably a few days late, the virus news was sooo last week. Well the campus network is still having problems through a weird confluence of events: Sobig, Blaster, Namchi (or whatever the hell it is called), dormant computers, new students bringing in infected computers, students who don't correctly patch them, students who don't think any of this applies to them, Microsoft who won't release a Blaster patch for Windows Server 2003 Beta, yada, yada, yada. It all adds up to a campus net that is constantly under siege, overworked IT staff who are trying to fight the good fight, and students who are unhappy when we unplug the residence halls from the net because we have to teach classes on a crippled network.

Adding to all of that was some weird power problems yesterday. It would seem that one phase of our three phase power went down sometime last night, causing several PC's on campus to protect their surge suppressors by blowing their power supplies. AAAugh.

So, what do we do? First off, find the cretins who wrote the virii and figure out the most Sisyphean punishment imaginable. Off the top of my head is making them manually fix EACH and EVERY computer they infected. One monitor, one keyboard, one mouse, and the hundreds of thousands of infected computers. No batch files, no network fixes, just them and the box. And while they are at it, they have to erase all Temporary Internet Files, defrag the hard drives, and install a Spam filter. Better yet, they have to erase the hard drive and install Linux. And, for ever after that, they should only be allowed to access the Net using a 486 running Windows 3.1 and a 24k modem using AOL.

Oh, and don't get me started on Spammers. The punishment they would get would be much worse.