Every morning on CNN.com, there's a fresh batch of predictions about what the stock market will do today, and why. They're almost always wrong, but it's rare, and therefore doubly amusing, to get two articles that say the opposite on the same day.
The primary culprits behind the market turmoil are sky-high stock prices -- and it's only going to get worse, writes Fortune's Shawn Tully.
Futures point to higher open as bank merger hopes, lower oil outweigh more mortgage losses and forecasts of weak housing sales.
Based on the way the market's been behaving the last few weeks, I'm going to pick "meltdown".
** spectacularly wrong!! **
Completely OT:
http://www.themishmash.com/2007/11/8-telltale-sign.html
:)
** spectacularly wrong!! **
I didn’t have the heart to tell you.
i can has six more days of that ?
OT – Help! I’ve got some sort of malware that seems to have attached itself to my home computer, and is constantly creating false “critical system error” messages with the little yellow caution sign and then saying I should download some sort of anti-spyware/virus software. I can tell they’re false because there is a misspelled word in each one. It also seems to have integrated itself into Internet Explorer as there is some new taskbar that I’ve never seen before, and then up pops what looks like an internet explorer window urging me to download X but it pops up much too quickly to be IE; it has also put shortcuts on my desktop that appear to be “official” MS stuff but clearly aren’t.
I ran Webroot’s spysweeper but that didn’t take care of the problem. I then ran its virus detection software and that picked up two or three viruses that it supposedly quarantined but I’m sort of dubious (and didn’t have a chance to reboot to see if it worked). I googled what I thought was the offending .exe file but nothing came up, there also looked like there were some new .dll files created around the time this all happened in the /windows/system32 folder.
Any thoughts?
Also, it seems that the explorer.exe file has been taken over as well.
yuck.
i’d try following these steps…
also, do you have any anti-virus software on that PC ? (if not you should get some, ASAP. try Avast or AVG – they have free versions)
also, try SpyBot and AdAware
odds are, one of those things can handle this…
of course if explorer.exe is really compromised, installing these things might be, um, a challenge.
not much help, i know…
Thanks, will give those a try.
I downloaded Webroot’s anti-spyware last night.
Sounds like you’re running Vista. :)
The sad thing is I think my firewall was blocking the more malicious stuff but somehow I “allowed” explorer.exe to access the internet, and then the real trouble began.
On the upside, maybe I can convince the wife to get a new computer (or, heaven forbid, switch to a Mac).
yeah, get a mac. then talk me into it!
Jesus, the damn thing won’t even work right in Safe Mode.
ow. that sucks.
should i ask if you had backups ?
No backups, but that doesn’t bother me too much, other than it’s going to make it harder to do the tax return this year (and if you know of a way of moving music files from an iPod back to the computer, that would be useful). Hopefully when we take it in today the computer store will be able to fix it (unfortunatley we’re going to have to resort to the “Geek Squad” at BestBuy as I know of no local computer shop that might work).
if you know of a way of moving music files from an iPod back to the computer, that would be useful
there are a bunch of apps out there that can do this. i’ve never used any them, so i don’t know which is best.
good luck :)
i’m going to run a full backup today, in your honor.
hmmm… so the best option appears to be to have Geek Squad do a data backup and then have us do a clean Windows install, which supposedly will wipe everything out.
I know you’re eagerly awaiting my updates…
yeah, that’s kindof what i suspected they’d do. hopefully, the thing didn’t hurt any of your data …
Do you use a second hard drive or something else for backing up data? I’m gonna be much more careful going forward (and load up on the firewall and anti-spyware software).
Now my biggest worry is that the Geek squad people are going to steal my identity.
i do automated incremental backups to a local external drive (a NAS device) twice a week. then once a month (today) i do a full backup to an external HD that i keep at work. i use a program called Retrospect to do the backups.
i’ve never had to do a full recovery, but i’ve used it to retrieve individual files many times.
Now my biggest worry is that the Geek squad people are going to steal my identity.
yeah. i’d worry about that too, at least a little.