Agreed. And that's just the immediate cost. When things like this happen, stores/businesses lose loyal customers to competitors and it takes months to recover.
And what about the IT costs? I guarantee you, there is now an effort underway in all major businesses to (1) test new anti-virus patches before rolling them out, (2) re-review all anti-virus software being used, (3) developing and testing mitigation plans for another failure. All of this is VERY expensive.
Here's another example: Airlines shut down because of a volcano. You think when the volcano stops that their business is going to go back to the previous levels? Nope. Even for something like airlines where people often don't have a choice, it will take quite some time to recover. 9/11 is another example of this; it took years for airlines to get back to pre-9/11 levels, although there were other economic factors that led to the decline in '01.

Many years ago I finally got broadband via cable (it wasn't COX.)
The Usenet service they included was sub-contracted from another company, and to keep things simple, all customers used the same id & pass to access the Usenet servers.
I don't remember what the ID was, but the pass was what I consider to be the most ultimate inside joke ever:
The pass was: abpe4me

She absolutely needs psych help; a LOT of paranoia here, not just re. the government planting the chip, but thinking her coworkers were torturing her.
My wife use to work at a university insect ID lab and got a LOT of "samples" (ie. fuzz, lint, or just an empty bottle) from people with delusional parasitosis. This woman has the same thing, only a little more high-tech.

Not that I'm a fan of Bing.... just sayin' they demo'd this a couple of months ago. I'll try to find a link.

Yup.... it's hard to collect your stalkee's trash virtually.

Unfortunately it wouldn't be anything that cool... it would be more like ComcastNewtons, DisneyNewtons, or ExxonNewtons.

There's a couple of problems with any validation of general relativity short distance scales. Pretty much any measurement you take would fall within the range of experimental error due to things like Brownian motion and quantum effects of working at such a small scale. ...

If DDT were still in use, the Bald Eagle would be extinct, along with several other birds.


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Very true. I am a telephony engineer, specializing in call centers.
I was at VoiceCon, a multi-vendor show, in SF in December; it was a joke. There were very few vendors there and attendance was very low despite /giving/ away passes.
(Note: the VoiceCon in Orlando is still pretty good though.)
Avaya, Cisco, Genesys (which are the big vendors I mostly work with) each have their own show. Cisco doesn't even show up at VoiceCon shows anymore.
SuperComm is a bit different from the world I work in but the point is still the same: Big vendors have their own shows so they can control the message.


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Not mentioned in summary: this is only verizon wireless.
http://status.4chan.org/


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moot is not known for that kind of crap.
It has also been confirmed by many vzw customers.


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And fast lane changes can cause plenty of accidents too. The only time I've been rear-ended was when I had to stop short, and the car behind me didn't even slow down, just swerved over to the next lane barely missing me, which gave NO time for the car behind him to see that traffic had stopped.



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Disaster recovery centers are mostly for mainframes and other uber-mission critical functions. Most of our servers/software are running in multiple redundant data centers. When I left the bank, Wachovia had four major data centers.
But that's not the point. You would never use disaster recovery centers or redundant servers as a make-shift lab. If there was a problem on the production box and the redundant server wasn't available, you'd definitely be in deep doo doo.

My original point is if you have a production environment with 20 physical sites all connected a certain way, then you can't really FULLY test your changes in the lab unless your lab has the same number of sites all wired the same way, which is ridiculous. It would literally cost 50 mil.

I'm a call-center telephony engineer. Kinda the same thing as network engineer in that you're routing calls instead of packets.
Back around '01, I was working for First Union (which later became Wachovia). They had this massive corporate push for anyone and everyone in IT to roll out a standardized Software Configuration Management, and of course we were included. The big problem was the lab. The corporate standard was to test changes in a lab environment and then move to production (duh).
For a telephony environment, we had a pretty good lab that could duplicate most of our production scenarios, but not all. Another problem was there were a LOT of people with their fingers in the lab since so many groups were involved: eg. The IVR team is in there because you have to have IVRs in the system. Same with call routing, call recording, desktop software, Q&A, etc.etc.
So the lab was in a constant state of flux with multiple products, multiple teams, and different software cycles and endless testing always occurring. We made it work by testing the stuff we weren't sure about in the lab, only doing changes in prod after hours, and having really good testing and back-out plans.
So when the corporate overlords started telling use we couldn't make any changes to production without running everything through the lab first, we basically laughed and told them we'd need around 500 million for the lab and dedicated resources to run it. I ended up telling them that to duplicate the production environment, we'd need another bank as our "test bank", and we could test changes on the test bank and then put them in the production bank.

As with so many things in that IT department, it went from being a priority to fading away when something else became a priority.