Yep, that’s right.  It’s the last Friday in July making it one of the bestest holidays in the whole wide year!  It’s System Administrator Appreciation Day or Sysadmin Day for short.

You know, those folks who sit in the dungeon basement and keep all of your office computers running smoothly in spite of the great big world of hackers and viruses out there.  Those people who you probably barely even acknowledge the existence of, except for when anything goes wrong.  Well here’s your chance to show them that you really do care about all of the hard work that they do behind the scenes.  Thank a geek today.

Happy Independence Day you lucky Americans you!  Enjoy your 4th of July!  Have a BBQ.  Blow something up!  Live the American holiday dream.

In spite of all sorts of massive blunders by McAfee, people still use them for antivirus and such.  Goodness only knows why.  But in the spirit of past holiday celebrations, McAfee is making things fun all over again for Earth Day this year.  Perhaps it’s a brilliant plot to save the planet by reducing our use of electricity.  Or maybe they just didn’t test their virus definition update before pushing it out to the world at large.  They have been known to do that.

Whatever the reason, if you use McAfee VirusScan Enterprise, and you were unfortunate to “update” to DAT 5958, chances are you’re no longer a McAfee customer.  Why?  Because this particular virus definition update includes a false positive for a common Microsoft Windows component, svchost.  One which McAfee VirusScan Enterprise will happily quarantine the much-needed and eminently safe file and then shut down the machine to protect you from those nasty viruses.  Of course when you go to start the machine again, that really really rather necessary Windows component svchost.exe now happens to be missing … meaning and endless and fruitless reboot cycle.

Yes, once again, McAfee has bricked your PC.

You’d think they’d have learned to test their updates before releasing them by now, wouldn’t you?

Guess not.

Maybe when you’re such a big name like McAfee, you just don’t have to do those little things like basic testing before release.

Happy Earth Day, from McAfee!

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention to the calendar, it’s that time again: April 15th, Tax Day!

Oh no!

Yes, that’s right.  If you don’t have your income tax forms and/or payments in the mail by tonight, you’re gonna be late.

So if you  haven’t gotten it done yet, get to it!

On March 25th all registered users of MSI’s customer support forums received an email telling them, “The MSI-forum and MSI-support team are fed-up with explaining you what can be found in the manual,” of all things.  The email continued to go on, “I mean, come on, how hard is it to read a manual? They are printed on paper so you see them.“  It’s a rant that anyone who has engineered a product, hardware or software, can fully appreciate.  All too often if people would just Read The F___ing Manual (RTFM) then they wouldn’t need help in the first place, or wouldn’t have broken their product.  (For those not aware, RTFM is a very old engineer/technician joke.)

MSI’s email takes a decidedly strange twist from a good old-fashioned rant however, telling their users that their products have been fitted with an RTFM chip that can actually identify if a user has or hasn’t read their manual.  To which they can then use to deny service to a customer.  “So MSI decided to ban people from support, RMA, and the forum who has done the damage themselves or didn’t read the manual the first of next month,” their email went on to say.  “We know who you are, and we have gathered enough information via our RTFM-chip.”

It’s safe to say at this point that it’s incredibly obvious that this is therefore some kind of prank.  As obviously there’s no way to tell if a user actually read the manual or not with a chip in a product.  And even then, no one can just refuse service for not reading the manual, no matter how much we might like to.

But, of course, many people were offended.  It’s no surprise really.

To which MSI then tried to claim it was an April Fools joke, ha ha, and not some fed-up tech just going nuts.

Only there’s two problems with that.  First, it was an email sent out to everyone, some 97,000 recipients, not something hosted directly on the forum itself.  And second, April Fools Day is the 1st of April, and this was an email sent out literally a week too early, on the 25th of March.

Oops.  Perhaps then the joke is on MSI?

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