Land of the Lemmings, v2

Clean System to Zombie Bot in 4 minutes. Damn, that’s quick. And people wonder why I’m paranoid.

After reading a short entry from Glenn Reynolds about Wal-Mart, I hit the two links and did some reading.
PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE would like us to think that because the economy is improving, people are shunning Wal-Mart because of the lower priced, and therefore lower quality, goods that are sold there. Consumers choose to pay slightly more for brands with more name recognition.
The second goes down another track and claims that the shopping experience in general just sucks at Wal-Mart:

I can accept that, but Wal-Mart starts to lose the battle when Target clearly goes out of its way to maintain wide aisles, a slightly more upscale selection of merchandise and a store that’s not downright filthy six days out of seven. Maybe Wal-Marts outside of the Southeast are clean and neat, but I’ve yet to see a store stay clean and pleasant for more than six months after its opening. Those of us with the option don’t want to shop at Wal-Mart; not out of opposition to red state values or capitalism. We shop at Target because our feet don’t stick to the floor while walking down the frozen food aisle.

I’d agree with the second one, but I think they are both missing an underlying factor: Wal-Mart employees have no motivation to do a good job, their compensation and benefits suck. CostCo, for example, has better employee retention numbers and better starting salaries, according to this article. Contrast that with some of the reports about Wal-Mart’s wonderful employment record.
If you know you are just an easily replaced cog in the giant machine, why try to do anymore than just what is necessary to get by? Maybe this will encourage Wal-Mart to put employee well-being ahead of stock holders value and corporate profits in the race for the the all-mighty dollar.
Update: My stylesheet still makes quotes look like crap, gotta get that fixed.

Microsoft actually has a nice database of product support lifecycles available, though you may need to take notes to figure out what the charts mean.

I couldn’t agree with this guy more, NASCAR is failing the “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday” model and has for quite some time. (Via Jalopnik)

The student sites are now running on a Windows 2003 Server Active Directory. I learned a few things along the way:

• Don’t try to reuse an existing server name if it is staticly mapped in your WINS database. The Windows Server 2003 upgrade process will think there is a name collision and use some randomly generated name for the server, UNIVERSI-2345a8 for example.
• If you have messed around with the User Rights on your NT4 domain, you’d best find the defaults for Windows 2003 and reset them. Updates and other things just don’t install correctly until they are reset. (The Threats and Countermeasures Guide came in pretty handy here too.)
• Until the workstations DNS server and the default DNS domain name is changed, they keep working right along as if the domain is still NT4 based. Dynamic DNS doesn’t start working until then either.

I still need to move all the FSMO roles off the temporary DC, but that doesn’t need to happen any time soon. I may put any more changes off until winter break.

Is this thing on?

Yes, I’ve had the blog for a year now, and contrary to my own predictions, it isn’t neglected or dead.

I’ve got pictures and stories to post about tearing into my parents old house and the Windows NT4 to 2003 Active Directory upgrade at work, but I really don’t feel like writing up either of them right now.

Looks like there is a running theme behind the batch of failed Housing GX270s: failing capacitors. Dell Forums post, and another.