June 9, 2008 by roland.

Since I had to work my way through this problem, I thought I would post the information.

First off, I don’t use Windows for anything other than the occasional game of “Lords of the Realm”, nor do I recommend anyone be silly enough to load a virus like that on a computer you want to actually use. I was foisted into this issue because I upgraded notebooks and decided to be a nice guy. A friend of mine had a daughter starting Junior High and thought a notebook would come in handy for writing papers and such. They, of course, wanted the original Windows XP installed on it. I had long since given up on anything Microsoft produced. The notebook had Ubuntu on it for quite a while, but I had the original stuff, and like an idiot, agreed to do a wipe and re-install.

Oh, woe is me! What a stupid thing to agree to! It did let me get rid of some other Windows software which I had no use for, but had perfectly good licenses, so I was looking at this as more of a “shelf cleaning” exercise.

The original install media left the machine booting into Administrator without prompting for a password, even though a password was defined for the account. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it while I was loading all of the original distribution software, but then it started to nag me. I burned an entire evening and part of another doctor dorking around with this minor issue. Since the exact answer wasn’t posted on the Web in any place I could find, I decided to help someone else unfortunate enough to be loading a Microsoft product onto a machine. (It’s a shame the way we disrespect computers by loading Microsoft products on them.)

You need a Registry editor to fix this problem. I know, heavy sigh. I used the one from System Suite 8 Professional since I had bought and installed that on this computer to get them a descent firewall and virus protection. You need to click expand your way down to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Software
Microsoft
Windows NT
CurrentVersion
Winlogon

you click on Winlogon (don’t expand it by clicking the plus or whatever, just click on the entry.) On the right side will appear a bunch of cryptic names and values. You are looking for something similar to AdministratorAutoLogon. You will see it has a value of “1” if your problem is the same as mine. Change this value to “0”, save, and reboot. You will now see the Welcome screen.

If you have some desperate need to have the Administrator account appear on your Welcome screen you need to a little farther down under Winlogon to:
SpecialAccounts
UserList

On the right side you need to either add or modify the DWORD value having a name which matches the Administrator name exactly. A value of 0 keeps it off of the screen and a value of 1 puts it on the screen.

That’s it. One more icky nasty Windows problem taken care of.

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June 9, 2008 by roland.

It seems that not a day goes by on the various evening news shows when we don’t hear the word “Recession”. If you read any of the on-line business news sites, you see a larger and larger number of economists using the “R” word. Granted there are a few paid by the political spin-doctors claiming we aren’t in a recession. For those people losing their homes and jobs, it’s a recession even if you don’t call it one.

What is even more impressive is that once again, the journalists are swinging at the smoke and not seeing the fire. It seems that they are all looking for the headline which sells, not the root of the problem. Because of that you see news reports about the “Mortgage Crisis” and “Gas Crisis”, but you don’t see anyone tunneling down to the root of the problem. What you aren’t hearing is the story behind the story.

Oh, they have part of it correct. Some truly unscrupulous bastards got into the mortgage business with the single intention of praying upon those who were already being victimized by credit card companies. We cannot watch the numerous stories on the evening news and believe anything else. It is also true that what was once a $20 fill up at the pump now has the pump shutting off when you hit $100 whether you are full or not. What is overlooked though is the fact gas prices were going up anyway since we have now shot past the tipping point of the world’s known oil supply. We have already fought a war over oil, though we used the cover story of Saddam and WMD.

The economy could have had a soft landing over the oil prices. Indeed, political officials have been banking on that one since the 1970’s. What nailed the economy isn’t the “Mortgage Crisis”, but what caused the crisis in the first place.

Did you ever wonder how it was that high risk loans became high profit securities? Oh, Wall Street only packaged them up, so don’t go looking there. How was it enough of those loans got paid off to make the securities profitable in the first place? You see, those securities wouldn’t have sold in the billions of dollars range unless there was something making them profitable. When that something was removed, it was like kicking a chair out from under a drunk at a bar.

IT workers were making money hand over fist a few years ago, before Gartner started spouting off-shoring as the new Mega Trend. Because of the large disposable income, they bought the $70K SUV’s which made the auto makers money, and in turn those who worked at the plants. Everybody had money to buy bigger houses and play in the real estate market. Given the rate of returns happening in certain housing areas, it was a better bet to flip a house than it was to invest in the stock market. This created a large pool of good mortgage notes, until Gartner got involved.

Suddenly, there was a desire in the mortgage industry to take more risk. After all, if you have a large pool of good notes, you can blend in some high risk notes and get a better return. As long as the people were working, you could bleed them dry. Mortgage debt was secured by an asset, and their credit card wasn’t, so it was time for the bankers to rip their fair share out of the credit card companies hands.

The heads of the auto companies got even greedier. They wanted to slash their IT costs even further than they had by contracting it out to bottom feeding consulting companies. The bottom feeding consulting companies wanted to find an even lower bottom to boost their margins. They both turned their eyes to the off-shore labor market, where in some countries people made $10/day.

One little problem existed with the off-shore market though. Those countries needed infrastructure, and that was a big ticket gamble for just a few to take. Enter the Gartner Group, the tried and true marketing arm of the IT industry. A few well placed service subscriptions, and suddenly they were marketing to every large company the Utopia to be found when they paid to build infrastructure in these “emerging markets”.

As always, Gartner over sold what was really there. It didn’t matter. The MBA’s drooling from the price spike it would give their back dated stock options simply couldn’t resist. They swallowed this bait hook like and sinker. In a matter of a few short months corporations were having seasoned professionals trying to teach under skilled people how to do their job so the seasoned professionals could all be replaced with trainees.

Thus fell the first shoe of the Gartner Recession. Highly paid seasoned IT professionals were forced to either take massive pay cuts or simply shown the door. Mortgages started falling into default and $70K SUVs sat gathering dust on dealer lots.

Bankers and financial gurus started getting creative with the numbers. They demanded larger discounts on mortgage backed securities and bulked up on them trying to hide the losses. Since the skis needed even more grease to make this work, they didn’t offer ARM holders a chance to refinance at a lower fixed rate, they jacked the interest rates up to increase revenue and hide the losses. In some cases the interest rates went straight to the maximum allowed by the contract without a single missed payment. This, of course, forced more mortgage defaults, necessitating the need to jack interest rates everywhere to make the balance sheet look OK. Which in turn forced more defaults…

The SUV makers who started this whole mess, started cutting back on production, idling workers. It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what that did to the mortgage and credit markets.

Thus fell the second shoe of the Gartner Recession.

Would it surprise you to learn that this recession was a three legged beast? Yes, gas prices started to rise as these “emerging markets” flush with IT funds started buying and driving cars. The countries started building some of their own infrastructure, which in turn took additional oil resources.

You guessed it. The third shoe of the Gartner Recession dropped. Crude oil prices started to climb, and that was what the speculators were waiting for. A soft climb became a rocket ride when the sharks smelled blood. Pump prices shot past $3.00/gallon and even people who could afford SUVs stopped buying them. This forced the makers of SUVs to close plants putting an even larger strain on the “Mortgage Crisis” and “Credit Crunch”.

Thus fell the worlds largest and strongest economy, thanks to Gartner.

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