Computer Associates advertising

I just saw an advertisement for CA, where it discussed the boot time of computers, saying that computers infected with spyware can take 14 minutes to boot. I had to laugh at their attempt to mislead people for a variety of reasons.

First off, a lot of people still run Windows 2000. I recently spent a couple days trying to tweak all the performance I could out of my laptop. If I recall correctly, a fresh intall of Windows 2000 with no software installed required somewhere between 30 seconds and 1 minute to boot. After the Microsoft updates it took about 5 minutes to boot. After installing Norton Antivirus, the latest version, it took about 15 minutes to boot.

Based on that alone, it is misleading to suggest that an average boot time for a computer is being caused by spyware. That isn't to say spyware isn't a huge problem, but it is clear Computer Associates is being shady in their advertising.

That shouldn't be too surprising, however. Here in Utah I have worked with people that have worked in many levels of Computer Associates, and the integrity level of so many people in their corporate culture is abysmal. That is just their Utah office. On a higher corporate level it seems like they are rocked with scandal and dishonesty every year.

For my part, I can't imagine ever buying a CA product. I trust that there are honest engineers who work there, but they are so rife with dishonesty that it is just a risk to get involved with any of them.

As it relates to corporate culture, it is interesting that some companies, like AT&T, churn out people who have so much integrity that you could trust them with the keys to your house.

One last thought to wrap up. Regarding the original issue of why computers slow down, my colleagues and I have mused over that a bit. Honestly, my computer habits haven't changed much in 8 years. The majority of my computer use is using a word processor, email, and viewing the text on some websites. All of these things used to be smokingly fast on a Pentium 100 computer. It is strange to consider that the computers, doing the same tasks, become so poor at them now and the usefulness of the computers hasn't increased much despite the fact my computer is 20 times more powerful. One thing my colleagues and I have postulated is that Windows software has an algorithm that tells a computer to boot 50% slower and run 50% as fast for each year that passes, until it gets to a certain year when it calls a function that is called "hahahahupgrade()"