a powered on, logged in laptop being stolen.

[quote]

Chipzilla's Vpro anti-tampering tech will save the day and make you more attractive to the opposite sex.

[/quote]

I have one of two replies

1) Are you saying I am ugly?

2) Geeks have an opposite sex? I alway thought it was uni-sex.

Now where is that knee length coat? I just had a flash of inspiration.

Good for amusement purposes that is. Or good as in provoking a "who makes up these numbers?" reaction.

The fact that some companies may value their (potentially) lost or exposed data at several squillion arbitrary currency units will skew the average well above a level that's meaningful for *most* of the participants in the study.

And if it's anything like the surveys I fail to avoid, people will just have made up numbers to make the pollster[1] go away....

[1] I love the ones where they read a list of options at you without showing any underastanding of what any of the words mean...

That is after the £50 - £100 charge to come @ your table and dance.....

...and read "the reason it's Intel-sponsored is because the study finds Chipzilla's Vpro anti-tampering tech will save the day ".

I realised that this study has had carefully selected data. Data which makes the monetary losses seem more, so that Intel's solution looks like a panacea that will save companies money in the long term.

Mayb you could have used the following article instead:

"Intel are the latest in a long line of IT companies which fiddle with data in order to create a scare that will sell their products."

It was Verizon yesterday...

I think we all knew that...

"..... managers and directors have the most vital data on a biz, while executives...not so much."

So, what they're saying is that middle management have all sorts of important work-related things on their machines and the execs have all sorts of important golf-related things on their machines?

Quality, sheer quality. Worth every penny that Intel spent on it for that nugget of information alone.

Unbelievable - Really who gets paid to write these articles? I want their job i'm pretty good at story telling!

If a company invests in a solid robust encryption product then all they lose is a peice of hardware... not $40,000 like the article sggests. Really who out there who steals laptops would know how to decrypt a 256bit algorithm.

Muppets...!

If you're planning on "losing" your laptop, we've discovered its cheaper to fire you than to replace it!

No IT angle, just sales & marketing

... how much does it cost the Taxpayer when a Government agency loses one...?

If you work in a firm with more than 2000 employees then that just doesnt happen.

The firm I used to work for basically gave the damn things away for free.

Only about 2% of our workforce actually neeeded the damn things but everyone had one ( I refused, had a BBerry instead). I go round friends that have left the firm, to fix their 'PC' and what do I find...their old company laptop! No manager ever asked for them back, too busy, didnt even care.

We'd have £400+ a day contractors turn up, they would be given a brand new £900 Dell laptop and then they would leave as a matter of course a bit later.

Where was the laptop? Where was all the data they were working on for 4 months? What was his name again?

Oh well, havent got time to worry about that, got a project to deliver!

My suggestion to make all contractors work on a Citrix platform was considered far too expensive.

So there you go, companies dont give a fig if they lose kit. There was always money to buy more. Well there was, dunno about now.

Forget stolen laptops, merely replacing one at its end-of-life is a ridiculous fiasco. Where I work, IT gets to vet all computer purchases. Consider the following scenario:

* Our IT dolts wish for all laptops to be the same. Which means they want to buy the cheapest thing that can run Office.

* They're quite tight fisted, it's as though the money comes out of their own paychecks.

Last time, it was a 5 month ordeal that had me refusing two laptops because they hadn't met the hardware specification (a 1394 port, and an Express Card slot). Countless hours were spent dredging up hardware specifications in order to "prove" that things like my (their) 1394 camera (part of a Data Acquisition System) required a 1394 port. All of this for a project prototype that took under a month to complete. I could easily believe that 50k worth of time and trouble went into getting me a suitable laptop.

Enjoy some of these excuses from your brethren.

* It isn't "fair" if we give you a "better" one.

* If we buy that for you, we'll have to buy one for everybody.

* You don't "need" 4GB of RAM.

* You don't need a bigger hard disk.

* You don't need that video card.

* You don't need an extra power supply.

* We don't allow wireless on the premises

PS no whining about not being able to use all 4 GB; because it isn't economical to buy a 3.5GB module!

In regards to that article, I reckon that yeah, when a salespuke loses a lappy with customer lists / billing information on it or something like that, well durr hurr, everyone wishes they hadn't. A little care in planning for it is all that's needed to prevent the real damage. The rest are just junk laptops that probably need replacing anyway.