Gawker
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Tim the IT Guy
Facebook loses its members' email settings
It's on an O'Reilly blog, so it must be true: Facebook has lost some users' email settings. The company had to send them an apology, and a request to reset things. Let me explain in sysadmin jargon: That's fucked. Not because Facebook's engineers failed at Backups 101, but because by now the Marketing department has figured out they can reset all our email preferences to "Spam Me Like Crazy" by pretending to lose them again in January. Laugh while it's still funny.
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Comment by neekolas: I got this message two days ago. No spam, though. They switched all the settings to 'off', so I stopped getting... 3 Responses | Other threads
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Tim the IT Guy
Can you really rent-a-coder?
Electronic Arts recently shut down Blueprint, a strategic project to enable the company to develop more software without onsite programmers. Coding Horror blogger Jeff Atwood is a professional programmer who lives in Berkeley. That makes him biased against cheap-outsourced-programer sites like Guru.com. But Atwood's hard-to-explain discomfort — and the war stories left by commenters — are based on an unpopular truth: There's no substitute for being in the office. -
Tim the IT Guy
NASA discovers its own scope management plan
NASA announced today that deadlines and budget overruns have forced them to "cut certain features" from the upcoming Mars Science Laboratory. The feature? A "debris container" designed to "collect and store rock fragments for future study purposes." One small cost cut for a man, one giant leap for mankind. -
Tim the IT Guy
Want to fix the economy? Fire your sysadmin
Sooner or later we need to slam shut the door on technical have-nots. Pew Research found that nearly half of adults surveyed need help setting up computers and cell phones. Ars Technica notes what follows: Kids are always fixing their parents' PCs. But they don't take these insights to the logical conclusion: It's time to fire the IT support team. More »
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Comment by Incognito: Can we just fire the IT guy instead? Just kidding. 3 Responses | Other threads
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Tim the IT Guy
Microsoft does a victory dance on Sun's head
Redmond's biz-dev gorillas have strong-armed Sun Microsystems into bundling the MSN toolbar as an optional add-on to Sun's Java downloads in the US. What does the Silverlight-powered toolbar have to do with Java? Nothing! That's the genius of it. More »
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Comment by ShrikumariKollenda: Yup, to be a little more accurate - the only success Sun has had in generating significant new revenue for... more » | Other threads
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Tim the IT Guy
Traffic engineers pull a "Die Hard 4" on Los Angeles
Who pays attention to unions anymore? A bunch of carpenters picket your office because of a grievance with a contractor who works for the facilities department of the company on the floor below you. They might as well stencil WE ARE POWERLESS on their placards. But a couple of Los Angeles traffic engineers who work for that city's Automated Traffic Surveillance Center found a way to make "strike" an active verb again: They disabled four traffic lights at major intersections a couple of hours before a job action. The red-light gridlock lasted four days until the PHBs figured out how to reprogram things. Gabriel Murillo, 39, and Kartik Patel, 36 admitted to felony hacking as part of a plea bargain. I'm sure it sucked for commuters, but at least they didn't turn all the lights green. (Photo by AP/Nam Y. Huh)
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Comment by macbeach: Obviously one of the "change"es that needs to happen is making messing with public infrastructure a hanging offense like it... more » | Other threads
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Tim the IT Guy
PDFs now as rock-solid secure as ActiveX
It's a verified bug: PDF files can be used to take over your PC. Adobe's mistake was adding support for ever-sloppy JavaScript inside the once-benign PDF format. Core Security, the company that outed the vulnerability, says, "An attacker could put malicious code in JavaScript embedded in a PDF and [...] could manipulate the program's memory allocation pattern and trigger the vulnerability to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user." Great. I can hardly wait to reinstall Paul's PC after he pretends to read another of those ethics-in-journalism PDFs.
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Comment by macbeach: Sometimes it's good when the open source alternatives to these things don't follow the lead of the products they imitate.... more » | Other threads
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Tim the IT Guy
Dell wants employees to practice being laid off
Call it Company (Red). Michael Dell is asking employees at his computer maker to take five unpaid days off and thus help the company trim costs instead of slashing jobs. Extorting your people by suggesting they take a small hit now as opposed to a larger hit later on isn't particularly original. “We’ve seen a slowdown in spending,” says a Dell spokesbot, “but the primary reason is to ... to better position Dell for long-term competitiveness.” That makes no sense: Skimping on five days of payroll may temporarily give the company's bank account a fillip, but it doesn't change its permanent cost structure. Then again, maybe Dell's strategy is to drive away employees who are capable of doing math.
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Comment by Alaska Miller: Every trick in the manager handbook. Except the chapter on making quality products with profit margins. more » | Other threads
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commenter of the day
Tim the IT Guy
Our house sysadmin, Tim the IT Guy, had the best take on Twitter CEO's Ev Williams open call for a wannabe-CEO assistant: More »
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By Owen ThomasComment by dizzydj: Actually... that would probably be a pretty decent movie, and a lot more entertaining. Even the book would be vastly... more » | Other threads
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Tim the IT Guy
Cisco concludes we're all breaking the rules
I'm a liar. So are you. The funny part is, we all know it. A new study by Cisco just confirms it. The 10-word version: "Everyone breaks published security policy to get their job done." None of this is a surprise to your IT department. We long for the day we can punish problem users for violating the pages of acceptable-use policies they signed but never read their first day on the job. Please, please, please just let us ban one guy from the network — pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire said.
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Comment by Paul Boutin: What Tim means is: I use the same password for Valleywag as I do at First Republic. But damned... 2 Responses | Other threads
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Tim the IT Guy
Microsoft saves my job for the weekend
Hooray — another zero-day patch! The financial sky is falling! The only good news is I'm used to hedge fund managers throwing themselves out the windows. If you're as familiar with zero-day patches as collateralized debt obligations, let me explain the difference to an IT guy. A CDO means I'm fired. A zero-day patch means I'm working. All weekend. More »
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Comment by Nekoni: Maybe he's like my partner, likes the routine, regular money, a challenge, but not too much responsibility, just enough to... 1 Responses | Other threads
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toogle many googlers
Gmail now idiot-accessible
The rocket scientists at Google have a solution for our death-spiraling economy: emoticons in Gmail. The animated steaming pile of poo is especially classy. More »
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Comment by miscelaineous: The gchat emoticons are clever, but this is too much. Google, where did simplicity go? Jumping the gmail shark, much? more » | Other threads
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Tim the IT Guy
Is Sarah Palin's email worth $15 million?
There are ways to kill projects you don't want to work on without saying no. You can give the project "death by price tag," as did Alaska's state IT guys when ordered to produce evidence that could only hurt their home state's image. Examining one state employee's inbox for emails sent to Sarah Palin's husband, Todd, would take six hours, they told the Associated Press, which asked for the emails under public-records laws. Multiply that by 16,000 employees, at $73.87 an hour, and you get $15,364,960. It's the kind of math that will only fool a journalist, not an IT guy who's familiar with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, SMTP logs, and journaling file systems. By the time the media figures out what it should really cost, the election will be over. But think twice, guys. More »
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Comment by pleinad: I think you're getting it wrong. Emails relating to finances and accounting will have something to do with Sabane-Oxley. Palin... 2 Responses | Other threads
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Tim the IT Guy
Earthquakes seem funny now
Layoff, shmayoff –- I was 12 years old when the Loma Prieta quake hit 19 years ago. Sunny afternoon. An average Thursday and no reason to suspect anything was wrong. I had just gotten out of the shower and was about to get dressed when the shaking hit. It was far, far worse than I’d ever felt before. I dove for the doorjamb right about the same time my Dad appeared in another doorway. No time to throw pants on. I had to go commando through the worst quake in Bay Area history. More »
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Comment by Tim the IT Guy: 60 people died in this area, sir or madam - whatever the case may be - I'm sure their families... 2 Responses | Other threads
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Tim the IT Guy
NASA's shame: Hubble Space Telescope runs on a 486 chip
Two weeks ago, NASA spokespeople acknowledged that the $6 billion Hubble Space Telescope had stopped transmitting data back to Earth. Today, the optimistic news is that ground control technicians have remote-booted the telescope's backup computer. The Hubble's No. 2 system is built around a pre-Pentium Intel 80486 microchip. Five of the six "redundant components" activated this week haven't been powered up since 1990. Before you type this is not news, read Nasa's carefully crafted PR prose from 1999. Look how much we've gotten used to commodity PC hardware since then: More »
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Comment by macbeach: I wonder how they handle heat dissipation up there? If that is a pressurized box that the chip is... 4 Responses | Other threads
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Tim the IT Guy
Top 10 reasons to fire everyone now
As Wall Street's mistakes continue to spill over into the tech sector, nervous managers are scrambling for proven ways to cut their budgets. Tough times call for old solutions to new problems. But you need to package them as new solutions to old problems. Here's a translation guide to analyst house Gartner's pricey advice — or at least to Gartner's advice as rewritten by a bunch of journalists at ZD: More »
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Comment by DrewFinch: That zdnet article reads like word salad.... One of his top 10 disruptive technologies is "User Interface?" And better yet,... 2 Responses | Other threads
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Tim the IT Guy
Why you should find a headhunter you hate
If your own company's future is as uncertain as Wachovia's, it's probably time to hook up with a few professional recruiters and go looking for work while you're still a hot (read: employed) property. The first thing you should know about tech headhunters is they're not tech people. The second thing you should know is that they're effective. The third is that #1 + #2 = #3: You'll hate them. More »
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Comment by deathbychichi: A cheer for Tim the IT Guy for using a 30+ year-old Herbie Hancock album cover as the graphic for... 3 Responses | Other threads
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silicon valley users guide
How to keep your IT department happy
The stories of Terry Childs and Roger Duronio — resentful IT workers who wreaked vengeance on their employers — make nontechnical managers wonder what they might do differently than the City of San Francisco's Department of Technology. What does it take to keep your IT resources happy? More » -
silicon valley users guide
Surviving the HP-EDS merger
As a by-product of its recent merger with EDS, Hewlett-Packard announced a layoff of more than 24,000 jobs, or almost 8 percent of its workforce. The cuts are highest in support divisions — accounting, information technology, human relations, procurement and legal. But the main rationale of the layoffs is to refocus the combined company's computer-services division on high-end consulting, not low-end gruntwork. What’s worse is the timeframe: job cuts take place over three years. If you work at HP or EDS, your office has now become a professional hospice unit. Adding to the workplace angst: Some at HP, we hear, are getting bonuses even as their colleagues get pink slips. For those fretting about the potential loss of income in these troubling times, we offer the following suggestions on finding your next job or coping with survivor’s guilt. More » -
Leave Terry Childs Alone!
Why San Francisco deserved to lose control of its network
Terry Childs is the San Francisco government systems administrator who, threatened with losing his job, took over the network. Childs finally gave in from his jail cell and handed mayor Gavin Newsom the passwords he'd changed, along with a liturgy of hate for his pointy-haired bosses. San Francisco bureaucrats make Childs out to be another Kevin Mitnick, capable of breaking into confidential data. Truth is, he's a grunt router admin who got sick of being on call 365 days a year. Here's a rundown of the exaggerated claims San Francisco officials are heaping onto Childs: More »
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Comment by mmmike: More likely Childs just forgot to save to flash. You can't be serious. This guy is a Cisco-certified... 2 Responses | Other threads
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Tim the IT Guy
Worried about outsourcing? Then stop telecommuting
A recent WSJ article and countless horror stories chart the tricky waters that outsourcers must navigate to move jobs outside throat-choking range. Although nervous-nelly IT workers take comfort in these tales, don't forget the basic math of outsourcing: A job that can be done remotely by you from home for $X can probably be done remotely from Mumbai for $X/10. So how do you make your job outsource-proof? More »
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Comment by deathbychichi: Or you could 1. Produce more production code per week than your peers produce in a year 2. Generate brilliant stuff that... 5 Responses | Other threads
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mythbusting
Rejoice — your tube is big enough after all
Comcast's announcement of a bandwidth cap for home users beginning in October has raised a recurring fear: Is the Internet being overloaded? It's not a new worry. Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe forecasted a meltdown in 1995. But our growing adoption of BitTorrent downloads and YouTube-like streaming clips must be straining the pipes, right? More »
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Comment by Spy from the Land of Rainpeople: Am I reading the above conversation right? Is Comcast moving to a TV over IP and metered IP access resulting... 5 Responses | Other threads
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Tim the IT Guy
Stupid Google calculator tricks
Google's named after "googol," an incredibly large number — misspelled. Does it surprise you that the search engine makes mistakes with math, too? Just for fun, watch what happens when you use the Google calculator to solve equations involving a Googol (10^100). More »
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Comment by sample032: [en.wikipedia.org] explains it all in language that only hardware engineers and math majors can understand, pedantics usually reserved for MathWorld. 3 Responses | Other threads
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Tim the IT Guy
Home tech support from AT&T? Please hold
AT&T has launched a "Geek Squad meets Fire Dog" IT service called AT&T ConnecTech. The company told USA Today that ConnecTech will provide home technical services in all 50 states: Home networking. Household tech support. Home theater installation. Having dealt with AT&T's "We don't have to — we're the phone company" attitude for years, I predict ConnecTech will be more like "Geek Squad meets the DMV." More »
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Comment by mousecoder: I dumped ATT DSL for cable when a tech-support person actually gave me a list of phone numbers for other... more » | Other threads
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Tim the IT Guy
Nuclear power? You're soaking in it
San Francisco alone consumes 850 continuous megawatts of electricity during the day. How much is that? The two supersized solar arrays planned for 2013 won't be enough to run SF — they'll produce 800 megawatts total. Gavin Newsom's pet project, the tidal power generator, will only piddle out 55 megawatts — one-fifteenth of the city's needs. Meanwhile, the Golden State's two operating nuclear sites each crank out more than 2,000 megawatts — day or night, high tide or low. What really drives the greenies crazy? They're safe. More »
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Comment by NuclearPro-Am: Sorry to be so late to the game, but you asked for a Bush/Clinton/Bush spokesperson, and unfortunately you got one.... more » | Other threads
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security
How 15 minutes of shame can save your company
The Wall of Sheep is a tradition at the annual Defcon computer-security conference. Hackers at the event post information that other attendees have accidentally placed unsecured onto the conference's network. Passwords and porn are the best examples. Organizers at last week's Black Hat conference set one up, too. It's a fun prank, but here's a serious idea: Why not run a Wall of Sheep at your own company? There are two good reasons: More »
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Comment by Shadowlayer: @sample032: What about WPA2-AES? from what I know it's impenetrable. @Advertising Guru: I was going to say that. For this to... more » | Other threads
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Tim the IT Guy
Media hacks compete for best nonworking Olympics links
So far, no one has published a workaround for YouTube's block on Americans trying to reach the site's beijing2008 channel. But lazy reporting and glib posts from reputable sites make it sound like the geeks (i.e. me) have solved the problem already. Wired, Silicon Alley Insider, and Om Malik's NewTeeVee are the worst offenders. I spent most of today actually trying their suggestions. I am obligated to report they're all worse than useless. Here's how each of them failed: More » -
Tim the IT Guy
Oracle lawsuit kills off its cut-rate competition
On Monday, spokespeople for software megalith SAP announced that SAP would shut down its software support subsidiary, TommorrowNow, which PC World called "a rising star in third-party maintenance and support for Oracle enterprise applications such as Siebel, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards." The fatal bullet: A lawsuit from Oracle that claimed TomorrowNow employees had downloaded confidential data and software from Oracle. SAP decided there wasn't enough left to save. More » -
Tim the IT Guy
How to sell your company's secrets and not get caught
This week, the HP vice president indicted for leaking trade secrets from IBM, his former employeer, pleaded guilty. Dude, UR DOIN IT RONG. Atul Malhotra allegedly emailed the goods to a coworker, drawing a big red arrow back to his own forehead. Ready to cash in on your inside info? Follow this six-step plan. More » -
Tim the IT Guy
What Apple can learn from McDonald's
[Editor's note: Tim Woolery, aka Tim the IT Guy, works hands-on in IT in the Bay Area. With nearly 15 years' experience at everything from CAT 5-cabled steel furnaces to intercontinental remote-controlled radio stations, Tim's able to spot and plug holes in the coverage of important tech news. Rather than bone up on change management best practices ourselves, we decided to let Tim post for himself once a week.] More »
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