Next, switch CISSP with CCIE.

Childs is not a security professional, but a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert, a much more exclusive technical club. Childs was highly paid for his work because it takes years of study and experience to earn that kind of certification (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_Career_Certifications). As of June 2009, there were only 20,000 CCIE holders in the entire world, and they are in great demand. According to Global Knowledge, I could pass the CISSP test in two weeks if I take their boot camp training, which costs a fraction of the tuition for the Cisco classes that Childs had to take.

Want to bet that the newly-promoted San Francisco "IT Security Officer" who caused this whole fiasco probably doesn't hold a single certification? I know the one in my department isn't certified, and he got the job only because he was friends with the ISO who took early retirement due to a Departmental re-organization.

I would hire him in a heartbeat. This is exactly the kind of person I would want designing and securing my network. I'm a DBA, and we're all over the place. You can't spit ten feet on the sidewalk without hitting one without even trying. Terry Childs is a CCIE, a very exclusive certification (there are only 20,000 holders of the CCIE certification worldwide). If only there were more CCIE holders in the job market, I'd try to hire at least three of them, just in case one get's "hit by a bus." Most organizations are lucky to be able to afford even one.

Childs went above and beyond the call of duty to protect a network he was well-paid to administer. And he performed that job admirably. For what the City and County of San Francisco has done to him and his reputation, he deserves a generous legal settlement when (not if) all charges are dropped and he is released.

When I hosted a conference a couple of years ago, I opened a merchant account at my bank to help me handle credit card transactions for the registration fees. That's when I found out how much Visa, Mastercard, Discover and AMEX charge their real customers (merchants). It's just the cost of doing business, and the more transactions you have, the less it costs. But that didn't help me process payments over my website, so I ended up using both PayPal and Click and Pledge http://www.clickandpledge.com/, which was a perfect solution. Most of the people registering for the conference preferred using their own credit cards, and I only had two people use PayPal. While I didn't have any serious problems with PayPal, I was very impressed by Click and Pledge. Their fees were reasonable, their online technical assistance made implementing a payment button/link a snap, and they were extremely prompt in forwarding payment to me every month I used it (and they didn't charge me a dime after the conference was over and I wasn't taking any additional transactions). I closed the Merchant Account at the bank as soon as possible after the conference, because they were going to continue to charge me fees even when I had no more transactions to process.

Like PayPal, Mastercard and Visa are still just transaction brokers (very lucrative business, by the way), but late last year, American Express became a bank almost overnight. Ever since Congress passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), otherwise known as the Great Bank Bailout of 2008, any institution that wanted a chunk of bailout money had to be a bank (or an insurance company, like AIG, that insured banks and their worthless securities). In November 2008, after the government started handing out billions of federal reserve notes to failing institutions that were "too big to fail," American Express filed all the forms necessary to re-organize itself as a bank, and then recieved $3.4 billion (see http://bailout.propublica.org/entities/15-american-express). Fortunately, they just re-paid the entire loan--with interest--back to the U.S. Treasury Department, but they are now a bank, and will probably continue to be one as long as it benefits them.

Sorry to disagree with you, but I would have no problem at all living in a world where OS/2 was the rival OS to Apple and Amiga. OS/2 Warp 3.0 was my first deeply personal experience with x86 computers, the platform I installed on my first home-brewed 486-class PC that ran a BBS out of my home (well, second, if you count the years I used an Atari ST). It was a great system and gave me the tools I needed to find a job in the tech industry. I still have (and frequently wear) my old Team OS/2 tee shirt.

That's awesome! I'm jealous. Your office makes my clone-like cubicle seem really mass-produced and depressing. Which it is. Every fucking day.

Technet gives you the ability to download all of Microsoft's products, even old releases of Windows 3.1 and DOS 6 and earlier. Good for testing things in virtual environments. You also get two free Technical Support Incident calls with your subscription (which would normally cost >$200 each). But note that none of the Technet downloads are licensed for production use, so you can't run your business on them, or sell them to anyone else. You would need the Action Pack for that, which costs more, but allows you to support the products and install them as a re-seller. You also have to really, really learn just about everything about the whole range of products to provide a competent level of support to your small business customers. Action Pack subscribers who don't know what they're doing are wasting their money and the money their downstream customers pay them. They won't have those customers for very long.

I got my initial TechNet subscription through a User Group discount for the renewal price of $249, and now I pay $249 annually to continue the subscription. Yes, I consider it a bargain, but it also allows me to keep my skills up to date. Don't forget about the online training portal that you get with TechNet, another little bonus that is rarely discussed. MS Training can be really expensive, but the self-paced modules available through TechNet are a great investment.

At least until the RC install starts re-booting every 2 hours begining in March 2010. If you can live with that little problem, it should continue to work fine until June 2010. Or you can just re-set your system date in the BIOS to stay at 2009 for a while, if that doesn't screw up some of your applicationss (if you're using it primarily as a gaming box, then that shouldn't be a problem).

But I expect some clever coder will figure out a way to hack around this timebomb by then.

I had some initial problems with the first Longhorn beta and the Vista CTP (both obtained from my good friend who works at MS). One system had frequent BSOD problems while the other did not. Eventually, NVidia managed to provide working Vista drivers, and afterward, the BSOD problem was resolved and has never returned. Both systems are now running on Vista SP2 and doing quite well.

The Windows 7 Beta and now the RC (Build 7100) have both run completely stable on all four systems I've installed. Never had any BSOD problems, and the OS never hung up on me once(though some applications, notably Quicken, have had some issues running under Win7). I'm a TechNet subscriber, so I'll be putting the RTM on all these next month when the final code is available to download. Of course, I'll still dual-boot with Ubuntu.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the markets are completely rational. Now, this is not to imply that the markets are at all predictable. That's where risk comes into play. The "irrational exhuberance" of recent years has been severely punished and the market is just correcting itself. You may not like what it's doing, or how the government is responding, but it is doing exactly what Hayek and Friedman and Krugman and decades of economic models all predicted it should do.

I believe you're thinking of the original pilot episode "Where is Everybody?" written by Rod Serling that helped sell the series concpet to CBS. Astronaut (played by Earl Holliman) flips out after 484 days of an isolation experiment.

"Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is the sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars, waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting... in The Twilight Zone."
-- Serling's final narration at the end of the episode.

Tell your IT foiks that IE8 has a "compatibility mode" tab that launches the IE6 rendering engine in an isolated/sandboxed tab, so that any web page coded for IE6 can be displayed in IE8 if you can train your users to click on the Compabitility tab. I think it is rather like the IETab extension you can install in Firefox, which will open a Firefox tab using the IE6 engine. I use it to play NetFlix "Watch Now" videos in Firefox, which normally only play in IE.

Many businesses still run Win2K, but Microsoft no longer supports it. End of life for that product was announced three years ago. It may be "stable, well-known & well-documented" but Microsoft does not support it any longer and does not issue any new security updates for it. If you still run Win2K Server, you'd better be using it for a honeypot, because it's probably already compromised and part of a botnet.

This is the case in my office, where IE6 is the approved standard, and no one is allowed to use FireFox or Opera or Chrome unless they can submit a written justification to the IT standards committee and obtain their approval. That is rare.

This is mainly because we use several different web-based applications developed in-house for submitting travel claims and interfacing with our purchasing department's back-end databases, all built years ago on non-standards-compliant IE6 code. The team of contractors who developed these apps are long gone, and updating them would require finding a new contractor and paying them to re-build all the apps from scratch, a difficult sell to management in today's economy. It ain't broke, they say, so why fix it?

As is becoming more common with foreclosure cases these days, a homeowner can fight the action if they can have the bank prove that they hold the note and all the paperwork on the property. In many, many cases, the bank may well have bundled the mortgage into a security with dozens or even hundreds of other mortgages and sold it to another entity. That entity may well have sold it in a different bundled security to another bank and so on and on and on. I do recall reading about a case in, yes, Florida, where a homeowner has actually forced the bank to re-negotiate her mortgage because they have not been able to prove that they hold her mortgage! They sold it off years ago in such a deal, but now cannot trace the labyrinth of transactions to find the original promissory note, because it has been sold and re-sold multiple times since then.