Been there, done that.

I was invited into a company that was going through bankruptcy, and the previous C-level folks had already been indited for federal crimes.

I was given a short list of people to invite to leave, and full control to clear the slate of the entire IT staff, should I decide to.. Basically, I was to cut them all loose and start over, which as we all know is suicide. When I was ready for those who weren't team players, and detrimental to the company, the CEO said no. Hrm.

I was given laundry lists of things to do, and no budget to do it with. Some were little things like, desktops that were a decade old. Servers that were past EOL by any standards. I presented very reasonable plans for both, which were indefinitely delayed until they were almost too late.

I kept things mostly moving forward for the duration. When the bankruptcy was done, I was promised lots of things. Eventually, the new owner cut loose everyone that was not primarily at the home office. That was directly contrary to the CEO's continued assurances.

That night, I drank heavily and celebrated.

Now I'm doing SysAdmin work again. I get stuff done. I don't have to make grand decisions. I don't do presentations for company changing projects. I don't even have to hire or fire anyone. I understand more of the crap that management goes through, even though I do my best to isolate myself away from office politics. I have the luxury of going home when the work is done, and no one bothers me until the next work morning.

Is it wrong for me to hope you die of the most unimaginably awful cancer, that will cause you to ooze horrible puss-like fluids that reek so awfully you're family won't be able to bear to be around you, and they will pray to God each and every night that you finally die... but you don't, and just linger in that state for years.

Is that wrong?

That a government may want something kept secret hardly means that it is wrong to reveal the secret. Yes, it will be a crime, but the debate here is not whether he committed a crime ore not, but whether what he did was right or not.

I won't argue with that. Well, the only thing I will point out is the same as I pointed out in another discussion elsewhere.

The government and military spying, both on enemies and your own people, has been going on since the invention of governments and militaries.

You can only assign blame specific incidents. The general idea has been around for an awful long time.

As long as we're somewhere on the sane side of McCarthyism and the Salem Witch Trials, I think we're mostly ok.. And for the record, I'm not a communist nor a witch.

Good thing we have ice cores, ocean sediments and the like.

Ever actually considers reading something by a climatologist?

Can't we blame them both?

Most of this stuff dates back to the Bush Jr. administration... But hey, go ahead and blame the black guy.

The same could be said or implied of the Steubenville hackers. Maybe there's a general grudge against schools, jocks, or a general belief that the state's investigators are inept.

Of course, the public statements now are for the preservation of evidence, and assistance of the victim and the courts.

"I have my home wired up like a datacenter. Everyone else should want a huge amount of network capacity and capability so that it makes my already extravagant costs slightly cheaper."

What's wrong with building out your home network like a datacenter? :) I'm perfectly happy with GigE. It handles the servers, iSCSI to the SAN, and an isolated branch for the desktops. It's the uplink speeds we have to work on.. I could upgrade to 10GigE, but when will the uplinks even get close? I'm putting my change order in for 100MB/s down next week. It'll be a long time before we see even 1GB/s uplink speeds for the home..

I really miss having my stuff hosted in a good Tier 1 DC, where I really did have GigE uplinks that could support the speeds. I could transfer stuff very nicely there, and then copy it to the laptop to bring home. Sneakernet has always been faster than residential speeds for large transfers.

Police should try and catch the thief and return the phone to it's owner. GPS won't work, unless the thief has switched it on. Cell tower information would probably be sufficient enough to get near the thief. If word gets out that teams of cops are actually on full-time phone retrieval duty, thieves are going to be a lot more cautious about stealing phones. The reason this happens so much is that the chance the thieves get caught is way too low.

Blocking the IMEI means the thieves will change the IMEI on the phone. Yes, they figure out how to do that and for most not-so-recent phones there is a black market where you can get that done. For the popular new phones, it usually will get done soon after the phone gets on the market. It's a software/firmware thing usually, so IMEI blocking is not sufficient. If there is no software solution, often the baseband chip gets replaced, or the phone gets exported to a country that doesn't use foreign IMEI blocking lists. I'm fairly certain that thieves will find a solution for the kill-switch too, given time.

As far as I'm aware, Neanderthals were in fact quite hungry a lot of the time and didn't eat meat every day. They were going by on daily fruits, nuts and vegetables and only had meat when the hunt was successful.

    I'm only surprised that I don't get frequent visits from O2STK.

    At least I'm sure they're entertained by my phone calls, emails, and risque pictures.

... and it seems to be accurate.

user@host:~$ ntpdate ntp0.bbc.co.uk && ntpdate uk.pool.ntp.org
  6 Jun 21:14:58 ntpdate[14686]: adjust time server 132.185.132.130 offset -0.072700 sec
  6 Jun 21:15:05 ntpdate[14687]: adjust time server 178.79.191.28 offset -0.074760 sec

It took a few seconds for each to respond, being I'm on the wrong side of the pond and all.

So they appear to participate in the centralized time system, that understands UTC, I don't see where their big problem is. 100 days to program a javascript clock to use their servers instead of the client machine?

I am surprised that they still do have a clock on there. Well, I never noticed when I went, but I wasn't really going to the BBC to check the time. Most people took clocks off of their web pages back in the late 90's, right along with dancing babies and blinking text.

You young whippersnapper get on the front page of SlashDot with questions on how to get job experience as a junior Windows admin. When I was your age I just installed the product and played a bit with it, asked some questions on usenet and then did an exam. Shortly after that, I discovered that once you had the certifications, there wasn't much of a career left to make with MicroSoft products so I switched to better paying operating systems and gigs. Look around you, plenty of jobs in IT don't even require knowledge of even a single MicroSoft product. You're just looking for jobs that require your skill set and find out that they also want MSSQL and MS-Exchange. They all want the world and are happy with a few countries, delighted with a whole continent. Just apply to the job and state that you've learned the rest of your CV's skills in relatively short time and have no doubt that you'll pick up exchange and sql quickly. That's what experience will teach you, not how to admin an Outlook frontend box....

echo "Starting time:" `date`
echo "fixing ntp.conf"
echo "server 0.uk.pool.ntp.org" >> /etc/ntp.conf
echo "server 1.uk.pool.ntp.org" >> /etc/ntp.conf
echo "server 2.uk.pool.ntp.org" >> /etc/ntp.conf
echo "server 3.uk.pool.ntp.org" >> /etc/ntp.conf
service ntpd restart
 
echo "forcing time update to now"
ntpdate -b uk.pool.ntp.org
echo "Ending time:" `date`

Servers taken care of. What's the BBC billing address? :)