26673538
submission
BobJacobsen writes:
The UC Berkeley email system has been either offline, or only providing limited access, for more than a week. How can the place where sendmail originated fall so far? The campus CIO gave an internal seminar(video, slides) where he discussed the incident, the response, and some of the history. Briefly, the growth of email clients was going to overwhelm the system eventually, but the crisis was advanced when a disk failure required a restart after some time offline. Not discussed is the long series of failures to identify and implement the replacement system (1, 2, 3, 4). Like the New York City Dept. of Education problem discussed yesterday, this is a failure of planning and management being discussed as a problem with (inflexible) technology. How can IT people solve things like this?
693209
submission
BobJacobsen writes:
CBSnews.com has an article about Bill Gates and Steve Balmer answering questions at the "All Things Digital" conference. When asked about "high points" in his time at Microsoft, Gates replied "Windows 95 was a nice milestone". The article continues "He also spoke highly of Microsoft SharePoint Server software, but didn't mention Vista." Was there really nothing else that Gates considered a high point? If true, how sad.
692857
submission
BobJacobsen writes:
FCW has an article about a NASA employee that was suspended for blogging on government time. Seems the unnamed employee's "politically partisan" blog entries were a violation of the Hatch Act. The article ends with a chilling quote from the government's Special Counsel in the case:
"Today, modern office technology multiplies the opportunities for employees to abuse their positions and — as in this serious case — to be penalized, even removed from their job, with just a few clicks of a mouse,"
