• 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 »

    11:40 AM on Thu Nov 20 2008
    By Tim the IT Guy
    2,652 views, 32 comments

    Most discussed Incognito: Can we just fire the IT guy instead? Just kidding. more »

  • 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 »

    3:20 PM on Tue Nov 11 2008
    By Tim the IT Guy
    856 views, 4 comments

  • 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)

    1:00 PM on Thu Nov 6 2008
    By Tim the IT Guy
    550 views, 1 comment

    Latest by macbeach: Obviously one of the "change"es that needs to happen is making messing with public infrastructure a hanging offense like it more »

  • 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.

    12:20 PM on Wed Nov 5 2008
    By Tim the IT Guy
    321 views, 1 comment

    Latest 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 »

  • 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.

    8:40 AM on Wed Nov 5 2008
    By Tim the IT Guy
    1,038 views, 5 comments

    Latest by Alaska Miller: Every trick in the manager handbook. Except the chapter on making quality products with profit margins. more »

  • 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:
    You're all missing the point: take the job and then write a book in 18 months - call it the Web 2.0 version of "The Devil Wears Prada."
    More »

    4:40 PM on Mon Nov 3 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    553 views, 1 comment

    Latest by dizzydj: Actually... that would probably be a pretty decent movie, and a lot more entertaining. Even the book would be vastly more »

  • 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.

    12:40 PM on Wed Oct 29 2008
    By Tim the IT Guy
    1,133 views, 7 comments

    Most discussed Paul Boutin: What Tim means is: I use the same password for Valleywag as I do at First Republic. But damned more »

  • 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 »

    5:00 PM on Fri Oct 24 2008
    By Tim the IT Guy
    3,401 views, 9 comments

    Most discussed Nekoni: Maybe he's like my partner, likes the routine, regular money, a challenge, but not too much responsibility, just enough to more »

  • 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 »

    9:35 AM on Fri Oct 24 2008
    By Tim the IT Guy
    1,927 views, 3 comments

  • 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 »

    5:00 PM on Mon Oct 20 2008
    By Tim the IT Guy
    6,093 views, 8 comments

    Most discussed pleinad: I think you're getting it wrong. Emails relating to finances and accounting will have something to do with Sabane-Oxley. Palin more »