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…

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 …

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.

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…

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.A dozen years ago, Microsoft broke Sun's run-anywhere Java technology,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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?The core issue isn't…

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…

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…