Sometimes funny, sometimes thoughtful, always a good time
Direct from the New York Times:
Our legal system in action. Woo hoo!
Roger Duronio has recently gained fame as the IT guy you shouldn’t annoy.
It seems he works (err, worked) for a bank called UBS Paine Webber, making a nice comfortable salary of $125,000 a year. He expected a hefty bonus of $50,000, but was sorely disappointed with a mere $32,000 bonus.
Unhappy with this, he decided to take a bit of revenge on his company… so he created a malicious piece of software that deleted all files on the bank’s central server, and then moved to all branch servers and did the dirty work there as well. The program worked nicely, erasing files from every server in every branch. A total of 2,000 servers went down in flames.
In what can only be described as a classic IT situation, backup files didn’t work. Everything Duronio’s little program erased is gone. The bank called in 200 IBM support engineers for what was probably the largest IT firefight of the year, and the director of IT for the bank said the disaster rated “a ten-plus” on a scale of one to ten.
Wow. Never, never make the IT guy mad.
From an Associated Press article:
I’m not sure whether to categorize this as “scary” because it’s our government asking us to spy on one another (again), or “staggeringly stupid” because they think people are going to sit in front of their computers watching a web cam of the Texas desert, waiting for a fuzzy ten-pixel blob to pop out of the sagebrush and make a move for the border.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe the kind people running this place.
The RIAA gets nastier…
Apple is apparently getting snippy with their iPod ads.
Seen on a Linux newsgroup:
I love geek jokes.
“If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America– even those designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants.’ If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles. It’s a transformative issue.”
— Alberto Mora, former General Counsel of the U.S. Navy
Another sign that Armageddon is near.
The Transformers will be a movie this summer.
Man, our house is really stuffy tonight for some reason. It’s been hot the past few days, and we tend not to use the air-conditioning much, but at night normally it cools off nicely. It turns out that tonight in particular it’s cooler outside than inside, and I have some work-related things to do on the laptop. I was kind of grumpy because I was uncomfortably hot, and Laralee suggested I just take the laptop outside.
So I did. I’m sitting in the backyard now, under the half-moon sky, hacking away. Nice!
“Soon we’ll be called the Recording Industry States of America.”
— millixaw on Digg, commenting about the RIAA’s latest tactics.