Letters to the editor: "2007: The Year of Being Outraged?"

Outrage lives

Regarding Mark Gibbs’ BackSpin column, “2007: The Year of Being Outraged?”: Yes, I am outraged at my government for giving Sony a free pass. I am also outraged at a war built upon lies, a war that has cost the lives of 150,000-650,000, depending on your source. I am outraged that the Western oil companies are standing to profit from this venture and the companies in charge of oversight have bought the necessary political influence to get the contracts. I am outraged that we cannot account for billions of dollars spent in Iraq. I am outraged that Kenneth Lay's estate will not pay out any money for his offenses. I am outraged that we can reveal the identity of an intelligence agent and see no one held accountable. I am outraged that our government sees no problem with denying a review of the source code for voting machines or will not require paper trails. I am outraged over voter fraud in every election, every state. I am outraged over having my taxes raised so that public employees (teachers, municipal employees, etc.) can still retire at 55 while my retirement age continues to drift to 70 and beyond. I am outraged that WalMart apparently wants me to have Windows XP and Windows Media Player installed and to turn off my firewall, virus protection and pop-up blocker before I can purchase music on-line from them. I am outraged by corruption through and through. I am outraged that the Carlyle group and others like it can wield the influence that they do. I am even outraged that the likes of Warren Buffett can spend a lifetime amassing money, often at the expense of laid-off individuals, and then gain iconic status for giving that money away (shades of Carnegie).

So yes, I have the outrage at the Sony situation, but it is just one on a very long list. See you in the streets!

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Outrage lives

Regarding Mark Gibbs’ BackSpin column, “2007: The Year of Being Outraged?”: Yes, I am outraged at my government for giving Sony a free pass. I am also outraged at a war built upon lies, a war that has cost the lives of 150,000-650,000, depending on your source. I am outraged that the Western oil companies are standing to profit from this venture and the companies in charge of oversight have bought the necessary political influence to get the contracts. I am outraged that we cannot account for billions of dollars spent in Iraq. I am outraged that Kenneth Lay's estate will not pay out any money for his offenses. I am outraged that we can reveal the identity of an intelligence agent and see no one held accountable. I am outraged that our government sees no problem with denying a review of the source code for voting machines or will not require paper trails. I am outraged over voter fraud in every election, every state. I am outraged over having my taxes raised so that public employees (teachers, municipal employees, etc.) can still retire at 55 while my retirement age continues to drift to 70 and beyond. I am outraged that WalMart apparently wants me to have Windows XP and Windows Media Player installed and to turn off my firewall, virus protection and pop-up blocker before I can purchase music on-line from them. I am outraged by corruption through and through. I am outraged that the Carlyle group and others like it can wield the influence that they do. I am even outraged that the likes of Warren Buffett can spend a lifetime amassing money, often at the expense of laid-off individuals, and then gain iconic status for giving that money away (shades of Carnegie).

So yes, I have the outrage at the Sony situation, but it is just one on a very long list. See you in the streets!

Geoff Fisher
Via e-mail

Time for a change

“Earlier daylight-saving start costing IT departments time” contains quotes from two different CIOs that give the impression if you rely on time servers, the Daylight Saving Time change will not be a major issue. Network Time Protocol specifications and every time service that I’m aware of use Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) as the time source and rely on the local host to apply an offset based on time zone/DST to calculate local time. Thus, a machine that syncs to an external time server but hasn’t been updated for the new DST rules will still be applying the wrong offset and will still be off by a hour. As most internal time servers themselves sync to an outside UTC source, simply having an internal server in most cases won’t mitigate the problem.

Rather than help with the problem, time servers syncing hosts that have not had their DST information updated may in fact exacerbate the issue. A user coming to work Monday morning, March 12, to an un-patched computer will find the time hasn’t been updated on his system and will likely try to reset it to the correct time. If successful, when that computer syncs with the time server, it will find it’s off by an hour and will be reset back to the incorrect time. If you have an application that relies on accurate local time information, this would be a very bad Monday indeed.