2007: The Year of Being Outraged?; Earlier daylight-saving start costing IT departments time; Telecommute. Kill a career?
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.
The DST change should be on every reader’s radar screen due to the potential disruption it may cause and I think it’s important that you highlight this time-server misconception in the article.
Glen Drager
Network administrator
Tyrone Area School District
Tyrone, Pa.
The CIO quoted in your article on daylight-saving changes contends that if you’re using something that’s tied externally to a network time server, then who cares about DST changes because the network time servers are going to be updated anyway.
NTP is the dominant time protocol in use today and distributes time updates using UTC (GMT). It is the responsibility of each NTP client to adjust this for a particular time zone and daylight savings time. Using NTP does not by any means solve the DST rule-change problem.
Jeff Davis
Project specialist, lead
Howmet Castings
Whitehall, Mich.
Telecommuting not a career killer
“Telecommute. Kill a career?”: contains a big dose of “Who me, a telecommuter? No way!” Yet these people are probably 100% mobile workers in mid- to senior-level executive positions and if so, they themselves have advanced while time-shifting their commutes and/or being flexible/mobile/teleworking/telecommuting employees.
At presentations I like to ask the audience, “How many of you telework or telecommute?” Not an arm stirs. But when I ask, “How many of you work at home in the evening, at weekends or while you are traveling?” a forest of hands goes up.
Also, out of the 71 countries responding to the survey, how many were not Western management style countries? It would be interesting to see how the percentages would come out if the responses were stratified between Western and Eastern management style countries.
John Edwards
Chairman
The Telework Coalition
Potomac Falls, Va.
