IT Job creations... IT job losses?

[Keith Mastin]

<snip>
> <QUOTE>
>
> One such user, Jeffrey Barczak, a network support specialist with the
> Pennsylvania State University, says that he first experienced problems
> with the OWA security update only hours after installing it on one of
> his personal test systems.

Like a certain smp kernel upgrade did earlier this year...

> "Mail began accumulating in the 'Outboxes' on the Outlook clients that
> my Exchange 2000 Server supports. And for the few POP3 clients that I
> support, their mail got stuck in the SMTP queue," he explains.

wu-imap/sendmail...

> The problem, Barczak discovered, was that Exchange 2000's Information
> Store (MSExchangeIS) and POP3 (POP3Svc) services were apparently hanging
> shortly after start-up. An e-mail to the Windows NT Systems

nfs...

> Administrators mailing list confirmed his suspicions: at least one other
> IT manager responded and acknowledged that he'd experienced similar
> issues. Both Barczak and the other affected IT manager found that simply
> removing the patch didn't solve their problems.

ssl upgrade a few months back...

> Sometime on Friday, Microsoft pulled the OWA security update from its
> TechNet Web site and replaced it with a cryptic message indicating that
> the patch was "temporarily unavailable" and that it would likely "be
> returned to the Web shortly." As of Sunday night, however, the software
> patch was again available on Microsoft's Download Web site.
>
> </QUOTE>
>
> So, you see, this poor guy who probably could be doing so many more
> productive things, instead he's dealing with the morass that MS patches
> bring on.

You haven't been caught in upgrade hell? This is popular on webservers
running MySQL or PostGreSQL, PHP, Apache and so on. Recently when
apache-2.0 made the stage, sounded like a great idea so a whole bunch of
admins on another list I'm on upgraded... and found too late that the php
was not ready, but in the meantime saw a newer version of PHP was
available and upgraded, making for some sporadic database connectivity...
so they upgraded more software and now virtually nothing worked right. It
happens.

>> Then these linux-windoh$ wannabes are releasing Lindoh$s... making
>> things worse by releasing a honeypot as a desktop.
>
> Yeah, don't get me started on Lindows... ;-)
>
>> > Software developers and admins seem to spend too much time trying to
>> > react to the latest threat, rather than building more useful
>> > software and systems.
>>
>> Been to sourceforge lately? They've gotten so huge so fast they can't
>> keep up with the leaps. So many projects...
>
> Of course, and with any luck that will continue to be so. As I said on
> another list, though, there's more to this than just carrying on "doing
> the right thing", I really believe an active fight is in order, how to
> model that fight, I guess, I don't really know.

...the rebellion of youth.. it'll pass. :)

-- 
Keith
--
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