Chris Farris

If your company seems evil, the best programmers won’t work for you. That hurt Microsoft a lot starting in the 90s. Programmers started to feel sheepish about working there. It seemed like selling out. When people from Microsoft were talking to other programmers and they mentioned where they worked, there were a lot of self-deprecating jokes about having gone over to the dark side. But the real problem for Microsoft wasn’t the embarrassment of the people they hired.

“Businessman Bernard Madoff pleads guilty to bilking investors out of $65 billion in a Ponzi scheme, forcing the Obama administration to withdraw his nomination for secretary of commerce.”

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department. “We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.” “What’s the problem?” I asked. “We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained. I choked on my latte. “Come again?” “We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,” he repeated.

Sharkoon USB LANPort gets your isolated USB drives on your local network — Engadget.

Opinion: The unspoken truth about managing geeks. Good IT pros are not anti-bureaucracy, as many observers think. They are anti-stupidity. The difference is both subjective and subtle. Good IT pros, whether they are expected to or not, have to operate and make decisions with little supervision. So when the rules are loose and logical and supervision is results-oriented, supportive and helpful to the process, IT pros are loyal, open, engaged and downright sociable.

Just in time for Christmas. Santa, if you’re reading this…… One terabyte ssd hits the shops – The Inquirer.

Is that you need to have ubiquitous Internet to make it work. Google OS: the end of the hard drive? – CNN.com. This looks like a neat device. But if none of my data is stored on the device, it is useless for reading email or working on documents. Wifi coverage is sporadic and expensive. Cellular coverage is even more expensive. WiMax (aka Clear) is only available in a few markets.

I can’t wait for some time to play with this After over six months of development and testing, ViaTalk is proud to announce the release of ViaTalk Mobile, a free application for the Apple iPhone that allows you complete control of your home phone service in the palm of your hand. With this application, you can set up call forwarding, access your voicemail, set special routing options, control security and privacy settings, view call logs, and return calls right from your cell phone.

I suspect this might be of interest to my political geek friends: How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools | FlowingData.