Because we seem often to be the quintessential Dilbert workplace.
- Save Me Time, Save Yourself Trouble: Buy Macintosh
- Why the Internet support specialist wants you to buy Macintosh. Hell hath no fury like a Windows user who discovers the Macintosh advantage.
- Anticipating failure
- Whenever a computer expert claims that you won’t have to open the window and that it is okay to seal it shut, require that somewhere on their upgrade they have to include Douglas Adams’s quote about air conditioning.
- IT’s rarefied view of obsolescence
- In IT, where everyone ends up trying to get the latest equipment, it is easy to forget that the rest of the world keeps using things until they are no longer useful.
- Losing and missing the point
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Two random and exceedingly boring observations about letting people play free, and the weight of unquestioned tradition. - The Slashdot security test
- I’ve found the Slashdot Security Test invaluable: if we implement this process and we get hacked, how will Slashdot posters react?
- A culture of incompetence
- A culture of incompetence breeds incompetence by encouraging lowest-common-denominator practices and ultimately driving good people away.
- Troubleshooting Phobia
- Most people seem to have a fear of solutions. It isn’t that they can’t find problems, it’s that they won’t.
- I can’t think of any other way to do it
- There is no system so insecure that a rushed migration can’t make things worse.
- A weekend solution, two months later
- I’ve never seen that look on a consultant’s face before.
- Bet you can’t order just one!
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What better place to put an anti-drug flier than above the coffee machine? - Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your funeral
- The most important first step in the design of any web page is to determine what that page stands for. What is its purpose? Why does it exist? “All of the above” is never a useful answer.
- Publicly available passwords
- Part of managing secure systems is assuming that security will occasionally fail.
- Strangest default ever
- We don’t know who you are… let’s give you access to the web server.
- Boiling users slowly
- One of the ways for an IT department to get a really good reputation is to never take down a service that people are still using. Always make the service so unreliable that nobody uses it. When no one’s using it any more, then take it down.
- Design for the future, but don’t code for the future
- When writing code, future-proofing your design is good (usually). But don’t actually write code for the future, write code for today. You know what you’re doing today, and you don’t know what you’re doing tomorrow.
- Seven habits of meeting-starved people
- I’ll bet I could get rich by creating a five-part series of four-hour meetings on how to not have meetings. We’d spend every day talking about how people need to better prioritize their time, and then at the end we’d schedule follow-up meetings. I could do this—but then I’d have recreated Seven Habits.
- Pigeon managers
- Random reinforcement explains manager behavior?
- Embarrassing password tricks
- Never trust anyone over 30 characters.
- The most popular passwords at school
- We are still lying about passwords to our community. What are the most popular first words in passwords?
- Odd rash of brute-force hacks…
- Oddly, even though we require users to enter 30-character secure passwords, we had a rash of successful brute-force hacks this past week. Of course, it isn’t odd at all. We require them to enter 30-character secure passwords, but then we truncate them to 8 character insecure passwords without telling them.
- Shared uidNumber? You have got to be kidding me!
- Times when I want to quit my job: 1,555 users share a uidNumber with another user. “Oh, yes, we know about that. We’ve been waiting until the new server is ready.”
