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How to ensure an orderly collapse of the banking system
The Financial Services Authority is consulting with UK High Street banks about the need to improve their IT systems so that consumers will get their money back more quickly if a bank should fail.…
Contractors and permies to go
Barclays is laying off another 400 IT staff whose "roles and responsibilities are unclear".…
The passengers are revolting
As Sodor wakes to a new year, Thomas and his friends notice some very disturbing things...…
Post-Meltdown rethink
The global economy didn't start getting bad in September, but it did start getting worse. That said, if you believe a set of surveys done by AFCOM - an association of data center professionals that collectively represents over 4,400 data centers - failing banks and various bailouts have not made the situation much worse than it already was for data centers. Not that the situation was necessarily good, mind you.…
Outlook only semi-dour
There is a lot of bad economic news out there, and sometimes, it is easy to wallow in despair. But there is some good news if you are on the IT staff here in the United States. According to Robert Half Technology's latest survey, which asks CIOs and IT managers about their staffing plans for the first quarter of 2009, the vast majority of companies are planning to keep the staff they have, with only a slightly larger number of shops saying they would be making layoffs compared to a year ago.…
Fills CIO spot vacant since October
An ex-IT executive at the failed investment bank Lehman Brothers has been hired by the FBI to be the agency's new technology chief.…
We really want to know...
According to the dictionary on my computer, the origin of the word ‘architect’ is from the Greek: specifically, from arkhi, which means ‘chief’ and tektōn, which means ‘builder’. That sounds like a pretty good start for understanding the role of the architect in IT; the trouble is, in practice things appear to unravel pretty quickly.…
Accessibility AND enjoyment
A British Standard will give business owners and marketing managers new guidance for building and maintaining web content that is accessible to disabled people. A draft version of BS 8878 was released for public comment today.…
RTM date leaked on interwebs
Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) looks set to hit manufacturers in April next year.…
Circulated 'inappropriate' image
Fifteen social workers from South Lanarkshire Council have been given their marching orders for circulating an email featuring a picture of convicted paedophile Gary Glitter "carrying a bag with a child's head superimposed on it", Sky reports.…
City workers under siege
Citibank is cutting another 53,000 from its payroll, on top of the 22,000 job cuts it has already announced.…
No to job losses, offshoring
Workers for Steria, which provides IT support for Co-operative Financial Services have voted in favour of strike action in protest at plans to offshore their jobs.…
Social networking for fun and P45s
Virgin Atlantic has sacked the thirteen staff who labelled customers "chavs" and criticised the maintenance record of the airline's fleet of Boeing 747s which fly from Gatwick.…
'Old boys network'
Four former senior Dell HR executives, all women, have filed a $500m class action that accuses the company of systemic gender and age discrimination.…
Server crash puts prosecutions at risk
Texas Governor Rick Perry has suspended the transfer of state files to IBM IT systems and fined the company $900,000 for data lost through back-up failures.…
Courier firm parcels up work and sends it to Prague
Delivery company DHL is halving the number of IT staff it employs and despatching the jobs to Prague in the Czech Republic.…
Offshoring comes home
Updated Members of union Unite at the Co-op are voting on possible strike action today to prevent compulsory redundancies when work is moved out to India.…
Use humans, save money
So I was at a Kofax customer and partner meeting last week, where the standard view of the electronic digital world taking over the analogue paper document world was stood on its head.…
Too much in one bucket?
HP commands one third of General Motors' $15bn annual technology budget, following its takeover of EDS. And GM doesn't like it.…
Your timing is impeccable
The government today announced that it will spend £30m to create a National Skills Academy for IT, in an attempt to train more of the workers employers are demanding.…
Hyderabad Bangalore or Sangli
Halifax Bank of Scotland is considering moving as many as 2,000 backoffice and IT jobs to India.…
Now, how about eating Siemens and Sun?
Size matters as much as scope in the IT sector, but at the same time, executives like to carve out their own empires within vast conglomerates. Which often means the big IT players have organizational charts that are messier than some of the code they write. Today, the org chart at the North American operations of Fujitsu just got a little simpler.…
'Stuck between rock and hard place'
IT workers at Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) face the job axe again this morning after the UK’s largest mortgage lender was thrown a £12.2bn lifeline from Lloyds TSB.…
Still dreaming of orgone?
Comment 
A lot of noise is currently being generated around Cloud Computing and flexible IT infrastructures based on virtualised platforms.…
As hard-up traders turn to eBay
Lehman Bros techies chucked onto the pavement yesterday face a decent chance of sliding into new jobs quickly, which may go some way towards sweetening the bitter pill of not receiving a final pay cheque.…
Co-op man breaks tape
The organisers of the 2012 Olympics in London have finally named the man who'll be in charge of overspending on implementing its IT strategy.…
Gov says computer scientists not in short supply
The UK is in dire need of ballet dancers, fish-gutters and sheep shearers - but not, it seems IT staff.…
Connectivity issues
Full trading has yet to restart on the London Stock Exchange after computer problems this morning forced it to suspend dealing.…
So the survey says
An IT administrator scorned is not to be trusted, according to a study recently conducted by Cyber-Ark.…
Fingerprints, iris scans sprayed to all comers
An exhibition designed to show off the whizzy high-tech futurescape of biometric identity has succumbed to a bout of very contemporary gremlins, by emailing dozens of fingerprints and iris scans to the wrong people.…
BT insists orders will be delivered
Online retailer Dabs.com has told customers to hang fire for a few days while orders due to be delivered by Amtrak are reassigned to another courier.…
Bad weather, Olympics, leaves on line credit crunch blamed
Ticket sales at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe were down ten per cent this year, in part because of the technical failure of its box office system.…
Offshoring blamed for cash bonanaza
The IT skills shortage in the UK is being made worse by the routine offshoring of entry-level tech jobs.…
Blackberry v iPhone v Windows Mobile
It used to be pretty simple. If you were a large organisation with a hard-core mobile email requirement, the only serious option from a security, robustness, manageability, usability and ease of deployment perspective was Blackberry. If you had a need to develop custom applications, then provided you were happy to construct your own middleware and management stack, then Windows Mobile was the accepted way forward.…
Tragedy of errors
The software outfit behind the chaotic implementation of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe’s box office system has gone titsup.…
.ohdear
Network Solutions - the company that resells top level domains like .com and .net - seems to have misplaced its own website.…
Bringing down the house
Edinburgh Fringe organisers will wait until after the last acts have packed up and gone home before picking over the bones of its box office system fiasco.…
Don't they teach BCC at PR school?
We've almost got bored of stories about people sending emails to lots of subscribers without using the BCC field, but not when the mail is sent to 20,000 people.…
Joke system leaves promoters baying for blood
Officials at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe are to launch an independent inquiry into the failure of its box office system.…
Standing on the shoulders of clowns
The Edinburgh Fringe festival gets underway a week on Saturday (3-25 August) but ever since tickets went on sale the box office system has suffered several major technical cock-ups.…
Large suppliers make hay from greater pricing pressure
Big IT firms are likely to do better from the credit crunch than smaller suppliers, as greater economies of scale allow them to offer cheaper prices.…
The password? Can't say? Won't say?
The sysadmin accused of locking the San Francisco city council out of its computer network was back in jail yesterday after pleading not guilty to four counts of computer tampering.…
US call centre workers can team up
Dell is facing a class action case from 5,000 call centre staff in the US who claim the computer giant has underpaid them since 2004.…
Mayor says bricked IT system won't affect ability to govern
San Francisco’s officials were squirming with embarrassment today as it emerged that they are still paying the salary of the banged-up sysadmin accused of locking down the city’s IT network and refusing to divulge the password.…
City 'doing everything necessary'
Hapless municipal bosses in San Francisco have been locked out of their network by a disgruntled sysadmin charged with computer sabotage.…
Follows the money offshore
Barclays is to axe 1,800 IT jobs in the UK as part of a major business overhaul to set up technology centres in key offshore locations around the world, with 700 workers being forced out by September.…
A header to save the internet
Updated As the AVG LinkScanner continues to spew fake traffic across the internet, web masters say they've uncovered a reliable means of filtering these rogue hits from their log files.…
OMG!
Social networking site Facebook is mainly unavailable this afternoon.…
Web 2.0-up your regs
Dealing with staff who misbehave on the web may be hampered by office policies written without Web 2.0 sites in mind, an employment expert has said. The warning follows disciplinary action against 18 police officers who boasted about crashes on Facebook.…
'Bang, bang, click, click, click'
Exclusive Budget airline easyJet.co.uk has warned Expedia.co.uk to stop selling its flights via its website or face the possibility of legal action.…