As I look back on my brief career in IT, I realize that things have changed. I started earning a paycheck working in MIS in 1996. At that point in time, very few people had computers at home. Those who did have computers at home very rarely had internet access. If they did have access, it was through services like CompuServe, or AOL or Prodigy. At that point in time, IT had an aura of newness. It was on the cutting edge. The perception was that if you had a job in IT, you were ahead of the game and definitely a cut above the rest of the staff. There was still an aura of mystery and guru-ness to being in IT. Google wasn't around and there weren't readily available resources to solve issues with. You actually had to know what you were doing and understand how the systems worked. There simply weren't blogs and other resources where you could tap into the knowledge of your peers. Your best bet was Usenet or a mailing list.
In this day and age anyone with a little bit of computer competence can handle most IT problems by tapping into the collective knowledge. Colleges and trade schools are filled with the courses and information that a person needs to get up to speed. In the eyes of corporate America, IT workers have gone from the cutting edge, to just another support function like building engineers and janitors.
It's been running Exchange since then, and yes, untold numbers of problems (though nothing like this).
What sort of problems were you having with Exchange? Were they real issues with the software, or lack of technical competence on the part of the IT staff?
I find it funny that they moved off of Exchange and ran into problems. Now granted the problem was with Google's migration API, and if Microsoft had open documentation for their Exchange code then it would be easier for Google to write compatible migration tools. In the long run the school will probably save money because they won't have to house all of their infrastructure and pay the associated costs. Most students probably won't ever leverage all of the features of Exchange so there isn't really any point for the school to pay for all of the bells and whistles.
To my knowledge, Google email support doesn't work on sundays.
For Google's sake I hope that is conjecture on your part and not the reality of the situation. Any organization that is touting their software as "enterprise ready" better have tech support there and ready to take care of problems 24x7x365 for organizations willing to pay for it.
The reality of the situation is that there isn't a conspiracy because the plan is right out there in the open. "The conspiracy" is woven into the fabric of our society and we are indoctrinated into it as soon as we pop out of the womb. In case you missed it, it goes something like this... Capitalism is the be all, end all system that will benefit the human race more so than any other system out there. Republican Democracy is the ultimate form of government and should be used as a template for countries all over the world. One world government is inevitable. As a race we need a large, central governing body to align the peoples of the world toward one common good. Nationalism is a relic, the 20th century equivalent of tribalism and inferior to globalized interconnectedness. There are more memes out there but those are the majority of the over arching ones that shape the world that we live in.
At this late stage of the game, "patriots" are a problem because they are nationalistic and aren't with the globalization program. American patriots are to one world government what al Qaeda and the Taliban are to Western socio/economic dominance of Central Asia and the Middle East.
The end game is to distribute what America has to the rest of the world (in terms of technology, business practices, government, etc.) The American people aren't going to like that. After all, when you're on top of the world, who wants to get knocked down to the level of everyone else? The institutions that control the underpinnings of American society don't care about the American people beyond keeping them happy enough that they don't outright revolt. It isn't conspiratorial to say that the end game results in an America with significantly diminished stature in the world. That is the way of things. An equilibrium will be achieved one way or another. The world won't tolerate millions of people starving in one part of it, while obese slobs throw half eaten cheese burgers out of gas guzzling SUVs in another part of it.
No-one expect the hijackers to fly the planes into buildings.
I really don't want this to devolve into a 9/11 Truth thread where people are hurling insults back and forth. I am going to give you the following link. It gives details about NUMEROUS warnings and STATEMENTS FROM GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS that detail their concerns about planes being used as weapons. It is a PDF and a long read, so I will excerpt one or two quotes that directly address the falsehood that you seem to have accepted as fact. To verify for yourself, you can go to page 8 and read the heading Bojinka
In 1996, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was indicted in the United States for a plot to blow up airliners and crash one of them into CIA headquarters. It was the Bonjinka plot. The FBI put him on their most-wanted list of terrorists; so someone obviously took the plan seriously, which means the government was fully aware of the plan to use passenger planes as flying bombs at least 5 years before 9-11.2
During hearings before the Joint House-Senate Intelligence Committee to Investigate 9-11, Eleanor Hill, who was the committee Staff Director, testified that, in August of 1998, intelligence agencies learned that a group of Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden plane into the World Trade Center. A few months later, she said, it was learned that groups connected with bin Ladin would target New York and Washington and seek an event that was "spectacular and traumatic." That was three years before 9-11.3
In February of 2005, a report of the 9/11 Commission revealed that, in the months before the attack, federal aviation officials had received fifty-two intelligence reports warning of the possibility that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda would launch terrorist attacks against the U.S., and some of those specifically warned of airline hijackings and suicide operations. According to The New York Times: "The Bush Administration had blocked the public release of the full, classified version of the report for more than five months, officials said, much to the frustration of former commission members."5
I like the idea of asking questions. In the context of the speech the speaker might ask, "When was the last time you were in danger of having your personal information compromised?" He can then go on to offer a couple of examples that illustrate his point of how wide spread the problem is.
Just plug in something like a Quantum ATL P3000 series and he's good to go. Of course it's completely overkill and completely overpriced for what needs to be done. On the other hand, there are definite geek points to be earned by having a robotic tape library.
Popularity has very little to do with why a system gets viruses or there would not have been as many viruses for the old Mac systems and there were a shit load of them for OS7, 8 and 9.
You have to remember that the old OS7, 8 and 9 systems WEREN'T connected to the internet. Also, virus writers in the 1990s were writing their virii in x86 ASM code. The Macintosh computers were running Motorola processors. In this day and age, the people writing serious security exploits are criminals and governments. They want money. They want information. What information is kept on a Mac that anybody cares about? Some InDesign files? Oooooo yeah, there's a real huge market for stolen graphics files. Maybe someone has the OSX equivalent of Quickbooks? Yeah, that's a real gold mine right there. Until OSX is running ERP and financial systems, very few people are going to bother to target it. The payoff simply isn't there.
Apples aren't immune to viruses, but they're a lot less likely to get them, because you don't have to escalate privileges all the time, so it's a surprise when you're asked to.
On OSX you are asked to escalate privileges every time the OS wants to install patches. That seems to happen about once a month. As soon as a malware designer comes up with an application that looks like the OSX software updater, a whole slew of OSX users are going to get owned. It seems like it was about a year ago that someone released a trojan disguised as iWorks or whatever that OSX productivity application is. Just like there are sites all over the place that host malicious Windows apps disguised as useful programs, there isn't anything to stop a proliferation of sites targeting OSX. Porn is a universal draw no matter what the OS being used to view it is. There are so many infection vectors that at this point it is only a matter of time before OSX starts getting hit. If not OSX itself, then apps it runs... like Safari, GarageBand or whatever else they throw in for free. Who is to say that Preview isn't vulnerable to some similar PDF based exploits that have been the bane of Adobe's existance for the last couple of years?
Do you even know what you're talking about? Going through the channels? What is this jibberish you are speaking?! Keeping a Linux box up to date is as simple as configuring your package manager to scan the repositories every night and grab the latest release.
I agree and I have to admit that I'm an example of a shitty admin. I put up an Ubuntu box a few months ago. As part of the process, I ran apt-get to update all of the applications installed on the box. I didn't even think to setup apt as a cron job to keep the box up to date. I figured that since it was a Linux box sitting behind a firewall with only a NAT'd SSH connection to the outside world, it would be safe. Well sure enough, a couple of weeks ago I found the box trying to connect to random IRC hosts on 6666 and 6667. Two days later, it took down the internet connection as it opened 65,000+ outgoing connections on port 22 to random hosts all over the internet.
The irony of the situation is that on a network of 20 Windows servers and 150+ XP workstations, the lone Linux box is the box that got owned. That doesn't have anything to do with the merits of the OS itself, but has everything to do with my lack of knowledge of proper *nix security practices and extreme familiarity with Windows security practices. Now the Linux box is running Ubuntu 9.04, has an iptables firewall properly configured and is running apt-get update every night at midnight to pull updates from the security repositories.
Tinfoil hats aside - the real trick is getting the data back off again. It's trivial to convince a cell phone (for example) to record conversations while appearing off. The trick is to get to the data without anyone noticing, while you're in a foreign (possibly hostile) nation. I'd think someone would notice if a cell phone was constantly 'phoning home'.
You might be making things too complicated. Once the conversation has been recorded it's pretty simple to do things the old fashion way. Just steal the device.
I submitted a story here about a year or so ago about Maxtor hard drives with compromised firmware that were made in China. It never got picked up. Go figure.
That's all great if things work like they should. In my case I have followed the directions and the Genius DOES NOT WORK on my iPod. I setup Genius on the desktop. I synced the iPod to the desktop. When I click the center button to bring up the menu on a song that is playing, the Genius option isn't there. There isn't a support article that addresses that problem.
It actually seems to be rather functional. It doesn't really analyze the songs so much as it just matches up other songs from the same genre or similar artists. It works well on the desktop. I can just pick a song from an artist that I like and then it will go through my library and find similar songs and similar artists. If I'm in a classical mood I get a bunch of classical. If I want some techno and electronica I can get that. It works better than random, where it will jump from Beethoven to Guns n Roses to Gang Starr to Orbital.
Their newsgroups are frustrating. It seems like they've re-designed their "Community" page a half dozen times in the last two years. Depending on which route through the site you take to get there, you will end up with a different list of newsgroups. Of course doing the logical thing and searching the site for "newsgroups" returns absolutely nothing of value. About the only saving grace for their newsgroups has been the ability to subscribe to your posts. I had to ask a question about terminal services licensing a couple of weeks ago and I received three accurate responses within two days.
I already griped about Microsoft's site in response to another post in this thread. Apple's site sucks for a different reason. Apple's site seems to be almost 100% marketing related. Any searches done on that site bring up a whole slew of marketing materials and little to no results of a technical nature. For example, a month or so ago I was trying to figure out how to make the Genius feature work on my iPod. Searching for "Genius" brought up all sorts of information about how great and innovative and wonderful the Genius function is. I didn't get anything about how to actually use the stupid thing. Of course this is Apple, and everything is supposed to "just work". Well in my case, it doesn't. Genius works fine in iTunes on my desktop. It doesn't work for shit on the actual device itself.
Just for shits and giggles I tried the same search again. "genius does not work on ipod" That search on the main site doesn't bring up a single technical solution. Doing the same search on the support site brings up solution HT2978 which doesn't address the problem.
2. Most of the Microsoft links are broken anyway. It seems like they completely reshuffle their site organization every three months. Any link older than that will inevitably be broken.
This issue seems to be getting worse as time goes on. I had grown used to finding the occasional reference to a knowledge base article from a third party site or article to be broken. It seems like over the last year, I've found internal links on their site that are broken. For example, there might be a TechNet article that points to a knowledge base article, and that link is broken.
Microsoft's site is pretty horrible. Their knowledge base is atrocious. If I had to make a wild ass guess, I'd say that I can actually find the solution to my Microsoft related problem by using their support tools only about 25% of the time. For the longest time until Microsoft shut Google out of their site, Google was my preferred search tool for microsoft.com related material. If it weren't for the huge numbers of people using and supporting Microsoft software, they would have gone under from a lack of support. Any other company out there that put out a product that is so hard to support and resolve issues with would go out of business. Microsoft gets a pass because so many people are stuck with the crap that we don't have any other choice but to find ways to make it work. I think it's an almost conscious decision intended to drive people to their PAID support offerings. The two or three times in the last ten plus years that I've actually had to call Microsoft for support, they resolved the issue. One time they even refunded the cost of the support call because the issue turned out to be a bug with their software. On that time they had a hot fix coded and available for me in less than 24 hours.
Preparation is key. The last position I was interviewing for I spoke with the Director of IT on the phone first. I spent most of the time asking him questions about his company and the way they had things setup and what they were looking for. He spent time asking me about my experiences with the technologies that his company has already implemented and is planning on implementing in the next fiscal year. I learned enough about his company and what they were up to in that thirty minute phone conversation that I decided I didn't want to go onto the next step. I thanked him for his time and wished him luck on finding a qualified candidate for the position.
The technical workforce marketplace has evolved. Ten years ago you could get a job with a bunch of certifications, or even just some experience. Today (and especially in this economy) there are so many people looking for work that employers have the luxury of screening. When it comes to IT work, it is very important to find competent people. In many cases, the foundation of the company rests in the hands of the IT staff. If the systems don't work or the developers aren't competent, the company will have a hard time doing business.
It shows a serious level of immaturity and a severe ego problem to get in a huff about pre-employment screening and tests. Temp to perm, or contract to full time positions are quite common. If you have the skills to get the job done then you rarely have anything to worry about. Despite all of the concerns over unscrupulous employers who will take advantage of workers (sure, there are a few out there), the large majority of companies don't want to invest the time in breaking in a long chain of employees. They want to hire someone who is good at what they do and who has the ability to help the company succeed. Once they find that person, they will do whatever they can to retain that person.
Where did you get the information that there are still fire fighters protecting the observatory? Yesterday the LA Times was saying that the fire fighters had cleared as much fuel as they could from the observatory campus and then they left because of the danger posed by the fire. They were leaving it in the hands of fate whether or not the mostly concrete and cement buildings would withstand the fire.
Slashdot Mirror
As I look back on my brief career in IT, I realize that things have changed. I started earning a paycheck working in MIS in 1996. At that point in time, very few people had computers at home. Those who did have computers at home very rarely had internet access. If they did have access, it was through services like CompuServe, or AOL or Prodigy. At that point in time, IT had an aura of newness. It was on the cutting edge. The perception was that if you had a job in IT, you were ahead of the game and definitely a cut above the rest of the staff. There was still an aura of mystery and guru-ness to being in IT. Google wasn't around and there weren't readily available resources to solve issues with. You actually had to know what you were doing and understand how the systems worked. There simply weren't blogs and other resources where you could tap into the knowledge of your peers. Your best bet was Usenet or a mailing list.
In this day and age anyone with a little bit of computer competence can handle most IT problems by tapping into the collective knowledge. Colleges and trade schools are filled with the courses and information that a person needs to get up to speed. In the eyes of corporate America, IT workers have gone from the cutting edge, to just another support function like building engineers and janitors.
..but I'm too tired, and I forgot what I was going to say.
My very first email address was on a ...demon.co.uk host, back in the early 1990s.
It's been running Exchange since then, and yes, untold numbers of problems (though nothing like this).
What sort of problems were you having with Exchange? Were they real issues with the software, or lack of technical competence on the part of the IT staff?
I find it funny that they moved off of Exchange and ran into problems. Now granted the problem was with Google's migration API, and if Microsoft had open documentation for their Exchange code then it would be easier for Google to write compatible migration tools. In the long run the school will probably save money because they won't have to house all of their infrastructure and pay the associated costs. Most students probably won't ever leverage all of the features of Exchange so there isn't really any point for the school to pay for all of the bells and whistles.
To my knowledge, Google email support doesn't work on sundays.
For Google's sake I hope that is conjecture on your part and not the reality of the situation. Any organization that is touting their software as "enterprise ready" better have tech support there and ready to take care of problems 24x7x365 for organizations willing to pay for it.
The reality of the situation is that there isn't a conspiracy because the plan is right out there in the open. "The conspiracy" is woven into the fabric of our society and we are indoctrinated into it as soon as we pop out of the womb. In case you missed it, it goes something like this... Capitalism is the be all, end all system that will benefit the human race more so than any other system out there. Republican Democracy is the ultimate form of government and should be used as a template for countries all over the world. One world government is inevitable. As a race we need a large, central governing body to align the peoples of the world toward one common good. Nationalism is a relic, the 20th century equivalent of tribalism and inferior to globalized interconnectedness. There are more memes out there but those are the majority of the over arching ones that shape the world that we live in.
At this late stage of the game, "patriots" are a problem because they are nationalistic and aren't with the globalization program. American patriots are to one world government what al Qaeda and the Taliban are to Western socio/economic dominance of Central Asia and the Middle East.
The end game is to distribute what America has to the rest of the world (in terms of technology, business practices, government, etc.) The American people aren't going to like that. After all, when you're on top of the world, who wants to get knocked down to the level of everyone else? The institutions that control the underpinnings of American society don't care about the American people beyond keeping them happy enough that they don't outright revolt. It isn't conspiratorial to say that the end game results in an America with significantly diminished stature in the world. That is the way of things. An equilibrium will be achieved one way or another. The world won't tolerate millions of people starving in one part of it, while obese slobs throw half eaten cheese burgers out of gas guzzling SUVs in another part of it.
No-one expect the hijackers to fly the planes into buildings.
I really don't want this to devolve into a 9/11 Truth thread where people are hurling insults back and forth. I am going to give you the following link. It gives details about NUMEROUS warnings and STATEMENTS FROM GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS that detail their concerns about planes being used as weapons. It is a PDF and a long read, so I will excerpt one or two quotes that directly address the falsehood that you seem to have accepted as fact. To verify for yourself, you can go to page 8 and read the heading Bojinka
http://www.freedomforceinternational.org/pdf/futurecalling4.pdf
In 1996, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was indicted in the United States for a plot to
blow up airliners and crash one of them into CIA headquarters. It was the Bonjinka plot. The FBI put him on their most-wanted list of terrorists; so someone obviously took the plan seriously, which means the government was fully aware of the plan to use passenger planes as flying bombs at least 5 years before 9-11.2
During hearings before the Joint House-Senate Intelligence Committee to Investigate 9-11, Eleanor Hill, who was the committee Staff Director, testified that, in August of 1998,
intelligence agencies learned that a group of Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden plane into the World Trade Center. A few months later, she said, it was learned that groups connected with bin Ladin would target New York and Washington and seek an event that was "spectacular and traumatic." That was three years before 9-11.3
In February of 2005, a report of the 9/11 Commission revealed that, in the months before the attack, federal aviation officials had received fifty-two intelligence reports warning of the possibility that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda would launch terrorist attacks against the U.S., and some of those specifically warned of airline hijackings and suicide operations. According to The New York Times: "The Bush Administration had blocked the public release of the full, classified version of the report for more than five months, officials said, much to the frustration of former commission members."5
I like the idea of asking questions. In the context of the speech the speaker might ask, "When was the last time you were in danger of having your personal information compromised?" He can then go on to offer a couple of examples that illustrate his point of how wide spread the problem is.
Just plug in something like a Quantum ATL P3000 series and he's good to go. Of course it's completely overkill and completely overpriced for what needs to be done. On the other hand, there are definite geek points to be earned by having a robotic tape library.
I wish I had a mod point. That's the funniest quip I've read in a while.
You have to remember that the old OS7, 8 and 9 systems WEREN'T connected to the internet. Also, virus writers in the 1990s were writing their virii in x86 ASM code. The Macintosh computers were running Motorola processors. In this day and age, the people writing serious security exploits are criminals and governments. They want money. They want information. What information is kept on a Mac that anybody cares about? Some InDesign files? Oooooo yeah, there's a real huge market for stolen graphics files. Maybe someone has the OSX equivalent of Quickbooks? Yeah, that's a real gold mine right there. Until OSX is running ERP and financial systems, very few people are going to bother to target it. The payoff simply isn't there.
On OSX you are asked to escalate privileges every time the OS wants to install patches. That seems to happen about once a month. As soon as a malware designer comes up with an application that looks like the OSX software updater, a whole slew of OSX users are going to get owned. It seems like it was about a year ago that someone released a trojan disguised as iWorks or whatever that OSX productivity application is. Just like there are sites all over the place that host malicious Windows apps disguised as useful programs, there isn't anything to stop a proliferation of sites targeting OSX. Porn is a universal draw no matter what the OS being used to view it is. There are so many infection vectors that at this point it is only a matter of time before OSX starts getting hit. If not OSX itself, then apps it runs... like Safari, GarageBand or whatever else they throw in for free. Who is to say that Preview isn't vulnerable to some similar PDF based exploits that have been the bane of Adobe's existance for the last couple of years?
Do you even know what you're talking about? Going through the channels? What is this jibberish you are speaking?! Keeping a Linux box up to date is as simple as configuring your package manager to scan the repositories every night and grab the latest release.
I agree and I have to admit that I'm an example of a shitty admin. I put up an Ubuntu box a few months ago. As part of the process, I ran apt-get to update all of the applications installed on the box. I didn't even think to setup apt as a cron job to keep the box up to date. I figured that since it was a Linux box sitting behind a firewall with only a NAT'd SSH connection to the outside world, it would be safe. Well sure enough, a couple of weeks ago I found the box trying to connect to random IRC hosts on 6666 and 6667. Two days later, it took down the internet connection as it opened 65,000+ outgoing connections on port 22 to random hosts all over the internet.
The irony of the situation is that on a network of 20 Windows servers and 150+ XP workstations, the lone Linux box is the box that got owned. That doesn't have anything to do with the merits of the OS itself, but has everything to do with my lack of knowledge of proper *nix security practices and extreme familiarity with Windows security practices. Now the Linux box is running Ubuntu 9.04, has an iptables firewall properly configured and is running apt-get update every night at midnight to pull updates from the security repositories.
You might be making things too complicated. Once the conversation has been recorded it's pretty simple to do things the old fashion way. Just steal the device.
I submitted a story here about a year or so ago about Maxtor hard drives with compromised firmware that were made in China. It never got picked up. Go figure.
How do you explain the huge numbers of Office 2007 AND Open Office installs if Windows users don't upgrade their software?
That's all great if things work like they should. In my case I have followed the directions and the Genius DOES NOT WORK on my iPod. I setup Genius on the desktop. I synced the iPod to the desktop. When I click the center button to bring up the menu on a song that is playing, the Genius option isn't there. There isn't a support article that addresses that problem.
It actually seems to be rather functional. It doesn't really analyze the songs so much as it just matches up other songs from the same genre or similar artists. It works well on the desktop. I can just pick a song from an artist that I like and then it will go through my library and find similar songs and similar artists. If I'm in a classical mood I get a bunch of classical. If I want some techno and electronica I can get that. It works better than random, where it will jump from Beethoven to Guns n Roses to Gang Starr to Orbital.
Their newsgroups are frustrating. It seems like they've re-designed their "Community" page a half dozen times in the last two years. Depending on which route through the site you take to get there, you will end up with a different list of newsgroups. Of course doing the logical thing and searching the site for "newsgroups" returns absolutely nothing of value. About the only saving grace for their newsgroups has been the ability to subscribe to your posts. I had to ask a question about terminal services licensing a couple of weeks ago and I received three accurate responses within two days.
I already griped about Microsoft's site in response to another post in this thread. Apple's site sucks for a different reason. Apple's site seems to be almost 100% marketing related. Any searches done on that site bring up a whole slew of marketing materials and little to no results of a technical nature. For example, a month or so ago I was trying to figure out how to make the Genius feature work on my iPod. Searching for "Genius" brought up all sorts of information about how great and innovative and wonderful the Genius function is. I didn't get anything about how to actually use the stupid thing. Of course this is Apple, and everything is supposed to "just work". Well in my case, it doesn't. Genius works fine in iTunes on my desktop. It doesn't work for shit on the actual device itself.
Just for shits and giggles I tried the same search again. "genius does not work on ipod" That search on the main site doesn't bring up a single technical solution. Doing the same search on the support site brings up solution HT2978 which doesn't address the problem.
This issue seems to be getting worse as time goes on. I had grown used to finding the occasional reference to a knowledge base article from a third party site or article to be broken. It seems like over the last year, I've found internal links on their site that are broken. For example, there might be a TechNet article that points to a knowledge base article, and that link is broken.
Microsoft's site is pretty horrible. Their knowledge base is atrocious. If I had to make a wild ass guess, I'd say that I can actually find the solution to my Microsoft related problem by using their support tools only about 25% of the time. For the longest time until Microsoft shut Google out of their site, Google was my preferred search tool for microsoft.com related material. If it weren't for the huge numbers of people using and supporting Microsoft software, they would have gone under from a lack of support. Any other company out there that put out a product that is so hard to support and resolve issues with would go out of business. Microsoft gets a pass because so many people are stuck with the crap that we don't have any other choice but to find ways to make it work. I think it's an almost conscious decision intended to drive people to their PAID support offerings. The two or three times in the last ten plus years that I've actually had to call Microsoft for support, they resolved the issue. One time they even refunded the cost of the support call because the issue turned out to be a bug with their software. On that time they had a hot fix coded and available for me in less than 24 hours.
Preparation is key. The last position I was interviewing for I spoke with the Director of IT on the phone first. I spent most of the time asking him questions about his company and the way they had things setup and what they were looking for. He spent time asking me about my experiences with the technologies that his company has already implemented and is planning on implementing in the next fiscal year. I learned enough about his company and what they were up to in that thirty minute phone conversation that I decided I didn't want to go onto the next step. I thanked him for his time and wished him luck on finding a qualified candidate for the position.
The technical workforce marketplace has evolved. Ten years ago you could get a job with a bunch of certifications, or even just some experience. Today (and especially in this economy) there are so many people looking for work that employers have the luxury of screening. When it comes to IT work, it is very important to find competent people. In many cases, the foundation of the company rests in the hands of the IT staff. If the systems don't work or the developers aren't competent, the company will have a hard time doing business.
It shows a serious level of immaturity and a severe ego problem to get in a huff about pre-employment screening and tests. Temp to perm, or contract to full time positions are quite common. If you have the skills to get the job done then you rarely have anything to worry about. Despite all of the concerns over unscrupulous employers who will take advantage of workers (sure, there are a few out there), the large majority of companies don't want to invest the time in breaking in a long chain of employees. They want to hire someone who is good at what they do and who has the ability to help the company succeed. Once they find that person, they will do whatever they can to retain that person.
Where did you get the information that there are still fire fighters protecting the observatory? Yesterday the LA Times was saying that the fire fighters had cleared as much fuel as they could from the observatory campus and then they left because of the danger posed by the fire. They were leaving it in the hands of fate whether or not the mostly concrete and cement buildings would withstand the fire.