The answer is 42.
DaniWeb — Remember Terry Childs?
He was the network administrator for the city of San Francisco who — claiming he was protecting the city government’s computer system from incompetent coworkers — changed the system’s passwords and then for more than a week refused to give them to anyone, even after being arrested.
Childs eventually did give the passwords to Gavin Newsom, and was charged with four felony counts.
Due process is serving Childs well. But what about San Francisco?
Is the city’s IT system safer than it was one year ago?
The city spends $200 million a year on IT, and still has little to show for it.
Based on Gavin Newsom’s latest PR stunt, he’s more interested in the promise of peripheral user applications like Twitter to run his administration than improving the actual technological infrastructure of the government.
And you know, for once I agree with Gavin.
“Technology Nightmare” just isn’t a sexy headline. Unless it’s Halloween in San Francisco.
Whereas “San Francisco showcases free applications” is a super sexy press release headline. Hey, I want to win that prize money!
The truth is this: the Terry Childs incident should never have happened at an enterprise the size of the City & County of San Francisco.
It happened on Gavin’s watch, hasn’t been addressed, and is a perfect illustration of how the mayor with the gelled hair would rather focus on shiny new things, that actually fixing old and broken infrastructure while improving the lives of taxpayers.
No wonder the man-child mayor is so unpopular at home.
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