Frank Hayes

It's been a rough year for the IT industry. The death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in October grabbed international headlines. But we also lost other major figures from almost every area of technology, including Xerox PARC founder Jacob E. Goldman, who died in late December. Here's one last look at some of the people who made a big difference.

Dennis M. Ritchie

Godfather of Unix, Father of C

Worried about security in the cloud ? Fret over this instead: Last month, a hacker surfaced who claimed he can sell access to more than a dozen government, military and university Web sites €” all cracked easily because of bad programming.

Who needs the cloud for lousy security ? It's everywhere!

Santa shook his head as he gazed at the PC's screen. "We never should have computerized," he sighed. "Sure, it made inventory and fulfillment and logistics much more effective. But now someone has leaked my list of who's been naughty and nice this year to WikiLeaks. We'll never hear the end of it."

"Aw, cheer up, chief," said the elf at his elbow, tapping away on an iPad. "I'm pretty sure every­body already knew what you thought of 'em. Besides, those leaks just trickle out, and we're almost done -- you just have to decide what to give the IT industry bigwigs. They were all over the naughty list this year."

OK, all together now: Small IT projects succeed; huge IT projects fail. We all know that tune. The latest voice to join the choir is that of Roger Sessions, CTO at ObjectWatch , who has patented a methodology for breaking big projects into small pieces. There's just one problem: In the real world, big projects are big winners.

It's true. And that's a real pain, because Sessions and everyone else in the "huge projects fail" chorus is absolutely correct. We've known that ever since Fred Brooks wrote The Mythical Man-Month in 1975. Since then, the data has piled up. Sessions quotes recent research that says sub-million-dollar IT projects have a better-than-75% success rate. Once the budget passes $10 million, the chance of success drops below 10%. Ouch.

Maybe it's time to rethink the cloud. Yeah, I know -- at this point, most IT shops haven't thought through the cloud the first time. But Microsoft's recent troubles keeping its cloud services available to users shine a harsh light on the issue of cloud availability and reliability.

Trouble is, those are the wrong things to be thinking about.

The NSA's Perfect Citizen program reminds me of several huge chunks of wood that used to be suspended 30 feet above my street by heavy cables strung between utility poles. When I moved in, I needed a lot of extra phone lines, and it seemed like it was taking forever to get the new service to go live. When I finally asked an installer why, he pointed to the chunks of wood.

Know what those are? he asked. No idea, I said.

Last month, the FBI arrested a 19-year-old grocery store employee for trying to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from ATMs. He planned to use default passwords he found online to reprogram the ATMs, convincing them they held $1 bills instead of $20 bills.

Moral of the story:Change your default passwords.

Fifty cents. That's how much U.S. businesses could save by shutting down all their PCs at night and on weekends, according to a study released last month (download file) by the Alliance to Save Energy. Of course, that's not how the report headlined it. The alliance's number was US$2.8 billion per year.

That's the sort of thing that gives "green IT" a bad name.

To Vista or not to Vista? If that's the question, the answer is money. Microsoft would really, really like IT shops to quit waffling and start migrating to the latest version of Windows. After all, Vista has been out for years now. It's stable. It's secure. The new software has even been paid for already under many volume licenses.

But even when that's true, the answer is still money.

Oh, not again. Last week, the SANS Institute and Mitre released yet another list of the most serious programming errors that break software security. And this time, SANS and Mitre got dozens of other organizations to sign on, including Microsoft , Apple, Oracle , Tata, Symantec , the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency .

But no matter how good it is, a list won't solve this problem.

Please tell me this isn't happening in 2009: Last week, an 18-year-old student reportedly used a password-guessing program to get into the account of a Twitter employee (see story). From there, the teen cracker hijacked the accounts of President-elect Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Fox News and 30 other Twitter users.

A password-guessing program? That is so 1983.

Ready for 2009? At this time last year, we were wondering how far down the economy would go . Now we know: way, waaaaay down. And at the moment, it feels like there's no end in sight -- so it's strange to think that this year IT will lead the way to recovery.

But that's exactly what you should be preparing for.