Good

This site's network is hit by the Netsky worm, which begins sending infected e-mails that appear to be from people in users' address books. "Apparently, some people hadn't cleaned out their address books for quite a while," says IT. "One lady received an e-mail that said it was from a co-worker who had passed away a year before. The subject line was 'I'm back.' Needless to say, she was a bit startled."

Due to IT not informing users that they have moved the office fax from the PABX to a direct line, fax users who were familiar with dialling '0' for an outside line, then 0011 to send an international fax when the fax was on the PABX, now end up sending a fax to 000 emergency operators. Bad design plan?

Bad

Ironically, the US Department of Justice's lawsuit to block Oracle's proposed takeover of PeopleSoft is predicated on the argument that only three vendors meet the needs of customers seeking enterprise-strength ERP systems: Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP. But for its own ERP purchase, the DoJ looked beyond the Big Three. The agency last week announced it has selected American Management Systems' Momentum software to run its financial management system, in a deal worth up to $US24 million. That price tag places the deal on the high end of the ERP spectrum -- precisely where the DoJ argues customers' choices are limited.

Ugly

Intel and National Semiconductor plan to significantly reduce the amount of lead contained within their products. Intel plans to begin shipping lead-free packages with some of its processors and chipsets starting in the third quarter of this year, and with some of its embedded processors in the second quarter. National Semiconductor's products will be completely lead-free by the end of the year, it said. The two companies plan to use a mixture of silver, copper, and tin. Health concerns over the use of certain chemicals in the semiconductor manufacturing process has also plagued the industry in recent years. Former IBM employees have tried to sue the company and the US Semiconductor Industry Association recently announced it would conduct a retrospective epidemiological study of semiconductor manufacturing employees after a Johns Hopkins University study concluded enough data existed to form a scientific conclusion about the rates of cancer within the industry.