A few years ago, when tech jobs were sparse, nobody had the balderdash to speak of leaving their current jobs to pursue brighter opportunities. To have an IT job at all seemed like a gift, one not to be treated carelessly. Yet, by most accounts, the market has changed for the better and in the years that have passed, a somewhat restless IT workforce has emerged. There are good and bad reasons to leave a job, as well as good and bad times, experts told eWEEK. Why you want to leave is as important as what you are leaving for, if not more so.

Hewlett-Packard’s board of directors adjourned an emergency meeting Sunday with no statement on the fate of embattled Chairwoman Patricia Dunn. Some critics have called on Dunn to resign for her role in an internal probe of the company’s board that may have used illegal methods to spy on some directors as well as reporters. HP said in a one-paragraph statement that the board met for several hours Sunday morning and would reconvene late Monday. It said no further statement will be made before then.

The owner of a software piracy Web site has been sentenced to more than seven years in prison–the longest sentence ever handed down for software piracy. Nathan Peterson, 27, of Los Angeles, sold copyrighted software at a huge discount on his site, iBackups.net, prosecutors said. The FBI began investigating the site in 2003 and shut it down in February 2005. U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III on Friday ordered Peterson to pay restitution of more than $5.4 million. Peterson pleaded guilty in December to two counts of copyright infringement for illegally copying and selling more than $20 million in software.

Two CNET News.com reporters’ personal telephone records were accessed by a contractor hired by Hewlett-Packard to uncover the source of boardroom leaks to the media, according to the California attorney general’s office. The investigation conducted by a company hired by HP used a controversial technique called "pretexting" to obtain the personal phone records of CNET News.com reporters Dawn Kawamoto and Tom Krazit, state prosecutors said. Pretexting is a sometimes-illegal method of obtaining personal records through misrepresentation of someone’s identity.

Hewlett-Packard wants to take the hassle out of managing fleets of desktops with a new lineup of business PCs. The computer giant rolled out four new desktop models in its HP Compaq Business PC and HP desktop workstation lines. Two of the models offer Intel’s Core 2 Duo desktop processor, while two include Advanced Micro Devices’ Athlon 64 X2 or Opteron processors. HP made over the desktops with higher-performance processors and other bits, such as supporting chip sets. However, it also emphasized increased security and manageability, two major sources of focus for senior-level IT managers.

How has Sep. 11, 2001, changed the way we live and work? Baseline asked three information-technology managers whose organizations were affected by the attacks in New York City to share their personal and professional experiences from that day and the months that followed.

Though 69 percent of senior IT and business professionals believe that there is a likelihood that a disaster or crisis will interrupt their business workflow over the next two years, 60 percent have not increased their budgets in preparation, finds a study released by infrastructure solutions provider Forsythe Technology. The study found that while only 35 percent of companies were prepared to deploy more than 10 percent of their work force remotely, 30 percent felt they needed 60 percent or more of their employee population present to order to maintain adequate business operations.

With privacy and security breaches now making news almost daily, there has been a recent spate of legislation aimed at helping to solve the problem. Unfortunately, this has created a whirlwind of ineffective compliance activity throughout public and private-sector organizations in Canada. As deadlines rapidly approach, there is a feverish redesigning and revamping of software, forms, Web sites, and policies related to customer and employee data collection. A knee-jerk response to events creates a security blanket with too many holes to effectively deal with criminal activity. With this in mind, the CIO Association of Canada is advocating a more inclusive and thoughtful approach to the problem, which it has described in a Privacy and Security Issues white paper. The approach advocates broader consultation with the IT community, and a better-coordinated, phased-in approach to legislation.

IBM Lotus Sametime V7.5 is a major upgrade in real-time collaboration. No matter where you are IBM Lotus Sametime V7.5 can find you with its new location awareness feature. Learn about the server-side and client-side mechanisms for location awareness and get a peak at a plug-in that uses location data to bring you local attractions.

What happens when Roy loses Fridays? It can happen to the nicest of guys, but the reason’s a bit complex. In another of Nancy Hand’s popular Those Amazing Users series, we learn what went wrong and what Nancy had to do in Notes to fix the problem.

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