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I can remember TV shows from the 80's that showed a Japanese factory worker alone in a room and armed with a club. The worker would pound on a management, effigy figure with his club. The worker's venting aggression on the effigy management figure was supposedly one of the underlying secrets to the success of Japanese businesses in the international market place.

From suggestion boxes to round tables it's pretty much all been tried in one form or another. Most likely the factors that make for successful operations are myriad and too complex to ever be set in stone.

just my loose change

You need one of these then.

Hey - if Uranus jokes are good enough for Dilbert , they're good enough for you!

Is it the elbonian MP3 player?

That might work, but only if they include a free iPod as well.

Too bad it's still ugly.

It doesn't matter as long as they remember to add Angelina Jolie lips..

Elbonian mp3 player

This MP3 player is the one everyone is talking about!

Need to tell more ? http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilb ert-20060331.html

All it needs is Angelina Jolie lips and everyone will love it!

All it needs is Angelina Jolie lips and everyone will love it!

...has the word "virtual" in the list of adjectives, but not exactly the word "virtualization"... http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/games/career /bin/ms_adj.cgi Maybe the Novell marketing team is using Mission Statement Generator v2.0

You can also find the online version, with virtual tours and everything right here.

Oil is Fungible.

It's one thing to try to hack a static machine that has been carefully prepared for the assault. It's quite a different matter to hack a heavily used workstation which supports many more applications and much higher activity than the above-mentioned test case.

Let's face it - AFAIK OS X doesn't support NX. Given that even XP has no-execute pages at this point, OS X is way behind the times. I don't see Apple implementing ProPolice, rodata, randomized malloc, extensive privsep, or even a strlcpy/strlcat audit.

The above features can mean the difference between getting hacked and not. I don't know if they would help in the latest OS X security problems, but they will close a number of doors.

It goes without saying that users are boneheads. An OS with extensive security features is the best for neophyte users when you don't want the system to go down (praise be to VMS).

If Wisconsin is serious, give out the IP of the OS X box that belongs to the President's Secretary. Have him/her download a bunch of applications - listen to MP3s, run some bittorrent, use Office, get a few chat clients. Let that test run for six months.

In any case, Apple has a security reputation that they don't deserve. Lazy bums.

I'm going to guess that office and IT environments around the globe probably share more in common than their superficial differences (language, decor, degree of automation etc...) suggest. Indeed, petty politics and general insanity are going to raise their heads regardless of your office's time zone. As such, how well does Dilbert, the quintessential North American corporate satire, translate into Arabic? Do you see your office in these cartoons? If not, is there an Arabic version that does a better job?

You can find interesting information here: http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilb ert-20060216.html

How Dilbert life was back then in the late 90's. Sure it was a long time ago, but I bet it's "good practice" someplace...

Everytime I see a business with an AOL email address they lose credibility with me, just like people with the same. I see them as not very tech saavy.

So you don't read Dilbert, because Scott Adams has an "@aol.com" e-mail addres? (Look between the panels of the strip).

Everytime I see a business with an AOL email address they lose credibility with me, just like people with the same. I see them as not very tech saavy.

So you don't read Dilbert, because Scott Adams has an "@aol.com" e-mail addres? (Look between the panels of the strip).

uh oh, the analogy police are coming!

Analogy Police. Please come with me.

Slavery infringes upon the rights of others.

Homosexuality doesn't hurt anybody except arguably for those who are participating in it, and even then, 'harm' is a very vague term, and I doubt any of them see it that way.

As long as your beliefs don't infringe upon others, I don't see how they can be harmful. As long as everyone's tolerant, it should be a win-win situation. Why is this so hard for people to grasp?

By analogy, if I leave my CDs and DVDs out where visitors to my house can grab them, they are not stealing. Instead, I am sharing them

Good analogy.

Intel=Nintendo.
Sony=AMD

I refer you to yesterday's Dilbert.

Here's a bottomless source of information on that and related subjects:

http://www.dilbert.com/

The best argument I've read for both Intelligent Design and Evolution are from Scott Adams the writer of Dilbert.

It's not that difficult these days to get VC funding, at least not with this guy around...

In today's Dilbert cartoon we see a career criminal looking for a job.

It appears that the Internet remains a magnicifently untameable beast still, despite pointy headed attempts like this to control it.

"Postmortem" is now common PHB-speak. These are the same kind of folks who put a task in the default project template called "Post-retrospection Review." You can find that under the Department of Redundancy Department.

> I seem to have missed the reasoning. Terrorism?

As if you did not know that your government are trrorists... or at least henchmen of terrorists... (some of them are mentioned here: http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/shop/html/we asel_poll_results_2005.html, for more just look at some stock indices...)

They're also likely to release more than 6,000,000 keylogging programs this year. They're also likely to release more than 1 keylogging program this year.

Looks a lot like Dogbert http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/imag es/dilbert2005113320118.gif.

Took me a while to realize the article was talking about a different Scott Adams.

What a shame that Scott Adams' "Weasel Awards" for 2005 have already been awarded. There's always 2006 I suppose, but this will probably have been long since done and dusted by then... unless it's still churning though legal systems in the US and elsewhere of course.

On a side note, the results of the Dilbert Weasel Poll rank "Advocating the teaching of intelligent design in our schools" as the weaseliest behavior by a good margin.

An it will continue to pass closer and closer until *SPLAT*.

Haven't you noticed? 5 years ago, it would have been rare to meet 2 dense induhviduals in a week! Now, I usually encounter at least 1 a day. This accumulating density is subtly increasing the Earth's gravitational field. (Yes, yhat's also why your scale keeps going up.)

I believe reality television is to blame. I eagerly tuned in to the first season of Survivor, thinking "Oh boy! Televised Darwin Awards!" But, wha?? They *vote* people off? The smart people? This isn't "survival of the fittest", it's survival of the weaseliest. (It is so a word, Dilbert says so and that's good enough for me!)

And weaselness is closly related to denseness. Don't believe me? Take a minute to talk to your upper management. Then another minute to see what they get away with. See!?

Asok works at Microsoft? I wasn't aware of that...

IT managers who want to deploy an open source solution but are worried about company politics should go ahead and do it without asking, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Japan IT manager Mark Uemura.

Sounds like a good plan, although I'm wondering if my unemployment check will cover my current quality of living.

Faced with an unreliable network, Uemura went ahead and migrated systems from Windows to OpenBSD on the premise that management would trust his judgement.

Is this guy fresh out of school, or what? I direct him to this useful resource.

"PricewaterhouseCoopers is a Windows shop but we were forced to use open source," he said. "I inherited a real nightmare with servers going up and down. There were e-mail outages and on top of that there was a bad relationship between our users and IT."

Now that's something you want to hear from a financial company.

"My experience is that if something has to be done, just do it - don't ask! They will thank you later," he said.

This guy must be truly good to put his ass on the line instead of his manager's. If the boss doesn't sign off on it, I don't do it.

"So we had to put an OpenBSD firewall in front of Checkpoint," he said. "We saved seven salaries worth over one year. It was so dramatic they gave me a big raise and I was promoted from system administrator to IT manager. And because of the savings we get more productivity out of old hardware."

This guy better stay with this job. I'm not sure most employers would appreciate such a cowboy mentality. He's just lucky it didn't blow up.

Because they are using the font "Enron Beelzebub".

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilb ert-20051011.html

...is free. If you've never read Dilbert, you should. If there ever was a comic that engineers could appreciate, this would be it.

From reading TFA, Mr. Schmidt wants to hold programmers directly responsible. Personally I think don't think he has a damn clue. Either he just likes to hear himself talk, is completely nuts, or is just trying to get some publicity. In TFA BCS has a more reasonable opinion: hold the companies responsible insecure code and also shift some of the blame on the customers that don't apply the security patches.

Holding the programmers responsible is quite unwise and has already been detailed from previous posts. One of the biggest problems I see comes from management and sales; certain features are outlined and a completely unreasonable deadline is put forward. To simply put it, you have two ways to code; the quick and dirty or the correct way. I know a good amount of programmers that prefer to put out good quality code however can't due to time constraints, pressure from management, and possible repercussions if the deadline isn't met.

I do admit I'm a little bitter, but after ten years in the corporate world I'd say it's to be expected or you just go and make a cartoon.

It was at a Lawyer's office... It's not really a threat without the silver bullets

You don't even need bullets if you hire a porpoise.

What exactly is wrong with refining the development process?

I guess it depends on who changes the policy.

-ds

That reminds me of one of this week's Dilbert comics.

Damned pointy-haired bosses...

Unless you happen to be Dilbert, there are some situations where it's better to walk away with your marbles instead of losing your marbles trying to "out think" a moron. :P

Thanks for the tips! This is too true. I wish I could find a PHB buzz word site so I could use some words that are sure to get them all listening. ; )

Try http://www.dilbert.com/. There's also a short list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzword.

You could also sign up at http://www.buzzwhack.com/nletter/nlsign.htm to receive daily buzzwords by e-mail.

And, last but not least, here's two bullshit generators: http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html and http://orion.it.luc.edu/~ahill1/buzzword.html.

Now aren't you happy that you read Slashdot and learn the stuff that matters ?

If Linux weren't a threat, Microsoft wouldn't be smearing it in a campaign but instead treating it as an annoying little gnat - by ignoring it and lauding it's own positives. By paying so much attention to and attempting to shape Linux's image publicly, Microsoft is validating it by its own advertising despite the negative content.

People with brains will realize what is propaganda and check Linux out on their own. Thanks to MS.

I completely agree with this... However...

The operative part here is 'with brains'. The problem is that there are a LOT of Pointy Haired Bosses out there that will believe
whatever propaganda a big corporation like Microsoft will throw at them. Especially when they are bombarded with more propaganda about how MS is the answer to all their technology problems, they're on their side, etc etc.

I used to work in hospital IT. The network manager was affectionately known as Mordac the Preventor.

Or it could be that your IT guys aren't lazy, they just don't know anything so they can't characterize the risk associated with H.323 or they don't know how to setup NAT for what you need.

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/games/career /bin/ms.cgi