Check out the PogoPlug Solution which combines a hardware device for storage with cloud accessibility for all the devices you listed. It's extremely easy to use. You don't have to use their cloud solution if you purchase the cheap hardware device. You simply plug in an external hard drive/thumb drive and use their Internet interface on all your devices not just for file storage, but also for streaming.
I once oversaw moving a firms's HQ and IT functions from Silicon Valley to San Antonio, TX because of the "math" some white collar genius put together like this Forbes nonsense. Sure, the "average" wage was one-half of what it was in Palo Alto, but because of the "quality" of local talent, we ended up hiring THREE TIMES as many staff to do the same amount of work. (For the math-challenged, that meant productivity sucked by 50%.) This wasn't just a drain on company resources, but on the few people who DID know their chops and had to hoist it in for the dullards. Those that made the move and saw the disaster had to in turn move completely out of the area to restore sanity to their careers. And the "icing on the cake" is that San Antonio is the only place I've stood hip deep in mud and had sand blow in my face. No thanky-thanky.
No, they don't and I have the tickets with Google to prove it. I send out an HTML email newsletter and subscribe to many services such as gmail for testing and to see how things look to the consumer. Gmail flunks big time and there support continues to acknowledge, "Yeah". But that's just one of the symptoms that speaks to the disease of pushing out the incomplete and not coming back to address.
Uh...who CARES about RFC822? Let's go with the expectations of providing features and content on par with rivals and not satisfying the nit-picky trivia of the geek hordes.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to rant just a bit because I've found many things Google has done to be incomplete. Like another company we so enthusiastically bash for putting out products that take several iterations before even getting close to the feature set first anticipated, I've seen this with Google. For instance, gmail doesn't handle HTML email, to name 1 of a number of shortcomings when compared to other rival online offerings. I'd like to see them solidify and expand on such basics, but they seem to always be partially implementing something else to expand the overall base of subset-implemented apps. I know, I know...I'm a heretic, so let the flaming begin...
Friday afternoon the issue began creeping throughout our network. The irony is that the mis-cued anti-virus patch effectively acted so much like a virus that we kept looking to Trend Micro for the solution, when it turned out to be the source. [sigh] Does anyone else feel like the space-time continuum just hiccuped and provided a brief repeat of the state of enterprise computing circa 1981?
In the spirit of "the glass is half full", Steinberg recently released a new version of their music software "Cubase" and, on the very day it was available, released the "x.1" patch. Yes, some of you "the glass is half empty" people will say they should have waited on the major release, but I say this is a step in the right direction.
And until we're all running the exact same hardware I think we're going to have to settle for "less than perfect" from the software industry. When there's a bug with every sound card on the planet I fault the software company's lack of testing/research. When it doesn't work with a sound card only 116 people on the planet own, it's still listed as a "bug" and, lumped together with the other statistically insignificant "bugs" looks awful when reported together.
Finally, to all these estimates of how much $$$ "bad" software is costing....How much would it cost WITHOUT the software? Do you really want to jump in the WayBack machine and return to the glory days of a totally manual world where every problem was described as, "It's somewhere in the secreatarial pool?"
With a modicum of research of his "resume" and verification of RESULTS at past positions of employment they could have EASILY discovered "the man behind the curtain." It's amazing how the assumption "Well, he was CIO for the County of San Bernardino" equated to "Therefore he's qualified to run the whole state." Even a cursory look at his performance there would raise warnings.
But then, when the highest ranking IT executive in the largest state of the union only gets $122K/year, another dimension is added to "you get what you pay for". Ergo, what you deserve.
Stated this in a previous thread but worth stating again. Having worked for the bucket-head-known-as Eli Cortez who was appointed the State CIO and got them in this mess, the governor and California are getting what they deserve. This man has a history of screwing everything up on a grand and global scale like some sort of nuclear picnic. Just shows how powerful the unqualified and criminially negligient can be if you place them in key positions. Having destroyed a county and now a state, I'm sure Eli Cortez is being recruited to run the federal government as we speak. Call it "destiny."
Wish I'd seen this posting when it originally came out. I once worked for the "fabulous" Eli Cortez, the State of California CIO responsible for this fiasco. Who -- for the record -- was once an employee of Oracle. This is not about government ineptitude as much as it is about having an unqualified pinhead given responsibility beyond both his personal expertise and his work history. As a Californian I'm outraged not by the purchase itself but by this glistening example of HR malaise in the hiring of an unqualified person who, with just a few phone calls, could have been verified as dangerous and inept by the previous organizations he worked for. This is the "Peter Principle" at its classic best.
The music industry's "math" -- first begun with consumer reel-to-reel hardware and perpetuated through such media as 8-track, cassette, DAT, mini-disc, CD, DVD and now downloads -- is that every single download equals a lost sale. This is the truly absurd aspect of their argument. They try to make us believe that each and every download represents a lost album sale! Piracy estimates in this regard have ALWAYS been completely misrepresented. MAYBE it could reach as high as 10% of downloads, but I doubt it would even be THAT high. Following their reasoning, the music industry should have died in the '50's with the advent of the consumer reel-to-reel deck. Or in the 60's with 8-tracks, in the 70's with cassettes, in the 80's with DAT and so on and so on. I guess we're doomed to have this discussion every time a new technology ingrains itself into the music industry.
With a little over 20 years experience of managing very large software projects for Fortune 500 companies I can identify the root cause for the spectacular successes and the colossal failures: Scope Creep.
If the business requirements have been properly defined and management discipline exercised to keep within the original scope, every estimate I've developed -- using a variety of methods over the year -- has been successful. But those instances where the specs continually change, the business requirements are "discovered" along the way and/or new requirements are added to the mix are all failures. This has been true whether I've led teams doing something "no one's done before" or the "same old thing" again.
Kudos to everyone here that has posted information on the REAL solutions in the form risk management, scope containment, good old fashioned discipline, and the like.
Can an Internet model be developed to leverage a similar, existing system by which radio stations pay artists for playing their copyrighted material WITHOUT charging the listener?
Radio stations are required to turn in playlists and pay set royalties to a couple of organizations who distribute payments to the artists. The money comes from radio stations advertising revenues, not directly from the consumer. But the more songs (copyrighted material) a radio station plays, the more it throws into this "pot", and the more the artist is monetarily rewarded in the end if his/her song is played more. (Analagous to "he/she whose stuff is downloaded more, gets more.)
I'm not saying this exact system can be used without some tweaking, but my point is that there are already precedents, tracking organizations, and methods of distributing copyrighted material that compensate the author without burdening the consumer. (Can you imagine if we had to check the "I Agree" box before listening to a song on the raido? Get real....)
At the risk of heresy, could such a system be implemented wherein neither the ISP or the consumer is directly billed, but the website host? (OK, I'm putting my absestos kevlar vest on now.)
In seeking to run a workstation that is 100% free of MS I find that I can live quite well within the confines of StarOffice (I'm sure they can fix the "annoyances" that currently exist) but really miss my Adobe products. (Anyone from that organization reading this?)
I've never had a problem buying software or hardware over the web. This Christmas I dared to move out beyond my "geek" boundaries and make purchases from J.C. Penney, Sears and Spiegel. I'm 0-and-3.
There was the confirmation email from Sears that the products were on the way, but following it up through their web site order tracking mechanism I discovered that they were unable to verify my Sears credit card (with over $1,000 free on it for a $250 order) so, in reality, it was not ordered nor coming.
The Spiegel order hiccuped and died on the web site upon hitting the "Purchase Now" button, and J.C. Penney repeatedly stated on the web site that the desired items were available, but follow-up indicated they were always back-ordered. Hey...if I know up front it's back-ordered and still make the purchase, I don't care. But the reverse....I'm not happy.
Discussions above regarding the integrity of Andersen Consulting and the use of NT servers aside, the bottom line is that it just hasn't worked for me yet.
I'm usually a world-class techno-geek when it comes to stuff like this, but I don't think it will actually move beyond niche markets until someone comes up with an interface that is as fast as a keyboard. I can clearly see the ability to download tons of stuff for viewing, I've just never seen anything remotely close to duplicating the input/response speed of a keyboard or even the pen-input grafitti system used by the Pilot. I saw one with a tiny keyboard wrapped around the forearm. NOT suitable for mainstream use, unless "mainstream use" is pretty much limited to receiving email/movies.
When you hold a book, magazine or report in your hands, you have a lot of information about the object you'll never get from the same information presented on a screen. Whether you realize it or not, the mind makes associations as to WHERE past information was located on a page, how much further to the end of the article, the relationship of information in a work such as by chapters, etc., etc.
I think we underestimate the physical and visual indicators we get from physically handling media. I believe that if these types of cues can be reproduced in an electronic format that then -- and only then -- will we begin to see the decline in paper. Electronic bookmarking and highlighting and just too primitive at this point to replace these physical manifestations that indicate that "reading" is much more than just processing the information with the eye.
I've been doing this dance for a few weeks now. While I agree with the individual points made, let's understand the REAL problem: If anyone in the HR field knew enough about OUR field, they would've LEFT the HR field a long time ago and would be among the geek ranks! This applies to a lot of areas if you twist the situation a bit. Pretend YOU'RE a recruiter looking for women's fashion designers for a client firm. Not knowing anything substantive of the industry I have no idea how to evaluate their resumes, etc.
Solution: Turn the tables on them. Make direct contact with the HR weenie and take charge from your end. After all, they don't get their commission if they don't place you.
No need to de-classify anything. It's published already in the US Government Code EXACTLY what NSA's parameters are: Can not operate against anything on American soil. And you think those of us conducting these operations just casually shake that off? Get real.
Why is it every movie portrays NSA, CIA, FBI -- whatever -- as mind-numbed robots that will kill every American baby if it remotely threatens national security? Who works for NSA? American citizen. As a former SIGINT analyst let me tell you what the first couple of weeks of training consist of: Learning the US Government laws that govern the activities of the NSA. You don't stop being a citizen when you join, and the reason the public finds out about any inappropriate actions is that these same American citizens will let it be know that laws have been violated, usually through a leak to the press. If you think these agencies are "out to get" you, you probably think the moon landing never really happened, Elvis was on the last space shuttle mission, the earth is flat....
Slashdot Mirror
Check out the PogoPlug Solution which combines a hardware device for storage with cloud accessibility for all the devices you listed. It's extremely easy to use. You don't have to use their cloud solution if you purchase the cheap hardware device. You simply plug in an external hard drive/thumb drive and use their Internet interface on all your devices not just for file storage, but also for streaming.
I once oversaw moving a firms's HQ and IT functions from Silicon Valley to San Antonio, TX because of the "math" some white collar genius put together like this Forbes nonsense. Sure, the "average" wage was one-half of what it was in Palo Alto, but because of the "quality" of local talent, we ended up hiring THREE TIMES as many staff to do the same amount of work. (For the math-challenged, that meant productivity sucked by 50%.) This wasn't just a drain on company resources, but on the few people who DID know their chops and had to hoist it in for the dullards. Those that made the move and saw the disaster had to in turn move completely out of the area to restore sanity to their careers. And the "icing on the cake" is that San Antonio is the only place I've stood hip deep in mud and had sand blow in my face. No thanky-thanky.
No, they don't and I have the tickets with Google to prove it. I send out an HTML email newsletter and subscribe to many services such as gmail for testing and to see how things look to the consumer. Gmail flunks big time and there support continues to acknowledge, "Yeah". But that's just one of the symptoms that speaks to the disease of pushing out the incomplete and not coming back to address.
Uh...who CARES about RFC822? Let's go with the expectations of providing features and content on par with rivals and not satisfying the nit-picky trivia of the geek hordes.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to rant just a bit because I've found many things Google has done to be incomplete. Like another company we so enthusiastically bash for putting out products that take several iterations before even getting close to the feature set first anticipated, I've seen this with Google. For instance, gmail doesn't handle HTML email, to name 1 of a number of shortcomings when compared to other rival online offerings. I'd like to see them solidify and expand on such basics, but they seem to always be partially implementing something else to expand the overall base of subset-implemented apps. I know, I know...I'm a heretic, so let the flaming begin...
Friday afternoon the issue began creeping throughout our network. The irony is that the mis-cued anti-virus patch effectively acted so much like a virus that we kept looking to Trend Micro for the solution, when it turned out to be the source. [sigh] Does anyone else feel like the space-time continuum just hiccuped and provided a brief repeat of the state of enterprise computing circa 1981?
Properr formance
Prior
Planning
Prevents
Piss
Poor
Pe
Double duh....
In the spirit of "the glass is half full", Steinberg recently released a new version of their music software "Cubase" and, on the very day it was available, released the "x.1" patch. Yes, some of you "the glass is half empty" people will say they should have waited on the major release, but I say this is a step in the right direction.
And until we're all running the exact same hardware I think we're going to have to settle for "less than perfect" from the software industry. When there's a bug with every sound card on the planet I fault the software company's lack of testing/research. When it doesn't work with a sound card only 116 people on the planet own, it's still listed as a "bug" and, lumped together with the other statistically insignificant "bugs" looks awful when reported together.
Finally, to all these estimates of how much $$$ "bad" software is costing....How much would it cost WITHOUT the software? Do you really want to jump in the WayBack machine and return to the glory days of a totally manual world where every problem was described as, "It's somewhere in the secreatarial pool?"
With a modicum of research of his "resume" and verification of RESULTS at past positions of employment they could have EASILY discovered "the man behind the curtain." It's amazing how the assumption "Well, he was CIO for the County of San Bernardino" equated to "Therefore he's qualified to run the whole state." Even a cursory look at his performance there would raise warnings.
But then, when the highest ranking IT executive in the largest state of the union only gets $122K/year, another dimension is added to "you get what you pay for". Ergo, what you deserve.
Stated this in a previous thread but worth stating again. Having worked for the bucket-head-known-as Eli Cortez who was appointed the State CIO and got them in this mess, the governor and California are getting what they deserve. This man has a history of screwing everything up on a grand and global scale like some sort of nuclear picnic. Just shows how powerful the unqualified and criminially negligient can be if you place them in key positions. Having destroyed a county and now a state, I'm sure Eli Cortez is being recruited to run the federal government as we speak. Call it "destiny."
Wish I'd seen this posting when it originally came out. I once worked for the "fabulous" Eli Cortez, the State of California CIO responsible for this fiasco. Who -- for the record -- was once an employee of Oracle. This is not about government ineptitude as much as it is about having an unqualified pinhead given responsibility beyond both his personal expertise and his work history. As a Californian I'm outraged not by the purchase itself but by this glistening example of HR malaise in the hiring of an unqualified person who, with just a few phone calls, could have been verified as dangerous and inept by the previous organizations he worked for. This is the "Peter Principle" at its classic best.
The music industry's "math" -- first begun with consumer reel-to-reel hardware and perpetuated through such media as 8-track, cassette, DAT, mini-disc, CD, DVD and now downloads -- is that every single download equals a lost sale. This is the truly absurd aspect of their argument. They try to make us believe that each and every download represents a lost album sale! Piracy estimates in this regard have ALWAYS been completely misrepresented. MAYBE it could reach as high as 10% of downloads, but I doubt it would even be THAT high. Following their reasoning, the music industry should have died in the '50's with the advent of the consumer reel-to-reel deck. Or in the 60's with 8-tracks, in the 70's with cassettes, in the 80's with DAT and so on and so on. I guess we're doomed to have this discussion every time a new technology ingrains itself into the music industry.
With a little over 20 years experience of managing very large software projects for Fortune 500 companies I can identify the root cause for the spectacular successes and the colossal failures: Scope Creep.
If the business requirements have been properly defined and management discipline exercised to keep within the original scope, every estimate I've developed -- using a variety of methods over the year -- has been successful. But those instances where the specs continually change, the business requirements are "discovered" along the way and/or new requirements are added to the mix are all failures. This has been true whether I've led teams doing something "no one's done before" or the "same old thing" again.
Kudos to everyone here that has posted information on the REAL solutions in the form risk management, scope containment, good old fashioned discipline, and the like.
Can an Internet model be developed to leverage a similar, existing system by which radio stations pay artists for playing their copyrighted material WITHOUT charging the listener?
Radio stations are required to turn in playlists and pay set royalties to a couple of organizations who distribute payments to the artists. The money comes from radio stations advertising revenues, not directly from the consumer. But the more songs (copyrighted material) a radio station plays, the more it throws into this "pot", and the more the artist is monetarily rewarded in the end if his/her song is played more. (Analagous to "he/she whose stuff is downloaded more, gets more.)
I'm not saying this exact system can be used without some tweaking, but my point is that there are already precedents, tracking organizations, and methods of distributing copyrighted material that compensate the author without burdening the consumer. (Can you imagine if we had to check the "I Agree" box before listening to a song on the raido? Get real....)
At the risk of heresy, could such a system be implemented wherein neither the ISP or the consumer is directly billed, but the website host? (OK, I'm putting my absestos kevlar vest on now.)
In seeking to run a workstation that is 100% free of MS I find that I can live quite well within the confines of StarOffice (I'm sure they can fix the "annoyances" that currently exist) but really miss my Adobe products. (Anyone from that organization reading this?)
I've never had a problem buying software or hardware over the web. This Christmas I dared to move out beyond my "geek" boundaries and make purchases from J.C. Penney, Sears and Spiegel. I'm 0-and-3.
There was the confirmation email from Sears that the products were on the way, but following it up through their web site order tracking mechanism I discovered that they were unable to verify my Sears credit card (with over $1,000 free on it for a $250 order) so, in reality, it was not ordered nor coming.
The Spiegel order hiccuped and died on the web site upon hitting the "Purchase Now" button, and J.C. Penney repeatedly stated on the web site that the desired items were available, but follow-up indicated they were always back-ordered. Hey...if I know up front it's back-ordered and still make the purchase, I don't care. But the reverse....I'm not happy.
Discussions above regarding the integrity of Andersen Consulting and the use of NT servers aside, the bottom line is that it just hasn't worked for me yet.
I'm usually a world-class techno-geek when it comes to stuff like this, but I don't think it will actually move beyond niche markets until someone comes up with an interface that is as fast as a keyboard. I can clearly see the ability to download tons of stuff for viewing, I've just never seen anything remotely close to duplicating the input/response speed of a keyboard or even the pen-input grafitti system used by the Pilot. I saw one with a tiny keyboard wrapped around the forearm. NOT suitable for mainstream use, unless "mainstream use" is pretty much limited to receiving email/movies.
When you hold a book, magazine or report in your hands, you have a lot of information about the object you'll never get from the same information presented on a screen. Whether you realize it or not, the mind makes associations as to WHERE past information was located on a page, how much further to the end of the article, the relationship of information in a work such as by chapters, etc., etc.
I think we underestimate the physical and visual indicators we get from physically handling media. I believe that if these types of cues can be reproduced in an electronic format that then -- and only then -- will we begin to see the decline in paper. Electronic bookmarking and highlighting and just too primitive at this point to replace these physical manifestations that indicate that "reading" is much more than just processing the information with the eye.
I've been doing this dance for a few weeks now. While I agree with the individual points made, let's understand the REAL problem: If anyone in the HR field knew enough about OUR field, they would've LEFT the HR field a long time ago and would be among the geek ranks! This applies to a lot of areas if you twist the situation a bit. Pretend YOU'RE a recruiter looking for women's fashion designers for a client firm. Not knowing anything substantive of the industry I have no idea how to evaluate their resumes, etc.
Solution: Turn the tables on them. Make direct contact with the HR weenie and take charge from your end. After all, they don't get their commission if they don't place you.
No need to de-classify anything. It's published already in the US Government Code EXACTLY what NSA's parameters are: Can not operate against anything on American soil. And you think those of us conducting these operations just casually shake that off? Get real.
Why is it every movie portrays NSA, CIA, FBI -- whatever -- as mind-numbed robots that will kill every American baby if it remotely threatens national security? Who works for NSA? American citizen. As a former SIGINT analyst let me tell you what the first couple of weeks of training consist of: Learning the US Government laws that govern the activities of the NSA. You don't stop being a citizen when you join, and the reason the public finds out about any inappropriate actions is that these same American citizens will let it be know that laws have been violated, usually through a leak to the press. If you think these agencies are "out to get" you, you probably think the moon landing never really happened, Elvis was on the last space shuttle mission, the earth is flat....