Que the stories of laptop hard drives failing before their time and rebuttals and blame shifting from about 200 people, mingled with "in soviet Russia, hard drive crashes you!" jokes and ordered lists that feature question marks and profit.
If it makes you feel any better, my degree is in International Relations. IT is one of those hobby turned vocation things.
Also, licensing is no longer an issue, although it once was. We are a 100% linux shop except for the accountant and the graphic artist, who have some software requirements that linux does not meet (btw, if anybody knows of a drop in linux replacement for winbooks that would be really helpful; I'm willing to pay).
Anyway, for the boss it really is not about snooping, its about laziness. The stmp password reset was a result of him wanting to be able to log in without having to remember a password. He sends email from other people's accounts because it is easier than having them auto-forward when they leave for a day. It is not just email, he does it with our other systems as well, notably our client management db and the vacancy tracker for our student accommodation.
Oh, and trust me, the fear thing doesn't work for everybody. I already worked that angle, but laziness takes precedence every time.
I currently do the IT for a small business to pay the bills while I am in grad school. The hardest thing for me has been to get the owner on board with a sane security policy. When I walked in the door, the business used the same username and password for all 22 of the desktops, the one email account (that everybody shared!), the web server, the online bank account, everything. I was able to get all the employees on board with my security plans mostly because I explained what I wanted to do and why, and what it would do for the company... and they were happy to be getting separate email accounts.
Then there is the boss. I explained my reasons for wanting a better security policy when I came on board. We sat down together and discussed different options, and he always gave me his approval. I thought everything was gravy, but I seriously overestimated his give-a-shit factor.
For obvious reasons, he wants to have administrator access to all of our systems (we are small enough that that is reasonable). At one point our info@ account started spewing spam and got our IP blacklisted for a couple of days. The reason? the boss had changed the stmp password to 4. He regularly demands that his employees give him their email passwords and proceeds to send email in their names. In general he is just a walking nightmare.
Of course, before long the other employees began picking up on his nonchalance, and they stopped bothering with security, too. Basically, due to his behavior, the architecture that should have given them a reasonable amount of professional privacy and accountability/deniability totally failed. I think this is really key: users are in general not stupid. Generally they are smart enough to understand the "why" behind security and follow through on it. You have to have systems in place to catch the bad apples, but that is about it. However, one stupid manager can ruin everything.
I wouldn't care either, except that I have to clean up the messes this situation makes. This job is ultimately important for my resume (first post military employment), and I don't want to make the news for record data loss.
(provided that is there decision...there's still time for Microsoft to bribe them like they did at ISO for OOXML).
The ECJ is not some dinky little standards body. The ECJ is a immensely powerful court composed of some of the most powerful people in Europe. Its decisions legally bind entire industries and countries. It is more like the SCOTUS than ISO
I am not saying that the members of the ECJ are incorruptible, just that Microsoft, as rich as they are, have nowhere near the means to corrupt them.
Of course, this is not in the court system yet. Right now it is being handled by the European Commission's Directorate General of Competition, which is kind of like the US Attorney's office in the US. This institution exists purely to find and punish anti-competitive behavior. Its members live under a microscope and its deliberations are a matter of public record. They regularly go after massive European corporations openly supported by member State governments.
Some foreign IT company is not going to have the means to corrupt this body, either.
As a web developer, I really and truly hate Microsoft from the bottom of my heart for the steaming pile of incompatibility that is IE.
However, I cannot conceive selling a consumer/business OS without a web browser these days. From the end user perspective, browsing the web is simply a piece of basic functionality. What's more, it would make windows the only consumer grade OS that does not have a browser after installing a graphical environment. OS X has safari. The major desktop environments for *nix have a browser by default (galleon or konqueror) or the distro has added one (firefox in xubuntu, for example). Even damn small has dillo.
Technically, it does not make much sense to yank the browser out. If I understand correctly, Trident draws much of the windows desktop anyway, so it is a small step to wrap a window around it and call it a browser.
No, today the browser is just part of the OS. The Commission's directorate general of anti-competition (DG Comp, for those who hang out at Schuman) missed the boat on this one. They should have been fighting this fight a decade ago. Today is too late.
Form autocomplete? It's about time. Not that I like the feature anyway, it's too dumb. 90% of the time it doesn't offer any suggestion (wild guess, if a web site asks for my name, maybe my browser might know the answer). The rest of the time (10%), it has a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right.
The auto complete isn't guessing. The reason that it doesn't always know your name is because different web sites give the fields with more or less the same meaning different names (name as in html attribute, not as in the label). They do this because the web front end reflects whatever backend that the site runs on.
As a web developer, you might want somebody's first name and last name separately, (for example, if you have to check a cc number against it) in which case you would use a two fields like this:
Name:<input type="text" name="firstname"/><input type="text" name="lastname"/>
Or, it might just be to display your name to other users, in which case you don't care and to keep your database simple you just do: Name:<input type="text" name="name"/>
Or, you might be asking for login credentials, so you'll ask for:
Name:<input type="text" name="firstname"/>
Or, you might want to be preventing bots from trying to use usernames/passwords harvested from another, insecure sight, so you'll obfuscate like this:
Name: <input type="text" name="wxys"/>
As you can see, form auto complete has no way of knowing which entries it should use. However, auto-complete is far from useless. We have a web-based client management database where I work, and there the browser does know what to put in the fields because, obviously, the fields are consistently named. In this case, it is a huge time saver. It just seems dumb to you because you have not really needed to use it for what it was intended for.
This is ridiculous. Should/. have paid the guy who submitted this? What about me for all the moderation I have done? Should my company pay people who fill in customer satisfaction surveys?
I am really getting tired of this/. "google really is evil" meme. I mean, jeez, here we're jumping on them for doing standard market research. When they do something that really is evil (like when Microsoft killed netscape), that will be news.
For years I have been listening to people here rant about the potential for records to get lost due to proprietary formats. Nobody listened, and now it is happening:
The contingency plan, quietly approved by the National Archives on Nov. 7, emphasizes the difficulties posed by large numbers of White House records created with proprietary commercial software.
Problem is, some of this information is classified, and most of it isn't. Some of it legitimately contains private information that should not be made public yet (things like job applications). It contains personal information that should probably be permanently removed from what the public sees, such as employee social security numbers.
What isn't classified or private needs to be available to the public, what is classified or private needs to be available to people with the proper credentials. Some of it will be automatically declassified in 5 years, some of it in 7 years.
In short, somebody has to look at it before it is added to an index. Probably security will dictate that the classified information is stored on different machines, probably different networks, than the publicly available stuff. You might be able to write an algorithm that automates this process, but Google certainly isn't it.
They have to store it without losing any of it. That means redundant storage distributed geographically. The cost of doing this is pretty significant.
What's more, the interest is not just historical, they should be able to access this information immediately. For example, when the new administration is looking to negotiate a deal with North Korea, they need to know exactly what the old administration was doing and why. They need to know what overtures the US has made and why. Additionally, they need to know what overtures the North has made and what they could mean. It will save the new administration lots of time to read the old administration's analyses instead of having to generate their own. Theoretically, the transition team should be assuring that this kind of institutional knowledge is passed, but in reality something always gets missed.
With this amount of data, you are looking at something a lot more complicated than a mysql database and a web based front-end. To be quite honest, I would be surprised if there is any off-the-shelf software capable of this task.
Being volunteer has nothing to do with it. Lots of successful anti-spam/malware projects are or were run largely by volunteers. See ClamAV and SpamAssassin.
Twice in as many days that we get a post about a service nobody ever heard of ending its life.
Editors: how about posting news about cool services and sites before they die so that we can check them out, use them, and contribute (ie, keep them from dying)? I have seen things like this in the firehose, but they never make the front page.
It was shut down before, but Bruce had this to say on the site:
Hi Folks. Well, a lot of you seem to be disappointed about the site shutting down, and several people have offered to keep it going. I've turned down those offers. Technocrat was intended to get technology experts (us) involved in technology policy. It didn't succeed in that, although it was a good discussion site. The goal of getting people involved in tech policy is still a good one.
Thus, Technocrat will be re-launched with a new format. It will not be a discussion site any longer. Instead, it will offer tech stories and legislation alerts to be syndicated by other web sites, including discussion sites. There will also be some other features that I'll keep quiet about until the new site is on the air.
The goal is still to get more technology experts involved in setting technology policy.
Thanks
Bruce
That new format was slashcode, but looking at the most recent archives, he was only getting a couple posts per story (prolly mostly from twitter). Of course, slashcode's moderation system exists to try to separate the cream from the milk, but at the volumes he was getting, it was all just yogurt. To bad, though.
I have heard of filesharing cases being brought against grandma's, mentally disabled dead people, single mothers who had never used a computer, and on and on, but I think that this is the first time that I have seen somebody argue that they were going to be used to target minority youths. Please, do elaborate, perhaps with the help of a real life example or something else resembling evidence.
By the way, although your rhetoric about re-enslaving black people in the US was quite vogue in the 1990's, I like to think that the fact that we are potentially about to elect a half-African president pretty thoroughly debunks that. Drug laws in the US are broken, drug laws do hit poor people unfairly, but they are not a racist conspiracy.
Sometimes I think it would be acceptable to sacrifice a certain amount of due process in return for reasonable sanctions. A few people who receive the injustice of losing their internet connections is better than the mockery that the RIAA has perpetrated on the US justice system.
By the way, while I could not find the reference to the parliamentary action noted above, the summary is way off in its assessment of the weight of the European Parliament's action. The EU does not have the power to outlaw these kinds of things, only to issue directives that the member states transpose into their laws. The parliament itself is the weakest of the three European institutions, and if we are in traditional first pillar decision making in this case, its amendments do not really mean anything until the Council has approved them. In many cases, the Council can just reject an amendment and pass the legislation in its original form, or at the very least force the EP into negotiation. Historically, the EP yields to the council as soon as the Council makes an issue of something.
Once a piece of legislation (we'll assume that this is a directive and that the EP's amendment stands) is approved, France still has quite a long time (in general, 3 to 5 years) to transpose the directive. Only once this time limit is reached can any hypothetical tussle between France and the EU begin. These are, however, very rare as the EU is ultimately an inter-state, diplomatic body. It would require that either (a) the Commission place a complaint before the European Court of Justice, (b) that the French courts themselves ask the ECJ to interpret the situation, or (c), that another member state accuses France of not fulfilling its obligations.
None of these situations are very likely over something this insignificant. The Commission is aware that it depends on the good will of the member states to accomplish its duties. The French courts are historically reticent to ask the ECJ for opinions. Member states have attacked each other in front of the ECJ on less than a dozen occasions AKAIK as such actions are politically very sensitive.
In short, I would not hold my breath for a Eurocrat in shining armour to save the French internet users.
Please forgive my misuse of technical vocabulary in this post, my studies are in French.
As somebody who admins google apps in a business environment, I can say, that is not what they have to offer. What they have to offer is up-time that is better than what internal solutions could ever possibly offer at a price an internal solution could not pray to beat. Is it 100%? Is it free? Nope, but neither is the exchange server in the basement. Do I control my data? Nope, but realistically the alternative would be to contract my data storage out to somebody else anyway.
Bill W. is probably taking heat because he sold google apps to his superiors as having 100% uptime with no disadvantages, which of course it does not.
I have actually worked on disposing old IT equipment in the military, so I can tell you for a fact that this speculation is wrong.
All computers and IT equipment (down to mice and thumb drives) are tracked on a company's property book. When the item comes up for life cycle replacement, it is wiped and turned into the Property Book Office. Everything that was ever on a property book has to be turned in this way, regardless of depreciation. A commander can write off a certain amount, but since it is always a challenge to stay under the limit, they in practice never throw stuff in a closet to be taken home by some IT dude.
Anyways, after the equipment gets turned in, it goes to the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service. While this stuff sometimes shows up in auctions later on, realistically anything that can still be used gets sent to an ally (usually Iraq or Afghanistan these days) as military/civil service aid.
Military contractors, on the other hand, are a whole different ball of wax. You want to see some waste, allow me to introduce you to Honeywell.
I really like DHTML + JS + CSS for dynamic content. I downright love CSS; it takes time to learn, but it is just awsome. It's really just a problem of getting browser vendors to support a cross-platform standard for the DOM tree (I think we all know who I am talking about). Even with the mess that we have now, js libraries like prototype.js and mochikit have done a pretty good job of abstracting the browser quirks out of our code and given us a means to develop quality, working web applications quickly and easily.
Or, you could scrap all this progress and start over on a new standard. Good luck with that.
I must say that in general I have been unsatisfied with thawte. They gave me a hard time about re-issuing my cert after the debian-ssl debacle and in general their tech support people don't know anything beyond what is already on their site.
Seriously, I pay over a hundred clams a year just to so that I can have ssl communication without the "OMFG THIS SITE IS GONNA HAXOR YOU" dialog box pop up in user's browsers, and they pull all kinds of monkey business.
But since verisign owns them, I wouldn't hold my breath for them to be shut down. My guess is the other CAs do this, too.
I knew this kind of position was coming as soon as he said he didn't know how to use a computer. He obviously doesn't understand the issues, so naturally he is just going to default to his party's (or contributor's) position.
If I were in his place and somebody asked me to formulate a position on farming, I would do the same thing. That's why it is important to look at what party a candidate belongs to and who is giving him money.
I guess most of the countries' representatives ond't effectively govern as well as you could. Too bad you can't rule the world and bring us the Utopia in your head:)
Who do you think that these wonderful leaders are? They put their pants on one leg at a time just like you and me. Most of the bureaucrats who prepare these decisions are no more educated than you or I. Governments, even authoritarian ones, are the people.
What's more, I live in a democratic republic, and in such a system, the people must participate or it fails. Questioning government positions is part of what you call a country's "political discourse," which is necessary for the society as a whole to come to a coherent decision that expresses itself in elections.
You could have just linked to TFA since the video is embedded right on the page... No matter, though.
This video is a perfect example of the Streisand effect. It's a horrible little clip with ear-jarring music, poor video quality and even worse editing. I wouldn't have even known what it was about without the article, and even so it does not contain much of a message. Very few people ever would have seen this video if the IOC hadn't issued the takedown notice in the first place, but now it's on the/. front page.
I have mod points, but I would rather say something.
That is a beautiful woman with a happy, healthy child child. Get out of your make-believe Hollywood world and into the real one. I for one, saw the picture and thought it was sweet.
Slashdot Mirror
Que the stories of laptop hard drives failing before their time and rebuttals and blame shifting from about 200 people, mingled with "in soviet Russia, hard drive crashes you!" jokes and ordered lists that feature question marks and profit.
Oh, and probably a hot grits joke or two.
If it makes you feel any better, my degree is in International Relations. IT is one of those hobby turned vocation things.
Also, licensing is no longer an issue, although it once was. We are a 100% linux shop except for the accountant and the graphic artist, who have some software requirements that linux does not meet (btw, if anybody knows of a drop in linux replacement for winbooks that would be really helpful; I'm willing to pay).
Anyway, for the boss it really is not about snooping, its about laziness. The stmp password reset was a result of him wanting to be able to log in without having to remember a password. He sends email from other people's accounts because it is easier than having them auto-forward when they leave for a day. It is not just email, he does it with our other systems as well, notably our client management db and the vacancy tracker for our student accommodation.
Oh, and trust me, the fear thing doesn't work for everybody. I already worked that angle, but laziness takes precedence every time.
The management is everything.
I currently do the IT for a small business to pay the bills while I am in grad school. The hardest thing for me has been to get the owner on board with a sane security policy. When I walked in the door, the business used the same username and password for all 22 of the desktops, the one email account (that everybody shared!), the web server, the online bank account, everything. I was able to get all the employees on board with my security plans mostly because I explained what I wanted to do and why, and what it would do for the company... and they were happy to be getting separate email accounts.
Then there is the boss. I explained my reasons for wanting a better security policy when I came on board. We sat down together and discussed different options, and he always gave me his approval. I thought everything was gravy, but I seriously overestimated his give-a-shit factor.
For obvious reasons, he wants to have administrator access to all of our systems (we are small enough that that is reasonable). At one point our info@ account started spewing spam and got our IP blacklisted for a couple of days. The reason? the boss had changed the stmp password to 4. He regularly demands that his employees give him their email passwords and proceeds to send email in their names. In general he is just a walking nightmare.
Of course, before long the other employees began picking up on his nonchalance, and they stopped bothering with security, too. Basically, due to his behavior, the architecture that should have given them a reasonable amount of professional privacy and accountability/deniability totally failed. I think this is really key: users are in general not stupid. Generally they are smart enough to understand the "why" behind security and follow through on it. You have to have systems in place to catch the bad apples, but that is about it. However, one stupid manager can ruin everything.
I wouldn't care either, except that I have to clean up the messes this situation makes. This job is ultimately important for my resume (first post military employment), and I don't want to make the news for record data loss.
God, I can't wait till I graduate.
(provided that is there decision...there's still time for Microsoft to bribe them like they did at ISO for OOXML).
The ECJ is not some dinky little standards body. The ECJ is a immensely powerful court composed of some of the most powerful people in Europe. Its decisions legally bind entire industries and countries. It is more like the SCOTUS than ISO
I am not saying that the members of the ECJ are incorruptible, just that Microsoft, as rich as they are, have nowhere near the means to corrupt them.
Of course, this is not in the court system yet. Right now it is being handled by the European Commission's Directorate General of Competition, which is kind of like the US Attorney's office in the US. This institution exists purely to find and punish anti-competitive behavior. Its members live under a microscope and its deliberations are a matter of public record. They regularly go after massive European corporations openly supported by member State governments.
Some foreign IT company is not going to have the means to corrupt this body, either.
As a web developer, I really and truly hate Microsoft from the bottom of my heart for the steaming pile of incompatibility that is IE.
However, I cannot conceive selling a consumer/business OS without a web browser these days. From the end user perspective, browsing the web is simply a piece of basic functionality. What's more, it would make windows the only consumer grade OS that does not have a browser after installing a graphical environment. OS X has safari. The major desktop environments for *nix have a browser by default (galleon or konqueror) or the distro has added one (firefox in xubuntu, for example). Even damn small has dillo.
Technically, it does not make much sense to yank the browser out. If I understand correctly, Trident draws much of the windows desktop anyway, so it is a small step to wrap a window around it and call it a browser.
No, today the browser is just part of the OS. The Commission's directorate general of anti-competition (DG Comp, for those who hang out at Schuman) missed the boat on this one. They should have been fighting this fight a decade ago. Today is too late.
Form autocomplete? It's about time. Not that I like the feature anyway, it's too dumb. 90% of the time it doesn't offer any suggestion (wild guess, if a web site asks for my name, maybe my browser might know the answer). The rest of the time (10%), it has a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right.
The auto complete isn't guessing. The reason that it doesn't always know your name is because different web sites give the fields with more or less the same meaning different names (name as in html attribute, not as in the label). They do this because the web front end reflects whatever backend that the site runs on.
/><input type="text" name="lastname" />
/>
/> />
As a web developer, you might want somebody's first name and last name separately, (for example, if you have to check a cc number against it) in which case you would use a two fields like this:
Name:<input type="text" name="firstname"
Or, it might just be to display your name to other users, in which case you don't care and to keep your database simple you just do:
Name:<input type="text" name="name"
Or, you might be asking for login credentials, so you'll ask for: Name:<input type="text" name="firstname"
Or, you might want to be preventing bots from trying to use usernames/passwords harvested from another, insecure sight, so you'll obfuscate like this:
Name: <input type="text" name="wxys"
As you can see, form auto complete has no way of knowing which entries it should use. However, auto-complete is far from useless. We have a web-based client management database where I work, and there the browser does know what to put in the fields because, obviously, the fields are consistently named. In this case, it is a huge time saver. It just seems dumb to you because you have not really needed to use it for what it was intended for.
This is ridiculous. Should /. have paid the guy who submitted this? What about me for all the moderation I have done? Should my company pay people who fill in customer satisfaction surveys?
/. "google really is evil" meme. I mean, jeez, here we're jumping on them for doing standard market research. When they do something that really is evil (like when Microsoft killed netscape), that will be news.
I am really getting tired of this
The contingency plan, quietly approved by the National Archives on Nov. 7, emphasizes the difficulties posed by large numbers of White House records created with proprietary commercial software.
Problem is, some of this information is classified, and most of it isn't. Some of it legitimately contains private information that should not be made public yet (things like job applications). It contains personal information that should probably be permanently removed from what the public sees, such as employee social security numbers.
What isn't classified or private needs to be available to the public, what is classified or private needs to be available to people with the proper credentials. Some of it will be automatically declassified in 5 years, some of it in 7 years.
In short, somebody has to look at it before it is added to an index. Probably security will dictate that the classified information is stored on different machines, probably different networks, than the publicly available stuff. You might be able to write an algorithm that automates this process, but Google certainly isn't it.
They have to store it without losing any of it. That means redundant storage distributed geographically. The cost of doing this is pretty significant.
What's more, the interest is not just historical, they should be able to access this information immediately. For example, when the new administration is looking to negotiate a deal with North Korea, they need to know exactly what the old administration was doing and why. They need to know what overtures the US has made and why. Additionally, they need to know what overtures the North has made and what they could mean. It will save the new administration lots of time to read the old administration's analyses instead of having to generate their own. Theoretically, the transition team should be assuring that this kind of institutional knowledge is passed, but in reality something always gets missed.
With this amount of data, you are looking at something a lot more complicated than a mysql database and a web based front-end. To be quite honest, I would be surprised if there is any off-the-shelf software capable of this task.
Being volunteer has nothing to do with it. Lots of successful anti-spam/malware projects are or were run largely by volunteers. See ClamAV and SpamAssassin.
Twice in as many days that we get a post about a service nobody ever heard of ending its life.
Editors: how about posting news about cool services and sites before they die so that we can check them out, use them, and contribute (ie, keep them from dying)? I have seen things like this in the firehose, but they never make the front page.
Just a thought.
Hi Folks. Well, a lot of you seem to be disappointed about the site shutting down, and several people have offered to keep it going. I've turned down those offers. Technocrat was intended to get technology experts (us) involved in technology policy. It didn't succeed in that, although it was a good discussion site. The goal of getting people involved in tech policy is still a good one.
Thus, Technocrat will be re-launched with a new format. It will not be a discussion site any longer. Instead, it will offer tech stories and legislation alerts to be syndicated by other web sites, including discussion sites. There will also be some other features that I'll keep quiet about until the new site is on the air.
The goal is still to get more technology experts involved in setting technology policy.
Thanks
Bruce
That new format was slashcode, but looking at the most recent archives, he was only getting a couple posts per story (prolly mostly from twitter). Of course, slashcode's moderation system exists to try to separate the cream from the milk, but at the volumes he was getting, it was all just yogurt. To bad, though.
I have heard of filesharing cases being brought against grandma's, mentally disabled dead people, single mothers who had never used a computer, and on and on, but I think that this is the first time that I have seen somebody argue that they were going to be used to target minority youths. Please, do elaborate, perhaps with the help of a real life example or something else resembling evidence.
By the way, although your rhetoric about re-enslaving black people in the US was quite vogue in the 1990's, I like to think that the fact that we are potentially about to elect a half-African president pretty thoroughly debunks that. Drug laws in the US are broken, drug laws do hit poor people unfairly, but they are not a racist conspiracy.
Sometimes I think it would be acceptable to sacrifice a certain amount of due process in return for reasonable sanctions. A few people who receive the injustice of losing their internet connections is better than the mockery that the RIAA has perpetrated on the US justice system.
By the way, while I could not find the reference to the parliamentary action noted above, the summary is way off in its assessment of the weight of the European Parliament's action. The EU does not have the power to outlaw these kinds of things, only to issue directives that the member states transpose into their laws. The parliament itself is the weakest of the three European institutions, and if we are in traditional first pillar decision making in this case, its amendments do not really mean anything until the Council has approved them. In many cases, the Council can just reject an amendment and pass the legislation in its original form, or at the very least force the EP into negotiation. Historically, the EP yields to the council as soon as the Council makes an issue of something.
Once a piece of legislation (we'll assume that this is a directive and that the EP's amendment stands) is approved, France still has quite a long time (in general, 3 to 5 years) to transpose the directive. Only once this time limit is reached can any hypothetical tussle between France and the EU begin. These are, however, very rare as the EU is ultimately an inter-state, diplomatic body. It would require that either (a) the Commission place a complaint before the European Court of Justice, (b) that the French courts themselves ask the ECJ to interpret the situation, or (c), that another member state accuses France of not fulfilling its obligations.
None of these situations are very likely over something this insignificant. The Commission is aware that it depends on the good will of the member states to accomplish its duties. The French courts are historically reticent to ask the ECJ for opinions. Member states have attacked each other in front of the ECJ on less than a dozen occasions AKAIK as such actions are politically very sensitive.
In short, I would not hold my breath for a Eurocrat in shining armour to save the French internet users.
Please forgive my misuse of technical vocabulary in this post, my studies are in French.
As somebody who admins google apps in a business environment, I can say, that is not what they have to offer. What they have to offer is up-time that is better than what internal solutions could ever possibly offer at a price an internal solution could not pray to beat. Is it 100%? Is it free? Nope, but neither is the exchange server in the basement. Do I control my data? Nope, but realistically the alternative would be to contract my data storage out to somebody else anyway.
Bill W. is probably taking heat because he sold google apps to his superiors as having 100% uptime with no disadvantages, which of course it does not.
I have actually worked on disposing old IT equipment in the military, so I can tell you for a fact that this speculation is wrong.
All computers and IT equipment (down to mice and thumb drives) are tracked on a company's property book. When the item comes up for life cycle replacement, it is wiped and turned into the Property Book Office. Everything that was ever on a property book has to be turned in this way, regardless of depreciation. A commander can write off a certain amount, but since it is always a challenge to stay under the limit, they in practice never throw stuff in a closet to be taken home by some IT dude.
Anyways, after the equipment gets turned in, it goes to the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service. While this stuff sometimes shows up in auctions later on, realistically anything that can still be used gets sent to an ally (usually Iraq or Afghanistan these days) as military/civil service aid.
Military contractors, on the other hand, are a whole different ball of wax. You want to see some waste, allow me to introduce you to Honeywell.
I really like DHTML + JS + CSS for dynamic content. I downright love CSS; it takes time to learn, but it is just awsome. It's really just a problem of getting browser vendors to support a cross-platform standard for the DOM tree (I think we all know who I am talking about). Even with the mess that we have now, js libraries like prototype.js and mochikit have done a pretty good job of abstracting the browser quirks out of our code and given us a means to develop quality, working web applications quickly and easily.
Or, you could scrap all this progress and start over on a new standard. Good luck with that.
Thawte does this; look about halfway down the page
I must say that in general I have been unsatisfied with thawte. They gave me a hard time about re-issuing my cert after the debian-ssl debacle and in general their tech support people don't know anything beyond what is already on their site.
Seriously, I pay over a hundred clams a year just to so that I can have ssl communication without the "OMFG THIS SITE IS GONNA HAXOR YOU" dialog box pop up in user's browsers, and they pull all kinds of monkey business.
But since verisign owns them, I wouldn't hold my breath for them to be shut down. My guess is the other CAs do this, too.
My wife is Finnish, and this pretty much confirms my suspicion that she and all other Finns are in fact from outer space.
I knew this kind of position was coming as soon as he said he didn't know how to use a computer. He obviously doesn't understand the issues, so naturally he is just going to default to his party's (or contributor's) position.
If I were in his place and somebody asked me to formulate a position on farming, I would do the same thing. That's why it is important to look at what party a candidate belongs to and who is giving him money.
I guess most of the countries' representatives ond't effectively govern as well as you could. Too bad you can't rule the world and bring us the Utopia in your head :)
Who do you think that these wonderful leaders are? They put their pants on one leg at a time just like you and me. Most of the bureaucrats who prepare these decisions are no more educated than you or I. Governments, even authoritarian ones, are the people.
What's more, I live in a democratic republic, and in such a system, the people must participate or it fails. Questioning government positions is part of what you call a country's "political discourse," which is necessary for the society as a whole to come to a coherent decision that expresses itself in elections.
Seems like "Because we hate Microsoft" isn't a compelling enough reason for the ISO.
True, but "unimplementable" should be.
You could have just linked to TFA since the video is embedded right on the page... No matter, though.
/. front page.
This video is a perfect example of the Streisand effect. It's a horrible little clip with ear-jarring music, poor video quality and even worse editing. I wouldn't have even known what it was about without the article, and even so it does not contain much of a message. Very few people ever would have seen this video if the IOC hadn't issued the takedown notice in the first place, but now it's on the
I have mod points, but I would rather say something.
That is a beautiful woman with a happy, healthy child child. Get out of your make-believe Hollywood world and into the real one. I for one, saw the picture and thought it was sweet.