This is something that are country tends to fail miserably at and unfortunately you can't blame it all on corporations. The media very much deserves a large part of the blame for this with an attitude that everyone's private business is public business. It's not just this issue, Gawker took their anti-gun crusade and published peoples personal addresses after they followed New York law and registered their guns.
Example after example of the media blatantly disregarding people's privacy can be cited with entirely too much ease. As a society we should be ashamed of events like this and look to Europe for guidance on respecting other peoples privacy. Perhaps someday the right for privacy should be the next great civil rights crusade?
Those figures should have included nuclear energy from the get go. It's the greenest energy we have and the/only/ reason to exclude it to begin with is political. That certainly makes China appear even more green, and for the nuclear investment China does deserve credit. That being said the results implied are far from accurate, as there is a significant difference between investing in a thing and using it.
China is investing in the technology which they will then sell to others that will pay money for it. Unfortunately except for a few limited examples what China uses is very different from what they invest in or manufacture. Pollution is very bad in China and the article makes it sound like they are a green dream.
This is a really bad example to make your case. She has HIPAA data and needs to upgrade as her computer can't be patched anymore next year. No sympathy for someone with HIPAA data trying to get out of patching their system.
Now, if you had picked an example of someone who didn't have HIPAA data I'd point to options that could be done. However to be frank I am all out of sympathy for anyone in this situation. Microsoft announced end of life on this a very long time ago and frankly gave a lot longer on the EOL and support for the OS than Mac or any of the Linux variants.
This reminds me of the gas station owners put out of business by the new standards for underground tanks. They had years of advanced notice, yet they still refused to modernize something critical to their business that they knew they needed to. Time came that they could no longer be grandfathered in and all of a sudden a bunch of stations went out of business.
Why, because they didn't want to spend money for tanks that were resistant to leaks that could ruin the environment? A doctor that doesn't want to spend money to help prevent leaks (patient data) is no better than the gas station owner. It's a business expense just like any other and a business owner that refuses to give IT it's due as they should. Quit supporting IT neglect by helping people like this out.
What people don't understand is that for facial recognition software to work you have to have good quality cameras, images, a more static environment. This is why you hear about it being used in casinos is Las Vegas and elsewhere. In those environments you have high quality cameras with close range and good angles working against a smaller set of good pictures in a relatively static environment (people in casinos tend to congregate and not move around a lot). You also have staff with a distinct vested interest in watching out for their 'bad guys'.
In a place like a large public venue you have lower quality cameras, far more people running around, worse angles and range and the environment is far more transient. The tool is being used in a completely different environment with far less support and far larger data sets to work with.
It's like taking your Rav4 off-roading the Rubicon trail and coming way with the conclusion that off-roading is a bunch of hype. You've taken the tool (grocery getter) and put it to use for a job it was never meant for. Meanwhile your guy with the old Jeep knows for a fact that his tools works for the job because he uses it for that job on a routine basis, however he would be just as foolish to except his jeep to work as well as a daily grocery getter as a Rav4.
Until the tools are put into environments that allow them to succeed, and with the hardware that they need they will continue to fail. You could call it a failing of the tool, however the tools and hardware are immature. Give it another five years and this would be a very different story. It's just technology advancing and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it short of getting hold of your politician and demanding reforms or limits on it's use.
Things don't have to be over for Microsoft and they are perfectly capable of pulling out of their slump. Their failures, and they are massive multi-billion dollar failures that are taking down the entire PC industry with them can be rectified at any time of Microsoft's choosing. If Microsoft did the following it would rejuvenate the market, restore enterprise confidence and bring back the 800 pound gorilla.
1. They need to release a patch for Windows 8 that allows direct booting to the desktop. This is a/very/ big deal for the enterprise market and will cause another 10 year repeat of what happened with Windows XP until they do. 2. They need to bring back the Start menu for the desktop. While not quite the epic level failure of the forcing the boot into Metro it is a very large issue for the enterprise market. This issue greatly strengthens the case for another 10 year repeat for Windows 7 such as was experienced with Windows XP. 3. Simplify, simplify! In their efforts to make things looks dumbed down for a toddler they made formerly simple tasks like powering down too complicated. Making things look simple is great, but not at the expense of actually making them more complicated. 4. Surface is a great product and Microsoft should do more with it, however they need to drop the price by hundreds of dollars if they are going to inspire anyone to actually buy the thing. Having a reference product (Nexus etc) is not a bad thing, but you have to make it at a price that is low enough to inspire people to actually want to buy the thing. 5. Issue a statement letting people know that Xbox 720 will not require always on DRM. This was a public relations fiasco as illustrated by Sim City and they already have problems with developers leaving their platform as being too much of a pain in the ass to work with. Having a console that is a pain in the ass for both developers and consumers is product suicide. 6. Stop customer hostile policies that are running rampant in places like MSDN and Technet. What they are gaining in stopping piracy they are more than losing in mindshare as people get fed up and don't want to deal with Microsoft anymore. 7. Stop employee ranking for reviews, the result has been the loss of good employees and blatant sabotaging of work and a complete loss of teamwork. The result has clearly shown in a loss of quality in the product that employees produce and the quality of the talent that Microsoft attracts. Nobody wants to work in a hostile workplace. 8. Provide better support to the hardware vendors that have been getting bleed dry. They are suffering significant losses, especially with the Windows 8 disaster and will soon be at the point where they don't have the financial risks they used to by banding together to support another product (Linux variant or Android Desktop variant could be a serious risk). 9. Stop ignoring your customers (hardware, enterprise, consumers) when they tell you that they don't like something and go back and change it.
I feel like one of those UFO people standing in a field waiting for little green men to pop out of flying saucers on the second blue moon when the planets line up just right with the moon. I want to believe, really I do want to believe. But like the buffoon in the field waiting on the little green men I'm going to be waiting a very long time before Oracle/gets/ security.
It takes a lot more than simply delaying a given release of a given product to get your security ducks in a row. Here are some things Oracle needs to start embracing if they want to be taken half as seriously as Microsoft (never would have imagined saying that a decade ago).
Make it easy for security related people to get hold of you at any time of day on day of the year. Make it easy for people supporting your products to know what is wrong with your products. Release updates about what is wrong with your products in a timely manner. There is never an excuse to take longer than 60 days to release a patch - ever. Realize that the 'bad guys' don't operate on quarterly release schedules! Provide workarounds for security vulnerabilities that make it easier to keep your product than remove your product. Provide information about vulnerabilities faster than the news media, will they control the message or will you? You can't stop the message from getting out, so at a minimum always provide a 'were working on this and we'll get it out asap' note. Security through obscurity does not work in the real world, repeat until stop practicing this! Make it easy to find out about vulnerabilities, navigating your website is only sanely done through Google. Version control, automatic updates should NEVER move upgrade between major versions.
Oracle, I applaud that you are starting to take your head out of the sand, but you still don't get security and until I start to see some of the real world changes I listed above I'm going to continue to rank you one of the highest security risks any organization has to deal with.
First off, I find most of your comment the most intelligent one in this thread, in particular I agree that sex should simply never come up as an issue. On the point about the the affirmative action though I will have to disagree with you. In many government jobs, or jobs that relate to government (road construction etc) where affirmative action is required you happen to be wrong.
A couple of examples for you are when the Federal government setup the TSA. I was involved with the program from an IT standpoint as we had testing stations all over the US and territories. When the program first started we to hire an entire government agencies worth of people all at once and it was a massive logistical undertaking. We had hotels rented, nurses and doctors for physical exams, IT staff, security staff, the whole nine yards were on hand to run tests to hire enough people to hire the screeners. On average each temporary hiring center had between 30-60 temporary staff on hand.
We had to keep each center open until the appropriate quotas were filled for each airport. In some cases that meant we kept centers staffed for weeks or months in order to make sure we hired enough women for certain positions (supervisors etc). We actually had the same thing happen with men in Guam or American Samoa if I recall where the local culture was that only women worked in security.
You'll see the same thing happen with any number of other fields that relate to government in any number of other ways. In many of these cases affirmative action literally equals a quota and the more qualified white/male/other majority class will lose out on the job to the entirely unqualified candidate simply because they are trying to fill a given quota.
And you have to restrain yourself to the United States to get that figure. While I certainly don't sympathize with neo-nazis or their ilk (and I doubt they'd approve of my non-white girlfriend), your cherry picking of facts is disingenuous. Worldwide the overwhelming majority of bombings are performed by Muslims and it's only by parsing the data in a certain way that you can make it look any other way.
Your sort of on track. What you really need is a properly set up lab environment that you have administrative access to. Your needs are perfectly legitimate, and you certainly need to be able to do the things you do in a timely manner. This is not an issue with administrators, but an issue with not having the lab set up correctly. This is what you need, I speak from the experience of setting these things up when I used to travel.
This is what your IT staff needs to set up for you for you in a proper enterprise class lab.
1. Your lab needs to be identical to production. Rights, operating systems, software, versions, everything except hardware needs to be identical. 2. Labs should never have special privileges to make things easier or faster, if you have done this you have failed. 3. Your lab needs the ability for you to reset any given machine on demand without going change control. 4. Your lab must have enough RAM to be usable, ESXi or equivalent lab servers with inadequate RAM will spend far more in labor than the cost of RAM in days. 5. Your lab must support the number of users that are needed for use simultaneously. 6. Your lab needs to be part of change control. Nothing should ever happen in production until it has been tested in the lab. 7. The use of snapshots to maintain parity with production is critical. 8. Your lab must be patched as the test environment before production. It is never acceptable to have an unpatched lab.
Remember that lab license costs are almost always allowed to be significantly offset by almost any vendor as long as it is not production.
I feel your pain, that's a large part of what I did was implementing the type of things your talking about needing. In fact it was setting up that kind of process and environment where I would run into the cowboys. IT is supposed to support and facilitate the business in meeting their needs. It should never be an obstacle or an impediment.
In order to do that you have to responsive to what the business needs in a timely manner. You can't take so long to implement something that the business works around you. If your environment wants to use Mac's and you don't have a solid reason not to do so than you need to figure out a way to do so. For example I've got 8500 Mac computers where I work that were not being managed so I created a steering committee to oversee them and drove the process to bring in an enterprise management platform because that is what a large number of users want to use - not what I want.
You also have to implement enough change management that your retaining control of your organization. Change management should never involve making secondary changes like you've experienced, that is the result of poor change control. Rollback plans are important though, the idea is that if something fails you should have a plan for how you would put things back.
Things like setting up labs that are identical between production and development are critical for success. If development doesn't mirror production (rights, different OS's, different versions of software etc) than all of your testing is meaningless./rant off
I think I have figured out the appeal of Google Glass. People saw Terminator 2 and remember all the information the terminator had at his 'eyeballs' and thought it was really, really cool. Google glass is an attempt to make this happen, next up Google Robot.
They already have to the OS of course, it will be simple to port 'droid' to it's next version that we'll call 'robot'. It's a small and light weight OS that can run on a variety of hardware platforms and was meant for one shape but adapted to another. It will adapt well to it's future cyborg form without a lot of expected difficulties. It features the following advantages ready for production today:
The operating system is made for remote management and updating without human intervention. Many programs are available and can be readily downloaded as needed for a variety of situations as needed. It has fairly good battery life and can be recharged via USB ports which are everywhere. It's open source and so it can be modified by anyone/thing.
Other related developments: Drones are all over the place, they can even fly jumbo jets without human pilots now. We already have Google Car, so autonomous Priuses are here to bore everyone to death already. Google fiber is being rolled out to allow for a nice robust network that humiliates all other providers in the US
The only logical conclusion? The founders of Google are entirely too fond of the Terminator movies and are planning on releasing Google Skynet to take over the world. Once Google decides to purchase SpaceX and start launching their own Google Satellites it's time to run for the hills...
My point of fact I have been paid well for reining in cowboys like him. I traveled for years as a consultant and while that wasn't my job as such, it was something that kept coming up. Point being that every time I have to deal with a cowboy it takes up time and energy to rein them in and bring them back town to earth.
I've never lost the argument, and I've never failed to rein in any department of developers, no matter how much they thought they were big shots. It's not about my ego though, it's about keep cowboys from bringing down the house when their ego get's out of control.
I've reined in cowboys like you for years, from one fortune 500 to another. Arrogant jackasses that can't be bothered with change management, best practices, version control, documentation, pesky things like policies, regulations and laws. Self righteous developers that can't see past their own nose too see how thier actions or inactions affect those around them.
Every single time they think they are above these things and that they know better than the industry around them. They never realize why something that works in their special environment works perfectly fine where they have the rights of a God but has all kinds of mysterious errors in production where there they are brought back down to earth. They then chafe when their development environment is set up identical to production, yet it is amazing how quickly previous mysterious bugs that plagued production and caused incredible operational costs suddenly get fixed. They of course never have to clean up multi-million dollar messes, talk to regulatory agencies, sit down with lawyers to plan how to mitigate their mess or have a face to face with an angry Attorney General.
I've only won this argument and helped companies save millions by reining in the cowboys like yourself a couple dozen times. Probably something to do.with cleaning up large multi-million dollar messes more than once.
RTFA! Many of the phones have been patched by the manufacturer and they in turn have handed over the patch to the carrier. The carriers sit on the patches because they don't want to be bothered taking the time and money to test them. The carriers make the patches because the phones are sold worldwide for many models and they are expected to support them in other markets. If you can't find your patch for your phone in the US you can often the patch for the international version if you look.
About bloody time that someone does this. It is absolutely indefensible that the carriers have refused to release patches for known security holes for extended periods of time if they release them at all. This blatantly leaves their customers vulnerable and their customers have no way of circumventing this short of rooting their phones.
I read the article before it appeared on Slashdot and many of these phone will literally never receive any patches from the carrier. These phones are effectively being sold as known defective devices and I hope someone initiates a class action lawsuit on the matter as I can't think of any other way to fix this issue. Patch Management really should not be an afterthought and it affects every device, every operating system and unfortunately there are still legions of idiots out there equate Patch Management with Microsoft Windows patch Tuesday.
That it would require a lawsuit in order to patch your phone and secure it against a known vulnerability say much about about the state of American cell phone industry. This country desperately needs to adopt the standards used by the rest of the world and it's a point of shame that we have the industry we do. Most Americans don't know how bad things are here because they never go abroad, and once they do it's like walking into a candy store for the first time with "you can do that?", again and again.
Tie H1B visas to the local tech unemployment rate and average salary rate for a given field. Don't allow any more H1B visas into a given metropolitan area until average salaries have gone up and average unemployment has gone down. If there is really a shortage than the market will respond by increasing salaries and decreasing unemployment, let the market do it's work. That would get rid of the bogus job ads that are placed for the explicit purpose of not hiring an American.
In other words you can't get H1B visas unless the local area actually has a demonstrable need for people with those skills. This would do wonders for unemployed and underpaid Americans that have been devastated by the H1B visa program. Create a progressive payroll tax that goes up by the percentage of H1B visas that are on your payroll either directly or through contract companies.
Now to address some of the needs of the employers. Get rid of limits for H1B visas altogether, and allow anyone who attends University in the United States to get a similar visa automatically upon graduation. This would allow for true labor shortages to be met and for companies to grow as claimed. Allow the best and brightest to stay in America and contribute to our economy. Company after company has been founded by hard working immigrants that have made significant contributions to our society. These are the people that we want working for us, not for the competition.
Society is the key word here though, make the H1B visa program a fast track to citizenship for America. In four years you earn your citizenship and become a contributing member of society or your out. Allow those that would contribute to our society to immigrate and have a legitimate path to citizenship, it's the American way.
Oh, I understand, those words are rarely used properly and almost always used as management speak. In this case I rather deliberately used them as a tweak on Microsoft management.
The problem is that Microsoft didn't bet their company on their attempts to force a paradigm shift in how people interact with and use Windows. They bet the entire desktop computer industry along with them. By way of point on how bad things are Windows Vista wasn't released at Christmas like Windows 8 was and Windows Vista saw much higher deployment rates (not sales rates) than Windows 8 has for the same months after release. The net result was an almost epic level collapse of the industry that followed with a record drop in PC sales, however all of the offered excuses fall flat when you look at them with a touch of logic:
The economy. It's actually better now than it has been for the last several years and unemployment has been starting to decrease. Tablets. Tablets started becoming popular a few years ago, the slump in PC sales is directly timed with the release of Windows 8. People already having a computer. Since the Mhz wars petered out a several years back speed has had a little to do with new computer sales. Again, nothing new here. Smart Phones. Smart Phones started taking off en mass about 3-4 years ago and there is nothing particularly expansive related to the last 6 months there.
The bottom line is that Microsoft started causing severe economic damage to the PC industry with their attempt to force a UI change on the market. If they hurt the industry enough, the industry while feel compelled to look for alternatives to Microsoft to distribute their products. Microsoft knows that this can and has happened with smart phones and tablets and industry simply couldn't take any more pain without risk of simply no longer being dependent on Microsoft.
The secondary reason is that the enterprise market has made adamantly clear that they absolutely will not deploy Windows 8 until the start button and boot to desktop interface issues are resolved. Microsoft saw enterprises stick it to them with XP for a decade and realizes that enterprise is not about to put up with another Vista experience. Microsoft has to make these changes, or they risk losing their distribution chain to their competition.
Actually the UI change/was/ the point. Microsoft want's people going through their store where they get a cut of sales instead of people buying software through traditional channels. In order to facilitate this they had to make access to the use of traditional software more burdensome and the use of software sold through their market less burdensome. By making the traditional desktop more burdensome it would 'inspire' people to want to use their new user interface.
The fact that their new user interface is the same interface you will see in their other products is very deliberate. The point is to leverage Windows to facilitate sales of mobile and other products since they will look and feel like your computer and to make tablets feel like a natural Windows environment. Remember that Microsoft has actually had their OS on tablets for well over a decade and no one bought them beyond token quantities.
Everything boils down to Microsoft wanting to force people to greatly inspire people to buy their software through their market and trying to extend their desktop OS branding to mobile markets. They bet the desktop market to try force the public into an unwanted paradigm shift thinking this would blow over like the ribbon bar in office. This hasn't blown over and their bet is backfiring and is taking causing significant harm to the desktop market as a direct result.
Things in the public domain (like airwaves) belong to the public and private businesses should not be able to simply decide they want to take away from the public domain just because they feel like it. They can always ask someone with a cell phone who is being an ass to leave their premises if they don't like it.
Now if only other government agencies would respect the public domain for things like formerly copyrighted works that were previously released into the public domain and other a whole host of other things....
The problem is the concept of the license instead of the purchase. The media companies want to get away from the idea that you 'own' anything. In order to do that with the shift to digital goods they 'license' everything. This way when you die they can claim that all of your purchases were in fact not purchases but in effect lifelong rental agreements. Your heirs get nothings and all of the money you spent becomes wasted.
There are two potential ways too challenge this. Someone could list a large number of digital assets in a bankruptcy case and get the trustee to challenge the idea that they cannot be sold. To the best of my knowledge the only time this came up it was settled out of court without setting precedent. The other way is to have the trustee of someone's estate challenge this when you die. The bottom line is that you have to have enough digital assets for the trustee to feel that it is worth their time and money to fight over. Since most people only have a couple grand or so in digital assets it usually isn't worth the court costs to try to recover them.
The practical alternative is to include your account password in your will so that your heirs can log into your account and use it after you pass away.
Just remember there is no need for them to spy on US citizens. After all if they want to do that they would just have the FBI do it. After all a fair amount of the time a pretty significant amount of spying can be done without even getting a warrant. I know people love to get extra paranoid and conspiracy theory bound here but look at the logistical complications. It isn't worth it for them to do it, and if something did catch their interest they would just call their buddies at the FBI who don't have the same political problems. From a purely beauracratic, political, and logistical standpoint they are probably fairly clean.
Cell phones need better microphones and noise canceling so that people on the other end can hear better. This would have the added benefit of greatly reducing how annoying their users are to those around them as people would no longer feel the need to talk really loudly into their phone. Imagine what a better society we would have with this one small change.
They have long wanted to wipe Israel off the face of the map and this is how they will do it. Just make their own maps and pretend they don't exist. Now if only they would do support virtual terrorism instead of real terrorism.
Is it really that unreasonable to get a warrant before doing the following activities?
Reading your email? Tracking your car? Tracking your phone calls? Tracking your cell phone? Tracking your every movement? Entering your private home? Entering your private car?
In today's society it is highly difficult to function without these capabilities, yet we are expected to check our constitutional rights out the door when we want to operate as normal members of society. Expecting nothing more than asking a judge to review if law enforcement has a reasonable reason to invade your privacy for legal purposes - as the constitution demands - should not even be a debate.
Slashdot Mirror
This is something that are country tends to fail miserably at and unfortunately you can't blame it all on corporations. The media very much deserves a large part of the blame for this with an attitude that everyone's private business is public business. It's not just this issue, Gawker took their anti-gun crusade and published peoples personal addresses after they followed New York law and registered their guns.
Example after example of the media blatantly disregarding people's privacy can be cited with entirely too much ease. As a society we should be ashamed of events like this and look to Europe for guidance on respecting other peoples privacy. Perhaps someday the right for privacy should be the next great civil rights crusade?
Those figures should have included nuclear energy from the get go. It's the greenest energy we have and the /only/ reason to exclude it to begin with is political. That certainly makes China appear even more green, and for the nuclear investment China does deserve credit. That being said the results implied are far from accurate, as there is a significant difference between investing in a thing and using it.
China is investing in the technology which they will then sell to others that will pay money for it. Unfortunately except for a few limited examples what China uses is very different from what they invest in or manufacture. Pollution is very bad in China and the article makes it sound like they are a green dream.
This is a really bad example to make your case. She has HIPAA data and needs to upgrade as her computer can't be patched anymore next year. No sympathy for someone with HIPAA data trying to get out of patching their system.
Now, if you had picked an example of someone who didn't have HIPAA data I'd point to options that could be done. However to be frank I am all out of sympathy for anyone in this situation. Microsoft announced end of life on this a very long time ago and frankly gave a lot longer on the EOL and support for the OS than Mac or any of the Linux variants.
This reminds me of the gas station owners put out of business by the new standards for underground tanks. They had years of advanced notice, yet they still refused to modernize something critical to their business that they knew they needed to. Time came that they could no longer be grandfathered in and all of a sudden a bunch of stations went out of business.
Why, because they didn't want to spend money for tanks that were resistant to leaks that could ruin the environment? A doctor that doesn't want to spend money to help prevent leaks (patient data) is no better than the gas station owner. It's a business expense just like any other and a business owner that refuses to give IT it's due as they should. Quit supporting IT neglect by helping people like this out.
What people don't understand is that for facial recognition software to work you have to have good quality cameras, images, a more static environment. This is why you hear about it being used in casinos is Las Vegas and elsewhere. In those environments you have high quality cameras with close range and good angles working against a smaller set of good pictures in a relatively static environment (people in casinos tend to congregate and not move around a lot). You also have staff with a distinct vested interest in watching out for their 'bad guys'.
In a place like a large public venue you have lower quality cameras, far more people running around, worse angles and range and the environment is far more transient. The tool is being used in a completely different environment with far less support and far larger data sets to work with.
It's like taking your Rav4 off-roading the Rubicon trail and coming way with the conclusion that off-roading is a bunch of hype. You've taken the tool (grocery getter) and put it to use for a job it was never meant for. Meanwhile your guy with the old Jeep knows for a fact that his tools works for the job because he uses it for that job on a routine basis, however he would be just as foolish to except his jeep to work as well as a daily grocery getter as a Rav4.
Until the tools are put into environments that allow them to succeed, and with the hardware that they need they will continue to fail. You could call it a failing of the tool, however the tools and hardware are immature. Give it another five years and this would be a very different story. It's just technology advancing and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it short of getting hold of your politician and demanding reforms or limits on it's use.
Things don't have to be over for Microsoft and they are perfectly capable of pulling out of their slump. Their failures, and they are massive multi-billion dollar failures that are taking down the entire PC industry with them can be rectified at any time of Microsoft's choosing. If Microsoft did the following it would rejuvenate the market, restore enterprise confidence and bring back the 800 pound gorilla.
1. They need to release a patch for Windows 8 that allows direct booting to the desktop. This is a /very/ big deal for the enterprise market and will cause another 10 year repeat of what happened with Windows XP until they do.
2. They need to bring back the Start menu for the desktop. While not quite the epic level failure of the forcing the boot into Metro it is a very large issue for the enterprise market. This issue greatly strengthens the case for another 10 year repeat for Windows 7 such as was experienced with Windows XP.
3. Simplify, simplify! In their efforts to make things looks dumbed down for a toddler they made formerly simple tasks like powering down too complicated. Making things look simple is great, but not at the expense of actually making them more complicated.
4. Surface is a great product and Microsoft should do more with it, however they need to drop the price by hundreds of dollars if they are going to inspire anyone to actually buy the thing. Having a reference product (Nexus etc) is not a bad thing, but you have to make it at a price that is low enough to inspire people to actually want to buy the thing.
5. Issue a statement letting people know that Xbox 720 will not require always on DRM. This was a public relations fiasco as illustrated by Sim City and they already have problems with developers leaving their platform as being too much of a pain in the ass to work with. Having a console that is a pain in the ass for both developers and consumers is product suicide.
6. Stop customer hostile policies that are running rampant in places like MSDN and Technet. What they are gaining in stopping piracy they are more than losing in mindshare as people get fed up and don't want to deal with Microsoft anymore.
7. Stop employee ranking for reviews, the result has been the loss of good employees and blatant sabotaging of work and a complete loss of teamwork. The result has clearly shown in a loss of quality in the product that employees produce and the quality of the talent that Microsoft attracts. Nobody wants to work in a hostile workplace.
8. Provide better support to the hardware vendors that have been getting bleed dry. They are suffering significant losses, especially with the Windows 8 disaster and will soon be at the point where they don't have the financial risks they used to by banding together to support another product (Linux variant or Android Desktop variant could be a serious risk).
9. Stop ignoring your customers (hardware, enterprise, consumers) when they tell you that they don't like something and go back and change it.
I feel like one of those UFO people standing in a field waiting for little green men to pop out of flying saucers on the second blue moon when the planets line up just right with the moon. I want to believe, really I do want to believe. But like the buffoon in the field waiting on the little green men I'm going to be waiting a very long time before Oracle /gets/ security.
It takes a lot more than simply delaying a given release of a given product to get your security ducks in a row. Here are some things Oracle needs to start embracing if they want to be taken half as seriously as Microsoft (never would have imagined saying that a decade ago).
Make it easy for security related people to get hold of you at any time of day on day of the year.
Make it easy for people supporting your products to know what is wrong with your products.
Release updates about what is wrong with your products in a timely manner.
There is never an excuse to take longer than 60 days to release a patch - ever.
Realize that the 'bad guys' don't operate on quarterly release schedules!
Provide workarounds for security vulnerabilities that make it easier to keep your product than remove your product.
Provide information about vulnerabilities faster than the news media, will they control the message or will you?
You can't stop the message from getting out, so at a minimum always provide a 'were working on this and we'll get it out asap' note.
Security through obscurity does not work in the real world, repeat until stop practicing this!
Make it easy to find out about vulnerabilities, navigating your website is only sanely done through Google.
Version control, automatic updates should NEVER move upgrade between major versions.
Oracle, I applaud that you are starting to take your head out of the sand, but you still don't get security and until I start to see some of the real world changes I listed above I'm going to continue to rank you one of the highest security risks any organization has to deal with.
First off, I find most of your comment the most intelligent one in this thread, in particular I agree that sex should simply never come up as an issue. On the point about the the affirmative action though I will have to disagree with you. In many government jobs, or jobs that relate to government (road construction etc) where affirmative action is required you happen to be wrong.
A couple of examples for you are when the Federal government setup the TSA. I was involved with the program from an IT standpoint as we had testing stations all over the US and territories. When the program first started we to hire an entire government agencies worth of people all at once and it was a massive logistical undertaking. We had hotels rented, nurses and doctors for physical exams, IT staff, security staff, the whole nine yards were on hand to run tests to hire enough people to hire the screeners. On average each temporary hiring center had between 30-60 temporary staff on hand.
We had to keep each center open until the appropriate quotas were filled for each airport. In some cases that meant we kept centers staffed for weeks or months in order to make sure we hired enough women for certain positions (supervisors etc). We actually had the same thing happen with men in Guam or American Samoa if I recall where the local culture was that only women worked in security.
You'll see the same thing happen with any number of other fields that relate to government in any number of other ways. In many of these cases affirmative action literally equals a quota and the more qualified white/male/other majority class will lose out on the job to the entirely unqualified candidate simply because they are trying to fill a given quota.
And you have to restrain yourself to the United States to get that figure. While I certainly don't sympathize with neo-nazis or their ilk (and I doubt they'd approve of my non-white girlfriend), your cherry picking of facts is disingenuous. Worldwide the overwhelming majority of bombings are performed by Muslims and it's only by parsing the data in a certain way that you can make it look any other way.
Your sort of on track. What you really need is a properly set up lab environment that you have administrative access to. Your needs are perfectly legitimate, and you certainly need to be able to do the things you do in a timely manner. This is not an issue with administrators, but an issue with not having the lab set up correctly. This is what you need, I speak from the experience of setting these things up when I used to travel.
This is what your IT staff needs to set up for you for you in a proper enterprise class lab.
1. Your lab needs to be identical to production. Rights, operating systems, software, versions, everything except hardware needs to be identical.
2. Labs should never have special privileges to make things easier or faster, if you have done this you have failed.
3. Your lab needs the ability for you to reset any given machine on demand without going change control.
4. Your lab must have enough RAM to be usable, ESXi or equivalent lab servers with inadequate RAM will spend far more in labor than the cost of RAM in days.
5. Your lab must support the number of users that are needed for use simultaneously.
6. Your lab needs to be part of change control. Nothing should ever happen in production until it has been tested in the lab.
7. The use of snapshots to maintain parity with production is critical.
8. Your lab must be patched as the test environment before production. It is never acceptable to have an unpatched lab.
Remember that lab license costs are almost always allowed to be significantly offset by almost any vendor as long as it is not production.
I feel your pain, that's a large part of what I did was implementing the type of things your talking about needing. In fact it was setting up that kind of process and environment where I would run into the cowboys. IT is supposed to support and facilitate the business in meeting their needs. It should never be an obstacle or an impediment.
In order to do that you have to responsive to what the business needs in a timely manner. You can't take so long to implement something that the business works around you. If your environment wants to use Mac's and you don't have a solid reason not to do so than you need to figure out a way to do so. For example I've got 8500 Mac computers where I work that were not being managed so I created a steering committee to oversee them and drove the process to bring in an enterprise management platform because that is what a large number of users want to use - not what I want.
You also have to implement enough change management that your retaining control of your organization. Change management should never involve making secondary changes like you've experienced, that is the result of poor change control. Rollback plans are important though, the idea is that if something fails you should have a plan for how you would put things back.
Things like setting up labs that are identical between production and development are critical for success. If development doesn't mirror production (rights, different OS's, different versions of software etc) than all of your testing is meaningless. /rant off
I think I have figured out the appeal of Google Glass. People saw Terminator 2 and remember all the information the terminator had at his 'eyeballs' and thought it was really, really cool. Google glass is an attempt to make this happen, next up Google Robot.
They already have to the OS of course, it will be simple to port 'droid' to it's next version that we'll call 'robot'. It's a small and light weight OS that can run on a variety of hardware platforms and was meant for one shape but adapted to another. It will adapt well to it's future cyborg form without a lot of expected difficulties. It features the following advantages ready for production today:
The operating system is made for remote management and updating without human intervention.
Many programs are available and can be readily downloaded as needed for a variety of situations as needed.
It has fairly good battery life and can be recharged via USB ports which are everywhere.
It's open source and so it can be modified by anyone/thing.
Other related developments:
Drones are all over the place, they can even fly jumbo jets without human pilots now.
We already have Google Car, so autonomous Priuses are here to bore everyone to death already.
Google fiber is being rolled out to allow for a nice robust network that humiliates all other providers in the US
The only logical conclusion? The founders of Google are entirely too fond of the Terminator movies and are planning on releasing Google Skynet to take over the world. Once Google decides to purchase SpaceX and start launching their own Google Satellites it's time to run for the hills...
My point of fact I have been paid well for reining in cowboys like him. I traveled for years as a consultant and while that wasn't my job as such, it was something that kept coming up. Point being that every time I have to deal with a cowboy it takes up time and energy to rein them in and bring them back town to earth.
I've never lost the argument, and I've never failed to rein in any department of developers, no matter how much they thought they were big shots. It's not about my ego though, it's about keep cowboys from bringing down the house when their ego get's out of control.
I've reined in cowboys like you for years, from one fortune 500 to another. Arrogant jackasses that can't be bothered with change management, best practices, version control, documentation, pesky things like policies, regulations and laws. Self righteous developers that can't see past their own nose too see how thier actions or inactions affect those around them.
Every single time they think they are above these things and that they know better than the industry around them. They never realize why something that works in their special environment works perfectly fine where they have the rights of a God but has all kinds of mysterious errors in production where there they are brought back down to earth. They then chafe when their development environment is set up identical to production, yet it is amazing how quickly previous mysterious bugs that plagued production and caused incredible operational costs suddenly get fixed. They of course never have to clean up multi-million dollar messes, talk to regulatory agencies, sit down with lawyers to plan how to mitigate their mess or have a face to face with an angry Attorney General.
I've only won this argument and helped companies save millions by reining in the cowboys like yourself a couple dozen times. Probably something to do.with cleaning up large multi-million dollar messes more than once.
RTFA! Many of the phones have been patched by the manufacturer and they in turn have handed over the patch to the carrier. The carriers sit on the patches because they don't want to be bothered taking the time and money to test them. The carriers make the patches because the phones are sold worldwide for many models and they are expected to support them in other markets. If you can't find your patch for your phone in the US you can often the patch for the international version if you look.
About bloody time that someone does this. It is absolutely indefensible that the carriers have refused to release patches for known security holes for extended periods of time if they release them at all. This blatantly leaves their customers vulnerable and their customers have no way of circumventing this short of rooting their phones.
I read the article before it appeared on Slashdot and many of these phone will literally never receive any patches from the carrier. These phones are effectively being sold as known defective devices and I hope someone initiates a class action lawsuit on the matter as I can't think of any other way to fix this issue. Patch Management really should not be an afterthought and it affects every device, every operating system and unfortunately there are still legions of idiots out there equate Patch Management with Microsoft Windows patch Tuesday.
That it would require a lawsuit in order to patch your phone and secure it against a known vulnerability say much about about the state of American cell phone industry. This country desperately needs to adopt the standards used by the rest of the world and it's a point of shame that we have the industry we do. Most Americans don't know how bad things are here because they never go abroad, and once they do it's like walking into a candy store for the first time with "you can do that?", again and again.
Tie H1B visas to the local tech unemployment rate and average salary rate for a given field. Don't allow any more H1B visas into a given metropolitan area until average salaries have gone up and average unemployment has gone down. If there is really a shortage than the market will respond by increasing salaries and decreasing unemployment, let the market do it's work. That would get rid of the bogus job ads that are placed for the explicit purpose of not hiring an American.
In other words you can't get H1B visas unless the local area actually has a demonstrable need for people with those skills. This would do wonders for unemployed and underpaid Americans that have been devastated by the H1B visa program. Create a progressive payroll tax that goes up by the percentage of H1B visas that are on your payroll either directly or through contract companies.
Now to address some of the needs of the employers. Get rid of limits for H1B visas altogether, and allow anyone who attends University in the United States to get a similar visa automatically upon graduation. This would allow for true labor shortages to be met and for companies to grow as claimed. Allow the best and brightest to stay in America and contribute to our economy. Company after company has been founded by hard working immigrants that have made significant contributions to our society. These are the people that we want working for us, not for the competition.
Society is the key word here though, make the H1B visa program a fast track to citizenship for America. In four years you earn your citizenship and become a contributing member of society or your out. Allow those that would contribute to our society to immigrate and have a legitimate path to citizenship, it's the American way.
Oh, I understand, those words are rarely used properly and almost always used as management speak. In this case I rather deliberately used them as a tweak on Microsoft management.
The problem is that Microsoft didn't bet their company on their attempts to force a paradigm shift in how people interact with and use Windows. They bet the entire desktop computer industry along with them. By way of point on how bad things are Windows Vista wasn't released at Christmas like Windows 8 was and Windows Vista saw much higher deployment rates (not sales rates) than Windows 8 has for the same months after release. The net result was an almost epic level collapse of the industry that followed with a record drop in PC sales, however all of the offered excuses fall flat when you look at them with a touch of logic:
The economy. It's actually better now than it has been for the last several years and unemployment has been starting to decrease.
Tablets. Tablets started becoming popular a few years ago, the slump in PC sales is directly timed with the release of Windows 8.
People already having a computer. Since the Mhz wars petered out a several years back speed has had a little to do with new computer sales. Again, nothing new here.
Smart Phones. Smart Phones started taking off en mass about 3-4 years ago and there is nothing particularly expansive related to the last 6 months there.
The bottom line is that Microsoft started causing severe economic damage to the PC industry with their attempt to force a UI change on the market. If they hurt the industry enough, the industry while feel compelled to look for alternatives to Microsoft to distribute their products. Microsoft knows that this can and has happened with smart phones and tablets and industry simply couldn't take any more pain without risk of simply no longer being dependent on Microsoft.
The secondary reason is that the enterprise market has made adamantly clear that they absolutely will not deploy Windows 8 until the start button and boot to desktop interface issues are resolved. Microsoft saw enterprises stick it to them with XP for a decade and realizes that enterprise is not about to put up with another Vista experience. Microsoft has to make these changes, or they risk losing their distribution chain to their competition.
Actually the UI change /was/ the point. Microsoft want's people going through their store where they get a cut of sales instead of people buying software through traditional channels. In order to facilitate this they had to make access to the use of traditional software more burdensome and the use of software sold through their market less burdensome. By making the traditional desktop more burdensome it would 'inspire' people to want to use their new user interface.
The fact that their new user interface is the same interface you will see in their other products is very deliberate. The point is to leverage Windows to facilitate sales of mobile and other products since they will look and feel like your computer and to make tablets feel like a natural Windows environment. Remember that Microsoft has actually had their OS on tablets for well over a decade and no one bought them beyond token quantities.
Everything boils down to Microsoft wanting to force people to greatly inspire people to buy their software through their market and trying to extend their desktop OS branding to mobile markets. They bet the desktop market to try force the public into an unwanted paradigm shift thinking this would blow over like the ribbon bar in office. This hasn't blown over and their bet is backfiring and is taking causing significant harm to the desktop market as a direct result.
Things in the public domain (like airwaves) belong to the public and private businesses should not be able to simply decide they want to take away from the public domain just because they feel like it. They can always ask someone with a cell phone who is being an ass to leave their premises if they don't like it.
Now if only other government agencies would respect the public domain for things like formerly copyrighted works that were previously released into the public domain and other a whole host of other things....
The problem is the concept of the license instead of the purchase. The media companies want to get away from the idea that you 'own' anything. In order to do that with the shift to digital goods they 'license' everything. This way when you die they can claim that all of your purchases were in fact not purchases but in effect lifelong rental agreements. Your heirs get nothings and all of the money you spent becomes wasted.
There are two potential ways too challenge this. Someone could list a large number of digital assets in a bankruptcy case and get the trustee to challenge the idea that they cannot be sold. To the best of my knowledge the only time this came up it was settled out of court without setting precedent. The other way is to have the trustee of someone's estate challenge this when you die. The bottom line is that you have to have enough digital assets for the trustee to feel that it is worth their time and money to fight over. Since most people only have a couple grand or so in digital assets it usually isn't worth the court costs to try to recover them.
The practical alternative is to include your account password in your will so that your heirs can log into your account and use it after you pass away.
Just remember there is no need for them to spy on US citizens. After all if they want to do that they would just have the FBI do it. After all a fair amount of the time a pretty significant amount of spying can be done without even getting a warrant. I know people love to get extra paranoid and conspiracy theory bound here but look at the logistical complications. It isn't worth it for them to do it, and if something did catch their interest they would just call their buddies at the FBI who don't have the same political problems. From a purely beauracratic, political, and logistical standpoint they are probably fairly clean.
Cell phones need better microphones and noise canceling so that people on the other end can hear better. This would have the added benefit of greatly reducing how annoying their users are to those around them as people would no longer feel the need to talk really loudly into their phone. Imagine what a better society we would have with this one small change.
They have long wanted to wipe Israel off the face of the map and this is how they will do it. Just make their own maps and pretend they don't exist. Now if only they would do support virtual terrorism instead of real terrorism.
Is it really that unreasonable to get a warrant before doing the following activities?
Reading your email?
Tracking your car?
Tracking your phone calls?
Tracking your cell phone?
Tracking your every movement?
Entering your private home?
Entering your private car?
In today's society it is highly difficult to function without these capabilities, yet we are expected to check our constitutional rights out the door when we want to operate as normal members of society. Expecting nothing more than asking a judge to review if law enforcement has a reasonable reason to invade your privacy for legal purposes - as the constitution demands - should not even be a debate.