If the package costs more than $20 I'm going to want to talk to someone who's used the product.
And one of the questions that I'll be asking is about their experience with upgrades. After all, version 5 means that they've gone through what I would consider to be FOUR major upgrades. What kind of support do they have for that? How painful was it? What hoops did you have to jump through. What "artifacts" are still lingering around from the previous upgrades?
if your product's target consumers are gullible or naive end users, then you might get away with something like this. but i imagine most tech savvy consumers would be turned off by a company that puts so much weight on marketing rather than focusing on their development process (which such manipulation of the versioning system undermines).
What would YOU do when you tried to research FooBar v6.0... and could not find anything at all about v5... v4... v3... v2... v1 ?
My first thought would not be that Marketing had fucked with the version numbers. It would be that that company's past product have sucked so badly that NO ONE would use them.
If I cannot find a SINGLE user who is happy with v5 what does that tell me about the likelihood that v6 will be decent?
And when I find out that v6 is really v1... but Marketing wants to fuck with the numbering to FOOL people into buying it... no way. I'll go with a competitor's product. That's just too many warning signs for me.
Well YOU were the one that clicked "okay" when the machine WARNED you that it MIGHT be dangerous. (Conveniently ignore the other thousand times when you were "warned" and it was not a threat.) Just a modern take on the old "boy who cried wolf" theme.
As can be seen in the recent "terrorist" arrests in the US. Once you start paying people to turn in "terrorists", you start a market in "terrorists".
So the guy who wants to sell a "terrorist" to the government finds some idiot who meets the basic criteria (non-Christian, non-white) and encourages that idiot to make inflammatory statements while being recorded.
I would seriously consider voting for either one that came forward and promised to cut TSA's authority and streamline the process, getting back to only those people who are basically confirmed problems being on the list, no matter what their views might be on Iraq, Afghanistan, the economy, or offshore drilling.
Vote for me.
I'd take their "no fly" list and identify every single person on it who was a legitimate threat and either have them under 24 hour surveillance or arrested.
The mere concept of a list of names of people who are too "dangerous" to let fly... but not dangerous enough to track... that just fucking stupid.
Think about how many people could be killed in the airport terminal itself WITHOUT getting on a plane... say during the Thanksgiving or Christmas rushes there.
What idiot would let the people on that list (if they were really a threat) into a terminal? Wouldn't you expect them to STOP them BEFORE they get into a position to do that kind of damage?
We have a similar problem here that I've not been allowed to fix yet.
The employees typically turn on their computers and then LEAVE THE OFFICE to get Starbucks coffee or whatever. A 10 minute wait turns into 30 minutes of non-productivity.
The computers should be the same as the phones. Instant on - any time - every time.
I'm running a few Ubuntu boxes and I just "apt-get install powertop" and fired it up.
It found a few items on one of the older boxes and one item on the newer boxes.
So I followed the simple directions "press U to enable USB sleep" or something like that and now the app says that my boxes are waking from idle 5 times a second.
Whether that is good or not... I have not noticed any increase in performance. But it seems to be applicable to my generic Ubuntu systems.
There's an entire culture now of buying a house with a mortgage payment of 80%+ of your take-home pay, counting on cashing out equity every year because "house prices only go up". This isn't a problem the government can fix.
Yeah, it can. It's called "regulation" and it's what certain sections keep ranting against.
Simply put, make it illegal for the bank to write a mortgage unless certain criteria are met.
If we had stuck to that then we wouldn't be facing this crisis today. It would probably be a different crisis. But it wouldn't be this one.
Because once you allow people to connect personal items to the network your security model is non-existent. And connecting them to the workstations counts as having them on the network in this instance.
If they want to play music or whatever, they can bring radios / players / etc in. But they cannot use the company's workstations to load iTunes and fill up their iPod. That just creates another potential issue that IT has to deal with.
Now, if they'd be willing to take a pay cut so IT could afford a few more employees who would handle iTunes problems and such... say... $100 a month... each.
And resisting it is mostly just frustrating everyone.
Now, I'm not saying you have to support every oddball app on the planet. I would recommend you have an 'approved software' list, and back that software up with support. Saying 'that is not supported, use this' is far better than locking things down, from my experience.
Good luck with that.
Since you seem to believe that setting one limit is unenforceable, why do you believe that setting a different limit is enforceable?
You cannot use IM app X because: a. You are not allowed to use IM at work. b. You are only allowed to use IM app Y (which does not connect to the service you want to use).
And, from TFA:
Unless companies are prepared to lock down their systems in unprecedented ways - or otherwise radically reconceive their computing operations - this accelerating, unmanaged influx of new devices and services is going to force IT departments into a reactive role.
Why do so many people see "No" as "reactive"? You can evaluate new technology and new products and determine that they present security issues that outweigh their benefits.
In just about every other aspect of business this would be a non-issue. You don't allow people to replace the phone system with their own phone that is incompatible with your PBX but it's okay because they can just call the phone company and run a POTS line to their cubicle.
While they wait for that, they'll fire up a deep fryer in their cubicle and make up a batch of donuts for everyone.
I don't care if their "standard" only requires a "sub-set" of the RPM format. Just dump it.
Write the specifications for a.lsb install format.
Then encourage the other package systems to include your format in their systems. I should be able to apt-get install foo.lsb and have it SEEMLESSLY integrate with Debian's package management system. And the same file with rpm -i foo.lsb and so forth.
There, the first problem is solved. People can easily identify the LSB packages and install / remove / upgrade / back-rev / whatever them.
And they would be completely platform NEUTRAL which SHOULD have been their first goal.
So, now that you can install their packages... they need to start identifying which libraries and such are required by foo. Is there any reason that those libraries would not also be distributed as.lsb packages? Meta packages if necessary?
And don't even get me started on where Apache gets installed vs where they tell you a commercial web server should be installed. Apps is apps. It doesn't matter whether the distribution shipped it, you built it from source or you bought it from an ISV. Unless you're the LSB. Then it matters.
But the reality is that they've been working on this for over a decade and have yet to show a single ISV who supports it.
Their approach is flawed.
What the ISV's really want is what they've been doing for years. They "partner" with a distribution and, officially, support very defined releases from that distribution.
Every time I opened one of them up to upgrade or something I was amazed that they would even run at all. And the dirt...
And from the other side, I'm constantly telling people to clean the crud out of their machines. Just last week a co-worker brought in her boyfriend's machine because it "would not work". Two minutes of blowing out the dust in the slots (RAM, AGP and PCI) and it booted up just fine.
I'm in agreement with the "dodging a bullet" comment.
Just because it is possible that there might not be problems (unless X, Y or Z happens) is not the same as taking pro-active steps to reduce the potential problems.
Sure, their server handled the water dripping on it.
But then, you would NOT be reading the story (because it would not be published) if the water had shorted out that server. It would have been a case of "Duh! They put the servers in a tent in the rain. What did they expect."
With stories like these, you will NEVER read of the failures. The failures are common sense. You will only read of the times when it seems to have worked. And only then because it seems to contradict "common sense".
In my personal opinion, the reliability of email reached its maximum near 1998; it has gone down ever since as the result of increasingly aggressive anti-spam/virus measures. This observation has led me to conclude that the spammers aren't destroying the email infrastructure, it's the well-meaning people with their countermeasures.
I use Exim4 as a pre-processor for a GroupWise system.
This allows me to reject messages during the SMTP connection (no receive and then bounce back) and I have customized the rejection messages to include my phone number. As long as YOUR email admin handles error messages in any sane way, you'll get a phone number to call and talk to the guy who set up the system that rejected your email. I get a call about every other month now.
The real problem is not "aggressive anti-spam/virus measures".
It is that 80%+ of the inbound connections are spam-related. So just about ANY action taken will reduce the amount of spam. But the email admins still need to continually evaluate their processes.
Getting traditional "silo" orientated programmers to use distributed computing is hard now!
And (for many of them) it's never going to get any easier.
It is too easy for them to just think of "one program, one OS, one machine".
Their app takes all the resources it sees from the OS it sees on the machine it sees.
So VMWare "solves" this by making it easy (for a price) for each app to believe that it has it's own machine. So the programmers can keep working they've always worked.
The problem is, that if you're not prepared to have your beliefs shaken, you're not really fit for science.
Now imagine a class with 10 Creationist students in it.
All arguing their latest talking points with the teacher.
All demanding that books X, Y and Z be read to show the "facts" of Creationism.
All saying that authors A, B and C have "disproven" evolution.
All claiming that evolution is a religion.
Fuck that. Put Creationism in a World Religions class and just save the time and arguments. As can be seen from the comments here, even self described "nerds" have trouble understanding what science is (and is not). Why bother with the confusion and the arguments?
The only reasonable thing to do, then, is to present both of these theories, give them equal time, and let the students draw their own conclusions about which one they're going to accept.
Again, a scientific theory has evidence to support it. It is falsifiable. It can be tested.
Yet you keep using the same word to describe evolution and Creationism.
It is that exact error that is the reason against teaching Creationism.
I think that that is the problem we had.
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
There have been a lot of comments about how your manager doesn't need to know the technical aspects of what you do.
Let's just extend that with your Ford analogy.
The CEO doesn't know what a carburetor is. So he hires person A to handle that. But person A does not know, either. So person A hires person B to handle that. But person B does not know, either. So person B hires person C to handle that....
Eventually you end up with the situation where you have layers and layers of "middle management" that do nothing other than move reports around and attend meetings.
And that's why you're probably driving an import today.
And 100% agreement on HP and Carly. I have no respect for HP now. The person at the top is paid a LOT of money... supposedly because she has a LOT of knowledge and expertise and skill. Arguing that knowledge is not needed... well, people always disparage what they do not have.
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If the package costs more than $20 I'm going to want to talk to someone who's used the product.
And one of the questions that I'll be asking is about their experience with upgrades. After all, version 5 means that they've gone through what I would consider to be FOUR major upgrades. What kind of support do they have for that? How painful was it? What hoops did you have to jump through. What "artifacts" are still lingering around from the previous upgrades?
What would YOU do when you tried to research FooBar v6.0 ... and could not find anything at all about v5 ... v4 ... v3 ... v2 ... v1 ?
My first thought would not be that Marketing had fucked with the version numbers. It would be that that company's past product have sucked so badly that NO ONE would use them.
If I cannot find a SINGLE user who is happy with v5 what does that tell me about the likelihood that v6 will be decent?
And when I find out that v6 is really v1 ... but Marketing wants to fuck with the numbering to FOOL people into buying it ... no way. I'll go with a competitor's product. That's just too many warning signs for me.
The tool did NOT find the problem that was causing their crashes. Which was that their video drivers were to versions behind.
What the tool DID "find" was mostly meaningless (empty IE's temp folder and such).
It isn't about security.
It's about blame.
Well YOU were the one that clicked "okay" when the machine WARNED you that it MIGHT be dangerous. (Conveniently ignore the other thousand times when you were "warned" and it was not a threat.) Just a modern take on the old "boy who cried wolf" theme.
Add photos that you aren't in and tag them as you.
Then add backstory for them.
This photo was taken at my sister's friend's cousin's lesbian wedding in Monaco. That's me on lead guitar.
Since you cannot always hide information. You can always try to obscure the facts with the fallacies.
As can be seen in the recent "terrorist" arrests in the US. Once you start paying people to turn in "terrorists", you start a market in "terrorists".
So the guy who wants to sell a "terrorist" to the government finds some idiot who meets the basic criteria (non-Christian, non-white) and encourages that idiot to make inflammatory statements while being recorded.
Ka-CHING!
Vote for me.
I'd take their "no fly" list and identify every single person on it who was a legitimate threat and either have them under 24 hour surveillance or arrested.
The mere concept of a list of names of people who are too "dangerous" to let fly ... but not dangerous enough to track ... that just fucking stupid.
Think about how many people could be killed in the airport terminal itself WITHOUT getting on a plane ... say during the Thanksgiving or Christmas rushes there.
What idiot would let the people on that list (if they were really a threat) into a terminal? Wouldn't you expect them to STOP them BEFORE they get into a position to do that kind of damage?
... something like monitoring system usage and bringing additional boxes up when usage hits something like 80%?
And then suspending boxes when usage drops down to 10%?
All in all, trying to maintain a level 50% utilization level? Maybe with the utilization level setting being an option that the sysadmin could change?
I'd recommend you patent that idea.
We have a similar problem here that I've not been allowed to fix yet.
The employees typically turn on their computers and then LEAVE THE OFFICE to get Starbucks coffee or whatever. A 10 minute wait turns into 30 minutes of non-productivity.
The computers should be the same as the phones. Instant on - any time - every time.
I'm running a few Ubuntu boxes and I just "apt-get install powertop" and fired it up.
It found a few items on one of the older boxes and one item on the newer boxes.
So I followed the simple directions "press U to enable USB sleep" or something like that and now the app says that my boxes are waking from idle 5 times a second.
Whether that is good or not ... I have not noticed any increase in performance. But it seems to be applicable to my generic Ubuntu systems.
Yeah, it can. It's called "regulation" and it's what certain sections keep ranting against.
Simply put, make it illegal for the bank to write a mortgage unless certain criteria are met.
If we had stuck to that then we wouldn't be facing this crisis today. It would probably be a different crisis. But it wouldn't be this one.
Because once you allow people to connect personal items to the network your security model is non-existent. And connecting them to the workstations counts as having them on the network in this instance.
If they want to play music or whatever, they can bring radios / players / etc in. But they cannot use the company's workstations to load iTunes and fill up their iPod. That just creates another potential issue that IT has to deal with.
Now, if they'd be willing to take a pay cut so IT could afford a few more employees who would handle iTunes problems and such ... say ... $100 a month ... each.
The problem with depending upon anti-virus packages is that they are reactive. And their is a delay in them.
It is a LOT easier (and verifiable) to identify what SHOULD be on a machine and then remove everything else.
Which is why most decent IT shops lock down the machines so that new apps cannot be installed on them.
Good luck with that.
Since you seem to believe that setting one limit is unenforceable, why do you believe that setting a different limit is enforceable?
You cannot use IM app X because:
a. You are not allowed to use IM at work.
b. You are only allowed to use IM app Y (which does not connect to the service you want to use).
And, from TFA:
Why do so many people see "No" as "reactive"? You can evaluate new technology and new products and determine that they present security issues that outweigh their benefits.
In just about every other aspect of business this would be a non-issue. You don't allow people to replace the phone system with their own phone that is incompatible with your PBX but it's okay because they can just call the phone company and run a POTS line to their cubicle.
While they wait for that, they'll fire up a deep fryer in their cubicle and make up a batch of donuts for everyone.
I don't care if their "standard" only requires a "sub-set" of the RPM format. Just dump it.
Write the specifications for a .lsb install format.
Then encourage the other package systems to include your format in their systems. I should be able to apt-get install foo.lsb and have it SEEMLESSLY integrate with Debian's package management system. And the same file with rpm -i foo.lsb and so forth.
There, the first problem is solved. People can easily identify the LSB packages and install / remove / upgrade / back-rev / whatever them.
And they would be completely platform NEUTRAL which SHOULD have been their first goal.
So, now that you can install their packages ... they need to start identifying which libraries and such are required by foo. Is there any reason that those libraries would not also be distributed as .lsb packages? Meta packages if necessary?
And don't even get me started on where Apache gets installed vs where they tell you a commercial web server should be installed. Apps is apps. It doesn't matter whether the distribution shipped it, you built it from source or you bought it from an ISV. Unless you're the LSB. Then it matters.
But the reality is that they've been working on this for over a decade and have yet to show a single ISV who supports it.
Their approach is flawed.
What the ISV's really want is what they've been doing for years. They "partner" with a distribution and, officially, support very defined releases from that distribution.
And from the other side, I'm constantly telling people to clean the crud out of their machines. Just last week a co-worker brought in her boyfriend's machine because it "would not work". Two minutes of blowing out the dust in the slots (RAM, AGP and PCI) and it booted up just fine.
I'm in agreement with the "dodging a bullet" comment.
Just because it is possible that there might not be problems (unless X, Y or Z happens) is not the same as taking pro-active steps to reduce the potential problems.
Sure, their server handled the water dripping on it.
But then, you would NOT be reading the story (because it would not be published) if the water had shorted out that server. It would have been a case of "Duh! They put the servers in a tent in the rain. What did they expect."
With stories like these, you will NEVER read of the failures. The failures are common sense. You will only read of the times when it seems to have worked. And only then because it seems to contradict "common sense".
From TFA:
I use Exim4 as a pre-processor for a GroupWise system.
This allows me to reject messages during the SMTP connection (no receive and then bounce back) and I have customized the rejection messages to include my phone number. As long as YOUR email admin handles error messages in any sane way, you'll get a phone number to call and talk to the guy who set up the system that rejected your email. I get a call about every other month now.
The real problem is not "aggressive anti-spam/virus measures".
It is that 80%+ of the inbound connections are spam-related. So just about ANY action taken will reduce the amount of spam. But the email admins still need to continually evaluate their processes.
And (for many of them) it's never going to get any easier.
It is too easy for them to just think of "one program, one OS, one machine".
Their app takes all the resources it sees from the OS it sees on the machine it sees.
So VMWare "solves" this by making it easy (for a price) for each app to believe that it has it's own machine. So the programmers can keep working they've always worked.
Congratulations. You're the first person I've seen who understands that.
Accounting understands the need to close one year and open the next. They have processes for what is carried over and how it is identified.
Yet no other department (or application) understands the need to close old data and archive it.
Now imagine a class with 10 Creationist students in it.
All arguing their latest talking points with the teacher.
All demanding that books X, Y and Z be read to show the "facts" of Creationism.
All saying that authors A, B and C have "disproven" evolution.
All claiming that evolution is a religion.
Fuck that. Put Creationism in a World Religions class and just save the time and arguments. As can be seen from the comments here, even self described "nerds" have trouble understanding what science is (and is not). Why bother with the confusion and the arguments?
Again, a scientific theory has evidence to support it. It is falsifiable. It can be tested.
Yet you keep using the same word to describe evolution and Creationism.
It is that exact error that is the reason against teaching Creationism.
Because then you would be perpetuating the error you just made.
A "theory" in science has evidence to support it.
Where is the evidence to support Creationism?
That's the easiest way.
There have been a lot of comments about how your manager doesn't need to know the technical aspects of what you do.
Let's just extend that with your Ford analogy.
The CEO doesn't know what a carburetor is. ...
So he hires person A to handle that.
But person A does not know, either.
So person A hires person B to handle that.
But person B does not know, either.
So person B hires person C to handle that.
Eventually you end up with the situation where you have layers and layers of "middle management" that do nothing other than move reports around and attend meetings.
And that's why you're probably driving an import today.
And 100% agreement on HP and Carly. I have no respect for HP now. The person at the top is paid a LOT of money ... supposedly because she has a LOT of knowledge and expertise and skill. Arguing that knowledge is not needed ... well, people always disparage what they do not have.