Many of the people who rise to the tops of large organizations are backstabbing, loudmouthed, blowhards. They scheme and calculate their way to the top. This applies to almost all large organizations. A simple way around this is to add randomization. The idea is that for any promotion you have many many qualified candidates and then pick one at random. I very much doubt that there was only one qualified candidate for her job. Obviously the system they used picked one of the worst.
This random system then prevents people from spending all their time scheming to set up the ideal circumstances where all the other candidates have been pushed under a bus. Also then they don't owe any favors for their job.
Shouldn't not killing or torturing someone be default behavior. This would be like hiring staff and in their employment contract saying that you won't stab them to death with a sharpened chair leg. It sort of goes without saying in any civilized work place.
Now on the other hand you have to look at their loose definition of torture. Is waterboarding torture? Is 20 years of solitary torture? Are 20 interrogations per day torture? Is putting someone who should be free, in jail torture? According to the white house the answer to all these is probably, no.
Prepared statements have many advantages ranging from cleaner code to the huge security benefits. Why aren't these guys using them? Or is it more insidious in that the library that these guys are using for prepared statements has some kind of hole? I wish that a NTSB type group would examine these larger data breaches and produce a public report.
For example. I somewhat sanitize the input from users. But I do rely on prepared statements to make SQL injection impossible. Thus if library X.3 is somehow susceptible I would love to see reports showing that company X was hacked because of library Y. Now in theory I could go out and read the billion various security forums but they tend to be a wee bit obscure. But reports of actual events of an actual hack with the suggested changes that would have prevented that hack would be really cool.
Or are these programmers just that dumb. In that case it would be nice to name and shame the developers.
I don't know why you got voted down as I can even top that. I tried reinstalling Windows 7(HD died) using the disks that came with the machine and it wouldn't because the install said it was the wrong machine. The disks came with the machine and had the exact model on the packaging. I am about as technically savvy (short of a MSDN certification) that you could hope for. If I can't install it then less than 1% of the population could (assuming there was a way) and MS wonders why PC sales are in the toilet. If I didn't have many other tricks up my sleeve then my machine was now dead without professional help.
I have reinstalled Mac OS and it is just about as brain dead easy as possible. If you were using a time capsule then you may very well be looking at an exact replica of your original machine post install (right down to the desktop icon placement). I am not saying this can't be done in Windows it is just that computer illiterates might just manage it on the mac.
I am also not saying woo hoo the mac is so much better. It just highlights that the Windows PC experience could be so much less miserable.
After ripping McAfee's infestations from the guts of many a PC, and watching even the wingnut McAfee trash talking his own old company, I think I'll pass on anything not only from that company but anything that even were to rhyme with McAfee. To me there is never just one cockroach.
But nobody can exaggerate how crappy their bloated, pile of dung, machine slowing, worst-possible-time pop-up, fear mongering, computer newb fooling, circle of garbage really is.
In the future when people are writing case studies about the PC industry they are going to point a huge finger at the bloated trialware business model that has ruined the experience of buying a new computer. Basically consumer PCs are sold profitless. Then the companies hope that a certain percentage of the fools buy one of these piles of snot software packages of which the manufacturer gets a significant cut. Profit.
But the end result is that non-tech people unwrap their shiny new machine only to find all kinds of confusing icons for music services, media services, a trial for MS Office, and the worst... some AV pile of vomit. The AV vomitus will then tell them that they need to subscribe to their service otherwise the machine will be more infested than a street-walking Bangkok lady-boy.
Some defenders will scream, "If they don't want it then they can uninstall it." But the simple reality is that your average computer buyer from Staples is 100% unable to uninstall it thus will have this software threatening them every time they look at the screen.
I don't know how many giant screens or kiosks that I have seen screaming about the subscription running out.
But then the next layer of pain is that nobody hardly trusts these popups. With people like myself saying, "For the love of all that is good don't buy that crap." So now how can they distinguish between some AV crap trying to scam them and just their OS telling them that they should install the update.
Then people like myself come along and see that they are about 3 years behind on their updates because they were to scared to ever OK the updates. Their Adobe Flash is 4 versions out of date and their browser is running a beta of this new Javascript thing. So the fear caused by the bloatware AV has now caused them to allow their machine to become woefully insecure.
The alternative is that they blindly trust everything that seems helpful resulting in so many toolbars that they are left with around 1 inch of working browser and their machine takes 5 minutes and 8 casino ads to boot up.
So to me these AV types are not just the scum they obviously are but an insidious destroyer of the PC industry.
The best part is how people have been leaping to smart-phones to get away from desktops that scare them only to find many of the Telcos have installed "Helpful" software that points to obscure music/ringtone services, custom search engines, and other things that no doubt send a kickback their way.
My dream is that the robots free up huge chunks of the population to live a life of leisure or at least find something new, productive, and stimulating to do. My fear is that a very tiny minority will end up with all the wealth and attempt to turn the population into serfs.
I genuinely worry about this. My key worry is that we will keep economic structures in place that deal with past problems. So when million after million lose their jobs with no viable skills, I don't see mass retraining programs. I don't see extended unemployment insurance. So after a decade or two of absolute misery governments might be so broken and debt ridden as to be unable to do whatever it is that should have been done a decade or so earlier.
At a certain point the core focus will have to be to restore the dignity of being human. This is one of the big differences between our generations and the generation that lived through the depression. We see people on welfare as parasites, losers, and defectives. But for people who lived through the depression they saw good people slide into grinding poverty. There was simply no money. People began bartering, skilled people moving back onto family farms. This went on for a full decade. Things like the new deal sort of worked but people knew it was fake. But then the war started and poof, everyone was at full employment with real pay cheques coming in. Typically in North America there were some shortages of things that were imported like spices (and precision German goods) but there was money for food, clothes, etc. Plus people were doing things. The trains were full, the roads were full, factories were being built. So people then knew two things. That bad things happen to good people and that the government can buy an instant recovery if the money is handed to the people productively (if you can call building munitions productive). This was the generation that then voted in welfare and banking reforms vowing never again.
This depression era generation is now mostly gone, especially from government decision making. So we have the first part which is all the depression era banking reforms are now gone. Now we are just waiting for a trigger.
I guess I should have said the tide suddenly turned; as opposed to it all just went away. Sort of like the rain stopping and the ground is still wet but you don't worry about any more flooding.
It seems to me that the McCarthyism was actually quite small in that without computers the paperwork alone kept their mayhem somewhat limited. In contrast I read about a British couple who were denied entry to the US when they were connected with a Tweet that said something like "We're going to destroy this town." which clearly in context was that they were going to party all night. The immense data trawling and processing needed to connect that tweet to a couple flying in on an airplane is immense. Typically matching records from one data source to another is really really hard. But then to apply zero common sense just made the whole situation worse.
Then you now have the difficult to measure damage done to the US. That couple will not probably ever return. But lets assume that they or some associates were thinking of doing business in the US they will now think twice. It might only be something small but the millions do add up.
Basically think of a list of countries you wouldn't do business with (due to scams, corruption, scary crime, etc). Then put yourself into the shoes of a legitimate business person in one of those countries and what he has to go through to do business with the rest of the world. Now put yourself into the shoes of someone who has heard about problems of traveling to the US and where possible chooses other business locations (you might think that this isn't the case but many many business leaders have abandoned travel to the US. The former head of Mercedes apparently hated going to the US and cited it as one of the many reasons they dumped Chrysler)
Now realize that if you are a legitimate US business person you are now facing more and more of an uphill battle to do business with foreigners who have lost interest in the US. I am not talking all business people as the US is still a huge and interesting market. But the shine is starting to wear off. After the toxic waste of the US banking disaster, the crazy security TSA stuff, and now the spying, the shine is getting tarnished.
Was just my email exposed to some more spam? Not so bad.
Was my password exposed? That would suck as I hate remembering new ones but I use a different one for every site.
The worst from a password exposure would be if they then log in and developer reject all my apps.
Was my credit card exposed along with bits like the code on the back? That would suck but again I use a crap card for online stuff.
Were my private app keys exposed which then probably opens my app to piracy? That would suck too.
Was my banking information exposed. That could mega suck. Either if they manage to redirect payments or just do something nasty to my account.
Was all my contact info exposed? Along with my CC this would be the worst, as a scam artist could send an email/phone me, saying they that my apps were pulled from the store because of porn or something and that I could click HERE to contact Apple to protest. Even though I would be sure it is a scam and I would log in normally to check, my blood pressure would be up for a while.
So I would say of the various exposures banking info would be the worst.
Here is where many cultural legal systems will be severely tested. Robots. From my position in the present looking into the future I see robots feeding capitalism to an extreme point while eating jobs like a 70's Japanese city eating monster.
For an interesting historical president the factories of the industrial revolution ate many cottage industries which at first caused much upset but then the jobs in the factories were a huge blow to the feudal system. So in the long run it was a breakthrough for mankind. But in the short term it was brutally painful.
But one difference with Robots I just don't see where the jobs are going to be created. So you will have a fairly small percentage (maybe 1%) who have capital and are able to invest in things like nearly 100% robot driven farms/factories/stores/restaurants/construction/cleaning and the rest with no capital will both lose their jobs and not participate in the capital.
Under these circumstances I can see a huge problem with massive unemployment and lack of participation with the economy. So what do you do with 60% of the population who are permanently out of the economic picture? Do you punish them for being poor? Do you let them just vote bread and circuses? I don't think that there will be any easy solutions but one of the keys to economics is consumption not production. With Robotic production we may hit this semi-utopian "Post scarcity" scenario. So the key to the economy will be focusing on getting people to consume? How do you get people with no money to consume? You give them money. Then they get to participate in the economy and maybe they don't just decide that the guillotine was an excellent lever for social change.
My guess is that countries that have traditionally focused on financial equality will do far better with robots than countries that have focused on survival of the fittest.
The ebook is a different medium and as Marshall McLuhan pointed out the medium is the message. That is the medium dictates how the message is best sent and interpreted. Ebooks can simulate a paper book but just taking a book best formatted for paper is often not going to work well when just stuffed into an ebook. Many times it is simple the diagrams and whatnot being the wrong size for the often smaller screen. But other times (as with a magazines) you want to flick through looking for an article that catches your attention. Some like paperbacks translate well to the kindle with its e-ink and simple page turning formula.
Then with ebooks there are potential advantages such as speed of downloading, massive weight reductions, easy logistics, etc.
So I would not condemn the ebook so much as we should condemn the near lack of innovation in taking advantage of this wonderful new medium. To me this would be like saying that TV was not an improvement over radio if all people had done with it was to film people reading radio plays.
If I had to guess ebook improvements would include the obvious such as interactivity and formatting changes. But other things such getting rid of a general purpose textbook covering many subjects at one level and changing it so that each subject is covered from beginning to end and you just move on to another subject when you reach the desired level.
My argument is more that people attach themselves so very strongly to left right but don't completely know where to stand on authority. When the government in power is trying to enforce their utopia then many are all for extreme measures. But when the other side gets power then any extreme enforcement becomes an abuse of power. What is difficult for people to grasp is that maybe the government should not be able to push either agenda so hard. There are many things that both sides agree upon. Fire departments should be around to put out fires. Roads shouldn't have potholes. Police should arrest genuinely bad people (bank robbers etc). But at some point the whole things devolves into the government pushing the interests of fairly small groups of very noisy people.
The key problem with all this is that it can be cultural. In the US there is a culture of glorifying extreme success. While this can be argued to push people to achieve, only a tiny tiny minority will every be extremely successful. Yet since so many dream of being wildly successful they won't support measures that might hurt the successful, including those that would vastly improve their own lot. You have the working poor not supporting minimum wage all the while watching the owner of the business they work for buy another BMW for his kid going to a $50,000 per year collage.
The question is coming as to how all this is going to play out. It is easy to look at the NSA stuff and extrapolate out to the US being Nazi by 2019 but if you look at McCarthyism (which was pretty bad) it just ended overnight. One day there was a red under every bed and then poof the losers running the nuthouse were shut down. Communists were still a threat just not a threat worth destroying yourself over. The same may happen with the NSA.
As for left and right being different seeing that things like Guantanamo and PRISIM were created by Bush and not shut down by Obama I'm not seeing much of a difference between the two.
As for dealing with the militarization of the police it can quickly be dealt with. You make things like no-knock warrants almost impossible to get. You restrict the types of weapons that the police can possess. You cut off terrorism funding and tell them that things like that will be handled by the FBI. But most importantly you remove the investigation of the police from any body associated with law enforcement and you give them the ability to terminate police without any recourse of their unions. I saw this up close; when the police screw up they not only look bad but they make their political masters look bad. So solid investigations that solidly confirm that policeman X was bad and is now fired is confirmation that politico X isn't doing his job. Thus it is in their best interests that the investigations are "Internal" and "Confidential" (i.e. not embarrassing). This is why so few autopsies are performed after unusual deaths in hospitals; they are only going to expose screwups.
One other pressure is that being a cop can be pretty boring. Wrestling drunks, traffic patrol, walking/driving the beat, arguing with crazy people. Then you have the relative lack of genuine promotion opportunities most communities only need a tiny number of detectives or major crimes investigators. Plus the reality is that via tickets issued and petty crime prevention being high priorities for most local governments, they don't really want many cops to be anything but uniforms driving marked units.
So then comes along SWAT. With the occasional columbine the cops are able to convince the local politicians that they don't want to be caught with their pants down. Internally they wont meet much resistance because who doesn't want to play soldier and act all tough. You get to do cool training (pit maneuvers, kicking down doors, and lots of shooting). Basically action hero stuff; who didn't become a cop without at least a small hero fantasy in the back of their brain.
But then the last factor is that most police departments are by nature separate from the politicians. This is sort of a requirement otherwise politicians could too easily interfere with investigations "I can vouch for him personally, he would never do anything like that, I think you should drop it, Now." Plus the police need to be able to distribute their resources as they see fit. Again the politicians would distribute the policing according to political needs which would generally be very different than distributing the resources for crime prevention.
But the real question becomes one of authoritarianism vs libertarianism. This is the true divide in North America, not left wing and right wing. There are those who believe that we should be exposed to no risk and aim to impose some kind of perfect Disney society. They believe that with enough rules that this society can be achieve. The war on terror and the war on drugs are perfect examples of this. Yet the simple measure of the impossibility of this would be maximum security prisons these places are full of drugs and violence. If near 100% removal of liberty and relentless monitoring can not work in these facilities, what hope is there outside in "free" society? Bizarrely the various police agencies are slowly turning "free" society into those very failed prisons.
This sort of behavior often has many unintended consequences. This us against them mentality might first pervade the police but it then pervades the public. You end up with a public who stop cooperating with the police as a rule thinking that any cooperation will be used against them. This significantly reduces the usefulness of the police while reinforcing their mentality of us against them.
But then this feedback loop seems to get worse. The authoritarianism begins to spread to the legal system where you get angry prosecutors and hanging judges trying to prove that the system still works. The politicians are then harangued to make the penalties stiffer and stiffer as toleration of any libertarian policies would be to admit failure.
But luckily fantasy can only hold out so long against reality and as we are seeing a few jurisdictions have effectively eliminated their marijuana penalties. The world did not come to an end. Money is being save and lives aren't being ruined. But the authoritarian types are still desperate to hit people with sticks. So they are now making DUI laws where you will test positive a week or more after smoking up. Also these involve taking a blood sample. A fairly invasive and nasty privilege to give to the police.
So my suggestion is to fight fire with fire. New fundamental laws need to be put into place that will severely punish any members of the legal system who violate people's rights. There should be a people's jury that can be called that can permanently remove from office any official who is accused of abusing rights (judges, police, prosecutors). Freedom of information laws should be massively strengthened to the point where when a FOI request is issued that the officials will place it at the top of their todo list with little recourse to say no. Information is truely the lever of power and by giving information back to the people the people will regain the power that is rightfully theirs.
I read a book where a guy often got around extreme high security buildings (guys with guns at the front door) by locating the smoker's entrance. He would walk up with some smokes hand them around wait for a full rotation of smokers and then just go in. The door was often propped open with a rock.
Lobbyists will flood the streets of Washington and this will be down before August. While the decision by the IT staff is sensible and sane that won't change the thinking of the entertainment industry. I know someone in this industry and they produced a pilot good show a few years ago that they just couldn't sell. So I suggested that they promote it via various torrents and whatnot. This person just about lost their mind. It wasn't that they disagreed with my marketing logic it was that they wouldn't allow those pirating bastards to make one cent off their work. I pointed out that he wasn't making one cent off his work either.
This and other factors leads me to believe that the thinking inside the movie industry that the whole internet (Netflix types included) is pure evil. This thinking seems to be religious in nature. So if you sell you wares on Netflix you have gone to the dark side.
An example of the venom that I once heard about Netflix was that they won't do things like feature one work over another based on kickbacks or politicing. Basically the traditional TV types are comfortable when they can use their political weight to push their show into the primetime slot on Thursday which guarantees an audience. Whereas Netflix is more of "If people want it they will click on it". This does not sit well with people who would rather use their sharp elbows to make their crap shows a success.
So these government IT people are showing a hint of reality by putting up the most used tool VLC. But the lobbyists will show their well financed Fantasy thinking by shutting this down before the end of the month. So in the long term they will run out of money to finance this stupid fantasy of theirs but they have a lot of money so it will take a long time.
I sign up for Coursera courses willy nilly. Then I let my schedule at the time the course starts dictate my participation; that along with the apparent quality of the course. So my completion/pass rate is abysmal. Most of the courses I withdraw from look awesome but through no fault of the course it is bye bye for me. Then there is the annoying situation where two awesome but time consuming courses start at the same time. So again through no fault of the course designers it is bye bye.
Now if I had paid good money and was going to attend a bricks and mortar school course with a very fixed schedule I would make sure to schedule around that.
So my guess is that this school was spooked by numbers that didn't match up with their existing medium of bums in seats. I also wonder if there are "metrics" that would then make this online course look like a complete dud. I could see a university looking at completion and withdrawal numbers to compare one professor to another. I suspect that the crappy professors just stand out statistically when compared to other professors. So this course may have statistically looked like a professor who would pee on the front row and throw feces at the student out of splashing distance all the while screaming that they can all pick up their F's at the end of class.
Why they wouldn't look at this as an experiment and let it ride for a while? Basically try it, tweak it, try it, tweak it.
The other thing that probably killed this course was how much it freaked out the non-researching teaching-only professors.
My experience with university is that many of the courses are glorified highschool courses with glorified highschool teachers. But then hidden here and there are researchers on the prowl for students who have a future at the graduate levels. More online courses will make the distinction that much clearer when the glorified highschool teachers are basically demoted to online TAs while the real researchers are given the recognition that they are something different; mentors and researchers.
I want two bits of functionality. One is the ability to turn off fine grained access to my phone. With mac there is a great program Little Snitch. I can install an application and tell it that it can access the internet except I don't want it phoning home to stats.application.com. Or I can say no net access at all. I want the same thing for all my applications. Generally if the application (say a game) doesn't need net access I would like to cut it off. But at the same time some applications need some net access to be useful but I don't want them calling anyone I don't trust.
Then there are bits that I really don't want applications accessing such as my contacts, messages, photos, etc. And lastly there are bits that I don't want some applications wasting energy with such as a colorwheel application accessing my GPS.
The key functionality is that I don't want an application to be able to not run when I cut it off from non core functionality. It is obvious that my video camera app should give up if I cut off from the camera but it shouldn't be approved if it won't run without net access or GPS. This access restriction would also apply to applications built into the phone itself. No exceptions for google or apple.
A great example of this would be the large number of Facebook logins that want access to my friends. I can't turn that off so I don't use them. I know the second that I say yes they will spam all my friends.
But I am fairly sure that I can hold my breath before either Apple or Google allow this because it would cut off access to the sleazier aspects of both companies.
Reddit is a bizarre combination of of well... reddit types and very very savvy marketing types. If you are a top marketing agency you have some of your fingers deep into the reddit pie. Many companies have whole teams working to make sure that the reddit buzz is shaped the way they want it. Same with facebook, twitter, etc.
A positive front page on reddit is easily worth as much as a full page spread in the NYT.
Then why have I seen huge companies that call themselves "Microsoft shops"
The core of many government networks is still Novell. Those networks have a non podunk network admin.
Mail servers are often run and are often one of the fiddliest part of a network admin's job.
Network admins are responsible for the webserver. Rarely the web content so I don't know where you get webmaster.
If a network admin didn't build FTP servers, who does? The janitor?
Running and integrating the BlackBerry servers would be a core admin job. And other than hospitals who the heck still uses pagers? Did I mention pagers.
And as for BB in 2013 the network admin is often 100% responsible for making that happen. In a tiny company they might let the phone company handle the BB stuff but in a large organization system integration with BB is a complicated affair. If the network admin wasn't involved he would have to give full physical and software access to whomever was and then cover his eyes.
About the only network admins that exist 100% outside of contact with the users of the system would be the mega king maya maya networks where data center is an understatement. For your average non IT company with say 50,000 employees the network admin is actively involved with everything from network connectivity right down to what version OS is deployed to everyone's desktops. They will have layers of underlings screwing with broken keyboards, etc. But nothing is attached to the network without their involvement.
Exactly. This is why a great network admin makes things happen. Not makes things not happen. A great example of Network Admins being paternalistic is their general love of Blackberry. With blackberries you can set fine grained corporate policies until you are blue in the face. The result was that while a Blackberry is a pretty good smartphone and once was arguably the best by far, that by turning off all the good bits it was turned into an insulting pile of crap by so many IT departments. So people went out and bought their own iPhones which (were for a long time) out of reach of turning bits on and off. This is not just my opinion but something written by one of the top RIM people after he quit. That he would visit huge BB customers and see everyone with an iPhone and their free BB in a drawer. But in step some asshat companies that allow IT departments to cripple the crap out of iPhones before the company issues them.
My theory is quite simple. If you put a person in charge of some non IT department with billions of dollars of responsibility and then have the IT department treat him like he is 5 you don't think that guy isn't going to outsource with a vengeance? Basically if he can't control IT he will get an IT he can control. Just as you say the data might leak like a firehose but the guy finally got his iPad to work.
But there is even worse. I have visited huge companies (Fortune 500) and witnessed them having adware (Porn ads) on nearly all the machines. I wondered how it was able to spread to all the machines so I took a look and found that it was because the XP OS was running SP1 when SP3 was in Vogue. I asked the local IT guy "What the hey?" And he said that it was because some internal software wouldn't work with later service packs. Yet this company's Network admins had gone to a Whitelist web surfing policy with a long complicated process for adding websites. Senior managers didn't have free access.
Another huge company with network admins who favorite word was NO were so incompetent that they had a sheet they faxed around to local IT people to issue desktop IP addresses. This was around 2001 so automatically handling this was drop dead easy. These guys were masters of technobabble though. They made it sound like everything they did was heroic. So integrating whatever you wanted was made to sound like a moon launch.
So my theory basically goes. Network admins who actively interfere with the reasonable requests made of the network are network admins who can't handle their existing responsibilities and thus fear more responsibilities.
Cooperative and uncooperative are the two primary traits of network admins. Seeing that most network admins are ignored when everything is going well and cursed when things are going badly it quickly becomes obvious to most network admins that saying no to most requests becomes a survival trait. But this often means that a network admin starts actively interfering with the actual business (unless the business is network administration)
So take your average non IT company. The sales people want to switch from Blackberries to iPhones and Androids. The network admin has 4 certifications from RIM and recently set up a huge Blackberry server. Plus this particular admin hates all things touch screen. The usual scenario will be that the admin will pull out 9 whitepapers showing just how secure Blackberry is as compared to iOS and Android. Using techno babble he will explain how hackers will be running the company in under a week. The salesman on the otherhand say that they look like tools from the 90s with their blackberries. The network admin wins the battle but then he starts to get nervous as he notices traffic on his BB server is nearly zero. A quick investigation shows that nearly every Blackberry sits in a drawer and the Salesman have gone out and bought their own phones and swapped the SIM cards. The network admin sends out a memo saying this is against corporate policy which is ignored. His attempts to get a salesman fired(to set an example) for violating security fail. He then notices nearly everyone is using gmail instead of his highly secure MailMaster2000. Then sends out a memo indicating that this is against corporate policy. He then implements a 30 day mandatory password rotation. Internal file server traffic nearly drops to zero because everyone switched to dropbox. He then sends out a memo that dropbox is against corporate policy. He then starts blocking sites such as reddit and he notices that network traffic drops to nearly zero. But walking by a sales person's office he notices that they are on reddit. So he investigates and finds out the entire sales team has bought mobile data plans. He then sends out a memo saying that private data plans are against corporate policy.
Then he comes to work only to find a contractor in his office. The contractor is there to "rationalize" IT seeing that after the IT guy insisted that all apps be developed for BB first the sales people have gone out on their own and developed 3 smartphone applications that have increased sales by 80% and that promotions via Reddit have sent corporate website visits through the roof. The company now works with clients via dropbox much more successfully than with the sftp system that merely served to confuse before. With mobile dataplans the salesforce has become much more effective.
Now the IT guy is left filling out a resume where his two best features are many Novell certifications and many Blackberry certifications.
IT people shouldn't cave into every whim of the week but I have seen so many that are stuck in the thinking of whatever year they became head of IT. IT is just one tiny department in so many companies yet I have seen IT somehow be able to treat senior managers of other departments like children. Seeing that they aren't children they often discover the virtues of outsourcing. The key benefit of outsourcing being that if the people they outsource to try pulling any crap they can be dropped in a second.
I think they are not only going to overreact on alerts but that they will start using them willy nilly. The alert that would piss me off the most would be a message of condolence. If this had been in place on 9/11 a situation where the public knew as much as the government (thus no alerts needed) that they wouldn't have had their PR flacs put together a sincere message to all those affected in this time of crisis. They also know that when there is a crisis that nobody will complain about their stupid messages as those people would look bad. Yet the message itself would be an example of a government that was impotent trying to look like they are doing something.
My key complaint is that governments should be very careful about granting themselves special powers and rights that aren't given to the public. If you go to Soviet(still) Russia the officials still rush around in special convoys with blue lights where everyone has to get out of their way. If people want these messages the service should be available for anyone who wants to opt in.
It has always made me angry that manufacturers have had to cut prices so much that for basic consumer machines 100% of their profits come from the trial/bloat ware that they stuff their machines with. Yet Microsoft still keeps charging a ~$100 tax on every machine. This is $100 on a machine selling for maybe $300-$400.
What I wish would happen is some daring company like Staples would start selling some machines with Linux on them and have their sales people show that you can browse, watch Youtube, and edit office documents just fine. They could give the customer the option of trying Linux out for a few weeks and if they don't like it then they can come back with $100 in their hand and Staples will install Windows.
I suspect a fair number of people would be 100% happy with Linux and at least people would understand that Microsoft was gouging them for 25%.
Any bad companies sending spam will be off-shore and/or untraceable. The legitimate companies sending out emails that people subscribed to will be nailed for not following the exacting letter of the law. Just one more nail in the coffin of non mining businesses in Canada.
A simple predictive test for how effective laws of this type are in Canada would be the 3-5 calls I get per week where I have won a trip, can lower my CC rates, or have a problem with my "Windows" that I must immediately fix. Since the DNC came into effect I receive more, not less. This sucks because I am now answering zero long distance calls where I don't recognize the number.
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Many of the people who rise to the tops of large organizations are backstabbing, loudmouthed, blowhards. They scheme and calculate their way to the top. This applies to almost all large organizations. A simple way around this is to add randomization. The idea is that for any promotion you have many many qualified candidates and then pick one at random. I very much doubt that there was only one qualified candidate for her job. Obviously the system they used picked one of the worst.
This random system then prevents people from spending all their time scheming to set up the ideal circumstances where all the other candidates have been pushed under a bus. Also then they don't owe any favors for their job.
Shouldn't not killing or torturing someone be default behavior. This would be like hiring staff and in their employment contract saying that you won't stab them to death with a sharpened chair leg. It sort of goes without saying in any civilized work place.
Now on the other hand you have to look at their loose definition of torture. Is waterboarding torture? Is 20 years of solitary torture? Are 20 interrogations per day torture? Is putting someone who should be free, in jail torture? According to the white house the answer to all these is probably, no.
Prepared statements have many advantages ranging from cleaner code to the huge security benefits. Why aren't these guys using them? Or is it more insidious in that the library that these guys are using for prepared statements has some kind of hole? I wish that a NTSB type group would examine these larger data breaches and produce a public report.
For example. I somewhat sanitize the input from users. But I do rely on prepared statements to make SQL injection impossible. Thus if library X.3 is somehow susceptible I would love to see reports showing that company X was hacked because of library Y. Now in theory I could go out and read the billion various security forums but they tend to be a wee bit obscure. But reports of actual events of an actual hack with the suggested changes that would have prevented that hack would be really cool.
Or are these programmers just that dumb. In that case it would be nice to name and shame the developers.
I don't know why you got voted down as I can even top that. I tried reinstalling Windows 7(HD died) using the disks that came with the machine and it wouldn't because the install said it was the wrong machine. The disks came with the machine and had the exact model on the packaging. I am about as technically savvy (short of a MSDN certification) that you could hope for. If I can't install it then less than 1% of the population could (assuming there was a way) and MS wonders why PC sales are in the toilet. If I didn't have many other tricks up my sleeve then my machine was now dead without professional help.
I have reinstalled Mac OS and it is just about as brain dead easy as possible. If you were using a time capsule then you may very well be looking at an exact replica of your original machine post install (right down to the desktop icon placement). I am not saying this can't be done in Windows it is just that computer illiterates might just manage it on the mac.
I am also not saying woo hoo the mac is so much better. It just highlights that the Windows PC experience could be so much less miserable.
After ripping McAfee's infestations from the guts of many a PC, and watching even the wingnut McAfee trash talking his own old company, I think I'll pass on anything not only from that company but anything that even were to rhyme with McAfee. To me there is never just one cockroach.
But nobody can exaggerate how crappy their bloated, pile of dung, machine slowing, worst-possible-time pop-up, fear mongering, computer newb fooling, circle of garbage really is.
In the future when people are writing case studies about the PC industry they are going to point a huge finger at the bloated trialware business model that has ruined the experience of buying a new computer. Basically consumer PCs are sold profitless. Then the companies hope that a certain percentage of the fools buy one of these piles of snot software packages of which the manufacturer gets a significant cut. Profit.
But the end result is that non-tech people unwrap their shiny new machine only to find all kinds of confusing icons for music services, media services, a trial for MS Office, and the worst... some AV pile of vomit. The AV vomitus will then tell them that they need to subscribe to their service otherwise the machine will be more infested than a street-walking Bangkok lady-boy.
Some defenders will scream, "If they don't want it then they can uninstall it." But the simple reality is that your average computer buyer from Staples is 100% unable to uninstall it thus will have this software threatening them every time they look at the screen.
I don't know how many giant screens or kiosks that I have seen screaming about the subscription running out.
But then the next layer of pain is that nobody hardly trusts these popups. With people like myself saying, "For the love of all that is good don't buy that crap." So now how can they distinguish between some AV crap trying to scam them and just their OS telling them that they should install the update.
Then people like myself come along and see that they are about 3 years behind on their updates because they were to scared to ever OK the updates. Their Adobe Flash is 4 versions out of date and their browser is running a beta of this new Javascript thing. So the fear caused by the bloatware AV has now caused them to allow their machine to become woefully insecure.
The alternative is that they blindly trust everything that seems helpful resulting in so many toolbars that they are left with around 1 inch of working browser and their machine takes 5 minutes and 8 casino ads to boot up.
So to me these AV types are not just the scum they obviously are but an insidious destroyer of the PC industry.
The best part is how people have been leaping to smart-phones to get away from desktops that scare them only to find many of the Telcos have installed "Helpful" software that points to obscure music/ringtone services, custom search engines, and other things that no doubt send a kickback their way.
My dream is that the robots free up huge chunks of the population to live a life of leisure or at least find something new, productive, and stimulating to do. My fear is that a very tiny minority will end up with all the wealth and attempt to turn the population into serfs.
I genuinely worry about this. My key worry is that we will keep economic structures in place that deal with past problems. So when million after million lose their jobs with no viable skills, I don't see mass retraining programs. I don't see extended unemployment insurance. So after a decade or two of absolute misery governments might be so broken and debt ridden as to be unable to do whatever it is that should have been done a decade or so earlier.
At a certain point the core focus will have to be to restore the dignity of being human. This is one of the big differences between our generations and the generation that lived through the depression. We see people on welfare as parasites, losers, and defectives. But for people who lived through the depression they saw good people slide into grinding poverty. There was simply no money. People began bartering, skilled people moving back onto family farms. This went on for a full decade. Things like the new deal sort of worked but people knew it was fake. But then the war started and poof, everyone was at full employment with real pay cheques coming in. Typically in North America there were some shortages of things that were imported like spices (and precision German goods) but there was money for food, clothes, etc. Plus people were doing things. The trains were full, the roads were full, factories were being built. So people then knew two things. That bad things happen to good people and that the government can buy an instant recovery if the money is handed to the people productively (if you can call building munitions productive). This was the generation that then voted in welfare and banking reforms vowing never again.
This depression era generation is now mostly gone, especially from government decision making. So we have the first part which is all the depression era banking reforms are now gone. Now we are just waiting for a trigger.
I guess I should have said the tide suddenly turned; as opposed to it all just went away. Sort of like the rain stopping and the ground is still wet but you don't worry about any more flooding.
It seems to me that the McCarthyism was actually quite small in that without computers the paperwork alone kept their mayhem somewhat limited. In contrast I read about a British couple who were denied entry to the US when they were connected with a Tweet that said something like "We're going to destroy this town." which clearly in context was that they were going to party all night. The immense data trawling and processing needed to connect that tweet to a couple flying in on an airplane is immense. Typically matching records from one data source to another is really really hard. But then to apply zero common sense just made the whole situation worse.
Then you now have the difficult to measure damage done to the US. That couple will not probably ever return. But lets assume that they or some associates were thinking of doing business in the US they will now think twice. It might only be something small but the millions do add up.
Basically think of a list of countries you wouldn't do business with (due to scams, corruption, scary crime, etc). Then put yourself into the shoes of a legitimate business person in one of those countries and what he has to go through to do business with the rest of the world. Now put yourself into the shoes of someone who has heard about problems of traveling to the US and where possible chooses other business locations (you might think that this isn't the case but many many business leaders have abandoned travel to the US. The former head of Mercedes apparently hated going to the US and cited it as one of the many reasons they dumped Chrysler)
Now realize that if you are a legitimate US business person you are now facing more and more of an uphill battle to do business with foreigners who have lost interest in the US. I am not talking all business people as the US is still a huge and interesting market. But the shine is starting to wear off. After the toxic waste of the US banking disaster, the crazy security TSA stuff, and now the spying, the shine is getting tarnished.
Was just my email exposed to some more spam? Not so bad.
Was my password exposed? That would suck as I hate remembering new ones but I use a different one for every site.
The worst from a password exposure would be if they then log in and developer reject all my apps.
Was my credit card exposed along with bits like the code on the back? That would suck but again I use a crap card for online stuff.
Were my private app keys exposed which then probably opens my app to piracy? That would suck too.
Was my banking information exposed. That could mega suck. Either if they manage to redirect payments or just do something nasty to my account.
Was all my contact info exposed? Along with my CC this would be the worst, as a scam artist could send an email/phone me, saying they that my apps were pulled from the store because of porn or something and that I could click HERE to contact Apple to protest. Even though I would be sure it is a scam and I would log in normally to check, my blood pressure would be up for a while.
So I would say of the various exposures banking info would be the worst.
Here is where many cultural legal systems will be severely tested. Robots. From my position in the present looking into the future I see robots feeding capitalism to an extreme point while eating jobs like a 70's Japanese city eating monster.
For an interesting historical president the factories of the industrial revolution ate many cottage industries which at first caused much upset but then the jobs in the factories were a huge blow to the feudal system. So in the long run it was a breakthrough for mankind. But in the short term it was brutally painful.
But one difference with Robots I just don't see where the jobs are going to be created. So you will have a fairly small percentage (maybe 1%) who have capital and are able to invest in things like nearly 100% robot driven farms/factories/stores/restaurants/construction/cleaning and the rest with no capital will both lose their jobs and not participate in the capital.
Under these circumstances I can see a huge problem with massive unemployment and lack of participation with the economy. So what do you do with 60% of the population who are permanently out of the economic picture? Do you punish them for being poor? Do you let them just vote bread and circuses? I don't think that there will be any easy solutions but one of the keys to economics is consumption not production. With Robotic production we may hit this semi-utopian "Post scarcity" scenario. So the key to the economy will be focusing on getting people to consume? How do you get people with no money to consume? You give them money. Then they get to participate in the economy and maybe they don't just decide that the guillotine was an excellent lever for social change.
My guess is that countries that have traditionally focused on financial equality will do far better with robots than countries that have focused on survival of the fittest.
The ebook is a different medium and as Marshall McLuhan pointed out the medium is the message. That is the medium dictates how the message is best sent and interpreted. Ebooks can simulate a paper book but just taking a book best formatted for paper is often not going to work well when just stuffed into an ebook. Many times it is simple the diagrams and whatnot being the wrong size for the often smaller screen. But other times (as with a magazines) you want to flick through looking for an article that catches your attention. Some like paperbacks translate well to the kindle with its e-ink and simple page turning formula.
Then with ebooks there are potential advantages such as speed of downloading, massive weight reductions, easy logistics, etc.
So I would not condemn the ebook so much as we should condemn the near lack of innovation in taking advantage of this wonderful new medium. To me this would be like saying that TV was not an improvement over radio if all people had done with it was to film people reading radio plays.
If I had to guess ebook improvements would include the obvious such as interactivity and formatting changes. But other things such getting rid of a general purpose textbook covering many subjects at one level and changing it so that each subject is covered from beginning to end and you just move on to another subject when you reach the desired level.
My argument is more that people attach themselves so very strongly to left right but don't completely know where to stand on authority. When the government in power is trying to enforce their utopia then many are all for extreme measures. But when the other side gets power then any extreme enforcement becomes an abuse of power. What is difficult for people to grasp is that maybe the government should not be able to push either agenda so hard. There are many things that both sides agree upon. Fire departments should be around to put out fires. Roads shouldn't have potholes. Police should arrest genuinely bad people (bank robbers etc). But at some point the whole things devolves into the government pushing the interests of fairly small groups of very noisy people.
The key problem with all this is that it can be cultural. In the US there is a culture of glorifying extreme success. While this can be argued to push people to achieve, only a tiny tiny minority will every be extremely successful. Yet since so many dream of being wildly successful they won't support measures that might hurt the successful, including those that would vastly improve their own lot. You have the working poor not supporting minimum wage all the while watching the owner of the business they work for buy another BMW for his kid going to a $50,000 per year collage.
The question is coming as to how all this is going to play out. It is easy to look at the NSA stuff and extrapolate out to the US being Nazi by 2019 but if you look at McCarthyism (which was pretty bad) it just ended overnight. One day there was a red under every bed and then poof the losers running the nuthouse were shut down. Communists were still a threat just not a threat worth destroying yourself over. The same may happen with the NSA.
As for left and right being different seeing that things like Guantanamo and PRISIM were created by Bush and not shut down by Obama I'm not seeing much of a difference between the two.
As for dealing with the militarization of the police it can quickly be dealt with. You make things like no-knock warrants almost impossible to get. You restrict the types of weapons that the police can possess. You cut off terrorism funding and tell them that things like that will be handled by the FBI. But most importantly you remove the investigation of the police from any body associated with law enforcement and you give them the ability to terminate police without any recourse of their unions. I saw this up close; when the police screw up they not only look bad but they make their political masters look bad. So solid investigations that solidly confirm that policeman X was bad and is now fired is confirmation that politico X isn't doing his job. Thus it is in their best interests that the investigations are "Internal" and "Confidential" (i.e. not embarrassing). This is why so few autopsies are performed after unusual deaths in hospitals; they are only going to expose screwups.
One other pressure is that being a cop can be pretty boring. Wrestling drunks, traffic patrol, walking/driving the beat, arguing with crazy people. Then you have the relative lack of genuine promotion opportunities most communities only need a tiny number of detectives or major crimes investigators. Plus the reality is that via tickets issued and petty crime prevention being high priorities for most local governments, they don't really want many cops to be anything but uniforms driving marked units.
So then comes along SWAT. With the occasional columbine the cops are able to convince the local politicians that they don't want to be caught with their pants down. Internally they wont meet much resistance because who doesn't want to play soldier and act all tough. You get to do cool training (pit maneuvers, kicking down doors, and lots of shooting). Basically action hero stuff; who didn't become a cop without at least a small hero fantasy in the back of their brain.
But then the last factor is that most police departments are by nature separate from the politicians. This is sort of a requirement otherwise politicians could too easily interfere with investigations "I can vouch for him personally, he would never do anything like that, I think you should drop it, Now." Plus the police need to be able to distribute their resources as they see fit. Again the politicians would distribute the policing according to political needs which would generally be very different than distributing the resources for crime prevention.
But the real question becomes one of authoritarianism vs libertarianism. This is the true divide in North America, not left wing and right wing. There are those who believe that we should be exposed to no risk and aim to impose some kind of perfect Disney society. They believe that with enough rules that this society can be achieve. The war on terror and the war on drugs are perfect examples of this. Yet the simple measure of the impossibility of this would be maximum security prisons these places are full of drugs and violence. If near 100% removal of liberty and relentless monitoring can not work in these facilities, what hope is there outside in "free" society? Bizarrely the various police agencies are slowly turning "free" society into those very failed prisons.
This sort of behavior often has many unintended consequences. This us against them mentality might first pervade the police but it then pervades the public. You end up with a public who stop cooperating with the police as a rule thinking that any cooperation will be used against them. This significantly reduces the usefulness of the police while reinforcing their mentality of us against them.
But then this feedback loop seems to get worse. The authoritarianism begins to spread to the legal system where you get angry prosecutors and hanging judges trying to prove that the system still works. The politicians are then harangued to make the penalties stiffer and stiffer as toleration of any libertarian policies would be to admit failure.
But luckily fantasy can only hold out so long against reality and as we are seeing a few jurisdictions have effectively eliminated their marijuana penalties. The world did not come to an end. Money is being save and lives aren't being ruined. But the authoritarian types are still desperate to hit people with sticks. So they are now making DUI laws where you will test positive a week or more after smoking up. Also these involve taking a blood sample. A fairly invasive and nasty privilege to give to the police.
So my suggestion is to fight fire with fire. New fundamental laws need to be put into place that will severely punish any members of the legal system who violate people's rights. There should be a people's jury that can be called that can permanently remove from office any official who is accused of abusing rights (judges, police, prosecutors). Freedom of information laws should be massively strengthened to the point where when a FOI request is issued that the officials will place it at the top of their todo list with little recourse to say no. Information is truely the lever of power and by giving information back to the people the people will regain the power that is rightfully theirs.
I read a book where a guy often got around extreme high security buildings (guys with guns at the front door) by locating the smoker's entrance. He would walk up with some smokes hand them around wait for a full rotation of smokers and then just go in. The door was often propped open with a rock.
Lobbyists will flood the streets of Washington and this will be down before August. While the decision by the IT staff is sensible and sane that won't change the thinking of the entertainment industry. I know someone in this industry and they produced a pilot good show a few years ago that they just couldn't sell. So I suggested that they promote it via various torrents and whatnot. This person just about lost their mind. It wasn't that they disagreed with my marketing logic it was that they wouldn't allow those pirating bastards to make one cent off their work. I pointed out that he wasn't making one cent off his work either.
This and other factors leads me to believe that the thinking inside the movie industry that the whole internet (Netflix types included) is pure evil. This thinking seems to be religious in nature. So if you sell you wares on Netflix you have gone to the dark side.
An example of the venom that I once heard about Netflix was that they won't do things like feature one work over another based on kickbacks or politicing. Basically the traditional TV types are comfortable when they can use their political weight to push their show into the primetime slot on Thursday which guarantees an audience. Whereas Netflix is more of "If people want it they will click on it". This does not sit well with people who would rather use their sharp elbows to make their crap shows a success.
So these government IT people are showing a hint of reality by putting up the most used tool VLC. But the lobbyists will show their well financed Fantasy thinking by shutting this down before the end of the month. So in the long term they will run out of money to finance this stupid fantasy of theirs but they have a lot of money so it will take a long time.
I sign up for Coursera courses willy nilly. Then I let my schedule at the time the course starts dictate my participation; that along with the apparent quality of the course. So my completion/pass rate is abysmal. Most of the courses I withdraw from look awesome but through no fault of the course it is bye bye for me. Then there is the annoying situation where two awesome but time consuming courses start at the same time. So again through no fault of the course designers it is bye bye.
Now if I had paid good money and was going to attend a bricks and mortar school course with a very fixed schedule I would make sure to schedule around that.
So my guess is that this school was spooked by numbers that didn't match up with their existing medium of bums in seats. I also wonder if there are "metrics" that would then make this online course look like a complete dud. I could see a university looking at completion and withdrawal numbers to compare one professor to another. I suspect that the crappy professors just stand out statistically when compared to other professors. So this course may have statistically looked like a professor who would pee on the front row and throw feces at the student out of splashing distance all the while screaming that they can all pick up their F's at the end of class.
Why they wouldn't look at this as an experiment and let it ride for a while? Basically try it, tweak it, try it, tweak it.
The other thing that probably killed this course was how much it freaked out the non-researching teaching-only professors.
My experience with university is that many of the courses are glorified highschool courses with glorified highschool teachers. But then hidden here and there are researchers on the prowl for students who have a future at the graduate levels. More online courses will make the distinction that much clearer when the glorified highschool teachers are basically demoted to online TAs while the real researchers are given the recognition that they are something different; mentors and researchers.
I want two bits of functionality. One is the ability to turn off fine grained access to my phone. With mac there is a great program Little Snitch. I can install an application and tell it that it can access the internet except I don't want it phoning home to stats.application.com. Or I can say no net access at all. I want the same thing for all my applications. Generally if the application (say a game) doesn't need net access I would like to cut it off. But at the same time some applications need some net access to be useful but I don't want them calling anyone I don't trust.
Then there are bits that I really don't want applications accessing such as my contacts, messages, photos, etc. And lastly there are bits that I don't want some applications wasting energy with such as a colorwheel application accessing my GPS.
The key functionality is that I don't want an application to be able to not run when I cut it off from non core functionality. It is obvious that my video camera app should give up if I cut off from the camera but it shouldn't be approved if it won't run without net access or GPS. This access restriction would also apply to applications built into the phone itself. No exceptions for google or apple.
A great example of this would be the large number of Facebook logins that want access to my friends. I can't turn that off so I don't use them. I know the second that I say yes they will spam all my friends.
But I am fairly sure that I can hold my breath before either Apple or Google allow this because it would cut off access to the sleazier aspects of both companies.
Reddit is a bizarre combination of of well ... reddit types and very very savvy marketing types. If you are a top marketing agency you have some of your fingers deep into the reddit pie. Many companies have whole teams working to make sure that the reddit buzz is shaped the way they want it. Same with facebook, twitter, etc.
A positive front page on reddit is easily worth as much as a full page spread in the NYT.
Then why have I seen huge companies that call themselves "Microsoft shops"
The core of many government networks is still Novell. Those networks have a non podunk network admin.
Mail servers are often run and are often one of the fiddliest part of a network admin's job.
Network admins are responsible for the webserver. Rarely the web content so I don't know where you get webmaster.
If a network admin didn't build FTP servers, who does? The janitor?
Running and integrating the BlackBerry servers would be a core admin job. And other than hospitals who the heck still uses pagers? Did I mention pagers.
And as for BB in 2013 the network admin is often 100% responsible for making that happen. In a tiny company they might let the phone company handle the BB stuff but in a large organization system integration with BB is a complicated affair. If the network admin wasn't involved he would have to give full physical and software access to whomever was and then cover his eyes.
About the only network admins that exist 100% outside of contact with the users of the system would be the mega king maya maya networks where data center is an understatement. For your average non IT company with say 50,000 employees the network admin is actively involved with everything from network connectivity right down to what version OS is deployed to everyone's desktops. They will have layers of underlings screwing with broken keyboards, etc. But nothing is attached to the network without their involvement.
Exactly. This is why a great network admin makes things happen. Not makes things not happen. A great example of Network Admins being paternalistic is their general love of Blackberry. With blackberries you can set fine grained corporate policies until you are blue in the face. The result was that while a Blackberry is a pretty good smartphone and once was arguably the best by far, that by turning off all the good bits it was turned into an insulting pile of crap by so many IT departments. So people went out and bought their own iPhones which (were for a long time) out of reach of turning bits on and off. This is not just my opinion but something written by one of the top RIM people after he quit. That he would visit huge BB customers and see everyone with an iPhone and their free BB in a drawer. But in step some asshat companies that allow IT departments to cripple the crap out of iPhones before the company issues them.
My theory is quite simple. If you put a person in charge of some non IT department with billions of dollars of responsibility and then have the IT department treat him like he is 5 you don't think that guy isn't going to outsource with a vengeance? Basically if he can't control IT he will get an IT he can control. Just as you say the data might leak like a firehose but the guy finally got his iPad to work.
But there is even worse. I have visited huge companies (Fortune 500) and witnessed them having adware (Porn ads) on nearly all the machines. I wondered how it was able to spread to all the machines so I took a look and found that it was because the XP OS was running SP1 when SP3 was in Vogue. I asked the local IT guy "What the hey?" And he said that it was because some internal software wouldn't work with later service packs. Yet this company's Network admins had gone to a Whitelist web surfing policy with a long complicated process for adding websites. Senior managers didn't have free access.
Another huge company with network admins who favorite word was NO were so incompetent that they had a sheet they faxed around to local IT people to issue desktop IP addresses. This was around 2001 so automatically handling this was drop dead easy. These guys were masters of technobabble though. They made it sound like everything they did was heroic. So integrating whatever you wanted was made to sound like a moon launch.
So my theory basically goes. Network admins who actively interfere with the reasonable requests made of the network are network admins who can't handle their existing responsibilities and thus fear more responsibilities.
Cooperative and uncooperative are the two primary traits of network admins. Seeing that most network admins are ignored when everything is going well and cursed when things are going badly it quickly becomes obvious to most network admins that saying no to most requests becomes a survival trait. But this often means that a network admin starts actively interfering with the actual business (unless the business is network administration)
So take your average non IT company. The sales people want to switch from Blackberries to iPhones and Androids. The network admin has 4 certifications from RIM and recently set up a huge Blackberry server. Plus this particular admin hates all things touch screen. The usual scenario will be that the admin will pull out 9 whitepapers showing just how secure Blackberry is as compared to iOS and Android. Using techno babble he will explain how hackers will be running the company in under a week. The salesman on the otherhand say that they look like tools from the 90s with their blackberries. The network admin wins the battle but then he starts to get nervous as he notices traffic on his BB server is nearly zero. A quick investigation shows that nearly every Blackberry sits in a drawer and the Salesman have gone out and bought their own phones and swapped the SIM cards. The network admin sends out a memo saying this is against corporate policy which is ignored. His attempts to get a salesman fired(to set an example) for violating security fail. He then notices nearly everyone is using gmail instead of his highly secure MailMaster2000. Then sends out a memo indicating that this is against corporate policy. He then implements a 30 day mandatory password rotation. Internal file server traffic nearly drops to zero because everyone switched to dropbox. He then sends out a memo that dropbox is against corporate policy. He then starts blocking sites such as reddit and he notices that network traffic drops to nearly zero. But walking by a sales person's office he notices that they are on reddit. So he investigates and finds out the entire sales team has bought mobile data plans. He then sends out a memo saying that private data plans are against corporate policy.
Then he comes to work only to find a contractor in his office. The contractor is there to "rationalize" IT seeing that after the IT guy insisted that all apps be developed for BB first the sales people have gone out on their own and developed 3 smartphone applications that have increased sales by 80% and that promotions via Reddit have sent corporate website visits through the roof. The company now works with clients via dropbox much more successfully than with the sftp system that merely served to confuse before. With mobile dataplans the salesforce has become much more effective.
Now the IT guy is left filling out a resume where his two best features are many Novell certifications and many Blackberry certifications.
IT people shouldn't cave into every whim of the week but I have seen so many that are stuck in the thinking of whatever year they became head of IT. IT is just one tiny department in so many companies yet I have seen IT somehow be able to treat senior managers of other departments like children. Seeing that they aren't children they often discover the virtues of outsourcing. The key benefit of outsourcing being that if the people they outsource to try pulling any crap they can be dropped in a second.
Wet towels under the door. Wet cloth across your face. Plus it does take time for gasses to diffuse past closed windows.
I think they are not only going to overreact on alerts but that they will start using them willy nilly. The alert that would piss me off the most would be a message of condolence. If this had been in place on 9/11 a situation where the public knew as much as the government (thus no alerts needed) that they wouldn't have had their PR flacs put together a sincere message to all those affected in this time of crisis. They also know that when there is a crisis that nobody will complain about their stupid messages as those people would look bad. Yet the message itself would be an example of a government that was impotent trying to look like they are doing something.
My key complaint is that governments should be very careful about granting themselves special powers and rights that aren't given to the public. If you go to Soviet(still) Russia the officials still rush around in special convoys with blue lights where everyone has to get out of their way. If people want these messages the service should be available for anyone who wants to opt in.
It has always made me angry that manufacturers have had to cut prices so much that for basic consumer machines 100% of their profits come from the trial/bloat ware that they stuff their machines with. Yet Microsoft still keeps charging a ~$100 tax on every machine. This is $100 on a machine selling for maybe $300-$400.
What I wish would happen is some daring company like Staples would start selling some machines with Linux on them and have their sales people show that you can browse, watch Youtube, and edit office documents just fine. They could give the customer the option of trying Linux out for a few weeks and if they don't like it then they can come back with $100 in their hand and Staples will install Windows.
I suspect a fair number of people would be 100% happy with Linux and at least people would understand that Microsoft was gouging them for 25%.
Any bad companies sending spam will be off-shore and/or untraceable. The legitimate companies sending out emails that people subscribed to will be nailed for not following the exacting letter of the law. Just one more nail in the coffin of non mining businesses in Canada.
A simple predictive test for how effective laws of this type are in Canada would be the 3-5 calls I get per week where I have won a trip, can lower my CC rates, or have a problem with my "Windows" that I must immediately fix. Since the DNC came into effect I receive more, not less. This sucks because I am now answering zero long distance calls where I don't recognize the number.