I both agree and disagree. Makeing fun of people that call the help desk is not always the best thing to do.
In fact professionalism(if required by your job is the best thing you can do), or possibly humor with an answer. Will get you alot farther than abject mocking of the people that are comming to you for help.
Having said that... "All you need a good solid 2 or 3 weeks of training and you can answer the phones too" Is a load of crap. You can answer the phone the first day you are on the job, after a week or two of training you can even do something usefull after you say hello. However this does not make you either technical or prticularly adept at being able to cope with the many and varried problems that you will encounter. That takes time skill and intelligence.
I am glad that I no longer work in phone support and that I now have a job that requires thinking and information to solve problems as opposed to opening up a trouble ticket and passing it on to someone higher up the chain than I am(although sometimes it is hard being the top of the chain).
I laugh at UserFriendly, dilbert, afterY2K, redmeat and others. Not because I think that it(making fun of people who think my job is still to trouble shoot PCs and who continue to ask me the same questions repetedly and after patient and well documented education) is right, but because I can still draw parallels from when I did that to what I do now.
Besides sometimes laughter is the only thing that keeps you from grabbing your LART and killing an office full of people.
For some interesting information about linking in relation to copyright violation read the following article. That I am proud to say was co written by a friend of mine.
It talks about the speed of current laws in relation to the speed of the internet and legal precidents.
Wired Which someone mentioned. I did a search on altavista, google, hotbot, ask, webcrawler, excite and newsreal. Not one other mention of this story. I can't believe that only wired picked this up. I also won't believe the web site for it's word.
The idea that you can write down the information and mail it to yourself although interesting, is flawed. In talking to a lawyer friend this is not a valid way to prove anything.
As for the disclosure statement. You have 1 year to shit or get off the pot(patent it as it were), otherwise the data in your "Disclosure Statement" is public domain.
Having never tried to get funding for anything that I was directly involved in creating, I can only provide you with my opnion on what I have seen while working for a number of start up companies.
It would seem to me that in the world of VC you must provide to the company nearly full information about your product to get even a chance at funding. This does not however mean that you don't need to protect yourself.
The first step is probably talking to an attorney and getting a fairly solid NDA. Barring that expense you may want to at least take a copy of all the NDAs that you have signed and try to cull out the pertinant bits(I would recommend finding a good technical lawyer, it would really be a shame to have your technology leak out due to a loophole you inadvertentaly left in).
After you feel good about the state of your NDA, you will probably have to fight to get good face time with any real VC firm.
Assuming you do get an offer for funding, you should keep in mind that a VC firm is giving you money to make them money. They will most likely want a place on your board of directors(you have incorperated havn't you?). At least quarterly status reports on what you are doing with their money. All sorts of proof that you are doing your best to make your product work. Certainly a majority stake in the ownership of the company.
As a matter of fact you had better have a couple of lawyers look at any offer you receive, and then get an accountant to look over the numbers, as well as an accountant to handle the money and the books.
It would be a shame afterall to get locked into a contract with a VC and get bumped off the development, design, and focus of your product. Especially if you end up having to pay the money back because you violated some clause in the contract.
Really I'm not pessimistic, but the view of VC firms as sharks does have some basis in fact.
Seeing as sending the keystrokes could be viewed as export, I don't think you could do it.
As for being a US citizen and coding outside the US it appears to have been done relating to at least one ssh product. TTSSH is a free SSH client for Windows. It is implemented as an extension DLL for Teraterm Pro by Robert O'Callahan roc+tt@cs.cmu.edu
Although the last update was Dec 98 so it is possible that he is now in jail.
excerpt: "November 3, 1998: A lot of people have been asking me when TTSSH will support SSH 2.x. Unfortunately SSH 2.x is a very big, complex protocol and looks a lot of work to implement from scratch. Also, it looks like it will be hard to integrate all its features into Teraterm without significantly modifying the design of the main Teraterm application. There's no way I'll have enough time overseas in the foreseeable future to undertake this project, sorry. I hope there are other people with more time and freedom... "
That seems to indicate that the work was done outside the US.
As for other forms of export, I would guess that you could always do what was done by theEFF or with PGP. Remember it is only the electronic export of crypto that is the problem.
Moderation VS. newbie segragation WAS:My thoughts.
on
Slashdot Forum Updates
·
· Score: 1
It was not my intent to imply that new users should be activly encouraged to post. Or that a set of rules should be enacted to govern the moderators.
My plea for newbie education is aimed more at improving the community. Guide lines for posts, places to go for more information. It is always "your" option to release the guide lines and wander off into uncharted territory. Sometime this is the only way to do things.
I am not saying that as a newbie, post or not post. What I am saying is post in an educated manner, one that will hopefully not start a flame war(unless that is your goal).
As for rules for moderators, some level of controll must be present, first to keep people from abusing the system(as much as possible), second, because some for of direction at least gives moderators an idea of what to do. You will never be able to force a moderator to do something they do not want to do, they will either stop moderating, or be removed.
I don't know exactly how the user tracking is done on/. I would assume through normal use of httpd logs, and parsing scripts. Probably cookies as well since I see persistance in logins.
As others have said, this happens at all web sites that keep transaction logs. A statement of personal data collection and usage policies may be a good idea, one might already exist. I am not currently pressed enough to find out.
As for the "do not track me" button, I would guess that it would be possible with a mod to the webserver, but why?
This should only be a concern if you are worried either about the integrity of the site you are visiting(/. in this case), or if you are doing things you don't want people to know about.
If this is the case, then don't log in as a user, since it is an even tighter tie yo your identity than the IP address of the machine you are comming from(also logged) and the document you requested.
Oh and what about all those cookies?
If you feel the need to be that paranoid, be my guest, but it is your decision where to draw the line between convience and security. This relates directly to any discussion of security and privacy, $$/convience:security/privacy level where do you decide that this is enough? When you are totally secure/private or when the ammount of work involved in maintaing your security/privacy makes the security/privacy not worth it because you can't get any work done?
Moderation VS. newbie segragation WAS:My thoughts.
on
Slashdot Forum Updates
·
· Score: 4
Moderation will/should raise the signal to noise ratio. Use the filters. This should keep the "Me too posts, and the "fist post KNEEP" posts from bothering you.
The goal though is to not need to filter on that level of post, and instead filter on the quality of the posts.(read further if you would like my opnion on what to do about that).
Slight diversion of topic follows:
I see where you are comming from, but we were all newbies once, trying to . Excluding newbies is not the answer, some times it really feels good to flame the living crap out of someone, or berate them for their ignorance.
Yes,/. is cool, it has lots of usefull information, You can say to your friends, hey did you read that article on/. today(Woo Hoo instant proof of your imminent geekdom).
If you were a newbie, and you were comming to/. looking for new information, trying to not be a newbie any more only to find out that because you are a newbie you cannot get away from being a newbie(that would suck, think about the potential loss we could suffer).
The answer has been and always will be user education. At times I hate to admit it, talking about lusers and coworkers(cow-orkers) making your job painfully hard because they are stupid.
With rare exeption, a good program of education and available resources(and a willingness to learn) will take the worst person you have to deal with and at least make them tollerable.
In summary: Don't alienate newbies, we were all newbies once.
You don't have to hand hold newbies, just point them in the direction of the information they need and be available to answer questions.
User education is the key to a happier existance(OK, a ST1550 makes a good LART and brings a smile to my face, but that goes against the point of this post)
Conclusion:
The answer instead of creating nerds. geeks. BOFH./. may be an educational page. Like hey here are some general guide lines, this is good this is bad, whatever.
I do not agree with the "no moderating of forums you post in" aspect of the change.
If forced to chose between posting and moderating, I think I would chose posting(since I personally tend to lurk this is not as much of an issue).
If the majority of moderators(that posted), decided that they wanted to post, although the quality of the posts would be good(on average), I'm not sure that I would ever see them. I currently read at a moderated score of >= 2. With the moderators posting instead of moderating, or vice versa, I think the quality of both the posts, and the moderation will suffer.
Admittedly, the number of people who are/will be moderators, all don't post(thankfully?), so my aregument is on the weak side.
I must say in defense that doesn't it make sense to have people who are involved with a particular discussion have access to moderate it? Allowing them to take the cream of the crop as it were, and raise it's level for those people who are only interested in the best.
In reading the other comments thus far, I believe that a compromise allowing people to both post and moderate in the same forum, with the exclusion of a thread they are involved in.
This also brings up the idea, of allowing moderators to moderate within a thread they are posting in, but only above the level of their post(thus allowing them to raise the score of a previous post and respond to a previous post as well, but not allowing them to supress responses to their own post).
Your stated a machine base of 10% linux, I am assuming that a good persentage of the remaining un-managed boxen are windows.
I agree with most of the statements that suggest firewalling, security policy, etc.
Your problems in my opnion will be the enforcement of the policy, creating a policy, implementing the policy, and user complaints based on the policy.
Implementation will be one of the hardest aspects(beside enforcement). You will have to assume that the majority of your users are idiots, and write comprehensive step by step documentation that will lead them by the hand through the process of securing their machines.
Enforcement of the policy will also be hard, a simple port scan, or external security tool run will catch blatant violations. Where I see problems is in the realm of the more subtile aspects, things that can only be checked by internal access to the machine. Do you have the manpower/inclination/time to run around and check all the machines that are in use?
The soloution IMHO is to combine good firewall policy, with good internal security policy(someone who knows the numbers can point out how many security violations are internal), both of which need to be combined with user education as to why security should matter to them.
Keep in mind though, that as soon as the firewall goes up, and the policy becomes enforced, you will get complaints from all manner of users. Asking why "the thing they did yesterday" doesn't work today, with little to no more information.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact professionalism(if required by your job is the best thing you can do), or possibly humor with an answer. Will get you alot farther than abject mocking of the people that are comming to you for help.
Having said that...
"All you need a good solid 2 or 3 weeks of training and you can answer the phones too"
Is a load of crap. You can answer the phone the first day you are on the job, after a week or two of training you can even do something usefull after you say hello. However this does not make you either technical or prticularly adept at being able to cope with the many and varried problems that you will encounter. That takes time skill and intelligence.
I am glad that I no longer work in phone support and that I now have a job that requires thinking and information to solve problems as opposed to opening up a trouble ticket and passing it on to someone higher up the chain than I am(although sometimes it is hard being the top of the chain).
I laugh at UserFriendly, dilbert, afterY2K, redmeat and others. Not because I think that it(making fun of people who think my job is still to trouble shoot PCs and who continue to ask me the same questions repetedly and after patient and well documented education) is right, but because I can still draw parallels from when I did that to what I do now.
Besides sometimes laughter is the only thing that keeps you from grabbing your LART and killing an office full of people.
It talks about the speed of current laws in relation to the speed of the internet and legal precidents.
Wired Which someone mentioned. I did a search on altavista, google, hotbot, ask, webcrawler, excite and newsreal. Not one other mention of this story. I can't believe that only wired picked this up.
I also won't believe the web site for it's word.
As for the disclosure statement. You have 1 year to shit or get off the pot(patent it as it were), otherwise the data in your "Disclosure Statement" is public domain.
It would seem to me that in the world of VC you must provide to the company nearly full information about your product to get even a chance at funding. This does not however mean that you don't need to protect yourself.
The first step is probably talking to an attorney and getting a fairly solid NDA. Barring that expense you may want to at least take a copy of all the NDAs that you have signed and try to cull out the pertinant bits(I would recommend finding a good technical lawyer, it would really be a shame to have your technology leak out due to a loophole you inadvertentaly left in).
After you feel good about the state of your NDA, you will probably have to fight to get good face time with any real VC firm.
Assuming you do get an offer for funding, you should keep in mind that a VC firm is giving you money to make them money. They will most likely want a place on your board of directors(you have incorperated havn't you?). At least quarterly status reports on what you are doing with their money. All sorts of proof that you are doing your best to make your product work. Certainly a majority stake in the ownership of the company.
As a matter of fact you had better have a couple of lawyers look at any offer you receive, and then get an accountant to look over the numbers, as well as an accountant to handle the money and the books.
It would be a shame afterall to get locked into a contract with a VC and get bumped off the development, design, and focus of your product. Especially if you end up having to pay the money back because you violated some clause in the contract.
Really I'm not pessimistic, but the view of VC firms as sharks does have some basis in fact.
rather, Robert O'Callahan wrote TTSSH the extension of TeraTerm Pro, sorry if that was misleading.
As for being a US citizen and coding outside the US it appears to have been done relating to at least one ssh product. TTSSH is a free SSH client for Windows. It is implemented as an extension DLL for Teraterm Pro by Robert O'Callahan roc+tt@cs.cmu.edu
Although the last update was Dec 98 so it is possible that he is now in jail.
excerpt:
"November 3, 1998: A lot of people have been asking me when TTSSH will support SSH 2.x. Unfortunately SSH 2.x is a very big, complex protocol and looks a lot of work to implement from scratch. Also, it looks like it will be hard to integrate all its features into Teraterm without significantly modifying the design of the main Teraterm application. There's no way I'll have enough time overseas in the foreseeable future to undertake this project, sorry. I hope there are other people with more time and freedom... "
That seems to indicate that the work was done outside the US.
As for other forms of export, I would guess that you could always do what was done by theEFF or with PGP.
Remember it is only the electronic export of crypto that is the problem.
You can search for yourself at www.fnal.gov.
It was not my intent to imply that new users should be activly encouraged to post. Or that a set of rules should be enacted to govern the moderators.
My plea for newbie education is aimed more at improving the community. Guide lines for posts, places to go for more information. It is always "your" option to release the guide lines and wander off into uncharted territory. Sometime this is the only way to do things.
I am not saying that as a newbie, post or not post. What I am saying is post in an educated manner, one that will hopefully not start a flame war(unless that is your goal).
As for rules for moderators, some level of controll must be present, first to keep people from abusing the system(as much as possible), second, because some for of direction at least gives moderators an idea of what to do. You will never be able to force a moderator to do something they do not want to do, they will either stop moderating, or be removed.
I don't know exactly how the user tracking is done on /. I would assume through normal use of httpd logs, and parsing scripts. Probably cookies as well since I see persistance in logins.
As others have said, this happens at all web sites that keep transaction logs. A statement of personal data collection and usage policies may be a good idea, one might already exist. I am not currently pressed enough to find out.
As for the "do not track me" button, I would guess that it would be possible with a mod to the webserver, but why?
This should only be a concern if you are worried either about the integrity of the site you are visiting(/. in this case), or if you are doing things you don't want people to know about.
If this is the case, then don't log in as a user, since it is an even tighter tie yo your identity than the IP address of the machine you are comming from(also logged) and the document you requested.
Oh and what about all those cookies?
If you feel the need to be that paranoid, be my guest, but it is your decision where to draw the line between convience and security. This relates directly to any discussion of security and privacy, $$/convience:security/privacy level where do you decide that this is enough? When you are totally secure/private or when the ammount of work involved in maintaing your security/privacy makes the security/privacy not worth it because you can't get any work done?
The goal though is to not need to filter on that level of post, and instead filter on the quality of the posts.(read further if you would like my opnion on what to do about that).
Slight diversion of topic follows:
I see where you are comming from, but we were all newbies once, trying to . Excluding newbies is not the answer, some times it really feels good to flame the living crap out of someone, or berate them for their ignorance.
Yes, /. is cool, it has lots of usefull information, You can say to your friends, hey did you read that article on /. today(Woo Hoo instant proof of your imminent geekdom).
If you were a newbie, and you were comming to /. looking for new information, trying to not be a newbie any more only to find out that because you are a newbie you cannot get away from being a newbie(that would suck, think about the potential loss we could suffer).
The answer has been and always will be user education. At times I hate to admit it, talking about lusers and coworkers(cow-orkers) making your job painfully hard because they are stupid.
With rare exeption, a good program of education and available resources(and a willingness to learn) will take the worst person you have to deal with and at least make them tollerable.
In summary:
Don't alienate newbies, we were all newbies once.
You don't have to hand hold newbies, just point them in the direction of the information they need and be available to answer questions.
User education is the key to a happier existance(OK, a ST1550 makes a good LART and brings a smile to my face, but that goes against the point of this post)
Conclusion:
The answer instead of creating nerds. geeks. BOFH./. may be an educational page. Like hey here are some general guide lines, this is good this is bad, whatever.
I do not agree with the "no moderating of forums you post in" aspect of the change.
If forced to chose between posting and moderating,
I think I would chose posting(since I personally tend to lurk this is not as much of an issue).
If the majority of moderators(that posted), decided that they wanted to post, although the quality of the posts would be good(on average), I'm not sure that I would ever see them. I currently read at a moderated score of >= 2. With the moderators posting instead of moderating, or vice versa, I think the quality of both the posts, and the moderation will suffer.
Admittedly, the number of people who are/will be moderators, all don't post(thankfully?), so my aregument is on the weak side.
I must say in defense that doesn't it make sense to have people who are involved with a particular discussion have access to moderate it? Allowing them to take the cream of the crop as it were, and raise it's level for those people who are only interested in the best.
In reading the other comments thus far, I believe that a compromise allowing people to both post and moderate in the same forum, with the exclusion of
a thread they are involved in.
This also brings up the idea, of allowing moderators to moderate within a thread they are posting in, but only above the level of their post(thus allowing them to raise the score of a previous post and respond to a previous post as well, but not allowing them to supress responses to their own post).
Shawn
Your stated a machine base of 10% linux, I am assuming that a good persentage of the remaining un-managed boxen are windows.
I agree with most of the statements that suggest firewalling, security policy, etc.
Your problems in my opnion will be the enforcement of the policy, creating a policy, implementing the policy, and user complaints based on the policy.
Implementation will be one of the hardest aspects(beside enforcement). You will have to assume that the majority of your users are idiots, and write comprehensive step by step documentation
that will lead them by the hand through the process of securing their machines.
Enforcement of the policy will also be hard, a simple port scan, or external security tool run will catch blatant violations. Where I see problems is in the realm of the more subtile aspects, things that can only be checked by internal access to the machine. Do you have the manpower/inclination/time to run around and check all the machines that are in use?
The soloution IMHO is to combine good firewall
policy, with good internal security policy(someone who knows the numbers can point out how many security violations are internal), both of which need to be combined with user education as to why security should matter to them.
Keep in mind though, that as soon as the firewall goes up, and the policy becomes enforced, you will get complaints from all manner of users. Asking why "the thing they did yesterday" doesn't work today, with little to no more information.
Sorry I'm rambling.