In fact I believe its a constitutional right to have one, I do believe I read that somewhere.
The constitutional right is to keep and bear arms.
There's not a constitutional right to transport around on one's person a ready-to-go firearm holstered in public or around someone else's property, such that a person could fear for their life.
You see a random stranger walking up to your place of residence with a gun prominently displayed, holstered or not, --- that is a direct threat, and an indication that you are in immediate danger.
The corporate fuckup was their inability to route due notification of the problem to the correct people in order to get it fixed or even to acknowledge they had received the notice.
Most companies don't provide a notification or support mechanism: unless you are their customer.
And usually it will just be someone following a script.
If your problem isn't in their script, normally you will be screwed.
Microsoft has become like Apple. Don't ask users what they want; if you get negative feedback, and them telling you what they don't want -- ignore that, and give it to them anyways.
Don't give your users what they ask for.
Evidence?
Exhibit A: Removal of start menu in Windows 8
Exhibit B: Reintroduction of 'start tile' in Windows 8.1, BUT still no start menu
I think the same story could be true eventually for on-premise applications.
And the Windows desktop operating systems themselves moving to the cloud as well -- becoming more iOS-like; your OS becomes just a web browser remotely controlled by things running in Azure.
there are a lot of legal, financial, and regulatory reasons for on-premise deployments
Companies' management can be persuaded to look the other way in regards to legal and financial reasons.
They can be persuaded that the IT folks are just using the excuses about financial/legal reasons as FUD to try and protect their jobs.
The cloud providers can trumpet around their ISO security certifications and 3rd party audit results as "proof" that their cloud has compliance with security regulations and provides a safer environment than on-premise; By definition according to these vendors, if you meet certain standards, and you can check off all the items in pre-defined lists, then your cloud is secure.
Most private and public companies don't put their networks through the same standards.
So the cloud vendors are able to produce something that looks very impressive on paper:
only because it's part of their revenue model that they be able to market their cloud environment as "secure" and applications running on it as "compliant by definition", or such and such.
I admit that the emails he sent were pretty funny, but, the people asking for help weren't the ones not fixing the email address screwup. He could have easily had a stock response set up to respond to each of these describing Zynga's mistake and unwillingness to fix it.
I wonder if this will be used by Zynga later in a UDRP dispute as evidence of bad-faith use of the domain.
If they named their game themepark; I imagine Zynga wants to be the domain registration owner of themepark.com.
which probably transcends game ideas into directly taking web designs that are, by definition, available to anyone with an HTTP connection. Stay classy, Zynga.
Dang right... stealing Apache error pages.
Wait a minute.... remote visitors can't download httpd.conf... how would Zynga get the ServerAdmin value then?
Are you suggesting they hacked into their servers and got their Apache configuration too, because the Zynga folks don't know how to configure Apache?
Or perhaps some insider from themepark.com provided a server config template, or helped them get their site up?
Quite a creative reaction to a corporate screwup.:-)/em>
I'm not so sure it's a corporate screwup. It seems more like some Apache admin wasn't too careful about populating the ServerAdmin value for the virtualhost with a legitimate value.
This is probably one person's mistake, that noone else responsible for Apache server administration happened to spot.
These are supposed to be webmaster contact addresses provided by the server, for reporting to provide more information for troubleshooting purposes; they're not supposed to be a company's customer service address anyways.
With enough CPU power and malice, i could destroy Bitcoin in its current incarnation.
But enough CPU power is not a fixed quantity; that is a number that keeps going up continuously, at a faster and faster rate.
The larger the bitcoin mining networks become, the larger that quantity, until it is so large, that it is no one entity could round up sufficient CPU power.
Nah, technology adapts far easier and quicker against them than at their favor. Visa and Mastercard are hardy the only ways in existence to exchange money and as they become more and more restrictive other options are sure to fill the void.
Right... it is ultimately to their detriment to adopt these policies.
They are creating a motivation and a market for other companies to replace them
then it would be in my best interest to take the card. Equally obviously, they would never do that, cause why would they?
To entice you to take the card. Of course, the incentive to the employee is temporary, and does not have to exceed the kickback that the employer gets.
The idea is: if you're enticed to take the card, and the burden is made high enough to switch, and you are only allowed to make the election in a certain way at a certain time, the incentive might get more people happy to take the card, who won't be willing to go to the trouble of switching back to cash.
I think you've got that backwards, you'd want to audit the program and THEN cancel it, not cancel it and audit it.
I don't mean audit the program; I meant audit any end users with significant assets for compliance with the license terms. The penalty for noncompliance with software license terms is not cancellation of benefits, it's paying a large sum.
If I do recall correctly, there are audit rights that continue for a period, even after the program is cancelled, or the user ends their subscription.
We can't backup exchange mailboxes while they're being replicated to our DR site - the exchange server blue-screens BY DESIGN to provent the mailstore from being corrupted.
It sounds like a possible storage sizing issue, or an issue with the way the replication has been put into place; it's not acceptable to block an Enterprise application's production I/O for DR operations: I wonder if your replication solution is freezing writes or using up all the disk IOPS... it is definitely possible to design a deployment with Exchange databases replicated at the storage layer, without any issues.
In fact... I have experience doing that -- I have not gotten a single blue screen on production VMware virtualized Exchange, although I have in the lab seen restarts, if there is a storage failure event lasting longer than the SCSI timeout - any server could be expected to treat such circumstances as a hardware failure.
After shutting dowen replication we have to backup the entire 200GB database as one blob, every time - this takes at least a couple of hours over the network to our backup server.
Use a VSS-aware backup solution with support for incremental backups.
Microsoft has provided a backup API that provides incremental backups to the backup solution.
You get a transactionally consistent backup that you can be assured matches the source database as of a point in time.
Rsync does not provide the same level of transactional consistency -- in other words, things can be missing from the backup - or worse, on a busy mail server, rsync never finishes.
That's Phase I. For Phase II, depending on their estimates, they might (or might not) start exercising their right to a physical audit of technet subscribers to identify potential compliance issues.
Not really. Not if you have several projects over the next few years and don't want to have to set up your Server 2012 domain over and over and over again...
One of the things they will probably fix one day, is if you're content with a notification experience and/or (with some of the OSes) a reboot every 24 hours, you can probably evaluate for longer by not activating, or by ignoring the expiration
This allowed for two very important things, first it allowed for the ecosystem to be license compliant which made it easier to stay in the habit of being license compliant while at work work. The second thing it did was allow workers exposure to products to gain access for skills development. Workers that have exposure to products tends to push for the products that they are familiar with at work.
I probably already mentioned it, but the Cynic in me tells me Microsoft maybe wants fewer people having a career around their products, so there is less competition against their cloud.
If there are fewer Microsoft folks: they will have an easier time pushing their Office and online Exchange cloud services as cost-saving measures, over hiring a dwindling supply of workers familiar with administration of MS software.
If you want to make on-premise less attractive; it makes sense to do whatever you can to undercut the abilities of consultants and IT admins servicing on-premise deployments or competing clouds.
The IT admins/consultants with artificially reduced effectiveness get fired and put out to pasture, in favor of the greener fields of Azure
Visual studio? Try virtually every Microsoft product ever created, available for download and legal for running without further licensing so long as you use them for intentionally-vague "development" purposes.
I believe the product you are thinking of is called MSDN Ultimate.
Technet doesn't even include Visual studio, because Technet is not for use in an application development environment!
As a constituent, I urge you to pass legislation that would ban fees on prepaid cards that are used to pay wages with the possible exception of overdraft fees.
No overdraft fees on cards. They are not a check. And the transaction is electronically authorized.
If the bank electronically wrongly authorizes the transaction, they should be responsible for the resulting overdraft.
But ultimately, it is still your employer making the decision.
Let's try a little thought experiment... If your employer offered you a one time $200 bonus, to switch to this method of receiving your pay, providing you committed to keep that method of pay for 1 year or return the incentive, would you do it?
How about if they gave you 33% of their incentive from the bank?
Or people who chose the card method of payment get awarded an extra $5 per month?
Whereas... only cash withdrawls or bank transfers from the card incur a fee, and ordinary purchase transactions are free.
Eventually... the employee market must come to some value proposition which is the minimum extra wage they would be wiling to accept to be happy to switch to a less-desirable payment method, and then, that arrangement would by definition be mutually beneficial....
So California law prohibits the "company store" scam - employers can't pay with a "gift card" that doesn't convert to cash.
I think they might be inclined to argue an interpretation of the law different from your interpretation.
They may claim the gift card is "money" in an electronic form. Therefore it could be held to fall under (2) as a scrip, coupon, or card.
Redeemable for merchandise or money.
Redeemable without discount, but there is a service fee for the execution of the transaction.
They want to lower cost, so they pass the charges to have accounting payment etc on to the employee. My ex-wife got a minimum wage job once, that paid on one of these cards. Cash withdrawl $3.
Employees in such a situation need to make a complaint with the regulators that they are being paid LESS THAN MINIMUM WAGE.
That is, the fees required for them to convert their wages into a usable form must be subtracted, in determining what they are actually being paid.
the kids aren't there in school to learn the material. Their parents aren't doing their job as they should.
Around here... truancy laws are vigorously enforced; non-compliant parents get fines imposed on them, threats of jail time and loss of custody of their kids, if their child is not sufficiently in attendance.
They release a monstrosity of a desktop OS (Win8), a sub-par hermaphrodite laptop/tablet to go with it (Surface), and they are now giving their loyal developers the finger.
Technet subscriptions are not allowed to be used for software development and testing purposes per the EULA.
Technet subscriptions are for IT administrators, training, evaluation, and proof of concept.
MSDN subscriptions are for development, testing, and demonstration, per the EULA, and not allowed to be used for training/evaluation.
I wonder if they are just going to combine the two?
Unsure what you mean by enforcing security policy.
I'll give you some examples, with how this is achieved within an Exchange environment in a typical enterprise:
Users outside the enterprise access their mail through Activesync or OWA (Outlook Web Access)
These services are published to the internet by a Forefront UAG or TMG -- smart card, or password and 2-factor access token are used for login via OWA, so this is secure.
Activesync is the open standards-based protocol utilized with smart phones, in order to synchronize things from a mail server to the mobile device.
When an enterprise authorized smart phone is provisioned, a client-side certificate is installed on the device, to allow Activesync connection using SSL, so again, there is two factor auth
Activesync devices, when they associate download a security policy; this provides mechanisms that can be used to enforce policy
Example: PIN Required policy, requires that the user must set a PIN on their smartphone, and enter their PIN number to gain access to Enterprise mail. In addition, after repeated failed entries, the device will be wiped.
Aside from activesync policies; the mail server the device is associated with gets a Remote Wipe Function; in the event that the smart phone is lost or stolen, the enterprise can push down a message that will cause all the sensitive e-mail to be wiped; the phone will reset to factory defaults.
OWA, Outlook, and Activesync protocol devices support meeting requests; free/busy availability for other people; calendar sharing and appointment functions. There are many tools provided through open standard activesync that are not available on generic IMAP clients.
OWA and Outlook support functionality to Classify Sensitive Messages, view encrypted message, and send encrypted messages and documents, which can be disseminated only within the enterprise -- in other words, they cannot be accidentally forwarded outside the organization. So called Digital Rights Management or Information Rights Management functions.
The closest OSS equivalent is PGP and does not provide a user friendly interface for end users, that can be readily administered by IT security.
Aside from rights management, there is this concept of Data Leak Protection; where messages that contain sensitive information, will be detected by automated algorithms on the mail server, and users prevented from forwarding the messages outside the organization ---- this provides robust security against accidental leaks since Rights management services protected encrypted documents cannot be viewed, except by valid users on computers with a user certificate and computer certificate that acquired a "view license", using mail software that supports RMS --- generic POP/IMAP clients, and generic document viewers do not support implementing this kind of security.
With a bit of effort, you can scale these services over as many servers as you wish.
This is only horizontal scaling, and is inefficient, meaning that more overall resources and cost is required to scale up massively -- DESPITE the fact that the cost of each license is $0 with OSS; additional computers and electricity happen to be very expensive. The available OSS does not have adequate vertical scaling, and would require lots of custom bespoke system customization.
Unsure why you think a flat file cannot exceed 2GB. Of course, it's not optimal to have a mailbox file that big,
Flatfiles are not inherently restricted, but on many systems there is no largefile support.
The exact details are murky, but there are plenty of reasons a 2GB mailbox doesn't work out so well.
I am really using the example to highlight an entire class of issues.
You'd have switched to the Maildir format years ago
Being Google.... I would have expected them to have included this in Google Glass: GPS and always-on panoramic camera, and have it enabled by default, to upload street view imagery from every user everywhere....
Slashdot Mirror
In fact I believe its a constitutional right to have one, I do believe I read that somewhere.
The constitutional right is to keep and bear arms.
There's not a constitutional right to transport around on one's person a ready-to-go firearm holstered in public or around someone else's property, such that a person could fear for their life.
You see a random stranger walking up to your place of residence with a gun prominently displayed, holstered or not, --- that is a direct threat, and an indication that you are in immediate danger.
The corporate fuckup was their inability to route due notification of the problem to the correct people in order to get it fixed or even to acknowledge they had received the notice.
Most companies don't provide a notification or support mechanism: unless you are their customer.
And usually it will just be someone following a script. If your problem isn't in their script, normally you will be screwed.
Do they really expect that to happen?
Microsoft has become like Apple. Don't ask users what they want; if you get negative feedback, and them telling you what they don't want -- ignore that, and give it to them anyways. Don't give your users what they ask for.
Evidence?
Exhibit A: Removal of start menu in Windows 8
Exhibit B: Reintroduction of 'start tile' in Windows 8.1, BUT still no start menu
I think the same story could be true eventually for on-premise applications. And the Windows desktop operating systems themselves moving to the cloud as well -- becoming more iOS-like; your OS becomes just a web browser remotely controlled by things running in Azure.
there are a lot of legal, financial, and regulatory reasons for on-premise deployments
Companies' management can be persuaded to look the other way in regards to legal and financial reasons. They can be persuaded that the IT folks are just using the excuses about financial/legal reasons as FUD to try and protect their jobs.
The cloud providers can trumpet around their ISO security certifications and 3rd party audit results as "proof" that their cloud has compliance with security regulations and provides a safer environment than on-premise; By definition according to these vendors, if you meet certain standards, and you can check off all the items in pre-defined lists, then your cloud is secure.
Most private and public companies don't put their networks through the same standards. So the cloud vendors are able to produce something that looks very impressive on paper: only because it's part of their revenue model that they be able to market their cloud environment as "secure" and applications running on it as "compliant by definition", or such and such.
I admit that the emails he sent were pretty funny, but, the people asking for help weren't the ones not fixing the email address screwup. He could have easily had a stock response set up to respond to each of these describing Zynga's mistake and unwillingness to fix it.
I wonder if this will be used by Zynga later in a UDRP dispute as evidence of bad-faith use of the domain.
If they named their game themepark; I imagine Zynga wants to be the domain registration owner of themepark.com.
which probably transcends game ideas into directly taking web designs that are, by definition, available to anyone with an HTTP connection. Stay classy, Zynga.
Dang right... stealing Apache error pages.
Wait a minute.... remote visitors can't download httpd.conf... how would Zynga get the ServerAdmin value then?
Are you suggesting they hacked into their servers and got their Apache configuration too, because the Zynga folks don't know how to configure Apache?
Or perhaps some insider from themepark.com provided a server config template, or helped them get their site up?
Quite a creative reaction to a corporate screwup. :-) /em>
I'm not so sure it's a corporate screwup. It seems more like some Apache admin wasn't too careful about populating the ServerAdmin value for the virtualhost with a legitimate value.
This is probably one person's mistake, that noone else responsible for Apache server administration happened to spot.
These are supposed to be webmaster contact addresses provided by the server, for reporting to provide more information for troubleshooting purposes; they're not supposed to be a company's customer service address anyways.
With enough CPU power and malice, i could destroy Bitcoin in its current incarnation.
But enough CPU power is not a fixed quantity; that is a number that keeps going up continuously, at a faster and faster rate.
The larger the bitcoin mining networks become, the larger that quantity, until it is so large, that it is no one entity could round up sufficient CPU power.
Nah, technology adapts far easier and quicker against them than at their favor. Visa and Mastercard are hardy the only ways in existence to exchange money and as they become more and more restrictive other options are sure to fill the void.
Right... it is ultimately to their detriment to adopt these policies.
They are creating a motivation and a market for other companies to replace them
then it would be in my best interest to take the card. Equally obviously, they would never do that, cause why would they?
To entice you to take the card. Of course, the incentive to the employee is temporary, and does not have to exceed the kickback that the employer gets.
The idea is: if you're enticed to take the card, and the burden is made high enough to switch, and you are only allowed to make the election in a certain way at a certain time, the incentive might get more people happy to take the card, who won't be willing to go to the trouble of switching back to cash.
I think you've got that backwards, you'd want to audit the program and THEN cancel it, not cancel it and audit it.
I don't mean audit the program; I meant audit any end users with significant assets for compliance with the license terms. The penalty for noncompliance with software license terms is not cancellation of benefits, it's paying a large sum.
If I do recall correctly, there are audit rights that continue for a period, even after the program is cancelled, or the user ends their subscription.
We can't backup exchange mailboxes while they're being replicated to our DR site - the exchange server blue-screens BY DESIGN to provent the mailstore from being corrupted.
It sounds like a possible storage sizing issue, or an issue with the way the replication has been put into place; it's not acceptable to block an Enterprise application's production I/O for DR operations: I wonder if your replication solution is freezing writes or using up all the disk IOPS... it is definitely possible to design a deployment with Exchange databases replicated at the storage layer, without any issues.
In fact... I have experience doing that -- I have not gotten a single blue screen on production VMware virtualized Exchange, although I have in the lab seen restarts, if there is a storage failure event lasting longer than the SCSI timeout - any server could be expected to treat such circumstances as a hardware failure.
After shutting dowen replication we have to backup the entire 200GB database as one blob, every time - this takes at least a couple of hours over the network to our backup server.
Use a VSS-aware backup solution with support for incremental backups.
Microsoft has provided a backup API that provides incremental backups to the backup solution.
You get a transactionally consistent backup that you can be assured matches the source database as of a point in time.
Rsync does not provide the same level of transactional consistency -- in other words, things can be missing from the backup - or worse, on a busy mail server, rsync never finishes.
When B is greater than A, the program gets cut.
That's Phase I. For Phase II, depending on their estimates, they might (or might not) start exercising their right to a physical audit of technet subscribers to identify potential compliance issues.
Not really. Not if you have several projects over the next few years and don't want to have to set up your Server 2012 domain over and over and over again...
One of the things they will probably fix one day, is if you're content with a notification experience and/or (with some of the OSes) a reboot every 24 hours, you can probably evaluate for longer by not activating, or by ignoring the expiration
This allowed for two very important things, first it allowed for the ecosystem to be license compliant which made it easier to stay in the habit of being license compliant while at work work. The second thing it did was allow workers exposure to products to gain access for skills development. Workers that have exposure to products tends to push for the products that they are familiar with at work.
I probably already mentioned it, but the Cynic in me tells me Microsoft maybe wants fewer people having a career around their products, so there is less competition against their cloud.
If there are fewer Microsoft folks: they will have an easier time pushing their Office and online Exchange cloud services as cost-saving measures, over hiring a dwindling supply of workers familiar with administration of MS software.
If you want to make on-premise less attractive; it makes sense to do whatever you can to undercut the abilities of consultants and IT admins servicing on-premise deployments or competing clouds.
The IT admins/consultants with artificially reduced effectiveness get fired and put out to pasture, in favor of the greener fields of Azure
Visual studio? Try virtually every Microsoft product ever created, available for download and legal for running without further licensing so long as you use them for intentionally-vague "development" purposes.
I believe the product you are thinking of is called MSDN Ultimate. Technet doesn't even include Visual studio, because Technet is not for use in an application development environment!
i guess MS no longer needs sys admins and IT professionals to support their products.
They want Enterprises to move to Azure and the Microsoft cloud.
On-Premise deployments of software are in the process of being phased out.
Microsoft has planned obsolescence for Windows IT professionals
As a constituent, I urge you to pass legislation that would ban fees on prepaid cards that are used to pay wages with the possible exception of overdraft fees.
No overdraft fees on cards. They are not a check. And the transaction is electronically authorized.
If the bank electronically wrongly authorizes the transaction, they should be responsible for the resulting overdraft.
But ultimately, it is still your employer making the decision.
Let's try a little thought experiment... If your employer offered you a one time $200 bonus, to switch to this method of receiving your pay, providing you committed to keep that method of pay for 1 year or return the incentive, would you do it?
How about if they gave you 33% of their incentive from the bank?
Or people who chose the card method of payment get awarded an extra $5 per month?
Whereas... only cash withdrawls or bank transfers from the card incur a fee, and ordinary purchase transactions are free.
Eventually... the employee market must come to some value proposition which is the minimum extra wage they would be wiling to accept to be happy to switch to a less-desirable payment method, and then, that arrangement would by definition be mutually beneficial....
So California law prohibits the "company store" scam - employers can't pay with a "gift card" that doesn't convert to cash.
I think they might be inclined to argue an interpretation of the law different from your interpretation.
They may claim the gift card is "money" in an electronic form. Therefore it could be held to fall under (2) as a scrip, coupon, or card. Redeemable for merchandise or money.
Redeemable without discount, but there is a service fee for the execution of the transaction.
They want to lower cost, so they pass the charges to have accounting payment etc on to the employee. My ex-wife got a minimum wage job once, that paid on one of these cards. Cash withdrawl $3.
Employees in such a situation need to make a complaint with the regulators that they are being paid LESS THAN MINIMUM WAGE. That is, the fees required for them to convert their wages into a usable form must be subtracted, in determining what they are actually being paid.
the kids aren't there in school to learn the material. Their parents aren't doing their job as they should.
Around here... truancy laws are vigorously enforced; non-compliant parents get fines imposed on them, threats of jail time and loss of custody of their kids, if their child is not sufficiently in attendance.
What you'll find though is pride gets in the way,
If pride is in the way... then why the heck are there so many people getting food stamps and welfare checks, paid for by us taxpayers?
Does forcible offering of assistance imposed by the government circumvent the pride problem?
They release a monstrosity of a desktop OS (Win8), a sub-par hermaphrodite laptop/tablet to go with it (Surface), and they are now giving their loyal developers the finger.
Technet subscriptions are not allowed to be used for software development and testing purposes per the EULA.
Technet subscriptions are for IT administrators, training, evaluation, and proof of concept.
MSDN subscriptions are for development, testing, and demonstration, per the EULA, and not allowed to be used for training/evaluation.
I wonder if they are just going to combine the two?
Unsure what you mean by enforcing security policy.
I'll give you some examples, with how this is achieved within an Exchange environment in a typical enterprise:
With a bit of effort, you can scale these services over as many servers as you wish.
This is only horizontal scaling, and is inefficient, meaning that more overall resources and cost is required to scale up massively -- DESPITE the fact that the cost of each license is $0 with OSS; additional computers and electricity happen to be very expensive. The available OSS does not have adequate vertical scaling, and would require lots of custom bespoke system customization.
Unsure why you think a flat file cannot exceed 2GB. Of course, it's not optimal to have a mailbox file that big,
Flatfiles are not inherently restricted, but on many systems there is no largefile support. The exact details are murky, but there are plenty of reasons a 2GB mailbox doesn't work out so well. I am really using the example to highlight an entire class of issues.
You'd have switched to the Maildir format years ago
You m
Being Google.... I would have expected them to have included this in Google Glass: GPS and always-on panoramic camera, and have it enabled by default, to upload street view imagery from every user everywhere....