The Australian Government knows that its being screwed by the likes of Microsoft and upper middle management are allowing this to happen. Unfortunately the people assigned to fix this don't know shit from sugar and will allow themselves to be bent over a barrel.
You are also confusing two issues, this is about creating a competitive market and nothing to do with "Super stable" Any idiot can tell you that where there is competition in the market the price of desktop products has dropped orders of magnitude, ie antivirus and where there is no competition due to a format lock in products have increased in price ie MS office suite. The shell game of doubling the price and then offering a 35% discount is growing old fast. A couple of side notes Word is meant to be a communication tool and in the enterprise it fails dismally, wikis work more effectively as they are multi user. The Australian Government would be much more productive if they were only allowed to use notepad as people waste most of their time playing with formatting. I've also worked with researchers who use office as one of the tools of their trade and once expressed similar sentiments to yours and was howled down. Apparently it is unstable, sucks for writing book size projects and also sucks when collaborating with other authors. Word is a toy for playing round with formatting, MS would love for it to replace the browser as a wiki interfaces but that isn't going to come for some time yet and hopefully
HTTP thrived because all of the major vendors were trying to shackle customers to their proprietry interfaces and along came this open transparent system which allowed information to be shared. Now a bunch of dinosaurs and upstarts are pushing a set of completely unnecessary controls onto this platform solely for their own benefit. Not the customers benefit. Let everyone know that these services already existing without DRM, there is absolutely no benefit to those with Web browsers. The point of these stardards is to consolidate the status quo rather and allowing the economy to transform around more efficient information transportation modes.
An organisms role is to generate more copies of itself, it doesn't matter if it wipe out 99% of the host during that periods as long as it spreads. If increased virulance spreads better than being benign the virulence wins as more copies of that clade will spread.
The real reason that people in nuclear establishments undergo extensive screening relates more to a cold war philosophy than public safety. They're just making sure that you don't sell those secrets to the Reds.
1. Biological agents are readily available. 2. Biological agents are naturally dangerous ie H5N1 is killing people. 3. Reseach into these agents will provide positive outcomes. ie vaccines 4. Stupid measures such as profiles fail the best researchers, eg NSA fails more than 50% of maths researchers. Those creative left handed types are dangerous. It's actually true that NSA employs fewer left handed people than the research community at large and is an acknowledged problem.;-) 5. Research doesn't have many resources, wasting them upon dumb controls means much less reseach. 6 The military has oodles of cash (read wasteful) however they're not allowed to play with biological weapons so biology doesn't get much of this cash. (unlike nukes)
Mmmm it tastes just like butter, really??? Slashdot do you really need to place advertisments in this manner? Check the approval process for this piece of crap and you'll find someone taking kickbacks. If it wasn't deliberate ie a corporate decision then you have someone in the ranks getting kickbacks.
This is suicide for google, and a traditional play by managers with no imagination who want to show that they can do things in an environment which is dominated by technical types that they can't and won't understand. This is money better spent by infiltrating the educational space or keeping margins lower. Please Google, keep the list of names of the people who support this initiative so that is can be a permanent blemish on their reconds. I for one won't be employing them.
Technology is not the solution unless you're talking about changing the nature of the classroom. For example if yoush to enable remote learning a content management system might be of assistance. If you want an efficient mechanism for evaluating teaching methods, technology may be of assistance. However technology can just be a waste of time, MS word is great for writing stories but is possibly the biggest time waster in corporate history, playing with templates, creating documents that noone reads that you store multple times.
What a load of toss. US companies price fix with the US price minimised, this is because their government is elected by US citizens. Price fixing by cation or region should be made illegal. nuff said
C is for consumers that support this behaviour. Anyone with an apple device is complicit in these actions. Apple is at the apogee of their corporate life and they are using the legal system to stay there as long as possible because they are no longer capable of innovation. Here's a bet apple's share price will plummet over the next three years as they completely fail to innovate and vainly try to use the legal system as a club against competitors.
Everyone thinks that they have a sense of humour & Everyone thinks that they write good code. I've worked with enough tossers who believed that a particular style was the best way and that whatever style was being used was crap that I just want to vomit. Go and fix the MS word templates because they offend you sense of style, stay out of my way. I used to get involved in these debates and found that it was better to simply marginalise the idiot until he went away. Now I run a company which makes money and internally you don't get 'pretty'. The job of coders is to ship code. If he's shipping more code and meeting more deadlines than you he's a better coder.
Really this point of view is bigger than this, it relates to directory structures, word templates, diagrams basically if you care about these things you're a time waster and are worth keeping on because you constantly get distracted by fluff and don't make money.
During the merger between two large organisations the CEO held "Town Hall" style meetings which requested that if anyone has ideas which would help with the merger suggest contact him via email. ICT was made up of idiot middle manager who were trying to work their way up the food chain at the expense of the organisation, in short, the CEO took the concept on and ran with it. Project was completed, I've since moved on as a consultant with a significant organisational reengineering project under my belt.
It's good to see that someone is being held accountable here. Benjamin Smedberg creates a shitload of negative publicity, pisses off a proportion of dedicated testers and he: A. Gets a promotion B. Is removed from positions of responsibility because he demonstrates poor judgement C. Nothing happens D. Gets a pay increase.
Answer = C Come on guys at least make him wear a T shirt for a month that says, I must not override the recommendations of others in relation to 64 bit builds. One of the key problems in organisations is that people aren't held accountable for poor judgement, or at least a running sheet is not maintained. Ben will probably continue to be promoted even through he has demonstrated that he has a fundamental lack of connection with what end users want. There is obviously something wrong occurring in the firefox mozilla groupthink and yet nothing is being done.
I really want a large screen e-ink display for reading at work, led/lcd screens are really inferior to paper whereas e-ink screen is less so. This would be in additon to my exiting screen. The current crop of tablets really such for reading a novel or event short papers.
Management is attempting to commoditise the IT workform however this relates to a fundamental misunderstanding of what IT is meant to do. IT is meant to either replace or augment people. Paying peanuts to commoditise your workforce and using BA to provide the insight is an attempt to apply Taylors principles to this problem. However it doesn't work in practice. Business needs to employ evolutionary models of software and system design and employ capable practictioners. Rule 1 If you can innovate Rule 2 If you can copy the most successful innovators. Rule 3 Don't pay for software unless you absolutely have to.
Look at what google, facebook etc are doing and contrast this to your environment. If you're a MS shop, your doing it wrong because the software is not free. You're paying an overhead that you don't have to and licencing constrains your growth.
A number of people appear to be under the misunderstanding that this is about licensing however that is incorrect. The simple issue is that this is about companies charging more because they can. If I buy a book from a web site in the US from an authorised distributor then it is a legitimate purchase, that is the point of parallel import laws in Australia. These restrictions are attempts to block the use of parallel import channels because it reduces their profit margin.
This is a PR and marketing strategy. Google relies on selling people to companies however this hegemony is threatened by lawmakers whom may constrain what google collects. By saying that we might be able to win the war of drugs if you let us collect more data on people is a simple strategy and the government is so silly that they'll buy it. They want people to associate limitations on google's ability to collect data with crime.
This practice is wrong and the numpties advocating the practice are idiots who don't actually understand the problem space. I have worked in the IT security space for over 15 years doing risk assessments, designing gateways and demonstrating remote compromises. The two threats that these controls are meant to treat are information egress and inbound malware. Unfortunately it is woefully ineffective for both. Essentially an evil administrator can harvest the financial credentials of internal staff and any corporation sponsoring this practice is liable. I'm not saying that this threat is not real however there are fundamentally better mechanisms for treating this problem. In one organisation which was sensitive to remote compromise we used browsers hosted in a DMZ an used XWindow to provide the browser on a users desktop. The two threats mentioned above are gone and we didn't need to compromise the privacy of end users. By the way, I have been involved in demontrating remote comprises or organisations which implement gateway SSL termination and in reality its and ineffective contol.
This is a classic dumb idea, if you want to do this create do it via a plugin. The reasons for the browsers declining popularity is simple, performance...
If your not sure on the what you're trying to achieve by this presentation you're already lost. There are 100 people who are worth $100/hour so the presentation has a cost of $5000 for 30 minutes. Once you're got something that you want to communicate the next step is how. For this I would use the Lessig method rather than death by powerpoint. Google "Lessig Method". If you can present your message in 5 minutes do it. Don't try to bore people for 30 minutes because you think to have to.
There are a couple of assumptions here which are actually validated. One is that all government code is outsourced, actually its not. The fundamental problem here is that government agencies especially can't tell shit from suger in terms of the quality of their software. Industry can't tell them either, I know from experience that Government already spends enormous sums of money on processes which are meant to make software better, guess what? It doesn't work. Government agencies (and staff promotions) are measured by inputs rather than outputs, ie how much they spend rather than what they produce, until this changes government software will be shit.
The development of effective vaccines is the most effective strategy for reducing the potential for loss of life from this virus. This measure will increases the likelihood that you or your loved ones will die from something that could have been prevented. There is a real need for the public to actively lobby for reductions in volume of information which governments are restricting "for the common good" as it is having a negative impact upon society's ability to mitigate the associated risks. A significant part of the puzzle has been the renewed vigor of the cold war agencies in their war on terror, their practices are geared towards countering foreign intelligence services rather than the the current threat. For example you will find that while terrorist acts are criminal activities the infrastructure which exists in many countries actually effectively reduces agencies ability to counter and prosecute these threats which is disappointing to say the least. Research organisation have known for many years what our security organisations are only just starting to realize, dissemination yields greater results than information partitioning, in fact the benefits from dissemination are exponential in nature, or conversely, limitations on information flow leads to an exponential reduction in your personal safety.
Decide what you're best at, most managers are poor designers. Just because you're a manager doesn't mean you deserve control. Being a manager is understanding what the business desires & needs, using your skill to translate that through the talent that you've employed into a profitable outcome and marketing the end result. I would advise you to give your staff an IQ test and try to offload design to someone who scored well in this area, You then market their designs to management
There are a couple of points related to this. 1 You're not particularly good at assessing risk. Do the maths on people killed by disease and people killed by terrorists 2 There is a history of the flu virus turning lethal. Spanish flu and earlier history of extremely deadly pandemics. 3 This study demonstrates breeding a better pathogen using natural means using traits that already exist. 4 Vaccines for flu type virus are very effective. 5 Exposure to a similar flu virus or vaccine confers some immunity. 6 Agents that boost the immune response to vaccines confer an even broader immunity
The point is that government should be preparing broad spectum bird flu vaccines and allowing people to put their hands up to get them as the risk of this type of virus arising naturally is high. This study demonstrates this are fact.
CSIRO, an Australian research organisation released research relating to mouse pox virus modifications that created a deadly virus precisely because it was hoped that it would lead to better treatments. They also surmised that governments around the world already knew about this but had kept it secret. http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001755.html
Slashdot Mirror
The Australian Government knows that its being screwed by the likes of Microsoft and upper middle management are allowing this to happen.
Unfortunately the people assigned to fix this don't know shit from sugar and will allow themselves to be bent over a barrel.
You are also confusing two issues, this is about creating a competitive market and nothing to do with "Super stable" Any idiot can tell you that where there is competition in the market the price of desktop products has dropped orders of magnitude, ie antivirus and where there is no competition due to a format lock in products have increased in price ie MS office suite. The shell game of doubling the price and then offering a 35% discount is growing old fast.
A couple of side notes
Word is meant to be a communication tool and in the enterprise it fails dismally, wikis work more effectively as they are multi user.
The Australian Government would be much more productive if they were only allowed to use notepad as people waste most of their time playing with formatting.
I've also worked with researchers who use office as one of the tools of their trade and once expressed similar sentiments to yours and was howled down. Apparently it is unstable, sucks for writing book size projects and also sucks when collaborating with other authors. Word is a toy for playing round with formatting, MS would love for it to replace the browser as a wiki interfaces but that isn't going to come for some time yet and hopefully
HTTP thrived because all of the major vendors were trying to shackle customers to their proprietry interfaces and along came this open transparent system which allowed information to be shared.
Now a bunch of dinosaurs and upstarts are pushing a set of completely unnecessary controls onto this platform solely for their own benefit. Not the customers benefit. Let everyone know that these services already existing without DRM, there is absolutely no benefit to those with Web browsers. The point of these stardards is to consolidate the status quo rather and allowing the economy to transform around more efficient information transportation modes.
Mental health issues correlates with IQ
Religousity negatively correlates with IQ
Therefore fewer religous people suffer from mental health issues.
An organisms role is to generate more copies of itself, it doesn't matter if it wipe out 99% of the host during that periods as long as it spreads. If increased virulance spreads better than being benign the virulence wins as more copies of that clade will spread.
The real reason that people in nuclear establishments undergo extensive screening relates more to a cold war philosophy than public safety. They're just making sure that you don't sell those secrets to the Reds.
1. Biological agents are readily available. ;-)
2. Biological agents are naturally dangerous ie H5N1 is killing people.
3. Reseach into these agents will provide positive outcomes. ie vaccines
4. Stupid measures such as profiles fail the best researchers, eg NSA fails more than 50% of maths researchers. Those creative left handed types are dangerous. It's actually true that NSA employs fewer left handed people than the research community at large and is an acknowledged problem.
5. Research doesn't have many resources, wasting them upon dumb controls means much less reseach.
6 The military has oodles of cash (read wasteful) however they're not allowed to play with biological weapons so biology doesn't get much of this cash. (unlike nukes)
Mmmm it tastes just like butter, really??? Slashdot do you really need to place advertisments in this manner? Check the approval process for this piece of crap and you'll find someone taking kickbacks. If it wasn't deliberate ie a corporate decision then you have someone in the ranks getting kickbacks.
This is suicide for google, and a traditional play by managers with no imagination who want to show that they can do things in an environment which is dominated by technical types that they can't and won't understand. This is money better spent by infiltrating the educational space or keeping margins lower. Please Google, keep the list of names of the people who support this initiative so that is can be a permanent blemish on their reconds. I for one won't be employing them.
Technology is not the solution unless you're talking about changing the nature of the classroom. For example if yoush to enable remote learning a content management system might be of assistance. If you want an efficient mechanism for evaluating teaching methods, technology may be of assistance. However technology can just be a waste of time, MS word is great for writing stories but is possibly the biggest time waster in corporate history, playing with templates, creating documents that noone reads that you store multple times.
What a load of toss. US companies price fix with the US price minimised, this is because their government is elected by US citizens. Price fixing by cation or region should be made illegal. nuff said
C is for consumers that support this behaviour. Anyone with an apple device is complicit in these actions. Apple is at the apogee of their corporate life and they are using the legal system to stay there as long as possible because they are no longer capable of innovation. Here's a bet apple's share price will plummet over the next three years as they completely fail to innovate and vainly try to use the legal system as a club against competitors.
Everyone thinks that they have a sense of humour & Everyone thinks that they write good code.
I've worked with enough tossers who believed that a particular style was the best way and that whatever style was being used was crap that I just want to vomit. Go and fix the MS word templates because they offend you sense of style, stay out of my way. I used to get involved in these debates and found that it was better to simply marginalise the idiot until he went away. Now I run a company which makes money and internally you don't get 'pretty'.
The job of coders is to ship code. If he's shipping more code and meeting more deadlines than you he's a better coder.
Really this point of view is bigger than this, it relates to directory structures, word templates, diagrams basically if you care about these things you're a time waster and are worth keeping on because you constantly get distracted by fluff and don't make money.
During the merger between two large organisations the CEO held "Town Hall" style meetings which requested that if anyone has ideas which would help with the merger suggest contact him via email.
ICT was made up of idiot middle manager who were trying to work their way up the food chain at the expense of the organisation, in short, the CEO took the concept on and ran with it.
Project was completed, I've since moved on as a consultant with a significant organisational reengineering project under my belt.
Go over their heads if you can win.
It's good to see that someone is being held accountable here. Benjamin Smedberg creates a shitload of negative publicity, pisses off a proportion of dedicated testers and he:
A. Gets a promotion
B. Is removed from positions of responsibility because he demonstrates poor judgement
C. Nothing happens
D. Gets a pay increase.
Answer = C
Come on guys at least make him wear a T shirt for a month that says, I must not override the recommendations of others in relation to 64 bit builds.
One of the key problems in organisations is that people aren't held accountable for poor judgement, or at least a running sheet is not maintained. Ben will probably continue to be promoted even through he has demonstrated that he has a fundamental lack of connection with what end users want. There is obviously something wrong occurring in the firefox mozilla groupthink and yet nothing is being done.
I really want a large screen e-ink display for reading at work, led/lcd screens are really inferior to paper whereas e-ink screen is less so. This would be in additon to my exiting screen. The current crop of tablets really such for reading a novel or event short papers.
Management is attempting to commoditise the IT workform however this relates to a fundamental misunderstanding of what IT is meant to do. IT is meant to either replace or augment people. Paying peanuts to commoditise your workforce and using BA to provide the insight is an attempt to apply Taylors principles to this problem. However it doesn't work in practice. Business needs to employ evolutionary models of software and system design and employ capable practictioners.
Rule 1 If you can innovate
Rule 2 If you can copy the most successful innovators.
Rule 3 Don't pay for software unless you absolutely have to.
Look at what google, facebook etc are doing and contrast this to your environment. If you're a MS shop, your doing it wrong because the software is not free. You're paying an overhead that you don't have to and licencing constrains your growth.
A number of people appear to be under the misunderstanding that this is about licensing however that is incorrect. The simple issue is that this is about companies charging more because they can.
If I buy a book from a web site in the US from an authorised distributor then it is a legitimate purchase, that is the point of parallel import laws in Australia.
These restrictions are attempts to block the use of parallel import channels because it reduces their profit margin.
This is a PR and marketing strategy. Google relies on selling people to companies however this hegemony is threatened by lawmakers whom may constrain what google collects. By saying that we might be able to win the war of drugs if you let us collect more data on people is a simple strategy and the government is so silly that they'll buy it.
They want people to associate limitations on google's ability to collect data with crime.
This practice is wrong and the numpties advocating the practice are idiots who don't actually understand the problem space. I have worked in the IT security space for over 15 years doing risk assessments, designing gateways and demonstrating remote compromises. The two threats that these controls are meant to treat are information egress and inbound malware. Unfortunately it is woefully ineffective for both. Essentially an evil administrator can harvest the financial credentials of internal staff and any corporation sponsoring this practice is liable. I'm not saying that this threat is not real however there are fundamentally better mechanisms for treating this problem. In one organisation which was sensitive to remote compromise we used browsers hosted in a DMZ an used XWindow to provide the browser on a users desktop. The two threats mentioned above are gone and we didn't need to compromise the privacy of end users. By the way, I have been involved in demontrating remote comprises or organisations which implement gateway SSL termination and in reality its and ineffective contol.
This is a classic dumb idea, if you want to do this create do it via a plugin. The reasons for the browsers declining popularity is simple, performance...
If your not sure on the what you're trying to achieve by this presentation you're already lost.
There are 100 people who are worth $100/hour so the presentation has a cost of $5000 for 30 minutes.
Once you're got something that you want to communicate the next step is how. For this I would use the Lessig method rather than death by powerpoint. Google "Lessig Method". If you can present your message in 5 minutes do it. Don't try to bore people for 30 minutes because you think to have to.
There are a couple of assumptions here which are actually validated. One is that all government code is outsourced, actually its not.
The fundamental problem here is that government agencies especially can't tell shit from suger in terms of the quality of their software.
Industry can't tell them either, I know from experience that Government already spends enormous sums of money on processes which are meant to make software better, guess what? It doesn't work.
Government agencies (and staff promotions) are measured by inputs rather than outputs, ie how much they spend rather than what they produce, until this changes government software will be shit.
The development of effective vaccines is the most effective strategy for reducing the potential for loss of life from this virus. This measure will increases the likelihood that you or your loved ones will die from something that could have been prevented.
There is a real need for the public to actively lobby for reductions in volume of information which governments are restricting "for the common good" as it is having a negative impact upon society's ability to mitigate the associated risks.
A significant part of the puzzle has been the renewed vigor of the cold war agencies in their war on terror, their practices are geared towards countering foreign intelligence services rather than the the current threat. For example you will find that while terrorist acts are criminal activities the infrastructure which exists in many countries actually effectively reduces agencies ability to counter and prosecute these threats which is disappointing to say the least.
Research organisation have known for many years what our security organisations are only just starting to realize, dissemination yields greater results than information partitioning, in fact the benefits from dissemination are exponential in nature, or conversely, limitations on information flow leads to an exponential reduction in your personal safety.
Decide what you're best at, most managers are poor designers. Just because you're a manager doesn't mean you deserve control. Being a manager is understanding what the business desires & needs, using your skill to translate that through the talent that you've employed into a profitable outcome and marketing the end result. I would advise you to give your staff an IQ test and try to offload design to someone who scored well in this area, You then market their designs to management
There are a couple of points related to this.
1 You're not particularly good at assessing risk. Do the maths on people killed by disease and people killed by terrorists
2 There is a history of the flu virus turning lethal. Spanish flu and earlier history of extremely deadly pandemics.
3 This study demonstrates breeding a better pathogen using natural means using traits that already exist.
4 Vaccines for flu type virus are very effective.
5 Exposure to a similar flu virus or vaccine confers some immunity.
6 Agents that boost the immune response to vaccines confer an even broader immunity
The point is that government should be preparing broad spectum bird flu vaccines and allowing people to put their hands up to get them as the risk of this type of virus arising naturally is high. This study demonstrates this are fact.
CSIRO, an Australian research organisation released research relating to mouse pox virus modifications that created a deadly virus precisely because it was hoped that it would lead to better treatments. They also surmised that governments around the world already knew about this but had kept it secret.
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001755.html