First you have to define an aim for this documentation that management as well as staff buy into. The simplest way to explain the need is repeatability and quality improvement: "if we write it down it'll be easy to teach new people if you're ill, and if something is wrong we can correct it" - don't forget to point out that process errors are not seen as human errors (and get management to confirm that).
Now, your audience is really the staff - management needs metrics more than the processes. I have found that flowcharts work best (most people think visually), but don't make it all whizz bang with click through etc. Just compile a document series, and convert the most current versions to PDF and HTML (I'm assuming you have doc version management in place) - make them easy to access (like on an intranet with search abilities). And do not forget to introduce each new one, this will require training time.
I think this actually hits the nail very firmly on the head. Sure, there must be a way to go after those who screw up if it is clear incompetence, but the way things are going lawyers are killing good practice medicine.
There is probably only one good aspect to this: one day lawyers will die because nobody wants to treat them for the risk of getting sued. A sort of Darwinian correction..
Look, get DRM out of your head - I have yet to find a place for it, and I've only been in IT for 25 years, of which 15 in security. I have seen dongles (still in use in the CAD industry), I have seen floppy disks with laser holes (bypassed by TSRs), I have seen media with altered parameters (which neededs special drives: say hello to hardware maintenance hell), I have seen registration schemes..
You should really first see if the disadvantages outweigh the benefits, from what I read you're simply after some method to protect information from disclosure. Well, encrypt it. Just don't use any DRM related solution because you're inflicting a serial chain of single points of failures on your business, and it'll screw any backup and recovery strategy as well. Just don't. You really don't know just how much trouble you're heading for.
I have an SZ1 and an SZ4 (later model) which are carbon and darkened brushed alu - both do it, but not all the time. The PSU, however, is properly earthed..
Think about the psychological damage to the child if there were negative consequences of such revelations - either directly or through the damage of the child-parent relationship.
Yeah, jail would be nice - with a lot of soap that is just too slippery to hang on to in the shower..
As that technique stores a lot more energy in the same volume, I would imagine that a lot more energy will come out if something goes wrong with the battery.
I guess moving to OO or StarOffice would not be such a bad move after all then. La least the macro language is consistent across apllications as well as platforms.
I guess the only question remaining is why you would run Windows after that, but you should ave been asking that question quite a while back..
What MS did to the ISO process was so damaging that it has drawn the direct attention of the Commission. I had a feeling the Commission would examine it the moment they were made aware - the EU is very dependent on standards (any community is) and the damage MS has caused extends well beyond their little file format war.
The EU is lifting the covers off this one to see what type of standard MS was trying to ram through. Given the rather extensive amount of proprietary elements in MSOOXML I think they're in for another lashing - especially given the "collateral" damage (to use a popular military term).
It's one thing to draw scrutiny. It's another thing entirely to be back in the spotlight because it appears to suggest that the fine wasn't high enough. It's interesting that the EU seems to have a brain and teeth whereas the DoJ appears to only employ wet noodle slapping.
I think these boys have just managed to get themselves in line for a VERY large lawsuit. I have no idea which corporate idiot dreamt that up, but if they have been sending out letters they've dug themselves a rather deep hole, and not just from a PR point of view. Knowing corporate idiocy they will continue digging until they hit bedrock, then order in the dynamite to go deeper once more.
Thankfully it's Ford. I mean, if it was Ferrari or something I'd care, but Ford?
Ab-so-lu-te-ly, totally, completely insane. I thought I'd seen everything now, but this is award winning stupidity. This may not be bettered, not just in 2008 but possibly this decade (well, OK maybe by another Sony rootkit or RIAA, but those are easy targets. This is in a stupidity class of its own).
Applause guys. Could we have the names of the clowns who dreamt this up so we could avoid accidentally employing them? Thanks.
First off it's not their responsibility, but being an overarching mechanism means they can be used to set policy so expect some serious cozying up by Intel and Microsoft if they ever make noises that way.
Secondly, I think we need to get away from the fact that OLPC is "just for poor countries" - IMHO Negroponte is not doing himself (and OLPC) favours with that by not addressing that perception error. It makes it look like a throwaway ("here, you're poor, have one") and fails to flag what a fantastic tool it is overall. Don't forget that kids in 'richer' countries like them too, and I can't see the educational value lower itself in that case.
As a matter of fact, if they sold in Europe I would have already bought one for my 9 year old.
The problem with OLPC is that it makes good *political* news, so as long as the OLPC guys keep that in mind they should be OK.
I'm going to make a phone call to put a few things into gear. If I manage to pull off what I plan, Microsoft won't matter that much anymore, so I hope the people I'm calling will bite:-).
Imagine the scene: thumper car stands at traffic light, with the sound turned up high as usual - windows are always down on those sort of cars because they have to make sure everyone hears just what a horrendous lack of taste they have.
A very large "I have loadsamoney" car silently pulls up beside it (say a Rolls or something). Guy in the back never even lowers his newspaper but says something to which his driver nods politely and pressed a button.
Front window adjacent to the thumper silently slides down, and a beautiful engineered speaker pops up - it plays one single, long violin note. All very classy.
The violin note resonates with every piece of glass in the thumper car. It all breaks, the turned down windows shatter inside the doors, the windshield spiders then crumbles, even the driver's watchface goes to pieces and his sunglasses shatter into pieces that are only saved from falling by sticking to his goatee.
Speaker pops back down while the window quietly slides shut, light goes green and the car glides forth, leaving a disassembled thumper behind..
If you look what gets Microsoft and Intel BOTH seriously worried, it's a little cheap laptop made for kids in 3rd world countries, and there are a number of damn good reasons for that.
(1) It shows IT doesn't have to cost buckets of money. The power in an OLPC is so low you can probably emulate 10 concurrently on your average Linux desktop and they'd still be faster - so why are we producing so much landfill? Faster animated cursors (those who have tried Vista know *exactly* what I'm talking about)?
(2) It shows both MS and Intel up as the resource wasters they are. AMD has seriously kicked ass with the chipsets they have produced there, and it shows clearly that Intel is hanging on to the 'top' position in more or less identical ways as Microsoft (the recent "leaving" OLPC events have proved that once again): FUD. It would be nice if they could actually deliver something instead, but I guess (like with MS) *THAT* would cost effort.
(3) It demonstrates that intelligent, user focused design does not depend on the existing paradigms. Negroponte's team came up with a new way of doing things, and it's *seriously* good. So good that it MUST be stopped or it will show up clubs like MS as the non-innovators they are. Let me remind you to compare the size of Negroponte's team (minus the Open Source component here) with the huge amount of 'top' people working for Microsoft? That THEY can't produce innovation is a sign they're seriously mismanaged.
If you're an intelligent shareholder you should see by now that the show is over for MS and Intel. Sure, they will continue to produce revenue but neither have created any kind of real innovation in over a decade or so, and the tide is turning against the methods they use to hang on to their position in industry despite those flaws.
You could say that OLPC is a bit the Nintendo of the computing world. Someone sat down and went back to basics: WHY do we use something? In Nintendo's case the answer was "fun", and the Nintendo Wii was born which totally nuked the "more/faster graphics/computing power" race. I see a similar thing happening with OLPC. All it takes is a next version made for adults and all hell will break lose. And in my opinion that can't happen early enough.
The problem with most of these gadgets is that they have one type mike, which may not always be the best for the circumstances you're in. Plan to buy a good but small mike, that has more influence on the quality than which device (IMHO).
she will not have a computer/game system (or TV for that matter) in her own room until she is 14 at least
I hate to break it to you, but you strike me as a new parent. You're forgetting that (a) she will visit others who may not be so strict, and that is ignoring that (b) she will have pestered you to death WAY before then to have her own laptop because all her friends have it. I agree with it being in sight, but I suggest you plan a little bit ahead and expect that control not to work so well.
Having said that, by the time she's 14 you will have given up any idea of control anyway and will have realised that the one thing you MUST do is educate. What you won't be able to do is control, and IMHO that is not as bad as it seems. Your job is to make sure she doesn't fall that hard, but only the bumps are educational. Keeping her away from danger is actually achieving the opposite as she won't develop street smarts.
Ironically, you may have learned this lesson already, but may not have realised it. Try keeping her hand away from anything hot. She will continue to reach for something until she burns herself - your job is to divert that grabbing to a radiator pipe which is hot enough to warn and hurt, but not hot enough to burn. The rest of your life is pretty much like that, and I suggest you enjoy it. She'll be 18 before you know it..
But you must understand that the spice of life is that very risk of being caught! That's what makes it so exciting!
You can have spice without victimising those around you. I really don't care one way or the other if someone is into cordless bungee jumping or other madness, but as soon as they treat those around them as mere accessories instead of human beings all bets are off.
At that point I merely hope such an unethical so-and-so gets everything that the law can throw at them, and in some case I'd even be willing to fund extra slippery shower soap when they're locked up. When they're that far gone, physical violence is the only thing that gets through because, let's face it, they know the moment they get out they can start playing the system again.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, that made me laugh :-)
First you have to define an aim for this documentation that management as well as staff buy into. The simplest way to explain the need is repeatability and quality improvement: "if we write it down it'll be easy to teach new people if you're ill, and if something is wrong we can correct it" - don't forget to point out that process errors are not seen as human errors (and get management to confirm that).
Now, your audience is really the staff - management needs metrics more than the processes. I have found that flowcharts work best (most people think visually), but don't make it all whizz bang with click through etc. Just compile a document series, and convert the most current versions to PDF and HTML (I'm assuming you have doc version management in place) - make them easy to access (like on an intranet with search abilities). And do not forget to introduce each new one, this will require training time.
That's all I have time for, sorry.
An iPhone or the hands of a model (or for some, the searching hands of a model :-).
You know, I can buy an iPhone any time. Warehouses are full of them - easy choice.
--
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some drinking to do.
I think this actually hits the nail very firmly on the head. Sure, there must be a way to go after those who screw up if it is clear incompetence, but the way things are going lawyers are killing good practice medicine.
There is probably only one good aspect to this: one day lawyers will die because nobody wants to treat them for the risk of getting sued. A sort of Darwinian correction..
Q: has this ever been submitted as evidence in a Court case? Could be fun to revisit that ..
Look, get DRM out of your head - I have yet to find a place for it, and I've only been in IT for 25 years, of which 15 in security. I have seen dongles (still in use in the CAD industry), I have seen floppy disks with laser holes (bypassed by TSRs), I have seen media with altered parameters (which neededs special drives: say hello to hardware maintenance hell), I have seen registration schemes..
You should really first see if the disadvantages outweigh the benefits, from what I read you're simply after some method to protect information from disclosure. Well, encrypt it. Just don't use any DRM related solution because you're inflicting a serial chain of single points of failures on your business, and it'll screw any backup and recovery strategy as well. Just don't. You really don't know just how much trouble you're heading for.
.. and Zimbabwe will probably beat them too..
I have an SZ1 and an SZ4 (later model) which are carbon and darkened brushed alu - both do it, but not all the time. The PSU, however, is properly earthed..
Think about the psychological damage to the child if there were negative consequences of such revelations - either directly or through the damage of the child-parent relationship.
Yeah, jail would be nice - with a lot of soap that is just too slippery to hang on to in the shower..
Just in case you're nicely in line with its trajectory :-).
As that technique stores a lot more energy in the same volume, I would imagine that a lot more energy will come out if something goes wrong with the battery.
This could get interesting later..
I guess moving to OO or StarOffice would not be such a bad move after all then. La least the macro language is consistent across apllications as well as platforms.
..
I guess the only question remaining is why you would run Windows after that, but you should ave been asking that question quite a while back
What MS did to the ISO process was so damaging that it has drawn the direct attention of the Commission. I had a feeling the Commission would examine it the moment they were made aware - the EU is very dependent on standards (any community is) and the damage MS has caused extends well beyond their little file format war.
The EU is lifting the covers off this one to see what type of standard MS was trying to ram through. Given the rather extensive amount of proprietary elements in MSOOXML I think they're in for another lashing - especially given the "collateral" damage (to use a popular military term).
It's one thing to draw scrutiny. It's another thing entirely to be back in the spotlight because it appears to suggest that the fine wasn't high enough. It's interesting that the EU seems to have a brain and teeth whereas the DoJ appears to only employ wet noodle slapping.
.. then why do you close the curtains at night?
I think these boys have just managed to get themselves in line for a VERY large lawsuit. I have no idea which corporate idiot dreamt that up, but if they have been sending out letters they've dug themselves a rather deep hole, and not just from a PR point of view. Knowing corporate idiocy they will continue digging until they hit bedrock, then order in the dynamite to go deeper once more.
Thankfully it's Ford. I mean, if it was Ferrari or something I'd care, but Ford?
Ab-so-lu-te-ly, totally, completely insane. I thought I'd seen everything now, but this is award winning stupidity. This may not be bettered, not just in 2008 but possibly this decade (well, OK maybe by another Sony rootkit or RIAA, but those are easy targets. This is in a stupidity class of its own).
Applause guys. Could we have the names of the clowns who dreamt this up so we could avoid accidentally employing them? Thanks.
.. so you only need to send up the cleaner .. :-)
First off it's not their responsibility, but being an overarching mechanism means they can be used to set policy so expect some serious cozying up by Intel and Microsoft if they ever make noises that way.
Secondly, I think we need to get away from the fact that OLPC is "just for poor countries" - IMHO Negroponte is not doing himself (and OLPC) favours with that by not addressing that perception error. It makes it look like a throwaway ("here, you're poor, have one") and fails to flag what a fantastic tool it is overall. Don't forget that kids in 'richer' countries like them too, and I can't see the educational value lower itself in that case.
As a matter of fact, if they sold in Europe I would have already bought one for my 9 year old.
The problem with OLPC is that it makes good *political* news, so as long as the OLPC guys keep that in mind they should be OK.
:-).
I'm going to make a phone call to put a few things into gear. If I manage to pull off what I plan, Microsoft won't matter that much anymore, so I hope the people I'm calling will bite
That is a VERY good point :-)
Imagine the scene: thumper car stands at traffic light, with the sound turned up high as usual - windows are always down on those sort of cars because they have to make sure everyone hears just what a horrendous lack of taste they have.
A very large "I have loadsamoney" car silently pulls up beside it (say a Rolls or something). Guy in the back never even lowers his newspaper but says something to which his driver nods politely and pressed a button.
Front window adjacent to the thumper silently slides down, and a beautiful engineered speaker pops up - it plays one single, long violin note. All very classy.
The violin note resonates with every piece of glass in the thumper car. It all breaks, the turned down windows shatter inside the doors, the windshield spiders then crumbles, even the driver's watchface goes to pieces and his sunglasses shatter into pieces that are only saved from falling by sticking to his goatee.
Speaker pops back down while the window quietly slides shut, light goes green and the car glides forth, leaving a disassembled thumper behind..
Yum..
I stop wasting my time on slashdot.
:-).
Look, that's really pushing credibility. No way.
If you look what gets Microsoft and Intel BOTH seriously worried, it's a little cheap laptop made for kids in 3rd world countries, and there are a number of damn good reasons for that.
(1) It shows IT doesn't have to cost buckets of money. The power in an OLPC is so low you can probably emulate 10 concurrently on your average Linux desktop and they'd still be faster - so why are we producing so much landfill? Faster animated cursors (those who have tried Vista know *exactly* what I'm talking about)?
(2) It shows both MS and Intel up as the resource wasters they are. AMD has seriously kicked ass with the chipsets they have produced there, and it shows clearly that Intel is hanging on to the 'top' position in more or less identical ways as Microsoft (the recent "leaving" OLPC events have proved that once again): FUD. It would be nice if they could actually deliver something instead, but I guess (like with MS) *THAT* would cost effort.
(3) It demonstrates that intelligent, user focused design does not depend on the existing paradigms. Negroponte's team came up with a new way of doing things, and it's *seriously* good. So good that it MUST be stopped or it will show up clubs like MS as the non-innovators they are. Let me remind you to compare the size of Negroponte's team (minus the Open Source component here) with the huge amount of 'top' people working for Microsoft? That THEY can't produce innovation is a sign they're seriously mismanaged.
If you're an intelligent shareholder you should see by now that the show is over for MS and Intel. Sure, they will continue to produce revenue but neither have created any kind of real innovation in over a decade or so, and the tide is turning against the methods they use to hang on to their position in industry despite those flaws.
You could say that OLPC is a bit the Nintendo of the computing world. Someone sat down and went back to basics: WHY do we use something? In Nintendo's case the answer was "fun", and the Nintendo Wii was born which totally nuked the "more/faster graphics/computing power" race. I see a similar thing happening with OLPC. All it takes is a next version made for adults and all hell will break lose. And in my opinion that can't happen early enough.
The problem with most of these gadgets is that they have one type mike, which may not always be the best for the circumstances you're in. Plan to buy a good but small mike, that has more influence on the quality than which device (IMHO).
I hate to break it to you, but you strike me as a new parent. You're forgetting that (a) she will visit others who may not be so strict, and that is ignoring that (b) she will have pestered you to death WAY before then to have her own laptop because all her friends have it. I agree with it being in sight, but I suggest you plan a little bit ahead and expect that control not to work so well.
Having said that, by the time she's 14 you will have given up any idea of control anyway and will have realised that the one thing you MUST do is educate. What you won't be able to do is control, and IMHO that is not as bad as it seems. Your job is to make sure she doesn't fall that hard, but only the bumps are educational. Keeping her away from danger is actually achieving the opposite as she won't develop street smarts.
Ironically, you may have learned this lesson already, but may not have realised it. Try keeping her hand away from anything hot. She will continue to reach for something until she burns herself - your job is to divert that grabbing to a radiator pipe which is hot enough to warn and hurt, but not hot enough to burn. The rest of your life is pretty much like that, and I suggest you enjoy it. She'll be 18 before you know it..
You can have spice without victimising those around you. I really don't care one way or the other if someone is into cordless bungee jumping or other madness, but as soon as they treat those around them as mere accessories instead of human beings all bets are off.
At that point I merely hope such an unethical so-and-so gets everything that the law can throw at them, and in some case I'd even be willing to fund extra slippery shower soap when they're locked up. When they're that far gone, physical violence is the only thing that gets through because, let's face it, they know the moment they get out they can start playing the system again.