The problem with the DMV versus a real company is that, usually, to do anything involving the DMV, I have to go there during normal business hours, wait in line forever, wait in another line forever, etc.
Meanwhile, if there is something I need to do involving a company, odds are I can do it online without getting my ass out of my chair.
The percentage of events that need to be escalated to actual human contact with the DMV is much higher than it is with most companies I deal with.
why would a city government offering free wireless even have tech support??? If you can't figure out how to pop in a 802.11 card and connect to "CityWireless" that's your problem-- you get what you pay for!
The problem with this logic is it assumes the citizens aren't paying for the "free" wireless via taxes.
Second, there is no law forcing you to use the government-sponsored wireless connectivity.
If the government offers a "free" wireless solution that everyone pays for with taxes (no opt-out), then it will undercut every other commercial wireless provider effectively driving them out of business in that market.
I dunno. People, myself included, have hated dealing with the DMV for as long as I can remember. Long lines, complicated fee structures, very few if any online capabilities.
I've seen people wait in line for 15 minutes, then, after being served, be told they had to go wait in a different line for something else. I've gone to DMV stations where I've been told they only offer a subset of services there, and I'd have to drive 15 miles to a nearby town to take care of the rest.
That said, I also hate dealing with the ISPs. But in all honesty, I think I'd rather deal with them. They may be rat bastards from hell, but they generally have it together a little better than government entities.
Besides, an ISPs core business is to provide internet service. A city government's core business is to govern and manage. I wouldn't expect a city to get into the ISP business any more than I would expect Kraft foods to do the same.
That doesn't really answer the question. You're describing an ongoing personality trait when the question asked for the biggest mistake. Mistake implies a decision that a person would reverse if the could. If you want to apply that to a behavior, then the assumption here would be that working too hard is a mistake, and presumably you plan to correct that error at your next position.
That said, I doubt any politician would answer the question any more accurately.
I think you may have missed an obvious point. Germany and Japan were both the aggressors, meanwhile in the case of Iraq, the US invaded.
If you start a fight with someone and get beat up, it's not so much the other guy's fault. If you make a joke about somebody's mother and they respond in a non proportional manner by pounding you into a bloody pulp, you're gonna be pretty pissed off at the guy.
Another big difference is probably the media pressence and public opinion... both of which are worlds different in Iraq versus WW2.
This may seem a tid bit lazy but...
It seems like there are linux distributions for just about anything you might want: routers, pvrs, etc. Are there any linux distributions designed to be a mail anti-spam/anti-virus (or just anti=spam) gateway?... something that would install and configure postfix, spam assassin, etc to receive mail and forward it to another server after filtering it.
The reason I think this would be cool is because configuring mail apps on linux can be hard and because this would be a great linux foot-in-the-door distribution for Exchange admins who didn't want to pay thousands of dollars for antispam gateways.
Posting documents in a window would be analogous to putting them on a webserver. Having them in an unsecured share drive is like having them sitting on a table in an unlocked room
With network shares and web servers, you are publishing content. With both, you can control who has access to the content. I've seen network shares used to distribute publicly accessible content and I've seen websites running with restricted access. My point is, from a security perspective, they are virtually identical.
If we can not assume configuration to share implies intent to share, how can we ever click on anything?
It wasn't a "open server" it was an unsecured server. Big difference. It's just like using someones unsecured WiFi basestation.
You mean an open wireless access point? What if they were publishing the information on a publicly accessible website instead of a publicly accessible network share? Would that somehow make it different? I don't get it. Someone had to configure this serve to share that content with everyone.
If we can not assume that configuration to share implies intent to share, then we have to get approval to access every link before we click on it. We have to identify the owner of every folder on a network share to see if they in fact did mean for this to be accessible before we access it.
Instead of the Republicans apologizing to the Democrats can we have the Democrats apologize to their constituents for winning the technological equivalent of a darwin award?
Re:Those stats don't really mean much though
on
Mock World Vote
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I particularly like how preslashdot, according to the story, Bush was ahead in the US... and post slashdot it is like 70% Kerry - 20% Bush.
I mean how accurate can a survey be when it's posted on slashdot and not immediately reduced to a pile of smoldering rubble.....
Most everyone I know is salaried or overtime exempt... so how exactly is the company required to compensate. Seriously I'd like to know because if there is such a law I'm pretty sure the statute of limitations wouldn't be up from my last death march.
Wrong. A mathematical proof demonstrates to (some) other mathematicians that the approach works for all cases. Meanwhile, this translates to the rest of the world as "the math guys say they think this works." To many of us, this is roughly equivalent to hearing someone say, "Jim thinks he has fixed the mail server."
To lend validity to either of these statements, you need to add understandable, accessible evidence. Jim thinks he fixed the mail server. It's been up and running for 30 days without any problems. Here is a proof showing how to numerically solve any polynomial equation and here's a program that runs the algorithm and shows several examples that work.
Focus on being a facilitator, not an instigator. People hate being forced into activities with coworkers. It is very difficult to pick an activity that everyone will like, and it is very difficult to get everyone to like each other. As a manager, people may not always tell you they don't want to go out for drinks or go out on bowling night. Instead they might just sit their seething in resentment when they'd rather be home.
What you have to do is plant a seed of an idea, and then see if something grows out of it.
Some examples of facilitation:
* Building a volleyball court for employee use.
* Permitting use of office projectors for movie night.
* Letting people run a gaming server on the company pipe
* Foster an environment where people can leave work together to grab coffee or whatever (as opposed to an environment where everyone always tries to make it look like they are always working)
Some no no's:
* Forcing your sys admins to play volleyball during their lunch hour.
* Asking everyone to spend their friday night watching Planet of the Apes at work.
* Pressuring people into 1st person shooters after work.
* Insisting everyone go out to get coffee every morning as a break.
The all time worst company sponsored activity I have ever heard of was an event a big company picnic. Employees were sent into a corn maze and they raced to escape the maze. A few hours of time off was awarded to everyone with more given to those who finished fastest. The managers sat and watched the whole thing from a platform overlooking the maze. For some reason, the situation reminds me of slaves fighting against each other in a gladatorial pit for the amusement of their masters except in this case the only reward was a few hours of freedom.
Does this have any real world consequences? Like I know if P=NP and P ain't that bad, there could be dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, giant marshmallow men in new york, etc... What about this?
Consider looking inside the city's information systems. If my experience is any indicator, large decentralized organizations tend to be exceptionally bad at managing the flow of information amongst sub units.
For example, last year, a professor at Ohio State told me that every month he is expected to go over his phone bill (from a university owned provider), then transfer all of the long distance calls onto a separate set of forms. These forms get submitted to the department secretary and from there I don't know where they go. Presumably, they are eventually re-entered into some system by hand. I don't know if the story is true, and it's not something I have to do. However it is the kind of convoluted manual information change I have grown to expect.
So back to my original point... instead of trying to create new services for the public, focus on cleaning up the city's information systems. They are probably a mess and if you are going to build public service sites on top of them, then you should address problems in the foundation before you start.
Besides, people with stable government jobs love it when you make their work much easier.
If you are going to create new services for the public and you are a big city, my vote is for traffic & parking. Create a website you can check on to discover if your car has been towed, pay associated fees, get email reminders for street sweeping dates, etc.
I do sometimes. Any music I buy is immediately ripped and compressed to ogg for play from my networked and backed up file server. If it were as easy to do with dvd, I would do it as well. With hard drive prices dropping it's starting to look viable though software's probably not nearly as good as that used for cds. Additionally, I sometimes will get ISOs for games I own just to use the no cd hacks.
There's really two reasons for all this. The first is I would really hate to lose data due to corrupted media. The second and more "here and now" reason is that storing everything on computers is an access time optimization for me. It takes a lot less time to find and play something over a network than it does to hunt around for a physical object.
Ughh.... bikes and other things. My bike was stolen out of my car trunk (don't ask) a few months ago. Two of my room mates have also had bikes stolen. We've also had seats and brakes (wtf) stolen.
All over campus, you can find old deceased bikes with wheels bent in 'L' shapes as if they been run over with something heavy. I think it must be the yard work go-cart things or one of the half million construction vehicles roaming around.
I think my favorite, most confusing weird theft has been the front right wheel off of my room mate's 93 Ford Taurus. They just left it sitting up on a couple of bricks. Had it been one of the rear wheels, he might not have even noticed before getting in and that could have been bad. In the end he just drove my car to a junk yard and picked up a new wheel for like $20, but it cost him a half day of work. Who the hell steels a wheel of an 11 year old car?
One day I road my brand new bike in to work and locked it up to one of the bike racks. They're actually not so much a bike rack as a sequence of upside down metal U shaped things embedded in the concrete sidewalks. Anyways, when I left work in the afternoon I came out to discover a construction crew had ripped up all the U shaped bike rack things and tossed them up against a building along with the attached bikes. These U things are 3 inch diameter steel embedded in concrete so removing them was no delicate task. Most of the bikes, including mine were effectively unsecured for who knows how many hours. In addition, the amount of stress exerted on the bike/lock while they moved it was enough to damage the the U-bolt's plastic/rubber coating. Since my u-bolt was tightly fit through the frame, front wheel, and U shaped rack... I have no idea how I was able to escape damage to the front wheel and spokes.
And don't get me started on the tow truck cartel. I've literally had the tow truck people try to tow my own car with correct permits out of my own damn driveway... and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Maybe what they've got is a seven year track of projects designed to address some of the chronic security problems through abandonment or rewrite of legacy code. For example, getting rid of the old crufty C/C++ apis and replacing them with managed dotnet could be a boost to security, especially as dotnet matures.
Any good security policy would include callbacks to ensure the person you're talking to is actually within your organization.
Every good security policy is a balance of risk mitigation, ease of use, and a number of other factors. Forcing callbacks would not be an acceptable security measure in most organizations.
Indeed, here's another novel argument from Bruce Schneier's book....
in regards to the strength of 256-bit encryption:
now, the annual energy output of our sun is about 121 * 10^41 ergs. this is enough to power about 2.7 * 10^56 single bit changes on our ideal computer; enough state changes to put a 187-bit counter through all its values. if we build a dyson sphere around the sun and captured all of its energy output for 32 years, without any loss, we should power a computer to count up to 2 ^ 192. of course, it wouldn't have the energy left over to perform any useful calculations with this counter.
but that's just one star, and a measly one at that. a typical supernova releases something like 10^51 ergs. (about a hundred times as much energy would be released in the form of neutrinos, but i let them go for now.) if all this energy could be channeled into a single orgy of computation, a 219-bit counter could be cycled through all of its states.
these numbers have nothing to do with the technology of the devices; they are the maximum that thermodynamics will allow. and they strongly imply that brute-force attracks against 256-bit keys will be infeasable until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.
I'm not saying it isn't racketeering. Frankly I don't know that it is or isn't. Hence the question. In neither of the linked articles did I find a single statement indicating a specific law was broken. In fact, the suit brought by the FTC was a civil action not any kind of criminal charge. If it was racketeering, I would expect that to not be a matter for civil court (but what do I know).
Seriously, am I the only one that feels that the government should never become involved in what is so very clearly a technical problem? What exactly did the FTC achieve with this? At an unknown cost, they stopped one US based group from sending messenger pop-ups. Why not just fix the problem at the source?
I mean, let's just say there was a switch on all phones that said, "Do not receive telemarketing calls." Would it be better for the government to start going after telemarketers or to just have people flip the damn switch? I'm not saying the switch isn't a little hard to find in this case, but it still exists. People can be told how to do it fairly easily, and even better, the manufacturer can change the default behavior to enable the switch.
The funny thing is I would have scored 100% is this was for real. Why? I don't do PayPal, Visa, Earthlink and so on:)
Exactly, none of them even made it past my "should I look at an email with this subject" test. The way I look at things, if I'm checking mail headers or looking at the urls links are pointing to, I've already lost. The only
winning move is not to play.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with the DMV versus a real company is that, usually, to do anything involving the DMV, I have to go there during normal business hours, wait in line forever, wait in another line forever, etc.
Meanwhile, if there is something I need to do involving a company, odds are I can do it online without getting my ass out of my chair.
The percentage of events that need to be escalated to actual human contact with the DMV is much higher than it is with most companies I deal with.
why would a city government offering free wireless even have tech support??? If you can't figure out how to pop in a 802.11 card and connect to "CityWireless" that's your problem-- you get what you pay for!
The problem with this logic is it assumes the citizens aren't paying for the "free" wireless via taxes.
Second, there is no law forcing you to use the government-sponsored wireless connectivity.
If the government offers a "free" wireless solution that everyone pays for with taxes (no opt-out), then it will undercut every other commercial wireless provider effectively driving them out of business in that market.
I dunno. People, myself included, have hated dealing with the DMV for as long as I can remember. Long lines, complicated fee structures, very few if any online capabilities.
I've seen people wait in line for 15 minutes, then, after being served, be told they had to go wait in a different line for something else. I've gone to DMV stations where I've been told they only offer a subset of services there, and I'd have to drive 15 miles to a nearby town to take care of the rest.
That said, I also hate dealing with the ISPs. But in all honesty, I think I'd rather deal with them. They may be rat bastards from hell, but they generally have it together a little better than government entities.
Besides, an ISPs core business is to provide internet service. A city government's core business is to govern and manage. I wouldn't expect a city to get into the ISP business any more than I would expect Kraft foods to do the same.
That doesn't really answer the question. You're describing an ongoing personality trait when the question asked for the biggest mistake. Mistake implies a decision that a person would reverse if the could. If you want to apply that to a behavior, then the assumption here would be that working too hard is a mistake, and presumably you plan to correct that error at your next position.
That said, I doubt any politician would answer the question any more accurately.
I think you may have missed an obvious point. Germany and Japan were both the aggressors, meanwhile in the case of Iraq, the US invaded.
If you start a fight with someone and get beat up, it's not so much the other guy's fault. If you make a joke about somebody's mother and they respond in a non proportional manner by pounding you into a bloody pulp, you're gonna be pretty pissed off at the guy.
Another big difference is probably the media pressence and public opinion... both of which are worlds different in Iraq versus WW2.
This may seem a tid bit lazy but... ... something that would install and configure postfix, spam assassin, etc to receive mail and forward it to another server after filtering it.
It seems like there are linux distributions for just about anything you might want: routers, pvrs, etc. Are there any linux distributions designed to be a mail anti-spam/anti-virus (or just anti=spam) gateway?
The reason I think this would be cool is because configuring mail apps on linux can be hard and because this would be a great linux foot-in-the-door distribution for Exchange admins who didn't want to pay thousands of dollars for antispam gateways.
Posting documents in a window would be analogous to putting them on a webserver. Having them in an unsecured share drive is like having them sitting on a table in an unlocked room
With network shares and web servers, you are publishing content. With both, you can control who has access to the content. I've seen network shares used to distribute publicly accessible content and I've seen websites running with restricted access. My point is, from a security perspective, they are virtually identical.
If we can not assume configuration to share implies intent to share, how can we ever click on anything?
It wasn't a "open server" it was an unsecured server. Big difference. It's just like using someones unsecured WiFi basestation.
You mean an open wireless access point? What if they were publishing the information on a publicly accessible website instead of a publicly accessible network share? Would that somehow make it different? I don't get it. Someone had to configure this serve to share that content with everyone.
If we can not assume that configuration to share implies intent to share, then we have to get approval to access every link before we click on it. We have to identify the owner of every folder on a network share to see if they in fact did mean for this to be accessible before we access it.
Instead of the Republicans apologizing to the Democrats can we have the Democrats apologize to their constituents for winning the technological equivalent of a darwin award?
I particularly like how preslashdot, according to the story, Bush was ahead in the US... and post slashdot it is like 70% Kerry - 20% Bush.
I mean how accurate can a survey be when it's posted on slashdot and not immediately reduced to a pile of smoldering rubble.....
Most everyone I know is salaried or overtime exempt... so how exactly is the company required to compensate. Seriously I'd like to know because if there is such a law I'm pretty sure the statute of limitations wouldn't be up from my last death march.
Wrong. A mathematical proof demonstrates to (some) other mathematicians that the approach works for all cases. Meanwhile, this translates to the rest of the world as "the math guys say they think this works." To many of us, this is roughly equivalent to hearing someone say, "Jim thinks he has fixed the mail server."
To lend validity to either of these statements, you need to add understandable, accessible evidence. Jim thinks he fixed the mail server. It's been up and running for 30 days without any problems. Here is a proof showing how to numerically solve any polynomial equation and here's a program that runs the algorithm and shows several examples that work.
Focus on being a facilitator, not an instigator. People hate being forced into activities with coworkers. It is very difficult to pick an activity that everyone will like, and it is very difficult to get everyone to like each other. As a manager, people may not always tell you they don't want to go out for drinks or go out on bowling night. Instead they might just sit their seething in resentment when they'd rather be home.
What you have to do is plant a seed of an idea, and then see if something grows out of it.
Some examples of facilitation:
* Building a volleyball court for employee use.
* Permitting use of office projectors for movie night.
* Letting people run a gaming server on the company pipe
* Foster an environment where people can leave work together to grab coffee or whatever (as opposed to an environment where everyone always tries to make it look like they are always working)
Some no no's:
* Forcing your sys admins to play volleyball during their lunch hour.
* Asking everyone to spend their friday night watching Planet of the Apes at work.
* Pressuring people into 1st person shooters after work.
* Insisting everyone go out to get coffee every morning as a break.
The all time worst company sponsored activity I have ever heard of was an event a big company picnic. Employees were sent into a corn maze and they raced to escape the maze. A few hours of time off was awarded to everyone with more given to those who finished fastest. The managers sat and watched the whole thing from a platform overlooking the maze. For some reason, the situation reminds me of slaves fighting against each other in a gladatorial pit for the amusement of their masters except in this case the only reward was a few hours of freedom.
- No, I am Sparticus.
Does this have any real world consequences? Like I know if P=NP and P ain't that bad, there could be dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, giant marshmallow men in new york, etc... What about this?
Consider looking inside the city's information systems. If my experience is any indicator, large decentralized organizations tend to be exceptionally bad at managing the flow of information amongst sub units.
For example, last year, a professor at Ohio State told me that every month he is expected to go over his phone bill (from a university owned provider), then transfer all of the long distance calls onto a separate set of forms. These forms get submitted to the department secretary and from there I don't know where they go. Presumably, they are eventually re-entered into some system by hand. I don't know if the story is true, and it's not something I have to do. However it is the kind of convoluted manual information change I have grown to expect.
So back to my original point... instead of trying to create new services for the public, focus on cleaning up the city's information systems. They are probably a mess and if you are going to build public service sites on top of them, then you should address problems in the foundation before you start.
Besides, people with stable government jobs love it when you make their work much easier.
If you are going to create new services for the public and you are a big city, my vote is for traffic & parking. Create a website you can check on to discover if your car has been towed, pay associated fees, get email reminders for street sweeping dates, etc.
I do sometimes. Any music I buy is immediately ripped and compressed to ogg for play from my networked and backed up file server. If it were as easy to do with dvd, I would do it as well. With hard drive prices dropping it's starting to look viable though software's probably not nearly as good as that used for cds. Additionally, I sometimes will get ISOs for games I own just to use the no cd hacks.
There's really two reasons for all this. The first is I would really hate to lose data due to corrupted media. The second and more "here and now" reason is that storing everything on computers is an access time optimization for me. It takes a lot less time to find and play something over a network than it does to hunt around for a physical object.
Ughh.... bikes and other things. My bike was stolen out of my car trunk (don't ask) a few months ago. Two of my room mates have also had bikes stolen. We've also had seats and brakes (wtf) stolen.
/rubber coating. Since my u-bolt was tightly fit through the frame, front wheel, and U shaped rack... I have no idea how I was able to escape damage to the front wheel and spokes.
All over campus, you can find old deceased bikes with wheels bent in 'L' shapes as if they been run over with something heavy. I think it must be the yard work go-cart things or one of the half million construction vehicles roaming around.
I think my favorite, most confusing weird theft has been the front right wheel off of my room mate's 93 Ford Taurus. They just left it sitting up on a couple of bricks. Had it been one of the rear wheels, he might not have even noticed before getting in and that could have been bad. In the end he just drove my car to a junk yard and picked up a new wheel for like $20, but it cost him a half day of work. Who the hell steels a wheel of an 11 year old car?
One day I road my brand new bike in to work and locked it up to one of the bike racks. They're actually not so much a bike rack as a sequence of upside down metal U shaped things embedded in the concrete sidewalks. Anyways, when I left work in the afternoon I came out to discover a construction crew had ripped up all the U shaped bike rack things and tossed them up against a building along with the attached bikes. These U things are 3 inch diameter steel embedded in concrete so removing them was no delicate task. Most of the bikes, including mine were effectively unsecured for who knows how many hours. In addition, the amount of stress exerted on the bike/lock while they moved it was enough to damage the the U-bolt's plastic
And don't get me started on the tow truck cartel. I've literally had the tow truck people try to tow my own car with correct permits out of my own damn driveway... and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Go Buckeyes.
Maybe what they've got is a seven year track of projects designed to address some of the chronic security problems through abandonment or rewrite of legacy code. For example, getting rid of the old crufty C/C++ apis and replacing them with managed dotnet could be a boost to security, especially as dotnet matures.
Any good security policy would include callbacks to ensure the person you're talking to is actually within your organization.
Every good security policy is a balance of risk mitigation, ease of use, and a number of other factors. Forcing callbacks would not be an acceptable security measure in most organizations.
I don't see anything labelled as an FCC code, but every once in a while I've had some luck identifying equipment using the FCC's database.
Indeed, here's another novel argument from Bruce Schneier's book....
in regards to the strength of 256-bit encryption:
now, the annual energy output of our sun is about 121 * 10^41 ergs. this is enough to power about 2.7 * 10^56 single bit changes on our ideal computer; enough state changes to put a 187-bit counter through all its values. if we build a dyson sphere around the sun and captured all of its energy output for 32 years, without any loss, we should power a computer to count up to 2 ^ 192. of course, it wouldn't have the energy left over to perform any useful calculations with this counter.
but that's just one star, and a measly one at that. a typical supernova releases something like 10^51 ergs. (about a hundred times as much energy would be released in the form of neutrinos, but i let them go for now.) if all this energy could be channeled into a single orgy of computation, a 219-bit counter could be cycled through all of its states.
these numbers have nothing to do with the technology of the devices; they are the maximum that thermodynamics will allow. and they strongly imply that brute-force attracks against 256-bit keys will be infeasable until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.
bruce schneier, applied cryptography, p 158
I'm not saying it isn't racketeering. Frankly I don't know that it is or isn't. Hence the question. In neither of the linked articles did I find a single statement indicating a specific law was broken. In fact, the suit brought by the FTC was a civil action not any kind of criminal charge. If it was racketeering, I would expect that to not be a matter for civil court (but what do I know).
Exactly how is this racketeering?
Seriously, am I the only one that feels that the government should never become involved in what is so very clearly a technical problem? What exactly did the FTC achieve with this? At an unknown cost, they stopped one US based group from sending messenger pop-ups. Why not just fix the problem at the source?
I mean, let's just say there was a switch on all phones that said, "Do not receive telemarketing calls." Would it be better for the government to start going after telemarketers or to just have people flip the damn switch? I'm not saying the switch isn't a little hard to find in this case, but it still exists. People can be told how to do it fairly easily, and even better, the manufacturer can change the default behavior to enable the switch.
The funny thing is I would have scored 100% is this was for real. Why? I don't do PayPal, Visa, Earthlink and so on :)
Exactly, none of them even made it past my "should I look at an email with this subject" test. The way I look at things, if I'm checking mail headers or looking at the urls links are pointing to, I've already lost. The only winning move is not to play.