I'm not sure about where the FAA's flight plan software falls in, but I'm guessing that since it's not safety critical, and only an operational risk...
Considering that flight plans exist to prevent planes from crashing into one another, I'd lump them into your category of "safety critical."
Oh, absolutely. Further, the fact that they're following the tax codes to the letter of the law (legal loopholes, after all, are simply strict interpretations of the law as it's written) means that they're somehow "getting away with something."
I welcome the complainers to file their next tax returns with zero exemptions and absolutely no deductions. Anything less would be utter hypocrisy, and we certainly can't have that.
Personally, I prefer to dislike Microsoft for the correct reasons. This, on the other hand, is just trifling nonsense.
Ok, so where are the employees educated before they get into MS service? If you're implying that the answer to your question is definitively "Washington" — thus ignoring that Microsoft hires from... well, everywhere — then you're kidding yourself for the sake of your argument.
Plus you can't force people to attend useless meetings if they telecommute.
I call shenanigans on that part of the preceding comment. I've been telecommuting for most of the past four years, and in that duration, have attended useless meetings far too often.
However, I generally attend them sans pants, so I win.
You've just pointed out two great examples of Microsoft offering crappy software for another platform that was later superseded by superior alternatives. IE was a native OS X app prior to the creation of Safari, but it was — at best — a mediocre implementation of a web user agent. Once Safari was released, IE lagged far behind, and Microsoft publicly acknowledged that it was a better representation of what customers wanted.
Along similar lines, the Microsoft-distributed Telestream Flip4Mac is far better than the OS X version of WMP could ever have hoped to be. A plugin for QuickTime that integrates reasonably cleanly with the rest of the OS was a much better idea than that buggy standalone app.
Indeed; in the three years that I've worked and telecommuted for this particular large international corporation, I have yet to have any actual facetime with either of the two managers I've had (each of them lives/works over a thousand miles from my location), though I've seen photos of them each time an IM has been initiated. Nevertheless, I have no problems with using the standard, rather unremarkable tools that have been provided (phone, VPN, email, IM, VNC, ssh, etc.) to collaborate with my co-workers, instruct my subordinates, and get the job done.
A decade ago, I worked myself out of my first private-sector IT job, which was as the sole sysadmin for a small [two-office] engineering firm. Within a couple of months of being hired, I was fully familiar with the nature of the majority of their day-to-day server, LAN, WAN, and workstation problems, so I set upon the task of addressing all of the root causes. Six months later, my job was blissfully simple, which did not go unnoticed.
It was quite easy for them to outsource my job to a company they could bring in on an as-needed basis. It was fine, though, as it was rather boring after I'd fixed all of their recurring themes. I left with a good reference and a nice severance check, and was hired by another company within a couple of days.
These days, as I've been working for consultancies for the past eight years and have positioned myself as a transition lead, I no longer worry about working my way out of a job. Technically, that's now part of my job description.
For different reason, however, I try to stay as far from end users as possible.
Aside from any concerns about potentially insidious ulterior motives, it has been shown time and time again that numerous government agencies — at the fedaral, state, and municipal levels — are nigh incapable of securing their own computers that house extremely sensitive data. Do you really think it's a good assumption to trust that OS-level patches made available on public government sites will be entirely safe from external manipulation?
That's exactly the type of password scheme my employer doesn't allow. The criteria they impose [via software] demands not only that the password be at least eight characters in length, contain a mix of alpha and non-alpha characters, cannot be reused until after at least four iterations, and must be changed at least every 90 days, but there are also restrictions on the repetition of characters, and it requires that no more than three consecutive characters in the new password can be replicated from the old one. I don't know if they match submitted passwords against an English dictionary, because I've never actually tried to incorporate a dictionary word.
I admire these restrictions (for their efficacy) just as much as I detest them (for the sheer inconvenience).
People who tend to express more negative emotions are typically more emotionally stressed. Chronic excessive emotional stress has been quite well known to be physically debilitating, as it generally weakens the immune system. Beyond that, the link between depression and immunodeficiency is hardly a new one; its causation actually swings in both directions.
Instead, I'd use a solution that works on multiple platforms.
That's one of the reasons why I prefer [Symantec] VERITAS NetBackup Enterprise Server — running on a Sun E450 with Solaris 9 — as my personal backup solution. Its native format is tar, so I should never have any problems with data retrieval, regardless of whether or not I have access to that particular app.
Well, there's that, and my great love of overkill. It's akin to using an interocitor to make popcorn.
Aside from former HP chairman Patricia Dunn, the other four charged were actually Kevin T. Hunsaker, HP's former senior lawyer; Ronald DeLia, a private detective; Matthew DePante, of data-brokering company Action Research Group; and Bryan Wagner, a Colorado man believed to have been an employee of Action Research. Not much from the board per se, but the charges seem to cover the responsible parties.
So these crooked corporate executives make the decision to have their company settle out of court.
I find it amusing that you quoted the article but somehow managed to neglect this, also from the article: "The case is separate from the felony criminal charges that have been brought against five individuals."
Also bear in mind that the executive most responsible, chairman Patricia Dunn, is now a former employee, and is one of the five currently under indictment for the four alleged felony counts — fraudulent wire communications, wrongful use of computer data, identity theft, and conspiracy to commit those three crimes. Each of those charges carries a maximum potential prison sentence of three years, and I don't believe that any of the defendants are actually immune from civil litigation.
I have never ever encountered someone in my direct environment who has upgraded any kind of non-free software (I mean going to a shop to buy a new version).
Believe it or not, there exists a non-trivial percentage of end users who seek out and pay for software upgrades that provide new features. I, for one, eagerly await Adobe Photoshop CS3. Some of us are not so cheap and actually have specific needs and desires for improved productivity and functionality.
Then, of course, there's also corporate IT. That's pretty much Microsoft's core demographic for upgrades.
"There is no mention whatsoever of the omission in the latest advance notification at the company's security site."
My first thought leads me to ask, why would there be any mention of bug fixes that are not included in a patch cluster's content notification? Why would any company specifically call out features that are not being provided in a particular software distribution, in circumstances other than the discovery of a clear and consistent workaround (aside from the standard "temporarily avoid use of [software x]")?
The situation of miscellaneous zero-day exploits must be embarrassing enough already; I couldn't imagine them calling even more attention to it. "Hey, guess what we're not fixing next week. Check it out!"
I've always felt that within the lyrics to the song, "Outside In," Poster Children has an excellent definition for what directly leads to the phenomenon of burnout.
"Trade the future for a payment
On a suitable replacement
For everything you've lost along the way."
Eventually, it begins to feel more automatic to simply stop caring about what you're not doing instead of working and otherwise engaging in preparation of the acquisition of things like physical possessions or the proposition of stability, which is sadly often just a cycle that feeds itself. The burnout comes when your brain realizes that life has been passing you by while you've been instead focusing on things that are really supposed to be enabling you to live it.
--
"It's easier if you don't think about what's missing at the end of every week."
Re:Are we sure it comes from work?
on
Understanding Burnout
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Anyone else go through a life-altering experience, and realize it wasn't your job that was the problem?
I knew full well that at one point in my life, I was working so hard and for such long hours just because it seemed to be the only thing I could really try to control in my life. However, I also knew that I was doing this largely because I was living in an area that did not suit me (the city of my birth, of all places), and thus had a life that I could not happily claim as my own. I relocated from one geographic region with surroundings and friends that made me blissful to another I'd wanted to avoid since first leaving it for college, but had little choice in the matter simply because I needed the job. The stress from all of this literally made me sick; it actually triggered new allergies.
I worked my ass off in a deliberate attempt to substitute career success, money, and some level of prestige for my lost contentment. Of course it didn't work, and I'm sure that the strain couldn't have been good for my relationship with my then-fiancée. Fortunately enough, I didn't go overboard in the acquisition of "stuff," and even better, I managed to get away from all of that. I relocated twice and now live in a place that directly contributes to my happiness and overall well-being, and best of all, I rather enjoy my job, it pays more than previous ones, and I telecommute. I didn't have to give anything up, save for a bit of sanity along the way.
Innocent until proven guilty would still apply. If the company did authorize spamming then there's bound to be a paper trail somewhere. If they didn't then they'd be cleared.
Indeed, it's just that simple, because no individual or corporate entity has ever been caused undue financial or reputational harm as a direct result of spurious accusations of impropriety.
Games have always been hard to produce the only difference between then and now is that they have more pixels to work with which means more graphics to create, not necessarily more gameplay.
So the physics model for Pong wasn't really all that different than that of, say, Quake 4? The greater complexity and raw power of more modern systems allow for more expansive gameplay beyond the pushing of pixels and shaders. The AI, the level of interaction with the environment, and the immersive qualities of the audio fields are only a few of the ways that games have evolved since the offerings available during my childhood.
Relegating the changes to mere visual aesthetic modifications completely discounts the capabilities that the technology allows as well as the pure academic research that led to each of these advances. From a tech-geek standpoint, your assertion is almost offensive.
A particular dollar in your bank account does, however, represent a physical dollar payable to you.
A physical greenback hardly qualifies as a "stable tangible asset." How many Euros will a USD net me tomorrow? How about the day after? In July it was 0.8 USD, but right now it's closer to 0.75. A dollar merely represents a particular value, but as with many other things fiscal, that value is quite fluid.
Ultimately these items are just records in a database.
To play devil's advocate, one could just as easily say that ultimately, so is the money in your bank account. At any significant level, financial transactions are simply reflected in shifting data from one field or cell to another. Physical denominations of money are simply a quaint relic; it's not as though dollars actually represent any stable tangible assets anymore.
Are you implying that the only way to conveniently have "the ability to store confirmation numbers and tracking numbers and such and easily access them in the future if need be" or to "easily recover lost passwords from registration" is to give miscellaneous vendors your primary email address?
I ask because I want you to know that that's not actually true.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure about where the FAA's flight plan software falls in, but I'm guessing that since it's not safety critical, and only an operational risk...
Considering that flight plans exist to prevent planes from crashing into one another, I'd lump them into your category of "safety critical."
Oh, absolutely. Further, the fact that they're following the tax codes to the letter of the law (legal loopholes, after all, are simply strict interpretations of the law as it's written) means that they're somehow "getting away with something."
I welcome the complainers to file their next tax returns with zero exemptions and absolutely no deductions. Anything less would be utter hypocrisy, and we certainly can't have that.
Personally, I prefer to dislike Microsoft for the correct reasons. This, on the other hand, is just trifling nonsense.
I telecommute, and the VPN client that I use to attach to my company (and through their network, my customers) is a product of AT&T.
I call shenanigans on that part of the preceding comment. I've been telecommuting for most of the past four years, and in that duration, have attended useless meetings far too often.
However, I generally attend them sans pants, so I win.
...sucked.
...sucked.
You've just pointed out two great examples of Microsoft offering crappy software for another platform that was later superseded by superior alternatives. IE was a native OS X app prior to the creation of Safari, but it was — at best — a mediocre implementation of a web user agent. Once Safari was released, IE lagged far behind, and Microsoft publicly acknowledged that it was a better representation of what customers wanted.
Along similar lines, the Microsoft-distributed Telestream Flip4Mac is far better than the OS X version of WMP could ever have hoped to be. A plugin for QuickTime that integrates reasonably cleanly with the rest of the OS was a much better idea than that buggy standalone app.
Indeed; in the three years that I've worked and telecommuted for this particular large international corporation, I have yet to have any actual facetime with either of the two managers I've had (each of them lives/works over a thousand miles from my location), though I've seen photos of them each time an IM has been initiated. Nevertheless, I have no problems with using the standard, rather unremarkable tools that have been provided (phone, VPN, email, IM, VNC, ssh, etc.) to collaborate with my co-workers, instruct my subordinates, and get the job done.
Oh... and in that time, I have been promoted.
A decade ago, I worked myself out of my first private-sector IT job, which was as the sole sysadmin for a small [two-office] engineering firm. Within a couple of months of being hired, I was fully familiar with the nature of the majority of their day-to-day server, LAN, WAN, and workstation problems, so I set upon the task of addressing all of the root causes. Six months later, my job was blissfully simple, which did not go unnoticed.
It was quite easy for them to outsource my job to a company they could bring in on an as-needed basis. It was fine, though, as it was rather boring after I'd fixed all of their recurring themes. I left with a good reference and a nice severance check, and was hired by another company within a couple of days.
These days, as I've been working for consultancies for the past eight years and have positioned myself as a transition lead, I no longer worry about working my way out of a job. Technically, that's now part of my job description.
For different reason, however, I try to stay as far from end users as possible.
Aside from any concerns about potentially insidious ulterior motives, it has been shown time and time again that numerous government agencies — at the fedaral, state, and municipal levels — are nigh incapable of securing their own computers that house extremely sensitive data. Do you really think it's a good assumption to trust that OS-level patches made available on public government sites will be entirely safe from external manipulation?
That's exactly the type of password scheme my employer doesn't allow. The criteria they impose [via software] demands not only that the password be at least eight characters in length, contain a mix of alpha and non-alpha characters, cannot be reused until after at least four iterations, and must be changed at least every 90 days, but there are also restrictions on the repetition of characters, and it requires that no more than three consecutive characters in the new password can be replicated from the old one. I don't know if they match submitted passwords against an English dictionary, because I've never actually tried to incorporate a dictionary word.
I admire these restrictions (for their efficacy) just as much as I detest them (for the sheer inconvenience).
People who tend to express more negative emotions are typically more emotionally stressed. Chronic excessive emotional stress has been quite well known to be physically debilitating, as it generally weakens the immune system. Beyond that, the link between depression and immunodeficiency is hardly a new one; its causation actually swings in both directions.
That's one of the reasons why I prefer [Symantec] VERITAS NetBackup Enterprise Server — running on a Sun E450 with Solaris 9 — as my personal backup solution. Its native format is tar, so I should never have any problems with data retrieval, regardless of whether or not I have access to that particular app.
Well, there's that, and my great love of overkill. It's akin to using an interocitor to make popcorn.
Aside from former HP chairman Patricia Dunn, the other four charged were actually Kevin T. Hunsaker, HP's former senior lawyer; Ronald DeLia, a private detective; Matthew DePante, of data-brokering company Action Research Group; and Bryan Wagner, a Colorado man believed to have been an employee of Action Research. Not much from the board per se, but the charges seem to cover the responsible parties.
I find it amusing that you quoted the article but somehow managed to neglect this, also from the article: "The case is separate from the felony criminal charges that have been brought against five individuals."
Also bear in mind that the executive most responsible, chairman Patricia Dunn, is now a former employee, and is one of the five currently under indictment for the four alleged felony counts — fraudulent wire communications, wrongful use of computer data, identity theft, and conspiracy to commit those three crimes. Each of those charges carries a maximum potential prison sentence of three years, and I don't believe that any of the defendants are actually immune from civil litigation.
So much for "getting off scot-free."
Believe it or not, there exists a non-trivial percentage of end users who seek out and pay for software upgrades that provide new features. I, for one, eagerly await Adobe Photoshop CS3. Some of us are not so cheap and actually have specific needs and desires for improved productivity and functionality.
Then, of course, there's also corporate IT. That's pretty much Microsoft's core demographic for upgrades.
My first thought leads me to ask, why would there be any mention of bug fixes that are not included in a patch cluster's content notification? Why would any company specifically call out features that are not being provided in a particular software distribution, in circumstances other than the discovery of a clear and consistent workaround (aside from the standard "temporarily avoid use of [software x]")?
The situation of miscellaneous zero-day exploits must be embarrassing enough already; I couldn't imagine them calling even more attention to it. "Hey, guess what we're not fixing next week. Check it out!"
I've always felt that within the lyrics to the song, "Outside In," Poster Children has an excellent definition for what directly leads to the phenomenon of burnout.
"Trade the future for a payment
On a suitable replacement
For everything you've lost along the way."
Eventually, it begins to feel more automatic to simply stop caring about what you're not doing instead of working and otherwise engaging in preparation of the acquisition of things like physical possessions or the proposition of stability, which is sadly often just a cycle that feeds itself. The burnout comes when your brain realizes that life has been passing you by while you've been instead focusing on things that are really supposed to be enabling you to live it.
--"It's easier if you don't think about what's missing at the end of every week."
I knew full well that at one point in my life, I was working so hard and for such long hours just because it seemed to be the only thing I could really try to control in my life. However, I also knew that I was doing this largely because I was living in an area that did not suit me (the city of my birth, of all places), and thus had a life that I could not happily claim as my own. I relocated from one geographic region with surroundings and friends that made me blissful to another I'd wanted to avoid since first leaving it for college, but had little choice in the matter simply because I needed the job. The stress from all of this literally made me sick; it actually triggered new allergies.
I worked my ass off in a deliberate attempt to substitute career success, money, and some level of prestige for my lost contentment. Of course it didn't work, and I'm sure that the strain couldn't have been good for my relationship with my then-fiancée. Fortunately enough, I didn't go overboard in the acquisition of "stuff," and even better, I managed to get away from all of that. I relocated twice and now live in a place that directly contributes to my happiness and overall well-being, and best of all, I rather enjoy my job, it pays more than previous ones, and I telecommute. I didn't have to give anything up, save for a bit of sanity along the way.
...and who needs that, anyway?
False. I have never used my ISP's SMTP servers; I use my own.
Indeed, it's just that simple, because no individual or corporate entity has ever been caused undue financial or reputational harm as a direct result of spurious accusations of impropriety.
Right....
So the physics model for Pong wasn't really all that different than that of, say, Quake 4? The greater complexity and raw power of more modern systems allow for more expansive gameplay beyond the pushing of pixels and shaders. The AI, the level of interaction with the environment, and the immersive qualities of the audio fields are only a few of the ways that games have evolved since the offerings available during my childhood.
Relegating the changes to mere visual aesthetic modifications completely discounts the capabilities that the technology allows as well as the pure academic research that led to each of these advances. From a tech-geek standpoint, your assertion is almost offensive.
Like this one?
A physical greenback hardly qualifies as a "stable tangible asset." How many Euros will a USD net me tomorrow? How about the day after? In July it was 0.8 USD, but right now it's closer to 0.75. A dollar merely represents a particular value, but as with many other things fiscal, that value is quite fluid.
To play devil's advocate, one could just as easily say that ultimately, so is the money in your bank account. At any significant level, financial transactions are simply reflected in shifting data from one field or cell to another. Physical denominations of money are simply a quaint relic; it's not as though dollars actually represent any stable tangible assets anymore.
Are you implying that the only way to conveniently have "the ability to store confirmation numbers and tracking numbers and such and easily access them in the future if need be" or to "easily recover lost passwords from registration" is to give miscellaneous vendors your primary email address?
I ask because I want you to know that that's not actually true.