Its been interesting to watch Steve go from wild=and-crazy VP of Sales to CEO. The very talents (and he has talents) that made him a really good VP of Sales are not the talents that the CEO needs. Ballmer is the epitome of the classic sales guy. Nothing strategic,all tactical. Being tactical and able to execute NOW is what makes a sales guy good. M$ culture is built around having a CEO with both a vision of the playing field and a vision of how technology can be exploited to keep the Corp. competitive. These are very strategic, core capabilities. A company like M$ can't thrive when the CEO has to call his geeks and ask them what will be hot in a few years. They need the CEO to be the person who spots the hot stuff before most (not all) people know it is hot.
It will be interesting to see how publicly traded companies square this type of behavior with the controls they have implemented for compliance with the 404 parts of SarBox (o/w known as "The full employment act for American accountants and auditors.")
How can a company say they have control of their systems when an outside company can come right in (pretty much regardless of your network controls, firewall, etc..) and change files on one of their computers at will. With 404 controls, you typically have separate test environments and strong processes to control how software moves into production environments. This hardly fits that model.
Its always so refreshing when people when people who know little or nothing about technology can produce rulings like this.
I guess a broad interpretation of this ruling would be that anything that was ever in RAM must be 'discoverable'.
Hmmm. I guess I'd better start saving the results of each iteration of loops in my code which calculate things. Who knows, it could someday be supoena'd.
Secure remove (srm) will securely delete the files. Just set up a shellscript with the files and/or directories you want cleaned out and schedule it in cron.
Seems to me that a browser that would spool its files in a ramdisk (with user input as to what you want to hang onto) and automatic use of anonymizers is the real solution.
Most IT organizations are focused on their own existence and power. They have almost no connection (ie: understanding) of the needs of the corporation and how they can strategically and positively impact the bottom line. Sadly, no one in any other part of the organization has any more vision about how IT can help. Its just a necessary evil...."You have a bathroom, you must have toliet paper. You have a big corporation, you must have IT."
Just become an independent contractor and deliver a fair days work for a fair days pay and recognize that you will occaisionally be screwed in the "persecution of the innocent phase" of various projects.
We've developed a sedentary, couch-potato lifestyle. We eat fast food, restaurant food, junk food, food full of all kinds of preservatives. We eat foods that are significantly different from the foods our individual ancestors ate. We spend hours in our cars commuting. We work 50-60 hours a week and carry our pagers/pda's/notebooks on the few vacations we take. Our retirement funds are failing, businesses are off-shoring our work , etc...
Not only is there no mystery, its suprising that the suicide rate hasn't risen.
I am happy about the processor upgrade, but the delay is indeed irritating.
I also ordered an abosolute top-of-the-line macbook on the 10th and had an original ship date of 2/15. Mine has been slipped to 2/28 with a delivery date of March 7. (Who pays for express shipping for an item when you've already waited 6 weeks?)
In spite of that, I'm not going to cancel my order because I can't be at the Apple store when it opens on the day that they get them in. I don't expect them to last long enough for me to come by after work.
I run a small = 100 person consulting firm and for the most part, when people resign, we let all positions (including systems) work out their notice, with 1 exception. We rarely let sales people remain around because once they've resigned, their interests and efforts are generally oriented towards their new job and not towards laying the foundations for sales they'll never finish. I almost always let them go immediately, with a couple of exceptions. Retirement is one and spousal transfer is another. In those cases, it is a transition planned over several months and generally involves a smooth and gradual handoff of accounts.
When my Systems guys resign, we generally involve them in the interviewing of successors process and we have them help up phase them out of our systems.
When consultants resign and they don't currently have accounts that they are managing, we take them up on the offer to leave anytime in the 2 weeks and let them leave for their new job immediately. They generally give 'up to 2 weeks notice.'
Once piece of advice to anyone resigning. Unless you detest the organization and would never return, don't burn any bridges. Remain helpful and cordial or you will have insured that you never return.
Seems like a lot of time/energy is being wasted 'discussing' something that may or may not happen, into which we have no input and over which we have little control.
Governments (world, continental, national, etc...) do not want input from the masses other than in the form of money.
You folks must have a lot of excess time on your hands.
In the 'old days' (80's-early 90's) users expected the software to be (nearly) bug-free and just run. Over the years (mid-90's to now) as we've transitioned more and more to MS technology the bar has dramatically lowered.
Users no longer expect their systems to run consistently or correctly.
They've come to believe (and rightly so) that most software is flaky and undependable and that's the way it is.
The days of having to explain to management why a system had to be brought down every 12-18 months for an upgrades are gone.
Now we distract users with visions of interoperable utopia's (that we both know will probably never actually function reliably) and blind them with new features (that they mostly don't need) and no one discusses ridiculous concepts such as uptime, accuracy or consistency.
Would have been nice to have included a PowerPC linux distro running on the same G5 boxes as a part of the benchmarks. Then we could have seen how the CPUs performed, unhindered by the microkernel
This 'study' has been around a while. Here's the premise, take the latest greatest windows bits and compare them to 4-5 yr old linux stuff. RH 2.1, 2.4 kernel and Apache 1.3. When this study was done, the 2.6 kernel and Apache 2.0 were well established.
Slashdot Mirror
Its been interesting to watch Steve go from wild=and-crazy VP of Sales to CEO. The very talents (and he has talents) that made him a really good VP of Sales are not the talents that the CEO needs. Ballmer is the epitome of the classic sales guy. Nothing strategic,all tactical. Being tactical and able to execute NOW is what makes a sales guy good. M$ culture is built around having a CEO with both a vision of the playing field and a vision of how technology can be exploited to keep the Corp. competitive. These are very strategic, core capabilities. A company like M$ can't thrive when the CEO has to call his geeks and ask them what will be hot in a few years. They need the CEO to be the person who spots the hot stuff before most (not all) people know it is hot.
How will Apple handle this if it applies to all hdwe sales?
Their intel offerings run Linux and Windows, but if they can't bundle a preinstalled copy of OSX, it will impact them somewhat.
It will be interesting to see how publicly traded companies square this type of behavior with the controls they have implemented for compliance with the 404 parts of SarBox (o/w known as "The full employment act for American accountants and auditors.")
How can a company say they have control of their systems when an outside company can come right in (pretty much regardless of your network controls, firewall, etc..) and change files on one of their computers at will. With 404 controls, you typically have separate test environments and strong processes to control how software moves into production environments. This hardly fits that model.
Its always so refreshing when people when people who know little or nothing about technology can produce rulings like this.
I guess a broad interpretation of this ruling would be that anything that was ever in RAM must be 'discoverable'.
Hmmm. I guess I'd better start saving the results of each iteration of loops in my code which calculate things. Who knows, it could someday be supoena'd.
No wonder Lenovo wants to buy Seagate.
From the /. story...
"solution spilled and nearly went into a chain reaction"
From the actual story....
"the solution potentially could have collected in such a way to cause an uncontrolled nuclear reaction."
Are they talking about the same incident?
They'll be needing a lot of those. I wonder what kind of software is used to tie it all together and perform searches?
'Hot on the heals of a UK government report'
Would robots really want people who can't even build a proper sentence looking after them?
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009337
Here are two Democratic Senators urging Exxon to not support any contrary research in the area of global warming.
Secure remove (srm) will securely delete the files. Just set up a shellscript with the files and/or directories you want cleaned out and schedule it in cron.
Seems to me that a browser that would spool its files in a ramdisk (with user input as to what you want to hang onto) and automatic use of anonymizers is the real solution.
There are plenty of premixed liquid explosives that are practically undetectable now.
The Feds know this. They've been doing FAA studies on explosives since Locherbie.
We're just lucky that the Jihadists haven't gotten the wherewithal to make them yet.
Most IT organizations are focused on their own existence and power. They have almost no connection (ie: understanding) of the needs of the corporation and how they can strategically and positively impact the bottom line. Sadly, no one in any other part of the organization has any more vision about how IT can help. Its just a necessary evil...."You have a bathroom, you must have toliet paper. You have a big corporation, you must have IT."
Just become an independent contractor and deliver a fair days work for a fair days pay and recognize that you will occaisionally be screwed in the "persecution of the innocent phase" of various projects.
We've developed a sedentary, couch-potato lifestyle. We eat fast food, restaurant food, junk food, food full of all kinds of preservatives. We eat foods that are significantly different from the foods our individual ancestors ate. We spend hours in our cars commuting. We work 50-60 hours a week and carry our pagers/pda's/notebooks on the few vacations we take. Our retirement funds are failing, businesses are off-shoring our work , etc...
Not only is there no mystery, its suprising that the suicide rate hasn't risen.
Damn. You'd think they could package something up for us treo users too.
I am happy about the processor upgrade, but the delay is indeed irritating.
I also ordered an abosolute top-of-the-line macbook on the 10th and had an original ship date of 2/15. Mine has been slipped to 2/28 with a delivery date of March 7. (Who pays for express shipping for an item when you've already waited 6 weeks?)
In spite of that, I'm not going to cancel my order because I can't be at the Apple store when it opens on the day that they get them in. I don't expect them to last long enough for me to come by after work.
My version of this rule is slightly different.
"Users will always tell you what they think they should have done, not what they actually did."
I run a small = 100 person consulting firm and for the most part, when people resign, we let all positions (including systems) work out their notice, with 1 exception. We rarely let sales people remain around because once they've resigned, their interests and efforts are generally oriented towards their new job and not towards laying the foundations for sales they'll never finish. I almost always let them go immediately, with a couple of exceptions. Retirement is one and spousal transfer is another. In those cases, it is a transition planned over several months and generally involves a smooth and gradual handoff of accounts.
When my Systems guys resign, we generally involve them in the interviewing of successors process and we have them help up phase them out of our systems.
When consultants resign and they don't currently have accounts that they are managing, we take them up on the offer to leave anytime in the 2 weeks and let them leave for their new job immediately. They generally give 'up to 2 weeks notice.'
Once piece of advice to anyone resigning. Unless you detest the organization and would never return, don't burn any bridges. Remain helpful and cordial or you will have insured that you never return.
Seems like an obvious safeguard to take. And since the island had been (theoretically) cleared of rats, he wasn't getting any anyway.
Seems like a lot of time/energy is being wasted 'discussing' something that may or may not happen, into which we have no input and over which we have little control.
Governments (world, continental, national, etc...) do not want input from the masses other than in the form of money.
You folks must have a lot of excess time on your hands.
That the Navy and the NSA are using some branch of this technology to do a microbend tap of other nations undersea fiber links.
I've got no problem with that. It sucks though, that the government is opposed to helping the little guys who's technology helps them.
Lucent's just kind of hanging around waiting to die, but these little inventors will always be there.
Why let them be abused whem for (relatively) little money they could be on your side?
In the 'old days' (80's-early 90's) users expected the software to be (nearly) bug-free and just run. Over the years (mid-90's to now) as we've transitioned more and more to MS technology the bar has dramatically lowered.
Users no longer expect their systems to run consistently or correctly.
They've come to believe (and rightly so) that most software is flaky and undependable and that's the way it is.
The days of having to explain to management why a system had to be brought down every 12-18 months for an upgrades are gone.
Now we distract users with visions of interoperable utopia's (that we both know will probably never actually function reliably) and blind them with new features (that they mostly don't need) and no one discusses ridiculous concepts such as uptime, accuracy or consistency.
What a relief.
Send it to China. Couldn't be any worse.
I know that this is a concept that we all (especially MicroSofties) find abhorrentt. I applaud Bill for being against dominance.
Would have been nice to have included a PowerPC linux distro running on the same G5 boxes as a part of the benchmarks. Then we could have seen how the CPUs performed, unhindered by the microkernel
This 'study' has been around a while. Here's the premise, take the latest greatest windows bits and compare them to 4-5 yr old linux stuff. RH 2.1, 2.4 kernel and Apache 1.3. When this study was done, the 2.6 kernel and Apache 2.0 were well established.
I am just amazed that an industry alliance group with both Sun and MicroSoft in it would have reservations about Linux.
I guess we should feel reassured that they have only our best interests heart.