.... at least try to use ones that hold some water.
IN the analogy you are using, you can refer the matter to an arbiting authority: the police.
In the case of Google, there is no referee, the referee is the client. And the judge, and everything.
If you wanna play in China (and if all your competition is alreading doing so, you must do so) then you are going to play under Chinese rules and brush up your Mandarin.
Labour may kill thuosends of innocent people in Iraq, but at least they keep people back honme in gainful employment (which explains why the murderous bastards got reelected).
I applied for a job with a software company some time ago. I was asking for 60 peanuts (peanuts is the currency of my parables) and in fact the advertisment stated that they were offering 65 peanuts.
I went through 3 rounds of interviews, I liked the company, then found my charming and capable (of course) and then we sat dwon to talk peanuts, I mean, money.
Knowing that they were offering 65 peanuts and keeping in mind I wanted 60 peanuts initially I asked for 62 peanuts (unsalted). They looked at me in a combination of anger, disbelief, confussion. Then, with her voice trembling my prospective boss (a readheaded babe worth of a role in a King Kong movie) said "you are a greedy bastard!".
I, feeling aggravated, asked why were they insulting me. Then they told me that asking 12 peanuts more than what they were offering was not on. All of the sudden I realized what had happened, and it just took a couple of phone calls to confirm it: the agency had told me they were offering more (far more) than what they were actually offering, they told the company I was expecting far less than what I was actually expecting, and the agency cynics hoped that somehow we would meet somewhere in between (I mean, boss to be was gorgeous, but still).
... is that a company that states that has a set of values is perfect and all knowing.
And that would be easy if there were no ambigous situations in real life.
Neither you, Google or the Chinese goverment know at this moment what would be more beneficial in the long term for the Chinese population.
Many people blabber about the lack of freedom and democracy in China but fail to realize a couple of things:
-Chinese people at large like the way things are, they value economic progress over democratic freedoms, at least for the time being.
-You can't introduce democratic values in a society like China overnight.
This country, just 30 years ago, was financing psicopaths all around the world to make the Cultural Revolution a global phenomenon, and now they are allowing Google, a foreign company, to hold the keys to the Internet. They may dictate the rules under which those keys are used, but the keys are Google's not the Chinese goverment's. THis is a monumental shift in openess, and I think is good time that some people stop blabbering and recognize the lenghts to which the Chinese elite has gone so far in order to move China in the correct direction without generalized violence.
The shortermism and facile black and white vision of the world of many/.ers is worrying and shameful.
It is the work of other goverments to make them see the wrongndness of their ways, but it is not necessarily a task for a private company.
Many companies do actually choose not to work in some unsavoury places, but in the case of China this is becoming an impossibility: if only one of your competitors goes into that market, you can't afford not to do the same. Not taping that market now may doom you in the future.
The current Chinese elite has long time ago dissociated themselves from Maoist teachings. For bunnies sakes, the trial of the gang of four was decades ago.
This regime is the one allowing commerce with Western companies and allowing direct ownership of Chinese companies by foreigners.
And they just allowed Lolita to be published uncensored.
They are moving in the right direction, but you can expect their monumental inertia to allow them to do this conversion swiftly.
China is moving towards a more open society, for bunnies sakes, all the big international companies are making bussiness there.
This is the land of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. You lack historical perspective.
If China was moving in the wrong direction you may have a point, but if you think a country of 1.2 billion people with an authoritarian tradition will move to democracy real soon, you are completely deluded.
It is imperative to make bussiness in CHina because that way they will be forced to bring values of transparency and accountability (nobody wants to invest in a country with a shaddy legal system or marred by corruption.
Today. not making bussiness in China would be evil for the simple fact that you would be ignoring the big picture.
It is a well stablished practice in any job that the employer has to provide the necessary tools to do you job.
This should include the necessary training when they are the instigators of a change in your work situation (i.e if they hired you as an experienced Windows SA with experience in W2K+3, then it is your responsibility to be trained). If you were hired for a diferent role and the hot potato of a server you are not familiar with is dropped in your lap, then the company has to do its utmos to provide training.
This training is not necessarily in the form of paid curses, some companies can't afford this. But they can pay for books and allow you to put aside some time during working hours so you can learn the skills you need on your own. I would consider this a reasonable arrangement if the company can't pay instructor lead training.
Please don't allow your work to creep into your private life. Don't listen to the/.ers, most of them are teenagers, or live in basements, thus extra work brings some extra excitment lacking on their lives. If you want to thinker because you can't live without doing so, all the power to you, but you seem to have a busy live out of work, that is precious and IMNSHO should be protected no matter what.
Many folks here are judging Google based on their westernized propaganda regarding democracy(not values, if people in Western countries were defending any values Bush, Blair and others would be out of office by now, and perhaps facing judicial processes. They may still do, hopefully). If you are a right winger you tend to see things in white and black only, which does not help because life is in all shades of grey.
What many people here are not appreciating is that freedom of expression and political dissent is not seen as a good thing in many societies, specially in East Asia.
For many people over there censorship and limited or non existing democractic rights are a perfectly reasonable thing, lack of censorship and too much freedom of speech are seen as a social evil that puts preasure in the social contract (and here I am not tlaking about outright dictatorships, nominal democracies like Malaysia, SIngapore and even Thailand have reservations about many things that in the West are considered more less standard freedoms and rights).
From the Chinese point of view, not to censor may be considered evil. Remember that for each Chinese dissident out there there are 100 people that could not care less about this and that will wholeheartedly and genuinely be convinced that censorship is the right thing to do.
The problem for Google (and any company doing bussiness globally) is that this may leave them in a no win situation, with half their users concerned about what they do in a different part of the globe.
I see many people blabbering maddly about how Google is not honouring its "do no evil" comitment. What I fail to see is a sane course of action that Google could have followed.
TO blabber madly is evil, to show you have an idea that may work (I myself don't) would be not.
Enjoying what you is not a prerequisite to become a millionaire.
Most dirty rich people see an oportunity, apply themselves to a task and are at the right place at the correct time, very often these people are very passionate about what they do, but they do not necessarily love what they do, but understand that it is a means to an end.
A computer, specially for corporate users costs peanuts. It is a very negligible cost, and if the Linux-XP guy is a rare ocurrence, the cost for additional machines small on the great scheme of things, or he can have as second machine one of the many in any medium sized enterprise that is upgraded. Your cost argument is a non issue.
As is the inconveniencing. How it is inconveniencing somebody to ensure this person has access to both environments at the same time? The dual booting means only one or the other is available. What a fucking inconvenience. And even if it was inconvenient, the minimal distress caused has to be contrasted with the security issue of not patching boxes timely. And you know what? I would be damned to let a bit of inconveniencing get on the way of the security of my organization.
2 machines are not twice the admin time, one dual boot machine may be, but two machines aligned to supported configurations are a non issue from the administrative point of view: once you have a solution that escalates to 50 machines (or 100, 100, or 10000), adding one more machine adds no burden.
You either had a machine that was not allowed or failed to provide enough information to the support drones.
IF you reached a point in which they did not know what Linux is, it is your fault (or your department's or whoever was responsible to make sure the XP drones knew abou leenucs) that they did not have that information.
1.- So you were willing to email something (email is not secure and it is not guaranteed that a message is delivered) but could not send it with a messaging company? Sorry, but give me a frigging fucking brake. It sounds to me more like you decided to get a freebie with the IT restrictions as an excuse. Oh yea, you ignored ftp, sftp and the post box down the road (don't fucking tell me it is not safe. You were emailing the damn thing, you are defenseless there).
2.- Tell your IT people that I say they are dumb. Honestly. But also the bussiness side of things is at fault. If you are not able to make a bussiness case for handling deployment of security patches more efficiently your bussiness should also question how capable they are.
3.- Correct actions, wrong approach. What they did (reorganize access to a resource) is impecably correct, there should no be user whining about it. What is absolutely unnaceptable is the lack of notice. What does not surprise me is the obvious understaffing: IT may have quite a lot of power nowadays, but that does not mean that they get the resources they need. This is the fault of the bussiness side of things that keeps considering IT a cost and treat it as waste of money.
4.- Read above. Perhaps yout IT people were ready to implement single password sing on but are understaffed? The best indication of this is having all the technical resources ready but nobody to implement things. Your IT poeple are a bit dumb, but the bussiness side of things is obviously not providing the resources required to keep things running smoothly.
People addicted to substances will spend any money they get, no matter who hands it to them.
If the goverment hands out money to drug addicts (which is not the case anywhere, but I will humour your uninformed diatribe) then at least I would know I will not be mugged by the drug addicts since they would have access to the drugs they need. You were rusing so heavily to your idiotic conclussions that failed to see any benefits that alleged policy would have.
You don't need 1000 CDs. You don't need 500 DVDs. You don't need hours and hours of shaking, badly focused home videos. You don't need 5000 bad pictures.
(if you really do you know I am not referring to you).
Nobody is going to watch all that crap, and unless you have not got a life, you are included on that select group.
Prune your digital trash.
You will find that a moderate amount of disk space is more than enough to hold all your files.
If you want to make a datacentre of your home, go ahead and enjoy, but the lamest excuse is to house all those GBytes of data that are never going to be seen again.
Slashdot Mirror
.... at least try to use ones that hold some water.
IN the analogy you are using, you can refer the matter to an arbiting authority: the police.
In the case of Google, there is no referee, the referee is the client. And the judge, and everything.
If you wanna play in China (and if all your competition is alreading doing so, you must do so) then you are going to play under Chinese rules and brush up your Mandarin.
Labour may kill thuosends of innocent people in Iraq, but at least they keep people back honme in gainful employment (which explains why the murderous bastards got reelected).
etc....
Here is my anecdotal evidence:
I applied for a job with a software company some time ago. I was asking for 60 peanuts (peanuts is the currency of my parables) and in fact the advertisment stated that they were offering 65 peanuts.
I went through 3 rounds of interviews, I liked the company, then found my charming and capable (of course) and then we sat dwon to talk peanuts, I mean, money.
Knowing that they were offering 65 peanuts and keeping in mind I wanted 60 peanuts initially I asked for 62 peanuts (unsalted). They looked at me in a combination of anger, disbelief, confussion. Then, with her voice trembling my prospective boss (a readheaded babe worth of a role in a King Kong movie) said "you are a greedy bastard!".
I, feeling aggravated, asked why were they insulting me. Then they told me that asking 12 peanuts more than what they were offering was not on. All of the sudden I realized what had happened, and it just took a couple of phone calls to confirm it: the agency had told me they were offering more (far more) than what they were actually offering, they told the company I was expecting far less than what I was actually expecting, and the agency cynics hoped that somehow we would meet somewhere in between (I mean, boss to be was gorgeous, but still).
And long live to the assholes that keep proposing it as a sane method to keep things secure.
... is that a company that states that has a set of values is perfect and all knowing.
/.ers is worrying and shameful.
And that would be easy if there were no ambigous situations in real life.
Neither you, Google or the Chinese goverment know at this moment what would be more beneficial in the long term for the Chinese population.
Many people blabber about the lack of freedom and democracy in China but fail to realize a couple of things:
-Chinese people at large like the way things are, they value economic progress over democratic freedoms, at least for the time being.
-You can't introduce democratic values in a society like China overnight.
This country, just 30 years ago, was financing psicopaths all around the world to make the Cultural Revolution a global phenomenon, and now they are allowing Google, a foreign company, to hold the keys to the Internet. They may dictate the rules under which those keys are used, but the keys are Google's not the Chinese goverment's. THis is a monumental shift in openess, and I think is good time that some people stop blabbering and recognize the lenghts to which the Chinese elite has gone so far in order to move China in the correct direction without generalized violence.
The shortermism and facile black and white vision of the world of many
Because they are an independent sovereign nation.
It is the work of other goverments to make them see the wrongndness of their ways, but it is not necessarily a task for a private company.
Many companies do actually choose not to work in some unsavoury places, but in the case of China this is becoming an impossibility: if only one of your competitors goes into that market, you can't afford not to do the same. Not taping that market now may doom you in the future.
The current Chinese elite has long time ago dissociated themselves from Maoist teachings. For bunnies sakes, the trial of the gang of four was decades ago.
This regime is the one allowing commerce with Western companies and allowing direct ownership of Chinese companies by foreigners.
And they just allowed Lolita to be published uncensored.
They are moving in the right direction, but you can expect their monumental inertia to allow them to do this conversion swiftly.
China is moving towards a more open society, for bunnies sakes, all the big international companies are making bussiness there.
This is the land of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. You lack historical perspective.
If China was moving in the wrong direction you may have a point, but if you think a country of 1.2 billion people with an authoritarian tradition will move to democracy real soon, you are completely deluded.
It is imperative to make bussiness in CHina because that way they will be forced to bring values of transparency and accountability (nobody wants to invest in a country with a shaddy legal system or marred by corruption.
Today. not making bussiness in China would be evil for the simple fact that you would be ignoring the big picture.
What exactly.
... that there are treaties between countries that recognize patents granted in other countries, that may be that case here...
It is a well stablished practice in any job that the employer has to provide the necessary tools to do you job.
/.ers, most of them are teenagers, or live in basements, thus extra work brings some extra excitment lacking on their lives. If you want to thinker because you can't live without doing so, all the power to you, but you seem to have a busy live out of work, that is precious and IMNSHO should be protected no matter what.
This should include the necessary training when they are the instigators of a change in your work situation (i.e if they hired you as an experienced Windows SA with experience in W2K+3, then it is your responsibility to be trained). If you were hired for a diferent role and the hot potato of a server you are not familiar with is dropped in your lap, then the company has to do its utmos to provide training.
This training is not necessarily in the form of paid curses, some companies can't afford this. But they can pay for books and allow you to put aside some time during working hours so you can learn the skills you need on your own. I would consider this a reasonable arrangement if the company can't pay instructor lead training.
Please don't allow your work to creep into your private life. Don't listen to the
The company provides training but in the form of a free interest loan to the employee, payable during one or two years.
Thus the employee receives the training he needs, but if he jumps ship too soon he is left with a bill to pay, which in all honestly, is quite fair.
Many folks here are judging Google based on their westernized propaganda regarding democracy(not values, if people in Western countries were defending any values Bush, Blair and others would be out of office by now, and perhaps facing judicial processes. They may still do, hopefully). If you are a right winger you tend to see things in white and black only, which does not help because life is in all shades of grey.
What many people here are not appreciating is that freedom of expression and political dissent is not seen as a good thing in many societies, specially in East Asia.
For many people over there censorship and limited or non existing democractic rights are a perfectly reasonable thing, lack of censorship and too much freedom of speech are seen as a social evil that puts preasure in the social contract (and here I am not tlaking about outright dictatorships, nominal democracies like Malaysia, SIngapore and even Thailand have reservations about many things that in the West are considered more less standard freedoms and rights).
From the Chinese point of view, not to censor may be considered evil. Remember that for each Chinese dissident out there there are 100 people that could not care less about this and that will wholeheartedly and genuinely be convinced that censorship is the right thing to do.
The problem for Google (and any company doing bussiness globally) is that this may leave them in a no win situation, with half their users concerned about what they do in a different part of the globe.
I see many people blabbering maddly about how Google is not honouring its "do no evil" comitment. What I fail to see is a sane course of action that Google could have followed.
TO blabber madly is evil, to show you have an idea that may work (I myself don't) would be not.
They would be kicked out of the country in a whim if they are found to be supporting any organizations opossed to the Chinese authorities.
That is completely different. What would you have done? Stand against it?
You would have been shot, and sombedoy else would have taken your place, under further duress if necessary.
Enjoying what you is not a prerequisite to become a millionaire.
Most dirty rich people see an oportunity, apply themselves to a task and are at the right place at the correct time, very often these people are very passionate about what they do, but they do not necessarily love what they do, but understand that it is a means to an end.
Can you pray tell us how the hype was created given the small factoid that this company did not advertise on the msinstream media at all?
Nah, why let the facts get in the way of a good old fashioned baseless character assasination, that would not be fun, would it?
And it should be moderated as such, but if you are keen on the idea why don't you try posting an Ask Slashdot quuestion?
"I am the state".
But maybe you live in China, Cuba or North Korea, that wuld excuse your sorry confussion.
Sorry, but what you are saying is utter nonsense.
A computer, specially for corporate users costs peanuts. It is a very negligible cost, and if the Linux-XP guy is a rare ocurrence, the cost for additional machines small on the great scheme of things, or he can have as second machine one of the many in any medium sized enterprise that is upgraded. Your cost argument is a non issue.
As is the inconveniencing. How it is inconveniencing somebody to ensure this person has access to both environments at the same time? The dual booting means only one or the other is available. What a fucking inconvenience. And even if it was inconvenient, the minimal distress caused has to be contrasted with the security issue of not patching boxes timely. And you know what? I would be damned to let a bit of inconveniencing get on the way of the security of my organization.
2 machines are not twice the admin time, one dual boot machine may be, but two machines aligned to supported configurations are a non issue from the administrative point of view: once you have a solution that escalates to 50 machines (or 100, 100, or 10000), adding one more machine adds no burden.
So it is 3 strikes, you are out matey.
You were in the wrong. Period.
You either had a machine that was not allowed or failed to provide enough information to the support drones.
IF you reached a point in which they did not know what Linux is, it is your fault (or your department's or whoever was responsible to make sure the XP drones knew abou leenucs) that they did not have that information.
1.- So you were willing to email something (email is not secure and it is not guaranteed that a message is delivered) but could not send it with a messaging company? Sorry, but give me a frigging fucking brake. It sounds to me more like you decided to get a freebie with the IT restrictions as an excuse. Oh yea, you ignored ftp, sftp and the post box down the road (don't fucking tell me it is not safe. You were emailing the damn thing, you are defenseless there).
2.- Tell your IT people that I say they are dumb. Honestly. But also the bussiness side of things is at fault. If you are not able to make a bussiness case for handling deployment of security patches more efficiently your bussiness should also question how capable they are.
3.- Correct actions, wrong approach. What they did (reorganize access to a resource) is impecably correct, there should no be user whining about it. What is absolutely unnaceptable is the lack of notice. What does not surprise me is the obvious understaffing: IT may have quite a lot of power nowadays, but that does not mean that they get the resources they need. This is the fault of the bussiness side of things that keeps considering IT a cost and treat it as waste of money.
4.- Read above. Perhaps yout IT people were ready to implement single password sing on but are understaffed? The best indication of this is having all the technical resources ready but nobody to implement things. Your IT poeple are a bit dumb, but the bussiness side of things is obviously not providing the resources required to keep things running smoothly.
People addicted to substances will spend any money they get, no matter who hands it to them.
If the goverment hands out money to drug addicts (which is not the case anywhere, but I will humour your uninformed diatribe) then at least I would know I will not be mugged by the drug addicts since they would have access to the drugs they need. You were rusing so heavily to your idiotic conclussions that failed to see any benefits that alleged policy would have.
You don't need 1000 CDs.
You don't need 500 DVDs.
You don't need hours and hours of shaking, badly focused home videos.
You don't need 5000 bad pictures.
(if you really do you know I am not referring to you).
Nobody is going to watch all that crap, and unless you have not got a life, you are included on that select group.
Prune your digital trash.
You will find that a moderate amount of disk space is more than enough to hold all your files.
If you want to make a datacentre of your home, go ahead and enjoy, but the lamest excuse is to house all those GBytes of data that are never going to be seen again.