The test is, and always has been, pop-psychology nonsense. It's a cold reading in a phony clinical setting. The diagnoses is always "more costly therapy sessions".
This is like the association of soothsayers trying to supress the "secret" of tarot or tea leave reading, because if everybody knows it wont be magic anymore.
You're wrong. The Rorschach test is not, nor has it ever been a tool for identifying what's wrong with you. It's a tool that allows the person administering it to better understand the mental state of the person they're dealing with in a way that doesn't allow them to employ the usual defensive responses. It further allows them to identify what major pathologies might be present, but does not provide a diagnosis. You're essentially implying that any tool which doesn't offer a full-blown diagnosis is akin to superstition and should be discarded.
By that logic, a stethoscope is a useless tool, since it never provides a complete diagnosis, but a set of data points that can be applied to one.
Maybe we'll all get lucky and Oracle will just GPL the OpenSolaris code and merge some of the more useful stuff like DTrace and (dare I say it) ZFS into the Linux kernel.
That's almost certainly the way they'll go. They already have their own Linux distribution, so there'd be no reason not to do this unless they felt that they were going to derive some value from these technologies being proprietary... again, can't see why.
Sorry, that was a bad example. I meant "you broker a purchase of my car and lend the buyer the money." The rest of the example holds.
Also, I may be wrong about the case in point on a small issue. I think it's state-regulated, not federal. Again, the point holds, but that statement was wrong.
It may sound funny, but it's not, and in fact WF is doing the right thing.
If you follow this story, you'll note that they've responded to concerns from investors and the press alike noting that this is a typical process, and that they're not "suing themselves," but filing a motion to have the court intercede in a matter that's federally regulated. They're naming themselves because they're involved in both sides of the transaction, which is correct procedure.
Think of it this way. You buy my car and loan me the money to do so. Then you find that the car isn't up to local lemon laws. You want to take me to court to require me to upgrade the car as appropriate, but the state requires that you name lenders as well as the seller. Thus, you name yourself on the suit. Nothing odd, here, and it's not that you're being stupid. You're just doing the paperwork correctly and getting the end-result that you wanted (upgraded car in accordance with law).
I think that's the point to the paper (RTFA'sTFA, I guess). The typical secure password advice is obsolete, and far, far more valuable than strong passwords is a secure desktop.
Of course if you read the article, I know it is a lot to ask, you will find that he is not talking about competition.
Of course not. This is Robert X. Cringely. He's talking about "war... destruction... horrible nasty... look at the bones!"
He's a loud, but relatively uninsightful prognosticator of tech markets. Nothing to see here.
More to the point, he's wrong. Microsoft and Google aren't involved in a "war", they're involved in a re-alignment of the market. Google is attempting to assert that the market for operating systems is so moot that there's no longer a value in productizing the OS itself so much as the service of maintaining it. Microsoft is asserting that "uhh... we can do search just as well as Google did 5 years ago. So there."
Feel free to select your "winner" in this non-war.
You should note that that came from a forum post on Alakhazam, and that it's almost certainly a fake. However, it's also brilliant. It outlines the future of WoW with the kind of detail that only someone who had spent a lot of time on the lore could. I doubt that it was real, but I also wish I knew who did it so that I could congratulate them.
The test server was called "Maelstrom Test" which could be a copy of the existing live server, but given that it was yanked immediately and that it's the likely subject of the next expansion which Blizzard has said is in the works, it's more likely to be their internal test host for the expansion.
The speculation about the name, had you read even the rest of the summary (not suggesting you have to go out of your way to RTFA, here), has lead to quite a lot of information about the expansion itself. If it is, indeed "Cataclysm" that almost certainly means that the next expansion will focus on the central ocean of Azeroth and the swirling vortex at its center which was formed in an even of the same name (AKA The Great Sundering where the single continent was split in half 10,000 years prior to the game's timeframe).
Thus we know that the the primary antagonists would be the Naga and there are almost certain to be strong Goblin involvement in the expansion.
If you want to learn more, perhaps you could RTFA.
Your post had no points in it, the idea that MMO's are all about socializing is BS
MMOs are about... well, they're not about anything. They're what you put into them. WoW can be about raiding every week to get a shiny new toy.
It can be about taking out opposing players in the arena.
It can be about building the perfect "RP set" of gear with the perfect look to match the background you've written for your character.
It can be about crushing the competition in the auction house.
It can be about collecting every non-combat pet in the game.
It can be about exploring the world (more on that below).
For many people I know, WoW is just where they log in to talk to their friends.
After you've explored a world once it gets really fucking boring treading back and forth
There's an achievement in WoW for having explored the entire world. One of my characters has it, and it's a bit of a lie because you only have to visit the major parts of each zone. Even after questing in every zone while I leveled, there was still a good solid two weeks of evenings I put in going to all of the places that were left. WoW is *huge*... exploring isn't something you just do in a week and are done. Amusingly, even after having done that I found myself, today, in a cave saying, "oh hey, I've never seen this cave before!"
You're really not speaking with any authority, here.
WOW is really a crap MMO from a lot of standpoints outside the aesthetics of the cartoony graphics,
Such as....
it still didn't hold a candle to Blizzards previous games like Warcraft and Starcraft
Not MMOs...
If you're used to single player RPG's of yesteryear it breaks all the conventions
You're comparing apples to oranges and complaining that apples don't taste anything like oranges. Well... yes, but not really relevant to the quality of apples or oranges.
Out of curiosity, how far did you get in WoW? If all you did was level grind, then I can see why you didn't enjoy it much. Did you try out PvP, tradeskills, gathering, exploring the world, roleplaying, world events/holidays, Darkmoon Faire? If you played now, you could also explore the achievement system, daily quests, arena, and a number of other features added since launch.
Level grinding is there to slow you down so that by the time you get to max level, you've learned how to use your abilities. It's boring for a reason, but that's just a good reason to take breaks and try other aspects of the game.
Just to give you a sense of how seriously different WoW (as of the Wrath expansion) is on this point, let me describe the events of the Wrathgate from the Horde point of view (warning, spoilers):
FIrst you do some generic questing.
Then you are sent to the Wrathgate to help with the effort against the Lich King
In a cut-scene, the Lich King appears, slaughters a major character and is then attacked by a rogue faction of the Horde, killing another major lore character
Once the dust has settled (cut scene is over) you are now in the same place, but there are burning bodies everywhere
You are sent back to the Horde home city, which now has refugees who were never there before and you're informed that the Horde has descended into a civil war and a major city (Undercity) has been lost to opposing forces
You then proceed to join two of the horde leaders to wipe out the incursion, where you kill another major lore character who has been working along-side the leader of Undercity since the game was launched.
The ability to personalize a zone to a particular player's progression through a quest line means that they can change anything they like, and to some extent things change expansion-to-expansion as well (e.g. the return of King Wrynn on the Allinace side, which replaced the faction leader for the Alliance, a major change to the World PvP game).
If you want to follow the story behind wow, can I suggest WoWWIki? It's got just about everything about the WoW lore all in one place. Good places to start are outlined in a recent post on my blog about WoW lore and what to browse through on WoWwiki.
I'm fairly sure most WoW players of today will not care. They will care that there is new content, they will care that there are new areas, they will care that there is a higher level cap, they will care that there is new stuff, they will care that there is some new additional goodie they can tack to their character...
They will not care what it's called. I'm fairly sure you could call it "The quest for even more loot" and people will buy it. You could call that endboss drop "the superspecialawesome axe of leet" and they will go in and farm it, they will equip it and be proud to have it.
Name does not matter. Neither does the story. Not at all.
There are certainly players that match your description. They *might* even be a majority, but I doubt it. There's a lot of investment in this game, and many players are just as invested in the lore as the size of their sword. Sure, you have the "must have latest goodie" types, but Blizzard changed course on design in Wrath because the community didn't think TBC felt "Warcraftish". There are streams of complaints from the community, not that the art was bad, but that it didn't feel like Warcraft, and rocketships, however cool, don't really feel right in the setting.
Michael Jackson died. Apparently millions of people care. But really, who cares?
No, what you mean is "really, I don't care." That's fine, but again, you're dead-wrong if you think that there aren't a chunky fraction of those 11 million who care In fact, I suspect they care even more now that China managed a world-first takedown. That will likely spur a new wave of Asian interest.
For me, mostly it's about the lore. I really enjoy seeing where they'll take it. Sadly, most of the really good bits (like the curse of flesh) are spoiled for me when the beta hits, and I never get to discover them on my own for the first time.
Just curious, did you follow the link? I admit that my experience with such things is mostly through financial institutions which take SOX much more seriously than your run-of-the-mill public corp. Still, it's very hard to correctly isolate out audit-worthy emails from not. For example, if a customer submits a bug report and your engineers bounce it back and forth on an internal mailing list between them and someone from the CFO's office who is trying to track down how much time is being spent on that project, how much of that conversation needs to be retained? Just the part that finance saw? Some auditors would say yes, some no.
Pretty much every large company is de-facto required to rigorously delete materials that aren't required by law to be kept.
Which, in any public company or company that has a fiduciary role is either every piece of email for at least 5 years or a very specific cross-section of email which must be painstakingly identified (and most companies do not do this). This is the joyous ambiguity of S-Ox. Nowhere in the law does it say this explicitly, but the interpretation (which is very broadly applied by public corporations in order to cover their asses, since being "buried in discovery," as you put it is far better than literally going to jail) is that any email might contain data which is related to auditing requirements, and therefore must be retained.
First off, I just want to say that the paranoia issue is moot. Google provides the same sort of assurances that any other outsourced IT organization provides. It's a matter of seeing successful businesses doing this for years that will convince everyone that Google isn't just that ad company they're so familiar with.
You've certainly nailed one of the biggest issues. The ability to control your data, have a deletion policy that is then subpoena-free (including backup destruction), etc. is certainly a deal breaker for most larger companies.
Not optional for any public company in the US, so a non-issue.
There are other issues too though: Availability / uptime (and yes, I know a poorly run Exchange infrastructure can have a lot of downtime, but a well run one - ours - has certainly outperformed the availability of Google over the last two years)
Sure, you might expose yourself to increased downtime (though it's probably worth noting that you're referring to apps during its beta period). That's a valid down-side. Of course, you get global replication and disaster recovery for free, so you have to think in terms of not having to implement those VERY costly options which aren't optional for most corporations. If downtime were massive, then it still doesn't matter, but Google has had a few bad days during beta, which is vastly superior to my last company and about the same as my current one.
Integration with other MS applications such as SharePoint and Access
Sharepoint (and whatever MS's IM system is, which does quite a lot more than IM, and integrates deeply with SharePoint) is really what this article was getting at. I fully agree that this is a limitation of Google Apps, and while I think it's surmountable for most companies, those that are already serious MS shops will have significant end-user pain moving to something else. Google Docs + Google Talk (both branded and isolated to your company's domain through Apps) make up for some of the functionality, but certainly not all.
Another aspect of the "data control" is user control - some companies don't want their folks logging on to mail from just any old virus-infected, malware laden machine and want them to only connect via known good machines on the corporate network. Gmail makes that control impossible.
That's true ONLY of Google's default Gmail, not the Gmail that's part of Apps. If I recall correctly, you can limit access to your domain by IP. There's a lot of services for the upper-end that I'm not as familiar with because my domain is the freebie service, but I vaguely recall seeing this as a feature (along with S-Ox compliance and various other for-extra-pay features).
There are many others, but that's the flavor. I know that some small companies and even some medium ones will think the above concerns are silly and misplaced, but that's the type of argument you are going to get from the big hitters.
Of course, the real question is: are these significant enough issues that the big boys aren't going to have to deal with competing against leaner organizations that grow up from those smaller companies today. I honestly think that outsourced infrastructure is going to be the way almost all large companies go over the next 20 years. This is why I got out of sysadmin, in part.
You're absolutely right, here. The correct solution has yet to present itself, but IMHO, we will have failed the concept of the free press unless we avoid the duopoly of AP and Reuters controlling US journalism. Given the Web, its possible that a new form of journalism will emerge. Iran, for example, has forced this sort of change, but there's no economy to support it, yet, and no sense of journalistic integrity that drove stories like Watergate, for example. There will have to be more shaking out of the system, and new business models will have to emerge. I think the point he's making here is that we have to consider what it is we're doing to the free press while we wait patiently for that to happen.
Because public discourse merits considered responses? Because you're only reading a second-hand, and probably incendiary account of what he said? Because he has demonstrated enough understanding of the issues to be given the benefit of the doubt when he says something that, on the surface sounds insane?
Consideration is always a good thing, even if the ultimate response is the same.
"The filthy British and American orcs have us pinned down with their green-hued protests, but we must rise up and smite them all, even if it means our deaths!"
Why shouldn't you use information from Wikipedia with no cited sources? Why can't Wikipedia be the source? Does the same go for citing from Encyclopedia Britannica?
I suspect you're confused about what's being cited. Of course, it's perfectly reasonable to say, "Wikipedia says that the moon is made of red donuts and bubblegum." This is a statement of fact, and if it were true that Wikipedia said that, it would certainly be a very interesting fact indeed!
The confusion comes about when you are not reporting on the content of an encyclopedia, but on its topic. In that case, the encyclopedia stops being a primary source and becomes, at best, a secondary source. Secondary sources are ideal for writing about perception (Wikipedia encourages secondary sourcing as it's condensing the consensus view, not the unfiltered primary sources; e.g. they're rather you cite a book that talks about how multiple academic papers were received and what impact they had on the field than the papers themselves). However, primary sources are much more valuable to research works, and typically you only cite secondary sources when you're establishing broader issues that support a core conclusion after citing your primary sources.
To sum it up simply: when you're writing for an encyclopedia, it's appropriate to cite secondary sources. When you're writing a more focused work that aims to distill a topic in detail, you should cite primary sources nearly exclusively and secondary sources should NEVER be cited to support your central points.
That's a distribution cost, and yes, software has a negligible distribution cost. Compared to most goods, it's practically free to distribute.
Let's get our costs straight here, since you don't seem to understand how manufacturing works. Here's what you spend money on for a product:
Overhead (e.g. HR, admin and other support staff as well a regulatory costs, legal fees, etc.)
R&D (this may include physical costs such as laboratory time and the like, but primarily you're talking about salaries dedicated to prototype creation)
Manufacturing (line workers, assembly/publication equipment ranging from looms to robots to printing presses)
Distribution (shipping, upload bandwidth (as you point out), retail arrangements, etc.)
Now software has the largest expense associated with it on the R&D and overhead sides, but clearly there are distribution costs, and even some manufacturing costs (boxing up shrinkwrap copies and paying for CDROM duplication), but compared to an industry such as textiles or food, there is essentially no manufacturing and distribution costs. Software doesn't grow mold in transit, need giant looms and operators, etc. Software is essentially the best-case scenario for manufacturing and distribution costs.
Want proof that that's true? The advent of FOSS. This would not be possible in the textiles industry or the automotive industry and as other posters pointed out, it's not even possible in computer-science related fields such as computer hardware. It's the fact that costs are negligible that allows companies to justify contributing to these projects and for students, researchers and amateurs to donate their time. The value received in terms of recognition, collective problem-solving and other less tangible rewards are able to offset the costs involved such as buying computers and storage space and even for companies to fund bandwidth costs.
Sometime ask a produce distributor if he'd like to have the distribution costs of software that allow for a company to distribute thousands of products to millions of consumers as a free service to promote their other efforts (e.g. Sourceforge, Google Code, etc.)
I don't think RMS does more good than harm in most situations anymore, but to be fair to him, there's nothing hypocritical about acknowledging the realities of hardware manufacturing. One of the cornerstones of his free software thesis is that software has no (or negligible) manufacturing cost (R&D, yes, but not manufacturing). This makes proprietary software a purely artificial construct. Proprietary hardware is, in his eyes, unfortunate, but much more a matter of practical limitations.
Now, the lines DO get fuzzy. The Lisp Machine history shows that pretty clearly, as software was migrated into hardware and the whole OS+hardware platform was made proprietary. That had RMS ranting for decades. I think we're now reaching that stage with computing platforms. Operating systems are, from the standpoint of an application, hardware. The POSIX library or the C++ standard library are the same everywhere, and there's no real value in any particular one being available to you as source, so long as some are.
The layers above that, on the other hand, are very different, and in some cases I agree with RMS, but he's ignoring the fact that many of these computation-as-service frameworks are built on open source. Most use Linux as their base. Many of them use open source virtualization. There are even large teams of open source developers working to develop tools for these environments.
So no, I think he's off-base, here, as he often is, but it's unfair to write him off as a hypocrite because of the realities of hardware manufacturing.
Slashdot Mirror
The test is, and always has been, pop-psychology nonsense. It's a cold reading in a phony clinical setting. The diagnoses is always "more costly therapy sessions".
This is like the association of soothsayers trying to supress the "secret" of tarot or tea leave reading, because if everybody knows it wont be magic anymore.
You're wrong. The Rorschach test is not, nor has it ever been a tool for identifying what's wrong with you. It's a tool that allows the person administering it to better understand the mental state of the person they're dealing with in a way that doesn't allow them to employ the usual defensive responses. It further allows them to identify what major pathologies might be present, but does not provide a diagnosis. You're essentially implying that any tool which doesn't offer a full-blown diagnosis is akin to superstition and should be discarded.
By that logic, a stethoscope is a useless tool, since it never provides a complete diagnosis, but a set of data points that can be applied to one.
Maybe we'll all get lucky and Oracle will just GPL the OpenSolaris code and merge some of the more useful stuff like DTrace and (dare I say it) ZFS into the Linux kernel.
That's almost certainly the way they'll go. They already have their own Linux distribution, so there'd be no reason not to do this unless they felt that they were going to derive some value from these technologies being proprietary... again, can't see why.
Sorry, that was a bad example. I meant "you broker a purchase of my car and lend the buyer the money." The rest of the example holds.
Also, I may be wrong about the case in point on a small issue. I think it's state-regulated, not federal. Again, the point holds, but that statement was wrong.
It may sound funny, but it's not, and in fact WF is doing the right thing.
If you follow this story, you'll note that they've responded to concerns from investors and the press alike noting that this is a typical process, and that they're not "suing themselves," but filing a motion to have the court intercede in a matter that's federally regulated. They're naming themselves because they're involved in both sides of the transaction, which is correct procedure.
Think of it this way. You buy my car and loan me the money to do so. Then you find that the car isn't up to local lemon laws. You want to take me to court to require me to upgrade the car as appropriate, but the state requires that you name lenders as well as the seller. Thus, you name yourself on the suit. Nothing odd, here, and it's not that you're being stupid. You're just doing the paperwork correctly and getting the end-result that you wanted (upgraded car in accordance with law).
I think that's the point to the paper (RTFA'sTFA, I guess). The typical secure password advice is obsolete, and far, far more valuable than strong passwords is a secure desktop.
Of course if you read the article, I know it is a lot to ask, you will find that he is not talking about competition.
Of course not. This is Robert X. Cringely. He's talking about "war ... destruction ... horrible nasty ... look at the bones!"
He's a loud, but relatively uninsightful prognosticator of tech markets. Nothing to see here.
More to the point, he's wrong. Microsoft and Google aren't involved in a "war", they're involved in a re-alignment of the market. Google is attempting to assert that the market for operating systems is so moot that there's no longer a value in productizing the OS itself so much as the service of maintaining it. Microsoft is asserting that "uhh... we can do search just as well as Google did 5 years ago. So there."
Feel free to select your "winner" in this non-war.
You should note that that came from a forum post on Alakhazam, and that it's almost certainly a fake. However, it's also brilliant. It outlines the future of WoW with the kind of detail that only someone who had spent a lot of time on the lore could. I doubt that it was real, but I also wish I knew who did it so that I could congratulate them.
The test server was called "Maelstrom Test" which could be a copy of the existing live server, but given that it was yanked immediately and that it's the likely subject of the next expansion which Blizzard has said is in the works, it's more likely to be their internal test host for the expansion.
The speculation about the name, had you read even the rest of the summary (not suggesting you have to go out of your way to RTFA, here), has lead to quite a lot of information about the expansion itself. If it is, indeed "Cataclysm" that almost certainly means that the next expansion will focus on the central ocean of Azeroth and the swirling vortex at its center which was formed in an even of the same name (AKA The Great Sundering where the single continent was split in half 10,000 years prior to the game's timeframe).
Thus we know that the the primary antagonists would be the Naga and there are almost certain to be strong Goblin involvement in the expansion.
If you want to learn more, perhaps you could RTFA.
Your post had no points in it, the idea that MMO's are all about socializing is BS
MMOs are about ... well, they're not about anything. They're what you put into them. WoW can be about raiding every week to get a shiny new toy.
It can be about taking out opposing players in the arena.
It can be about building the perfect "RP set" of gear with the perfect look to match the background you've written for your character.
It can be about crushing the competition in the auction house.
It can be about collecting every non-combat pet in the game.
It can be about exploring the world (more on that below).
For many people I know, WoW is just where they log in to talk to their friends.
After you've explored a world once it gets really fucking boring treading back and forth
There's an achievement in WoW for having explored the entire world. One of my characters has it, and it's a bit of a lie because you only have to visit the major parts of each zone. Even after questing in every zone while I leveled, there was still a good solid two weeks of evenings I put in going to all of the places that were left. WoW is *huge*... exploring isn't something you just do in a week and are done. Amusingly, even after having done that I found myself, today, in a cave saying, "oh hey, I've never seen this cave before!"
You're really not speaking with any authority, here.
WOW is really a crap MMO from a lot of standpoints outside the aesthetics of the cartoony graphics,
Such as....
it still didn't hold a candle to Blizzards previous games like Warcraft and Starcraft
Not MMOs...
If you're used to single player RPG's of yesteryear it breaks all the conventions
You're comparing apples to oranges and complaining that apples don't taste anything like oranges. Well... yes, but not really relevant to the quality of apples or oranges.
Out of curiosity, how far did you get in WoW? If all you did was level grind, then I can see why you didn't enjoy it much. Did you try out PvP, tradeskills, gathering, exploring the world, roleplaying, world events/holidays, Darkmoon Faire? If you played now, you could also explore the achievement system, daily quests, arena, and a number of other features added since launch.
Level grinding is there to slow you down so that by the time you get to max level, you've learned how to use your abilities. It's boring for a reason, but that's just a good reason to take breaks and try other aspects of the game.
Well, there's "story" and then there's "story".
Just to give you a sense of how seriously different WoW (as of the Wrath expansion) is on this point, let me describe the events of the Wrathgate from the Horde point of view (warning, spoilers):
The ability to personalize a zone to a particular player's progression through a quest line means that they can change anything they like, and to some extent things change expansion-to-expansion as well (e.g. the return of King Wrynn on the Allinace side, which replaced the faction leader for the Alliance, a major change to the World PvP game).
If you want to follow the story behind wow, can I suggest WoWWIki? It's got just about everything about the WoW lore all in one place. Good places to start are outlined in a recent post on my blog about WoW lore and what to browse through on WoWwiki.
Excellent stuff. I've added a link to this to the original article. Thanks!
I'm fairly sure most WoW players of today will not care. They will care that there is new content, they will care that there are new areas, they will care that there is a higher level cap, they will care that there is new stuff, they will care that there is some new additional goodie they can tack to their character...
They will not care what it's called. I'm fairly sure you could call it "The quest for even more loot" and people will buy it. You could call that endboss drop "the superspecialawesome axe of leet" and they will go in and farm it, they will equip it and be proud to have it.
Name does not matter. Neither does the story. Not at all.
There are certainly players that match your description. They *might* even be a majority, but I doubt it. There's a lot of investment in this game, and many players are just as invested in the lore as the size of their sword. Sure, you have the "must have latest goodie" types, but Blizzard changed course on design in Wrath because the community didn't think TBC felt "Warcraftish". There are streams of complaints from the community, not that the art was bad, but that it didn't feel like Warcraft, and rocketships, however cool, don't really feel right in the setting.
Michael Jackson died. Apparently millions of people care. But really, who cares?
No, what you mean is "really, I don't care." That's fine, but again, you're dead-wrong if you think that there aren't a chunky fraction of those 11 million who care In fact, I suspect they care even more now that China managed a world-first takedown. That will likely spur a new wave of Asian interest.
For me, mostly it's about the lore. I really enjoy seeing where they'll take it. Sadly, most of the really good bits (like the curse of flesh) are spoiled for me when the beta hits, and I never get to discover them on my own for the first time.
Just curious, did you follow the link? I admit that my experience with such things is mostly through financial institutions which take SOX much more seriously than your run-of-the-mill public corp. Still, it's very hard to correctly isolate out audit-worthy emails from not. For example, if a customer submits a bug report and your engineers bounce it back and forth on an internal mailing list between them and someone from the CFO's office who is trying to track down how much time is being spent on that project, how much of that conversation needs to be retained? Just the part that finance saw? Some auditors would say yes, some no.
Pretty much every large company is de-facto required to rigorously delete materials that aren't required by law to be kept.
Which, in any public company or company that has a fiduciary role is either every piece of email for at least 5 years or a very specific cross-section of email which must be painstakingly identified (and most companies do not do this). This is the joyous ambiguity of S-Ox. Nowhere in the law does it say this explicitly, but the interpretation (which is very broadly applied by public corporations in order to cover their asses, since being "buried in discovery," as you put it is far better than literally going to jail) is that any email might contain data which is related to auditing requirements, and therefore must be retained.
See http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1039054510969 for more detail. Then see http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2009/07/google_apps_gra.html;jsessionid=IASOOQCSKFDVGQSNDLOSKH0CJUNN2JVN for some info on the retention policy features in Google Apps, though I'm sure you could find more on Google's site at google.com/a
First off, I just want to say that the paranoia issue is moot. Google provides the same sort of assurances that any other outsourced IT organization provides. It's a matter of seeing successful businesses doing this for years that will convince everyone that Google isn't just that ad company they're so familiar with.
You've certainly nailed one of the biggest issues. The ability to control your data, have a deletion policy that is then subpoena-free (including backup destruction), etc. is certainly a deal breaker for most larger companies.
Not optional for any public company in the US, so a non-issue.
There are other issues too though:
Availability / uptime (and yes, I know a poorly run Exchange infrastructure can have a lot of downtime, but a well run one - ours - has certainly outperformed the availability of Google over the last two years)
Sure, you might expose yourself to increased downtime (though it's probably worth noting that you're referring to apps during its beta period). That's a valid down-side. Of course, you get global replication and disaster recovery for free, so you have to think in terms of not having to implement those VERY costly options which aren't optional for most corporations. If downtime were massive, then it still doesn't matter, but Google has had a few bad days during beta, which is vastly superior to my last company and about the same as my current one.
Integration with other MS applications such as SharePoint and Access
Sharepoint (and whatever MS's IM system is, which does quite a lot more than IM, and integrates deeply with SharePoint) is really what this article was getting at. I fully agree that this is a limitation of Google Apps, and while I think it's surmountable for most companies, those that are already serious MS shops will have significant end-user pain moving to something else. Google Docs + Google Talk (both branded and isolated to your company's domain through Apps) make up for some of the functionality, but certainly not all.
Another aspect of the "data control" is user control - some companies don't want their folks logging on to mail from just any old virus-infected, malware laden machine and want them to only connect via known good machines on the corporate network. Gmail makes that control impossible.
That's true ONLY of Google's default Gmail, not the Gmail that's part of Apps. If I recall correctly, you can limit access to your domain by IP. There's a lot of services for the upper-end that I'm not as familiar with because my domain is the freebie service, but I vaguely recall seeing this as a feature (along with S-Ox compliance and various other for-extra-pay features).
There are many others, but that's the flavor. I know that some small companies and even some medium ones will think the above concerns are silly and misplaced, but that's the type of argument you are going to get from the big hitters.
Of course, the real question is: are these significant enough issues that the big boys aren't going to have to deal with competing against leaner organizations that grow up from those smaller companies today. I honestly think that outsourced infrastructure is going to be the way almost all large companies go over the next 20 years. This is why I got out of sysadmin, in part.
You're absolutely right, here. The correct solution has yet to present itself, but IMHO, we will have failed the concept of the free press unless we avoid the duopoly of AP and Reuters controlling US journalism. Given the Web, its possible that a new form of journalism will emerge. Iran, for example, has forced this sort of change, but there's no economy to support it, yet, and no sense of journalistic integrity that drove stories like Watergate, for example. There will have to be more shaking out of the system, and new business models will have to emerge. I think the point he's making here is that we have to consider what it is we're doing to the free press while we wait patiently for that to happen.
Why should we consider it?
Because public discourse merits considered responses? Because you're only reading a second-hand, and probably incendiary account of what he said? Because he has demonstrated enough understanding of the issues to be given the benefit of the doubt when he says something that, on the surface sounds insane?
Consideration is always a good thing, even if the ultimate response is the same.
They're probably redubbed that bit to:
"The filthy British and American orcs have us pinned down with their green-hued protests, but we must rise up and smite them all, even if it means our deaths!"
Why shouldn't you use information from Wikipedia with no cited sources? Why can't Wikipedia be the source? Does the same go for citing from Encyclopedia Britannica?
I suspect you're confused about what's being cited. Of course, it's perfectly reasonable to say, "Wikipedia says that the moon is made of red donuts and bubblegum." This is a statement of fact, and if it were true that Wikipedia said that, it would certainly be a very interesting fact indeed!
The confusion comes about when you are not reporting on the content of an encyclopedia, but on its topic. In that case, the encyclopedia stops being a primary source and becomes, at best, a secondary source. Secondary sources are ideal for writing about perception (Wikipedia encourages secondary sourcing as it's condensing the consensus view, not the unfiltered primary sources; e.g. they're rather you cite a book that talks about how multiple academic papers were received and what impact they had on the field than the papers themselves). However, primary sources are much more valuable to research works, and typically you only cite secondary sources when you're establishing broader issues that support a core conclusion after citing your primary sources.
To sum it up simply: when you're writing for an encyclopedia, it's appropriate to cite secondary sources. When you're writing a more focused work that aims to distill a topic in detail, you should cite primary sources nearly exclusively and secondary sources should NEVER be cited to support your central points.
That's a distribution cost, and yes, software has a negligible distribution cost. Compared to most goods, it's practically free to distribute.
Let's get our costs straight here, since you don't seem to understand how manufacturing works. Here's what you spend money on for a product:
Now software has the largest expense associated with it on the R&D and overhead sides, but clearly there are distribution costs, and even some manufacturing costs (boxing up shrinkwrap copies and paying for CDROM duplication), but compared to an industry such as textiles or food, there is essentially no manufacturing and distribution costs. Software doesn't grow mold in transit, need giant looms and operators, etc. Software is essentially the best-case scenario for manufacturing and distribution costs.
Want proof that that's true? The advent of FOSS. This would not be possible in the textiles industry or the automotive industry and as other posters pointed out, it's not even possible in computer-science related fields such as computer hardware. It's the fact that costs are negligible that allows companies to justify contributing to these projects and for students, researchers and amateurs to donate their time. The value received in terms of recognition, collective problem-solving and other less tangible rewards are able to offset the costs involved such as buying computers and storage space and even for companies to fund bandwidth costs.
Sometime ask a produce distributor if he'd like to have the distribution costs of software that allow for a company to distribute thousands of products to millions of consumers as a free service to promote their other efforts (e.g. Sourceforge, Google Code, etc.)
I don't think RMS does more good than harm in most situations anymore, but to be fair to him, there's nothing hypocritical about acknowledging the realities of hardware manufacturing. One of the cornerstones of his free software thesis is that software has no (or negligible) manufacturing cost (R&D, yes, but not manufacturing). This makes proprietary software a purely artificial construct. Proprietary hardware is, in his eyes, unfortunate, but much more a matter of practical limitations.
Now, the lines DO get fuzzy. The Lisp Machine history shows that pretty clearly, as software was migrated into hardware and the whole OS+hardware platform was made proprietary. That had RMS ranting for decades. I think we're now reaching that stage with computing platforms. Operating systems are, from the standpoint of an application, hardware. The POSIX library or the C++ standard library are the same everywhere, and there's no real value in any particular one being available to you as source, so long as some are.
The layers above that, on the other hand, are very different, and in some cases I agree with RMS, but he's ignoring the fact that many of these computation-as-service frameworks are built on open source. Most use Linux as their base. Many of them use open source virtualization. There are even large teams of open source developers working to develop tools for these environments.
So no, I think he's off-base, here, as he often is, but it's unfair to write him off as a hypocrite because of the realities of hardware manufacturing.