All the articles I found, linked from here or at second-level links, talked about "an app" or "the app" but never named, or linked to, any app. Maybe I'm missing something, but was this app only available for a short period of time, and now is no longer available?
Well, USPTO is getting smarter, but not smart enough. If you are really serious about reform, and you applaud USPTO's rejection of this term, you must also support revoking the Microsoft trademark on "Windows". Let's get on it Slashdot.
was this exact scenario. NDS (and possibly other directory services) has a concept of an "Organizational Role" which is the source of the privileges, rather than the actual user him or herself, and the user's account in the Tree is given the "role" of... say, "Admin." There wasn't any privilege outside of that role, the user accounts were all pretty well stripped bare and derived all ability to function from the role they were said to "occupy."
How does that help? Well, if LDAP or some other free-as-in-beer-and-speech directory service will allow your organization to control that level of access better than granting superuser/sudo privs to particular admins, who could in theory leave behind shadowed user accounts, that might be something worth looking into. I haven't been a NetWare admin in several years, and haven't followed their current progress with NDS, but I do recall that for a while there was a version of it that would sit on top of Linux/Unix as well as Windows and Mac workstations, and Linux/Unix and Windows servers, and could be managed from most of them as well.
But this is a no-brainer. Seriously, the only people who think having Flash installed *at all* is a good idea are people who have no brains, namely Adobe and a handful of lazy web developers.
Flash is just, exactly, precisely, no-doubt-about-it as retarded as Steve Jobs said... only I've been saying it since a long time ago, he's just got a bigger platform than I do to evangelize against that steaming pile of crap that is Flash.
Why is this even here, exactly?
Oh, that's right. Because the six Adobe fanbois, all of whom stalk/., are trying to stir up something from nothing.
Flash Player doesn't ship by default on any OS that I have installed on any of the computers in my house, and I like it that way. If I need it, I'll go get it myself.
<-- admits to being an Apple fanboy. I've hated Flash from the outset; nothing against Adobe/per se/, just that from "GO!" Flash was a memory hog, still leaks even today, and was a major security backdoor through which an otherwise fairly secure web browsing experience could be hijacked, and rather easily.
Apple's recent changes to drive lock-in, such as through the App Store, don't sit well with me, but I'll wait and see what the outcome is. Flash is a miserable piece of crap, and always has been. Forgive me for continually despising it, but I do loathe it so.
The middle ground is to return patents to what they are supposed to cover: inventions of physical machines. Copyright and trademarks cover things like Process and Software, and they are the appropriate places to protect them.
"Many companies see the on-call issue as analogous to a fire fighter's job. Most of the time, a fire fighter is off-duty but on call, hanging around the firehouse, cooking, sleeping, or whatever. What that person really gets paid for is the relatively small, but crucial, amount of time he spends walking into a burning building with an ax."
Maybe where that lawyer lives, firefighters spend most of their time in the firehouse cooking, sleeping, or whatever, and not getting paid for it. Most of the engine companies I work with spend 3-4 hours per 24 h shift drilling, and run EMS calls in addition to fire, pest (snake/spider/wild animal) relocation, and public assist calls, many of them averaging a total of 10-12 calls per shift (all calls included). They also get paid for the full 24, not a sub-set of it. There is no reason to say that someone who has an on-call status is off the clock just because they are not actively working every second of their on-call time. If you expect someone to be at your beck-and-call 24 hours, you must compensate them for that. Now, if they are at home, with an "oh-shit" pager/cell phone, you can probably compensate them for far less than their normal wage. As an example, I have a friend who works full time as a paramedic with us, and part-time as a blood recovery tech for a local hospital. Certain days he is on 24 hour on-call status as a recovery tech, and gets paid like $1.50/hour on call. If he gets called in to the OR for a job, then he gets his full hourly wage from the time the page goes out until he leaves the hospital again, after which the pay goes back to the lower wage. He can't drink alcohol, he can't leave the city, he can't really plan any long events, and though he does do things like attend his son's various sport events, he could be torn away from them without warning. The compensation, even at a quite low wage, is recognition that although you are not working, you are also not really free to do anything you wish since your employer or client could recall you without warning. I believe that any employer who thinks that on-call is just like being off-duty should probably come out here to a fire station of my choosing. That thinking will change toot-sweet.
Of COURSE Wall Street's math models fail to take human behavior into account. We as a species don't even know what human behavior *is*, let alone what kind of mathematical equations might describe it.
Attempting to model any behavior is doomed to failure as long as the model is incomplete. All humans have their own perceptions, interpretations of events, and people will make money decisions based on information that you can't possibly predict algorithmically.
I've thought for a while that if the RIAA &/| MPAA pursue a "download tax" on media, they must also give up their rights to puruse copyright violations: they've already collected for the violations, to do otherwise would constitute double jeopardy.
Here in Tucson we've had (some) LED traffic control lamps for a while, at least a year. I find it terribly hard to believe that we're on the leading edge of this technology. Many of our emergency response code lights are LED, though mostly on newer vehicles (/i.e./, no retrofit code-packages). Again, this can't be new, nor news.
re: 0): The lights don't "pulse" on and off, they are switched on and off by being turned on and off. That is, the power is on (1) and then off (0). So, your rationale that his reasoning is wrong, is flawed: you can turn lights on and off just fine with DC without it being attributable to "flicker" or "pulsing"
Well, yeah if your small set of things includes music files. What other kinds of things do you expect iTunes to pick up?.DOC files? Spreadsheets? your PHP source Files?
And why is that?
I think it's because most people can't do them, don't understand them, and can't appreciate an elegant mathematical solution.
While it's also true that most people can't throw a tight spiral at all, let alone throw one in pads, while running, and 15 yards downfield to split two defenders and hit a receiver on a crossing route in-stride, they _can_ appreciate how hard it is to do, and how much effort went into it. Most people have some more-or-less frame of reference for the QB/RB/CB/Pitcher/insert-sports-position-here.
Is that the chicken, with the egg being poor emphasis on academics for the last three decades, or is it the egg, with the chicken being "I don't need to learn more than the basics of math, because I can be a superstar (insert-position-name-etc.)!"
I'm not smart enough to figure that one out. Maybe someone here can enlighten me?
I say you can't. By your own admission, you note that you don't have good metrics in place to measure quality output. That's not your worker's fault, that's your fault. And, it means that you can't identify good and bad performers because the standard against which they are measured is, as you yourself imply, a bad standard.
Here's your Life Lesson(tm) #1: quality work is not strongly correlated with time spent. Focus your effort on identifying the quality of the work as the measureable, and use the time as a modifier, rather than using time as your metric.
Telecommuting should be easy to do, arrange, and should be a top-notch way to get high-quality work out of employees.
I attribute the most basic problem with telecommuting failures to be a lack of a manager's ability to accurately identify what a good metric is, with respect to measuring production. As a corollary to that, most managers (in my experience) are concomitantly unable to recognize good from bad performers, since the metrics that are used fail to correlate with productive work.
If you can find a management chain that has a solid understanding of the workflow, the requirements of the product or service being offered, and can accurately set milestones along the path to whatever the work goal is, you should be able to do nearly all IT work remotely, all the time.
Or that, yes. Either way, people get freaked out and... probably do nothing. I mean, they've (where they == your average end user) not yet gotten freaked out and stopped using Microsoft products even when there have been really good reasons to stop, so I hold little hope that this will be a tipping point. But you never know.
If, and only if, Microsoft offers the software both for rent and for purchase. The article didn't say that they were going to a strictly rental model for Office, and I assume they are not... but, assuming anything with Microsoft is a bad idea.
Anyway, yes, I think that rental for home users can work, but cannot be the only way to get the software. Otherwise, it will work, a little, for a year, after which time people will forget to re-subscribe, Office will stop working, and they'll freak out.
Slashdot Mirror
All the articles I found, linked from here or at second-level links, talked about "an app" or "the app" but never named, or linked to, any app. Maybe I'm missing something, but was this app only available for a short period of time, and now is no longer available?
Uh, it's the patent and trademark office (USPTO). And we're talking about trademarks (oranges and oranges). Read more carefully.
Well, USPTO is getting smarter, but not smart enough. If you are really serious about reform, and you applaud USPTO's rejection of this term, you must also support revoking the Microsoft trademark on "Windows". Let's get on it Slashdot.
was this exact scenario. NDS (and possibly other directory services) has a concept of an "Organizational Role" which is the source of the privileges, rather than the actual user him or herself, and the user's account in the Tree is given the "role" of ... say, "Admin." There wasn't any privilege outside of that role, the user accounts were all pretty well stripped bare and derived all ability to function from the role they were said to "occupy."
How does that help? Well, if LDAP or some other free-as-in-beer-and-speech directory service will allow your organization to control that level of access better than granting superuser/sudo privs to particular admins, who could in theory leave behind shadowed user accounts, that might be something worth looking into. I haven't been a NetWare admin in several years, and haven't followed their current progress with NDS, but I do recall that for a while there was a version of it that would sit on top of Linux/Unix as well as Windows and Mac workstations, and Linux/Unix and Windows servers, and could be managed from most of them as well.
Touché.
QuickTime, H.264, WMV, all work fine without flash. Why is flash necessary for online video, exactly?
But this is a no-brainer. Seriously, the only people who think having Flash installed *at all* is a good idea are people who have no brains, namely Adobe and a handful of lazy web developers. Flash is just, exactly, precisely, no-doubt-about-it as retarded as Steve Jobs said ... only I've been saying it since a long time ago, he's just got a bigger platform than I do to evangelize against that steaming pile of crap that is Flash.
and live in a place without Daylight Saving Time, which is one of the most ridiculous ideas in human history. ELIMINATE DST!
Why is this even here, exactly? Oh, that's right. Because the six Adobe fanbois, all of whom stalk /., are trying to stir up something from nothing.
Flash Player doesn't ship by default on any OS that I have installed on any of the computers in my house, and I like it that way. If I need it, I'll go get it myself.
Not everyone.
/per se/, just that from "GO!" Flash was a memory hog, still leaks even today, and was a major security backdoor through which an otherwise fairly secure web browsing experience could be hijacked, and rather easily.
<-- admits to being an Apple fanboy. I've hated Flash from the outset; nothing against Adobe
Apple's recent changes to drive lock-in, such as through the App Store, don't sit well with me, but I'll wait and see what the outcome is. Flash is a miserable piece of crap, and always has been. Forgive me for continually despising it, but I do loathe it so.
Wait, so ... Flash is buggy, and a security risk?!?
WHO
FREAKING
KNEW?!?
(oh, that's right. Steve Jobs did. Thank God.)
The middle ground is to return patents to what they are supposed to cover: inventions of physical machines. Copyright and trademarks cover things like Process and Software, and they are the appropriate places to protect them.
and eliminate Software Patents entirely.
Just because Buckner can't properly field a grounder doesn't mean the message isn't good ...
"Many companies see the on-call issue as analogous to a fire fighter's job. Most of the time, a fire fighter is off-duty but on call, hanging around the firehouse, cooking, sleeping, or whatever. What that person really gets paid for is the relatively small, but crucial, amount of time he spends walking into a burning building with an ax." Maybe where that lawyer lives, firefighters spend most of their time in the firehouse cooking, sleeping, or whatever, and not getting paid for it. Most of the engine companies I work with spend 3-4 hours per 24 h shift drilling, and run EMS calls in addition to fire, pest (snake/spider/wild animal) relocation, and public assist calls, many of them averaging a total of 10-12 calls per shift (all calls included). They also get paid for the full 24, not a sub-set of it. There is no reason to say that someone who has an on-call status is off the clock just because they are not actively working every second of their on-call time. If you expect someone to be at your beck-and-call 24 hours, you must compensate them for that. Now, if they are at home, with an "oh-shit" pager/cell phone, you can probably compensate them for far less than their normal wage. As an example, I have a friend who works full time as a paramedic with us, and part-time as a blood recovery tech for a local hospital. Certain days he is on 24 hour on-call status as a recovery tech, and gets paid like $1.50/hour on call. If he gets called in to the OR for a job, then he gets his full hourly wage from the time the page goes out until he leaves the hospital again, after which the pay goes back to the lower wage. He can't drink alcohol, he can't leave the city, he can't really plan any long events, and though he does do things like attend his son's various sport events, he could be torn away from them without warning. The compensation, even at a quite low wage, is recognition that although you are not working, you are also not really free to do anything you wish since your employer or client could recall you without warning. I believe that any employer who thinks that on-call is just like being off-duty should probably come out here to a fire station of my choosing. That thinking will change toot-sweet.
Of COURSE Wall Street's math models fail to take human behavior into account. We as a species don't even know what human behavior *is*, let alone what kind of mathematical equations might describe it. Attempting to model any behavior is doomed to failure as long as the model is incomplete. All humans have their own perceptions, interpretations of events, and people will make money decisions based on information that you can't possibly predict algorithmically.
This.
I've thought for a while that if the RIAA &/| MPAA pursue a "download tax" on media, they must also give up their rights to puruse copyright violations: they've already collected for the violations, to do otherwise would constitute double jeopardy.
Here in Tucson we've had (some) LED traffic control lamps for a while, at least a year. I find it terribly hard to believe that we're on the leading edge of this technology. Many of our emergency response code lights are LED, though mostly on newer vehicles (/i.e./, no retrofit code-packages). Again, this can't be new, nor news.
re: 0): The lights don't "pulse" on and off, they are switched on and off by being turned on and off. That is, the power is on (1) and then off (0). So, your rationale that his reasoning is wrong, is flawed: you can turn lights on and off just fine with DC without it being attributable to "flicker" or "pulsing"
On OSX, iTunes _does_ pick things up.
For an extremely small set of "things", sure.
Well, yeah if your small set of things includes music files. What other kinds of things do you expect iTunes to pick up? .DOC files? Spreadsheets? your PHP source Files?
And why is that? I think it's because most people can't do them, don't understand them, and can't appreciate an elegant mathematical solution. While it's also true that most people can't throw a tight spiral at all, let alone throw one in pads, while running, and 15 yards downfield to split two defenders and hit a receiver on a crossing route in-stride, they _can_ appreciate how hard it is to do, and how much effort went into it. Most people have some more-or-less frame of reference for the QB/RB/CB/Pitcher/insert-sports-position-here. Is that the chicken, with the egg being poor emphasis on academics for the last three decades, or is it the egg, with the chicken being "I don't need to learn more than the basics of math, because I can be a superstar (insert-position-name-etc.)!" I'm not smart enough to figure that one out. Maybe someone here can enlighten me?
I say you can't. By your own admission, you note that you don't have good metrics in place to measure quality output. That's not your worker's fault, that's your fault. And, it means that you can't identify good and bad performers because the standard against which they are measured is, as you yourself imply, a bad standard. Here's your Life Lesson(tm) #1: quality work is not strongly correlated with time spent. Focus your effort on identifying the quality of the work as the measureable, and use the time as a modifier, rather than using time as your metric.
Telecommuting should be easy to do, arrange, and should be a top-notch way to get high-quality work out of employees. I attribute the most basic problem with telecommuting failures to be a lack of a manager's ability to accurately identify what a good metric is, with respect to measuring production. As a corollary to that, most managers (in my experience) are concomitantly unable to recognize good from bad performers, since the metrics that are used fail to correlate with productive work. If you can find a management chain that has a solid understanding of the workflow, the requirements of the product or service being offered, and can accurately set milestones along the path to whatever the work goal is, you should be able to do nearly all IT work remotely, all the time.
Or that, yes. Either way, people get freaked out and ... probably do nothing. I mean, they've (where they == your average end user) not yet gotten freaked out and stopped using Microsoft products even when there have been really good reasons to stop, so I hold little hope that this will be a tipping point. But you never know.
If, and only if, Microsoft offers the software both for rent and for purchase. The article didn't say that they were going to a strictly rental model for Office, and I assume they are not ... but, assuming anything with Microsoft is a bad idea.
Anyway, yes, I think that rental for home users can work, but cannot be the only way to get the software. Otherwise, it will work, a little, for a year, after which time people will forget to re-subscribe, Office will stop working, and they'll freak out.