A lot of the GSA sales are on the back of large Sharepoint installs, where clients wake up and realise there is no way to find anything. GSA ships with out-of-the-box connectors for Sharepoint. By bundling Fast, they're cutting off this entry point for Google. It's worth it because *any* Google in the enterprise inevitably leads to discussion on Google Apps, and we just can't have that, can we now...:)
First a couple of "credentials": I left the US with my family a bit over five years ago. Wife is American as are the kids - I'm originally from Europe but have gone through the US school system and spent fifteen years in the IT workforce (i.e. this was not my first migration!)
Our home is now New Zealand. It is now definitely home - you know that feeling when the plane touches down and you sort of exhale & relax on the familiar grounds?
We moved here for a number of reasons - the dotcom disaster was looming, kids were getting to be school age and we weren't too happy about the prospect of schooling in the US, the right-wing politics of the US were starting to look scary (we flew over the night Bush scammed the election).
The short of it is that if you have good IT skills you're marketable pretty much anywhere in the world. Really.
The reality is that any move will be a tradeoff, and it's knowing about these that will decide how miserable you're really going to be. Because there is plenty of misery to be had regardless of where you're going - you can count on that.
If you're young and don't have kids - go live someplace like London, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Tokyo, etc. Move downtown, and live it up. These are not the places you will want to live in once you have kids - your choice will be a commute from hell or raising kids in an apartment - both choices suck, and you'll end up doing the commute anyway.
Once you have kids your priorities will drastically shift. You won't be going on ad-hoc ski trips Fri after work, and having a back yard and a GOOD school will become paramount. If your salary is more important than your lifestyle the family won't matter anyway and you'll do what your boss demands, so I'll skip that one...
So why New Zealand? Because it's the BEST PLACE TO RAISE KIDS. It's safe, it's clean, the schools are EXCELLENT, and you're far away from most world events. The country is small. It's so small that on a number of occasions I've flown behind or next to various ministers including the prime minister! Seriously - commercial flights - she gets on and puts her bag up into the luggage compartment like anybody else.
When I first came out for interviews here some group of dissatisfied NZ expats in London bought out full page ads in the local newspapers demanding that the govt. improve the economy or they will not be returning. What struck me was the response of the prime minister, who dismissed the whole thing by saying that the country will focus on making sure it is the best place to raise kids - and that they will return when it's their turn to raise kids, not because of some short-term economic play. Having now seen our kids though five years of (public) schooling here I can say that the school system is very, very good. Well-funded, with good teachers, with a fundamentally different approach to teaching - my kids look forward to going back to school after breaks!
The political system is like anywhere - politicians are like anywhere else, but the scales are much smaller and so the "scandals" are a whole lot funnier (i.e. not billions of dollars at stake!) There is a huge degree of transparency in most areas of government, to the point where a few years ago a police cruiser was pulled over for speeding. As long as you're not too far to the right you'd be very happy with the elected govt here - it is principled, reasoned, and liberal by US standards. Some will of course disagree, but it's all opinion at the end of the day.
It's great to feel your kids are safe and well-cared for, and that you can have some pride in your government (no, really. It does feel that way!), but the BEST part is that we're far enough away from the rest of the world to not give a damn. If I don't want to worry about what's happening in Iraq or wherever I simply don't look at the international news. With time you gain the ability to see a lot of these (very stress-inducing) news items with a sense of distanc
Definitely, definitely don't base any decisions on a two week summer trip. Most Americans don't make it here longer than a year - it is VERY different from the US, despite the language being somewhat similar. The place is very wet, and most housing lacks insulation and central heating - you'll end up scraping mold from your walls in the winter while desperately trying to keep the house warm. Having breakfast while you can see your breath is no fun.
The country is also FAR away from anywhere, really. A trip back to the states for the whole family will set you back a BUNDLE - as you might imagine carriers aren't exactly killing themselves to lower fares.
Make sure you see the place in the winter (August is GREAT!) to get the whole experience...
And if you do make it - well, good on ya, mate...:)
Yeah yeah. Most American's who come here don't make it a single year. Really.
Between a really wet climate, confusing seasons (try Thanksgiving in the spring and Easter in the fall for a bit), horrendously under-insulated houses lacking central heating (at 50-55 degrees in the morning you can see your breath while eating breakfast), a customer service standard that just reeks of mother england, and, well, all the POM's (that's Brits for you yanks), it's a small wonder.
Other than that it's a great place. Oh, yeah, and there is the beetroot they insist in throwing on burgers. Kid you not - beetroot.
It's definitely a try-before-you-buy kind of thing, and if anyone tells you otherwise, they're trying to sell you something.
We've done this as well for a number of our clients. At the end of the day we get everyhing we need (i.e. root, dba, etc.) but under the (sometimes) watchful gaze of their admin.
This also sidesteps network security issues - we don't need secure connections to their network, etc. as long as the admin's PC is configured right.
On the whole, this is usually also the cheapest option - WebEx is cheap, and lets a number of our people join in as needed as well.
I've worked this as a vendor and as a client. When I find vendors doing this to me, I escalate this very quickly.
Put together a decent paper that details the potential risks that external root access carries. There is PLENTY of material on the internet to help you.
Make sure you QUANTIFY these. How many machines are put at risk? Which critical apps are running on these? Could the ERP or financials go down because of this? Great!
Put a price tag on whatever effort you need to expand internally to address these risks. Do you need more staff? More firewall equipment/software? Insurance??
In the end, as a techie, you CANNOT exert pressure on the vendors - so let other people who can do that for you.
Your excuse is quite simple - if next month the a key corporate app goes down for a day because of incompetent vendor YOU are going to be asked how YOU allowed this to happen. It is YOUR job to escalate risks to people who can accept them.
Oh, and if your mgmt makes the mistake of accepting those risks, well, your job just got a whole lot easier - didn't it?:)
Be careful, or you will find your name on some project's "top issues" list, floating up to some VP to resolve. Even if you do a good job, your peers might be incompetent - or the vendor may have other legitimate reasons for needing this.
When your ploy starts affecting their timelines and payment schedules your reasoning won't matter much - and you most likely won't get to explain it to the irate VP who is seeing her pet project slipping.
I've been to this movie - and from the vendor's perspective there is nothing like an internal scapegoat to buy time!
As an API/Library developer for my companies products, I've had to tell third parties I made a bad design decision (2) and you need to re-compile with the new library/API header. All of them appreciate and understand my mistake. Why can't Microsoft do this
umm.... because their customer list if a few orders of magnitude bigger than yours, and their customers' customers aren't as understanding?
compile debug code into any and every library...? Good one - you had me going there for a moment!:)
While in theory that may sound like a good thing, if you ever find yourself delving into the depths of the OS libraries you either either have too much free time on your hands, or you're about to create a support nightmare for someone else in the organization. Either way, not a good thing.
The passport changes talked about here do not affect just Americans. Look up ICAO, and Deployment of Machine Readable Travel Documents. There is a good chance that your country will change its passports in the next 18 months, since this is the timeline the US government laid out.
Without a new passport, you will not be eligible for streamlined entry into the US - in fact, you might not be allowed to travel to the US in the first place.
Again, this is not only about US passports - these are being forced on 28+ countries...
These standards are world-wide - or at least the US is making sure they are (i.e. to get easy processing at US ports of entry you must have a machine-readable passport, etc.)
So, to make it short, there are a lot of people outside of the US looking at these requirements, and deciding whether their citizens should be subject to these same conditions.
Welcome to big brother on the global scale. On the other hand it ain't that bad...
the standards these are based on call for very short range contact-less readers (on the order of 10cm, or 3 inches).
So one could, *theoretically*, "war-drive" for passports at a busy airport. You'd need the right equipment (i.e. a sizeable suitcase!), but as the recent example of Israeli Mossad stealing NZ passports demonstrates, there will always be parties willing to do so...
From the NTWG BIOMETRICS DEPLOYMENT (page 20): .Contactless ICs are to conform to ISO 14443 Type A or Type B .The LDS is to be encoded according to the Random Access method .read range should be up to 10cm
The technology behind the machine-readable insert isn't that great, plus there is a recognition that the technology will mature quickly.
For those reasons, the US government (and other governments that are being forced to do this) are most likely going to expire these after 5 years, rather than the customary 10...
If this is your yearly dose of contact with mgmt, well, enjoy the meal.
You need to understand that these folks deal with fundamentally different problems - share price, "alignment", "governance", etc. You also need to understand that they do not expect to find great insight into any of these issues from you, otherwise they'd be talking to you more often, wouldn't they?
As the poster above said, this is your bonus you're eating through, so enjoy!
I do a fair bit of work with various government organizations, mostly outside of the US. The thing to remember is that there are plenty of organizations that *must* obey very stringent infosec rules.
If the infosec audit did find that the organization is not up to par, they may well lose government contracts. This is generally very bad news.
It is also important to remember that there is much more to security than your firewall rule set - look into Common Criteria, or the Australian Defence Signals Directorate - ACSI 33 regulations (this is a good read for any network admin BTW).
It is entirely possible that our fellow reader had no clue what to do, was untrained, etc. etc. How to apportion the fault is another matter, but do realize that most network admins have no idea what infosec means.
Just in case they show the footage of this asswipe anywhere else on the planet - we're sorry. No, really, we are.
People in the crowd were cringing watching this idiot...
Jan
PDA phones aren't quite useful yet...
on
Death of the PDA?
·
· Score: 1
I travel a lot, and need something to keep track of people & calendar. In the last year I had a Treo, a P800, and a Nokia 3650.
The Treo is OK - on the plus side it has the highly usable Palm OS, but the battery is a dog (you have to charge it every day), and the Palm OS is not evolving fast enough. No bluetooth, etc.
The P800 is a flashy brick. It's heavy, and drains the batteries as quickly as Treo. The Symbian software is OK, but not nearly as functional as Palm... Take setting up a meeting time for example - the Symbian UI is as braindead as the PocketPC garbage - clearly designed by programmers and not people who actually need to go through the process a few times a day. Fortunately, the P800 is programmable enough to allow third-party software to take over most of the PDA functions. (check out http://www.my-symbian.com for a good collection!) Also on the negative side, the P800 phone interface is awful - very hard to use one-handed, and highly annoying and counter-intuitive in a lot of places (take my word, I struggled to switch for over a month). Don't bother with the camera.
For now I settled with the Nokia 3650 (the one with the funky key layout) - it's not nearly as heavy as the P800, no touchscreen, but the UI is far more functional. It's no Palm, but can be programmed - the battery life is much better than then P800 as well. The camera seems borderline usable, too. The 3650 is still a cruddy PDA - my contact list is huge, but I call relatively few of these people - Symbian makes it difficult to solve this problem. The to-do list shows the first 12 characters of each item, but in a huge font - with no means to change it. Again, designed by programmers. In case you were curious the key layout is easy to learn, but difficult to navigate with one hand - if you're righ handed chances are you will not be able to easily reach keys 7, 8 or 9. Don't these companies actually test these designs???
In summary, it's all cr1p. Don't throw away your PDA yet (unless you're not a big PDA user in the first place).
You should lay off Adam Smith for a while, and look outside.
Of course they are doing it out of greed - how else do you keep your share prices up in a declining market? How else do you justify the executive salaries?
For the amount of money that IBM gets in tax breaks and govt. contracts you'd think they should have some obligation to the people who made that possible...
Slashdot Mirror
To them these fears are real, and permeate their interactions with everyone, not just /.
They get ridiculed and ostracized, which only justifies their fears and makes it that much harder for them to seek (or get) help.
Posting their rantings is akin to laughing at the one-legged guy struggling with his prosthesis at the supermarket.
J
A lot of the GSA sales are on the back of large Sharepoint installs, where clients wake up and realise there is no way to find anything. GSA ships with out-of-the-box connectors for Sharepoint. By bundling Fast, they're cutting off this entry point for Google. It's worth it because *any* Google in the enterprise inevitably leads to discussion on Google Apps, and we just can't have that, can we now... :)
J
First a couple of "credentials": I left the US with my family a bit over five years ago. Wife is American as are the kids - I'm originally from Europe but have gone through the US school system and spent fifteen years in the IT workforce (i.e. this was not my first migration!)
Our home is now New Zealand. It is now definitely home - you know that feeling when the plane touches down and you sort of exhale & relax on the familiar grounds?
We moved here for a number of reasons - the dotcom disaster was looming, kids were getting to be school age and we weren't too happy about the prospect of schooling in the US, the right-wing politics of the US were starting to look scary (we flew over the night Bush scammed the election).
The short of it is that if you have good IT skills you're marketable pretty much anywhere in the world. Really.
The reality is that any move will be a tradeoff, and it's knowing about these that will decide how miserable you're really going to be. Because there is plenty of misery to be had regardless of where you're going - you can count on that.
If you're young and don't have kids - go live someplace like London, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Tokyo, etc. Move downtown, and live it up. These are not the places you will want to live in once you have kids - your choice will be a commute from hell or raising kids in an apartment - both choices suck, and you'll end up doing the commute anyway.
Once you have kids your priorities will drastically shift. You won't be going on ad-hoc ski trips Fri after work, and having a back yard and a GOOD school will become paramount. If your salary is more important than your lifestyle the family won't matter anyway and you'll do what your boss demands, so I'll skip that one...
So why New Zealand? Because it's the BEST PLACE TO RAISE KIDS. It's safe, it's clean, the schools are EXCELLENT, and you're far away from most world events. The country is small. It's so small that on a number of occasions I've flown behind or next to various ministers including the prime minister! Seriously - commercial flights - she gets on and puts her bag up into the luggage compartment like anybody else.
When I first came out for interviews here some group of dissatisfied NZ expats in London bought out full page ads in the local newspapers demanding that the govt. improve the economy or they will not be returning. What struck me was the response of the prime minister, who dismissed the whole thing by saying that the country will focus on making sure it is the best place to raise kids - and that they will return when it's their turn to raise kids, not because of some short-term economic play. Having now seen our kids though five years of (public) schooling here I can say that the school system is very, very good. Well-funded, with good teachers, with a fundamentally different approach to teaching - my kids look forward to going back to school after breaks!
The political system is like anywhere - politicians are like anywhere else, but the scales are much smaller and so the "scandals" are a whole lot funnier (i.e. not billions of dollars at stake!) There is a huge degree of transparency in most areas of government, to the point where a few years ago a police cruiser was pulled over for speeding. As long as you're not too far to the right you'd be very happy with the elected govt here - it is principled, reasoned, and liberal by US standards. Some will of course disagree, but it's all opinion at the end of the day.
It's great to feel your kids are safe and well-cared for, and that you can have some pride in your government (no, really. It does feel that way!), but the BEST part is that we're far enough away from the rest of the world to not give a damn. If I don't want to worry about what's happening in Iraq or wherever I simply don't look at the international news. With time you gain the ability to see a lot of these (very stress-inducing) news items with a sense of distanc
Definitely, definitely don't base any decisions on a two week summer trip. Most Americans don't make it here longer than a year - it is VERY different from the US, despite the language being somewhat similar. The place is very wet, and most housing lacks insulation and central heating - you'll end up scraping mold from your walls in the winter while desperately trying to keep the house warm. Having breakfast while you can see your breath is no fun.
:)
The country is also FAR away from anywhere, really. A trip back to the states for the whole family will set you back a BUNDLE - as you might imagine carriers aren't exactly killing themselves to lower fares.
Make sure you see the place in the winter (August is GREAT!) to get the whole experience...
And if you do make it - well, good on ya, mate...
Yeah yeah. Most American's who come here don't make it a single year. Really.
Between a really wet climate, confusing seasons (try Thanksgiving in the spring and Easter in the fall for a bit), horrendously under-insulated houses lacking central heating (at 50-55 degrees in the morning you can see your breath while eating breakfast), a customer service standard that just reeks of mother england, and, well, all the POM's (that's Brits for you yanks), it's a small wonder.
Other than that it's a great place. Oh, yeah, and there is the beetroot they insist in throwing on burgers. Kid you not - beetroot.
It's definitely a try-before-you-buy kind of thing, and if anyone tells you otherwise, they're trying to sell you something.
We've done this as well for a number of our clients. At the end of the day we get everyhing we need (i.e. root, dba, etc.) but under the (sometimes) watchful gaze of their admin.
This also sidesteps network security issues - we don't need secure connections to their network, etc. as long as the admin's PC is configured right.
On the whole, this is usually also the cheapest option - WebEx is cheap, and lets a number of our people join in as needed as well.
Jan
I've worked this as a vendor and as a client. When I find vendors doing this to me, I escalate this very quickly.
:)
Put together a decent paper that details the potential risks that external root access carries. There is PLENTY of material on the internet to help you.
Make sure you QUANTIFY these. How many machines are put at risk? Which critical apps are running on these? Could the ERP or financials go down because of this? Great!
Put a price tag on whatever effort you need to expand internally to address these risks. Do you need more staff? More firewall equipment/software? Insurance??
In the end, as a techie, you CANNOT exert pressure on the vendors - so let other people who can do that for you.
Your excuse is quite simple - if next month the a key corporate app goes down for a day because of incompetent vendor YOU are going to be asked how YOU allowed this to happen. It is YOUR job to escalate risks to people who can accept them.
Oh, and if your mgmt makes the mistake of accepting those risks, well, your job just got a whole lot easier - didn't it?
Jan
Be careful, or you will find your name on some project's "top issues" list, floating up to some VP to resolve. Even if you do a good job, your peers might be incompetent - or the vendor may have other legitimate reasons for needing this.
When your ploy starts affecting their timelines and payment schedules your reasoning won't matter much - and you most likely won't get to explain it to the irate VP who is seeing her pet project slipping.
I've been to this movie - and from the vendor's perspective there is nothing like an internal scapegoat to buy time!
Jan
You have dial-in access to defence facilities and financial institutions? Why stop there?
To anyone reading the above post, if you value your job, do not suggest anything like this to your bosses "because that's how military does it".
Third-party vendors will eventually get to review your planning and I guarantee that hilarity will not ensue - not for you, anyway!
Jan
umm.... because their customer list if a few orders of magnitude bigger than yours, and their customers' customers aren't as understanding?
compile debug code into any and every library...? Good one - you had me going there for a moment!
While in theory that may sound like a good thing, if you ever find yourself delving into the depths of the OS libraries you either either have too much free time on your hands, or you're about to create a support nightmare for someone else in the organization. Either way, not a good thing.
Jan
I just don't see this kind of person putting in a solid 8 hours of game time a day...
J
The passport changes talked about here do not affect just Americans. Look up ICAO, and Deployment of Machine Readable Travel Documents. There is a good chance that your country will change its passports in the next 18 months, since this is the timeline the US government laid out.
Without a new passport, you will not be eligible for streamlined entry into the US - in fact, you might not be allowed to travel to the US in the first place.
Again, this is not only about US passports - these are being forced on 28+ countries...
So, to make it short, there are a lot of people outside of the US looking at these requirements, and deciding whether their citizens should be subject to these same conditions.
Welcome to big brother on the global scale. On the other hand it ain't that bad...
So one could, *theoretically*, "war-drive" for passports at a busy airport. You'd need the right equipment (i.e. a sizeable suitcase!), but as the recent example of Israeli Mossad stealing NZ passports demonstrates, there will always be parties willing to do so...
From the NTWG BIOMETRICS DEPLOYMENT (page 20):
The technology behind the machine-readable insert isn't that great, plus there is a recognition that the technology will mature quickly.
For those reasons, the US government (and other governments that are being forced to do this) are most likely going to expire these after 5 years, rather than the customary 10...
You need to understand that these folks deal with fundamentally different problems - share price, "alignment", "governance", etc. You also need to understand that they do not expect to find great insight into any of these issues from you, otherwise they'd be talking to you more often, wouldn't they?
As the poster above said, this is your bonus you're eating through, so enjoy!
Jan
If the infosec audit did find that the organization is not up to par, they may well lose government contracts. This is generally very bad news.
It is also important to remember that there is much more to security than your firewall rule set - look into Common Criteria, or the Australian Defence Signals Directorate - ACSI 33 regulations (this is a good read for any network admin BTW).
It is entirely possible that our fellow reader had no clue what to do, was untrained, etc. etc. How to apportion the fault is another matter, but do realize that most network admins have no idea what infosec means.
Jan
Just in case they show the footage of this asswipe anywhere else on the planet - we're sorry. No, really, we are.
People in the crowd were cringing watching this idiot...
Jan
I travel a lot, and need something to keep track of people & calendar. In the last year I had a Treo, a P800, and a Nokia 3650.
The Treo is OK - on the plus side it has the highly usable Palm OS, but the battery is a dog (you have to charge it every day), and the Palm OS is not evolving fast enough. No bluetooth, etc.
The P800 is a flashy brick. It's heavy, and drains the batteries as quickly as Treo. The Symbian software is OK, but not nearly as functional as Palm... Take setting up a meeting time for example - the Symbian UI is as braindead as the PocketPC garbage - clearly designed by programmers and not people who actually need to go through the process a few times a day. Fortunately, the P800 is programmable enough to allow third-party software to take over most of the PDA functions. (check out http://www.my-symbian.com for a good collection!)
Also on the negative side, the P800 phone interface is awful - very hard to use one-handed, and highly annoying and counter-intuitive in a lot of places (take my word, I struggled to switch for over a month). Don't bother with the camera.
For now I settled with the Nokia 3650 (the one with the funky key layout) - it's not nearly as heavy as the P800, no touchscreen, but the UI is far more functional. It's no Palm, but can be programmed - the battery life is much better than then P800 as well. The camera seems borderline usable, too.
The 3650 is still a cruddy PDA - my contact list is huge, but I call relatively few of these people - Symbian makes it difficult to solve this problem. The to-do list shows the first 12 characters of each item, but in a huge font - with no means to change it. Again, designed by programmers.
In case you were curious the key layout is easy to learn, but difficult to navigate with one hand - if you're righ handed chances are you will not be able to easily reach keys 7, 8 or 9. Don't these companies actually test these designs???
In summary, it's all cr1p. Don't throw away your PDA yet (unless you're not a big PDA user in the first place).
Jan
... and can comfortably take a 3 inch hole (with minimal loss of helium). And the capsule is space-grade. Good luck scratching the paint.
Look at the larger picture. In the US, the company gives some $X of profits back to the workers - out of total $T. Company keeps T-X.
In India, company givex $Y to workers - and you can bet that Y is a LOT less than X, right?
So the net difference is that X-Y is the amount of ADDITIONAL profit to be concentrated. Over and above whatever they get now.
Hence, on the whole, this is not a wealth sharing mechanism...
Jan
Why do you think they are moving the jobs to India - to better distribute the wealth??? They are doing it because it's cheaper!
Following your argument, we should expect deepening discounts on IBM software and services, right?
Face it, this is about concentrating wealth, not spreading it around...
Jan
You should lay off Adam Smith for a while, and look outside.
Of course they are doing it out of greed - how else do you keep your share prices up in a declining market? How else do you justify the executive salaries?
For the amount of money that IBM gets in tax breaks and govt. contracts you'd think they should have some obligation to the people who made that possible...
Jan
The long lines of kids at the two large bookstores near us didn't seem to be motivated by the media.
As someone else has pointed out, I'd like to see the commercial that causes kids to drop everything and tear into a 900 page tome over a weekend!