Well, nifty. Good for you. Instead of acting super cool and belittling what someone else has done, can't you just say "nice one, and if readers are interested in this then look at what I did"?
Otherwise known as "soft skills". I.e. not acting like a complete tool around those who live by the dictum "time is money" and thinking they're a lot funnier than they really are.
You'd think this isn't that difficult, but every day I'm constantly amazed by how many people I encounter who handily demonstrate otherwise and then proceed to moan about their managers.
The German's and French have been doing it for a very long time without their society collapsing.
And the English, and the Australians, and the New Zealanders...
I'm sure several more countries have similar attitudes, best described as "you're an adult, we trust you to behave yourself and make adult decisions, and if you don't, well, you're also adult enough to take the consequences". I just mention the places with whose work structures I'm personally familiar. The U.S., on the other hand...urgh...forget it, or at least on the east coast (everywhere I've worked, from Maine down to Georgia). In a country where personal rights are ferociously guarded, I don't know why this should be so, but I follow it so I won't get fired.
That's a heck of a stretch. Raskolnikov believed himself superior to the great masses, not because he was a student or because of any great aim, but inherently superior. (At least during part of the story; Raskolnikov is nothing if not a tortured and introspective soul).
Bill Gates did not plan murder, and he did not plan something evil. He started a software company, probably for no other reason than he wanted to make money and this seemed to be something he was good at doing. Minus several million for usurping one of my favorite classics, Moraelin. You cheapen Bill Gates, Dostoevsky, and evil-doers in general. I am going to cease liking you now.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask for some reference on that. Most people hate Bill Gates? Why? Most people here on Slashdot, perhaps...but in the general public? I don't think so.
Slashdot readers are passionate about technology. Most people are not. They get frustrated when their computer acts up or crashes, maybe even mutter an imprecation against Microsoft or the vendor of the software/hardware that's causing a problem - if they know what it is that's causing the problem. But for the vast majority of the day, their computers probably work.
The dreaded car analogy - I drive a Toyota Camry. It's been super reliable for me, and I like it. I know a lot of car aficionados dislike Toyotas, and particularly the Camry, because it's bland, boring, whatever. I don't care about that. It's broken down a couple of times in the past 10 years/175000 miles, and while I don't like the inconvenience I accept that sometimes things wear out. Those one or two "outages" are by far outweighed by the years and miles of reliable, trouble-free service.
I know about the recent issues with Toyotas, but my overall experience means I have a positive outlook on them and I even admire the company for making such a popular and generally reliable vehicle. I'd hazard a guess that if you took a poll and asked a sample of the general public why they admire Bill Gates, they'd refer to the ubiquity of Windows and Office, how he's built a dominant company from very little at all, etc. Most people probably don't even remember the court cases a few years ago - and if you remind them of it, they won't care.
Unless they're passionate about technology. Which most people aren't.
Agreed. There's no call for it and there's nothing served by it. It just sounds like some petulant whiny 14 year old who wants to be a geek. Maybe that's appropriate; the more garbage I read on Slashdot the more I realize the teenagers who are dominating it today are not the teenagers of 20 years ago who were hacking in assembly on their Commodore 64.
To access the built-in audience immediately rather than expend the effort and time required to get visitors to go to his own brand new and totally unknown website?
People have been worrying about this issue since before there were sysadmins...nearly two thousand years, in fact. It's not about respect - it's about how well do I know this person, how well do you know anyone, how much "trust" is too much, and, well, what if they're in a car accident and suddenly incapacitated for four weeks and they are literally the only person who can do a, b, and c?
That's not to say that they are like Metallica where everything since the black album sounds like the black album.
That's pretty generous. If I'm feeling benevolent I'll give you that everything since Master of Puppets sounds the same. Otherwise I'll contend that they're like AC/DC - they've made the exact same album nn number of times. The main difference is AC/DC admit it; Metallica are a bunch of pretentious non-musicians who can play their instruments with a reasonable amount of technical dexterity but have no ability to infuse dynamic or variation into anything. (Hetfield was a parody of himself before anyone even knew who he was.)
The whole rant reads like, well, some kind of emotional rant from an angst-ridden teenager. She's "furious", and feels "used and abused. How could Novell enter into such a deal?...Why do I bother...".
The seventh paragraph alone sounds like a 13 year old's diary entry.
Is it intentional? Or does the heart find ways to justify what people want to do because they personally benefit? I leave that part to God. I can't read hearts. I analyze behavior only. But I see results. It's depressing to find out that community members are so easy to buy off, which is how I view it.
PJ has always struck me as being disingenous at best. She seems to have lost all perspective. The mission statement includes all these lofty goals and statements about legal research, being a resource, etc., etc. But if you read her own interview on how it started, she states right at the beginning that she used to hand out Knoppix CDs to Microsoft users, started Groklaw so she could learn how to blog, and then along came SCO and "it made me so angry". But she always wants to appear disengaged and "legal" and able to see both sides. What a load of self-serving rubbish.
No. It makes the authorities necessarily cautious because of the potential for scary stuff with this kind of activity.
Play devil's advocate for a moment - what if someone does something like this, and does load the plane with a bunch of explosives and kills someone, and it later comes out that the TSA/NYPD/pick-your-acronym knew about it and didn't at least check out the guy. How many people on this very thread would be jumping up and down bleating about how incompetent the authorities are and the agencies need to be disbanded?
They're in a no-win situation sometimes. Instead of playing everything as some kind of black and white game, try realizing there are gray areas and ask a few difficult questions.
Well, I thought exactly the same thing as the grandparent - "sneakily revealed" is a fairly remarkable statement.
The link is "http://www.nomachine.com/news-read.php?idnews=331", so it would appear that it's on a regular news portion of their site - hardly sneaky. Furthermore, it's mentioned in the very first paragraph.
Rome, Italy, December 21, 2010 - NoMachine, a global leader in cross platform remote access and application delivery solutions, announced a software preview of its upcoming new products and technologies which offer a completely redesigned client GUI and restructure its flagship suite of NX Server. The new products will not only extend the current functionalities of NX application delivery and remote access products, there will also be new naming conventions adopted. This release marks an important milestone in the history of the company. Version 4 of the software, in fact, will be only available under a closed source license.
Beats me how they're being sneaky about doing it, at any rate. Shall we agree that the summary is (shock, stunner, surprise!) badly written, or at least very biased, and go on to debating the impact of the move?
As much as I dislike Apple, iPhones are a solid platform. They have a few different versions of the OS (there needs to be progress, right?), but that's it. Much better for developers and for users.
Well, honestly, this is what Apple has always done. Apple decided very early on they would maintain strict control over their systems (in conrast to the IBM way of doing things and allowing clones). So on the PC compatible/Windows platform, you have complete openness, a plethora of players, squillions of devices, and chaos. On the Macintosh/iPhone/etc., Apple decreed "thou must do this". Developers (hardware and software) found they had a non-trivial amount of overhead to comply with Apple's strictures, but the end result is a very tight experience for the user.
They're not "slowly turning" at all. With their walled garden and draconian control over user habits and experience, they're a leading example of what a government might aspire to.
Give me a break. Apple sells a streamlined user experience to people who want exactly that.
Yeah, and those people are morally wrong and/or ignorant for selling a part of their soul and the future of all our children to a minor demon for shininess, figuratively speaking.
What's the difference between migla and a giraffe? A giraffe can't stick its nose as high in the air...
That's pretty condescending. Possibly those people just don't want to mess around with technology, have better things to do with their life, and simply choose to buy technology that's interoperable and "just works". (And I know it often doesn't "just work" - I don't own any Apple gear and have written on/. in the past about what a piece of junk iTunes is. But sanctimonious self-righteous preachy buggers like you just do something to me...)
“We’re not asking for names or addresses. We want to see the nature of the data they have,” he added. “Their claim is that none of it was obtained illegally anyway, so it kind of contradicts their underlying contention they’ve done nothing legally wrong.”
And, by the way, also from the story:
The company has since settled with many concerned regulators, sharing the data with Germany, France and Spain
I have not followed the story, so perhaps someone else can explain why Google would share the data with three other countries but not the U.S. (Not wild conspiracy theories, either - I mean Google's rationale or explanation.)
GP has a point: you can't tout how awesome open-source is when you make your living off of proprietary/closed-source software...
Sure you can. (Not that Netflix does - reading some other posts, they're pretty darned heavy in contributing back to a number of projects.) But it should always be about using the best tool for the job, regardless of ideology. Isn't that the whole point? I've heard this for years - give people the choice of what they want to run; don't force them or manipulate them like Microsoft is supposed to do. Provide a better tool and watch them flock. And look, it's working pretty well for servers running Linux.
...and expect us to be pleased.
Yeah, okay, you've got me there. Even if Netflix decided to write a Linux client (which would almost certainly be a money-losing proposition; consider they then have to maintain and support it for a probably quite small number of users), judging by the whining on this story there'd still be no keeping you lot happy. It wouldn't be as fully featured as you wanted, or wouldn't comply with some obscure Norwegian protocol of intense interest to seven people, or who knows what.
I am not very well versed in that concept, but I did see this sentence in the article.
The police offered alternatives including holding a static protest, marching an alternate route or holding the march at another time.
So the police tried to help them out. But the protestors simply didn't want to listen. It's like any other major city thoroughfare - if you want to march down, say, third avenue in New York or Broad Street in Philadelphia or Theobald's Road in the Bloomsbury section of London, it's disruptive and has to be properly planned out. Detours and road closures so you don't get carnage, for instance.
It's logistical support. In fairness, the original zdnet article is not particularly well written either; but if you read it carefully, it's clear enough what's going on. Here are the most important three paragraphs from the article.
The NSW Police said in a statement that the reason the assistant commissioner opposed the march in his correspondence was due to the organisers of the event failing to submit complete paperwork in a timely manner.
"The group gave one day's notice before the march saying that they intended to march on George Street to Martin Place in peak hour, but this was not acceptable to the police," the service said in a statement.
The police offered alternatives including holding a static protest, marching an alternate route or holding the march at another time.
Get that? The protestors gave one day notice that they were going to march down crowded city streets during peak hour. That is clearly not something you can just set up on a whim. The police responded that, with insufficient notice provided, they were concerned about being able to ensure the safety. Try doing a search on map george street sydney to get an idea of where they want to march.
The Australian police is not for or against the protest politically. They don't care if these people protest, but they do care that it's done in a safe manner (both for the sake of the protestors and for the sake of the general public).
Which is a long way of saying - total non-story except that the protest organizers are not especially organized, and so instead of doing things properly decided to start whining.
My lord, a handful of comments and already I've seen two comparisons to Hitler. That is pathetic, even by Slashdot standards. Why the vitriol? If you don't like Facebook, don't use it. How hard is this to understand? How is it really impacting your life, other than that it's, well, everywhere in the news and on promotional websites and so forth? (Which kind of might give you an indication as to why Zuckerberg got to this point.)
I've alreadygiven comments in previous stories on why I use Facebook and what value it gives to me, so I won't repeat them here. But for those who can't understand why he should be "person of the year", try thinking for a minute.
Facebook is easily the most successful social network site over the last couple of years, far eclipsing MySpace, Bebo, etc.
Major companies use it to run advertising campaigns. It's huge. Seriously, big. Have the people commenting here even noticed just how many companies these days have a "like us on Facebook" link to get some kind of promotional item? A "follow us on Facebook" link? Facebook has changed the way companies conduct their business. Think about that for a moment.
Heck, even Slashdot has the ubiquitous "share on Facebook" icon.
Seriously...comparisons to Hitler and Stalin? You really need to get some perspective, mate.
Were these people programmers, graphics designers, server administrators, network administrators, network technicians and others who actually produce something of value?
Or were these people involved with "marketing", "project management" and other ill-defined positions that usually just suck resources away from those getting real work done?
Spoken like a true naively arrogant 16 year old.
Next time you have to do an upgrade on a live service that is used by millions of people, tell us how it goes without a project manager to define the work breakdown structure, a business analyst to capture functional requirements and produce a traceability matrix, someone to hand hold your valuable clients (you know, the ones who pay the wages?) during the transition...all those other positions that "suck resources away", in your elegant words.
There are good project managers and poor PMs. There are good BAs and poor BAs. It's one thing to chuck up a small web site with a couple of developers; it's quite another to do this in the real world, where if things go wrong you lose millions of dollars, good will, reputation, and customers.
Their primary accomplishment of note thus far is to establish a wave of negativity directed against WikiLeaks by journalists and the general (non-technical) public.
The appropriate phrase is not "hoisted by their own petard"...but it's something awfully close.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, nifty. Good for you. Instead of acting super cool and belittling what someone else has done, can't you just say "nice one, and if readers are interested in this then look at what I did"?
Otherwise known as "soft skills". I.e. not acting like a complete tool around those who live by the dictum "time is money" and thinking they're a lot funnier than they really are.
You'd think this isn't that difficult, but every day I'm constantly amazed by how many people I encounter who handily demonstrate otherwise and then proceed to moan about their managers.
The German's and French have been doing it for a very long time without their society collapsing.
And the English, and the Australians, and the New Zealanders...
I'm sure several more countries have similar attitudes, best described as "you're an adult, we trust you to behave yourself and make adult decisions, and if you don't, well, you're also adult enough to take the consequences". I just mention the places with whose work structures I'm personally familiar. The U.S., on the other hand...urgh...forget it, or at least on the east coast (everywhere I've worked, from Maine down to Georgia). In a country where personal rights are ferociously guarded, I don't know why this should be so, but I follow it so I won't get fired.
That's a heck of a stretch. Raskolnikov believed himself superior to the great masses, not because he was a student or because of any great aim, but inherently superior. (At least during part of the story; Raskolnikov is nothing if not a tortured and introspective soul).
Bill Gates did not plan murder, and he did not plan something evil. He started a software company, probably for no other reason than he wanted to make money and this seemed to be something he was good at doing. Minus several million for usurping one of my favorite classics, Moraelin. You cheapen Bill Gates, Dostoevsky, and evil-doers in general. I am going to cease liking you now.
...most people hate him
I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask for some reference on that. Most people hate Bill Gates? Why? Most people here on Slashdot, perhaps...but in the general public? I don't think so.
Slashdot readers are passionate about technology. Most people are not. They get frustrated when their computer acts up or crashes, maybe even mutter an imprecation against Microsoft or the vendor of the software/hardware that's causing a problem - if they know what it is that's causing the problem. But for the vast majority of the day, their computers probably work.
The dreaded car analogy - I drive a Toyota Camry. It's been super reliable for me, and I like it. I know a lot of car aficionados dislike Toyotas, and particularly the Camry, because it's bland, boring, whatever. I don't care about that. It's broken down a couple of times in the past 10 years/175000 miles, and while I don't like the inconvenience I accept that sometimes things wear out. Those one or two "outages" are by far outweighed by the years and miles of reliable, trouble-free service.
I know about the recent issues with Toyotas, but my overall experience means I have a positive outlook on them and I even admire the company for making such a popular and generally reliable vehicle. I'd hazard a guess that if you took a poll and asked a sample of the general public why they admire Bill Gates, they'd refer to the ubiquity of Windows and Office, how he's built a dominant company from very little at all, etc. Most people probably don't even remember the court cases a few years ago - and if you remind them of it, they won't care.
Unless they're passionate about technology. Which most people aren't.
Agreed. There's no call for it and there's nothing served by it. It just sounds like some petulant whiny 14 year old who wants to be a geek. Maybe that's appropriate; the more garbage I read on Slashdot the more I realize the teenagers who are dominating it today are not the teenagers of 20 years ago who were hacking in assembly on their Commodore 64.
To access the built-in audience immediately rather than expend the effort and time required to get visitors to go to his own brand new and totally unknown website?
It's news that the lawyers have caught up to what everyone on the internet was thinking when they first encountered Wikileaks.
Not everyone. Please don't speak for me, because you're wrong.
People have been worrying about this issue since before there were sysadmins...nearly two thousand years, in fact. It's not about respect - it's about how well do I know this person, how well do you know anyone, how much "trust" is too much, and, well, what if they're in a car accident and suddenly incapacitated for four weeks and they are literally the only person who can do a, b, and c?
Not saying the cultures are 180 degrees dissimilar, but the BOFH stories were written by Simon Travaglia, who is a New Zealander.
That's not to say that they are like Metallica where everything since the black album sounds like the black album.
That's pretty generous. If I'm feeling benevolent I'll give you that everything since Master of Puppets sounds the same. Otherwise I'll contend that they're like AC/DC - they've made the exact same album nn number of times. The main difference is AC/DC admit it; Metallica are a bunch of pretentious non-musicians who can play their instruments with a reasonable amount of technical dexterity but have no ability to infuse dynamic or variation into anything. (Hetfield was a parody of himself before anyone even knew who he was.)
The whole rant reads like, well, some kind of emotional rant from an angst-ridden teenager. She's "furious", and feels "used and abused. How could Novell enter into such a deal?...Why do I bother...".
The seventh paragraph alone sounds like a 13 year old's diary entry.
Is it intentional? Or does the heart find ways to justify what people want to do because they personally benefit? I leave that part to God. I can't read hearts. I analyze behavior only. But I see results. It's depressing to find out that community members are so easy to buy off, which is how I view it.
PJ has always struck me as being disingenous at best. She seems to have lost all perspective. The mission statement includes all these lofty goals and statements about legal research, being a resource, etc., etc. But if you read her own interview on how it started, she states right at the beginning that she used to hand out Knoppix CDs to Microsoft users, started Groklaw so she could learn how to blog, and then along came SCO and "it made me so angry". But she always wants to appear disengaged and "legal" and able to see both sides. What a load of self-serving rubbish.
Forgive me if I don't agree with you. Not everything is so black and white. This isn't about slowly creeping bigotry: this is about...
to harm the reputation of by libel or slander
I think it's more a case of "first they defamed and ridiculed the communists, then they defamed and ridiculed the Jews...".
I'm with Kid Zero on this. I do not care for principles which say it's okay to hurt someone else with known lies.
No. It makes the authorities necessarily cautious because of the potential for scary stuff with this kind of activity.
Play devil's advocate for a moment - what if someone does something like this, and does load the plane with a bunch of explosives and kills someone, and it later comes out that the TSA/NYPD/pick-your-acronym knew about it and didn't at least check out the guy. How many people on this very thread would be jumping up and down bleating about how incompetent the authorities are and the agencies need to be disbanded?
They're in a no-win situation sometimes. Instead of playing everything as some kind of black and white game, try realizing there are gray areas and ask a few difficult questions.
Well, I thought exactly the same thing as the grandparent - "sneakily revealed" is a fairly remarkable statement.
The link is "http://www.nomachine.com/news-read.php?idnews=331", so it would appear that it's on a regular news portion of their site - hardly sneaky. Furthermore, it's mentioned in the very first paragraph.
Rome, Italy, December 21, 2010 - NoMachine, a global leader in cross platform remote access and application delivery solutions, announced a software preview of its upcoming new products and technologies which offer a completely redesigned client GUI and restructure its flagship suite of NX Server. The new products will not only extend the current functionalities of NX application delivery and remote access products, there will also be new naming conventions adopted. This release marks an important milestone in the history of the company. Version 4 of the software, in fact, will be only available under a closed source license.
Beats me how they're being sneaky about doing it, at any rate. Shall we agree that the summary is (shock, stunner, surprise!) badly written, or at least very biased, and go on to debating the impact of the move?
As much as I dislike Apple, iPhones are a solid platform. They have a few different versions of the OS (there needs to be progress, right?), but that's it. Much better for developers and for users.
Well, honestly, this is what Apple has always done. Apple decided very early on they would maintain strict control over their systems (in conrast to the IBM way of doing things and allowing clones). So on the PC compatible/Windows platform, you have complete openness, a plethora of players, squillions of devices, and chaos. On the Macintosh/iPhone/etc., Apple decreed "thou must do this". Developers (hardware and software) found they had a non-trivial amount of overhead to comply with Apple's strictures, but the end result is a very tight experience for the user.
They're not "slowly turning" at all. With their walled garden and draconian control over user habits and experience, they're a leading example of what a government might aspire to.
Give me a break. Apple sells a streamlined user experience to people who want exactly that.
Yeah, and those people are morally wrong and/or ignorant for selling a part of their soul and the future of all our children to a minor demon for shininess, figuratively speaking.
What's the difference between migla and a giraffe? A giraffe can't stick its nose as high in the air...
That's pretty condescending. Possibly those people just don't want to mess around with technology, have better things to do with their life, and simply choose to buy technology that's interoperable and "just works". (And I know it often doesn't "just work" - I don't own any Apple gear and have written on /. in the past about what a piece of junk iTunes is. But sanctimonious self-righteous preachy buggers like you just do something to me...)
Oh come on. Put away the conspiracy theories.
“We’re not asking for names or addresses. We want to see the nature of the data they have,” he added. “Their claim is that none of it was obtained illegally anyway, so it kind of contradicts their underlying contention they’ve done nothing legally wrong.”
And, by the way, also from the story:
The company has since settled with many concerned regulators, sharing the data with Germany, France and Spain
I have not followed the story, so perhaps someone else can explain why Google would share the data with three other countries but not the U.S. (Not wild conspiracy theories, either - I mean Google's rationale or explanation.)
I saw an online petition signed by over 50,000 linux users who said they would get a netflix account if they chose to support linux. want the link?
Yes please. I looked for it and found one with 9,553 signers (as I write) here. But nowhere near 50,000.
Waiting...
(Seriously, why not just include it in the original post? Or are you just making stuff up?)
GP has a point: you can't tout how awesome open-source is when you make your living off of proprietary/closed-source software...
Sure you can. (Not that Netflix does - reading some other posts, they're pretty darned heavy in contributing back to a number of projects.) But it should always be about using the best tool for the job, regardless of ideology. Isn't that the whole point? I've heard this for years - give people the choice of what they want to run; don't force them or manipulate them like Microsoft is supposed to do. Provide a better tool and watch them flock. And look, it's working pretty well for servers running Linux.
...and expect us to be pleased.
Yeah, okay, you've got me there. Even if Netflix decided to write a Linux client (which would almost certainly be a money-losing proposition; consider they then have to maintain and support it for a probably quite small number of users), judging by the whining on this story there'd still be no keeping you lot happy. It wouldn't be as fully featured as you wanted, or wouldn't comply with some obscure Norwegian protocol of intense interest to seven people, or who knows what.
I am not very well versed in that concept, but I did see this sentence in the article.
The police offered alternatives including holding a static protest, marching an alternate route or holding the march at another time.
So the police tried to help them out. But the protestors simply didn't want to listen. It's like any other major city thoroughfare - if you want to march down, say, third avenue in New York or Broad Street in Philadelphia or Theobald's Road in the Bloomsbury section of London, it's disruptive and has to be properly planned out. Detours and road closures so you don't get carnage, for instance.
It's logistical support. In fairness, the original zdnet article is not particularly well written either; but if you read it carefully, it's clear enough what's going on. Here are the most important three paragraphs from the article.
The NSW Police said in a statement that the reason the assistant commissioner opposed the march in his correspondence was due to the organisers of the event failing to submit complete paperwork in a timely manner.
"The group gave one day's notice before the march saying that they intended to march on George Street to Martin Place in peak hour, but this was not acceptable to the police," the service said in a statement.
The police offered alternatives including holding a static protest, marching an alternate route or holding the march at another time.
Get that? The protestors gave one day notice that they were going to march down crowded city streets during peak hour. That is clearly not something you can just set up on a whim. The police responded that, with insufficient notice provided, they were concerned about being able to ensure the safety. Try doing a search on map george street sydney to get an idea of where they want to march.
The Australian police is not for or against the protest politically. They don't care if these people protest, but they do care that it's done in a safe manner (both for the sake of the protestors and for the sake of the general public).
Which is a long way of saying - total non-story except that the protest organizers are not especially organized, and so instead of doing things properly decided to start whining.
My lord, a handful of comments and already I've seen two comparisons to Hitler. That is pathetic, even by Slashdot standards. Why the vitriol? If you don't like Facebook, don't use it. How hard is this to understand? How is it really impacting your life, other than that it's, well, everywhere in the news and on promotional websites and so forth? (Which kind of might give you an indication as to why Zuckerberg got to this point.)
I've already given comments in previous stories on why I use Facebook and what value it gives to me, so I won't repeat them here. But for those who can't understand why he should be "person of the year", try thinking for a minute.
Seriously...comparisons to Hitler and Stalin? You really need to get some perspective, mate.
Were these people programmers, graphics designers, server administrators, network administrators, network technicians and others who actually produce something of value?
Or were these people involved with "marketing", "project management" and other ill-defined positions that usually just suck resources away from those getting real work done?
Spoken like a true naively arrogant 16 year old.
Next time you have to do an upgrade on a live service that is used by millions of people, tell us how it goes without a project manager to define the work breakdown structure, a business analyst to capture functional requirements and produce a traceability matrix, someone to hand hold your valuable clients (you know, the ones who pay the wages?) during the transition...all those other positions that "suck resources away", in your elegant words.
There are good project managers and poor PMs. There are good BAs and poor BAs. It's one thing to chuck up a small web site with a couple of developers; it's quite another to do this in the real world, where if things go wrong you lose millions of dollars, good will, reputation, and customers.
Their primary accomplishment of note thus far is to establish a wave of negativity directed against WikiLeaks by journalists and the general (non-technical) public.
The appropriate phrase is not "hoisted by their own petard"...but it's something awfully close.