Attention Network Executives: Before I had a TiVo, I still never watched your infernal advertisements. Instead, every time they came on I got up and went to the fridge for a beer or checked slashdot on my laptop or changed the freakin' channel for 3 minutes. In fact TiVo has helped me lose weight, and increase my attention span.:)
We all know the networks hate the fact that we don't watch commercials, but let's face it, PVRs didn't start the commercial hatred and avoidance movement among consumers of TV programming. It's been there for years. The problem is that now all the executives for the companies that buy your advertising time have TiVos themseleves and it occurs to them as they skip forward that everyone else is doing it too.
How much of Kellner's spare time does he spend watching other peoples' commercials? That's what I want to know. And although he may not have a PVR (or maybe he does and he's just a hippocrite) I suspect that he has a human PVR that he calls a "media consultant," or "programming director" or something similar that tells him what to watch and filters out the crap that isn't worth a CEO's valuable time. Oh let's see... Like commercials!!!
I spent some time in the caribbean and this is how we received our "cable" TV. It worked, through all the weather we had, and was very good quality (considering the source of a lot of the programming was south american.) There was no internet broadband option. My impression of this technology is that it is most useful in limited physical spaces (like an island or dense urban area) and in markets where wired infrastructure doesn't exist, and is impractical to add. I suspect that this technology will not go mainstream. The general feeling on the island where I was visiting and knew several local IT people was that the government would not license private companies to provide internet access at a reasonable cost because it would compete with their governement monopoly on telecommunications. It was also the general feeling that given the limited coverage area and the geographic layout of the island, that with enough civilian interest, a renegade 802.11 network could be set up using fixed directional antennae and could cover the entire island at a reasonable cost, and that some neighborhoods already had local wireless networks.
With all the infrastructure we have in the US, I just don't see the need or use for this. The places that need alternate access (like rural plains states and remote wooded areas) probably wont be able to receive it anyway, so what's the point? Theres nothing new this tecchnology brings, it just delivers it via wireless instead of wires, and pretty much delivers it mostly to people who could obtain all the same services via wire at similar costs. I doubt this is the wave of the future.
A "friend of mine" works for a graphic arts company in Boston, and several months ago was put on a mandatory 4-day work week with corresponding 20% paycut. The irony of the situation is that this company is incredibly sales driven, and the way the business is structured, if my friend's sales person wanted her back on the job for the fifth day he would have to pay for her labor out of his own commissions. This strikes me as an incredibly good way to solve a fiscal problem: pit employees against each other.
The real moral of the story is to stand tall. My friend called their bluff, threatened to find other work, and was put back on a five day work week.
A job may not be a right, but dignity should be, and if more people stood up for theirs and demanded to be treated respectfully, employers might look in other places to cut costs during these hard times.
Although this is obviously aimed at more "business-productive" markets, I'd be interested to see how (or if) this technology affects the entertainment industry. Just yesterday, on the star wars topic, we saw lots of good banter about DLP, which is made up of millions of minature mirrors. I wonder if technology like this could take the mechanics out of something like DLP. Or perhaps, on a further refinement, this technology could supercede the entire concept of things like galvanometers in things like laser shows.
The major obstacle here seems to be cost, but what if making the waveguides so small wasnt the challenge?
A lot of people seem to be posting comments that amount to "well, Duh!" in response to this, but I think there are some interesting tidbits. Specifically the observation that "48% of large companies blame their worst security incident on employees" but "75% of those questioned named external hackers and criminals as the biggest threat to security." The BBC article doesnt seem to want to extrapolate on the reason for this, but I'm willing...
Companies like labelling the nefarious and elusive "black hat" as the primary risk because it makes it incredibly easy for them to say "There's nothign we can do!" or, perhaps in more cases, "We're doing everything we can!" This is roughly equivalent to a heroin addict telling someone that they've done everything in their power to avoid being gunned down in cold blood by their dealer. Never mind the fact that more junkies die from overdoses than from being gunned down by their dealer. Admitting the greater risk would entail acknowledging that employees aren't happy and might want to cause the company harm. This in turn indicates some flaw in the way the company conducts business, and opens them up for criticism. It's not surprising in the least that companies fear black hats more than they fear their own, because to fear their own would be to admit fault.
I'm just curious, of the 48% that report insiders as he cause of their greatest breaches, what percentage of those could be chalked up to insane or psychotic renegade employees as opposed to employees that may have had a semi-legitimate complaint that were driven to malice by a company's own policies and practices.
And all this USB key chain/MP3 player crap, I mean come on. If an insider wants to move data out of a company, its easy. In this arena these new devices are about as original as the floppy disk. Virtually anyone could e-mail attachments of reasonable size off site. I've never worked for a company with a proxy that blocked HTTP uploads (although I'm sure they exist) and what about the xerox machine? Should we get rid of that too?
Can someone explain what the point of an "education only" product is? Is that market really so different that it warrants restricting a product specifically to that market? Is this some kind of weird strategy to reduce support staff since most educational institutions have their own IT people? I'm baffled. Someone please explain it to me.
Oh boy. I just couldn't resist. There is a problem here. And that is that Access (not to mention the VB for Applications portions of the rest of the Office suite) are products of the Microsoft "Integrate Everything" campaign. You know, the same one that keeps all us windows users using IE. Access's dependencies go so deep into the OS with things like ActiveX, MS Forms, etc. that a similar package on any open source platform is incredibly unlikely. Now perhaps when Mono becomes mature, and some poor soul does a functional port of things like the Forms library, you might be staring into a (frightening) realm of possibility, but even so, if the necessary building blocks for such a complex (oops I mean convoluted) product become available, its unlikely that those solutions would be any less bloated and error prone than Microsoft's solution.
Don't misunderstand me; I like Microsoft's products (I may not be equally fond of their business practices) but to think that such a high level of integration (oops I mean convolution) is coming to an OSS office suite anytime soon, in my opinion is deluded.
Furthermore, its not as if OSS doesn't have comparable solutions. How about PHP, MySQL and Mozilla as a decent replacement for access? I guarantee you can do even more with that combo than you can with Access, its just that the learning curve is a little steeper. The power of access is attractive, or perhaps tempting would be a better word, but ultimately, Access should not be used to write real applications. I think to invest the man-years of effort it would take to develop an OSS solution to the problem of making the production of crappy database applications easier only wastes the valuable time of volunteer developers.
The other side to this is the desirability factor. Working tech support sucks. Period. And the initial comment in teh story about shinking profit margins is on point.
Look at municipal waste collection. Sure being a garbage man is a sucky job, but they make a veritable boatload of money. Tech support people get paid very little, and most often get treated like crap, because to their employer they're expendable. Which is why tech support never gets better. And on and on...
Reminds me of the scene in Office Space where Michael Bolton says "If everyone listened to her there'd be no janitors because no one would clean shit up if they had $1,000,000." The same is true of tech support. Given a choice between tech support and something more interesting, no one is going to volunteer to do tech support. So until tech support workers are making their own veritable boatload of cash, tech support will continue to suck.
Its a viscious cycle, and one thats unlikely to be broken any time soon.
The thing that some people seem to forget is that Dreamcast is a dead platform. Unlike an old P133 that you may put linux on and shove in the corner to be your personal bitchbox, dreamcast has just about zero potential to be useful.
I got really into the dcdev scene about a year ago, and even then, it was catch as catch can and often left me wondering why in hell I was sinking my fleeting spare time into it. Think of it this way: In order to have a hard drive in the thing, you have to hack together an IDE/ISA interface from raw gates. To use the thing on a network you need to put your hands on an (extremely) scarce broadband adapter, or a cobbled together ISA interface with some other ethernet card. Hell, to even play around with the thing in linux you need a special serial cable which you either have to make yourself by scamming samples of a MAX232 RS232 driver or buy from Lik-sang or whereever. If you could do *anything* useful (other than play old DC games) with a DC these days, the development community would be a lot further along. It is a hobbyist sect and should (and most likely will) stay that way.
Just as I know people who still run 68040 based NeXT boxes, I'm sure that people will continue to futz with DC indefinitely, but it really is more trouble than its worth. I would say the best (i.e. closest to drop-in functionality out of the box) idea I ever heard for the DC was the thought that, using serial communications alone, and with more specs on the graphics engine, you could create a boot CD that would run linux and then have a central machine with a whole bunch of serial ports that farmed out rendering tasks to be done in the graphics engine. (and even this idea suffers because of serial port bandwidth)
I am as much for hardware reuse as the next guy, but in my opinion, the people who are sinking so much time into the DC as an embedded platform should move on to something that's going to be around a little longer.
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Attention Network Executives: Before I had a TiVo, I still never watched your infernal advertisements. Instead, every time they came on I got up and went to the fridge for a beer or checked slashdot on my laptop or changed the freakin' channel for 3 minutes. In fact TiVo has helped me lose weight, and increase my attention span. :)
We all know the networks hate the fact that we don't watch commercials, but let's face it, PVRs didn't start the commercial hatred and avoidance movement among consumers of TV programming. It's been there for years. The problem is that now all the executives for the companies that buy your advertising time have TiVos themseleves and it occurs to them as they skip forward that everyone else is doing it too.
How much of Kellner's spare time does he spend watching other peoples' commercials? That's what I want to know. And although he may not have a PVR (or maybe he does and he's just a hippocrite) I suspect that he has a human PVR that he calls a "media consultant," or "programming director" or something similar that tells him what to watch and filters out the crap that isn't worth a CEO's valuable time. Oh let's see... Like commercials!!!
I spent some time in the caribbean and this is how we received our "cable" TV. It worked, through all the weather we had, and was very good quality (considering the source of a lot of the programming was south american.) There was no internet broadband option. My impression of this technology is that it is most useful in limited physical spaces (like an island or dense urban area) and in markets where wired infrastructure doesn't exist, and is impractical to add. I suspect that this technology will not go mainstream. The general feeling on the island where I was visiting and knew several local IT people was that the government would not license private companies to provide internet access at a reasonable cost because it would compete with their governement monopoly on telecommunications. It was also the general feeling that given the limited coverage area and the geographic layout of the island, that with enough civilian interest, a renegade 802.11 network could be set up using fixed directional antennae and could cover the entire island at a reasonable cost, and that some neighborhoods already had local wireless networks.
With all the infrastructure we have in the US, I just don't see the need or use for this. The places that need alternate access (like rural plains states and remote wooded areas) probably wont be able to receive it anyway, so what's the point? Theres nothing new this tecchnology brings, it just delivers it via wireless instead of wires, and pretty much delivers it mostly to people who could obtain all the same services via wire at similar costs. I doubt this is the wave of the future.
A "friend of mine" works for a graphic arts company in Boston, and several months ago was put on a mandatory 4-day work week with corresponding 20% paycut. The irony of the situation is that this company is incredibly sales driven, and the way the business is structured, if my friend's sales person wanted her back on the job for the fifth day he would have to pay for her labor out of his own commissions. This strikes me as an incredibly good way to solve a fiscal problem: pit employees against each other.
The real moral of the story is to stand tall. My friend called their bluff, threatened to find other work, and was put back on a five day work week.
A job may not be a right, but dignity should be, and if more people stood up for theirs and demanded to be treated respectfully, employers might look in other places to cut costs during these hard times.
Although this is obviously aimed at more "business-productive" markets, I'd be interested to see how (or if) this technology affects the entertainment industry. Just yesterday, on the star wars topic, we saw lots of good banter about DLP, which is made up of millions of minature mirrors. I wonder if technology like this could take the mechanics out of something like DLP. Or perhaps, on a further refinement, this technology could supercede the entire concept of things like galvanometers in things like laser shows.
The major obstacle here seems to be cost, but what if making the waveguides so small wasnt the challenge?
A lot of people seem to be posting comments that amount to "well, Duh!" in response to this, but I think there are some interesting tidbits. Specifically the observation that "48% of large companies blame their worst security incident on employees" but "75% of those questioned named external hackers and criminals as the biggest threat to security." The BBC article doesnt seem to want to extrapolate on the reason for this, but I'm willing...
Companies like labelling the nefarious and elusive "black hat" as the primary risk because it makes it incredibly easy for them to say "There's nothign we can do!" or, perhaps in more cases, "We're doing everything we can!" This is roughly equivalent to a heroin addict telling someone that they've done everything in their power to avoid being gunned down in cold blood by their dealer. Never mind the fact that more junkies die from overdoses than from being gunned down by their dealer. Admitting the greater risk would entail acknowledging that employees aren't happy and might want to cause the company harm. This in turn indicates some flaw in the way the company conducts business, and opens them up for criticism. It's not surprising in the least that companies fear black hats more than they fear their own, because to fear their own would be to admit fault.
I'm just curious, of the 48% that report insiders as he cause of their greatest breaches, what percentage of those could be chalked up to insane or psychotic renegade employees as opposed to employees that may have had a semi-legitimate complaint that were driven to malice by a company's own policies and practices.
And all this USB key chain/MP3 player crap, I mean come on. If an insider wants to move data out of a company, its easy. In this arena these new devices are about as original as the floppy disk. Virtually anyone could e-mail attachments of reasonable size off site. I've never worked for a company with a proxy that blocked HTTP uploads (although I'm sure they exist) and what about the xerox machine? Should we get rid of that too?
Can someone explain what the point of an "education only" product is? Is that market really so different that it warrants restricting a product specifically to that market? Is this some kind of weird strategy to reduce support staff since most educational institutions have their own IT people? I'm baffled. Someone please explain it to me.
Oh boy. I just couldn't resist. There is a problem here. And that is that Access (not to mention the VB for Applications portions of the rest of the Office suite) are products of the Microsoft "Integrate Everything" campaign. You know, the same one that keeps all us windows users using IE. Access's dependencies go so deep into the OS with things like ActiveX, MS Forms, etc. that a similar package on any open source platform is incredibly unlikely. Now perhaps when Mono becomes mature, and some poor soul does a functional port of things like the Forms library, you might be staring into a (frightening) realm of possibility, but even so, if the necessary building blocks for such a complex (oops I mean convoluted) product become available, its unlikely that those solutions would be any less bloated and error prone than Microsoft's solution.
Don't misunderstand me; I like Microsoft's products (I may not be equally fond of their business practices) but to think that such a high level of integration (oops I mean convolution) is coming to an OSS office suite anytime soon, in my opinion is deluded.
Furthermore, its not as if OSS doesn't have comparable solutions. How about PHP, MySQL and Mozilla as a decent replacement for access? I guarantee you can do even more with that combo than you can with Access, its just that the learning curve is a little steeper. The power of access is attractive, or perhaps tempting would be a better word, but ultimately, Access should not be used to write real applications. I think to invest the man-years of effort it would take to develop an OSS solution to the problem of making the production of crappy database applications easier only wastes the valuable time of volunteer developers.
The other side to this is the desirability factor. Working tech support sucks. Period. And the initial comment in teh story about shinking profit margins is on point.
Look at municipal waste collection. Sure being a garbage man is a sucky job, but they make a veritable boatload of money. Tech support people get paid very little, and most often get treated like crap, because to their employer they're expendable. Which is why tech support never gets better. And on and on...
Reminds me of the scene in Office Space where Michael Bolton says "If everyone listened to her there'd be no janitors because no one would clean shit up if they had $1,000,000." The same is true of tech support. Given a choice between tech support and something more interesting, no one is going to volunteer to do tech support. So until tech support workers are making their own veritable boatload of cash, tech support will continue to suck.
Its a viscious cycle, and one thats unlikely to be broken any time soon.
The thing that some people seem to forget is that Dreamcast is a dead platform. Unlike an old P133 that you may put linux on and shove in the corner to be your personal bitchbox, dreamcast has just about zero potential to be useful.
I got really into the dcdev scene about a year ago, and even then, it was catch as catch can and often left me wondering why in hell I was sinking my fleeting spare time into it. Think of it this way: In order to have a hard drive in the thing, you have to hack together an IDE/ISA interface from raw gates. To use the thing on a network you need to put your hands on an (extremely) scarce broadband adapter, or a cobbled together ISA interface with some other ethernet card. Hell, to even play around with the thing in linux you need a special serial cable which you either have to make yourself by scamming samples of a MAX232 RS232 driver or buy from Lik-sang or whereever. If you could do *anything* useful (other than play old DC games) with a DC these days, the development community would be a lot further along. It is a hobbyist sect and should (and most likely will) stay that way.
Just as I know people who still run 68040 based NeXT boxes, I'm sure that people will continue to futz with DC indefinitely, but it really is more trouble than its worth. I would say the best (i.e. closest to drop-in functionality out of the box) idea I ever heard for the DC was the thought that, using serial communications alone, and with more specs on the graphics engine, you could create a boot CD that would run linux and then have a central machine with a whole bunch of serial ports that farmed out rendering tasks to be done in the graphics engine. (and even this idea suffers because of serial port bandwidth)
I am as much for hardware reuse as the next guy, but in my opinion, the people who are sinking so much time into the DC as an embedded platform should move on to something that's going to be around a little longer.