If FB can figure out how properly utilize the data it has to properly send target advertisements in an unobtrusive way, they will be able to do what nobody has to date -- compete with Google on the advertising front.
This makes them supremely poised to be the ultimate competitor to Google for advertising dollars (which last I heard is the bulk of Google's profits). Note this doesn't make them a direct competitor to Google per se, but certainly it makes them capable of putting one heck of a dent in Google's bottom line.
By the time companies expend the time and resources necessary to validate that all of their "unused" IP blocks aren't actually being used by something, engineering migration plans for those that are being used by non-critical systems, etc. they could just go ahead and move to IPv6.
I've used Plone as a CMS in a company before and here's what I can tell you.
Plone security works great especially if you fine tune it. For example, you are definitely going to want to think about going in and tweaking what happens when documents move to different publishing states. I tweaked the "Publish External" to have the same privileges as internal publishing because for us, there was no such thing as external publishing since it was an internet facing company intranet and client extranet.
You will also want to proxy your access behind Apache if this is going to be internet facing.
Plone has a great ability to version files. Unless, of course, they are large files. IIRC, anything greater than 32MB causes versioning to fail. I know you can get around this by using external storage (external to the PloneDB) and I think they made it easier with version 4 that was just released, but I haven't tried Plone 4.
Plone is written in python, so if you want to build your own plugins, you are going to have to learn it. The built-in DB is like nothing I've ever seen and is not relational in any meaningful way that I saw, so if you ever have any ideas of doing something relational with it (i.e. a trouble ticketing system), you are going to have to use an external database for your plugin.
WebDAV works great in Plone. Versioning with it does not. Pick either versioning or WebDAV access for a folder.
Oh and unless things have changed, you cannot (AFAIK) do file level restores from backups. It is an all or nothing affair. You CAN restore to a test environment and then export an individual object to import on your live instance. For most issues of accidental deletion, you can recover from the management back-end though.
Like any solution, you will have lots of customization in front of you if what comes out of the box isn't sufficient for your needs. Depending on how dirty you want to get your hands with it, the learning curve can be gentle or very very steep.
I donated because I like the idea, I like their attitude about it and I had never heard of the alternatives before I heard about them.
Maybe they were just in the right place at the right time, but it is what it is. And no, I am not going to donate to the alternative you mentioned. A one man operation doesn't interest me as much as a team of four.
Your post is misleading at best. They only asked for $10,000 to fund them through the summer so they could dedicate themselves to this project and not have to find paid work. $10,000 for 4 people to last them several months really isn't that much money.
The fact that they have gotten such a huge response has caused them to rethink their original plan of just a few months, produce something working and be happy. It would seem they are raising the bar exactly because of the huge response.
Yes, this is the power of media coverage. Perhaps they really were in the right place at the right time. Maybe they did get really lucky while the similar projects that have been around for a while are just unlucky.
Whatever the case may be, your characterization is patently wrong. They had their sights set low on the donation front.
And as far as not having code yet . . . I think I read somewhere they have a very very rough prototype that is nowhere near ready for release yet. But even still, they are asking for people to fund them. Not "hey, we made this. please donate for all our cool work."
Doing it this way is actually quite better IMO. You can see what kind of support there is for your idea long before you pour in the blood sweat and tears.
Everyone here is just wrong. The biggest reason medical devices like the one mentioned cost so much is because of government regulations that must be followed (think FDA). WRT the FDA, it is part 11 compliance.
The extra effort you have to go through to ensure your devices meet these standards is a _major_ PITA. If you also sell the same part in a non-medical capacity, you can easily make manufacturing runs using the same equipment, materials and everything else but you just don't have to document the piss out of everything, have parts and equipment sitting waiting to be passed by QA before being used and also finished goods waiting for QA to be inspected before being shipped.
Essentially, your manufacturing costs at least double when following these regulations. Does that justify $18,000? I don't know. But I guarantee you their manufacturing costs dwarf that of the Wii device.
Wrong. The Supreme Court has already ruled that anything done on company computers absolutely IS the business of the company. There is no such thing as "your business" on a work computer. Period.
If he had a personal laptop there with his own cell wireless or used a personal cell phone, no problem.
Well I happen to know that as a whole, UK is sold heart and soul into the Microsoft world. Many of their sites and services do in fact function fine on Linux, but certainly not all.
They use Cisco for VPNs, so should you be in a situation for VPN usage, support on Linux is just fine for that.
Wireless doesn't do anything special, so it's fine too on Linux. I've tested it thoroughly. They do like to use odd key indexes on some of their secured APs, so make sure you know how to change your key index.
Many of their internal sites are Sharepoint and _should_ work just fine with Firefox on Linux, but not guaranteed.
Office 2007 is pretty much their standard, so you may find many documents you have to download for class could be in Microsoft's own XML flavor. Being that I'm not a student, I don't know if this is an issue or not.
Other than that, I have had success authenticating to their AD domain on Ubuntu. As a fun side note, they gave their domain the super original name of AD.
Is being rude the general company culture? Are the top level management rude and unappreciative to those under them?
If so, you are an army of one up against quite a challenge. Changing company culture while not impossible, is very hard for one person with no authority to do.
You can try the "I'm ok, are you ok?" method. Force them to either admit you have done a good job or tell you what is wrong. Getting people to formulate what's bugging them may force them to realize they aren't really upset with you but rather the crappy meeting they just got out of. You can do it simply with "so is everything working ok and are you all set?" after fixing something or something like that.
If all else fails, I'd suggest changing companies if you can. I did because of a situation VERY similar to the one you are in and it was the single best career move I've ever made.
9.04 is broken for me in some spectacularly stupid and disappointing ways.
-Intel video sucks. Actually come to think of it, this one has probably 3 or 4 sub-issues all on its own -Brasero doesn't work. Luckily K3B does. -God awful performance on some Q3 engine based games (8.10 wasn't much better but 8.04 was) -Right mouse clicks in Firefox randomly do strange things like pick a random item out of the right click menu and select it automatically -DVD playback is broken despite hours of trying to fix it -VPNC has a stupidly bizarre bug where it won't let me configure a VPN connection. How this made it out of QA defies explanation. -Occasionally the computer hangs while the screen is locked. -Lock screen is taken out of the default CTRL+ALT+DEL menu. Who thought THAT was a good idea?
And these are only the things I've found in a couple of weeks. God only know what other stupid things await me to discover.
In my opinion, 9.04 feel more like a very rough beta at best. To say I'm disappointed with them over this release would be the understatement of the year.
There are people certainly violating Microsoft's IP in areas like Samba
Wrong. Microsoft has worked with the Samba team to get their protocols implemented as required by the European Union stipulation. To try to attack the Samba team over this would essentially spell an end to Microsoft doing business in the EU.
Microsoft is a for-profit business with it's own search engine division and provides a product that could drive revenue to that business.
The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that provides financial support to the open source Mozilla project that has a product that drives revenue to Google in a deal inked where they have exclusive rights to being the default during installation in return for donating to the Mozilla Foundation.
I just don't see how the striking difference between those two scenarios could be more plain. I'll boil it down for those that can't:
Internet Explorer/Microsoft is a self-interest driven scenario.
Firefox/Mozilla/Google is a mutually beneficial scenario where one party is a business and the other is a non-profit.
As to how this answers your question--remember that Microsoft was convicted of being a Monopoly in the past. Neither Google nor The Mozilla Foundation suffers that burden.
I did something similar during my college days except I wrote it as a college newspaper article. I was surprised the editor allowed it to run since not only did I expose the flaws, but provided enough information so that any enterprising students could find what they needed to test the flaws themselves.
I hadn't intended on including the necessary information such as the name of the cracking program I used (John the Ripper) to crack the simple DES encryption covering all email accounts on a UNIX system where students had shell access.
The reason I included it was I called the head of IT to get his response to the article I was writing and he said, "The vast majority of the students are not knowledgeable enough for us to worry."
The reason I was writing the article was because of the danger to students and their data. Every machine on campus had a public IP that was not firewalled. It was the wild west of computing.
The reason I included instruction was because of the IT guy's indifference.
A few fun notes:
-I never heard from school administrators wanting to try to discipline me or anything else
-A firewall was installed to protect the campus in a matter of a couple of weeks
-A few years later, I applied for a job in the college IT department for which I was easily qualified. I never even got an interview.
Ummm, Iraq was being dealt with via weapons inspectors and sanctions.
Bush got impatient, wanted to settle an old family score and wanted some oil. Period.
Re:Sixty-hour work weeks with no overtime...
on
Should IT Unionize?
·
· Score: 1
There is a valid concern here that market forces do NOT easily fix.
Specifically, most companies I know consider IT a necessary evil that is a cost center, not a profit center.
If you spend 5 minutes in the business world, you will find out that cost centers get the minimum amount of budgetary attention. This means that IT shops often have to decide whether they will use their budget dollars to make necessary improvements or hire the extra staff they need handle issues that _cannot_ be fixed by efficiency or infrastructure improvements.
I am not suggesting unions are the answer. But what I am suggesting is that there are conditions many IT workers face that cannot be easily fixed because the _right_ solutions are one that upper management either won't get or won't accept. Historically, unions have been the most effective way for workers to force upper management to listen because of the potential for the negative consequences.
That's what I did when they were using old snapshots of Samba that had bugs that couldn't be fixed by tweaking settings. I went with Ubuntu instead.
The beauty of Ubuntu is that you don't have to pay to play and yet still get security updates. You can buy support for servers that need it and buy support for those that don't should a need arise.
As soon as the ID crowd can provide proof of any sort to move their take on things from fairy tale category to testable theory, then they can begin teaching it in classrooms.
Exactly. They turn into "damned if you do and damned if you don't" situations. If you vote for bill XYZ then you "vote to raise taxes" and if you vote against then you "fail to support the troops" or something like that.
Personally, I would like to see a central database that requires Representatives, Senators and even the President to explain their vote/veto on each vote within 24 hours of their vote.
Let them tell their side of the story in their own words at the time of the vote so later they can't come up with weasel words on the issue.
The "bad boy" approach will _definitely_ get you from zero to laid in a much shorter amount of time than the nice guy approach will.
The reason, I believe, is quite simple. If a girl perceives you to be one of these kind of guys, then even if they are educated, know what you are up to and what not, they will make a decision rather quickly whether or not they are up to some potentially dead-end (i.e. meaningless) sex or a short term fling.
Whether or not some evolutionary underpinnings are behind their mental processes or not is a whole separate discussion.
The nice guy approach is a much longer and drawn out way of getting to sex. Again the reason is simple--if you are nice and a girl realizes sex is not the first thing you are after then she will take lots of time to size you up before giving it up.
You kind of left out a party in your "win-win" analysis. How about customers? I have one very real group of customers in mind--Zimbra customers.
What are the odds Microsoft would have allowed it to flourish? I'm betting that, at a minimum, they would have jacked the price up until it was no longer as cost effective over Exchange.
I've been an IT Manager for a few years now and this is a catch phrase myth used to try to summarize what techs think management wants.
What they really want is something that works and that they're comfortable with. The shops that Linux has had the most success on the server side are the ones whose techs have convinced management they can support it so that they get that warm fuzzy comfortable feeling.
The desktop is a whole new ballgame because the support side is only half the equation. Users have to feel comfortable with it too.
I should also add that if the WINE crew gets sufficiently far enough that stuff just works (and it doesn't right now), then it will become infinitely easier to justify Linux on the desktops. Hint: You don't have to replace all your software and hardware because Vista is being crammed down your throat.
I ran into this once in a bar. Long ago, I developed the rule that I would never buy a woman a drink in a bar. So a couple of girls came up and started talking to me and a friend of mine. It was quite obvious (at least to me) that they were casually flirting.
So after a while, one of the girls says, "aren't you going to buy us drinks?" To which I reply, "No--and here's why. You girls aren't even remotely interested in us. You came over here hoping we would buy you drinks. I don't subscribe to women who sell themselves for things such as drinks. By the way, isn't that a mild form of prostitution?"
I was really surprised I didn't get slapped, but hey, it made me laugh!
Slashdot Mirror
If FB can figure out how properly utilize the data it has to properly send target advertisements in an unobtrusive way, they will be able to do what nobody has to date -- compete with Google on the advertising front.
This makes them supremely poised to be the ultimate competitor to Google for advertising dollars (which last I heard is the bulk of Google's profits). Note this doesn't make them a direct competitor to Google per se, but certainly it makes them capable of putting one heck of a dent in Google's bottom line.
By the time companies expend the time and resources necessary to validate that all of their "unused" IP blocks aren't actually being used by something, engineering migration plans for those that are being used by non-critical systems, etc. they could just go ahead and move to IPv6.
Apply a cure, not a band-aid.
I've used Plone as a CMS in a company before and here's what I can tell you.
Plone security works great especially if you fine tune it. For example, you are definitely going to want to think about going in and tweaking what happens when documents move to different publishing states. I tweaked the "Publish External" to have the same privileges as internal publishing because for us, there was no such thing as external publishing since it was an internet facing company intranet and client extranet.
You will also want to proxy your access behind Apache if this is going to be internet facing.
Plone has a great ability to version files. Unless, of course, they are large files. IIRC, anything greater than 32MB causes versioning to fail. I know you can get around this by using external storage (external to the PloneDB) and I think they made it easier with version 4 that was just released, but I haven't tried Plone 4.
Plone is written in python, so if you want to build your own plugins, you are going to have to learn it. The built-in DB is like nothing I've ever seen and is not relational in any meaningful way that I saw, so if you ever have any ideas of doing something relational with it (i.e. a trouble ticketing system), you are going to have to use an external database for your plugin.
WebDAV works great in Plone. Versioning with it does not. Pick either versioning or WebDAV access for a folder.
Oh and unless things have changed, you cannot (AFAIK) do file level restores from backups. It is an all or nothing affair. You CAN restore to a test environment and then export an individual object to import on your live instance. For most issues of accidental deletion, you can recover from the management back-end though.
Like any solution, you will have lots of customization in front of you if what comes out of the box isn't sufficient for your needs. Depending on how dirty you want to get your hands with it, the learning curve can be gentle or very very steep.
I donated because I like the idea, I like their attitude about it and I had never heard of the alternatives before I heard about them.
Maybe they were just in the right place at the right time, but it is what it is. And no, I am not going to donate to the alternative you mentioned. A one man operation doesn't interest me as much as a team of four.
Your post is misleading at best. They only asked for $10,000 to fund them through the summer so they could dedicate themselves to this project and not have to find paid work. $10,000 for 4 people to last them several months really isn't that much money.
The fact that they have gotten such a huge response has caused them to rethink their original plan of just a few months, produce something working and be happy. It would seem they are raising the bar exactly because of the huge response.
Yes, this is the power of media coverage. Perhaps they really were in the right place at the right time. Maybe they did get really lucky while the similar projects that have been around for a while are just unlucky.
Whatever the case may be, your characterization is patently wrong. They had their sights set low on the donation front.
And as far as not having code yet . . . I think I read somewhere they have a very very rough prototype that is nowhere near ready for release yet. But even still, they are asking for people to fund them. Not "hey, we made this. please donate for all our cool work."
Doing it this way is actually quite better IMO. You can see what kind of support there is for your idea long before you pour in the blood sweat and tears.
Everyone here is just wrong. The biggest reason medical devices like the one mentioned cost so much is because of government regulations that must be followed (think FDA). WRT the FDA, it is part 11 compliance.
The extra effort you have to go through to ensure your devices meet these standards is a _major_ PITA. If you also sell the same part in a non-medical capacity, you can easily make manufacturing runs using the same equipment, materials and everything else but you just don't have to document the piss out of everything, have parts and equipment sitting waiting to be passed by QA before being used and also finished goods waiting for QA to be inspected before being shipped.
Essentially, your manufacturing costs at least double when following these regulations. Does that justify $18,000? I don't know. But I guarantee you their manufacturing costs dwarf that of the Wii device.
Wrong. The Supreme Court has already ruled that anything done on company computers absolutely IS the business of the company. There is no such thing as "your business" on a work computer. Period.
If he had a personal laptop there with his own cell wireless or used a personal cell phone, no problem.
Well I happen to know that as a whole, UK is sold heart and soul into the Microsoft world. Many of their sites and services do in fact function fine on Linux, but certainly not all.
They use Cisco for VPNs, so should you be in a situation for VPN usage, support on Linux is just fine for that.
Wireless doesn't do anything special, so it's fine too on Linux. I've tested it thoroughly. They do like to use odd key indexes on some of their secured APs, so make sure you know how to change your key index.
Many of their internal sites are Sharepoint and _should_ work just fine with Firefox on Linux, but not guaranteed.
Office 2007 is pretty much their standard, so you may find many documents you have to download for class could be in Microsoft's own XML flavor. Being that I'm not a student, I don't know if this is an issue or not.
Other than that, I have had success authenticating to their AD domain on Ubuntu. As a fun side note, they gave their domain the super original name of AD.
Is being rude the general company culture? Are the top level management rude and unappreciative to those under them?
If so, you are an army of one up against quite a challenge. Changing company culture while not impossible, is very hard for one person with no authority to do.
You can try the "I'm ok, are you ok?" method. Force them to either admit you have done a good job or tell you what is wrong. Getting people to formulate what's bugging them may force them to realize they aren't really upset with you but rather the crappy meeting they just got out of. You can do it simply with "so is everything working ok and are you all set?" after fixing something or something like that.
If all else fails, I'd suggest changing companies if you can. I did because of a situation VERY similar to the one you are in and it was the single best career move I've ever made.
9.04 is broken for me in some spectacularly stupid and disappointing ways.
-Intel video sucks. Actually come to think of it, this one has probably 3 or 4 sub-issues all on its own
-Brasero doesn't work. Luckily K3B does.
-God awful performance on some Q3 engine based games (8.10 wasn't much better but 8.04 was)
-Right mouse clicks in Firefox randomly do strange things like pick a random item out of the right click menu and select it automatically
-DVD playback is broken despite hours of trying to fix it
-VPNC has a stupidly bizarre bug where it won't let me configure a VPN connection. How this made it out of QA defies explanation.
-Occasionally the computer hangs while the screen is locked.
-Lock screen is taken out of the default CTRL+ALT+DEL menu. Who thought THAT was a good idea?
And these are only the things I've found in a couple of weeks. God only know what other stupid things await me to discover.
In my opinion, 9.04 feel more like a very rough beta at best. To say I'm disappointed with them over this release would be the understatement of the year.
There are people certainly violating Microsoft's IP in areas like Samba
Wrong. Microsoft has worked with the Samba team to get their protocols implemented as required by the European Union stipulation. To try to attack the Samba team over this would essentially spell an end to Microsoft doing business in the EU.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1064
Microsoft is a for-profit business with it's own search engine division and provides a product that could drive revenue to that business.
The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that provides financial support to the open source Mozilla project that has a product that drives revenue to Google in a deal inked where they have exclusive rights to being the default during installation in return for donating to the Mozilla Foundation.
I just don't see how the striking difference between those two scenarios could be more plain. I'll boil it down for those that can't:
Internet Explorer/Microsoft is a self-interest driven scenario.
Firefox/Mozilla/Google is a mutually beneficial scenario where one party is a business and the other is a non-profit.
As to how this answers your question--remember that Microsoft was convicted of being a Monopoly in the past. Neither Google nor The Mozilla Foundation suffers that burden.
I did something similar during my college days except I wrote it as a college newspaper article. I was surprised the editor allowed it to run since not only did I expose the flaws, but provided enough information so that any enterprising students could find what they needed to test the flaws themselves.
I hadn't intended on including the necessary information such as the name of the cracking program I used (John the Ripper) to crack the simple DES encryption covering all email accounts on a UNIX system where students had shell access.
The reason I included it was I called the head of IT to get his response to the article I was writing and he said, "The vast majority of the students are not knowledgeable enough for us to worry."
The reason I was writing the article was because of the danger to students and their data. Every machine on campus had a public IP that was not firewalled. It was the wild west of computing.
The reason I included instruction was because of the IT guy's indifference.
A few fun notes:
-I never heard from school administrators wanting to try to discipline me or anything else
-A firewall was installed to protect the campus in a matter of a couple of weeks
-A few years later, I applied for a job in the college IT department for which I was easily qualified. I never even got an interview.
Ummm, Iraq was being dealt with via weapons inspectors and sanctions.
Bush got impatient, wanted to settle an old family score and wanted some oil. Period.
There is a valid concern here that market forces do NOT easily fix.
Specifically, most companies I know consider IT a necessary evil that is a cost center, not a profit center.
If you spend 5 minutes in the business world, you will find out that cost centers get the minimum amount of budgetary attention. This means that IT shops often have to decide whether they will use their budget dollars to make necessary improvements or hire the extra staff they need handle issues that _cannot_ be fixed by efficiency or infrastructure improvements.
I am not suggesting unions are the answer. But what I am suggesting is that there are conditions many IT workers face that cannot be easily fixed because the _right_ solutions are one that upper management either won't get or won't accept. Historically, unions have been the most effective way for workers to force upper management to listen because of the potential for the negative consequences.
That's what I did when they were using old snapshots of Samba that had bugs that couldn't be fixed by tweaking settings. I went with Ubuntu instead.
The beauty of Ubuntu is that you don't have to pay to play and yet still get security updates. You can buy support for servers that need it and buy support for those that don't should a need arise.
Proof is in the pudding.
As soon as the ID crowd can provide proof of any sort to move their take on things from fairy tale category to testable theory, then they can begin teaching it in classrooms.
Exactly. They turn into "damned if you do and damned if you don't" situations. If you vote for bill XYZ then you "vote to raise taxes" and if you vote against then you "fail to support the troops" or something like that.
Personally, I would like to see a central database that requires Representatives, Senators and even the President to explain their vote/veto on each vote within 24 hours of their vote.
Let them tell their side of the story in their own words at the time of the vote so later they can't come up with weasel words on the issue.
The "bad boy" approach will _definitely_ get you from zero to laid in a much shorter amount of time than the nice guy approach will.
The reason, I believe, is quite simple. If a girl perceives you to be one of these kind of guys, then even if they are educated, know what you are up to and what not, they will make a decision rather quickly whether or not they are up to some potentially dead-end (i.e. meaningless) sex or a short term fling.
Whether or not some evolutionary underpinnings are behind their mental processes or not is a whole separate discussion.
The nice guy approach is a much longer and drawn out way of getting to sex. Again the reason is simple--if you are nice and a girl realizes sex is not the first thing you are after then she will take lots of time to size you up before giving it up.
You kind of left out a party in your "win-win" analysis. How about customers? I have one very real group of customers in mind--Zimbra customers.
What are the odds Microsoft would have allowed it to flourish? I'm betting that, at a minimum, they would have jacked the price up until it was no longer as cost effective over Exchange.
As opposed to buying an Exchange server and licensing for your folks?
Plus with Zimbra mobile as opposed to having to use a BES, you save money there.
Seriously, spec out getting a BES and Exchange for 10 people. Then see what it would take to get Zimbra and Zimbra mobile for 10 people.
I think you'll find that even though you are buying email for 25 users with Zimbra, you are still spending less when all is said and done.
I've been an IT Manager for a few years now and this is a catch phrase myth used to try to summarize what techs think management wants.
What they really want is something that works and that they're comfortable with. The shops that Linux has had the most success on the server side are the ones whose techs have convinced management they can support it so that they get that warm fuzzy comfortable feeling.
The desktop is a whole new ballgame because the support side is only half the equation. Users have to feel comfortable with it too.
I should also add that if the WINE crew gets sufficiently far enough that stuff just works (and it doesn't right now), then it will become infinitely easier to justify Linux on the desktops. Hint: You don't have to replace all your software and hardware because Vista is being crammed down your throat.
As long as there are vulnerabilities in the underlying OS, it _will_ matter.
And since there is no such thing as completely secure software, that means forever.
I ran into this once in a bar. Long ago, I developed the rule that I would never buy a woman a drink in a bar. So a couple of girls came up and started talking to me and a friend of mine. It was quite obvious (at least to me) that they were casually flirting.
So after a while, one of the girls says, "aren't you going to buy us drinks?" To which I reply, "No--and here's why. You girls aren't even remotely interested in us. You came over here hoping we would buy you drinks. I don't subscribe to women who sell themselves for things such as drinks. By the way, isn't that a mild form of prostitution?"
I was really surprised I didn't get slapped, but hey, it made me laugh!