IT managers in my company with an attitude of "I will never allow this" will quickly find themselves looking for other work or at least having a very serious chat with their manager. A remarkable change from 5 years ago...
Many of our top brass as well as upper IT management are no longer sticking their fingers in their ears and going "no, no, no", they are coming around to the idea that this change is likely to happen, and are instead figuring out how to do this in a responsible way. If there is no way to do it safely, if there are no benefits, or if the cost is far too great, they will still say "no", but only after positively establishing facts instead of just going by sysadmin's opinions (which doesn't mean that those sysadmin's wont have part in making the decision). Which is a good attitude; we're not here to make any one particular person's job easier (not even the BOFH's), but to do business effectively.
There already seems to be a solid business case for doing this (and no, it is a little bit better than "we won't have to buy laptops for our workers anymore"). I think that in our company, this will be a reality in 2-4 years.
Super injunctions exist to prevent the Streisand effect. Of course that only works when those who know of them, stick to them. In this case they need something stronger... double secret injuction?
I agree that it's a matter of mindset, but it's not assholeness. I notice this all the time: young people and kids will go through every button and menu, try everything out, when they get their hands on a new device. Middle aged people like myself still like to tinker a bit but we're not as curious anymore. Once the device more or less performs as we expect it to, we'll leave it alone. And the elderly might be somewhat afraid to tinker with new tech.
When we got our grandma a VCR, she kept asking us to program the timer to record her favourite shows. She said she "would never understand something that complex"... so we just sat her down and took her through the motions, manual in hand. 15 minutes later she was amazed at how easy it turned out to be. The thing that had kept her from using her VCR wasn't a crap interface, it was fear to try.
Of course there are some awfully designed interfaces out there, but they are awful to everyone (Siemens microwave department, are you reading this?!). And don't get me started on the quality of manuals these days...
Actually, one of the major carriers in NL announced that they will start charging extra for certain services such as Skype, Ping, and WhatsApp. Other carriers are eagerly following suit. The driver for this is not data congestion but the fact that these services eat into their traditional revenue, however they are already considering charging extra for data-heavy services like Youtube. In other words, throwing net neutrality out the window.
On the plus side, EC commissioner ms. Kroes is still kicking ass and taking names, and just launched a proposal to cap outrageous data roaming charges in Europe to €0.90/MB, lowering this further to €0.50/MB in 2014. Current charges are typically over €2/MB (in some cases it's €10). That price cap is such that one can now comfortably enable data roaming when travelling within Europe.
Facebook's lawyers disagree, and they are well-paid and prepared to fight for the bitter end. Are you prepared to take them on, knowing that being right in these cases very rarely matters unless you have your own army of lawyers to back you up?
As I understand the case, DPI might not actually be illegal per se, but you can't do it without the customer's consent. And there's nothing about DPI in the current agreement. So, to continue to use this they will have to offer new terms to their customers, who then have the option to accept them or cancel without fees or penalties (or the company can offer to keep the old terms until the end of your contract, which they often do in case of contracts with subsidized handsets).
Success doesn't come from finding a happy medium, or from having more process or less process. It comes from understanding what you are doing and trying to accomplish, so that you can have the right amount of process that is lean and fit for purpose. The problem is that this understanding rarely exists. Managers often do not have it, and in larger organisations where you have mutliple departments working together you rarely find processes that have been designed with the full organisation in mind. Once you understand this, you can design processes that fit your organisation, and they will be different in every case.
It's rarely a question of too little or too much: people will ignore pointless processes and bypass hopeless ones even if there are only a few of them. And the same people will cheerfully stick to heavyweight, time consuming controls, if it makes sense for their work (aircraft control systems for example).
Dysfunction? Seriously, speak for (and get over) yourself. Sure, there are plenty of dysmal things in our history but there is greatness too, and there are men and women everywhere, poor or well-off, who are striving to be better than they are. This dream of travelling to the stars is part of that.
On the other hand, some say that we need to spread out beyond Earth because we are so dysfunctional, and now have the capacity to destroy ourselves.
I never got used to RPN, but I do love the HPs; I have my trusty 20S in front of me now. I got it as a present when I went to college, and now, 23 years later I am still using it regularly, and it's only on its second set of batteries if you can believe that. I like it a lot because it is not overly complicated, it has more or less the same number of buttons as a regular scientific calculator of the era, except better precision... and a "backspace" button!
Sure, and in the process he opens up his company and others for more trolling, meanwhile fattening the troll's war chest. Just like it's cheaper to pay off Guido instead of having him and his pal Vinnie come over to bust up your warehouse. In both cases, paying up might be the prudent choice, but it's still sad that these bullies get away with it.
As I recall, Wikileaks leaked very little counterterrorism intel. Most of it was governmental and corporate shenanigans. So, governments do underhanded deals that they have absolutely no business doing, and departments clam up on info sharing because governments want to keep those shady deals (not counterterrorism intel) a secret from the general public, and you're blaming Wikileaks for the next terrorist strike? Nice...
The "best" places for speed traps, according to the Dutch police, are not dangerous spots but the spots that generate the most revenue. For example, a dual carriageway that looks like one where 80km/h is the norm, is safe for and built for 80, but actually has a limit of 50km/h because it happens to be in the (poorly signposted) city limits.
A typical example: cops expressed shock that over 90% of drivers passing a speed trap were exceeding the speed limit, which was reduced because of road works. They kept writing tickets for a few days... and none of them stopped to think if perhaps the lower speed limit wasn't very clear, and if perhaps they should instead do something to slow oncoming traffic and make things safer for the construction workers. Nope, just keep that camera busy!
Some of those "10 boring Boston area" companies sound pretty interesting to me, with a revenue model based on creating services valuable enough for people to pay for them. Facebook? Now there's boring for you, yet another company luring eyeballs, selling adspace, and fencing data to marketeers. They just happened to be the right thing at the right time to get those eyeballs.
I'm sure these hackerspaces have some badass equipment and are simply oozing with Google Coolness, but the description left me rather unimpressed. The hackerspaces that have left an impression did so because of the stuff they made, not the stuff they had. And as Feynman said, it;s often a lack of fancy tools that stimulates creativity.
It's a cute myth, and the coin does fit in the center hole very nicely, but most likely both hole and coin sizes were picked for practical reasons, using a round number: 15mm.
The better myth is that the platter size was picked to be the same as a Heineken coaster. Perhaps the engineers foresaw the whole AOL CD spam thing, knowing how most of these CDs would end up being used...
I am fine with such apps making use of my current location. After asking me nicely, that is. And all apps on the iPhone do that: the first time (or 2 times) you use them you'll get a popup asking permission to use the current location. That is not quite the same thing as the phone tracking my location without my knowledge, and tracking that location over time to boot.
Outsource IT and you outsource responsiblity as well. If your own department fucks up, the top brass will come looking for you. However, If you outsource and the service provider messes up, you can shift the blame to them especially in case of big disasters like these. As long as you can show that you've managed the SLA's well and that it's them who didn't keep to their promises, you're good. More likely you'll find that those SLA's were crap to begin with, which is also fine, because it's likely your boss and his boss signed off on the deal as well. Pass the buck...
Often this is not the case, but it'll still work against you. If you are good at what you currently do, management will always be reluctant to promote you. They'll prefer to leave well enough alone, and instead promote the guy with mediocre performance but strong communication skills; maybe he'll improve his performance in a management role. From your manager's perspective, it kind of makes sense to take a chance on promoting a non-performer or hire a new guy, rather than promote they guy who is already doing a good job. That is why it makes sense to look for the next step in your career outside your own company... or you should be training your replacement from day 1. Never be irreplacable.
I think it's TBL being out of touch, not you. He's the one who should get up and out of his rocking chair. Or not, I don't really care as I don't really consider him to be a thought leader in social media. He sounds more like a systems guy.
Remember why Facebook offers such integration: to Facebook, you are not a customer; you're the product. A product generating data to be sold to marketeers. That is the real purpose of their offering of integration, Facebook currency, Like buttons, and soon to come: what is called the social layer on the WWW. It's all meant to generate valuable data, and it'll get worse and more pervasive as FB moves from the Grow and Consolidate phases to the Cash-in phase. And that is why I am staying well clear of Facebook, despite the fact that it does offer some value to its products, I mean customers.
Molten salt solar plants have some promise, as they are capable of generating electricity well into the night. But my money is still on PV; these things are getting better and cheaper to the point where it does start to make sense, bean counter wise. I can get a decent (2400Wp) home PV installation today that will pay for itself in about 10 years... with a subsidy per kWh generated. Not a bad investment, and I suspect that in 10 years or so we'll be able to buy installations that have a similar ROI without any subsidies. At that point it will make sense to build PV installations into the roofs of all new homes.
Wind on the other hand seems a dead end street; I doubt there will be many significant breakthroughs in cost, TCO or efficiency. They require space, are impopular due to horizon pollution, and are expensive to maintain (our govt was planning to build a wind farm out in the sea, you can only imagine the staggering cost of maintaining a setup like that!).
Good luck sueing the content provider if they go out of business. Farfetched? No, it has already happened a few times with companies selling music online, although in that case it was a DRM server being taken offline rather than streaming servers.
Or good luck sueing the provider if they government decides the content you previously enjoyed is now "undesirable" and no longer to be made available. And that is not that farfetched either, no matter what country you live in.
Slashdot Mirror
IT managers in my company with an attitude of "I will never allow this" will quickly find themselves looking for other work or at least having a very serious chat with their manager. A remarkable change from 5 years ago...
Many of our top brass as well as upper IT management are no longer sticking their fingers in their ears and going "no, no, no", they are coming around to the idea that this change is likely to happen, and are instead figuring out how to do this in a responsible way. If there is no way to do it safely, if there are no benefits, or if the cost is far too great, they will still say "no", but only after positively establishing facts instead of just going by sysadmin's opinions (which doesn't mean that those sysadmin's wont have part in making the decision). Which is a good attitude; we're not here to make any one particular person's job easier (not even the BOFH's), but to do business effectively.
There already seems to be a solid business case for doing this (and no, it is a little bit better than "we won't have to buy laptops for our workers anymore"). I think that in our company, this will be a reality in 2-4 years.
Super injunctions exist to prevent the Streisand effect. Of course that only works when those who know of them, stick to them. In this case they need something stronger... double secret injuction?
I agree that it's a matter of mindset, but it's not assholeness. I notice this all the time: young people and kids will go through every button and menu, try everything out, when they get their hands on a new device. Middle aged people like myself still like to tinker a bit but we're not as curious anymore. Once the device more or less performs as we expect it to, we'll leave it alone. And the elderly might be somewhat afraid to tinker with new tech.
When we got our grandma a VCR, she kept asking us to program the timer to record her favourite shows. She said she "would never understand something that complex"... so we just sat her down and took her through the motions, manual in hand. 15 minutes later she was amazed at how easy it turned out to be. The thing that had kept her from using her VCR wasn't a crap interface, it was fear to try.
Of course there are some awfully designed interfaces out there, but they are awful to everyone (Siemens microwave department, are you reading this?!). And don't get me started on the quality of manuals these days...
Actually, one of the major carriers in NL announced that they will start charging extra for certain services such as Skype, Ping, and WhatsApp. Other carriers are eagerly following suit. The driver for this is not data congestion but the fact that these services eat into their traditional revenue, however they are already considering charging extra for data-heavy services like Youtube. In other words, throwing net neutrality out the window.
On the plus side, EC commissioner ms. Kroes is still kicking ass and taking names, and just launched a proposal to cap outrageous data roaming charges in Europe to €0.90/MB, lowering this further to €0.50/MB in 2014. Current charges are typically over €2/MB (in some cases it's €10). That price cap is such that one can now comfortably enable data roaming when travelling within Europe.
Famous indeed....
Facebook's lawyers disagree, and they are well-paid and prepared to fight for the bitter end. Are you prepared to take them on, knowing that being right in these cases very rarely matters unless you have your own army of lawyers to back you up?
As I understand the case, DPI might not actually be illegal per se, but you can't do it without the customer's consent. And there's nothing about DPI in the current agreement. So, to continue to use this they will have to offer new terms to their customers, who then have the option to accept them or cancel without fees or penalties (or the company can offer to keep the old terms until the end of your contract, which they often do in case of contracts with subsidized handsets).
Success doesn't come from finding a happy medium, or from having more process or less process. It comes from understanding what you are doing and trying to accomplish, so that you can have the right amount of process that is lean and fit for purpose. The problem is that this understanding rarely exists. Managers often do not have it, and in larger organisations where you have mutliple departments working together you rarely find processes that have been designed with the full organisation in mind. Once you understand this, you can design processes that fit your organisation, and they will be different in every case.
It's rarely a question of too little or too much: people will ignore pointless processes and bypass hopeless ones even if there are only a few of them. And the same people will cheerfully stick to heavyweight, time consuming controls, if it makes sense for their work (aircraft control systems for example).
Dysfunction? Seriously, speak for (and get over) yourself. Sure, there are plenty of dysmal things in our history but there is greatness too, and there are men and women everywhere, poor or well-off, who are striving to be better than they are. This dream of travelling to the stars is part of that.
On the other hand, some say that we need to spread out beyond Earth because we are so dysfunctional, and now have the capacity to destroy ourselves.
I never got used to RPN, but I do love the HPs; I have my trusty 20S in front of me now. I got it as a present when I went to college, and now, 23 years later I am still using it regularly, and it's only on its second set of batteries if you can believe that. I like it a lot because it is not overly complicated, it has more or less the same number of buttons as a regular scientific calculator of the era, except better precision... and a "backspace" button!
Sure, and in the process he opens up his company and others for more trolling, meanwhile fattening the troll's war chest. Just like it's cheaper to pay off Guido instead of having him and his pal Vinnie come over to bust up your warehouse. In both cases, paying up might be the prudent choice, but it's still sad that these bullies get away with it.
As I recall, Wikileaks leaked very little counterterrorism intel. Most of it was governmental and corporate shenanigans. So, governments do underhanded deals that they have absolutely no business doing, and departments clam up on info sharing because governments want to keep those shady deals (not counterterrorism intel) a secret from the general public, and you're blaming Wikileaks for the next terrorist strike? Nice...
The "best" places for speed traps, according to the Dutch police, are not dangerous spots but the spots that generate the most revenue. For example, a dual carriageway that looks like one where 80km/h is the norm, is safe for and built for 80, but actually has a limit of 50km/h because it happens to be in the (poorly signposted) city limits.
A typical example: cops expressed shock that over 90% of drivers passing a speed trap were exceeding the speed limit, which was reduced because of road works. They kept writing tickets for a few days... and none of them stopped to think if perhaps the lower speed limit wasn't very clear, and if perhaps they should instead do something to slow oncoming traffic and make things safer for the construction workers. Nope, just keep that camera busy!
Some of those "10 boring Boston area" companies sound pretty interesting to me, with a revenue model based on creating services valuable enough for people to pay for them. Facebook? Now there's boring for you, yet another company luring eyeballs, selling adspace, and fencing data to marketeers. They just happened to be the right thing at the right time to get those eyeballs.
I'm sure these hackerspaces have some badass equipment and are simply oozing with Google Coolness, but the description left me rather unimpressed. The hackerspaces that have left an impression did so because of the stuff they made, not the stuff they had. And as Feynman said, it;s often a lack of fancy tools that stimulates creativity.
And that's why I try to avoid buying hardware from companies that also do business in content production (Sony) or distribution (Apple, Amazon).
It's a cute myth, and the coin does fit in the center hole very nicely, but most likely both hole and coin sizes were picked for practical reasons, using a round number: 15mm.
The better myth is that the platter size was picked to be the same as a Heineken coaster. Perhaps the engineers foresaw the whole AOL CD spam thing, knowing how most of these CDs would end up being used...
I am fine with such apps making use of my current location. After asking me nicely, that is. And all apps on the iPhone do that: the first time (or 2 times) you use them you'll get a popup asking permission to use the current location. That is not quite the same thing as the phone tracking my location without my knowledge, and tracking that location over time to boot.
Asking questions that are better left unasked. Just hope no one will come mod you down... in person.
Outsource IT and you outsource responsiblity as well. If your own department fucks up, the top brass will come looking for you. However, If you outsource and the service provider messes up, you can shift the blame to them especially in case of big disasters like these. As long as you can show that you've managed the SLA's well and that it's them who didn't keep to their promises, you're good. More likely you'll find that those SLA's were crap to begin with, which is also fine, because it's likely your boss and his boss signed off on the deal as well. Pass the buck...
Often this is not the case, but it'll still work against you. If you are good at what you currently do, management will always be reluctant to promote you. They'll prefer to leave well enough alone, and instead promote the guy with mediocre performance but strong communication skills; maybe he'll improve his performance in a management role. From your manager's perspective, it kind of makes sense to take a chance on promoting a non-performer or hire a new guy, rather than promote they guy who is already doing a good job. That is why it makes sense to look for the next step in your career outside your own company... or you should be training your replacement from day 1. Never be irreplacable.
I think it's TBL being out of touch, not you. He's the one who should get up and out of his rocking chair. Or not, I don't really care as I don't really consider him to be a thought leader in social media. He sounds more like a systems guy.
Remember why Facebook offers such integration: to Facebook, you are not a customer; you're the product. A product generating data to be sold to marketeers. That is the real purpose of their offering of integration, Facebook currency, Like buttons, and soon to come: what is called the social layer on the WWW. It's all meant to generate valuable data, and it'll get worse and more pervasive as FB moves from the Grow and Consolidate phases to the Cash-in phase. And that is why I am staying well clear of Facebook, despite the fact that it does offer some value to its products, I mean customers.
Molten salt solar plants have some promise, as they are capable of generating electricity well into the night. But my money is still on PV; these things are getting better and cheaper to the point where it does start to make sense, bean counter wise. I can get a decent (2400Wp) home PV installation today that will pay for itself in about 10 years... with a subsidy per kWh generated. Not a bad investment, and I suspect that in 10 years or so we'll be able to buy installations that have a similar ROI without any subsidies. At that point it will make sense to build PV installations into the roofs of all new homes.
Wind on the other hand seems a dead end street; I doubt there will be many significant breakthroughs in cost, TCO or efficiency. They require space, are impopular due to horizon pollution, and are expensive to maintain (our govt was planning to build a wind farm out in the sea, you can only imagine the staggering cost of maintaining a setup like that!).
Good luck sueing the content provider if they go out of business. Farfetched? No, it has already happened a few times with companies selling music online, although in that case it was a DRM server being taken offline rather than streaming servers.
Or good luck sueing the provider if they government decides the content you previously enjoyed is now "undesirable" and no longer to be made available. And that is not that farfetched either, no matter what country you live in.