Only an idiot(or a salesman) wants to put desktop apps in the cloud.
The cloud is for apps you've already put on a server, and if you wouldn't put it on a local server down the hall you definitely shouldn't put it in the cloud.
I have a lot of reservations about the cloud, and I have a lot of issues with the requirements of the business. That doesn't change the fact that I work in a service department, no different than cleaning or building maintenance. I get paid because what I do helps the business to succeed, not for any other reason. If what I'm doing isn't helping the business to succeed, then I'm not earning the money that I'm being paid. That's just the way it is. IT exists to assist the business, the business, we are, for the most part, employed in a service industry.
Data access, security, and integrity are important. However, your idea of data access, security, and integrity, and how important each of those three things are isn't necessarily the same as that of the people who pay you.
Telling your employer that you won't deliver the service they want you to deliver without giving a good reason why is going to get you ignored and/or fired. Presuming that your reasons are better or more important than their reasons will get you ignored and/or fired. Your job is to deliver the services they want, and yes you should have relatively free reign in choosing the best way to deliver those services, but not in choosing whether they should be getting those services.
SaaS is a rather moronic marketing idea. While having your version of software product X sit on a server somewhere for which you are charged a monthly fee is the wet dream of every software publisher and gartner analyst, it's not really a realistic. Certainly Application Service Provider's exist, and certainly enterprise customers do and will continue to pay for these services, but the idea of moving core thick client applications to the web has yet to see significant interest. The idea of doing this on the consumer market, where Software Assurance and paid support really aren't on radar is just never going to happen.
The cloud is really about delivering HaaS that is to say Hardware as a Service, which is much more interesting, and much more beneficial. A web app may never be as fast as a local copy, but being able to pay for hardware on demand is really rather useful. Generally speaking, if you have a proper business model, demand is directly proportional to revenue, but for IT hardware, supply was not directly linked to demand. You tried to buy what you thought you would need, and if you were wrong you ended up losing money(either because you couldn't deliver your service or you had hardware you didn't need). Most of the time, especially in the early days of a business, these estimations are wrong.
Now there's some argument to be made that for most businesses the current pricing for the cloud isn't attractive enough for them to bother yet or that the technology isn't mature enough yet to have sufficient standardization to have manageable levels of vendor lock-in, but that doesn't mean that the idea in and of itself is faulty.
Certainly SaaS providers are great candidates for HaaS since they have to deliver their software under variable loads, but the real benefits of the cloud have very little to do with delivering your word processor over the internet and an awful lot to do with delivering servers on demand.
IANAL, but I'm fairly certain that you retain ownership of the data you put on the cloud, and that it would not be part of any sale. That doesn't give the new owner the right to view it, and you aren't "sharing information" with them, you're renting storage from them. If you store your servers in a data center and I buy that data center, your servers don't become mine anymore than this data would belong to the new owners of the cloud company. Yes, if your cloud provider sells out to someone who doesn't particularly care about the law and is willing to break it, then you're screwed, but realistically if you go with someone fairly reputable(Amazon and Google certainly come to mind) then you'll have a lot of warning before it gets to that point, and you'd probably reach unusable service levels and have to bugger off way before that point.
Does this mean you shouldn't buy cloud services from some two bit company with a couple of servers in a back room somewhere, or from some start up with no reputation or history if you care about your data? HELL YES! However, the likelihood of a major player selling out to a company not subject to basic legal protections for this sort of thing are just short of nonexistent at the moment. Could google or Amazon go down hill that far, potentially yes, but you'd see it coming for a very long time.
The basic problem with this is that it presumes that your data is profitable to your cloud provider. It's not.
For it to be so, they'd have to be able to make more money from stealing your information than they could ever make from the cloud computing game(and for that matter everything else they do), and whatever legal penalties they'd have to pay for doing it. Given that most of the serious players in this market are multi-billion dollar companies, that would have to be a hell of a lot of money, and if you're storing private data that's worth that kind of cash, you can probably afford to put it in your own data centre.
Every day your company's data is exposed to people who have far less to lose by stealing it than a cloud computing provider, and comparatively far more to gain. For a mere few million bucks any one of your IT guys could retire to a non extradition country and live in luxury for the rest of their lives. They're also far more likely to become vindictive and try to damage you for no gain than a large multi-national. You trust them (or your company trusts you), and that's just the way it is.
I know that most of us are more than a little paranoid about this sort of thing, but the reality of the situation is that cloud vendors have an awful lot to lose even from external security breaches, and far more than your information is worth to lose from a deliberate one.
The thing is, you're not their parents. You're an employee of the business, as is your department. Your job is to facilitate what they do, not to do what you think is right, you don't generate any revenue, they do.
That doesn't mean you can't raise concerns, point out hidden costs(including jail time for some things), etc, or that there aren't some circumstances where "no, we can't do that because...." isn't the right response, but in the end, while you might be the custodian, it's their data, and you've got to do what they ask you to do wherever possible.
Being a dick and thinking you have the right to control what they do with their data is probably one of the reasons you don't get asked until the end in the first place. I've been driven up the wall by business requests too, and I've seen more than my share of absolutely idiotic ones, but the reality of the situation is that IT doesn't own the data, and the role of IT is to make the business work better, and that's really the end of it. Anything you do which doesn't result in improvements for the business(compliance with legislation/law suit protection is an improvement) is waste, and while a certain amount of waste is unavoidable, it should be minimal.
The thing is that that's not a technical limitation, it's a business process/legal one.
That is to say, it's an issue which technical people have no control over. This is the interesting thing about the cloud, in theory it's actually quite a good idea, and from a technical standpoint it pretty much works. There are issues, and those issues will probably stop cloud computing for a while yet, but they're the kind of issues which are entirely external. That means that, in reality, any one of us could walk into work one day and find that we're going to be moving all our stuff to the cloud, and there's not really a whole lot we could do about it. For the most part there just aren't any purely technical objections to the cloud(barring of course operating a business in a country which doesn't have any cloud data centers).
If EU regulators think that MySQL is EVER going to threaten Oracle's database software then they're high on something.
If they think that Oracle might can MySQL because they think it'll never make any serious money and it's not worth the effort, they're probably right.
If they think that Oracle not putting any development resources into MySQL means that open source databases are going to disappear they're high on something.
Even more importantly, they aren't even competitors.
Despite all the claims and lies about enterprise editions, MySQL still isn't remotely appropriate for handling large enterprise systems(and probably never will be), and Oracle is such a resource hungry behemoth that using it in any of the spaces where MySQL is appropriate would be an exercise in folly. If Oracle were acquiring MS SQL server, that'd be an anti-trust issue, but no one sane uses MySQL to replace Oracle in any place where Oracle was even remotely appropriate or vice versa.
That's certainly true, the business environment and laws of the US are indeed very different than those of Europe, but the OP is also right that the European Commission seems to get off on abusing American firms. They're certainly not alone in this, hating the US has been very popular at least since the start of the Bush administration, that doesn't make it right or particularly in the interest of the people they're supposed to be representing.
Despite the belief of Slashdot, most companies don't get to the point of a $32 million dollar lawsuit without trying some fairly rigorous steps to prevent getting to that point. Nor do judges tend to make decisions about "should have known" without at least "some" evidence that this was the case. Hell no one has even tried this one against a file sharer or torrent site, and I'm sure some lawyers thought about it.
The premise for cases like this is that deliberate ignorance is not a defense. You can't do a house inspection walk through the basement and pretend that the meth lab isn't there, you know it's there and you're responsible for doing something about it.
There have been any number of absolutely amazing and revolutionary changes in the last 50 years, they just haven't been as "in your face" as the ones in the previous 50 years.
In the last 50 years, we've had cures for diseases they didn't even know existed 50 years ago. We've had degrees of miniaturization which are just ridiculous, as well as increases in efficiency which are monumental. Yes these may seem like refinements in their results, but the technology behind them has been absolutely amazing. No one realistically predicted things like integrated circuits 50 years ago, even if they predicted the kinds of things that would be made with them. There's no car, or plane, or anything like that, but it doesn't change the fact that revolutionary discoveries have been made.
There's also the sci-fi factor. The 20th century, particularly the second half, was really the peak science fiction, people envisaged all sorts of things, many of which are probably impossible, they just imagined everything. This make it seem like everything we have was old hat, whereas just because an author came up with the idea it doesn't mean that making it work wasn't revolutionary. We've been fantasizing about flying cars for probably as long as there have been cars, but that won't mean that if/when they actually work it won't be a revolutionary discovery.
For another thing while no one likes vendor lock in, vendor lock in has absolutely nothing to do with how much you pay for the software licenses. Investing in serious linux infrastructure is as much a lockin to that vendor as doing the same thing on Windows. License fees just aren't that large a percentage of operational costs. Even if you write your own there's vendor lock-in, you're just the vendor. Getting something else is still expensive and difficult, no matter what you had before.
So it really comes down to what the benefits and costs of being locked into a specific Historically, Microsoft will support whatever version of Windows you choose to use for more than a decade so long as you keep paying them. Generally Linux distributions do not do this. If you lose a staff member, Microsoft techs are a dime a dozen, the same cannot be said for qualified linux techs.
The reality of the situation is that going open source does not automatically solve everyone's problems, it may be the solution, but you're not going to prove that by saying "you should go with us because the alternative is evil". Aside from the fact that evil is probably an overstatement, convincing fortune 500 CIO's that getting paid for your product is fundamentally evil is a hard sell.
The way to sell open source to companies is to understand what they get out of their current product, what they don't get out of their product, and how they might be unhappy with elements of one or the other. Then you show them how your product is better for their needs. Just like every other salesman. Telling them what they're doing is morally wrong might work if they're breaking the law or killing people, but using commercial software just doesn't rate.
The basic reality is that pretty much every CPU you can still buy for a desktop(and a laptop is not designed for the kind of use you're talking about) is already 64 bit and has been for a few years. 64 bit Operating Systems are available and stable. Vista x64 is great, Linux has supported 64 bit for years, I haven't used XP x64, but it's supposed to be fine and dandy to.
Given these circumstances and the fact that any other solution to the 4 GB problem is basically a nasty hack with performance problems. There's really no excuse not to go 64 bit.
Yes you don't have to go 64 bit, and you can try and hack your way around the limit any way you like, but in the end whatever you get will be less than what you'd have if you just went 64 bit. Hell, if you own Vista Ultimate, you can use the same license key and go 64 bit for free(or shipping and handling for the disk if you don't have one on hand).
Yes, however, the number of linux gamers(that is to say linux users who buy games, and who don't have a windows machine) is very likely not even close to half of all linux users, probably much closer to 1 or 2% of all linux users.
Cull out the people who would refuse to use a closed source binary blob driver from that group, and you're probably down to about.25% or something alone those lines(I'd presume most of the people adamant enough about open source to not have a windows system would refuse a binary driver too).
While I'd still take a buck from all of them if I didn't have to do anything to get it, I might be a little less enthused about getting even $50 from each of them if I had to spend a few hundred thousand plus support costs to do it.
It wasn't really the guide, though what the guide is is a little bit fluid, there's the tv mini series, the two different radio series, the books in print, the books on tape read by Adam's himself, as well as the movie. They're all very different, and all funny in their own way. A bit like Monty Python in a sense, the best sketches were done so many times and always involved at least some improvisation so those lines embedded in your brain may not actually be in the version you read/watch.
It was however, at least I thought, in the spirit of the guide. It's a little less bitter and twisted than the originals were, but if Douglas Adams himself was a lot less cynical and bitter towards the end so that's not really all that surprising. My understanding is that the whole thing started because Douglas Adams used to make a tv show where the world exploded at the end of every episode and he wondered what it would be like to start a story with the world exploding instead. The Douglas Adams of later years was not that same person.
The biggest problem with the movie was that most people seem to only believe that one of the many formats is the true guide. Some people don't even know there was a radio drama, or a tv mini series, and they don't realize that the universe was different every single time, and so they expect the movie to be the books, but on film, which it wasn't and wasn't supposed to be. The fact that Douglas Adams died before the movie was released, just adds to things because those same people can blame Hollywood for ruining the story, when the reality is that Douglas Adams was heavily involved with the process and the result would likely have been very similar had he survived.
The reality of the situation is that it's not really all that hard a sell to claim you felt your life was in danger.
Debt collectors tend to work mostly by intimidation factor. They kind of have to, because they can't actually take the money, or any assets that you own (collateral for secured loans is different, when you have a mortgage or an auto loan, the bank generally has the title to that property not you) without breaking the law. If you don't have a secured asset they can claim all they can do is try to threaten or harass you.
As such, generally speaking you'll find that most debt collectors are large brutish looking thugs who will generally claim to have all sorts of ability to force you to pay that they do not actually have. Convincing a jury that you felt your life was in danger from some thug who turned up on your property demanding money who then refused to leave when asked isn't exactly a hard sell. I mean if you're a member of special forces and the debt collector is a 5 foot tall woman then yes you might have some issues, but you're also more than capable of removing them without resorting to the firearm.
This doesn't of course apply to all trespassers, if some 8 year old kid is sitting on your lawn and you want him or her off and they refuse to go, shooting them if they didn't attack you first is probably going to send you to jail, but debt collectors generally aren't unarmed 8 year old kids.
Actually, millions of people have gaming ready PC's, if you stop trying to one up your graphics every time.
There's a big gap between popcap games and crysis and there's a huge market for games within that gap which don't have to be tetris.
The primary reason for the decline of PC gaming was that developers didn't realize that people have stopped buying a new PC every year, because for the most part there isn't any need to. They're perfectly happy to create games for consoles using 5 year old graphics hardware, but the idea that they could create games for that level of graphics on the PC seems to totally fail to cross their minds. Half the PC world has a graphics card which is on the order of at least a 5000 series Nvidia card, but they make games with huge amounts of features which can only be used on cards that aren't even out yet. Not even the PS3 has a card that powerful, but they can't control themselves these days. They make games which by the time anyone other than a few nutters has a system to see the graphics will be yesterday's news.
I personally find that while cool at first, voice actors just mean severely limited dialogue and character options. Certainly bad voice actors are horrible and can ruin a game, but I've played a lot of games with no voice acting at all, both new and old, which were perfectly acceptable. A great story does require dialogue, but it doesn't necessarily require voice actors.
Musicians are really a fairly minor part of the equation as they don't get paid anywhere near as highly as actors and composers(who actually are expensive) have always been necessary. The mario music was as much the work of some creative composer as anything from a modern game, and hiring an orchestra to record something for you isn't really all that expensive in the grand scheme of things, there are plenty of musicians out there who just want to eat and can play well enough(though not write anything worthwhile) who are also cheap.
Even graphics(which is where a lot of money goes) can be cut down a bit. The vast majority of players of any given game do not have a current state of the art gaming rig and so generally most of the top end features which took all the time aren't ever actually seen by anyone because they have to turn down the settings.
DRM is also stupid. It's not stupid because game developers don't have a right to feed their families, it's stupid because it doesn't work, and realistically can never work. There are always more clever people trying to break any DRM scheme than there are people implementing it, and they can always dedicate more man hours. That's just the way it is. All DRM has ever done is inconvenience legitimate customers and prevent small incidental piracy. Preventing that small incidental piracy is perfectly fine, but the bar required to do so is far lower than the increasingly draconian DRM that companies are spending money on.
The point of all of this is that companies have to do what makes them money. If the current model isn't working for them(and the article claims that it isn't) then changes have to be made. That probably means either increasing revenue or decreasing costs. While people do pay higher prices for games in other parts of the world than they do in the states(a new game is about $AU80-100 here in Australia), there probably isn't much wiggle room there. There's an argument to be made for selling more copies of cheaper games, but there's been no convincing arguments that this would actually create real profit increases. That essentially leave cutting costs, which basically means cutting some of the things they're talking about. That might not work either, gamers might not accept games without huge development budgets, but they're not accepting games with huge development budgets either so they can't keep going as they are.
Most anecdotal evidence shows that some proportion of gamers prefer games which are fun to games which have flashy features. The Wii proves that such a market exists, though it may not translate onto more traditional platforms. Even if the number of sales does drop, even if it drops dramatically, if the per unit revenue increases faster than the sales drop, then they could still come out on top.
I'm perfectly ok with her monitoring the police, and even indicating where they went and approximately when if she wants to. So long as she doesn't break any laws in doing so that's her right and probably a great public service.
Personally identifying the officers involved is probably a little bit of a gray area since it could have a negative impact on legal police investigations, logging that is probably fine, but it's not particularly helpful to make that immediately public, a coded name would probably have been better with the real information saved for if it was necessary. Posting the officer's personal details was however, totally unnecessary, and wrong. Even if he was involved in illegal searches that information is inappropriate. Yes the information was a matter of public record. Yes anyone could have done the same thing. Yes she probably didn't break any laws, but she still shouldn't have done it. The law is not the ultimate guide to right and wrong. Some things which are right are illegal and a whole lot of things which are wrong are legal.
It's perfectly acceptable to monitor the police(so long as you aren't breaking any laws), but the police have a job to do like everyone else, and what they do at work and what they do at home is separate. There is no need to know where this officer lives. It does not serve the public interest, and in context with the activity log it potentially risked harm both to the officer and to anyone else who lived in that house. The fact that it was(probably) legal doesn't defend this woman's actions in the slightest. Legality and Morality are not the same thing.
No prejudice. The OP pointed out a statistical anomaly which isn't backed up by external evidence(there aren't a disproportionately high number of Eastern Europeans in any other area of IT that I know of). I fully believe that these kids are probably fairly smart and were definitely the best at whatever the competition actually tested(whether that's informatics or not). I also know that a lot of times, these sorts of international prizes go to the country which is willing to dedicate the most resources to winning them. The US has a lot of baseline resources, but they don't generally push a lot of extra resources into things like this.
These kids most likely had a better chance of winning this competition because someone in their government cared about the competition, that's just life.
I'd think it was bullshit even if it was one by the US every year, I thought it was bullshit before I even read the kids name. The fact that it was held in Wisconsin when I was actually in Wisconsin in a university computer science degree program and I've never heard of it before is a fair indication that it's probably not considered all that important. The fact that they held it at UW parkside is another. The UW system has about 15 schools, and parkside is just about the smallest and least prestigious of them. It's not even anywhere near an international airport, so it doesn't even have the excuse of being convenient.
It's an informatics spelling bee. The kid may be brilliant, he may be nothing. He may go on to invent something absolutely amazing, he may end up flipping burgers for the rest of his life. None of these contests are ever solid indicators of future success.
My primary point was that TFA indicates that the kids who win this take a significant amount of time off school to prepare for it. Aside from the fact that any contest for high school students which requires them to stop being high school students to compete is stupid to begin with, assuming this has any requirements of actually being a high school student(as opposed to only being under 21), then you would need school approval to take that time off.
Even if it doesn't, school attendance in most western nations is mandatory for at least a portion of this time(I know you can't drop out till 16 in the US and then you need your parents permission). In most countries in the world, getting approval to continue as a student without actually attending classes involves talking to someone in government(sometimes state, but often federal).
Generally those folks don't do anything that isn't in their own best interest even if it doesn't really cost them anything to do so. Therefor a country which really wants to prove that it's not a completely inconsequential backwater or for whom having a winner of something like this would mean something to the general citizenry is likely to approve it are likely to bother. Eastern Europe has shown over the years in the regular olympics that both of these things are true in the region.
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with this kid, or that there's anything wrong with Eastern Europeans, but I've never seen anything to indicate that, on the whole, Eastern Europeans are any smarter or better educated than anyone else in the world, and outside of porn and botnets there isn't much of an IT industry over there to be encouraging and developing them.
Well it could be because, as far as I can tell, this meaningless high school contest is held in Bulgaria, which is within in the eastern block. It doesn't take much to get there from Eastern Europe and I think you'd find that kids from the region make up most of the competition.
TFA seems to also indicate that the kid who wins generally takes time off of school to do nothing but prepare for this thing. Generally speaking, only backwater countries who want anyone to remember they actually exist allow this sort of thing. Can you imagine getting approval for this sort of thing in the states or the UK? I doubt many teachers would approve of having a kid postpone high school for something like this? Eastern Europe basically invented this routine back in the soviet days.
This competition, from what little I can tell of it, seems like it basically means a whole lot of nothing, and it's won by kids who prepare for it above all else, so it's won by a lot of people from countries whose governments value winning this sort of thing above all else.
No, using an SSN(or something like it) is necessary because you need some number which identifies someone uniquely so that you can cross match records and all the things a PK does in a database. It doesn't necessarily have to be the SSN, but the SSN is a convenient number because everyone ought to have one and it's unique to the person as opposed to the account which is important for a number of reasons.
That said, while, at least when correctly supplied, an SSN is uniquely identifying and a perfectly good number for a PK, it does not provide the important step associating you with it. That's why identity theft with an SSN is possible. When I got my US drivers license, I had to provide my birth certificate and social security card. I wasn't required to produce any other identification or supporting documentation, I don't think they even looked at it long enough to have picked out a good forgery. My photo was put on that driver's license and all of a sudden it was me. From there I could open bank accounts, get credit cards, sign leases, all that sort of thing, with zero real proof I was who I said I was. Those bank accounts and credit cards provide further identification that I am who I say I am, but no proof I'm not lying.
This is the fundamental problem which causes identity theft. Your identity is based only on something you have. As I've said I'm not sure what the answers are going to be, some sort of genetic database? An encrypted ID card which is harder to fake than a social security card? Something else? Not using your SSN is really only security via obscurity because fundamentally the number has to be known by any number of people for it to work.
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Only an idiot(or a salesman) wants to put desktop apps in the cloud.
The cloud is for apps you've already put on a server, and if you wouldn't put it on a local server down the hall you definitely shouldn't put it in the cloud.
I have a lot of reservations about the cloud, and I have a lot of issues with the requirements of the business. That doesn't change the fact that I work in a service department, no different than cleaning or building maintenance. I get paid because what I do helps the business to succeed, not for any other reason. If what I'm doing isn't helping the business to succeed, then I'm not earning the money that I'm being paid. That's just the way it is. IT exists to assist the business, the business, we are, for the most part, employed in a service industry.
Data access, security, and integrity are important. However, your idea of data access, security, and integrity, and how important each of those three things are isn't necessarily the same as that of the people who pay you.
Telling your employer that you won't deliver the service they want you to deliver without giving a good reason why is going to get you ignored and/or fired. Presuming that your reasons are better or more important than their reasons will get you ignored and/or fired. Your job is to deliver the services they want, and yes you should have relatively free reign in choosing the best way to deliver those services, but not in choosing whether they should be getting those services.
Cloud Computing != Google Apps.
Despite all the BS, Cloud Computing != SaaS.
SaaS is a rather moronic marketing idea. While having your version of software product X sit on a server somewhere for which you are charged a monthly fee is the wet dream of every software publisher and gartner analyst, it's not really a realistic. Certainly Application Service Provider's exist, and certainly enterprise customers do and will continue to pay for these services, but the idea of moving core thick client applications to the web has yet to see significant interest. The idea of doing this on the consumer market, where Software Assurance and paid support really aren't on radar is just never going to happen.
The cloud is really about delivering HaaS that is to say Hardware as a Service, which is much more interesting, and much more beneficial. A web app may never be as fast as a local copy, but being able to pay for hardware on demand is really rather useful. Generally speaking, if you have a proper business model, demand is directly proportional to revenue, but for IT hardware, supply was not directly linked to demand. You tried to buy what you thought you would need, and if you were wrong you ended up losing money(either because you couldn't deliver your service or you had hardware you didn't need). Most of the time, especially in the early days of a business, these estimations are wrong.
Now there's some argument to be made that for most businesses the current pricing for the cloud isn't attractive enough for them to bother yet or that the technology isn't mature enough yet to have sufficient standardization to have manageable levels of vendor lock-in, but that doesn't mean that the idea in and of itself is faulty.
Certainly SaaS providers are great candidates for HaaS since they have to deliver their software under variable loads, but the real benefits of the cloud have very little to do with delivering your word processor over the internet and an awful lot to do with delivering servers on demand.
IANAL, but I'm fairly certain that you retain ownership of the data you put on the cloud, and that it would not be part of any sale. That doesn't give the new owner the right to view it, and you aren't "sharing information" with them, you're renting storage from them. If you store your servers in a data center and I buy that data center, your servers don't become mine anymore than this data would belong to the new owners of the cloud company. Yes, if your cloud provider sells out to someone who doesn't particularly care about the law and is willing to break it, then you're screwed, but realistically if you go with someone fairly reputable(Amazon and Google certainly come to mind) then you'll have a lot of warning before it gets to that point, and you'd probably reach unusable service levels and have to bugger off way before that point.
Does this mean you shouldn't buy cloud services from some two bit company with a couple of servers in a back room somewhere, or from some start up with no reputation or history if you care about your data? HELL YES! However, the likelihood of a major player selling out to a company not subject to basic legal protections for this sort of thing are just short of nonexistent at the moment. Could google or Amazon go down hill that far, potentially yes, but you'd see it coming for a very long time.
The basic problem with this is that it presumes that your data is profitable to your cloud provider. It's not.
For it to be so, they'd have to be able to make more money from stealing your information than they could ever make from the cloud computing game(and for that matter everything else they do), and whatever legal penalties they'd have to pay for doing it. Given that most of the serious players in this market are multi-billion dollar companies, that would have to be a hell of a lot of money, and if you're storing private data that's worth that kind of cash, you can probably afford to put it in your own data centre.
Every day your company's data is exposed to people who have far less to lose by stealing it than a cloud computing provider, and comparatively far more to gain. For a mere few million bucks any one of your IT guys could retire to a non extradition country and live in luxury for the rest of their lives. They're also far more likely to become vindictive and try to damage you for no gain than a large multi-national. You trust them (or your company trusts you), and that's just the way it is.
I know that most of us are more than a little paranoid about this sort of thing, but the reality of the situation is that cloud vendors have an awful lot to lose even from external security breaches, and far more than your information is worth to lose from a deliberate one.
The thing is, you're not their parents. You're an employee of the business, as is your department. Your job is to facilitate what they do, not to do what you think is right, you don't generate any revenue, they do.
That doesn't mean you can't raise concerns, point out hidden costs(including jail time for some things), etc, or that there aren't some circumstances where "no, we can't do that because ...." isn't the right response, but in the end, while you might be the custodian, it's their data, and you've got to do what they ask you to do wherever possible.
Being a dick and thinking you have the right to control what they do with their data is probably one of the reasons you don't get asked until the end in the first place. I've been driven up the wall by business requests too, and I've seen more than my share of absolutely idiotic ones, but the reality of the situation is that IT doesn't own the data, and the role of IT is to make the business work better, and that's really the end of it. Anything you do which doesn't result in improvements for the business(compliance with legislation/law suit protection is an improvement) is waste, and while a certain amount of waste is unavoidable, it should be minimal.
The thing is that that's not a technical limitation, it's a business process/legal one.
That is to say, it's an issue which technical people have no control over. This is the interesting thing about the cloud, in theory it's actually quite a good idea, and from a technical standpoint it pretty much works. There are issues, and those issues will probably stop cloud computing for a while yet, but they're the kind of issues which are entirely external. That means that, in reality, any one of us could walk into work one day and find that we're going to be moving all our stuff to the cloud, and there's not really a whole lot we could do about it. For the most part there just aren't any purely technical objections to the cloud(barring of course operating a business in a country which doesn't have any cloud data centers).
If EU regulators think that MySQL is EVER going to threaten Oracle's database software then they're high on something.
If they think that Oracle might can MySQL because they think it'll never make any serious money and it's not worth the effort, they're probably right.
If they think that Oracle not putting any development resources into MySQL means that open source databases are going to disappear they're high on something.
Even more importantly, they aren't even competitors.
Despite all the claims and lies about enterprise editions, MySQL still isn't remotely appropriate for handling large enterprise systems(and probably never will be), and Oracle is such a resource hungry behemoth that using it in any of the spaces where MySQL is appropriate would be an exercise in folly. If Oracle were acquiring MS SQL server, that'd be an anti-trust issue, but no one sane uses MySQL to replace Oracle in any place where Oracle was even remotely appropriate or vice versa.
That's certainly true, the business environment and laws of the US are indeed very different than those of Europe, but the OP is also right that the European Commission seems to get off on abusing American firms. They're certainly not alone in this, hating the US has been very popular at least since the start of the Bush administration, that doesn't make it right or particularly in the interest of the people they're supposed to be representing.
Despite the belief of Slashdot, most companies don't get to the point of a $32 million dollar lawsuit without trying some fairly rigorous steps to prevent getting to that point. Nor do judges tend to make decisions about "should have known" without at least "some" evidence that this was the case. Hell no one has even tried this one against a file sharer or torrent site, and I'm sure some lawyers thought about it.
The premise for cases like this is that deliberate ignorance is not a defense. You can't do a house inspection walk through the basement and pretend that the meth lab isn't there, you know it's there and you're responsible for doing something about it.
There have been any number of absolutely amazing and revolutionary changes in the last 50 years, they just haven't been as "in your face" as the ones in the previous 50 years.
In the last 50 years, we've had cures for diseases they didn't even know existed 50 years ago. We've had degrees of miniaturization which are just ridiculous, as well as increases in efficiency which are monumental. Yes these may seem like refinements in their results, but the technology behind them has been absolutely amazing. No one realistically predicted things like integrated circuits 50 years ago, even if they predicted the kinds of things that would be made with them. There's no car, or plane, or anything like that, but it doesn't change the fact that revolutionary discoveries have been made.
There's also the sci-fi factor. The 20th century, particularly the second half, was really the peak science fiction, people envisaged all sorts of things, many of which are probably impossible, they just imagined everything. This make it seem like everything we have was old hat, whereas just because an author came up with the idea it doesn't mean that making it work wasn't revolutionary. We've been fantasizing about flying cars for probably as long as there have been cars, but that won't mean that if/when they actually work it won't be a revolutionary discovery.
Well for one, plenty of CIO's are stupid.
For another thing while no one likes vendor lock in, vendor lock in has absolutely nothing to do with how much you pay for the software licenses. Investing in serious linux infrastructure is as much a lockin to that vendor as doing the same thing on Windows. License fees just aren't that large a percentage of operational costs. Even if you write your own there's vendor lock-in, you're just the vendor. Getting something else is still expensive and difficult, no matter what you had before.
So it really comes down to what the benefits and costs of being locked into a specific Historically, Microsoft will support whatever version of Windows you choose to use for more than a decade so long as you keep paying them. Generally Linux distributions do not do this. If you lose a staff member, Microsoft techs are a dime a dozen, the same cannot be said for qualified linux techs.
The reality of the situation is that going open source does not automatically solve everyone's problems, it may be the solution, but you're not going to prove that by saying "you should go with us because the alternative is evil". Aside from the fact that evil is probably an overstatement, convincing fortune 500 CIO's that getting paid for your product is fundamentally evil is a hard sell.
The way to sell open source to companies is to understand what they get out of their current product, what they don't get out of their product, and how they might be unhappy with elements of one or the other. Then you show them how your product is better for their needs. Just like every other salesman. Telling them what they're doing is morally wrong might work if they're breaking the law or killing people, but using commercial software just doesn't rate.
The basic reality is that pretty much every CPU you can still buy for a desktop(and a laptop is not designed for the kind of use you're talking about) is already 64 bit and has been for a few years. 64 bit Operating Systems are available and stable. Vista x64 is great, Linux has supported 64 bit for years, I haven't used XP x64, but it's supposed to be fine and dandy to.
Given these circumstances and the fact that any other solution to the 4 GB problem is basically a nasty hack with performance problems. There's really no excuse not to go 64 bit.
Yes you don't have to go 64 bit, and you can try and hack your way around the limit any way you like, but in the end whatever you get will be less than what you'd have if you just went 64 bit. Hell, if you own Vista Ultimate, you can use the same license key and go 64 bit for free(or shipping and handling for the disk if you don't have one on hand).
Yes, however, the number of linux gamers(that is to say linux users who buy games, and who don't have a windows machine) is very likely not even close to half of all linux users, probably much closer to 1 or 2% of all linux users.
Cull out the people who would refuse to use a closed source binary blob driver from that group, and you're probably down to about .25% or something alone those lines(I'd presume most of the people adamant enough about open source to not have a windows system would refuse a binary driver too).
While I'd still take a buck from all of them if I didn't have to do anything to get it, I might be a little less enthused about getting even $50 from each of them if I had to spend a few hundred thousand plus support costs to do it.
Or I suppose technically starship titanic or whatever it was called, which Adams was pretty involved in too, even if it's more of a spin off.
I liked the movie actually.
It wasn't really the guide, though what the guide is is a little bit fluid, there's the tv mini series, the two different radio series, the books in print, the books on tape read by Adam's himself, as well as the movie. They're all very different, and all funny in their own way. A bit like Monty Python in a sense, the best sketches were done so many times and always involved at least some improvisation so those lines embedded in your brain may not actually be in the version you read/watch.
It was however, at least I thought, in the spirit of the guide. It's a little less bitter and twisted than the originals were, but if Douglas Adams himself was a lot less cynical and bitter towards the end so that's not really all that surprising. My understanding is that the whole thing started because Douglas Adams used to make a tv show where the world exploded at the end of every episode and he wondered what it would be like to start a story with the world exploding instead. The Douglas Adams of later years was not that same person.
The biggest problem with the movie was that most people seem to only believe that one of the many formats is the true guide. Some people don't even know there was a radio drama, or a tv mini series, and they don't realize that the universe was different every single time, and so they expect the movie to be the books, but on film, which it wasn't and wasn't supposed to be. The fact that Douglas Adams died before the movie was released, just adds to things because those same people can blame Hollywood for ruining the story, when the reality is that Douglas Adams was heavily involved with the process and the result would likely have been very similar had he survived.
The reality of the situation is that it's not really all that hard a sell to claim you felt your life was in danger.
Debt collectors tend to work mostly by intimidation factor. They kind of have to, because they can't actually take the money, or any assets that you own (collateral for secured loans is different, when you have a mortgage or an auto loan, the bank generally has the title to that property not you) without breaking the law. If you don't have a secured asset they can claim all they can do is try to threaten or harass you.
As such, generally speaking you'll find that most debt collectors are large brutish looking thugs who will generally claim to have all sorts of ability to force you to pay that they do not actually have. Convincing a jury that you felt your life was in danger from some thug who turned up on your property demanding money who then refused to leave when asked isn't exactly a hard sell. I mean if you're a member of special forces and the debt collector is a 5 foot tall woman then yes you might have some issues, but you're also more than capable of removing them without resorting to the firearm.
This doesn't of course apply to all trespassers, if some 8 year old kid is sitting on your lawn and you want him or her off and they refuse to go, shooting them if they didn't attack you first is probably going to send you to jail, but debt collectors generally aren't unarmed 8 year old kids.
Actually, millions of people have gaming ready PC's, if you stop trying to one up your graphics every time.
There's a big gap between popcap games and crysis and there's a huge market for games within that gap which don't have to be tetris.
The primary reason for the decline of PC gaming was that developers didn't realize that people have stopped buying a new PC every year, because for the most part there isn't any need to. They're perfectly happy to create games for consoles using 5 year old graphics hardware, but the idea that they could create games for that level of graphics on the PC seems to totally fail to cross their minds. Half the PC world has a graphics card which is on the order of at least a 5000 series Nvidia card, but they make games with huge amounts of features which can only be used on cards that aren't even out yet. Not even the PS3 has a card that powerful, but they can't control themselves these days. They make games which by the time anyone other than a few nutters has a system to see the graphics will be yesterday's news.
Do they really need all that?
I personally find that while cool at first, voice actors just mean severely limited dialogue and character options. Certainly bad voice actors are horrible and can ruin a game, but I've played a lot of games with no voice acting at all, both new and old, which were perfectly acceptable. A great story does require dialogue, but it doesn't necessarily require voice actors.
Musicians are really a fairly minor part of the equation as they don't get paid anywhere near as highly as actors and composers(who actually are expensive) have always been necessary. The mario music was as much the work of some creative composer as anything from a modern game, and hiring an orchestra to record something for you isn't really all that expensive in the grand scheme of things, there are plenty of musicians out there who just want to eat and can play well enough(though not write anything worthwhile) who are also cheap.
Even graphics(which is where a lot of money goes) can be cut down a bit. The vast majority of players of any given game do not have a current state of the art gaming rig and so generally most of the top end features which took all the time aren't ever actually seen by anyone because they have to turn down the settings.
DRM is also stupid. It's not stupid because game developers don't have a right to feed their families, it's stupid because it doesn't work, and realistically can never work. There are always more clever people trying to break any DRM scheme than there are people implementing it, and they can always dedicate more man hours. That's just the way it is. All DRM has ever done is inconvenience legitimate customers and prevent small incidental piracy. Preventing that small incidental piracy is perfectly fine, but the bar required to do so is far lower than the increasingly draconian DRM that companies are spending money on.
The point of all of this is that companies have to do what makes them money. If the current model isn't working for them(and the article claims that it isn't) then changes have to be made. That probably means either increasing revenue or decreasing costs. While people do pay higher prices for games in other parts of the world than they do in the states(a new game is about $AU80-100 here in Australia), there probably isn't much wiggle room there. There's an argument to be made for selling more copies of cheaper games, but there's been no convincing arguments that this would actually create real profit increases. That essentially leave cutting costs, which basically means cutting some of the things they're talking about. That might not work either, gamers might not accept games without huge development budgets, but they're not accepting games with huge development budgets either so they can't keep going as they are.
Most anecdotal evidence shows that some proportion of gamers prefer games which are fun to games which have flashy features. The Wii proves that such a market exists, though it may not translate onto more traditional platforms. Even if the number of sales does drop, even if it drops dramatically, if the per unit revenue increases faster than the sales drop, then they could still come out on top.
I'm perfectly ok with her monitoring the police, and even indicating where they went and approximately when if she wants to. So long as she doesn't break any laws in doing so that's her right and probably a great public service.
Personally identifying the officers involved is probably a little bit of a gray area since it could have a negative impact on legal police investigations, logging that is probably fine, but it's not particularly helpful to make that immediately public, a coded name would probably have been better with the real information saved for if it was necessary. Posting the officer's personal details was however, totally unnecessary, and wrong. Even if he was involved in illegal searches that information is inappropriate. Yes the information was a matter of public record. Yes anyone could have done the same thing. Yes she probably didn't break any laws, but she still shouldn't have done it. The law is not the ultimate guide to right and wrong. Some things which are right are illegal and a whole lot of things which are wrong are legal.
It's perfectly acceptable to monitor the police(so long as you aren't breaking any laws), but the police have a job to do like everyone else, and what they do at work and what they do at home is separate. There is no need to know where this officer lives. It does not serve the public interest, and in context with the activity log it potentially risked harm both to the officer and to anyone else who lived in that house. The fact that it was(probably) legal doesn't defend this woman's actions in the slightest. Legality and Morality are not the same thing.
No prejudice. The OP pointed out a statistical anomaly which isn't backed up by external evidence(there aren't a disproportionately high number of Eastern Europeans in any other area of IT that I know of). I fully believe that these kids are probably fairly smart and were definitely the best at whatever the competition actually tested(whether that's informatics or not). I also know that a lot of times, these sorts of international prizes go to the country which is willing to dedicate the most resources to winning them. The US has a lot of baseline resources, but they don't generally push a lot of extra resources into things like this.
These kids most likely had a better chance of winning this competition because someone in their government cared about the competition, that's just life.
I'd think it was bullshit even if it was one by the US every year, I thought it was bullshit before I even read the kids name. The fact that it was held in Wisconsin when I was actually in Wisconsin in a university computer science degree program and I've never heard of it before is a fair indication that it's probably not considered all that important. The fact that they held it at UW parkside is another. The UW system has about 15 schools, and parkside is just about the smallest and least prestigious of them. It's not even anywhere near an international airport, so it doesn't even have the excuse of being convenient.
It's an informatics spelling bee. The kid may be brilliant, he may be nothing. He may go on to invent something absolutely amazing, he may end up flipping burgers for the rest of his life. None of these contests are ever solid indicators of future success.
My primary point was that TFA indicates that the kids who win this take a significant amount of time off school to prepare for it. Aside from the fact that any contest for high school students which requires them to stop being high school students to compete is stupid to begin with, assuming this has any requirements of actually being a high school student(as opposed to only being under 21), then you would need school approval to take that time off.
Even if it doesn't, school attendance in most western nations is mandatory for at least a portion of this time(I know you can't drop out till 16 in the US and then you need your parents permission). In most countries in the world, getting approval to continue as a student without actually attending classes involves talking to someone in government(sometimes state, but often federal).
Generally those folks don't do anything that isn't in their own best interest even if it doesn't really cost them anything to do so. Therefor a country which really wants to prove that it's not a completely inconsequential backwater or for whom having a winner of something like this would mean something to the general citizenry is likely to approve it are likely to bother. Eastern Europe has shown over the years in the regular olympics that both of these things are true in the region.
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with this kid, or that there's anything wrong with Eastern Europeans, but I've never seen anything to indicate that, on the whole, Eastern Europeans are any smarter or better educated than anyone else in the world, and outside of porn and botnets there isn't much of an IT industry over there to be encouraging and developing them.
Well it could be because, as far as I can tell, this meaningless high school contest is held in Bulgaria, which is within in the eastern block. It doesn't take much to get there from Eastern Europe and I think you'd find that kids from the region make up most of the competition.
TFA seems to also indicate that the kid who wins generally takes time off of school to do nothing but prepare for this thing. Generally speaking, only backwater countries who want anyone to remember they actually exist allow this sort of thing. Can you imagine getting approval for this sort of thing in the states or the UK? I doubt many teachers would approve of having a kid postpone high school for something like this? Eastern Europe basically invented this routine back in the soviet days.
This competition, from what little I can tell of it, seems like it basically means a whole lot of nothing, and it's won by kids who prepare for it above all else, so it's won by a lot of people from countries whose governments value winning this sort of thing above all else.
No, using an SSN(or something like it) is necessary because you need some number which identifies someone uniquely so that you can cross match records and all the things a PK does in a database. It doesn't necessarily have to be the SSN, but the SSN is a convenient number because everyone ought to have one and it's unique to the person as opposed to the account which is important for a number of reasons.
That said, while, at least when correctly supplied, an SSN is uniquely identifying and a perfectly good number for a PK, it does not provide the important step associating you with it. That's why identity theft with an SSN is possible. When I got my US drivers license, I had to provide my birth certificate and social security card. I wasn't required to produce any other identification or supporting documentation, I don't think they even looked at it long enough to have picked out a good forgery. My photo was put on that driver's license and all of a sudden it was me. From there I could open bank accounts, get credit cards, sign leases, all that sort of thing, with zero real proof I was who I said I was. Those bank accounts and credit cards provide further identification that I am who I say I am, but no proof I'm not lying.
This is the fundamental problem which causes identity theft. Your identity is based only on something you have. As I've said I'm not sure what the answers are going to be, some sort of genetic database? An encrypted ID card which is harder to fake than a social security card? Something else? Not using your SSN is really only security via obscurity because fundamentally the number has to be known by any number of people for it to work.