Someone who has deep knowledge of a group or place where they live should form an opinion about it. If the people have admirable qualities, the location has appealing vistas*, or the community has a proud history, then that should engender pride. People should tend to try to live where they find the most satisfaction in the most areas because to do so gives them a more pleasurable daily life.
If you therefore encounter someone who likes their area and speaks well of it, then you are encountering someone who shows the qualities that make them a person you are likely to enjoy knowing. If you meet someone who shows the opposite qualities, then they are not doing the things that are most likely to make them happy and that sort of thing is also contagious. In a nutshell, a person who doesn't like the home team is more likely to make your life unpleasant than someone who does.
* - Note the lowercase V, I don't know if there is anywhere that has appealing Vistas
I don't disagree with the idea that Sun would not improve Oracle's ability to compete and generate income. I'm still undecided on that point. I don't think it is a lack of synergy though. The idea that "different entities cooperate advantageously for a final outcome" where those entities are Oracle and Sun trying to take a bigger slice of the database server market, however, is reasonable. Oracle is a database software company with great marketing trying to break into a server market. Sun is a server company with lousy marketing that can't seem to make inroads in the corporate database market. If you combine them you could have a company with a strong database and software combination taking over the market for corporate database servers. Whether or not the merge would benefit the companies involved is still a question, but if it does then it will fit the definition of synergy very well.
Plus the media hype would complete my buzzword bingo card, so I'm all for it.
Communicator can be logged at the server level with the right configuration. It is a supported feature of the server.
I'd love to replace Communicator with FOSS, but Communicator does SSO, file transfer, AD integration and Outlook integration so that it can update your status according to your calendar. It even does a Mobile and Web client, though I haven't tried those. So far I haven't found anything FOSS that can match that.
Once a month or so I consider quitting my job and writing the code to do that.
Messing with the poll results would definitely have made it better. I personally was wondering how many people would vote for it (obviously I encourage a Yes vote) but what I really wish is that there was a way to tell how many people voted one way or the other thinking it was real. How did you vote?
Wow. This sounds absolutely fantastic! I can't wait to see Google's parallel work (wasn't it lunar google last year?)
Don't forget to vote, current stats for "I'll download it" are:
Cobden for iiNet - "You aren't the boss of me"
Bannon for Studios - "We told them to stop letting people do bad things, and they didn't do what we told them!"
Apparently there is speculation over whether iiNet will try to argue that packets of data are not a substantial portion of a work, or maybe that the one to one nature of bittorrent isn't the same as a public dissemination, but personally I hope that they establish first that the studios don't have a right to just shut people down by accusation and then argue the technicalities that might get them off. I think that the arguments that it isn't piracy are much weaker than the arguments that the Studio's lawyers do not representive a duely appointed government representative.
Wait, you thought that when I started stamping "My" all over the computer I meant that it was yours? Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
No really, *wheeze* all my proprietary software that you explicitly state is still mine in the agreement, that you explicitly agree not to try to take apart, that I use to label the computer you "bought" with My Computer and My Documents, you thought that I meant they were yours? Ha! Ha! *snort* Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Wait, did you drop a </sarcasm> tag? Oh. I guess that makes more sense then.
It's somewhat philosophical, but I've often wondered why people really care about whether an interlocutor is a machine or not.
This is exactly the right question to ask. The answer varies a little, but the consistent purpose of AI improvement is that it represents an improvement in programming techniques which in turn make computers more useful. There are a wide variety of obvious uses, such as improving expert services like WebMD, improving technical support (the thingy is all black and the lights are flashing on and off on the little box,) and billing software.
Consider just a few other services that could benefit from AI:
Your radio could tell you where to find out the information you're most likely to want
Marketers could stop trying to sell you stuff you don't want and focus tightly on the things you do want (spam that knows what I like does scare me a little though)
Your TV/DVR could find shows that you would like but didn't know to ask for
Virtual assistants could discuss travel preferences with you and offer packages that meet your needs better than you could do for yourself
Political races could feature interviews that reflect the desires of voters being asked by instantly responsive and interactive users
Truly advanced AI offers the potential of giving everyone access to the support of a team of experts in any area they want to explore. Wikipedia combined with Google is already enough to answer 90% of the questions I have in minutes from anywhere I have access to a computer when only a few years ago it would have taken hours of research in a library. In the future I may be able to get even better answers and advice that I didn't even know to ask for due to programs that react and process information in ways that only humans can provide now.
I don't think I've ever been a germiphobe, but after having kids and seeing what they survived putting in their mouths, I'm a lot less worried about accidentally ingesting something. I still try to avoid the gross bits, and I try to avoid swapping germs with anyone who doesn't volunteer, but I put a lot less effort into generally avoiding them than I used to.
I think that what he was saying is "a flawed argument is a flawed argument regardless of who puts it forth." If you think that an education and legal training make a mistake in logic unimportant, then you are the idiot.
You state in your post that his style of writing is flawed and criticize it for various specific reasons. I can't say that any of them are false, but frankly, I it doesn't make any difference. The issue isn't his writing skill, but rather whether or not the judge has caused a problem by accepting an illogical argument.
A complete waste of time would be criticizing a person's writing skill without addressing the real issue of discussion.
If Microsoft put forth a less than entirely crappy effort
I think you hit the nail squarely on the head. The levels of effort being put into so many products is expensive. I don't think anyone except MS can sustain the level of development they've been putting forth. I've used Windows 7 and, despite my complaints, it is a solid improvement. I've used IE8, and despite generally sucking, it shows potential. We use Sharepoint and, despite my loathing, nothing else quite competes. We use Office, Exchange and Communicator and they are really business enabling products.
I love, L O V E, using Linux and BSD. I'm fond of AIX, so fond people might confuse it with love. Despite all that, I believe that Microsoft is a company that can deliver on it's promise to deliver products that make our business better. Nobody except MS is in a position to deliver so much to so many and they really are trying. The question they face on a daily, sometimes hourly basis is how to turn their massive development power into profit.
The year of the Linux desktop isn't coming sometime in the future, it was last year, and it is this year and it is next year. Linux doesn't dominate the desktop percentages, but it is no longer just for the geeks, it is for the average consumer trying to save a buck. Linux is out there and nothing can put the genie back in the bottle. The evolution of the operating system has reached a point where it is no longer possible to lock in a market by doing one thing significantly better than everyone else, there just isn't room. Now you have compete at an affordable price. Microsoft has already reduced the price of the OS to the point where it is competitive, but the next step is to make it the OS chosen because it is easier, not because it is better. Better means doing something other products can't do, for which there is no road map, no plan, and no method. Easier, however, means cheaper. Easier means open source. Easier means that more software you want works on it without effort, it does what you want it to do and it does it well for the programs you want. Open Source is impossible to compete with for closed source software on this ground, but MS can compete by playing the same game. The article tries to outline some reasons they will but in the end it comes down to two things: Do it better, do it easier. MS has the resources, the drive and the market placement to do it better.
Microsoft faces the choice, embrace and compete or die. I don't think they'll give up. I think they will compete in the Open Source OS market, and I think they will do so brilliantly. The only question is how soon.
We're not a corporation, we're a not-for-profit financial institution, so my anecdotal evidence doesn't even directly contradict your statement. We still use XP rather than Vista except on a couple of IT machines. Our target workstation purchases are to be mid-line systems replaced every three years. It is becoming more and more difficult to plan around XP, and our hope is to skip Vista entirely and move directly to Windows 7. (Whether this will be feasible is not yet confirmed in testing.)
I think our company is typical of quite a few SMBs. We decided against moving to Vista, and as soon as we can move to Windows 7 it will seem very fast due to the backlog of machines that should have been upgraded by normal schedules, but were delayed.
I took the plunge the day before yesterday and it is indeed different. I put it on two machines, one a low end 32bit and one a higher end 64bit machine. I've been using Vista for about a year and Server 2008 for about the same period of time.
Windows 7 looks and feels like Vista with a mildly snazzed up taskbar, but without most of the annoyances of Vista. Aside from the taskbar and a toned down UAC, it feels exactly like what I would expect a slimmed down version of 2008 to feel like. Everything I like about Windows 7 could have been done with Vista and the taskbar improvements.
Still, I do think they are at least as different as Windows 95 and Windows 98 were. I can't get the LAN to work on the 64bit install, though I can assign an IP to the adapter. I can't get our primary software package (and the reason I'm testing) to work on either one. The system locks occasionally on both, probably due to the same testing. IE8 is kludgy and, where I've been able to test it, doesn't perform as well as either IE7 or Firefox 3. My yardstick of major differences is based on how many things are broken, and if the beta is a fair representation, then I'd say it does indeed deserve to be classified as a new version of Windows.
I think most of the testers are using software and hardware recommended and better tested by Microsoft than our typical system, but I cannot believe how different my experience has been from the typical media publications. I believe it is precisely because most of the reviews are Microsoft friendly rather than workplace critical.
It isn't exactly filesystem specific, though it does depend on being a filesystem that Windows will recognize. It infects USB by putting an autorun.inf on the device to install itself. The nasty bit is that, to the average user, it looks like the executable is just the windows dialog to open the device as a folder. f-secure.com has a nice writeup on it.
I'm not exactly a fan of the server, but I work in the financial industry and we work with a vendor which provides banking services built on this platform. (Name and version vary.) Whether they will continue to use it or not remains to be seen, but with it open sourced, they have the option to continue to use it and support it to whatever degree they desire where they might otherwise have felt like they were limited to whatever level of support they could get agreed to by Sun. This may make the difference for them between a solid and supportable product and costly development and associated growing pains on a new platform.
The real question is how does a society fund the journalism process it values. For the last umpteen years the answer has been "Sell advertising to the highest bidders" with the presumed question "how do I make money off of reporting the news?" As with so many other things, the Internet is changing the rules of the game. The Internet allows the consumer to get what they want, and not see or spend time on what they don't.
The fundamental problem with the Internet mindset of "show me only what I want" is that most people don't want to see most advertisements. I subscribed to two magazines for the last two years that I will not be subscribing to in the future and the reasons I won't resubscribe include irritating advertisements. I rely on the Internet to give me the information I need when I want it and I usually get it without being subjected to advertising I don't want. Without the Internet I would be more at the mercy of content providers and subjected to what they wanted to show me rather than what I want to see. For me as an example, the Internet is taking away the power of the content provider to control my experience. In the long run, I believe that is a good thing.
For a while, the providers will still struggle to try to control the experience of the consumers. Flash and Java give them some control at the moment since they can make the content difficult or nearly impossible to access without also being subjected to undesired advertising. As the medium and associated technology mature however, there will be an irrepressible shift to the empowerment of the consumer. Eventually it will be nearly impossible for a content provider to subject the consumer to undesired advertising and with it, a growing lack of ability to leverage that control into a profit. In twenty years I predict that advertising will only be profitable where it is desired by the consumer.
There is a solution. This bears repeating. There is a solution. The replacement of intrusive and irritating unwanted advertising will be the rise of desired advertising. As difficult as it is to consider the idea of desired advertising, it is an already existing phenomena. Many people already tune into the Super Bowl every year solely to view the advertisements. For those of us who don't really care to sit through the game, the next day, sometimes the next hour, the advertisements are available on youtube or other venues for viewing. I really enjoy watching ads when they are well designed and especially when they are humorous, to the extent that I put forth the effort to seek them out. I regularly watch Mac vs PC ads and seek out "Worlds funniest commercials" for entertainment. When advertisement companies are good enough at their jobs that they can sell ads that people want to see, then the market will rebound. When I am able to go to CNN or Slashdot and know that the ads there will be ones that add to the experience in my estimation, then the advertiser, the content provider and the consumer will all coexist in a happy symbiotic relationship.
Until then, I'll keep my Adblock turned on and unsubscribe to anything that tries to force me to spend my time viewing advertisements I don't want to see.
Sidenote, "umpteen" is recognized as a word by Firefox, but "Sidenote" is not.
Financial institutions don't necessarily have the best possible security, there are plenty of precedents to prove otherwise. They may or may not but I wouldn't use that as a standard. (I've worked in the "moving other peoples' money sector for several years so this is an insider's perspective.)
I have nothing against Securicon, they may be great, but I'd try to find out who handles testing for the credit bureaus. I've used a web interface with one of them and it was at least secure enough to take effort to use. We had to import a certificate to verify the client and register the IP with them, which seems like a good start.
You're dead right. First, IT doesn't necessarily attract people with people skills, but some jobs need people skills more than they need "smarter." Sometimes "smarter" doesn't mean better for the job. I know someone who was pretty ticked because after an aptitude test,they were turned down because they had "too much potential." After I asked a few questions about the job, I was convinced the hiring company was quite wise. The person with "too much potential" would have been bored out of their mind in six months but when they find a person who is comfortable doing the click, copy and paste job for ten years, it is the employee they really need.
You may already realize this, but wetware hacking with IT is dangerous. When I get a call from someone who is trying to pretend they know something, I'm immediately suspicious. Once in a while they turn out to be legitimate, but usually they go into the Indefinite Hold group. Claiming prior experience with my boss or a boss above is pretty much a straight trip to the "Send them to voicemail" queue. Every single call I get from someone that I don't know is in the potential hacker category until I have a reason to believe otherwise.
That caution noted, I welcome calls from sales people who have done their homework and are willing to give me an honest pitch. I'm expecting a call from a vendor who sells IT training later this month, who has taken the time to find out what we do, what we might be interested in and is willing to wait until I can spend the time to re-pitch his information to my boss. I'm looking forward to the potential to get training I need and it is because the vendor took the time to find out what we might be interested in and didn't try to BS me in order to convince me that we should talk. Contrast this with the vendor who called and wanted to talk to my boss, by name, about training but wasn't interested in talking to me about what or why. One vendor goes to/dev/null and the straight pitch man will likely garner a nice commission check, potentially followed by repeat business.
If you work for EMC, don't even bother calling. They have some of the best sales staff I've ever come across, but I've done business with your company after the sale and I'll recommend against it forever more. The phrase "gold plated turd" springs to mind. If you work for Network Box, then you can come to my office and tell me I need a platinum plated framis and I'll give you three hours to tell me what the contract I'm signing is about.
People are afraid of naming names, but when I'm trying to find out about a company, this type of reference is what I look for, so it's only fair I give it too.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone who has deep knowledge of a group or place where they live should form an opinion about it. If the people have admirable qualities, the location has appealing vistas*, or the community has a proud history, then that should engender pride. People should tend to try to live where they find the most satisfaction in the most areas because to do so gives them a more pleasurable daily life.
If you therefore encounter someone who likes their area and speaks well of it, then you are encountering someone who shows the qualities that make them a person you are likely to enjoy knowing. If you meet someone who shows the opposite qualities, then they are not doing the things that are most likely to make them happy and that sort of thing is also contagious. In a nutshell, a person who doesn't like the home team is more likely to make your life unpleasant than someone who does.
* - Note the lowercase V, I don't know if there is anywhere that has appealing Vistas
Wow. I've never really wanted to lead a life of crime but this makes it sound tempting.
Reason for requested leave: Starting an evil empire
I don't disagree with the idea that Sun would not improve Oracle's ability to compete and generate income. I'm still undecided on that point. I don't think it is a lack of synergy though. The idea that "different entities cooperate advantageously for a final outcome" where those entities are Oracle and Sun trying to take a bigger slice of the database server market, however, is reasonable. Oracle is a database software company with great marketing trying to break into a server market. Sun is a server company with lousy marketing that can't seem to make inroads in the corporate database market. If you combine them you could have a company with a strong database and software combination taking over the market for corporate database servers. Whether or not the merge would benefit the companies involved is still a question, but if it does then it will fit the definition of synergy very well.
Plus the media hype would complete my buzzword bingo card, so I'm all for it.
The Windows 7 testing delegation would like to tell the Linux Island group to kiss [LOST CARRIER]
Communicator can be logged at the server level with the right configuration. It is a supported feature of the server.
I'd love to replace Communicator with FOSS, but Communicator does SSO, file transfer, AD integration and Outlook integration so that it can update your status according to your calendar. It even does a Mobile and Web client, though I haven't tried those. So far I haven't found anything FOSS that can match that.
Once a month or so I consider quitting my job and writing the code to do that.
Cotton candy ponies that live in rainbows no less. I should have included the link for Google's lunar work: http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html but I was wrong about the year. Last year was Custom Time at http://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html
Judge me not only by my friends, but also by my enemies. Last year I resolved in part to make more enemies, and I'm feeling better about that now.
Messing with the poll results would definitely have made it better. I personally was wondering how many people would vote for it (obviously I encourage a Yes vote) but what I really wish is that there was a way to tell how many people voted one way or the other thinking it was real. How did you vote?
Don't forget to vote, current stats for "I'll download it" are:
including my Yes vote
Cobden for iiNet - "You aren't the boss of me"
Bannon for Studios - "We told them to stop letting people do bad things, and they didn't do what we told them!"
Apparently there is speculation over whether iiNet will try to argue that packets of data are not a substantial portion of a work, or maybe that the one to one nature of bittorrent isn't the same as a public dissemination, but personally I hope that they establish first that the studios don't have a right to just shut people down by accusation and then argue the technicalities that might get them off. I think that the arguments that it isn't piracy are much weaker than the arguments that the Studio's lawyers do not representive a duely appointed government representative.
Wait, you thought that when I started stamping "My" all over the computer I meant that it was yours? Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
No really, *wheeze* all my proprietary software that you explicitly state is still mine in the agreement, that you explicitly agree not to try to take apart, that I use to label the computer you "bought" with My Computer and My Documents, you thought that I meant they were yours? Ha! Ha! *snort* Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Wait, did you drop a </sarcasm> tag? Oh. I guess that makes more sense then.
It's somewhat philosophical, but I've often wondered why people really care about whether an interlocutor is a machine or not.
This is exactly the right question to ask. The answer varies a little, but the consistent purpose of AI improvement is that it represents an improvement in programming techniques which in turn make computers more useful. There are a wide variety of obvious uses, such as improving expert services like WebMD, improving technical support (the thingy is all black and the lights are flashing on and off on the little box,) and billing software.
Consider just a few other services that could benefit from AI:
Truly advanced AI offers the potential of giving everyone access to the support of a team of experts in any area they want to explore. Wikipedia combined with Google is already enough to answer 90% of the questions I have in minutes from anywhere I have access to a computer when only a few years ago it would have taken hours of research in a library. In the future I may be able to get even better answers and advice that I didn't even know to ask for due to programs that react and process information in ways that only humans can provide now.
Maybe. Maybe not.
I don't think I've ever been a germiphobe, but after having kids and seeing what they survived putting in their mouths, I'm a lot less worried about accidentally ingesting something. I still try to avoid the gross bits, and I try to avoid swapping germs with anyone who doesn't volunteer, but I put a lot less effort into generally avoiding them than I used to.
I think that what he was saying is "a flawed argument is a flawed argument regardless of who puts it forth." If you think that an education and legal training make a mistake in logic unimportant, then you are the idiot.
You state in your post that his style of writing is flawed and criticize it for various specific reasons. I can't say that any of them are false, but frankly, I it doesn't make any difference. The issue isn't his writing skill, but rather whether or not the judge has caused a problem by accepting an illogical argument.
A complete waste of time would be criticizing a person's writing skill without addressing the real issue of discussion.
If Microsoft put forth a less than entirely crappy effort
I think you hit the nail squarely on the head. The levels of effort being put into so many products is expensive. I don't think anyone except MS can sustain the level of development they've been putting forth. I've used Windows 7 and, despite my complaints, it is a solid improvement. I've used IE8, and despite generally sucking, it shows potential. We use Sharepoint and, despite my loathing, nothing else quite competes. We use Office, Exchange and Communicator and they are really business enabling products.
I love, L O V E, using Linux and BSD. I'm fond of AIX, so fond people might confuse it with love. Despite all that, I believe that Microsoft is a company that can deliver on it's promise to deliver products that make our business better. Nobody except MS is in a position to deliver so much to so many and they really are trying. The question they face on a daily, sometimes hourly basis is how to turn their massive development power into profit.
The year of the Linux desktop isn't coming sometime in the future, it was last year, and it is this year and it is next year. Linux doesn't dominate the desktop percentages, but it is no longer just for the geeks, it is for the average consumer trying to save a buck. Linux is out there and nothing can put the genie back in the bottle. The evolution of the operating system has reached a point where it is no longer possible to lock in a market by doing one thing significantly better than everyone else, there just isn't room. Now you have compete at an affordable price. Microsoft has already reduced the price of the OS to the point where it is competitive, but the next step is to make it the OS chosen because it is easier, not because it is better. Better means doing something other products can't do, for which there is no road map, no plan, and no method. Easier, however, means cheaper. Easier means open source. Easier means that more software you want works on it without effort, it does what you want it to do and it does it well for the programs you want. Open Source is impossible to compete with for closed source software on this ground, but MS can compete by playing the same game. The article tries to outline some reasons they will but in the end it comes down to two things: Do it better, do it easier. MS has the resources, the drive and the market placement to do it better.
Microsoft faces the choice, embrace and compete or die. I don't think they'll give up. I think they will compete in the Open Source OS market, and I think they will do so brilliantly. The only question is how soon.
We're not a corporation, we're a not-for-profit financial institution, so my anecdotal evidence doesn't even directly contradict your statement. We still use XP rather than Vista except on a couple of IT machines. Our target workstation purchases are to be mid-line systems replaced every three years. It is becoming more and more difficult to plan around XP, and our hope is to skip Vista entirely and move directly to Windows 7. (Whether this will be feasible is not yet confirmed in testing.)
I think our company is typical of quite a few SMBs. We decided against moving to Vista, and as soon as we can move to Windows 7 it will seem very fast due to the backlog of machines that should have been upgraded by normal schedules, but were delayed.
I took the plunge the day before yesterday and it is indeed different. I put it on two machines, one a low end 32bit and one a higher end 64bit machine. I've been using Vista for about a year and Server 2008 for about the same period of time.
Windows 7 looks and feels like Vista with a mildly snazzed up taskbar, but without most of the annoyances of Vista. Aside from the taskbar and a toned down UAC, it feels exactly like what I would expect a slimmed down version of 2008 to feel like. Everything I like about Windows 7 could have been done with Vista and the taskbar improvements.
Still, I do think they are at least as different as Windows 95 and Windows 98 were. I can't get the LAN to work on the 64bit install, though I can assign an IP to the adapter. I can't get our primary software package (and the reason I'm testing) to work on either one. The system locks occasionally on both, probably due to the same testing. IE8 is kludgy and, where I've been able to test it, doesn't perform as well as either IE7 or Firefox 3. My yardstick of major differences is based on how many things are broken, and if the beta is a fair representation, then I'd say it does indeed deserve to be classified as a new version of Windows.
I think most of the testers are using software and hardware recommended and better tested by Microsoft than our typical system, but I cannot believe how different my experience has been from the typical media publications. I believe it is precisely because most of the reviews are Microsoft friendly rather than workplace critical.
It isn't exactly filesystem specific, though it does depend on being a filesystem that Windows will recognize. It infects USB by putting an autorun.inf on the device to install itself. The nasty bit is that, to the average user, it looks like the executable is just the windows dialog to open the device as a folder. f-secure.com has a nice writeup on it.
Your humility is commendable sir and my hat is off to you. You almost make me want to be a lawyer if I ever grow up.
The parallels are staggering.
I'm not exactly a fan of the server, but I work in the financial industry and we work with a vendor which provides banking services built on this platform. (Name and version vary.) Whether they will continue to use it or not remains to be seen, but with it open sourced, they have the option to continue to use it and support it to whatever degree they desire where they might otherwise have felt like they were limited to whatever level of support they could get agreed to by Sun. This may make the difference for them between a solid and supportable product and costly development and associated growing pains on a new platform.
The real question is how does a society fund the journalism process it values. For the last umpteen years the answer has been "Sell advertising to the highest bidders" with the presumed question "how do I make money off of reporting the news?" As with so many other things, the Internet is changing the rules of the game. The Internet allows the consumer to get what they want, and not see or spend time on what they don't.
The fundamental problem with the Internet mindset of "show me only what I want" is that most people don't want to see most advertisements. I subscribed to two magazines for the last two years that I will not be subscribing to in the future and the reasons I won't resubscribe include irritating advertisements. I rely on the Internet to give me the information I need when I want it and I usually get it without being subjected to advertising I don't want. Without the Internet I would be more at the mercy of content providers and subjected to what they wanted to show me rather than what I want to see. For me as an example, the Internet is taking away the power of the content provider to control my experience. In the long run, I believe that is a good thing.
For a while, the providers will still struggle to try to control the experience of the consumers. Flash and Java give them some control at the moment since they can make the content difficult or nearly impossible to access without also being subjected to undesired advertising. As the medium and associated technology mature however, there will be an irrepressible shift to the empowerment of the consumer. Eventually it will be nearly impossible for a content provider to subject the consumer to undesired advertising and with it, a growing lack of ability to leverage that control into a profit. In twenty years I predict that advertising will only be profitable where it is desired by the consumer.
There is a solution. This bears repeating. There is a solution. The replacement of intrusive and irritating unwanted advertising will be the rise of desired advertising. As difficult as it is to consider the idea of desired advertising, it is an already existing phenomena. Many people already tune into the Super Bowl every year solely to view the advertisements. For those of us who don't really care to sit through the game, the next day, sometimes the next hour, the advertisements are available on youtube or other venues for viewing. I really enjoy watching ads when they are well designed and especially when they are humorous, to the extent that I put forth the effort to seek them out. I regularly watch Mac vs PC ads and seek out "Worlds funniest commercials" for entertainment. When advertisement companies are good enough at their jobs that they can sell ads that people want to see, then the market will rebound. When I am able to go to CNN or Slashdot and know that the ads there will be ones that add to the experience in my estimation, then the advertiser, the content provider and the consumer will all coexist in a happy symbiotic relationship.
Until then, I'll keep my Adblock turned on and unsubscribe to anything that tries to force me to spend my time viewing advertisements I don't want to see.
Sidenote, "umpteen" is recognized as a word by Firefox, but "Sidenote" is not.
Financial institutions don't necessarily have the best possible security, there are plenty of precedents to prove otherwise. They may or may not but I wouldn't use that as a standard. (I've worked in the "moving other peoples' money sector for several years so this is an insider's perspective.)
I have nothing against Securicon, they may be great, but I'd try to find out who handles testing for the credit bureaus. I've used a web interface with one of them and it was at least secure enough to take effort to use. We had to import a certificate to verify the client and register the IP with them, which seems like a good start.
You're dead right. First, IT doesn't necessarily attract people with people skills, but some jobs need people skills more than they need "smarter." Sometimes "smarter" doesn't mean better for the job. I know someone who was pretty ticked because after an aptitude test,they were turned down because they had "too much potential." After I asked a few questions about the job, I was convinced the hiring company was quite wise. The person with "too much potential" would have been bored out of their mind in six months but when they find a person who is comfortable doing the click, copy and paste job for ten years, it is the employee they really need.
You may already realize this, but wetware hacking with IT is dangerous. When I get a call from someone who is trying to pretend they know something, I'm immediately suspicious. Once in a while they turn out to be legitimate, but usually they go into the Indefinite Hold group. Claiming prior experience with my boss or a boss above is pretty much a straight trip to the "Send them to voicemail" queue. Every single call I get from someone that I don't know is in the potential hacker category until I have a reason to believe otherwise.
That caution noted, I welcome calls from sales people who have done their homework and are willing to give me an honest pitch. I'm expecting a call from a vendor who sells IT training later this month, who has taken the time to find out what we do, what we might be interested in and is willing to wait until I can spend the time to re-pitch his information to my boss. I'm looking forward to the potential to get training I need and it is because the vendor took the time to find out what we might be interested in and didn't try to BS me in order to convince me that we should talk. Contrast this with the vendor who called and wanted to talk to my boss, by name, about training but wasn't interested in talking to me about what or why. One vendor goes to /dev/null and the straight pitch man will likely garner a nice commission check, potentially followed by repeat business.
If you work for EMC, don't even bother calling. They have some of the best sales staff I've ever come across, but I've done business with your company after the sale and I'll recommend against it forever more. The phrase "gold plated turd" springs to mind. If you work for Network Box, then you can come to my office and tell me I need a platinum plated framis and I'll give you three hours to tell me what the contract I'm signing is about.
People are afraid of naming names, but when I'm trying to find out about a company, this type of reference is what I look for, so it's only fair I give it too.