What's the value in disregarding sensus communis simply because it is what it is? How is taking the advice of common aesthetic taste, needy? How is taking the advice of friends fundamentally different, and significantly less needy than taking the advice of other people you know? If you're trying something on in a store, and someone walks by and says "Oh! That's a nice shirt!", would it less needy to be influenced by that if it was your friend? Is it needy to favor a shirt more if 10 people make a remark about how nice it looks? What if it's 10 friends?
As someone who dresses to present well to the general public, because I don't exclusively interact with people I already know, what people generally think a garment is of value to me.
Sure, a particularly brain dead person might simply choose something solely based on the number of Facebook likes it gets, but chances are, people are interested in the number of people who 'liked' something on Facebook are probably conscious enough about the way things look to take their own opinion into account, too.
If you want to use your own disregard for trends as a point of pride, go nuts. Making character judgements based one someone disagreeing with you on that point is completely absurd.
It's kind of funny how, after all of this griping (from people like me) about lack of Photoshop like single-window mode in Gimp, Photoshop, at least for Mac, defaults to not having an "Application Frame"– which essentially means that it's not, by default, in single-window mode. It's easy enough to switch back, though.
Is it sad that this sort of innovation is stifled? It sure is. Is it completely reasonable reading of the situation? I think so.
The ruling said nothing more than it was the company who designed and operated the system, including all of the equipment that was recording the signals, that was actually doing the recording, not the customer. There weren't even damages awarded.
The company said that since the customer started the process themselves, they were actually the ones that were making the recording.
As an analog, I see a vending machine with an illegal item. Their argument: The customer was legally responsible for the sale, because they were selling it to themselves; they put into motion the mechanical process for the machine to deliver it to them. The vending company, who simply provided the mechanical elements to facilitate the transaction between the manufacturer and the customer, and provided those mechanical elements with the product to sell, had nothing to do with what was actually being delivered....yeah.
Is there a more accurate legal analog that contradicts this? From my perspective, it does seem completely reasonable.
This is simply a much less immediately invasive (though, invasive) version of those spyware smiley face emoticon getups that started to pop up in the late 90s/early 2ks, only with much better products. Don't want the popups and stuff? Uninstall (or, try to). If you simply keep using them and just complain that they're invading your privacy, I'm just gonna stop listening.
It's really easy to do completely anonymous searches with an install of the TOR browser... if you just don't want something on your tracked history, it's just as easy to open up a private/incognito browsing sessions which breaks most tracking. It's really easy to transfer, store and share files through your own server with a public IP address or a cheap shared hosting account. It's really easy to not have someone reading your mail and serving you adverts by not using a free email... Most hosting services, even on plans that cost less than $10/mo, have an email server setup that requires very little technical know-how to set up, and pre-installed webmail clients of your choice. Hostgator does this. These are not difficult problems for people with even the slightest amount of technical know-how to solve. Help out your less technically savvy friends by giving them an alternate email address.
You have options.
Of course, it's not going to be the same smooth user experience as using Google products... Google offers extremely *high quality* services at the cost of you being their precisely targeted, profiled, prospected, inspected, infected and unrespected advertising receptacle, and they have a LOT of customers that are perfectly willing to be that receptacle. Are they somehow ethically obligated to offer their premium products for a smaller exchange? If you really want them, but want to maintain more privacy, they even offer paid business accounts with different privacy policies and terms of service.
I spent enough time telling my less technical friends to always look for (bankname).com/ in the URLs of their banks, because virtually all banks in my area have.com addresses. At least initially, it's going to be that much more confusing for a user if they have to decide if, as a hypothetical example, bankofamerica.lowrates.cn/ is significantly less trustworthy than lowrates.bankofamerica/ without a solid rule to go by.
But the idea has worked perfectly. Everything has gone according to plan.
They're not blind, they don't specifically 'want' security to be worse, or people's grandmothers to be groped... they just don't care. If they play the game right while they control the government money flow now, they're going to be making a ton of money selling their political access and clout to companies like RapiScan when they're back in the private sector.
It was a great idea and worked perfectly for them, because it insured that they'd be making a lot of money for a really long time.
I used to think this viewpoint was overly cynical... but who was outspokenly speaking publicly in favor of RapiScan devices while being paid for what the RapiScan claims was 'unrelated consulting work', which happened to be the time that the government decided to not only use body scanners, but use RapiScan as the vendor? Well, former Chief of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, of course!
Whether or not the scanners are effective, or the policies are oppressive is completely irrelevant to the people who make the decision, which means the system is broken in this way. This will require deeper reform to remediate.
But they weren't strategic decisions, they were just mistakes resulting from the chronic miscalculation of what the real world can actually do outside of their test environments. It's not a strategy, they're just really bad at knowing how people actually use many of their products... including most specifically, what kind of hardware and network real estate people have access to. Dating back to the first SMB/NMB system (and before? I didn't have much experience prior) they just assumed that you had tons of spare network to let your file/print servers/clients constantly blather to each other about where they were and how they were feeling. As long as what the user was looking at worked mostly like they said it would and the basic 'just make it work' configuration could be done by some greenhorn who'd gone to a week long MS boot camp class, they simply didn't care what their products were doing to the back of the house to make it happen because in their environments it simply didn't matter. The fact that the hardware price/performance progress has been so steady is probably one of the only reasons that every MS OS release prior to windows 7 hasn't been a carbon copy of the Vista release. They actually assumed that everybody was not only going to go out and buy new hardware to run Vista, but they were going to buy *nice* hardware to run Vista... which is obviously something that most consumers simply weren't willing to do. I think they just *assumed* that everyone would have an awesome actually unlimited data plan to make their cloudy dreams happen. Now that the wireless comm industry is giving some whole-hearted push back with smaller caps (like in the UK) I'm willing to bet that this is going to cause some friction.
Someone earlier posted a link to this blog entry which is a pretty good read:
I can see why that would be your immediate reaction, but It's not fucked up at all. Keep in mind that many of the universities in the US have very large areas to cover, and in many cases are the primary generator of police calls in their areas. Since they are often legally "non-profit" organizations, they don't pay taxes on any of their real estate holdings. This would put a tremendous strain on local police forces in smaller communities where a University was present, yet the municipality wouldn't be getting very much in taxes to support the police force to handle the excess volume. So why can't the university just support the local municipalities' police force financially? Well, sometimes that is what they do, but sometimes a campus spans municipalities or even counties, and it would be unfair to expect the university to reinforce the police departments for every community that they spanned even if their holdings there were limited. It makes much more sense to have a university funded police force to deal with the problems that arise due to their facilities, staff and/or students.
A friend is a police officer in the Harvard University police department. The HUPD cops are legally public servants, receive training very similar to the state police, are sworn in to protect and serve the public (not the university), and are held to the same standards of service, protection and professionalism that any other police officer would be. (which of course produces varying levels of success, just like with any other law enforcement organization.) They're deputized in each county where there is a branch of Harvard... though they're not legally compelled to intervene outside of Harvard campuses/neighborhoods. Generally, unless they see a genuine public safety concern (e.g. someone being assaulted) they stick to enforcing the law in the immediate vicinity of their holdings. Since they do have county-wide powers in several counties though, this gives them the 3rd largest jurisdiction in the state of Massachusetts. The state police have jurisdiction throughout the state, so they've got the largest jurisdiction. The MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Public Transportation Authority) Police have similar deputization in any county in which they operate (all of the eastern ones, some of the central ones) which gives them the 2nd largest jurisdiction. Harvard has branches in 2 or 3 counties (Middlesex, Suffolk, and maybe Norfolk) giving them the 3rd.
As an example of how this works in day to day ops, some may remember the recent Cambridge Police/Professor Gates debacle. Even though this was less than 1/8 mi outside of Harvard Yard, and there are Harvard holdings directly in this neighborhood, since it wasn't taking place at a public Harvard building, the Cambridge police were automatically called upon by 911 to respond to the situation. The Harvard police would have also had jurisdiction though, and I imagine would have responded if called directly.
Harvard also has uniformed security guards to do regular securtiy work. They don't have the university police man the gates and work the front desks in dorms. Sure, it'd be pretty scary if all of the security guards that hang around a typical university just happen to have police powers, but that's not how it's set up.
Look, I can understand the distrust of anything and everything surrounding a corporate marketing push, but we should probably actually look before we call bull(bear)shit. Let's give credit where credit is due:
Many people seem to be making a distinction between 'criminals' and cops who illegally arrest, assault or harass people. A criminal is someone who breaks the (criminal) law. There are laws against illegally arresting, assaulting and harassing people. It doesn't matter if they are cops or not, when they break the law by doing these things, they *become* criminals. They've just got badges too.
That's not really how it works. The separation isn't that black and white.
The first sentence in the article: "The city is paying some 230 "consultants" an average salary of $400,000 a year for a computer project that is seven years behind schedule and vastly over budget."
I'm willing to bet that the person who wrote the article is confusing what the company charges for their services, and what they actually receive in payroll. I'd assume it's probably a pretty average tech salary. Look at the guys in those pictures. Do they look like they make almost 500k per year?
The city probably *is* paying for their time, it's just not in the form of payroll. I worked on a support team for a large software/hardware product that was deployed in large organizations by teams of people (usually for about a million bucks, a bit smaller than this project). These consultants are usually professional services contractors that were hired by the company to send out on projects to deploy and customize installations and occasionally take care of problems that tech support can't handle or can't handle as quickly as the company desires. During the initial sales discussion about the package, the company says that they need X number of contractors with X specialty working X hours under X project managers for X amount of time to complete the project. The organization that's buying the product then essentially hires these people through the company (almost like hiring someone through a temp service) and the company takes the majority of what the city pays to have these guys come in and work. Many of our consultants were billing around a million dollars a year to various customers for their services but they themselves were making around 100k.
At any time the city can choose to stop paying for these professional services... but then you've blown all of this cash on a project and have absolutely nothing to show for it. There are also lots of 3rd party professional services companies out there who specialize in coming in and cleaning up larger companies project disasters and charging less for their consultants. It's always a delicate balance in large projects. It's often hard to tell in advance if you're going to be dropping a significant initial investment with someone who won't be able to finish the project, or will intentionally delay the project to run up a huge services bill.
I never really trusted putting any of my documents on computers at all. Just in a locked safe, sitting in a larger locked safe, in a secure room in a non-government, non-corporate secure facility with access by nobody except me.
"... to push the limits of our power and find ways to get around things. This is often seen in a negative light (as in the OP's choice of the word "abuse"), yet it's also a trait that has allowed humans to survive, thrive, and make numerous advancements.
The OP talks about IT people white-listing websites they know to be safe because they themselves use them. I don't see this as having a negative impact for the staff or patrons of the places he mentions. If there is a negative impact, or "abuse", it comes from the executive decision to use censoring software in the first place, not the IT guy poking holes in it."
I disagree entirely. It's not a matter of what other people are deprived of by your gain, it's a simple matter of ethics.
In this case, the IT people are essentially policy enforcers. When people are expected to uphold or enforce rules and standards in a professional environment for themselves and others, it's simply not ethical to only enforce those rules on others while either selectively or not enforcing them on yourself. Can you think of a (valid) reason that IT personnel are somehow more worthy of entertainment at work than other workers? Sure it might not be the end of the world if Joe the CS rep can't access somethingawful.com, but if you're sitting there wasting just as much time messing around on whatever net based BS happens to tickle your fancy, it's completely hypocritical and simply not fair any way you slice it.
This is no more ethical than police using their power to avoid penalties for off-duty traffic offenses. Of course, them being penalized can't change what they did. Nobody (except for maybe the town budget) is losing out by them not being penalized. The fact alone that they aren't required to pay the price for their actions even if caught is sufficiently unethical.
What you are saying completely makes sense, though judging from my experiences as a former IBMer, I'm willing to bet that their actions are more schizophrenic than one might hope. A lot of people don't realize how little communication there is among IBM's dizzying assortment of departments. The problem is in the way the company is structured.
Let's start at the top. When it comes to the large company wide decisions, IBM might not only seem to be adaptable, but downright agile compared to other companies that size. It seems to me like the guys who make the big picture decisions are pretty talented.
They're also so far up the ladder that when it comes to the daily operation of the company, they've got no clue what's going on. They're often more than 5 managers above your average developer.
Down at the other end of the company, you've got lots of really talented (there are always exceptions that make the rule) developers, technicians and other individual contributors that do the heavy lifting. They're often governed by smart dedicated 1st level managers that really know what's going on.
The problem is in the middle. It's like you've got the head of a genius, the arms and legs of an Olympian, and the torso of Mr. Creosote from Monty Python's Meaning of Life. (Let's add one more project manager... he's wafer thin!)
When it comes to the internal processes that IBM uses to conduct business on a day to day basis, they're in the stone age. The layers upon layers of dead-weight middle management seem to have no purpose other than delaying what you're doing so they can say they played a part in it, ensuring that they look good enough in the eyes of the middle manager above them to have a job next quarter. The hordes of inefficient yet needlessly automated processes, completely outdated tools, absurd politics, arbitrary policies and snails pace adaptation of updates and changes to the business processes make it very difficult to actually speak up and make a difference... and given the sheer volume of arbitrary policies that you may be violating at any given time without knowing it, it's not worth speaking up and giving some random middle manager with a grudge leverage to politically manipulate your department. From a practical day to day perspective, you really could view it as a oddly associated bunch of groups, that are bound together by bureaucracy, not dissimilar from the government in Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil.
For example: Most people on Slashdot are probably aware of IBM's commendable commitment to transfer the entire company to Linux. I was very excited to learn that they had their own company endorsed/controlled internal Linux distro with all of the fixin's (Notes, etc) that we could install on our corporate workstations at our discretion. Being an upper level support guy who did a decent amount of scripting for customers who ran our Solaris based product, it was a much more appropriate choice for me than Windows. Everything worked great(or great-ish. I wasn't picky)! Now to install the ticket tracking system... Their idea of "updating" their ticket tracking system was making a screen scraping GUI that sat on top of a specific windows 3270 terminal emulator. I attempted to learn how to use the cryptic CLI/TUI application directly, but I was told by a support policy manager that the GUI program had been extended in ways that weren't supported by the terminal directly. "No problem" i thought "I'm a wine ninja... I can make it happen," no dice. Oh well, I was sure that they'd be coming out with a Linux version soon. After scouring the company intranet for more information, it turns out that there used to be a Linux version but it was permanently cancelled several years earlier because it was too difficult to maintain both branches. So I posted something in the product's board on the intranet asking if there was going to be a renewed interest in it as support was trying to get going with Linux, and the person who responded to the post (given I have no idea on what level they were inv
There are lots of highly paid, well educated, well qualified people who must wear uniforms. Though with many of these professions there are physical needs for these uniforms, they're quite often most valuable because they allow people to be identified by their jobs so they can be found in a crowd in case of an emergency without even exchanging words. It's quite important for people to be able to tell a doctor from a nurse from an orderly from a security guard in the hallway in a hospital. As a chef, I know that it's important for everyone from new waitstaff to health inspectors to vendors to be able to come into the kitchen and see who's the chef, who the line cooks are and who the dishwasher is without having to interrupt the workflow and start asking questions. To all of the people who would say associating cooks with IT guys is degrading for IT guys, most cooks that I've worked with were on average just as smart, just as well educated and/or more experienced in their field as your average guy that I worked with as a 3rd level support engineer for a large Solaris based software package for IBM. I would be much more likely to hire cooks into an IT organization than hire IT guys into a kitchen.
And though the word janitor has a definite 'cleaner' context to it, (and being a cleaner in most environments is not highly skilled labor) I'd certainly call most IT positions essentially custodial positions, especially in the help desk. Many facilities type custodial positions require them to perform basic electrical work, repair appliances, furniture, doors, windows, etc. These types of jobs certainly require more specialized knowledge than any of the helpdesk jobs I've hired for. When you're talking about someone who is generally only required to know how to check basic network connectivity, run malware and virus scanners, perform basic setup and configuration, and call someone the second they're in over there head, it's absurd that there's so much disdain for people in a position where they have to know how to replace a broken window pane, replace a broken faucet, snake a drain, fix a broken toilet, replace cracked tiles, tend to plants, safely replace light switches, strip and buff a floor, etc. etc. etc. You can go to Cornell and get a Masters degree in facilities management. Last I checked you couldn't get one in "helpdesk arts". I was in IT or closely related fields for over a decade and it certainly is an honorable profession. This thread perfectly highlights how condescending IT guys can be towards people in other fields, and more often than not, it's to people who have more difficult, more complicated, more stressful and often more important jobs. It's one of the primary reasons that so many end users are immediately defensive and confrontational when dealing with IT guys. They aren't born that way.
There are certainly tons of great IT guys out there... the overwhelming majority... but those guys that have the classic IT god/martyr complex is one of the primary reasons that I left the field to get into something where you're judged exclusively based on your merit as a worker and not how much noise you make about it. Keep convincing yourself that you are an invaluable IT artiste, certainly within the top 5 most important people in the company. You should even throw your arms up in the air and passionately shout::cue French accent:: "I cannot work under zees circumstances!" when management makes demands like this of you. It'll be a hilarious story to tell the guy in Bangalore who is going to replace you and 3 other people armed only with a remote desktop connection and a telephone.
Living in Boston, I'm quite happy that some specific places charge for wifi. Especially in the Cambridge/Somerville area it can be downright impossible to try and get a seat at a coffee shop that doesn't charge for wifi. It's not uncommon to see hoards of people sitting there for HOURS during the busiest times of day with a laptop and a long-since emptied small coffee. There are plenty of places around that give out free wifi, and there should be. In places where there are so many users that they're actually losing business because paying customers can't find a table, they should certainly charge a nominal fee.
Take a hint from my lovely state, Massachusetts (among others... i know, but we're one of the worst.) If you're a government and you can fine people for doing something, and the fine doesn't deter them from doing it... well son you've just created yourself a source of revenue. It's addictive. Soon enough you'll figure out what other non-crimes you can make fineable offenses like declaring a snow emergency (a state where parking is restricted to make room for snow plows and emergency vehicles) when it's not actually snowing or very little snow is forecast, then give out thousands of tickets for $100 and tow everyone!
This article is of course for the criminal action and not any civil suits. Naturally, there is a proposed class action in the US for those who were victimized:
The suit is for: All persons and entities who, between January 1, 1996 and December 11, 2006, directly purchased a TFT-LCD Product in the United States from any defendant or any subsidiary or affiliate thereof, or any co-conspirator. Excluded from the Class are defendants, their parent companies, subsidiaries and affiliates, any co-conspirators, all governmental entities, and any judges or justices assigned to hear any aspect of this action.
From what it says the motion to dismiss based on lack of evidence has been thrown out. Will they settle? Will their lawyers eventually be able to squish it like a little bug? What will the payout be? That's anybody's guess. Might be worth getting on board if you were a firm that bought a ton of LCDs in that time though... I would imagine that if there was a payout, it would be per infraction rather than per customer, right? I admit that this is well outside my area of expertise.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the value in disregarding sensus communis simply because it is what it is? How is taking the advice of common aesthetic taste, needy? How is taking the advice of friends fundamentally different, and significantly less needy than taking the advice of other people you know? If you're trying something on in a store, and someone walks by and says "Oh! That's a nice shirt!", would it less needy to be influenced by that if it was your friend? Is it needy to favor a shirt more if 10 people make a remark about how nice it looks? What if it's 10 friends?
As someone who dresses to present well to the general public, because I don't exclusively interact with people I already know, what people generally think a garment is of value to me.
Sure, a particularly brain dead person might simply choose something solely based on the number of Facebook likes it gets, but chances are, people are interested in the number of people who 'liked' something on Facebook are probably conscious enough about the way things look to take their own opinion into account, too.
If you want to use your own disregard for trends as a point of pride, go nuts. Making character judgements based one someone disagreeing with you on that point is completely absurd.
Photoshop CS5 for Mac defaults to not being grouped in a single window, brochacho.
It's kind of funny how, after all of this griping (from people like me) about lack of Photoshop like single-window mode in Gimp, Photoshop, at least for Mac, defaults to not having an "Application Frame"– which essentially means that it's not, by default, in single-window mode. It's easy enough to switch back, though.
Is it sad that this sort of innovation is stifled? It sure is. Is it completely reasonable reading of the situation? I think so.
The ruling said nothing more than it was the company who designed and operated the system, including all of the equipment that was recording the signals, that was actually doing the recording, not the customer. There weren't even damages awarded.
The company said that since the customer started the process themselves, they were actually the ones that were making the recording.
As an analog, I see a vending machine with an illegal item. ...yeah.
Their argument:
The customer was legally responsible for the sale, because they were selling it to themselves; they put into motion the mechanical process for the machine to deliver it to them. The vending company, who simply provided the mechanical elements to facilitate the transaction between the manufacturer and the customer, and provided those mechanical elements with the product to sell, had nothing to do with what was actually being delivered.
Is there a more accurate legal analog that contradicts this? From my perspective, it does seem completely reasonable.
::golfclap::
This is simply a much less immediately invasive (though, invasive) version of those spyware smiley face emoticon getups that started to pop up in the late 90s/early 2ks, only with much better products. Don't want the popups and stuff? Uninstall (or, try to). If you simply keep using them and just complain that they're invading your privacy, I'm just gonna stop listening.
It's really easy to do completely anonymous searches with an install of the TOR browser... if you just don't want something on your tracked history, it's just as easy to open up a private/incognito browsing sessions which breaks most tracking. It's really easy to transfer, store and share files through your own server with a public IP address or a cheap shared hosting account. It's really easy to not have someone reading your mail and serving you adverts by not using a free email... Most hosting services, even on plans that cost less than $10/mo, have an email server setup that requires very little technical know-how to set up, and pre-installed webmail clients of your choice. Hostgator does this. These are not difficult problems for people with even the slightest amount of technical know-how to solve. Help out your less technically savvy friends by giving them an alternate email address.
You have options.
Of course, it's not going to be the same smooth user experience as using Google products... Google offers extremely *high quality* services at the cost of you being their precisely targeted, profiled, prospected, inspected, infected and unrespected advertising receptacle, and they have a LOT of customers that are perfectly willing to be that receptacle. Are they somehow ethically obligated to offer their premium products for a smaller exchange? If you really want them, but want to maintain more privacy, they even offer paid business accounts with different privacy policies and terms of service.
I spent enough time telling my less technical friends to always look for (bankname).com/ in the URLs of their banks, because virtually all banks in my area have .com addresses. At least initially, it's going to be that much more confusing for a user if they have to decide if, as a hypothetical example, bankofamerica.lowrates.cn/ is significantly less trustworthy than lowrates.bankofamerica/ without a solid rule to go by.
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But the idea has worked perfectly. Everything has gone according to plan.
They're not blind, they don't specifically 'want' security to be worse, or people's grandmothers to be groped... they just don't care. If they play the game right while they control the government money flow now, they're going to be making a ton of money selling their political access and clout to companies like RapiScan when they're back in the private sector.
It was a great idea and worked perfectly for them, because it insured that they'd be making a lot of money for a really long time.
I used to think this viewpoint was overly cynical... but who was outspokenly speaking publicly in favor of RapiScan devices while being paid for what the RapiScan claims was 'unrelated consulting work', which happened to be the time that the government decided to not only use body scanners, but use RapiScan as the vendor? Well, former Chief of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, of course!
Whether or not the scanners are effective, or the policies are oppressive is completely irrelevant to the people who make the decision, which means the system is broken in this way. This will require deeper reform to remediate.
But they weren't strategic decisions, they were just mistakes resulting from the chronic miscalculation of what the real world can actually do outside of their test environments. It's not a strategy, they're just really bad at knowing how people actually use many of their products... including most specifically, what kind of hardware and network real estate people have access to. Dating back to the first SMB/NMB system (and before? I didn't have much experience prior) they just assumed that you had tons of spare network to let your file/print servers/clients constantly blather to each other about where they were and how they were feeling. As long as what the user was looking at worked mostly like they said it would and the basic 'just make it work' configuration could be done by some greenhorn who'd gone to a week long MS boot camp class, they simply didn't care what their products were doing to the back of the house to make it happen because in their environments it simply didn't matter. The fact that the hardware price/performance progress has been so steady is probably one of the only reasons that every MS OS release prior to windows 7 hasn't been a carbon copy of the Vista release. They actually assumed that everybody was not only going to go out and buy new hardware to run Vista, but they were going to buy *nice* hardware to run Vista... which is obviously something that most consumers simply weren't willing to do. I think they just *assumed* that everyone would have an awesome actually unlimited data plan to make their cloudy dreams happen. Now that the wireless comm industry is giving some whole-hearted push back with smaller caps (like in the UK) I'm willing to bet that this is going to cause some friction.
Someone earlier posted a link to this blog entry which is a pretty good read:
http://www.stepto.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=486
"doesn't look unlike"
Isn't this not unavoidant of the double negative rules, making it unnecessarily confusing to read?
I can see why that would be your immediate reaction, but It's not fucked up at all. Keep in mind that many of the universities in the US have very large areas to cover, and in many cases are the primary generator of police calls in their areas. Since they are often legally "non-profit" organizations, they don't pay taxes on any of their real estate holdings. This would put a tremendous strain on local police forces in smaller communities where a University was present, yet the municipality wouldn't be getting very much in taxes to support the police force to handle the excess volume. So why can't the university just support the local municipalities' police force financially? Well, sometimes that is what they do, but sometimes a campus spans municipalities or even counties, and it would be unfair to expect the university to reinforce the police departments for every community that they spanned even if their holdings there were limited. It makes much more sense to have a university funded police force to deal with the problems that arise due to their facilities, staff and/or students.
A friend is a police officer in the Harvard University police department. The HUPD cops are legally public servants, receive training very similar to the state police, are sworn in to protect and serve the public (not the university), and are held to the same standards of service, protection and professionalism that any other police officer would be. (which of course produces varying levels of success, just like with any other law enforcement organization.) They're deputized in each county where there is a branch of Harvard... though they're not legally compelled to intervene outside of Harvard campuses/neighborhoods. Generally, unless they see a genuine public safety concern (e.g. someone being assaulted) they stick to enforcing the law in the immediate vicinity of their holdings. Since they do have county-wide powers in several counties though, this gives them the 3rd largest jurisdiction in the state of Massachusetts. The state police have jurisdiction throughout the state, so they've got the largest jurisdiction. The MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Public Transportation Authority) Police have similar deputization in any county in which they operate (all of the eastern ones, some of the central ones) which gives them the 2nd largest jurisdiction. Harvard has branches in 2 or 3 counties (Middlesex, Suffolk, and maybe Norfolk) giving them the 3rd.
As an example of how this works in day to day ops, some may remember the recent Cambridge Police/Professor Gates debacle. Even though this was less than 1/8 mi outside of Harvard Yard, and there are Harvard holdings directly in this neighborhood, since it wasn't taking place at a public Harvard building, the Cambridge police were automatically called upon by 911 to respond to the situation. The Harvard police would have also had jurisdiction though, and I imagine would have responded if called directly.
Harvard also has uniformed security guards to do regular securtiy work. They don't have the university police man the gates and work the front desks in dorms. Sure, it'd be pretty scary if all of the security guards that hang around a typical university just happen to have police powers, but that's not how it's set up.
Look, I can understand the distrust of anything and everything surrounding a corporate marketing push, but we should probably actually look before we call bull(bear)shit. Let's give credit where credit is due:
That's not the only video... in fact It was on national television:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXmmOmR7M9w
Here's the writeup of the event at Guinness World Records:
http://community.guinnessworldrecords.com/_Clackers-in-a-TV-ad-What/blog/2271291/7691.html?b=
Many people seem to be making a distinction between 'criminals' and cops who illegally arrest, assault or harass people. A criminal is someone who breaks the (criminal) law. There are laws against illegally arresting, assaulting and harassing people. It doesn't matter if they are cops or not, when they break the law by doing these things, they *become* criminals. They've just got badges too.
It beats sniffing MIT students. Trust me.
That's not really how it works. The separation isn't that black and white.
The first sentence in the article: "The city is paying some 230 "consultants" an average salary of $400,000 a year for a computer project that is seven years behind schedule and vastly over budget."
I'm willing to bet that the person who wrote the article is confusing what the company charges for their services, and what they actually receive in payroll. I'd assume it's probably a pretty average tech salary. Look at the guys in those pictures. Do they look like they make almost 500k per year?
The city probably *is* paying for their time, it's just not in the form of payroll. I worked on a support team for a large software/hardware product that was deployed in large organizations by teams of people (usually for about a million bucks, a bit smaller than this project). These consultants are usually professional services contractors that were hired by the company to send out on projects to deploy and customize installations and occasionally take care of problems that tech support can't handle or can't handle as quickly as the company desires. During the initial sales discussion about the package, the company says that they need X number of contractors with X specialty working X hours under X project managers for X amount of time to complete the project. The organization that's buying the product then essentially hires these people through the company (almost like hiring someone through a temp service) and the company takes the majority of what the city pays to have these guys come in and work. Many of our consultants were billing around a million dollars a year to various customers for their services but they themselves were making around 100k.
At any time the city can choose to stop paying for these professional services... but then you've blown all of this cash on a project and have absolutely nothing to show for it. There are also lots of 3rd party professional services companies out there who specialize in coming in and cleaning up larger companies project disasters and charging less for their consultants. It's always a delicate balance in large projects. It's often hard to tell in advance if you're going to be dropping a significant initial investment with someone who won't be able to finish the project, or will intentionally delay the project to run up a huge services bill.
I never really trusted putting any of my documents on computers at all. Just in a locked safe, sitting in a larger locked safe, in a secure room in a non-government, non-corporate secure facility with access by nobody except me.
Ha! I out-neckbearded you both.
"... to push the limits of our power and find ways to get around things. This is often seen in a negative light (as in the OP's choice of the word "abuse"), yet it's also a trait that has allowed humans to survive, thrive, and make numerous advancements.
The OP talks about IT people white-listing websites they know to be safe because they themselves use them. I don't see this as having a negative impact for the staff or patrons of the places he mentions. If there is a negative impact, or "abuse", it comes from the executive decision to use censoring software in the first place, not the IT guy poking holes in it."
I disagree entirely. It's not a matter of what other people are deprived of by your gain, it's a simple matter of ethics.
In this case, the IT people are essentially policy enforcers. When people are expected to uphold or enforce rules and standards in a professional environment for themselves and others, it's simply not ethical to only enforce those rules on others while either selectively or not enforcing them on yourself. Can you think of a (valid) reason that IT personnel are somehow more worthy of entertainment at work than other workers? Sure it might not be the end of the world if Joe the CS rep can't access somethingawful.com, but if you're sitting there wasting just as much time messing around on whatever net based BS happens to tickle your fancy, it's completely hypocritical and simply not fair any way you slice it.
This is no more ethical than police using their power to avoid penalties for off-duty traffic offenses. Of course, them being penalized can't change what they did. Nobody (except for maybe the town budget) is losing out by them not being penalized. The fact alone that they aren't required to pay the price for their actions even if caught is sufficiently unethical.
Asteroids get smashed by YOU!
What you are saying completely makes sense, though judging from my experiences as a former IBMer, I'm willing to bet that their actions are more schizophrenic than one might hope. A lot of people don't realize how little communication there is among IBM's dizzying assortment of departments. The problem is in the way the company is structured.
Let's start at the top. When it comes to the large company wide decisions, IBM might not only seem to be adaptable, but downright agile compared to other companies that size. It seems to me like the guys who make the big picture decisions are pretty talented.
They're also so far up the ladder that when it comes to the daily operation of the company, they've got no clue what's going on. They're often more than 5 managers above your average developer.
Down at the other end of the company, you've got lots of really talented (there are always exceptions that make the rule) developers, technicians and other individual contributors that do the heavy lifting. They're often governed by smart dedicated 1st level managers that really know what's going on.
The problem is in the middle. It's like you've got the head of a genius, the arms and legs of an Olympian, and the torso of Mr. Creosote from Monty Python's Meaning of Life. (Let's add one more project manager... he's wafer thin!)
When it comes to the internal processes that IBM uses to conduct business on a day to day basis, they're in the stone age. The layers upon layers of dead-weight middle management seem to have no purpose other than delaying what you're doing so they can say they played a part in it, ensuring that they look good enough in the eyes of the middle manager above them to have a job next quarter. The hordes of inefficient yet needlessly automated processes, completely outdated tools, absurd politics, arbitrary policies and snails pace adaptation of updates and changes to the business processes make it very difficult to actually speak up and make a difference... and given the sheer volume of arbitrary policies that you may be violating at any given time without knowing it, it's not worth speaking up and giving some random middle manager with a grudge leverage to politically manipulate your department. From a practical day to day perspective, you really could view it as a oddly associated bunch of groups, that are bound together by bureaucracy, not dissimilar from the government in Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil.
For example:
Most people on Slashdot are probably aware of IBM's commendable commitment to transfer the entire company to Linux. I was very excited to learn that they had their own company endorsed/controlled internal Linux distro with all of the fixin's (Notes, etc) that we could install on our corporate workstations at our discretion. Being an upper level support guy who did a decent amount of scripting for customers who ran our Solaris based product, it was a much more appropriate choice for me than Windows. Everything worked great(or great-ish. I wasn't picky)! Now to install the ticket tracking system... Their idea of "updating" their ticket tracking system was making a screen scraping GUI that sat on top of a specific windows 3270 terminal emulator. I attempted to learn how to use the cryptic CLI/TUI application directly, but I was told by a support policy manager that the GUI program had been extended in ways that weren't supported by the terminal directly. "No problem" i thought "I'm a wine ninja... I can make it happen," no dice. Oh well, I was sure that they'd be coming out with a Linux version soon. After scouring the company intranet for more information, it turns out that there used to be a Linux version but it was permanently cancelled several years earlier because it was too difficult to maintain both branches. So I posted something in the product's board on the intranet asking if there was going to be a renewed interest in it as support was trying to get going with Linux, and the person who responded to the post (given I have no idea on what level they were inv
Uniform != Janitor
There are lots of highly paid, well educated, well qualified people who must wear uniforms. Though with many of these professions there are physical needs for these uniforms, they're quite often most valuable because they allow people to be identified by their jobs so they can be found in a crowd in case of an emergency without even exchanging words. It's quite important for people to be able to tell a doctor from a nurse from an orderly from a security guard in the hallway in a hospital. As a chef, I know that it's important for everyone from new waitstaff to health inspectors to vendors to be able to come into the kitchen and see who's the chef, who the line cooks are and who the dishwasher is without having to interrupt the workflow and start asking questions. To all of the people who would say associating cooks with IT guys is degrading for IT guys, most cooks that I've worked with were on average just as smart, just as well educated and/or more experienced in their field as your average guy that I worked with as a 3rd level support engineer for a large Solaris based software package for IBM. I would be much more likely to hire cooks into an IT organization than hire IT guys into a kitchen.
And though the word janitor has a definite 'cleaner' context to it, (and being a cleaner in most environments is not highly skilled labor) I'd certainly call most IT positions essentially custodial positions, especially in the help desk. Many facilities type custodial positions require them to perform basic electrical work, repair appliances, furniture, doors, windows, etc. These types of jobs certainly require more specialized knowledge than any of the helpdesk jobs I've hired for. When you're talking about someone who is generally only required to know how to check basic network connectivity, run malware and virus scanners, perform basic setup and configuration, and call someone the second they're in over there head, it's absurd that there's so much disdain for people in a position where they have to know how to replace a broken window pane, replace a broken faucet, snake a drain, fix a broken toilet, replace cracked tiles, tend to plants, safely replace light switches, strip and buff a floor, etc. etc. etc. You can go to Cornell and get a Masters degree in facilities management. Last I checked you couldn't get one in "helpdesk arts". I was in IT or closely related fields for over a decade and it certainly is an honorable profession. This thread perfectly highlights how condescending IT guys can be towards people in other fields, and more often than not, it's to people who have more difficult, more complicated, more stressful and often more important jobs. It's one of the primary reasons that so many end users are immediately defensive and confrontational when dealing with IT guys. They aren't born that way.
There are certainly tons of great IT guys out there... the overwhelming majority... but those guys that have the classic IT god/martyr complex is one of the primary reasons that I left the field to get into something where you're judged exclusively based on your merit as a worker and not how much noise you make about it. Keep convincing yourself that you are an invaluable IT artiste, certainly within the top 5 most important people in the company. You should even throw your arms up in the air and passionately shout ::cue French accent:: "I cannot work under zees circumstances!" when management makes demands like this of you. It'll be a hilarious story to tell the guy in Bangalore who is going to replace you and 3 other people armed only with a remote desktop connection and a telephone.
Learn to say no.
This sounds like it was posted by somebody who hasn't had to look for a job at any point in the past few years.
Living in Boston, I'm quite happy that some specific places charge for wifi. Especially in the Cambridge/Somerville area it can be downright impossible to try and get a seat at a coffee shop that doesn't charge for wifi. It's not uncommon to see hoards of people sitting there for HOURS during the busiest times of day with a laptop and a long-since emptied small coffee. There are plenty of places around that give out free wifi, and there should be. In places where there are so many users that they're actually losing business because paying customers can't find a table, they should certainly charge a nominal fee.
Take a hint from my lovely state, Massachusetts (among others... i know, but we're one of the worst.) If you're a government and you can fine people for doing something, and the fine doesn't deter them from doing it... well son you've just created yourself a source of revenue. It's addictive. Soon enough you'll figure out what other non-crimes you can make fineable offenses like declaring a snow emergency (a state where parking is restricted to make room for snow plows and emergency vehicles) when it's not actually snowing or very little snow is forecast, then give out thousands of tickets for $100 and tow everyone!
This is a criminal case, not a class action settlement.
This article is of course for the criminal action and not any civil suits. Naturally, there is a proposed class action in the US for those who were victimized:
http://www.lieffcabraser.com/antitrust/lcd-antitrust.htm
The suit is for:
All persons and entities who, between January 1, 1996 and December 11, 2006, directly purchased a TFT-LCD Product in the United States from any defendant or any subsidiary or affiliate thereof, or any co-conspirator. Excluded from the Class are defendants, their parent companies, subsidiaries and affiliates, any co-conspirators, all governmental entities, and any judges or justices assigned to hear any aspect of this action.
From what it says the motion to dismiss based on lack of evidence has been thrown out. Will they settle? Will their lawyers eventually be able to squish it like a little bug? What will the payout be? That's anybody's guess. Might be worth getting on board if you were a firm that bought a ton of LCDs in that time though... I would imagine that if there was a payout, it would be per infraction rather than per customer, right? I admit that this is well outside my area of expertise.