You sound like you are describing a wireless cellphone with built-in WiFi capability. The new MagicJack product would support GSM phones that don't have built-in WiFi. Once it gets on the internet, MJ is just another VoIP provider and provides service the same way your provider does, but they use advertising to supplement their revenue and reduce their phone rates.
The original product/service magic jack offers is basically a VoIP converter for landline (and in-home cordless) phones. The basic difference between the new product and the old is that they support different types of phones. Based on the service offerings, it sounds like they cater to the frugal who don't want to invest in new phones to use VoIP and don't want to pay a lot each month/year for phone service.
I wouldn't call them a scam, but they are definitely ad-ware/advertising supported, and people need to know that going in. My neighbor has their landline converter and as I remember, apart from the software, they also play recorded messages at the beginning of each call, or a certain portion of calls.
Downtime is needed, but sometimes "excessive" downtime is just a symptom of a team that doesn't know what it's doing and doesn't know where to start. And if the management culture discourages that kind of feedback from the team, this is the kind of shit that happens.
If you're doing other peoples' work, make sure your name is all over the place on the good stuff. Better yet, go to the project manager and ask for ownership of a piece you're already doing most of the work on. When the PM says "but Joe Blow owns that", that's when you trot out how much work Joe Blow has been dumping on you already.
Of course it's only fair to give Joe Blow a chance to pick up his share of the load before you try that last one..."Sorry Joe, I can't help you make your deadline this weekend, I have my own deadline to meet."
There's a difference between "misuse of system access" and "unlawful system access". Also back in 1990, there was no where near the level of consciousness about online privacy that there is currently. Online was still AOL, not the WWW. So in that environment, looking up someone's personal info was treated about the same as drunk drivers were treated before MADD got going in the 1980's. A slap on the wrist.
Personally, I think a set of permanent "privacy offenders lists" similar to the sex offenders lists most states maintain would be a good idea. But it's too late to put this guy on such a list.
As things stand. you can argue that he's a proven offender and might possibly commit such a crime again, or you can argue that his actions over the past 20 years since the incident make him "once bitten, twice shy" and less likely to fail. I think the telling point is that he "mis-remembered" the events and didn't bother to cross-check his memories against the record. That's either negligence or a failed attempt to cover-up/minimize what he did. If you're preparing for a confirmation hearing and you don't have your story straight, you deserve the consequences.
Should be at least a 3 or 4 insightful rather than a one. Especially that last paragraph. If this keeps up, only self-destructive morons will accept jobs in the public sector.
Umm, _everyone_ is prone to grave errors in judgment. That knowledge goes back to the doctrine of original sin in the church, and the idea that all humans are fallible.
I'm undecided about this one. If I could prove a negative that this guy has never made a similar misjudgment since his prior offense, I would actually prefer him as a "once bitten, twice shy" person, rather than a noob who is more likely to slide down the slippery slope into Dick Cheney territory because they haven't experienced the consequences. But since I don't have enough information about his activities since the incident, I have to stay neutral.
The hype came from the media, because they public loves doomsday predictions; and from the snake-oil salesmen who capitalized on the hysteria.
Regardless of the hysteria, a lot of corporations made long-term capital investments in IT systems that helped facilitate the business-methods revolution exemplified by Walmart, and the internet boom itself. So even if the Y2K problem was over-hyped, the Y2K opportunity was seized by many corporations that still enjoy competitive advantages from their investment.
Not the 2010 bug, but a lot of the Y2K fixes were kludged by putting in a 2 digit "window", so somewhere between 2040 and 2060 a lot of systems will start to foul up again, if they haven't been replaced by then.
WTF? It IS a developer's job to worry about system security from an application implementation perspective. It IS a developer's job to understand the operating system well enough to understand the best way to use the operating system's APIs and services. It IS a developer's job to understand what software is on their system, because that software could be interacting with the program they are developing. This knowledge alone makes them more competent to administer and manage their own PC than your typical COE support person. On top of that, they need the access to do their job.
1) Developers should have local admin rights on their machines 2) Apart from automated software updates for standard anti-malware and office tools, the developer should install and maintain the tools required to do their job. 3) The developer should not require access to the normal helpdesk support for issues local to their PC.
On the other hand, as posted below, there is no reason a development machine can't be isolated from the local network, or else the local admin rights can be granted to a local-only user that does not have access to the network. If your company doesn't want to provide developers with two separate computers, limit the network access to a non-admin user. Under *nix, Vista or Win 7 the developer can sudo or invoke the local admin user to install software and perform administrative tasks required for software development.
Heck you can even force developers to develop inside a virtualized environment in a VHD image, but they'll still need admin rights within the virtualized system. Your testers, even moreso.
ACTA negotiations with the US? With everything under the covers, all sides have plausible deniability about who is pushing for the most draconian copyright measures.
Well, except that if enough people leave out the pay step in the software purchase, the software company loses money there too. Or conversely, why should the paying customers of the software company subsidize the non-paying users? If it costs $1 M to develop and market a particular program and only 10% of the users actually pay for it, either the software company loses money or the program will cost 4x as much as if 40% of the users pay for it. Not saying every pirate would be a customer here, but if you make piracy too easy compared with legitimate purchase, you make it too hard for companies to stay in business even with a reasonable internet-based business model. Where would Redhat be if most of their paying customers suddenly decided to download their own source and maintain Linux in-house?
Yes, the problem here is the legal and political clout wielded by the old media industry, combined with the fact that their business model is so out of tune with the realities of the internet. When your cost structure doesn't allow you to be profitable selling electronic copies at $1.00 instead of disks at $20, you have to resort to other means to stay in business. Hence the heavy-handed attempts to stifle competition.
Mind you, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the full-blown pirates either. Maybe if you charged $1.00 a copy and paid money to charitable organizations for impoverished Blues and Jazz musicians who were ripped off by the record labels, I'd be on board. The artists need to be compensated or there won't be any art.
In some ways it's like the software engineers in the US and Europe who still expect to make $80k-$120k when companies can get multiple engineers and programmers in China and India for the same cost. The internet has changed our competitive landscape, but many of us still haven't adjusted. Even the authors of open source software typically have to keep their day jobs to pay the bills. The problems related to funding software developers in the future landscape are remarkably similar to the issues facing musicians and artists.
Also, a disdain for ambiguity can also manifest itself in over-engineering to cover all possible outcomes, rather than a frozen mind-set. Just because you want a definitive answer doesn't mean you are wedded to a particular answer. _effective_ engineers will do additional research to resolve ambiguities rather than just brushing people off. Unless of course, the question is so stupid (PEBCAK anyone?) that it would take weeks to bring the questioner up to speed as to what the real issues are.
It's amazing to me that anyone with an engineering background could have blind (I.E. without tangible proof) faith in any religion. Agnosticism seems to me to be the viewpoint most consistent with an Engineering outlook (until a religion provides some kind of tangible proof, which goes against what most of them say about faith.)
And yet there are many (non-biologist) scientists who are also creationists in the fundamentalist Christian sense. All you need is the Islamic equivalent.
The most successful "terrorist" revolt in history was instigated by the middle and professional classes in the 13 colonies of the US. These are the classes that suffer the most under repressive regimes but they also have more resources (money, education) available to them to successfully react. So I would expect to see the professional classes (engineers, teachers, doctors, lawyers) over-represented in an established revolutionary organization (as opposed to one-off wackos). The question that comes out of this, though, is why is the anger directed at the US, rather than at the local government that is doing the repressing? Are the local governments being seen as sock-puppets for the US as the US drains the middle east of oil?
This seems more plausible now that I've RTFA and seen that they address the recruiting issue in the article.
Maybe we're mixing cause and effect here. If I was running a terrorist organization, I would be actively recruiting people with the technical skills required to design the tools of my trade. In other words - chemical, electrical and computer engineers and technicians. So is the preponderance of engineers due to an affinity for extremism in the engineering mind-set, or due to active recruiting?
On the other hand, if you look at the flame wars that break out in/. and other technical communities, you could argue that there is definitely an affinity for extremism among the technical types. But my vote is that it's more due to the political/religious extremists actively seeking out the technical resources needed to do the job.
Actually, this is more likely mostly due to user incompetence. This number has to include the cost of all the extra IT and helpdesk personnel that are required to help PHBs who forget their passwords, download malware onto their work computers, can't figure out how to run a financial report and so on, you can get into the trillions pretty quickly.
The other big item is probably the industry-standard 20% of losses on IT projects due to scope creep, cancellations, system defects and projects that shouldn't have been attempted in the first place. Which includes IT incompetence but still has a PHB component.
No, Google deserves to be slammed. They're supposed to be a search engine and they're outsourcing the queries to Target's search engine? Cheap ass network engineers trying to save a few bucks on servers by outsourcing queries, and bad programmers that can't filter results from external search engines for "We can find no matches..." are Google's problem, not Target's.
Ted: You forgot to obtain the transfer of copyright from your parents. Or did you spring demonically from the muck of the Swamp of Doom? I mean, if you were born like most people, your parents are the ones who created and titled this work, so they own the copyright by default, not you. And of course if they named you after an ancester, there is no copyright, since you're a derivative work.
Hey, don't worry, I can go either way on this one.
Not to mention your emails. AT&T has migrated its mail services to Yahoo, so I now have a new Yahoo account instead of a mailbox on AT&T, even though the mail domain is unchanged. I imagine other ISPs are also outsourcing mailserver costs like this.
On the other hand, I doubt Yahoo! is any worse than AT&T in terms of bending over and spreading them at the drop of a National Security Letter. So I'm worse off because the government has two shots to get at my data on AT&T/Yahoo!, but they have to spend twice as much to make sure they've got all of it.
EFF doesn't have a problem with contracts, they're just pointing out a few facts: a) courts can void contract terms for various reasons. Witness the Early termination fees on wireless phone contracts in California. b) The EFF isn't necessarily saying the contracts aren't enforceable. They're saying no one's gone to court to see if they're enforceable. c) The EFF is saying that consumers need to pay more attention to this crap before they get raked over the coals the way the XBox modders did.
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You sound like you are describing a wireless cellphone with built-in WiFi capability. The new MagicJack product would support GSM phones that don't have built-in WiFi. Once it gets on the internet, MJ is just another VoIP provider and provides service the same way your provider does, but they use advertising to supplement their revenue and reduce their phone rates.
The original product/service magic jack offers is basically a VoIP converter for landline (and in-home cordless) phones. The basic difference between the new product and the old is that they support different types of phones. Based on the service offerings, it sounds like they cater to the frugal who don't want to invest in new phones to use VoIP and don't want to pay a lot each month/year for phone service.
I wouldn't call them a scam, but they are definitely ad-ware/advertising supported, and people need to know that going in. My neighbor has their landline converter and as I remember, apart from the software, they also play recorded messages at the beginning of each call, or a certain portion of calls.
... the BOFH
Then he'll REALLY understand how IT works.
Downtime is needed, but sometimes "excessive" downtime is just a symptom of a team that doesn't know what it's doing and doesn't know where to start. And if the management culture discourages that kind of feedback from the team, this is the kind of shit that happens.
If you're doing other peoples' work, make sure your name is all over the place on the good stuff. Better yet, go to the project manager and ask for ownership of a piece you're already doing most of the work on. When the PM says "but Joe Blow owns that", that's when you trot out how much work Joe Blow has been dumping on you already.
Of course it's only fair to give Joe Blow a chance to pick up his share of the load before you try that last one..."Sorry Joe, I can't help you make your deadline this weekend, I have my own deadline to meet."
Only if the designers encoded a 2 DIGIT YEAR, even after y2K. otherwise it would be 3216 instead of 2010. I would hope that they weren't that stupid.
Who needs binary floats or BCD? 1024-bit integers do the trick just fine!
There's a difference between "misuse of system access" and "unlawful system access". Also back in 1990, there was no where near the level of consciousness about online privacy that there is currently. Online was still AOL, not the WWW. So in that environment, looking up someone's personal info was treated about the same as drunk drivers were treated before MADD got going in the 1980's. A slap on the wrist.
Personally, I think a set of permanent "privacy offenders lists" similar to the sex offenders lists most states maintain would be a good idea. But it's too late to put this guy on such a list.
As things stand. you can argue that he's a proven offender and might possibly commit such a crime again, or you can argue that his actions over the past 20 years since the incident make him "once bitten, twice shy" and less likely to fail. I think the telling point is that he "mis-remembered" the events and didn't bother to cross-check his memories against the record. That's either negligence or a failed attempt to cover-up/minimize what he did. If you're preparing for a confirmation hearing and you don't have your story straight, you deserve the consequences.
Should be at least a 3 or 4 insightful rather than a one. Especially that last paragraph. If this keeps up, only self-destructive morons will accept jobs in the public sector.
Umm, _everyone_ is prone to grave errors in judgment. That knowledge goes back to the doctrine of original sin in the church, and the idea that all humans are fallible.
I'm undecided about this one. If I could prove a negative that this guy has never made a similar misjudgment since his prior offense, I would actually prefer him as a "once bitten, twice shy" person, rather than a noob who is more likely to slide down the slippery slope into Dick Cheney territory because they haven't experienced the consequences. But since I don't have enough information about his activities since the incident, I have to stay neutral.
Yeah, most techies were reporting real problems.
The hype came from the media, because they public loves doomsday predictions; and from the snake-oil salesmen who capitalized on the hysteria.
Regardless of the hysteria, a lot of corporations made long-term capital investments in IT systems that helped facilitate the business-methods revolution exemplified by Walmart, and the internet boom itself. So even if the Y2K problem was over-hyped, the Y2K opportunity was seized by many corporations that still enjoy competitive advantages from their investment.
Not the 2010 bug, but a lot of the Y2K fixes were kludged by putting in a 2 digit "window", so somewhere between 2040 and 2060 a lot of systems will start to foul up again, if they haven't been replaced by then.
WTF? It IS a developer's job to worry about system security from an application implementation perspective. It IS a developer's job to understand the operating system well enough to understand the best way to use the operating system's APIs and services. It IS a developer's job to understand what software is on their system, because that software could be interacting with the program they are developing. This knowledge alone makes them more competent to administer and manage their own PC than your typical COE support person. On top of that, they need the access to do their job.
1) Developers should have local admin rights on their machines
2) Apart from automated software updates for standard anti-malware and office tools, the developer should install and maintain the tools required to do their job.
3) The developer should not require access to the normal helpdesk support for issues local to their PC.
On the other hand, as posted below, there is no reason a development machine can't be isolated from the local network, or else the local admin rights can be granted to a local-only user that does not have access to the network. If your company doesn't want to provide developers with two separate computers, limit the network access to a non-admin user. Under *nix, Vista or Win 7 the developer can sudo or invoke the local admin user to install software and perform administrative tasks required for software development.
Heck you can even force developers to develop inside a virtualized environment in a VHD image, but they'll still need admin rights within the virtualized system. Your testers, even moreso.
ACTA negotiations with the US? With everything under the covers, all sides have plausible deniability about who is pushing for the most draconian copyright measures.
Well, except that if enough people leave out the pay step in the software purchase, the software company loses money there too. Or conversely, why should the paying customers of the software company subsidize the non-paying users? If it costs $1 M to develop and market a particular program and only 10% of the users actually pay for it, either the software company loses money or the program will cost 4x as much as if 40% of the users pay for it. Not saying every pirate would be a customer here, but if you make piracy too easy compared with legitimate purchase, you make it too hard for companies to stay in business even with a reasonable internet-based business model. Where would Redhat be if most of their paying customers suddenly decided to download their own source and maintain Linux in-house?
Yes, the problem here is the legal and political clout wielded by the old media industry, combined with the fact that their business model is so out of tune with the realities of the internet. When your cost structure doesn't allow you to be profitable selling electronic copies at $1.00 instead of disks at $20, you have to resort to other means to stay in business. Hence the heavy-handed attempts to stifle competition.
Mind you, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the full-blown pirates either. Maybe if you charged $1.00 a copy and paid money to charitable organizations for impoverished Blues and Jazz musicians who were ripped off by the record labels, I'd be on board. The artists need to be compensated or there won't be any art.
In some ways it's like the software engineers in the US and Europe who still expect to make $80k-$120k when companies can get multiple engineers and programmers in China and India for the same cost. The internet has changed our competitive landscape, but many of us still haven't adjusted. Even the authors of open source software typically have to keep their day jobs to pay the bills. The problems related to funding software developers in the future landscape are remarkably similar to the issues facing musicians and artists.
Also, a disdain for ambiguity can also manifest itself in over-engineering to cover all possible outcomes, rather than a frozen mind-set. Just because you want a definitive answer doesn't mean you are wedded to a particular answer. _effective_ engineers will do additional research to resolve ambiguities rather than just brushing people off. Unless of course, the question is so stupid (PEBCAK anyone?) that it would take weeks to bring the questioner up to speed as to what the real issues are.
It's amazing to me that anyone with an engineering background could have blind (I.E. without tangible proof) faith in any religion. Agnosticism seems to me to be the viewpoint most consistent with an Engineering outlook (until a religion provides some kind of tangible proof, which goes against what most of them say about faith.)
And yet there are many (non-biologist) scientists who are also creationists in the fundamentalist Christian sense. All you need is the Islamic equivalent.
The most successful "terrorist" revolt in history was instigated by the middle and professional classes in the 13 colonies of the US. These are the classes that suffer the most under repressive regimes but they also have more resources (money, education) available to them to successfully react. So I would expect to see the professional classes (engineers, teachers, doctors, lawyers) over-represented in an established revolutionary organization (as opposed to one-off wackos). The question that comes out of this, though, is why is the anger directed at the US, rather than at the local government that is doing the repressing? Are the local governments being seen as sock-puppets for the US as the US drains the middle east of oil?
This seems more plausible now that I've RTFA and seen that they address the recruiting issue in the article.
Maybe we're mixing cause and effect here. If I was running a terrorist organization, I would be actively recruiting people with the technical skills required to design the tools of my trade. In other words - chemical, electrical and computer engineers and technicians. So is the preponderance of engineers due to an affinity for extremism in the engineering mind-set, or due to active recruiting?
On the other hand, if you look at the flame wars that break out in /. and other technical communities, you could argue that there is definitely an affinity for extremism among the technical types. But my vote is that it's more due to the political/religious extremists actively seeking out the technical resources needed to do the job.
In other words, welcome to China.
Actually, this is more likely mostly due to user incompetence. This number has to include the cost of all the extra IT and helpdesk personnel that are required to help PHBs who forget their passwords, download malware onto their work computers, can't figure out how to run a financial report and so on, you can get into the trillions pretty quickly.
The other big item is probably the industry-standard 20% of losses on IT projects due to scope creep, cancellations, system defects and projects that shouldn't have been attempted in the first place. Which includes IT incompetence but still has a PHB component.
No, Google deserves to be slammed. They're supposed to be a search engine and they're outsourcing the queries to Target's search engine? Cheap ass network engineers trying to save a few bucks on servers by outsourcing queries, and bad programmers that can't filter results from external search engines for "We can find no matches..." are Google's problem, not Target's.
Google is using target's search engine to run searches and doesn't know how to interpret the string "We could find no matches"?
Not spam. Bad coding at Google.
Ted: You forgot to obtain the transfer of copyright from your parents. Or did you spring demonically from the muck of the Swamp of Doom? I mean, if you were born like most people, your parents are the ones who created and titled this work, so they own the copyright by default, not you. And of course if they named you after an ancester, there is no copyright, since you're a derivative work.
Hey, don't worry, I can go either way on this one.
Not to mention your emails. AT&T has migrated its mail services to Yahoo, so I now have a new Yahoo account instead of a mailbox on AT&T, even though the mail domain is unchanged. I imagine other ISPs are also outsourcing mailserver costs like this.
On the other hand, I doubt Yahoo! is any worse than AT&T in terms of bending over and spreading them at the drop of a National Security Letter. So I'm worse off because the government has two shots to get at my data on AT&T/Yahoo!, but they have to spend twice as much to make sure they've got all of it.
EFF doesn't have a problem with contracts, they're just pointing out a few facts: a) courts can void contract terms for various reasons. Witness the Early termination fees on wireless phone contracts in California. b) The EFF isn't necessarily saying the contracts aren't enforceable. They're saying no one's gone to court to see if they're enforceable. c) The EFF is saying that consumers need to pay more attention to this crap before they get raked over the coals the way the XBox modders did.