Then don't go for that third strike.
It's that easy.
No, (sigh) it isn't.
The fairness of the law isn't in its intent, but rather in it's resilience to potential abuse. It's the proverbial two-edged sword.
In all the examples I've seen of a three-strikes law so far, none of them required a trial or allowed any sort of window for legal representation in the defense of the accused.
Denying people the ability to communicate in the modern world effects isolation from the modern world, and in our social context is equivalent to a custodial order. (In fact, it is a specified part of some custodial orders, such as that of the infamous "Mr. Baldy".)
If you can effectively incarcerate someone on the strength of an unverified accusation you have rule by Red Guards or the Army-McCarthy hearings (just pick the bloody autocratic cultural movement of your choice) all over again. I don't want to see that. I really don't want to see that.
If there must be a three-strikes rule to protect intellectual property, and preservation of that intellectual property is important enough to defend it by imposition of harsh, Draconian sanctions, then the accused must have available to them the rule of law and the ability to defend themselves under it.
Ah, but I assume you are not a child aged 2-11. Disney's movies get played over and over in households with small children. Over and over. Disney would make a fortune selling per-view subscriptions to families. Over and over. Did I mention that kids watch the same movies over and over?
Agree. I am thoroughly convinced that my eldest daughter's bone structure is knitted together in crystalline patterns analogous to the sound track of Dumbo. She says she doesn't remember any of it, but all I have to do is quote half a sentence of any part of the film and she'll be humming the rest of the movie, in sequence from that point on. She knows this, and throws things at me when I do it. Unfair, really...
If Disney promised to send you a physical DVD (or whatever-media-is-popular-these-days) whenever you wanted to cancel your account or if they decided to discontinue the service, would that address your concerns?
Not really, no.
"Sorry, what is this "Disney Genuine Advantage" thing running on my PC?"
Thing is, there's been enough Disney out for long enough that other people can (and do) "Disney". Maybe without the trademarked mouse and duck which were tied to particular voice models anyway, and character voice compositions based on Walt's falsetto are um, problematic at this point.
Disney will be able to lock down their brand, but like a church that wants a monopoly on magic, they can't see that others can and will fill in any artificial voids they create.
Ok, Pixar was swallowed, but it's a wide, wide world out there and the global pool of talent is not restricted to the libraries of Buena Vista.
Global communications make this a dangerous era to build your business model on artificial scarcity.
WRT #2, another unintended effect. Imagine someone hits you from the front. The inertia of the impact would force your hand forward, causing you to *speed up*.
It's not the EU that is causing these job losses, it's Sun's piss-poor management that caused them to need to be bought out in the first place.
This goes up to fundamental problems in their business model, I think.
Over the last decade or so I've noticed a common thread in the IT business - when businesses suddenly start saying they're re-orienting themselves around a "services" model, it draws only one picture:
(1) They no longer have a viable product to sell,
(2) They haven't invested sufficiently in R&D over the long haul to keep themselves technically relevant, and
(3) They've bought into a race-to-the-bottom, price-driven market, and have effectively given their margins away to companies living in countries with a better $Local_Currency:dollar ratio.
(I do not believe this applies to the FOSS model, because community driven projects have always been services oriented, not transitioning to that model - they work to a different beat.)
Sun's product set consists of a set of high end servers (acquired from Cray originally iirc, not internally developed), the "Java" brand and associated software test suite, a version of Unix that is very good but competing with a free product, and a lot of very nice and clever people who nonetheless are competing with equally good brains from overseas that have the advantage of a depressed local currency.
What's not to like about this model? Sun is obviously able to convert air to money, to have a cash flow at all.
Anyone with half a brain realized converting from dumb paper ballots to "smart" electronic machines that could manipulate the votes was a Bad Idea (tm). Unfortunately that disqualifies most of our state politicians.
Wrong, Chucko! I have it on the very best knowledge that our state politicians do have half a brain.
I kind of like the approach taken by Microsoft internally, when I had a contract with them a few years ago. "Here's your laptop. Nothing's locked down. If you screw it up, dig yourself out. If you screw it up for others, expect them to speak to you about it".
Your point is only valid if you want to prevent a use from changing his wallpaper, screen savers and the like.
I don't think that's entirely true, I can think of an exception or two. Particularly where the workstation may be used in financial dealings with publicly-listed companies. In some cases you do not want people to fiddle with the settings of applications, to - for example - change the location of an audit log. Well, you might want to, but the financial regulator might raise an eyebrow over it.
Perhaps if you actually had the correct hardware you're experience would be different. I've seen huge implementations of SharePoint that run exceedingly well, albeit on the correct hardware. Continue your MS bashing..
Criticism is off-target, I think. I'm willing to separate Microsoft-the-business with Microsoft-the-products, and on the whole I rather like Microsoft products. I'm too old to be anybody's fanboi, though. If there's a problem with a technology, anybody's technology, it's worth discussing how to improve it.
We have nearly 40,000 people on an extremely reliable global network, and it's mostly Microsoft-based. Hardware budgets to support this are simply not a problem. Servers are fresh and strongly spec'd, software versions are pretty current and we're big enough to involve Microsoft in planning. (Strangely, it seems like the engineers, not the bean counters, are given the job of capacity planning here. One of the reasons I like this firm).
What that leaves is the software itself, and the surrounding network. And yes, I know about connection pooling.
Granted we're stretching the scale a bit, but I still find the process of using MOSS as remotely as we do (I live in Australia, hard to avoid it) is a bit slower and clunkier than I think it should be. And the delays tend to be inconsistent, which makes me think perhaps there is another reason for this besides the number of network hops - i.e. the network is consistent part of the delays we experince, but not necessarily the most significant part (variable delays being more aggravating than consistent delays).
Some pages simply take too long to load up what is essentially a clickable index, and I think it's the database that is responsible for the inconsistent component of the delays experienced. What else could it be? I'm still listening.
There are so many things to do to get this right - basically I'd add that you need a three-silo people model to match the three silos of dev,test,prod. Your development side are the creative ones; give them the tools they ask for and let them play. You need a critical, intelligent and demanding test manager in the middle, and for the production gatekeeper you need someone with absolutely no imagination at all (follow the rules, tick the boxes, or *zero* chance of advance to production. Seriously. Tell the people who think otherwise the *boat*will*sink* if all the test boxes aren't ticked. Just don't try to run development that way, mutiny isn't pretty.)
For the test through production phases, make sure you have your servers virtualised. Test because test environments tend to proliferate (try, just try to keep a baseline somewhere? Careful when you update it...) and Production because you'll need speedy rollback if you auger it, and strict version control on the server versions. This applies whether your virtual:physical server ratio is 1:1 or otherwise.
Look into data de-duplication solutions to keep the total disk space used by virtual images down.
ITIL is nice but it's really only the scaffolding. You still have to provide the cathedral.
FWIW... In my experience SharePoint is a flexible, feature-rich, capable tool. I was skeptical at first, mostly because I just didn't feel like learning it. But as a Project Manager I haven't found a better tool to replace the services you get from SharePoint.
And a project manager may be the most complex user Microsoft has. When you set it up right, MS Project Server has a lot of really useful, interesting integration products. And it uses Sharepoint. With that you can push tasks to users anywhere on the Active Directory and have them show up as Outlook tasks. People can update their tasks inside Outlook and have them posted to the project schedule as actuals, with a very low click overhead. Possibly their best, if not their most popular product.
That little trick involves Project, Outlook client, Exchange, Sharepoint (full MOSS), SQL Server, Windows Server and probably a VM to boot. In fact, I once had a single DVD with all that on it as a virtual server, as a demo system. Very complex little interplay there. You have to see it to believe it. Like the products or not, there are some good minds working on them.
I am considering upgrading from MS Paint to Sharepoint. I am concerned, however, about the ease of use of Sharepoint versus MS Paint. I have heard that Sharepoint can be complex and may take a long time to learn. I mostly draw funny captions on pictures of cats. Is Sharepoint the best platform for me?
LoL I can haz laf!
Because, strangely, Sharepoint might be the best product for that application. Lots of little document files that need a tiny bit of post-store metadata -- yep, that'll work.
You're still talking about additional server licensing and administration.
Virtual is its own reward.
VM's are very useful for fast rollback, deployment and load balancing, and in my opinion that's equally valuable to the hardware they save (and we've seen 20:1 min, more like 50:1 with occasional 100:1 server packings). The extra admin is offset by much faster MTTR (Changes crash system? Close it and reboot previous image).
The real problem is the proliferation of VM disk images. They grow amazingly numerous. Get a good data de-duplication system to help with that.
Microsoft has package deals that cut the number of licenses you need to run VM's on a single box. Oracle doesn't, I understand. Ran across this when we were rebuilding a toll road system.
And, like it or not (as I said before I'm not a great fan of SP) it very definitely has mindshare in large organisations. Us, for one, and quite a number of our customers, who are also corporations of decent size. Mostly it's seen as a way to get company IP off the laptop hard drive and on to someplace safer - our corporate intranet.
Well, we use Sharepoint at our company, a reasonably large global SI. I see it as a necessary pain, myself. We share a lot of material across more than thirty countries, and I don't think sending that much SMB directory detail around to do the same thing via file shares is a particularly good use of time or bandwidth. Just listing directories on a server - geez, even the servers themselves - is a slow process when you're on the other side of the world, and we have a decent networking budget and some very, very good network people.
That said, it's still a slow and uncomfortable alternative. The UI is a bit below par for anyone who has used a decent content management system, but I don't think that's really the problem. The problem is it's slow. You can learn the clicks if the response is good, but delays get people all bound up in navigation.
It's based on SQL Server as a storage medium. That's a decent enough database, but it's still an RDB, and the delays in setting up connections to that database, plus all the TCP overhead bouncing from router to router in establishing that connection adds seconds to your session, seconds you wouldn't feel if the files were stored locally (to say nothing of the compression-decompression overheads).
I think there's a fundamental misconfiguration to most Sharepoint sites, and that's the major source of its clunkyness. Using a database designed for speedy delivery of TPC-sized transactions, and using it to store whole large documents may be the best way to get Microsoft-based content available on a Microsoft-shaped browser perhaps, but it seems to me there's a lot of indexing and leaf balancing to get in the way of really crisp performance unless you're very clever with the database and have a lot more RAM available to cache it than appears rational on the surface.
I'm not sure if there's a lot of scope to improve that, but some would certainly be appreciated. I think it needs a custom database designed to purpose, not the general purpose SQL Server engine. Just a feeling* I have.
Cutting the number of hops somehow would help - perhaps a store-local and replicate model would do a better job; something like the block-level geographically distinct replication of fault tolerant disk farms perhaps (Didn't Exchange public folders work on this principle once?) but I don't know how I'd go about doing that.
*A feeling perhaps helped along by 10 years as a DBA, and a year or so as a Sharepoint SME and a few years as a network engineer (basically I know just barely enough to be dangerous with it - I could be old and out of touch).
Anyone making such a specific estimate at this point is making stuff up, almost certainly to push some agenda.
Perhaps, where Agenda=[intent to work a problem]. Add theory, speculation, a white board (or electronic equivalent), intelligent and learned people, a refining dialogue for long enough and you end up with science. The real thing, that you can prove independently and predict with. It was people discussing the problem that allowed us to ultimately find out what our neighboring planets are made of. You start with rough figures, rough methods, and you refine them until you have a set of workable orbital parameters in combination with a mechanism and method for acquiring them.
Or did you think it all came out of a magic book somewhere? Don't diss the dialogue mate.
Slashdot Mirror
She's 23, and a multimedia student. I'm lucky if it's books.
No, (sigh) it isn't.
The fairness of the law isn't in its intent, but rather in it's resilience to potential abuse. It's the proverbial two-edged sword.
In all the examples I've seen of a three-strikes law so far, none of them required a trial or allowed any sort of window for legal representation in the defense of the accused.
Denying people the ability to communicate in the modern world effects isolation from the modern world, and in our social context is equivalent to a custodial order. (In fact, it is a specified part of some custodial orders, such as that of the infamous "Mr. Baldy".)
If you can effectively incarcerate someone on the strength of an unverified accusation you have rule by Red Guards or the Army-McCarthy hearings (just pick the bloody autocratic cultural movement of your choice) all over again. I don't want to see that. I really don't want to see that.
If there must be a three-strikes rule to protect intellectual property, and preservation of that intellectual property is important enough to defend it by imposition of harsh, Draconian sanctions, then the accused must have available to them the rule of law and the ability to defend themselves under it.
It had to happen eventually. Whether or not this is the actual limit, deponent answereth not.
Ah, but I assume you are not a child aged 2-11. Disney's movies get played over and over in households with small children. Over and over. Disney would make a fortune selling per-view subscriptions to families. Over and over. Did I mention that kids watch the same movies over and over?
Agree. I am thoroughly convinced that my eldest daughter's bone structure is knitted together in crystalline patterns analogous to the sound track of Dumbo. She says she doesn't remember any of it, but all I have to do is quote half a sentence of any part of the film and she'll be humming the rest of the movie, in sequence from that point on. She knows this, and throws things at me when I do it. Unfair, really...
If Disney promised to send you a physical DVD (or whatever-media-is-popular-these-days) whenever you wanted to cancel your account or if they decided to discontinue the service, would that address your concerns?
Not really, no.
"Sorry, what is this "Disney Genuine Advantage" thing running on my PC?"
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Call Gregory.
Thing is, there's been enough Disney out for long enough that other people can (and do) "Disney". Maybe without the trademarked mouse and duck which were tied to particular voice models anyway, and character voice compositions based on Walt's falsetto are um, problematic at this point.
Disney will be able to lock down their brand, but like a church that wants a monopoly on magic, they can't see that others can and will fill in any artificial voids they create.
Ok, Pixar was swallowed, but it's a wide, wide world out there and the global pool of talent is not restricted to the libraries of Buena Vista.
Global communications make this a dangerous era to build your business model on artificial scarcity.
WRT #2, another unintended effect. Imagine someone hits you from the front. The inertia of the impact would force your hand forward, causing you to *speed up*.
Dude, logic + accelerometers.
Try it again. This time without the "oops"
It's not the EU that is causing these job losses, it's Sun's piss-poor management that caused them to need to be bought out in the first place.
This goes up to fundamental problems in their business model, I think.
Over the last decade or so I've noticed a common thread in the IT business - when businesses suddenly start saying they're re-orienting themselves around a "services" model, it draws only one picture:
(1) They no longer have a viable product to sell,
(2) They haven't invested sufficiently in R&D over the long haul to keep themselves technically relevant, and
(3) They've bought into a race-to-the-bottom, price-driven market, and have effectively given their margins away to companies living in countries with a better $Local_Currency:dollar ratio.
(I do not believe this applies to the FOSS model, because community driven projects have always been services oriented, not transitioning to that model - they work to a different beat.)
Sun's product set consists of a set of high end servers (acquired from Cray originally iirc, not internally developed), the "Java" brand and associated software test suite, a version of Unix that is very good but competing with a free product, and a lot of very nice and clever people who nonetheless are competing with equally good brains from overseas that have the advantage of a depressed local currency.
What's not to like about this model? Sun is obviously able to convert air to money, to have a cash flow at all.
Anyone with half a brain realized converting from dumb paper ballots to "smart" electronic machines that could manipulate the votes was a Bad Idea (tm). Unfortunately that disqualifies most of our state politicians.
Wrong, Chucko! I have it on the very best knowledge that our state politicians do have half a brain.
Each.
I kind of like the approach taken by Microsoft internally, when I had a contract with them a few years ago. "Here's your laptop. Nothing's locked down. If you screw it up, dig yourself out. If you screw it up for others, expect them to speak to you about it".
Your point is only valid if you want to prevent a use from changing his wallpaper, screen savers and the like.
I don't think that's entirely true, I can think of an exception or two. Particularly where the workstation may be used in financial dealings with publicly-listed companies. In some cases you do not want people to fiddle with the settings of applications, to - for example - change the location of an audit log. Well, you might want to, but the financial regulator might raise an eyebrow over it.
Perhaps if you actually had the correct hardware you're experience would be different. I've seen huge implementations of SharePoint that run exceedingly well, albeit on the correct hardware. Continue your MS bashing..
Criticism is off-target, I think. I'm willing to separate Microsoft-the-business with Microsoft-the-products, and on the whole I rather like Microsoft products. I'm too old to be anybody's fanboi, though. If there's a problem with a technology, anybody's technology, it's worth discussing how to improve it.
We have nearly 40,000 people on an extremely reliable global network, and it's mostly Microsoft-based. Hardware budgets to support this are simply not a problem. Servers are fresh and strongly spec'd, software versions are pretty current and we're big enough to involve Microsoft in planning. (Strangely, it seems like the engineers, not the bean counters, are given the job of capacity planning here. One of the reasons I like this firm).
What that leaves is the software itself, and the surrounding network. And yes, I know about connection pooling.
Granted we're stretching the scale a bit, but I still find the process of using MOSS as remotely as we do (I live in Australia, hard to avoid it) is a bit slower and clunkier than I think it should be. And the delays tend to be inconsistent, which makes me think perhaps there is another reason for this besides the number of network hops - i.e. the network is consistent part of the delays we experince, but not necessarily the most significant part (variable delays being more aggravating than consistent delays).
Some pages simply take too long to load up what is essentially a clickable index, and I think it's the database that is responsible for the inconsistent component of the delays experienced. What else could it be? I'm still listening.
There are so many things to do to get this right - basically I'd add that you need a three-silo people model to match the three silos of dev,test,prod. Your development side are the creative ones; give them the tools they ask for and let them play. You need a critical, intelligent and demanding test manager in the middle, and for the production gatekeeper you need someone with absolutely no imagination at all (follow the rules, tick the boxes, or *zero* chance of advance to production. Seriously. Tell the people who think otherwise the *boat*will*sink* if all the test boxes aren't ticked. Just don't try to run development that way, mutiny isn't pretty.)
For the test through production phases, make sure you have your servers virtualised. Test because test environments tend to proliferate (try, just try to keep a baseline somewhere? Careful when you update it...) and Production because you'll need speedy rollback if you auger it, and strict version control on the server versions. This applies whether your virtual:physical server ratio is 1:1 or otherwise.
Look into data de-duplication solutions to keep the total disk space used by virtual images down.
ITIL is nice but it's really only the scaffolding. You still have to provide the cathedral.
A horizontal flywheel would be totally awesome - no matter how fast you cornered, there would be no "roll".
Shhh! Keep it secret! Do Raceys tell Gimbals?
...And will re-badge its currency as the "Quatloo".
What more could the fragments of humanity hope for to save them from the impending global zombie domination?
Indeed! I think this is an EXCELLENT idea. EX... EX...
Hrmm.
- Davros
FWIW ... In my experience SharePoint is a flexible, feature-rich, capable tool. I was skeptical at first, mostly because I just didn't feel like learning it. But as a Project Manager I haven't found a better tool to replace the services you get from SharePoint.
And a project manager may be the most complex user Microsoft has. When you set it up right, MS Project Server has a lot of really useful, interesting integration products. And it uses Sharepoint. With that you can push tasks to users anywhere on the Active Directory and have them show up as Outlook tasks. People can update their tasks inside Outlook and have them posted to the project schedule as actuals, with a very low click overhead. Possibly their best, if not their most popular product.
That little trick involves Project, Outlook client, Exchange, Sharepoint (full MOSS), SQL Server, Windows Server and probably a VM to boot. In fact, I once had a single DVD with all that on it as a virtual server, as a demo system. Very complex little interplay there. You have to see it to believe it. Like the products or not, there are some good minds working on them.
Dear Microsoft Corporation,
I am considering upgrading from MS Paint to Sharepoint. I am concerned, however, about the ease of use of Sharepoint versus MS Paint. I have heard that Sharepoint can be complex and may take a long time to learn. I mostly draw funny captions on pictures of cats. Is Sharepoint the best platform for me?
LoL I can haz laf!
Because, strangely, Sharepoint might be the best product for that application. Lots of little document files that need a tiny bit of post-store metadata -- yep, that'll work.
You're still talking about additional server licensing and administration.
Virtual is its own reward.
VM's are very useful for fast rollback, deployment and load balancing, and in my opinion that's equally valuable to the hardware they save (and we've seen 20:1 min, more like 50:1 with occasional 100:1 server packings). The extra admin is offset by much faster MTTR (Changes crash system? Close it and reboot previous image).
The real problem is the proliferation of VM disk images. They grow amazingly numerous. Get a good data de-duplication system to help with that.
Microsoft has package deals that cut the number of licenses you need to run VM's on a single box. Oracle doesn't, I understand. Ran across this when we were rebuilding a toll road system.
And, like it or not (as I said before I'm not a great fan of SP) it very definitely has mindshare in large organisations. Us, for one, and quite a number of our customers, who are also corporations of decent size. Mostly it's seen as a way to get company IP off the laptop hard drive and on to someplace safer - our corporate intranet.
Well, we use Sharepoint at our company, a reasonably large global SI. I see it as a necessary pain, myself. We share a lot of material across more than thirty countries, and I don't think sending that much SMB directory detail around to do the same thing via file shares is a particularly good use of time or bandwidth. Just listing directories on a server - geez, even the servers themselves - is a slow process when you're on the other side of the world, and we have a decent networking budget and some very, very good network people.
That said, it's still a slow and uncomfortable alternative. The UI is a bit below par for anyone who has used a decent content management system, but I don't think that's really the problem. The problem is it's slow. You can learn the clicks if the response is good, but delays get people all bound up in navigation.
It's based on SQL Server as a storage medium. That's a decent enough database, but it's still an RDB, and the delays in setting up connections to that database, plus all the TCP overhead bouncing from router to router in establishing that connection adds seconds to your session, seconds you wouldn't feel if the files were stored locally (to say nothing of the compression-decompression overheads).
I think there's a fundamental misconfiguration to most Sharepoint sites, and that's the major source of its clunkyness. Using a database designed for speedy delivery of TPC-sized transactions, and using it to store whole large documents may be the best way to get Microsoft-based content available on a Microsoft-shaped browser perhaps, but it seems to me there's a lot of indexing and leaf balancing to get in the way of really crisp performance unless you're very clever with the database and have a lot more RAM available to cache it than appears rational on the surface.
I'm not sure if there's a lot of scope to improve that, but some would certainly be appreciated. I think it needs a custom database designed to purpose, not the general purpose SQL Server engine. Just a feeling* I have.
Cutting the number of hops somehow would help - perhaps a store-local and replicate model would do a better job; something like the block-level geographically distinct replication of fault tolerant disk farms perhaps (Didn't Exchange public folders work on this principle once?) but I don't know how I'd go about doing that.
*A feeling perhaps helped along by 10 years as a DBA, and a year or so as a Sharepoint SME and a few years as a network engineer (basically I know just barely enough to be dangerous with it - I could be old and out of touch).
How are you going to lift the ship? Space elevator?
Philosophically the same way a VASIMR rocket works -- not all at once, but little bits of it over a long period of time. You assemble it in orbit.
Anyone making such a specific estimate at this point is making stuff up, almost certainly to push some agenda.
Perhaps, where Agenda=[intent to work a problem]. Add theory, speculation, a white board (or electronic equivalent), intelligent and learned people, a refining dialogue for long enough and you end up with science. The real thing, that you can prove independently and predict with. It was people discussing the problem that allowed us to ultimately find out what our neighboring planets are made of. You start with rough figures, rough methods, and you refine them until you have a set of workable orbital parameters in combination with a mechanism and method for acquiring them.
Or did you think it all came out of a magic book somewhere? Don't diss the dialogue mate.
Trip times may vary as folks stop for bathrooms
Why would you want to waste a valuable propellent?
Found a use for Darl then. Reaction mass.