Having been involved in setting up a couple of non-profit organizations, I can testify that getting all the paperwork done and filed with the IRS can be a real pain. (The initial application, Form 1023, is currently 28 pages long -- not counting required attachments -- and comes with 38 pages of instructions.)
As a way to spend your time, it's almost as attractive as having a root canal.
Sizable organizations can generally bite the bullet and get it done, but this might be a real help to some smaller projects, or those just getting started.
I agree, I don't think that using a high-tech solution adds much in this case. I have ~3000 books, and I keep them organized on different shelves: technical books in my office, general fiction in the den, cookbooks in the kitchen, and so on. Then I may have subcategories (e.g., mysteries, science fiction) depending on how many books there are. It's easy enough to find a particular title within these smaller groups.
I also have more than 1000 sound recordings, which I organize along the same lines.
This problem really is essentially the same as organizing paper files.
The key thing is to decide on a classification scheme that makes sense to you, and the to go with that.
The only software you really need is what came pre-installed inside your skull.
'We're unlocking the next wave of growth for Microsoft,' Ballmer predicted
One thing to remember when thinking about what Microsoft does is how important their stock price is to them.
(Think of all the compensation in the form of options or stock grants.)
It's important to them to keep the perception that Microsoft is a "growth" company. Here's why.
The price/earnings (P/E) ratio for a common stock is a measure of the earnings growth expected by the market: other things equal, a higher P/E corresponds to higher expected growth.
At this writing, Microsoft stock (MSFT) is trading at $27.58, which is a P/E ratio of 22.8x the latest 12 months' earnings. IBM is trading at $83.12, which is 17.1x trailing 12-month earnings. If MSFT were to trade at the same P/E as IBM (meaning that it was expected to grow about as fast as IBM), its stock price would be $20.68, a decline of almost 25%. I think that might result in a few unhappy campers in Redmond.
Microsoft's practice of consistently announcing fabulous new products that generally turn up later and with less capability than they were touted with is entirely consistent with their need to keep the stock price up.
There are a couple of possibilities here, in terms of what the management is trying to achieve:
Avoid being blindsided by unofficial or ad hoc projects that, while possibly fine in isolation, conflict with some larger goal. (Security policy, which other posters have mentioned, is an example of this.)
Control information for PR or propaganda purposes, to allow only "favourable" information to be given outside the group. (Think political "spin doctors".)
It's hard to tell, from the limited amount you're able to post here, which case applies.
It may be productive to suggest a conversation with the group and management to try to clarify this, if you can figure out a non-confrontational way of suggesting that. (Just the reaction to such a suggestion might tell you quite a bit.)
The first objective is a reasonable one; perhaps it's just the approach or implementation that's ham-fisted. If you think that's the case, then perhaps you and your co-workers can come up with some ideas that will help toward the objective.
On the other hand, if this is a classic "information is power" political strategy, then you basically have to evaluate whether the good points of staying with the group you like outweigh the bad points of working for a jerk. (Do keep in mind, though, that jerks sometimes don't last -- keep your head down.)
Just to clarify -- I wasn't talking about systems admin type folks.
I know that sometimes they are constrained by stupid management decisions (I hope never by mine!), and really that was part of the point.
The guys quoted in TFA were management people.
If they believe their organization has security needs, it's their responsibility to make it happen -- which includes giving their staff people the authority and tools to do the job.
for a company to remain competitive at attracting the
best talent in the future, it needs to realize that home life
sometimes extends into the workday and the workplace
Actually, even in olden times we wanted happy staff, and included among the permitted uses things like E-mail, using the Web (when that came along), using "office" applications for personal stuff, and so on.
In many cases, we provided a choice of applications.
I have no quarrel with that at all, although you should realize that there are some industries (financial services being one, health care another) where individual freedom is constrained -- not because the boss is a mean old fart, but because there are rules imposed by law and bodies like the SEC that have to be followed. For example, in a financial services business, all E-mail has to be archived, and all external telephone calls from trading-room phones are recorded.
That leads to the main point I was trying to make.
If management, IT or otherwise, has security rules it really believes are important, then it has a duty to take steps to see that they are enforced.
It is ridiculous for management to merely "recommend" that users not install their own software,
and then act surprised, blaming some external entity, when things go wrong.
From TFA:
$ORGANIZATION is about to update its information security policy in light of Google Desktop with a recommendation that the software must not be downloaded onto any... PC.
For heaven's sake, what planet do these people that are allegedly responsible for IT come from? Let's see:
Express great concern for security of secret corporate data
Allow users to install software on their PCs
Express shock and outrage that potential security problems develop
Blame Google !
I've worked as an IT director in a few financial services companies over the last ~20 years, and everyone employed there, on their first day, had to read and sign something like this:
I understand that computer equipment and facilities provided to me are the property of the Company, and are to be used only for permitted business purposes, as outlined in the Computer Use Guidelines. In particular, I understand that unauthorized removal of Company data from the premises, or installing or downloading software from any unapproved source, are grounds for immediate termination. I acknowledge receipt of a copy of the Computer Use Guidelines.
We would install or make available external software if it was useful and appropriate, after testing it. Otherwise, no dice. Will some people complain? Absolutely! Tough shit.
Especially if you are involved in technology in some way, I don't think you'll have to do anything really special to push the idea of technology. The fact that it's all around them and that Mom and Dad use it will be enough to get them interested. I have two nieces, 10 and 16 years, and a nephew who graduated from Dartmouth last June with a CS degree. All of them are adept in their own ways with using computers without any special prodding. Of course, not every one wants to be or is cut out to be a tech specialist.
Personally, I think it's far more important to make sure they get a good grounding in the basics. Encourage them to read, to learn a second language (and I don't mean Perl!), and to master math and science courses. Especially in the early stages, these are the things that will help them learn how to learn, and how to think critically. I don't expect those skills to go out of fashion any time soon.
I have the right to refuse service to anyone whom I deem, so long as the service is considered a private and not a public service.
This is wrong, as a matter of fact. I realize that you are Canadian; but in the US, there are statutory limitations on the absolute freedom of private contracts, in addition to the common law exclusion of contracts contrary to public policy.[1] There are, for example, Federal laws prohibiting employment or housing discrimination on the basis of race; and state and local laws that also prohibit various forms of class-based discrimination. Some of these apply specifically to sexual orientation. At least some of these laws apply to business conducted with the public, not just that of public entities, like school boards.
The courts have consistently upheld the constitutionality of these laws, on the basis that there is a compelling public interest in having a fair society.
In fact, Colorado tried to amend its state constitution to prohibit any legislation protecting civil rights on the basis of sexual orientation.
The US Supreme Court ruled that the state amendment violated the US Constitution.
[1] The common-law exclusion means, for example, that a contract to commit a crime is unenforcable. I would be very surprised if this does not apply in Canada also.
Wall Street analysts have made a sharp upward revision in earnings forecasts for manufacturers of office furniture, citing an unexpected upsurge in demand for chairs in the US Pacific Northwest.
What the "identity thief" has done is to fool the bank's authentication system into thinking their transactions were authorized by you.
That's exactly right. "Identity theft" is a very misleading label -- what we're talking about is good old-fashioned fraudulent transactions.
The implementation is different, and facilitated by technology -- especially stupidly-used technology -- but the crime isn't that different in essence from a forged check.
In that light, we should remember that the bank is 100 percent liable for paying a forged check, and has been for a long time.
Yet banks have figured out how to cope with that, and the system seems to work.
When I was growing up (back when dinosaurs walked the earth), there was a prat that lived nearby who had a PhD in sociology. He insisted on being called "Dr. Prat" socially. I remember my granddad telling someone, "Yeah, he's a doctor, but not the kind that does anyone any good."
I mean, does anyone here really think that if a law puts that much power into the hands of an organized business cartel, that it's NOT going to be abused? Did anyone here NOT see this coming?
Of course it's going to be abused, for the same reason that centrally-planned economic systems are always abused. The participants decide that economic rent-seeking through legal games and political manipulation is a lot less work than actually producing good products or services for a competitive market. Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations) understood that; it is sad and ironic that so many so-called conservative politicians and pundits don't.
This kind of law is, in a way, an excellent example of why good intentions are not a suitable paving material.
(BTW, I'm not a conservative, but more of a classical liberal. But I think empowering monopoly, or putting in place the mechanism for a police state, is a Bad Idea in any case.)
It used to be that computers were expensive and people were relatively cheap. Nowadays, the reverse is generall
For most applications, the potential performance gains from hand optimization for a specific platform aren't enough to matter. (And, as I think Brian Kernighan said, trying to outsmart the compiler defeats the purpose of using one.)
Big performance gains come, in most cases, from figuring out a better way (~algorithm) to solve the problem, not from tweaks.
There's another aspect of portability that doesn't get mentioned too much: the portability of the programmer.
If you are in the habit of writing portable code, it's much easier to shift to working on a different platform.
(I'd also say, from my own experience, that it makes your work less error-prone.)
That versatility is potentially of significant value to your employer, and of course is of value to you personally.
While I largely agree that getting things going with the big companies is vital, I think that some effects might show up sooner than you think.
It would not take a wholesale switch away from MS Office to have a sizable impact on both the market and Microsoft, because a lot of MS's current position is based on the notion that "everyone uses Office".
(Microsoft's stock price also reflects its market position and, apparently, above-average expected earnings growth. I think it is safe to say that Bill Gates is
conscious of that.)
MS is in kind of an interesting situation here.
There's a risk that making more noise about how bad OpenDocument is will attract the attention of corporate types who otherwise wouldn't have noticed it at all.
Actually, you still have to deal with lateral friction between your tire and the road surface. The difference there is that there is less friction required and that it is applied mostly vertically to the vehicle,
Yes, that's what I was alluding to in talking about "sideways" force. Something else that matters, as someone has mentioned elsewhere in this thread, is that the cyclist can shift the center of mass relative to the contact point with the road.
In the end the fastest gravity racer was the Volvo entry, which hit 54 mph.
This sounds pretty fast, but road racing cyclists routinely achieve faster downhill speeds.
I'm no Lance Armstrong, but I've gone down steep hills at 55-60 mph.
The difference is that a two-wheeled vehicle can negotiate turns at higher speeds
than a four-wheeled one, because the two-wheeled vehicle turns by leaning.
So it doesn't have to deal with anything like the same "sideways" forces at the
tire / pavement interface.
I remember a couple of years ago watching some Tour de France footage with a (non-cycling) friend.
It was one of the mountain stages.
He asked, "Why do they have support motorcycles and cars?"
I said, "Because the cars can't keep up going downhill through the curves."
SQL has too many defects -- it isn't relational, it is badly designed
I agree. One of the great (potential) advantages of relational data bases (unlike previous horrors like IMS -- shudder) is that they had a theoretical basis in relational algebra. SQL loses some of that advantage.
Chris Date has written a lot about the deficiencies of SQL (e.g., how joins work). Check out his book Database in Depth, published by O'Reilly.
I've been using Linux for ~95% of my business, and exclusively for my personal work, for about 2.5 years now. Although I don't have a very high opinion of Microsoft's business practices, that had little to do with making the switch.
I'm part of a small IT consulting firm that works primarily with folks in "quantitative" areas: engineering and some parts of finance.
We had done some development for Windows (mainly NT and 2000), but were getting more and more frustrated with the constraints of that environment. Since we all had experience using various flavours of Unix, Linux seemed an obvious choice.
My/our main reasons for switching were:
Much better system reliability and stability
Better software development environment and tools, especially for "middleware" components
Easier integration of components from different sources
Availability of the source -- because it is the best documentation
That it's free (as in beer) is just a nice added extra.
While what you have said is right, I think you're missing part of the keyboard "issue". Many of us know how to touch-type: I learned years ago on a [manual!] typewriter. For us, the number of keystrokes (within reason) is not really a big issue.
I will type this post without ever looking at the keyboard; although a Dvorak keyboard might be theoretically "better", the putative benefit is not worth the aggravation of the change for me.
If someone really wanted to do this, there is not all that much standing in their way (for example, GUI environments generally allow keyboard re-mapping and shorcuts).
That few people seem to do this indicates to me that there isn't a huge payoff.
I have a notion -- and that's all it is, I can't cite any evidence -- that there is an "information density" (or, equivalently, a degree of redundancy) that people are used to from natural language. To the extent that a computer language differs greatly from that, I think it makes people uncomfortable.
So APL seems opaque because it is too "dense", and COBOL seems ridiculously long-winded because of things like:
ADD UNITS TO TOTAL-QUANTITY GIVING NEW-TOTAL
In other words, I think there's a trade-off between "efficiency" and practical usability.
Although I don't use a Mac / OS-X, and therefore can't really comment on the technical issues here, I do think this brings up something about Microsoft's near-monopoly that isn't always sufficiently understood.
Because Windows is so pervasive, and because it has some obvious flaws, particularly in the security area, we have a whole "symbiotic" culture that has evolved around MS.
That culture includes firms like Symantec and NAI/McAfee, as well as application vendors like Intuit.
All of these have a strong vested interest in keeping the near-monopoly status quo, even if something else might ultimately be more in their customers' interest.
You can then have clueless journalists (as well as, of course, the vendors' coin-operated "think tanks" and "research firms") talk about "industry consensus" and similar nonsense.
After reading TFA, it seems to me that his idea is mostly about how software for "grandma" should be designed. (For exammple, he dismisses the idea of just having better interconnections between cell phones and PCs by arguing that the underlying PC system is still visible to the user.) In other words, I don't see anything that ties this particularly to cell phones, although they do have some obvious thinigs going for them, communications capability in particular.
Perhaps I'm just being thick, but this seems like another variation on the "make the PC an appliance" theme.
The idea certainly has some appeal, but past efforts toward this sort of goal (e.g., the MailStation, WebTV) have had only modest success, if that.
One other thing: I am slightly skeptical of the use of Japan as a demonstration that a Cell phone can catch on as a general-purpose computing device.
The Japanese writing system is complicated: two different sets of ideograms plus a set of phonetic symbols.
I think this may mean that the difference in input speed between a regular keyboard and the phone keypad is considerably less in Japanese than in a language that uses the [Western] alphabet.
(If you have ever seen a Japanese word processor, I think you'll understand what I'm getting at.)
Slashdot Mirror
Sizable organizations can generally bite the bullet and get it done, but this might be a real help to some smaller projects, or those just getting started.
This problem really is essentially the same as organizing paper files. The key thing is to decide on a classification scheme that makes sense to you, and the to go with that. The only software you really need is what came pre-installed inside your skull.
One thing to remember when thinking about what Microsoft does is how important their stock price is to them. (Think of all the compensation in the form of options or stock grants.) It's important to them to keep the perception that Microsoft is a "growth" company. Here's why.
The price/earnings (P/E) ratio for a common stock is a measure of the earnings growth expected by the market: other things equal, a higher P/E corresponds to higher expected growth. At this writing, Microsoft stock (MSFT) is trading at $27.58, which is a P/E ratio of 22.8x the latest 12 months' earnings. IBM is trading at $83.12, which is 17.1x trailing 12-month earnings. If MSFT were to trade at the same P/E as IBM (meaning that it was expected to grow about as fast as IBM), its stock price would be $20.68, a decline of almost 25%. I think that might result in a few unhappy campers in Redmond.
Microsoft's practice of consistently announcing fabulous new products that generally turn up later and with less capability than they were touted with is entirely consistent with their need to keep the stock price up.
It's hard to tell, from the limited amount you're able to post here, which case applies. It may be productive to suggest a conversation with the group and management to try to clarify this, if you can figure out a non-confrontational way of suggesting that. (Just the reaction to such a suggestion might tell you quite a bit.)
The first objective is a reasonable one; perhaps it's just the approach or implementation that's ham-fisted. If you think that's the case, then perhaps you and your co-workers can come up with some ideas that will help toward the objective.
On the other hand, if this is a classic "information is power" political strategy, then you basically have to evaluate whether the good points of staying with the group you like outweigh the bad points of working for a jerk. (Do keep in mind, though, that jerks sometimes don't last -- keep your head down.)
Just to clarify -- I wasn't talking about systems admin type folks. I know that sometimes they are constrained by stupid management decisions (I hope never by mine!), and really that was part of the point. The guys quoted in TFA were management people. If they believe their organization has security needs, it's their responsibility to make it happen -- which includes giving their staff people the authority and tools to do the job.
Actually, even in olden times we wanted happy staff, and included among the permitted uses things like E-mail, using the Web (when that came along), using "office" applications for personal stuff, and so on. In many cases, we provided a choice of applications.
I have no quarrel with that at all, although you should realize that there are some industries (financial services being one, health care another) where individual freedom is constrained -- not because the boss is a mean old fart, but because there are rules imposed by law and bodies like the SEC that have to be followed. For example, in a financial services business, all E-mail has to be archived, and all external telephone calls from trading-room phones are recorded.
That leads to the main point I was trying to make. If management, IT or otherwise, has security rules it really believes are important, then it has a duty to take steps to see that they are enforced. It is ridiculous for management to merely "recommend" that users not install their own software, and then act surprised, blaming some external entity, when things go wrong.
$ORGANIZATION is about to update its information security policy in light of Google Desktop with a recommendation that the software must not be downloaded onto any
For heaven's sake, what planet do these people that are allegedly responsible for IT come from? Let's see:
I've worked as an IT director in a few financial services companies over the last ~20 years, and everyone employed there, on their first day, had to read and sign something like this:
We would install or make available external software if it was useful and appropriate, after testing it. Otherwise, no dice. Will some people complain? Absolutely! Tough shit.Personally, I think it's far more important to make sure they get a good grounding in the basics. Encourage them to read, to learn a second language (and I don't mean Perl!), and to master math and science courses. Especially in the early stages, these are the things that will help them learn how to learn, and how to think critically. I don't expect those skills to go out of fashion any time soon.
This is wrong, as a matter of fact. I realize that you are Canadian; but in the US, there are statutory limitations on the absolute freedom of private contracts, in addition to the common law exclusion of contracts contrary to public policy.[1] There are, for example, Federal laws prohibiting employment or housing discrimination on the basis of race; and state and local laws that also prohibit various forms of class-based discrimination. Some of these apply specifically to sexual orientation. At least some of these laws apply to business conducted with the public, not just that of public entities, like school boards.
The courts have consistently upheld the constitutionality of these laws, on the basis that there is a compelling public interest in having a fair society. In fact, Colorado tried to amend its state constitution to prohibit any legislation protecting civil rights on the basis of sexual orientation. The US Supreme Court ruled that the state amendment violated the US Constitution.
[1] The common-law exclusion means, for example, that a contract to commit a crime is unenforcable. I would be very surprised if this does not apply in Canada also.
Wall Street analysts have made a sharp upward revision in earnings forecasts for manufacturers of office furniture, citing an unexpected upsurge in demand for chairs in the US Pacific Northwest.
That's exactly right. "Identity theft" is a very misleading label -- what we're talking about is good old-fashioned fraudulent transactions. The implementation is different, and facilitated by technology -- especially stupidly-used technology -- but the crime isn't that different in essence from a forged check.
In that light, we should remember that the bank is 100 percent liable for paying a forged check, and has been for a long time. Yet banks have figured out how to cope with that, and the system seems to work.
That's interesting. What are they going to do to the second one that's voted off the team?
When I was growing up (back when dinosaurs walked the earth), there was a prat that lived nearby who had a PhD in sociology. He insisted on being called "Dr. Prat" socially. I remember my granddad telling someone, "Yeah, he's a doctor, but not the kind that does anyone any good."
Of course it's going to be abused, for the same reason that centrally-planned economic systems are always abused. The participants decide that economic rent-seeking through legal games and political manipulation is a lot less work than actually producing good products or services for a competitive market. Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations) understood that; it is sad and ironic that so many so-called conservative politicians and pundits don't.
This kind of law is, in a way, an excellent example of why good intentions are not a suitable paving material.
(BTW, I'm not a conservative, but more of a classical liberal. But I think empowering monopoly, or putting in place the mechanism for a police state, is a Bad Idea in any case.)
Yeah, it's an example of Murphy's Golden Rule: The guys that have the gold make the rules.
For most applications, the potential performance gains from hand optimization for a specific platform aren't enough to matter. (And, as I think Brian Kernighan said, trying to outsmart the compiler defeats the purpose of using one.) Big performance gains come, in most cases, from figuring out a better way (~algorithm) to solve the problem, not from tweaks.
There's another aspect of portability that doesn't get mentioned too much: the portability of the programmer. If you are in the habit of writing portable code, it's much easier to shift to working on a different platform. (I'd also say, from my own experience, that it makes your work less error-prone.) That versatility is potentially of significant value to your employer, and of course is of value to you personally.
MS is in kind of an interesting situation here. There's a risk that making more noise about how bad OpenDocument is will attract the attention of corporate types who otherwise wouldn't have noticed it at all.
Yes, that's what I was alluding to in talking about "sideways" force. Something else that matters, as someone has mentioned elsewhere in this thread, is that the cyclist can shift the center of mass relative to the contact point with the road.
This sounds pretty fast, but road racing cyclists routinely achieve faster downhill speeds. I'm no Lance Armstrong, but I've gone down steep hills at 55-60 mph.
The difference is that a two-wheeled vehicle can negotiate turns at higher speeds than a four-wheeled one, because the two-wheeled vehicle turns by leaning. So it doesn't have to deal with anything like the same "sideways" forces at the tire / pavement interface.
I remember a couple of years ago watching some Tour de France footage with a (non-cycling) friend. It was one of the mountain stages. He asked, "Why do they have support motorcycles and cars?" I said, "Because the cars can't keep up going downhill through the curves."
I agree. One of the great (potential) advantages of relational data bases (unlike previous horrors like IMS -- shudder) is that they had a theoretical basis in relational algebra. SQL loses some of that advantage.
Chris Date has written a lot about the deficiencies of SQL (e.g., how joins work). Check out his book Database in Depth, published by O'Reilly.
I'm part of a small IT consulting firm that works primarily with folks in "quantitative" areas: engineering and some parts of finance. We had done some development for Windows (mainly NT and 2000), but were getting more and more frustrated with the constraints of that environment. Since we all had experience using various flavours of Unix, Linux seemed an obvious choice.
My/our main reasons for switching were:
That it's free (as in beer) is just a nice added extra.
If someone really wanted to do this, there is not all that much standing in their way (for example, GUI environments generally allow keyboard re-mapping and shorcuts). That few people seem to do this indicates to me that there isn't a huge payoff.
I have a notion -- and that's all it is, I can't cite any evidence -- that there is an "information density" (or, equivalently, a degree of redundancy) that people are used to from natural language. To the extent that a computer language differs greatly from that, I think it makes people uncomfortable. So APL seems opaque because it is too "dense", and COBOL seems ridiculously long-winded because of things like:
In other words, I think there's a trade-off between "efficiency" and practical usability.Because Windows is so pervasive, and because it has some obvious flaws, particularly in the security area, we have a whole "symbiotic" culture that has evolved around MS. That culture includes firms like Symantec and NAI/McAfee, as well as application vendors like Intuit. All of these have a strong vested interest in keeping the near-monopoly status quo, even if something else might ultimately be more in their customers' interest.
You can then have clueless journalists (as well as, of course, the vendors' coin-operated "think tanks" and "research firms") talk about "industry consensus" and similar nonsense.
Thanks for the correction and info.
Perhaps I'm just being thick, but this seems like another variation on the "make the PC an appliance" theme. The idea certainly has some appeal, but past efforts toward this sort of goal (e.g., the MailStation, WebTV) have had only modest success, if that.
One other thing: I am slightly skeptical of the use of Japan as a demonstration that a Cell phone can catch on as a general-purpose computing device. The Japanese writing system is complicated: two different sets of ideograms plus a set of phonetic symbols. I think this may mean that the difference in input speed between a regular keyboard and the phone keypad is considerably less in Japanese than in a language that uses the [Western] alphabet. (If you have ever seen a Japanese word processor, I think you'll understand what I'm getting at.)