The information we collect thanks to tools like the Customer Experience Improvement Program, Online Crash Analysis, and Windows Error Reporting help us learn about where and when customers are having issues with Windows Vista and the applications that run on it.
Translation: We'll spy on our customers until we figure out how to give this pig some wings.
- Allow wide-ranging, warrant-less surveillance of internet traffic.
- Profit!!!!
And PS - Stop terrorists!
Hopefully they'll make whatever drug Cheney is smoking that let's him say with a straight face they've never violated anyone's civil liberties widely available. That should smooth over any remaining restlessness in the sheep.
The ultimate irony would be if the next administration started using some of these tools. Funny the right wing never thinks about that until someone is investigating them. Then they're all about civil rights. Just like Bush was all about fiscal conservatism after the Democrats got control of Congress.
Back in the day we had to count on MS to roll out new versions of languages that would require expensive re-writes of systems working perfectly well on the old platform.
Nice to see OSS getting into the act. Developers, developers, developers, developers...(insert monkey dance here).
Nothing what he said sounds even remotely improbable.
And it's not limited to the financial service sector. I worked at one mid-cap company using Excel linked spreadsheets to do all their quarterly numbers. A massive, bloated pile of VBA that would lumber through the reporting cycle every quarter. It was backed up by the auditors so it couldn't have been too far off. That was before SOX, not sure that audit trail would pass today.
I'm never surprised about what I find being done in Access or linked spreadsheets anymore.
In all my years in IT I've never seen a phrase in common use with less meaning than "best practices." Has anyone seen my big book of best practices? Can't seem to find it anywhere. It seems to be one of those phrases reps use to make themselves seem superior, like they know the answers. Funny how often best practices happen to include the very product they're selling. Amazing. It's all bulls***.
The first thing you have to do is get control of your desktops. If users can install...whatever...you're never going to get control of your internal processes. Users will be installing trialware, freeware and all manner of craptacular little gizmos. The object is to move toward a company portal with a common set of applications for email, contacts, IM, calendaring, corporate wikis, and document storage. Personally, I don't like MSFT solutions for any of those services and that includes Sharepoint. Web mail seems to be a better solution from a portability standpoint. Most companies aren't quite ready to turn everything over to Google Mail...yet, but that may change over time. User acceptance will drive corporate acceptance.
If you can get everyone using the company portal, then you can do some stuff from a documentation standpoint and actually make use of it. Start analyzing how departments work and focus internal development on their business processes. Web-enable their applications and move toward tighter integration with the portal. The more work processes are tied to the portal, the more likely it is to get used. The more web-enabled services you can offer the less critical the underlying operating system. If a company wants to position themselves to have options to the MS upgrade treadmill-o-rama, that's the way to get started down the road.
Paul McGuinness, longtime manager of the band U2, has called on Internet service providers to immediately introduce mandatory French-style service disconnections to end music downloading
Should read "Paul McGuinness, FORMER manager of the band U2...."
The Steve will roll the corporate jet out there and drop some democracy on them...I mean meet with the leadership and promise them $3 XP, hand out some training coupons, take them out to a strip club and get them good and boozed up. They'll come crawling back.
Oh, yeah.
I've used Linux for years and no one has ever flown out here and taken me to a strip club. Not once.
We're wandering off topic here but do you have any actual research to back that up? There was the Halabja gas attack (80,000), the Al-Anfal campaign (100,000), and it in the wake of the first gulf war crackdowns on the Kurds and Shiites.
Saddam was no choir boy but I think we're starting to realize that it takes a pretty brutal leader to keep a country with a history steeped in blood in line. There's no doubt he killed thousands but no evidence I've seen that he was much worse when it comes to killing people than we are. The number you quoted for the number killed since the invasion is almost certainly inaccurate. If you count total deaths from all causes, the actual number is probably going to be north of 300K, likely much higher. How many of those were the direct result of military action...hard to tell. We're counting on getting the numbers from the organization with an interest in minimizing the numbers. Would your opinion change if you had semi-reliable numbers that showed we have killed, or occasioned the deaths, of more people than Saddam since 2003? Or would you still justify us being there by suggesting the Iraqis are better off without him in spite of increased casualties? I'm not making statements in the form of a question, I'm legitimately curious.
Which makes me wonder if you did the same quality of research on medical marijuana, which has a fair amount of documentation supporting its effectiveness in reducing the side effects of chemotherapy. That application alone would amount to substantially more than a 1,000 people.
We're certainly not going to get anywhere justifying positions with fabricated statistics, from either side of the discussion.
In "the old days" (last year was it?) everything was SUSE. In "the REAL old days" (2 years ago was it?) it was RedHat.
Ah, yes, back in the days before the IP railroad came through the old west. When we had to send a horse and rider out with our packets. You think SUSE was last year, think back to Mandrake. And what a leap forward Xandros was when it rode into town. Those were the days.
ubiquitous surveillance are not news to this community
Because a lot us are the ones installing those applications. Some suit with a genius idea will burst in and ask, "Hey, can you install that tracker....thing...what do we need to track our employees?" And they'll want the weekly report in two different formats and ad hoc custom reports, which they'll ask for at 4 pm on Friday afternoon and want you to send them on their Treo.
The smart ones here will make millions selling counter-measures and running wild weasel missions for our clients.
And still no one here will be able to use all that technology to get a date with a real woman.
For everyone i can let roam free I have two I have to hand hold.
Thanks for sharing that perspective, my observations were a little one-sided. It's a tough situation. The good ones resent the intrusion but sometimes you have to treat everyone at the intelligence and dedication level of the least functional and trustworthy person. If I partner up with anyone on a job they're other independents like myself. I may clean up after dead beat employees but I'm not yoked with their stupidity.
or I can outsource at a half the hassle a third of the cost and at better quality (at least in this market).
And my friends like you are my best customers. That's my case for universal health care. I could consider going on my own because I have insurance. I'm available to outsource at a better rate than you could get from one of the big consulting companies. My opinion is more people would take that risk if they didn't have to worry about someone in the family getting sick. Then you're getting people who like to work at a lower cost than you could hire in house.
I like to work and I'm good at it, but I dislike a lot of the picky-pooh bs that goes along with being an employee. So much so I jump through hoops with picky-pooh regulators, dead beat customers, parking, and sometimes eating hours when something doesn't work right.
Ya know, as easy as it is to take potshots at Dubya...
I don't think this is limited to him and I don't think it means the rest of the world hates the US. I do think it says the rest of the world no longer trusts the US. And in some ways that's worse than hatred. It's definitely sad testimony to what we've become in the eyes of the rest of the world. Instead of being trusted to work cooperatively with other sovereign nations we've pretty much declared, by our actions if not by words, that our pursuit of terrorism trumps every other concern, legitimate or not.
And it's not just government actions. AT&T threatening to charge at both ends of the pipe and cooperating in warrant-less monitoring of internet and phone traffic on a massive scale. Several of the core ISP's threatening to block certain kinds of traffic. It could easily be a combination of corporate dickishness and the privacy insults we've foisted on the rest of the world and they're just tired of it.
The bad thing about being a contractor is I only get paid for the time I work (no sick leave, public holidays, annual leave etc)
The worst day working for yourself is better than the best day I've ever had as an employee...ever. There is a lot of detail work necessary: Invoicing, collecting on the invoices, insurance, license fees, expense tracking, quarterly taxes. And there are liability issues to consider. But as more and more employers keep pushing responsibility and accounting issues down to the lower ranks, the amount of paperwork really isn't that different. Many employers expect you to process all that paperwork on your own time and travel on your own time. Plus a lot of them are getting dickishly intrusive monitoring and spying on their employees.
Besides, cubicles suck ass.
IBM gets caught breaking the rules and responds by cutting salaries. Nice. Just keep pulling stunts like that and your turn over will remain painfully high.
Strangely enough, once I was working on a strictly per-hour basis, the boss found far fewer 'emergencies' that required me to work all weekend.
Funny how that works, isn't it? Want me to work all weekend? No problemo! Just sign this invoice...right there...here's a pen.
...the first robotic fly that is able to generate enough thrust to takeoff.
If that one was the first it makes one wonder just how many robotic fly failures came before. And where are the spectacular crash videos? Like the ones from the early days of spaceflight.
Yes, a truly proud chapter in the technological advancement of mankind. The day scientists huddled around their robotic fly and it spread its tiny, robotic wings and generated enough thrust to launch itself into history!
Quick! We need to book Ron Howard to direct a movie about this amazing stride in mechanical locomotion. Kids everywhere will grow up dreaming of inventing even better robotic insects. Someone cast a commemorative coin!
The scientists still want the virus to replicate in order to study it, so they developed monkey kidney cells which contained the protein needed.
Hey, isn't that how the Rage virus got started? Pretty soon those monkeys will develop a taste for human brains, the military will see this as a promising new bio-weapon and, 28 days later, Milla Jovovich is naked on your shower floor washing away the zombie blood...again.
How does anything anti-Bush get mod'ed as a troll? With all the lying, incompetence, turning the Justice Dept. into a stooge fest, exempting themselves from the law, wiretapping Americans, trampling on the Constitution, and plundering the nation's treasure who here still supports those asshats?
Depends on what the robot is doing
on
Robots Learn To Lie
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Wait until flight management systems pick up that little trick. Those trees look kind of close but the auto-pilot says we still have three thou-
I absolutely hate VBA but it's conflicted because I've made so much money untangling some spaghetti coded VBA nightmare cobbled together as a spare time project that became a legacy application no one can live without.
When really stupid ideas start seeing the light of day. That means most of the management team has insulated themselves from criticism by surrounding themselves with toadies and have, effectively, separated themselves from any semblance of reality.
Usually the case when you see corporate behavior and wonder, "How could they be that stupid?" Because on their little planet what they're doing makes sense. Just not on this world.
In my experience it also means upper management has divided themselves into warring camps.
Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker's productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.
This is just what MS needed to bolster their sagging image. Product activation, DRM, back-stabbing EULA's and file format lock-in just weren't getting the job done. No, they needed something...something to take corporate dickish intrusion to the next level and beyond. Something that would cement the perception that they have completely lost touch with the last threads of reality.
I don't care if this pos cures world hunger. Try to install this on some machine I'm working on and I'll start dropping my shoes in the gears of the machines.
Slashdot Mirror
The information we collect thanks to tools like the Customer Experience Improvement Program, Online Crash Analysis, and Windows Error Reporting help us learn about where and when customers are having issues with Windows Vista and the applications that run on it.
Translation: We'll spy on our customers until we figure out how to give this pig some wings.
The details probably look something like this:
- Grant telephone companies retroactive immunity.
- Allow wide-ranging, warrant-less surveillance of internet traffic.
- Profit!!!!
And PS - Stop terrorists!
Hopefully they'll make whatever drug Cheney is smoking that let's him say with a straight face they've never violated anyone's civil liberties widely available. That should smooth over any remaining restlessness in the sheep.
The ultimate irony would be if the next administration started using some of these tools. Funny the right wing never thinks about that until someone is investigating them. Then they're all about civil rights. Just like Bush was all about fiscal conservatism after the Democrats got control of Congress.
Hypocrites.
Back in the day we had to count on MS to roll out new versions of languages that would require expensive re-writes of systems working perfectly well on the old platform.
Nice to see OSS getting into the act. Developers, developers, developers, developers...(insert monkey dance here).
Nothing what he said sounds even remotely improbable.
And it's not limited to the financial service sector. I worked at one mid-cap company using Excel linked spreadsheets to do all their quarterly numbers. A massive, bloated pile of VBA that would lumber through the reporting cycle every quarter. It was backed up by the auditors so it couldn't have been too far off. That was before SOX, not sure that audit trail would pass today.
I'm never surprised about what I find being done in Access or linked spreadsheets anymore.
Wouldn't it be better to cut off people with infected computers than to censor the internet?
Yeah, that's great until MSFT convinces one of them that Linux is a virus.
But we're prepared to wipe the slate clean, give you a fresh start. And all you have to do is install Windows.
In all my years in IT I've never seen a phrase in common use with less meaning than "best practices." Has anyone seen my big book of best practices? Can't seem to find it anywhere. It seems to be one of those phrases reps use to make themselves seem superior, like they know the answers. Funny how often best practices happen to include the very product they're selling. Amazing. It's all bulls***.
The first thing you have to do is get control of your desktops. If users can install...whatever...you're never going to get control of your internal processes. Users will be installing trialware, freeware and all manner of craptacular little gizmos. The object is to move toward a company portal with a common set of applications for email, contacts, IM, calendaring, corporate wikis, and document storage. Personally, I don't like MSFT solutions for any of those services and that includes Sharepoint. Web mail seems to be a better solution from a portability standpoint. Most companies aren't quite ready to turn everything over to Google Mail...yet, but that may change over time. User acceptance will drive corporate acceptance.
If you can get everyone using the company portal, then you can do some stuff from a documentation standpoint and actually make use of it. Start analyzing how departments work and focus internal development on their business processes. Web-enable their applications and move toward tighter integration with the portal. The more work processes are tied to the portal, the more likely it is to get used. The more web-enabled services you can offer the less critical the underlying operating system. If a company wants to position themselves to have options to the MS upgrade treadmill-o-rama, that's the way to get started down the road.
Paul McGuinness, longtime manager of the band U2, has called on Internet service providers to immediately introduce mandatory French-style service disconnections to end music downloading
Should read "Paul McGuinness, FORMER manager of the band U2...."
There, I fixed it.
According to TFA, the camera weighed only a rather less impressive 46 lbs.
46 pound camera + a 6 lb weight for stability. Still somewhat short of 2,000 lbs.
The Steve will roll the corporate jet out there and drop some democracy on them...I mean meet with the leadership and promise them $3 XP, hand out some training coupons, take them out to a strip club and get them good and boozed up. They'll come crawling back.
Oh, yeah.
I've used Linux for years and no one has ever flown out here and taken me to a strip club. Not once.
Humph.
and Saddam killed millions of people...
We're wandering off topic here but do you have any actual research to back that up? There was the Halabja gas attack (80,000), the Al-Anfal campaign (100,000), and it in the wake of the first gulf war crackdowns on the Kurds and Shiites.
Saddam was no choir boy but I think we're starting to realize that it takes a pretty brutal leader to keep a country with a history steeped in blood in line. There's no doubt he killed thousands but no evidence I've seen that he was much worse when it comes to killing people than we are. The number you quoted for the number killed since the invasion is almost certainly inaccurate. If you count total deaths from all causes, the actual number is probably going to be north of 300K, likely much higher. How many of those were the direct result of military action...hard to tell. We're counting on getting the numbers from the organization with an interest in minimizing the numbers. Would your opinion change if you had semi-reliable numbers that showed we have killed, or occasioned the deaths, of more people than Saddam since 2003? Or would you still justify us being there by suggesting the Iraqis are better off without him in spite of increased casualties? I'm not making statements in the form of a question, I'm legitimately curious.
Which makes me wonder if you did the same quality of research on medical marijuana, which has a fair amount of documentation supporting its effectiveness in reducing the side effects of chemotherapy. That application alone would amount to substantially more than a 1,000 people.
We're certainly not going to get anywhere justifying positions with fabricated statistics, from either side of the discussion.
In "the old days" (last year was it?) everything was SUSE. In "the REAL old days" (2 years ago was it?) it was RedHat.
Ah, yes, back in the days before the IP railroad came through the old west. When we had to send a horse and rider out with our packets. You think SUSE was last year, think back to Mandrake. And what a leap forward Xandros was when it rode into town. Those were the days.
Now stay off my lawn...
ubiquitous surveillance are not news to this community
Because a lot us are the ones installing those applications. Some suit with a genius idea will burst in and ask, "Hey, can you install that tracker....thing...what do we need to track our employees?" And they'll want the weekly report in two different formats and ad hoc custom reports, which they'll ask for at 4 pm on Friday afternoon and want you to send them on their Treo.
The smart ones here will make millions selling counter-measures and running wild weasel missions for our clients.
And still no one here will be able to use all that technology to get a date with a real woman.
The US District Court for the District of Idaho has found that copyright law protects a lawyer demand letter...
That figures. Idaho potato rule: If they're big enough, they're old enough. It could only be less surprising if the ruling had originated in Utah.
For everyone i can let roam free I have two I have to hand hold.
Thanks for sharing that perspective, my observations were a little one-sided. It's a tough situation. The good ones resent the intrusion but sometimes you have to treat everyone at the intelligence and dedication level of the least functional and trustworthy person. If I partner up with anyone on a job they're other independents like myself. I may clean up after dead beat employees but I'm not yoked with their stupidity.
or I can outsource at a half the hassle a third of the cost and at better quality (at least in this market).
And my friends like you are my best customers. That's my case for universal health care. I could consider going on my own because I have insurance. I'm available to outsource at a better rate than you could get from one of the big consulting companies. My opinion is more people would take that risk if they didn't have to worry about someone in the family getting sick. Then you're getting people who like to work at a lower cost than you could hire in house.
I like to work and I'm good at it, but I dislike a lot of the picky-pooh bs that goes along with being an employee. So much so I jump through hoops with picky-pooh regulators, dead beat customers, parking, and sometimes eating hours when something doesn't work right.
Ya know, as easy as it is to take potshots at Dubya...
I don't think this is limited to him and I don't think it means the rest of the world hates the US. I do think it says the rest of the world no longer trusts the US. And in some ways that's worse than hatred. It's definitely sad testimony to what we've become in the eyes of the rest of the world. Instead of being trusted to work cooperatively with other sovereign nations we've pretty much declared, by our actions if not by words, that our pursuit of terrorism trumps every other concern, legitimate or not.
And it's not just government actions. AT&T threatening to charge at both ends of the pipe and cooperating in warrant-less monitoring of internet and phone traffic on a massive scale. Several of the core ISP's threatening to block certain kinds of traffic. It could easily be a combination of corporate dickishness and the privacy insults we've foisted on the rest of the world and they're just tired of it.
The bad thing about being a contractor is I only get paid for the time I work (no sick leave, public holidays, annual leave etc)
The worst day working for yourself is better than the best day I've ever had as an employee...ever. There is a lot of detail work necessary: Invoicing, collecting on the invoices, insurance, license fees, expense tracking, quarterly taxes. And there are liability issues to consider. But as more and more employers keep pushing responsibility and accounting issues down to the lower ranks, the amount of paperwork really isn't that different. Many employers expect you to process all that paperwork on your own time and travel on your own time. Plus a lot of them are getting dickishly intrusive monitoring and spying on their employees.
Besides, cubicles suck ass.
IBM gets caught breaking the rules and responds by cutting salaries. Nice. Just keep pulling stunts like that and your turn over will remain painfully high.
Strangely enough, once I was working on a strictly per-hour basis, the boss found far fewer 'emergencies' that required me to work all weekend.
Funny how that works, isn't it? Want me to work all weekend? No problemo! Just sign this invoice...right there...here's a pen.
If Vista had a bigger market share, there would be more exploits for it.
Payback's a bitch, ain't it?
If that one was the first it makes one wonder just how many robotic fly failures came before. And where are the spectacular crash videos? Like the ones from the early days of spaceflight.
Yes, a truly proud chapter in the technological advancement of mankind. The day scientists huddled around their robotic fly and it spread its tiny, robotic wings and generated enough thrust to launch itself into history!
Quick! We need to book Ron Howard to direct a movie about this amazing stride in mechanical locomotion. Kids everywhere will grow up dreaming of inventing even better robotic insects. Someone cast a commemorative coin!
The scientists still want the virus to replicate in order to study it, so they developed monkey kidney cells which contained the protein needed.
Hey, isn't that how the Rage virus got started? Pretty soon those monkeys will develop a taste for human brains, the military will see this as a promising new bio-weapon and, 28 days later, Milla Jovovich is naked on your shower floor washing away the zombie blood...again.
Do these people NEVER learn?
Put an ad link on the page with Upgrade IE with the MS logo...and have it point to Firefox.
I've got money that says more than half the sheeple out there would think it was the new version of IE.
How does anything anti-Bush get mod'ed as a troll? With all the lying, incompetence, turning the Justice Dept. into a stooge fest, exempting themselves from the law, wiretapping Americans, trampling on the Constitution, and plundering the nation's treasure who here still supports those asshats?
Wait until flight management systems pick up that little trick. Those trees look kind of close but the auto-pilot says we still have three thou-
I absolutely hate VBA but it's conflicted because I've made so much money untangling some spaghetti coded VBA nightmare cobbled together as a spare time project that became a legacy application no one can live without.
Hate the language, love the money from fixing it.
When really stupid ideas start seeing the light of day. That means most of the management team has insulated themselves from criticism by surrounding themselves with toadies and have, effectively, separated themselves from any semblance of reality.
Usually the case when you see corporate behavior and wonder, "How could they be that stupid?" Because on their little planet what they're doing makes sense. Just not on this world.
In my experience it also means upper management has divided themselves into warring camps.
Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker's productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.
This is just what MS needed to bolster their sagging image. Product activation, DRM, back-stabbing EULA's and file format lock-in just weren't getting the job done. No, they needed something...something to take corporate dickish intrusion to the next level and beyond. Something that would cement the perception that they have completely lost touch with the last threads of reality.
I don't care if this pos cures world hunger. Try to install this on some machine I'm working on and I'll start dropping my shoes in the gears of the machines.