To try and get their sweetheart legislation through before their sweethearts get the bum's rush out of office. The K Street project bearing fruit for all the millions Bellsouth and friends have sunk into the Republican party.
And don't try to blame the Democrats. This is bought and paid for with large cash donations, the vast bulk of which go to Republican lawmakers, who close the loop by hiring K Street lobbyists as staff. You can try to deflect blame by suggesting that if Dems were in power they'd be getting the millions, but that ignores the reality that they're not, and Republicans are the ones ramming sweetheart legislation through Congress for Bellsouth. Republican corruption in action.
With the existing installed base of windows & apps in the companies I consult for, it will take alot more than this to replace the windows based systems.
Of course, if you were urging your customers to move their critical systems to web-based apps three years ago and had rolled those systems out last year, then your customers would be almost ready to cut the cord. And it doesn't have to be all or nothing. I have one customer...70 employeess, graphic arts oriented business...that could move their entire sales center over. Which is 25 workstations.
Three years ago their primary sales entry process was a horrible clunky network app slaved to an access database. Constant problems. We moved them to ColdFusion middleware, SQL server on the back end and consolidated all the Access db's and took it off the desktops of everyone but the accounting department (and we're going to get those by another means). Now I'm showing them how much they could save switching to OpenOffice for productivity and managed desktops on Linux for the sales staff. Sadly, that would mean the end of WeaterBug, one app users felt they would miss a great deal.
They won't have to do anything until MSFT stops supporting 2000, but now they have options. I can promise Vista won't be a lock there. And that happens by implementing good business practices of not having everyone and their dog writing crappy Access and Excel apps. All the important functions have been captured in web apps in a portal with a nice dashboard. And thanks to not being tied to any ActiveX components they're free to use Firefox instead of IE, which they really like because of the tabbed windows.
The message we're sending to young people is the ends justify the means. Just like wiretapping millions of Americans justified by the war on terror. There is no bottom to either slope.
Guess I'm a little surprised how little value freedom has in America these days.
I think re-instituting natural selection back into civilized culture is a good start; get rid of seatbelt and helmet laws, no more power cords with 15 warning labels, etc...
I'd settle for letting natural selection take out the stupid ones. Like when some kid goes to great lengths to climb over the fence and into the bear cage at the zoo. Right now we shoot the bear, which is totally unfair. We're shooting the bear for doing a public service! We should reward the bear by shooting the parents and toss them over the fence as dessert and let the bleached bones stand as a warning to the legions of future stupid people looking at the fence and thinking it would be fun to climb over.
And giving families money when one of their relatives pulls a pop machine over on themselves because they were trying to steal from it or climb on top of it. Totally wrong. We should require, by law, that the next person to happen on the scene jump up and down on the pop machine until the bozo trapped underneath is good and dead, then make the family pay for a new pop machine and bury the dumbass in the old one after a week long open casket public display.
Every time I watch the neighbor kids flying down the road on their four wheelers, standing on the foot pegs, with no helmet and think that if they flipped it and ended up drooling down their chin for the rest of their life the family would probably sue and claim the four wheeler was unsafe. These are the people with flocks of mis-matched children in their yards. Each adult will have three or four kids, all from different partners. And drive a gigantic pickup truck that gets 9 miles to a gallon that they use to haul their race car to the track on weekends, all the while complaining about the high cost of gasoline. Hey, you don't suppose large numbers of people driving giant pickup trucks so they can haul their gas toys around on weekends might be contributing to the high cost of gasoline do you, Jethro?
Google assembles the majority of the hardware it uses...
On several occasions I've suggested to customers that they consider building their own servers. Going by the look on their face you'd think I'd just asked directions to Mars. I'll usually let them ba-humbug the idea for a while before informing them that Google does it and always has. That usually gets them started asking questions instead of telling me why it's such a bad idea.
That wouldn't work for most companies, but if they've got a technology core group that's big enough or if they're a tech oriented company, it's the most flexible way to go and not that much more work. Some standard box configurations and parts lists keeps all the components working together.
I wouldn't even consider buying a server for my own stuff. If there were an ATX type standard for laptops, I'd build those as well.
The thing about the MIHOP people is that they start with the strong belief that Bush is evil.
Fascinating. You have a blanket label for anyone who thinks Bush is evil. I don't think "purpose" has any bearing on the definition of evil. Incompetence raised to a high enough level is, in many ways, indistinguishable from deliberate intent. You don't have to be Darth Vader to personify evil. The most evil people I know tend to be ideologues who feel their dogma is more important than the means to institutionalize it. They are both zealous and incompetent leading to evil in deed if not in character. At a certain point it's hard to tell the difference. Evil is as evil does, to paraphrase an old truism. A little evil mixed with a lot of incompetence, shaken, not stirred, makes a disastrous cocktail regardless of intent.
But it's convenient to have a one-dimensional bucket to dump anyone disagreeing. A label and put down all rolled into one. Like labeling any exit strategy for Iraq as "cut and run" when most people are smart enough to realize no one is really suggesting that.
If Bush supporters represent the brightest and best this country has to offer, or even the biggest fraction of the whole, we're really fucked.
This really smacks of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.
It smacks of MSFT needing to find a way to boost stagnant earnings and keep their quarterly numbers up and that's exactly what it is.
All they can do is squeeze existing users for a few more pennies and try to generate sales with the strong arm product activation requirements. The security package is one way to extract a few more dollars from your wallet, racheting up the EULA restrictions so you can't transfer Windows between machines you own is another, and trying to sweep in sales from those using a pirated copy of Windows just to play games, which is the only reason many of you want Windows around at all. I've seen similar tactics going on on the commercial side of the house as well. Many of my business customers are flat unhappy with MSFT license fees and restrictions.
It's an interesting spiral. The more people switching to open source, the more MSFT has to squeeze their remaining customers for revenue, which always pisses off a small fraction who then jump to OSS. Rinse, lather, repeat.
Why can't I get called for jury duty on a case like this? Besides the fact I don't live there. I could pretty much guarantee a not guilty verdict, or a hung jury at a minimum.
Now at last we can turn the arguement around: If you're not doing anything wrong, why worry about the cameras? Police routinely tape large demonstrations and outdoor events, how is this any different? There's no expectation of privacy in public place, that's why they had to use wiretap laws. It wasn't the video, it was the audio. I'm guessing N.H. is a two-party state, where both parties have to consent to monitoring.
Either way this was a hugely bad move for the police department. Now it looks like they charged the guy in retaliation and are trying to cover up misdeeds by their own personnel. The defense will want to play the tape for the jury and they'll get to see the officer's unfiltered conduct. Not his well-dressed, well-mannered courtroom testimony. He might not have had a damage award case if they hadn't arrested him, but they might now if the jury is convinced the police acted out of malice. Dumb and dumber.
Smartest move the prosecutor could make would be to throw out the case, but none of those involved strike me as particularly gifted in the PR department.
So much for the Supreme Court counting on improved training to keep police conduct in check.
Does anyone else worry that the USA might use its intelligent services to give its corporate entities an advantage over foreign ones?
If we did we wouldn't be the first country to ever do that. In business trips to France we'd routinely have to practice security awareness at our hotels. It wasn't unusual for the French government to be spying on us, and it wasn't personal. Information they would use to gain commercial advantage.
The Israelis, Russians and Italians have all done similar things. One sort of expects it from the Russians. I'm not suggesting it's okay, no matter who is doing it. Just that we're not alone if we're doing it and, with it being nearly impossible to tell where corporate interests leave off and government begins, it would be naive to think none of that data is ending up in the hands of private industry.
I guess in our idealized view of ourselves the US previously prided itself on being different. But the last six years we've pretty much bulldozed the high road we used to travel. In its place we've substituted arrogance and ignorant dogma stemming from a philosophy of life whose most visible supporters are a neurotic shrew, a pervert with anger management issues and a drug addict.
And it wasn't just that I disagreed with him over net neutrality. He couldn't make a case that letting telco's balkanize the internet was in the interests of the consumer.
The way I see it this is nothing more than pure greed from AT&T (we know how much they look out for consumer interests), Bellsouth and handful of other companies all of which got a sweet deal when the internet was privatized. But in the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately corporate handout game, that history doesn't seem to matter now. There's a reason Bellsouth has a thirty person lobbying office on K Street. They spend millions on the hill and wouldn't be doing it if they didn't think there were billions waiting at the other end of this sweetheart legislation.
If internet traffic is such a burden, sell of those assets and move into another line of business. If it's such a loser, get of the business. Because I'm all a flutter over poor, poor Bellsouth not being able to set up toll booths on the net so they can charge at both ends of the pipe.
What's new and interesting to me is how special interest legislation is now connected to massive PR campaigns. The RIAA's launch to equate copyright infringement with theft, even though they are very different issues. The TV commercials touting tons of CO2 as a good thing for the environment. I'm just getting sick of corporate interests propagandizing TV and the mainstream media for political issues.
I want my government back, I want my news to be written by real journalists, not PR staff angling for a press hit, I want my privacy back and I want to own the data about me. Why is that asking so much?
What else are they going to say. But if you have to put out a press release to say something is not knee-jerk, you might as well be placing a full page ad in the Washington Post that it is a knee-jerk reaction. Story on Yahoo!
It's about walking around, in any circumstance, with megs of sensitive information on a portable device that isn't encrypted. Whether it's a desktop, laptop, USB device, external hard drive, PDA, cell phone or iPod. It's really about non-existent data security policies, data security audits of vendors handling sensitive customer and employee data and, above all, it's about no accountability in government or private industry for mishandling sensitive information.
When companies are liable for millions in damages for lost privacy act data, you'll see change bordering on a religious revival. Until then, it's just the masses whining.
If there are sufficient grounds to question the research that has been published thus far, I would expect that it would not be difficult to promote a dissenting work.
If you're dissenting opinion was financed by Exxon and the oil lobby, I can guarantee it will get published. Not only that but it will get picked up by the popular press because Exxon's PR firm will be working their press contacts for ink.
You can buy any kind of research results you want if you have enough money. I used to see tobacco companies do it all the time when I was in contract research. You'll be able to buy some really big name scientists and get the conclusions you want. They'll justify the intellectual prostitution by telling themselves that the research they do with the money they get will out-weigh the evil of promoting a position paid for by oil money, or tobacco money or Monsanto or whoever is funding your research center.
Big corporate money is corrupting our government, our research institutions, and our media. Half the fluff pieces you see on the news were produced by some industry group. Probably 90% of the articles you read in trade rags are influenced by an advertiser or their PR firm, it's really getting to the point you can't believe anything you read.
You making a joke but you're probably more right than you know. If kids suspect they're being monitored by their cell phones, they'll leave them behind when not wanting people to know where they're going.
Exactly the kind of situation where, if they got in a bind, you'd want them to have a cell phone to call for help. So at the times they're most likely to need a phone, they'll less likely to actually carry it.
What if some day the Chinese decided that they're not going to produce devices that don't meet their standards? So far it hasn't been a problem but if the government decided all Chinese factories were going to produce routers with China-Fi encryption, that's what they'd produce.
And since they own all our manufacturing capacity, there would be little we could do about it. It would take years to tool up enough manufacturing to replace everything we depend on them to produce.
I guess being dependent on foreign oil wasn't good enough. We had to match that folly by sending our component manufacturing overseas as well.
Slashdot Mirror
It's as if a cold shiver just ran through thousands of proprietary software companies all at once.
HA-HA!
You and your pathetic band will die. Behold the power of my fully operational domestic airport!
And don't try to blame the Democrats. This is bought and paid for with large cash donations, the vast bulk of which go to Republican lawmakers, who close the loop by hiring K Street lobbyists as staff. You can try to deflect blame by suggesting that if Dems were in power they'd be getting the millions, but that ignores the reality that they're not, and Republicans are the ones ramming sweetheart legislation through Congress for Bellsouth. Republican corruption in action.
With the existing installed base of windows & apps in the companies I consult for, it will take alot more than this to replace the windows based systems.
Of course, if you were urging your customers to move their critical systems to web-based apps three years ago and had rolled those systems out last year, then your customers would be almost ready to cut the cord. And it doesn't have to be all or nothing. I have one customer...70 employeess, graphic arts oriented business...that could move their entire sales center over. Which is 25 workstations.
Three years ago their primary sales entry process was a horrible clunky network app slaved to an access database. Constant problems. We moved them to ColdFusion middleware, SQL server on the back end and consolidated all the Access db's and took it off the desktops of everyone but the accounting department (and we're going to get those by another means). Now I'm showing them how much they could save switching to OpenOffice for productivity and managed desktops on Linux for the sales staff. Sadly, that would mean the end of WeaterBug, one app users felt they would miss a great deal.
They won't have to do anything until MSFT stops supporting 2000, but now they have options. I can promise Vista won't be a lock there. And that happens by implementing good business practices of not having everyone and their dog writing crappy Access and Excel apps. All the important functions have been captured in web apps in a portal with a nice dashboard. And thanks to not being tied to any ActiveX components they're free to use Firefox instead of IE, which they really like because of the tabbed windows.
The Republicans are the party that thinks the way to win the war on terror is spying on Americans.
Guess I'm a little surprised how little value freedom has in America these days.
I'd settle for letting natural selection take out the stupid ones. Like when some kid goes to great lengths to climb over the fence and into the bear cage at the zoo. Right now we shoot the bear, which is totally unfair. We're shooting the bear for doing a public service! We should reward the bear by shooting the parents and toss them over the fence as dessert and let the bleached bones stand as a warning to the legions of future stupid people looking at the fence and thinking it would be fun to climb over.
And giving families money when one of their relatives pulls a pop machine over on themselves because they were trying to steal from it or climb on top of it. Totally wrong. We should require, by law, that the next person to happen on the scene jump up and down on the pop machine until the bozo trapped underneath is good and dead, then make the family pay for a new pop machine and bury the dumbass in the old one after a week long open casket public display.
Every time I watch the neighbor kids flying down the road on their four wheelers, standing on the foot pegs, with no helmet and think that if they flipped it and ended up drooling down their chin for the rest of their life the family would probably sue and claim the four wheeler was unsafe. These are the people with flocks of mis-matched children in their yards. Each adult will have three or four kids, all from different partners. And drive a gigantic pickup truck that gets 9 miles to a gallon that they use to haul their race car to the track on weekends, all the while complaining about the high cost of gasoline. Hey, you don't suppose large numbers of people driving giant pickup trucks so they can haul their gas toys around on weekends might be contributing to the high cost of gasoline do you, Jethro?
Natural selection is there for a reason.
Since when has intelligence become a substitute for decisive action?
On several occasions I've suggested to customers that they consider building their own servers. Going by the look on their face you'd think I'd just asked directions to Mars. I'll usually let them ba-humbug the idea for a while before informing them that Google does it and always has. That usually gets them started asking questions instead of telling me why it's such a bad idea.
That wouldn't work for most companies, but if they've got a technology core group that's big enough or if they're a tech oriented company, it's the most flexible way to go and not that much more work. Some standard box configurations and parts lists keeps all the components working together.
I wouldn't even consider buying a server for my own stuff. If there were an ATX type standard for laptops, I'd build those as well.
Arrrrr.
Fascinating. You have a blanket label for anyone who thinks Bush is evil. I don't think "purpose" has any bearing on the definition of evil. Incompetence raised to a high enough level is, in many ways, indistinguishable from deliberate intent. You don't have to be Darth Vader to personify evil. The most evil people I know tend to be ideologues who feel their dogma is more important than the means to institutionalize it. They are both zealous and incompetent leading to evil in deed if not in character. At a certain point it's hard to tell the difference. Evil is as evil does, to paraphrase an old truism. A little evil mixed with a lot of incompetence, shaken, not stirred, makes a disastrous cocktail regardless of intent.
But it's convenient to have a one-dimensional bucket to dump anyone disagreeing. A label and put down all rolled into one. Like labeling any exit strategy for Iraq as "cut and run" when most people are smart enough to realize no one is really suggesting that.
If Bush supporters represent the brightest and best this country has to offer, or even the biggest fraction of the whole, we're really fucked.
It smacks of MSFT needing to find a way to boost stagnant earnings and keep their quarterly numbers up and that's exactly what it is.
All they can do is squeeze existing users for a few more pennies and try to generate sales with the strong arm product activation requirements. The security package is one way to extract a few more dollars from your wallet, racheting up the EULA restrictions so you can't transfer Windows between machines you own is another, and trying to sweep in sales from those using a pirated copy of Windows just to play games, which is the only reason many of you want Windows around at all. I've seen similar tactics going on on the commercial side of the house as well. Many of my business customers are flat unhappy with MSFT license fees and restrictions.
It's an interesting spiral. The more people switching to open source, the more MSFT has to squeeze their remaining customers for revenue, which always pisses off a small fraction who then jump to OSS. Rinse, lather, repeat.
Now at last we can turn the arguement around: If you're not doing anything wrong, why worry about the cameras? Police routinely tape large demonstrations and outdoor events, how is this any different? There's no expectation of privacy in public place, that's why they had to use wiretap laws. It wasn't the video, it was the audio. I'm guessing N.H. is a two-party state, where both parties have to consent to monitoring.
Either way this was a hugely bad move for the police department. Now it looks like they charged the guy in retaliation and are trying to cover up misdeeds by their own personnel. The defense will want to play the tape for the jury and they'll get to see the officer's unfiltered conduct. Not his well-dressed, well-mannered courtroom testimony. He might not have had a damage award case if they hadn't arrested him, but they might now if the jury is convinced the police acted out of malice. Dumb and dumber.
Smartest move the prosecutor could make would be to throw out the case, but none of those involved strike me as particularly gifted in the PR department.
So much for the Supreme Court counting on improved training to keep police conduct in check.
Not by a long shot. It's a bit more than a technicality when a federal judge writes in a decision that you:
- Ignored court orders for specificity
- Implied you tried to game the system and bs the judges
- The judge takes time to point out how you lied to your stockholders in the press
- The court stops speaking legalesse and says something like, "The court finds SCO's arguments unpersuasive."
- The court says you didn't meet the standard of proof you requested of the defense (the burden of proof is on you)
- And that your failures were willful
That's a long way from a technicality. That's SCO getting gut shot and left to wander around in extreme pain while they bleed out and die.
If we did we wouldn't be the first country to ever do that. In business trips to France we'd routinely have to practice security awareness at our hotels. It wasn't unusual for the French government to be spying on us, and it wasn't personal. Information they would use to gain commercial advantage.
The Israelis, Russians and Italians have all done similar things. One sort of expects it from the Russians. I'm not suggesting it's okay, no matter who is doing it. Just that we're not alone if we're doing it and, with it being nearly impossible to tell where corporate interests leave off and government begins, it would be naive to think none of that data is ending up in the hands of private industry.
I guess in our idealized view of ourselves the US previously prided itself on being different. But the last six years we've pretty much bulldozed the high road we used to travel. In its place we've substituted arrogance and ignorant dogma stemming from a philosophy of life whose most visible supporters are a neurotic shrew, a pervert with anger management issues and a drug addict.
And it wasn't just that I disagreed with him over net neutrality. He couldn't make a case that letting telco's balkanize the internet was in the interests of the consumer.
The way I see it this is nothing more than pure greed from AT&T (we know how much they look out for consumer interests), Bellsouth and handful of other companies all of which got a sweet deal when the internet was privatized. But in the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately corporate handout game, that history doesn't seem to matter now. There's a reason Bellsouth has a thirty person lobbying office on K Street. They spend millions on the hill and wouldn't be doing it if they didn't think there were billions waiting at the other end of this sweetheart legislation.
If internet traffic is such a burden, sell of those assets and move into another line of business. If it's such a loser, get of the business. Because I'm all a flutter over poor, poor Bellsouth not being able to set up toll booths on the net so they can charge at both ends of the pipe.
What's new and interesting to me is how special interest legislation is now connected to massive PR campaigns. The RIAA's launch to equate copyright infringement with theft, even though they are very different issues. The TV commercials touting tons of CO2 as a good thing for the environment. I'm just getting sick of corporate interests propagandizing TV and the mainstream media for political issues.
I want my government back, I want my news to be written by real journalists, not PR staff angling for a press hit, I want my privacy back and I want to own the data about me. Why is that asking so much?
What else are they going to say. But if you have to put out a press release to say something is not knee-jerk, you might as well be placing a full page ad in the Washington Post that it is a knee-jerk reaction. Story on Yahoo!
It's about walking around, in any circumstance, with megs of sensitive information on a portable device that isn't encrypted. Whether it's a desktop, laptop, USB device, external hard drive, PDA, cell phone or iPod. It's really about non-existent data security policies, data security audits of vendors handling sensitive customer and employee data and, above all, it's about no accountability in government or private industry for mishandling sensitive information.
When companies are liable for millions in damages for lost privacy act data, you'll see change bordering on a religious revival. Until then, it's just the masses whining.
You think you're going to get accountability from a Republican congress? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! That's a good one.
Well, let's see.
Not a good sign.
If you're dissenting opinion was financed by Exxon and the oil lobby, I can guarantee it will get published. Not only that but it will get picked up by the popular press because Exxon's PR firm will be working their press contacts for ink.
You can buy any kind of research results you want if you have enough money. I used to see tobacco companies do it all the time when I was in contract research. You'll be able to buy some really big name scientists and get the conclusions you want. They'll justify the intellectual prostitution by telling themselves that the research they do with the money they get will out-weigh the evil of promoting a position paid for by oil money, or tobacco money or Monsanto or whoever is funding your research center.
Big corporate money is corrupting our government, our research institutions, and our media. Half the fluff pieces you see on the news were produced by some industry group. Probably 90% of the articles you read in trade rags are influenced by an advertiser or their PR firm, it's really getting to the point you can't believe anything you read.
And, Googleplex fights back...
Exactly the kind of situation where, if they got in a bind, you'd want them to have a cell phone to call for help. So at the times they're most likely to need a phone, they'll less likely to actually carry it.
And since they own all our manufacturing capacity, there would be little we could do about it. It would take years to tool up enough manufacturing to replace everything we depend on them to produce.
I guess being dependent on foreign oil wasn't good enough. We had to match that folly by sending our component manufacturing overseas as well.