The company I work for uses opt-in newsletters (thank god) with a good removal system.
The result: less time and money spent on irritated customers who were spammed with information they didn't want.
When it comes to real, corporate business environments (note the qualification.. i'm not talking about fly-by-nights) the cost of opt-out mailing systems is too high. Someone has to go through all the irate emails sent to customer service to see if any have a valid message in them. That costs them money in terms of manhours, bandwidth, and storage (granted, the storage is cheap, but in today's economy, every penny is counted twice).
As someone who's actually opted in to a few mailing lists from companies I like (glenmorangie whisky for one) to get relevent information, I can tell you right now that I'm going to read what they send me, and that's what counts. Businesses don't want stats on how many emails you sent out. They want to know how many people actually read what they have to say. It's the eyeballs that really count.
Anything coming from a business I didn't specifically sign up for gets either a) deleted or b) forwarded to abuse@ for handling. Smart businesses are realizing that consumers are becoming more web-savvy, and opt-out is just not a good marketing practice.
heh. that's not good sense or waiting for established technologies. that's good, old fashioned entropy. Just about all beaurocratic organizations (and universities are among the top of those) take forever to adopt new technologies and phase out old ones.
Why not let people with some programming experience already poke and prod at the source code?
Three reasons:
1) Control over how the universities use the code. Universities are notoriously underfunded, so any help coming their way from a company like MS is a godsend. I'd love to see the restrictions placed on any code developped in university labs on.NET.
2) Good PR. MS looks like a saint for helping out the struggling education system.
3) The student programmer is in just the right stage to be brainwashed into thinking.NET is the only solution for all their web coding activities (I know not all students are like this, but honestly.. i remember what university was like.. 75% sheep). Not to mention bringing in a whole slew of.NET-trained graduates into the workforce.
Personally I think that "good content management software" should, well, make it easy to manage content. In other words, it should not cost you through the nose in training, or preferably in installation and upkeep.
While minimal training is fine for the lowest level of users (the TS gui is pretty slick for those who are simple authors...), its when you actually have to get into the guts of the program that the training becomes essential.
Creating templates for the users is one thing that I had to learn on my own, and would have been a lot easier for all concerned had i some training.
On a higher level, you have the internal management of TS itself. It's a beast. Anyone who's thrown into taking care of it without any training.. well, I feel sorry for them. And those are the courses that cost in the range of 2k US each plus travel and hotel.
TS itself is composed of many pieces: There's TS for simple content, Templating for creating templates (of course), DataDeploy for deploying to databases or XML files, OpenDeploy for deploying static content, and a myriad of other interrelating products that are difficult to figure out on your own. I know this intimately because this is exactly what I had to do. For the first three months, I was nearly in tears with frustration.
Now that i've had some experience dealing with it, and have even installed it a few times just for kicks, I can comfortably say that I have a handle on it and that if it breaks, I can quickly find the problem. But it took me a LONG time to get here (almost a year now), even with a good knowledge of PERL and familiarity with unix environments, and the help of a great (and tolerant) sysadmin. If i'd had the complete training package, things would have gone much more smoothly.
Any content management software is fairly complex in nature, but one with as much flexibility and as many componants as TS is on a level all its own. That's not to say it's bad... I can look back on my experiences now and say it was a good thing and I wouldn't take it back. But I'd think good and hard before placing anyone else in my position.
is what we use here. And I'm actually the one in charge of it. A few things to make note of:
1) it's a good product, AS LONG AS SOMEONE QUALIFIED INSTALLS IT. Our installation job was completely botched by the company that did it, and it ended up being practically unusable. We had to hire contractors to fix it. Whatever software you end up choosing, make sure someone certified by the company installs it. It's more expensive up front, but will save you endless hassles and cost much less in the long run. For god's sake whatever you do, don't assume it's just like installing any other software and any bonehead can do it. It's just too complex for that.
2) For whoever will be managing the software: either hire someone certified by the company, or send the person who'll be managing it on as many training courses provided by the company as possible. The more they know, the better. For interwoven, a knowledge of PERL, XML, DTDs, and some sysadmin type capabilities are a must. Familiarity with JAVA is a definate asset.
3) TeamSite is a great product for straight ahead, content management, but if you want any bulk functionality, you'll need to do extensive customization. It's meant for one-at-a-time changes. A good PERL programmer will save you a lot of headaches in this area.
4) $$$$$. Any good content management software is going to cost you through the nose in training, installation, and the software itself. Expect it, deal with it. Make sure the marketing pinheads know it.
5) Get the tech support, you'll need it.
6) TRAINING TRAINING AND MORE TRAINING. Make sure the editors take at least a basic training course in using the TS GUI, or your manager will spend 95% of his/her time fielding calls from frustrated content editors who don't understand what a DCR (Data Content Record) is, and don't know how to unlock a file.
7) Last, and most importantly, install it on solaris. Do not, under any circumstances, install it on WINNT. Gah.
There are a lot of good resources out there for TS. It's a popular product, and I'm on a few mailing lists that are quite helpful.
If you have any questions about TS, you can email me privately and I'll do my best to answer them.
It's not just you. Remember back when we were kids (for me that would be back in the mid to late 80s) when a movie would show up in theatres, and then stay there for a few months? Nowadays it's in and out. There's so much crap being produced that only the very top money-makers stay in theatres for more than a few weeks. The industry has become a veritable automaton, churning out one box office bomb after another, ending up in such a huge turnaround that they have no choice but to head almost straight to DVD to try and make up some of the money on the failures. The top earners get a small break, staying until the revenues from box-office sales drop off enough to make it reasonable to move to DVD. It's all about the profit-margins.
Gah. nowadays it feels like i'm working solely to support my DVD habit. Just since January we have (released or announced):
- Star Trek TNG season 1 (*drool*) - AbFab, the entire season (ok so this one isnt recent but damn i can't resist the gin-soaked duo) - Harry Potter - the Sorcerer's stone - Monsters Inc
And now LotR. What's a lowly programmer to do?
Thank god for birthdays and christmas.
Seriously though, isn't this all a bit of overkill? Do we REALLY need to have THREE seperate versions of a single movie released? Sure the extra footage is neat, and yes there's probably call for the individual movie and a box set version once all three are released, but do we need the extra release in November?
Things are getting out of hand when they're packaging extra DVD releases just to fit in all the junk that ended up on the cutting room floor. there's a reason it was cut: it was extraneous and unnecessary.
ok i'll probably be crucified for that.. but really.. enough is enough. Give us one version so we don't feel like we have to choose between the rent and DVDs.
The only reason I can see for going this route is to make more money for the already overly commercialized and money-grabbing movie industry. Any die-hard LotR fan (and there's a lot of them) is just GOING to have to have the first version as soon as it comes out. Then, three months later, bang here comes the second release of the same movie with new and improved pretty widgets. And all those same die-hard fans are going to rush out to have the latest shiny new version, complete with extra cutting-room floor bits.
We won't go into the hypocrisy implied by those same people coming back to/. bemoaning all the money that the MPAA forces them spend to buy their products. Oh the injustice of it all.
The oscars aren't about the best films...
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LoTR Takes 4 Oscars
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The oscars have never been about the best films. From day 1 (back in 1927), they were all about hollywood patting itself on the back. It was started by film and production executives, is chaired today by the same types of people. The only way to even get involved in the voting for the oscars is to be invited to join the Academy by the Board of Governers and is limited to 'those who have achieved distinction in the arts and sciences of motion pictures'. A link with the brief history is here. You'll never see a movie like LotR take top honours, now or ever, for a very good reason. It's not in hollywood's best interest to admit that a 'silly' sci-fi, fantasy, or comedy movie was the best they had that year. To sum up: the Oscars are of the hollywood crowd, for the hollywood crowd, by the hollywood crowd. This is why I never watch awards shows.
Vegetarian-approved meat. Now there's a fascinating concept. It might help with the moral vegetarians (who, i'm sorry but sometimes are just totally obsessive), but not much with the ones who just don't like meat. Sounds weird... but most of the vegetarians I know fall into the latter category. They're just grossed out by the taste and texture of meat. On a personal note, this article turned my stomach.. I'm allergic to seafood and the thought of chunks of goldfish brewing in nutrient broth makes my stomach churn.
Everyone on the planet who has an IOTA of common computer sense knows that AOL's consumer services are below average. How did they think they could handle corporate email services?
Even software like Outlook, which is specifically designed for this type of big-business structure, has trouble handling huge amounts of email (its not so much the amount of email thats the problem as much as the lack of security in the product. Oh wait, AOL doesn't do security well either.).
Why on earth did AOL think it could scale up to fit business needs? The requirements of John Q. Local User are far less than those of Mr. Corporate. They should have seen it coming.
Before, when it was just the individual that was getting bombarded by offers of barely legal pr0n and penis enhancers, Big Brother (the govt) didn't really seem to care. Sure, a few states have instituted laws.. but honestly, how effective has the "ADV" required by CA law been, if at all?
Finally, we're seeing reliable, solid information from big companies on how much these bits of unwanted flotsam are costing in actual dollars. This is exactly what it takes to get the Govt. to stand up and take notice. The big guys have the money, power, and voice to get the message heard and force action.
Unfortunately, even once laws are in place, I don't see much of a decrease in spam. The senders are getting smarter and smarter, the harvesting techniques are getting better, and their obfuscated headers and relays make them damned hard to track. Add in the fact that a lot of this stuff is across international boundaries, which makes local laws difficult if not impossible to enforce, so even if you can track down the offender, you end up with an incredibly difficult case to litigate.
I can see the same thing happening in this situation that has happened with online casinos: when things get unfriendly, they'll simply move their base of operation to a country that doesn't much care what they do as long as they're spending money. And with the right set up, it doesn't matter if they're spamming from NYC or Antartica... their damned message will still get through to cost you time and headaches.
If you're using the forwarding or POP3, then you're not viewing the web-page adverts that are Yahoo's bread & butter. Actually, in order to sign up for yahoo's pop3 service, you MUST agree to receive 'selected promotions' in your mail. Granted, they give you the choice as to how many (minimum of one per week) and if you want them in text or HTML (thank god), but you don't have a choice. Removing yourself from their 'promotional marketing' list means you can't pop your account at all. I rarely use my yahoo account anyway.. I think i have three or four that are sitting idle (due to groups and other assorted things) that I just don't bother with. All my group accounts forward to a specific account on my own domain (if it gets too spam-ridden, i change it). In today's economy, with profits from ad banners down and the average netizen finally showing that they're ready to pay for better services, I'm not surprised to see things like this happening. Almost all of the big web companies offer premium services at a price; IMHO it's a good way for them to make some revenue on a service that people want.
Speaking generally, communities are almost always their own worst enemy. This goes for the linux community, the GPL community, and just about any moderately social community you can name. And the reason for it is stated quite clearly in the article: We sell one product that is GPL. On at least a weekly basis we get someone telling us that we have to give them the source code because it is GPL. Some of them become verbally violent and abusive when I point out that the GPL provides for us to charge for the source code, we just have to make it available, and this we have done. Some of these people even tried to hack our system to get the code because they thought it was their God-given right to have it. These are also typically the people who contribute nothing to the community. While I think that the majority of any community is made up of decent, honest people who truly care about what they're involved with (yes i am that idealistic), there are always those marginal and VERY vocal few who MUST ruin the party for everyone else. These people usually know just enough of what they're talking about to make them dangerous... the uneducated public believes them because they sound like they know what they're talking about. The business community listens because they're loud, vocal, and usually ready to do something stupid to get their point across. It's because of people like this that GPLd products haven't gotten a big foothold in the commercial world. The thought that someone might actually CHARGE for their hard work and effort sends these people over the edge into a screaming, frothy frenzy of angry postings, DoS attacks, and god knows what other lame actions to 'punish' the bad guys who won't give them something for nothing. Never mind the fact that what they're doing is completely legal and good business... this self-righteous minority doesn't need messy facts to get in the way. It's those marginal people that make me see red, and make companies head in the same direction as TheKompany has.. they won't bother with the GPL because the vocal, obnoxious minority makes it too hard for them to be profitable from their work. Frankly, I don't blame them for deciding not to GPL anything else one bit. End Rant.
Not necessarily... why bother putting in copy protection for someone else's software if you can convince them to use your already-protected format instead? MS has been their proprietary music formats for a long time. This could be the push they need for the music industry to abandon their own products and turn to them for help instead. Paranoid? Maybe... but it wouldn't be the first time we've seen MS move to wipe out the competition by including 'added functionality'.
It's all fun and games til someone loses an eye. Seriously though, i'd be dangerous with one of those things. I've almost put out eyes with my safe lil koosh ring gun! But damn it looks like it'd be a blast around the office. "You wanted what? Before I leave today? Step over there please..." (glorious sounds of pinheaded clients demanding the impossible being riddled with rubber bands, welts sprouting.. ahh.. stress relief) Wonder if I could reverse engineer this thing? *goes off in search of woodworking tools...*
A bit idealistic
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Patent Nonsense
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I find this author's view to be a rather idealistic one. After all, the situations he's mentioning are two isolated cases, founded on the success stories of a few very specific companies. What about all the companies that have flourished because of patents? And all the other countries that seem to be doing quite well WITH the systems in place? I'm the first to admit that some patents are just plain silly (one-click, anyone?), and that the system needs a serious overhaul, especially in the US. But to totally do away with it? I don't think a few isolated examples from the last century makes a good case for doing away with patent laws. In one place he says: This tool has been denied to poor nations, partly as a result of energetic lobbying by the very companies which once made use of it.. While i'm all for helping developing nations (and I think cheap medical supplies, drugs, and genetically enhanced food crops should be available to anyone, patents be damned), I don't see patents as being the cause of all their troubles. I find it very unlikely that a lifting of patent laws on underprivileged countries would fix all their problems. It may alleviate some issues, but it won't fix much in the long run. He could better spend his time focusing on how to get these countries the cheap food and medical sources they need, rather than putting forth examples of 'patentless society'.
I wasn't talking about the training of new people coming in... you'll notice in my post i said "REtrain". Anyone who's going to switch software systems to something they've never used before is going to need retraining.. and that's going to be just about everyone from the top down. The initial training isn't the problem, its the repitition of that week of training or so that's going to cause headaches.
Whatever technology Canal+ placed on their smart cards, it would have been picked apart, prodded, poked, and eventually cracked and placed on the web regardless of funding from the big company. In this situation, Canal+ actually has the advantage of being able to point the finger at the Big guy with the huge corporate pockets and get some payback for loss of revenue. Good or bad? Who knows? Inevitable... definately. Canal should count themselves lucky that they might get damages awarded by a court as opposed to what they'd get if it was joe schmoe locked in his basement who cracked the smart cards, as happened with most other smart card technologies. I can see the motivations behind NDS wanting to know how the competition's smart cards work.. it's a simple matter of knowing what the other guy is up to. But placing it on the web was just dumb. I highly doubt this was a corporate decision. Most likely just some geek in the cube maze wanting to share the goods with friends. From what I can see in the article, they've refused to comment on the issue. Anyone have any info on where the decision to post it publicly came from?
Because the Air Force doesn't want to retrain all their personnel on software they're not familiar with. The costs of retraining and reconfiguring all their hardware far outweighs the kick in the ass scare they can put into Bill to fix up what they're already using. Just about everyone who has ever come into contact with a computer has experience with windows. From a user-interface point of view, its quick, clean, and easy. From a security point of view, its a nightmare. Unfortunately, the people who are deciding what to buy and what to install aren't the security-savvy techs.. they're the corporate middle management suits who see the flashy bells and whistles MS offers and bite so fast it'd make your head spin. MS had advertising, marketers, and a well-known product. Security wasn't as big a concern. All that adds up to a major problem today. Not only that, but lets face it, back when the USAF were first installing and configuring these services, there weren't many viable options out there. Yes yes, i know.. sendmail, etc. But who was out there pitching sendmail to the AF?
It reinforces the notion of tech elites who alone understand how the new tools of the Info Age really work, while most people struggle to use them. Honestly... if you look at ANY industry, from cars to computers to planes to medicine, there are those at the top who understand everything and can pick it up easily, then there are the rest of us, who struggle to change a spark plug. I don't see why this 'tech gap' is so all-consuming for Katz. The reality is, there are people who quickly grasp new software and gadgets. There always will be. Does this create a difference in people? Of course. But no more than the difference between the average citizen and a budding concert pianist. Why not whine about the talent gap? or the auto repair gap? And don't say 'this is different', because it's not. Just about anyone can take piano lessons. But very few of those people will go on to make money from playing that instrument. It's not a 'gap', its human nature and differences coming to the forefront. Vive le difference.. i'd hate to live in a society where we were all equally good at everything.
Even if it isn't as tasty... though I've always been more of a butter pecan fan, so the beige is fine with me. From a colour perspective, it makes much more sense than a shade of green. Every kid who's ever played with play-doh knows that if you mix a bit of this with a pinch of that to create new colours (which is essentially what you get from stars.. blue, red, green, yellow, etc), you eventually end up with that nasty brown lump of play-doh that ends up getting left under the couch for the dog to play with.
I mean seriously. This guy already made his (admittedly sensationalistic and unrealistic) point live, on tv, in front of all the corporate big wigs and 'important' people he wanted to.
Do you really think anyone's going to notice an article refuting those claims, even if it is on the NY Times site, refuting his claims?
These people (The RIAA types) aren't after verifiable truths and hard facts. They're after media-friendly catchphrases and meaningless FUD they can sow to get their way.
Anything said in this article is going to be about as meaningful and have as much impact as those tiny size 8 retractions printed on the inside back of a tabloid after they've splashed the latest unsubstantiated rumour over the front cover in size 40 bold print.
Unfortunately, our spies and our satellites have lost touch with reality, for they collect less than 10% of the relevant information that we must digest to understand the complex multi-cultural world that is now capable of producing very wealthy and suicidal terrorists.
There's a good reason for the above mentioned figure... While I agree that there's a lot of useful information on the net, there's also a lot of crap.
Any intelligence agency looking to filter out the 99.9% of nonsense that's out there to glean the remaining.01% of useful information faces an incredible challenge. That's not to say that it's impossible, just very, very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. For every real threat being posted on the net, there are tens of thousands of harmless, steam-blowing rants posted. And how do you decipher between the two? Do we now get into investigating every idle threat someone posts on a bb, or in a chat channel? The sheer scope of this project would daunt even the most dedicated Government sanctioned snoop.
Just as an example, sift through the comments of a/. article at -1, and you're guaranteed to find at least one or two flame-ridden rants about god knows what. Or look at your own past history. How many 'harmless' comments have you made about the stupidity of this or that idea, or how you'd like to kill that person for doing this? You know its harmless. Anyone who knows you probably thinks the same. But how does someone completely outside of your community know?
The article does make a few valid points, however:
Shocking as it may seem, our intelligence community does not routinely strive to identify the top people in the world (not just Americans) on the various topics of concern -- from terrorism to the environment to human trafficking to corruption to disease and public health -- with the result that our analysis tends to be shallow and incestuous, relying on the same consultants again and again.
I think just about anyone who lives outside the US looking in (as I do) would agree with this statement; one has only to observe the lack of knowledge American citizens display with regards to the rest of the world to see that this attitude is quite widespread, and probably does affect intelligence gathering. Raise your hand anyone who's seen the (Canadian) 22 minutes special "Talking to Americans". It's rather depressing actually, to think that so many people, including prominant politicians, could believe that Canada works on a 20 hour clock, or that we're going to change the country's name to Chicago (I'm not exaggerating either... quite a few people were taken in by this).
The Recommended Open Source Initiatives proposed in the article are interesting, though idealistic. One example: Digital History Project ($5M) to digitize and translate key Islamic, Chinese, and other foreign language historical, political, economic, cultural, social, and technical materials.. Having been involved in translation projects (French to English and vice versa) myself, I think he has seriously underestimated how much this would cost..Translation is an incredibly difficult and time-consuming activity; it's not a simple matter of babelfishing an article. Localized phrases and slang do not translate well from one language to another.
Before you can even begin to sift through the plethora of information, you'll need people that are very net and tech savvy. Combining tech skills with those of an intelligence agent is just the beginning. I won't even go into the thorny privacy issues that could be touched on here... that's just a political bomb waiting to go off.
Rather than relying on HTML codes to design web pages and embedding Flash as one component, Macromedia wants Flash to be used to design the entirety of a site.
I don't know about anyone else, but the LAST thing I want to see is a web gone completely flash.
Not only is flash annoying, invasive, and a pain in the ass, but it's not exactly the most user-friendly of web interfaces. Cumbersome downloads, long waits for those on slower connections, and a lack of accessibility for people with disabilities make flash a poor choice for web content, period. And let's not even get into those annoying in-your-face demands that you download this or that component in order to display the latest and greatest flash widgets.
I'm sure I'm not the only one out there who automatically clicks the "Skip Intro" links on sites that have them, and find other sources of amusement on sites that don't. As for the ones that have the option of flash or HTML on their splash page.. I can't remember ever actually CHOOSING to visit the flash version. If there's no static HTML option, I go elsewhere, period.
We thought the advent of FrontPage was hell.. can you IMAGINE what the self professed "Webmasters" will produce with a flash-based equivilent? Even Macromedia's people admit that people don't know how to use flash to advantage. From the article: The usability argument is somewhat ironic, given that Flash has been identified as a key culprit in bad Web design, enabling pages of blinking text and galloping images that do little more than consume bandwidth. Flazoom's MacGregor said that Macromedia learned its lesson with the last version of Flash, when it began an extensive campaign to educate designers on appropriate use of Flash.
Sorry MacGregor, but you can't train people to have good taste and common sense.
Slashdot Mirror
The company I work for uses opt-in newsletters (thank god) with a good removal system.
The result: less time and money spent on irritated customers who were spammed with information they didn't want.
When it comes to real, corporate business environments (note the qualification.. i'm not talking about fly-by-nights) the cost of opt-out mailing systems is too high. Someone has to go through all the irate emails sent to customer service to see if any have a valid message in them. That costs them money in terms of manhours, bandwidth, and storage (granted, the storage is cheap, but in today's economy, every penny is counted twice).
As someone who's actually opted in to a few mailing lists from companies I like (glenmorangie whisky for one) to get relevent information, I can tell you right now that I'm going to read what they send me, and that's what counts. Businesses don't want stats on how many emails you sent out. They want to know how many people actually read what they have to say. It's the eyeballs that really count.
Anything coming from a business I didn't specifically sign up for gets either a) deleted or b) forwarded to abuse@ for handling. Smart businesses are realizing that consumers are becoming more web-savvy, and opt-out is just not a good marketing practice.
heh. that's not good sense or waiting for established technologies. that's good, old fashioned entropy.
Just about all beaurocratic organizations (and universities are among the top of those) take forever to adopt new technologies and phase out old ones.
Why not let people with some programming experience already poke and prod at the source code?
.NET.
.NET is the only solution for all their web coding activities (I know not all students are like this, but honestly.. i remember what university was like.. 75% sheep). Not to mention bringing in a whole slew of .NET-trained graduates into the workforce.
Three reasons:
1) Control over how the universities use the code. Universities are notoriously underfunded, so any help coming their way from a company like MS is a godsend. I'd love to see the restrictions placed on any code developped in university labs on
2) Good PR. MS looks like a saint for helping out the struggling education system.
3) The student programmer is in just the right stage to be brainwashed into thinking
Personally I think that "good content management software" should, well, make it easy to manage content. In other words, it should not cost you through the nose in training, or preferably in installation and upkeep.
While minimal training is fine for the lowest level of users (the TS gui is pretty slick for those who are simple authors...), its when you actually have to get into the guts of the program that the training becomes essential.
Creating templates for the users is one thing that I had to learn on my own, and would have been a lot easier for all concerned had i some training.
On a higher level, you have the internal management of TS itself. It's a beast. Anyone who's thrown into taking care of it without any training.. well, I feel sorry for them. And those are the courses that cost in the range of 2k US each plus travel and hotel.
TS itself is composed of many pieces: There's TS for simple content, Templating for creating templates (of course), DataDeploy for deploying to databases or XML files, OpenDeploy for deploying static content, and a myriad of other interrelating products that are difficult to figure out on your own. I know this intimately because this is exactly what I had to do. For the first three months, I was nearly in tears with frustration.
Now that i've had some experience dealing with it, and have even installed it a few times just for kicks, I can comfortably say that I have a handle on it and that if it breaks, I can quickly find the problem. But it took me a LONG time to get here (almost a year now), even with a good knowledge of PERL and familiarity with unix environments, and the help of a great (and tolerant) sysadmin. If i'd had the complete training package, things would have gone much more smoothly.
Any content management software is fairly complex in nature, but one with as much flexibility and as many componants as TS is on a level all its own. That's not to say it's bad... I can look back on my experiences now and say it was a good thing and I wouldn't take it back. But I'd think good and hard before placing anyone else in my position.
is what we use here. And I'm actually the one in charge of it.
A few things to make note of:
1) it's a good product, AS LONG AS SOMEONE QUALIFIED INSTALLS IT. Our installation job was completely botched by the company that did it, and it ended up being practically unusable. We had to hire contractors to fix it. Whatever software you end up choosing, make sure someone certified by the company installs it. It's more expensive up front, but will save you endless hassles and cost much less in the long run. For god's sake whatever you do, don't assume it's just like installing any other software and any bonehead can do it. It's just too complex for that.
2) For whoever will be managing the software: either hire someone certified by the company, or send the person who'll be managing it on as many training courses provided by the company as possible. The more they know, the better. For interwoven, a knowledge of PERL, XML, DTDs, and some sysadmin type capabilities are a must. Familiarity with JAVA is a definate asset.
3) TeamSite is a great product for straight ahead, content management, but if you want any bulk functionality, you'll need to do extensive customization. It's meant for one-at-a-time changes. A good PERL programmer will save you a lot of headaches in this area.
4) $$$$$. Any good content management software is going to cost you through the nose in training, installation, and the software itself. Expect it, deal with it. Make sure the marketing pinheads know it.
5) Get the tech support, you'll need it.
6) TRAINING TRAINING AND MORE TRAINING. Make sure the editors take at least a basic training course in using the TS GUI, or your manager will spend 95% of his/her time fielding calls from frustrated content editors who don't understand what a DCR (Data Content Record) is, and don't know how to unlock a file.
7) Last, and most importantly, install it on solaris. Do not, under any circumstances, install it on WINNT. Gah.
There are a lot of good resources out there for TS. It's a popular product, and I'm on a few mailing lists that are quite helpful.
If you have any questions about TS, you can email me privately and I'll do my best to answer them.
It's not just you.
Remember back when we were kids (for me that would be back in the mid to late 80s) when a movie would show up in theatres, and then stay there for a few months?
Nowadays it's in and out. There's so much crap being produced that only the very top money-makers stay in theatres for more than a few weeks.
The industry has become a veritable automaton, churning out one box office bomb after another, ending up in such a huge turnaround that they have no choice but to head almost straight to DVD to try and make up some of the money on the failures. The top earners get a small break, staying until the revenues from box-office sales drop off enough to make it reasonable to move to DVD.
It's all about the profit-margins.
Gah. nowadays it feels like i'm working solely to support my DVD habit.
/. bemoaning all the money that the MPAA forces them spend to buy their products. Oh the injustice of it all.
Just since January we have (released or announced):
- Star Trek TNG season 1 (*drool*)
- AbFab, the entire season (ok so this one isnt recent but damn i can't resist the gin-soaked duo)
- Harry Potter - the Sorcerer's stone
- Monsters Inc
And now LotR. What's a lowly programmer to do?
Thank god for birthdays and christmas.
Seriously though, isn't this all a bit of overkill? Do we REALLY need to have THREE seperate versions of a single movie released?
Sure the extra footage is neat, and yes there's probably call for the individual movie and a box set version once all three are released, but do we need the extra release in November?
Things are getting out of hand when they're packaging extra DVD releases just to fit in all the junk that ended up on the cutting room floor. there's a reason it was cut: it was extraneous and unnecessary.
ok i'll probably be crucified for that.. but really.. enough is enough. Give us one version so we don't feel like we have to choose between the rent and DVDs.
The only reason I can see for going this route is to make more money for the already overly commercialized and money-grabbing movie industry. Any die-hard LotR fan (and there's a lot of them) is just GOING to have to have the first version as soon as it comes out. Then, three months later, bang here comes the second release of the same movie with new and improved pretty widgets. And all those same die-hard fans are going to rush out to have the latest shiny new version, complete with extra cutting-room floor bits.
We won't go into the hypocrisy implied by those same people coming back to
The oscars have never been about the best films. From day 1 (back in 1927), they were all about hollywood patting itself on the back.
It was started by film and production executives, is chaired today by the same types of people. The only way to even get involved in the voting for the oscars is to be invited to join the Academy by the Board of Governers and is limited to 'those who have achieved distinction in the arts and sciences of motion pictures'. A link with the brief history is here.
You'll never see a movie like LotR take top honours, now or ever, for a very good reason. It's not in hollywood's best interest to admit that a 'silly' sci-fi, fantasy, or comedy movie was the best they had that year.
To sum up: the Oscars are of the hollywood crowd, for the hollywood crowd, by the hollywood crowd. This is why I never watch awards shows.
Vegetarian-approved meat.
Now there's a fascinating concept.
It might help with the moral vegetarians (who, i'm sorry but sometimes are just totally obsessive), but not much with the ones who just don't like meat.
Sounds weird... but most of the vegetarians I know fall into the latter category. They're just grossed out by the taste and texture of meat.
On a personal note, this article turned my stomach.. I'm allergic to seafood and the thought of chunks of goldfish brewing in nutrient broth makes my stomach churn.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
Everyone on the planet who has an IOTA of common computer sense knows that AOL's consumer services are below average. How did they think they could handle corporate email services?
Even software like Outlook, which is specifically designed for this type of big-business structure, has trouble handling huge amounts of email (its not so much the amount of email thats the problem as much as the lack of security in the product. Oh wait, AOL doesn't do security well either.).
Why on earth did AOL think it could scale up to fit business needs? The requirements of John Q. Local User are far less than those of Mr. Corporate. They should have seen it coming.
Before, when it was just the individual that was getting bombarded by offers of barely legal pr0n and penis enhancers, Big Brother (the govt) didn't really seem to care. Sure, a few states have instituted laws.. but honestly, how effective has the "ADV" required by CA law been, if at all?
Finally, we're seeing reliable, solid information from big companies on how much these bits of unwanted flotsam are costing in actual dollars. This is exactly what it takes to get the Govt. to stand up and take notice. The big guys have the money, power, and voice to get the message heard and force action.
Unfortunately, even once laws are in place, I don't see much of a decrease in spam. The senders are getting smarter and smarter, the harvesting techniques are getting better, and their obfuscated headers and relays make them damned hard to track. Add in the fact that a lot of this stuff is across international boundaries, which makes local laws difficult if not impossible to enforce, so even if you can track down the offender, you end up with an incredibly difficult case to litigate.
I can see the same thing happening in this situation that has happened with online casinos: when things get unfriendly, they'll simply move their base of operation to a country that doesn't much care what they do as long as they're spending money. And with the right set up, it doesn't matter if they're spamming from NYC or Antartica... their damned message will still get through to cost you time and headaches.
If you're using the forwarding or POP3, then you're not viewing the web-page adverts that are Yahoo's bread & butter.
Actually, in order to sign up for yahoo's pop3 service, you MUST agree to receive 'selected promotions' in your mail. Granted, they give you the choice as to how many (minimum of one per week) and if you want them in text or HTML (thank god), but you don't have a choice. Removing yourself from their 'promotional marketing' list means you can't pop your account at all.
I rarely use my yahoo account anyway.. I think i have three or four that are sitting idle (due to groups and other assorted things) that I just don't bother with. All my group accounts forward to a specific account on my own domain (if it gets too spam-ridden, i change it).
In today's economy, with profits from ad banners down and the average netizen finally showing that they're ready to pay for better services, I'm not surprised to see things like this happening. Almost all of the big web companies offer premium services at a price; IMHO it's a good way for them to make some revenue on a service that people want.
Speaking generally, communities are almost always their own worst enemy. This goes for the linux community, the GPL community, and just about any moderately social community you can name.
And the reason for it is stated quite clearly in the article:
We sell one product that is GPL. On at least a weekly basis we get someone telling us that we have to give them the source code because it is GPL. Some of them become verbally violent and abusive when I point out that the GPL provides for us to charge for the source code, we just have to make it available, and this we have done. Some of these people even tried to hack our system to get the code because they thought it was their God-given right to have it. These are also typically the people who contribute nothing to the community.
While I think that the majority of any community is made up of decent, honest people who truly care about what they're involved with (yes i am that idealistic), there are always those marginal and VERY vocal few who MUST ruin the party for everyone else.
These people usually know just enough of what they're talking about to make them dangerous... the uneducated public believes them because they sound like they know what they're talking about. The business community listens because they're loud, vocal, and usually ready to do something stupid to get their point across.
It's because of people like this that GPLd products haven't gotten a big foothold in the commercial world. The thought that someone might actually CHARGE for their hard work and effort sends these people over the edge into a screaming, frothy frenzy of angry postings, DoS attacks, and god knows what other lame actions to 'punish' the bad guys who won't give them something for nothing. Never mind the fact that what they're doing is completely legal and good business... this self-righteous minority doesn't need messy facts to get in the way.
It's those marginal people that make me see red, and make companies head in the same direction as TheKompany has.. they won't bother with the GPL because the vocal, obnoxious minority makes it too hard for them to be profitable from their work. Frankly, I don't blame them for deciding not to GPL anything else one bit.
End Rant.
Not necessarily...
why bother putting in copy protection for someone else's software if you can convince them to use your already-protected format instead?
MS has been their proprietary music formats for a long time. This could be the push they need for the music industry to abandon their own products and turn to them for help instead.
Paranoid? Maybe... but it wouldn't be the first time we've seen MS move to wipe out the competition by including 'added functionality'.
It's all fun and games til someone loses an eye.
Seriously though, i'd be dangerous with one of those things. I've almost put out eyes with my safe lil koosh ring gun!
But damn it looks like it'd be a blast around the office.
"You wanted what? Before I leave today? Step over there please..." (glorious sounds of pinheaded clients demanding the impossible being riddled with rubber bands, welts sprouting.. ahh.. stress relief)
Wonder if I could reverse engineer this thing? *goes off in search of woodworking tools...*
I find this author's view to be a rather idealistic one. After all, the situations he's mentioning are two isolated cases, founded on the success stories of a few very specific companies. .
What about all the companies that have flourished because of patents? And all the other countries that seem to be doing quite well WITH the systems in place?
I'm the first to admit that some patents are just plain silly (one-click, anyone?), and that the system needs a serious overhaul, especially in the US. But to totally do away with it?
I don't think a few isolated examples from the last century makes a good case for doing away with patent laws.
In one place he says:
This tool has been denied to poor nations, partly as a result of energetic lobbying by the very companies which once made use of it.
While i'm all for helping developing nations (and I think cheap medical supplies, drugs, and genetically enhanced food crops should be available to anyone, patents be damned), I don't see patents as being the cause of all their troubles. I find it very unlikely that a lifting of patent laws on underprivileged countries would fix all their problems. It may alleviate some issues, but it won't fix much in the long run.
He could better spend his time focusing on how to get these countries the cheap food and medical sources they need, rather than putting forth examples of 'patentless society'.
I wasn't talking about the training of new people coming in... you'll notice in my post i said "REtrain". Anyone who's going to switch software systems to something they've never used before is going to need retraining.. and that's going to be just about everyone from the top down. The initial training isn't the problem, its the repitition of that week of training or so that's going to cause headaches.
Whatever technology Canal+ placed on their smart cards, it would have been picked apart, prodded, poked, and eventually cracked and placed on the web regardless of funding from the big company.
In this situation, Canal+ actually has the advantage of being able to point the finger at the Big guy with the huge corporate pockets and get some payback for loss of revenue.
Good or bad? Who knows? Inevitable... definately.
Canal should count themselves lucky that they might get damages awarded by a court as opposed to what they'd get if it was joe schmoe locked in his basement who cracked the smart cards, as happened with most other smart card technologies.
I can see the motivations behind NDS wanting to know how the competition's smart cards work.. it's a simple matter of knowing what the other guy is up to. But placing it on the web was just dumb. I highly doubt this was a corporate decision. Most likely just some geek in the cube maze wanting to share the goods with friends. From what I can see in the article, they've refused to comment on the issue. Anyone have any info on where the decision to post it publicly came from?
Because the Air Force doesn't want to retrain all their personnel on software they're not familiar with. .. sendmail, etc. But who was out there pitching sendmail to the AF?
The costs of retraining and reconfiguring all their hardware far outweighs the kick in the ass scare they can put into Bill to fix up what they're already using.
Just about everyone who has ever come into contact with a computer has experience with windows. From a user-interface point of view, its quick, clean, and easy.
From a security point of view, its a nightmare.
Unfortunately, the people who are deciding what to buy and what to install aren't the security-savvy techs.. they're the corporate middle management suits who see the flashy bells and whistles MS offers and bite so fast it'd make your head spin. MS had advertising, marketers, and a well-known product. Security wasn't as big a concern. All that adds up to a major problem today.
Not only that, but lets face it, back when the USAF were first installing and configuring these services, there weren't many viable options out there. Yes yes, i know
It reinforces the notion of tech elites who alone understand how the new tools of the Info Age really work, while most people struggle to use them.
Honestly... if you look at ANY industry, from cars to computers to planes to medicine, there are those at the top who understand everything and can pick it up easily, then there are the rest of us, who struggle to change a spark plug.
I don't see why this 'tech gap' is so all-consuming for Katz. The reality is, there are people who quickly grasp new software and gadgets. There always will be. Does this create a difference in people? Of course. But no more than the difference between the average citizen and a budding concert pianist. Why not whine about the talent gap? or the auto repair gap?
And don't say 'this is different', because it's not. Just about anyone can take piano lessons. But very few of those people will go on to make money from playing that instrument. It's not a 'gap', its human nature and differences coming to the forefront.
Vive le difference.. i'd hate to live in a society where we were all equally good at everything.
Even if it isn't as tasty...
though I've always been more of a butter pecan fan, so the beige is fine with me.
From a colour perspective, it makes much more sense than a shade of green. Every kid who's ever played with play-doh knows that if you mix a bit of this with a pinch of that to create new colours (which is essentially what you get from stars.. blue, red, green, yellow, etc), you eventually end up with that nasty brown lump of play-doh that ends up getting left under the couch for the dog to play with.
I mean seriously. This guy already made his (admittedly sensationalistic and unrealistic) point live, on tv, in front of all the corporate big wigs and 'important' people he wanted to.
Do you really think anyone's going to notice an article refuting those claims, even if it is on the NY Times site, refuting his claims?
These people (The RIAA types) aren't after verifiable truths and hard facts. They're after media-friendly catchphrases and meaningless FUD they can sow to get their way.
Anything said in this article is going to be about as meaningful and have as much impact as those tiny size 8 retractions printed on the inside back of a tabloid after they've splashed the latest unsubstantiated rumour over the front cover in size 40 bold print.
the CoS makes thousands of spam pages that points at its main pages
Fascinating. CoS is taking its clues from pr0n spammers in its search for higher rankings... gee, wonder how they stumbled onto THAT little idea?
I bet browsing through the images of CoS browser caches with ACDSee would produce some entertaining (and disturbing) results
Unfortunately, our spies and our satellites have lost touch with reality, for they collect less than 10% of the relevant information that we must digest to understand the complex multi-cultural world that is now capable of producing very wealthy and suicidal terrorists.
There's a good reason for the above mentioned figure... While I agree that there's a lot of useful information on the net, there's also a lot of crap.
Any intelligence agency looking to filter out the 99.9% of nonsense that's out there to glean the remaining .01% of useful information faces an incredible challenge. That's not to say that it's impossible, just very, very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. For every real threat being posted on the net, there are tens of thousands of harmless, steam-blowing rants posted. And how do you decipher between the two? Do we now get into investigating every idle threat someone posts on a bb, or in a chat channel? The sheer scope of this project would daunt even the most dedicated Government sanctioned snoop.
Just as an example, sift through the comments of a /. article at -1, and you're guaranteed to find at least one or two flame-ridden rants about god knows what. Or look at your own past history. How many 'harmless' comments have you made about the stupidity of this or that idea, or how you'd like to kill that person for doing this? You know its harmless. Anyone who knows you probably thinks the same. But how does someone completely outside of your community know?
The article does make a few valid points, however:
Shocking as it may seem, our intelligence community does not routinely strive to identify the top people in the world (not just Americans) on the various topics of concern -- from terrorism to the environment to human trafficking to corruption to disease and public health -- with the result that our analysis tends to be shallow and incestuous, relying on the same consultants again and again.
I think just about anyone who lives outside the US looking in (as I do) would agree with this statement; one has only to observe the lack of knowledge American citizens display with regards to the rest of the world to see that this attitude is quite widespread, and probably does affect intelligence gathering. Raise your hand anyone who's seen the (Canadian) 22 minutes special "Talking to Americans". It's rather depressing actually, to think that so many people, including prominant politicians, could believe that Canada works on a 20 hour clock, or that we're going to change the country's name to Chicago (I'm not exaggerating either... quite a few people were taken in by this).
The Recommended Open Source Initiatives proposed in the article are interesting, though idealistic. One example: Digital History Project ($5M) to digitize and translate key Islamic, Chinese, and other foreign language historical, political, economic, cultural, social, and technical materials.. Having been involved in translation projects (French to English and vice versa) myself, I think he has seriously underestimated how much this would cost..Translation is an incredibly difficult and time-consuming activity; it's not a simple matter of babelfishing an article. Localized phrases and slang do not translate well from one language to another.
Before you can even begin to sift through the plethora of information, you'll need people that are very net and tech savvy. Combining tech skills with those of an intelligence agent is just the beginning. I won't even go into the thorny privacy issues that could be touched on here... that's just a political bomb waiting to go off.
I don't know about anyone else, but the LAST thing I want to see is a web gone completely flash.
Not only is flash annoying, invasive, and a pain in the ass, but it's not exactly the most user-friendly of web interfaces. Cumbersome downloads, long waits for those on slower connections, and a lack of accessibility for people with disabilities make flash a poor choice for web content, period. And let's not even get into those annoying in-your-face demands that you download this or that component in order to display the latest and greatest flash widgets.
I'm sure I'm not the only one out there who automatically clicks the "Skip Intro" links on sites that have them, and find other sources of amusement on sites that don't. As for the ones that have the option of flash or HTML on their splash page.. I can't remember ever actually CHOOSING to visit the flash version. If there's no static HTML option, I go elsewhere, period.
We thought the advent of FrontPage was hell.. can you IMAGINE what the self professed "Webmasters" will produce with a flash-based equivilent? Even Macromedia's people admit that people don't know how to use flash to advantage. From the article: The usability argument is somewhat ironic, given that Flash has been identified as a key culprit in bad Web design, enabling pages of blinking text and galloping images that do little more than consume bandwidth. Flazoom's MacGregor said that Macromedia learned its lesson with the last version of Flash, when it began an extensive campaign to educate designers on appropriate use of Flash.
Sorry MacGregor, but you can't train people to have good taste and common sense.