Every year we here in Minnesota hear of folks who were out ice fishing on Lake Superior too late in the season and had to be rescued because the ice broke up and sent them adrift. As I recall these folks get a bill for the cost of the rescue effort from the Coast Guard. I'm not sure if they only bill people who are out on the ice after it's been declared unsafe or if it's a general policy that people get billed for these rescues.
I think you are in fact agreeing with the GP, he disagrees with the author's conclusion that we should regulate less. It seems that your opinion is also that less regulation of this area would not provide positive outcomes. Unless I am completely misreading your opinion, in which case I apologize.
At a place I was a contractor they had a locked desk policy. Anything that was considered secured information, which included anything involving the most minute of company operating details, had to be in a secured location at the end of the day. The would periodically do sweeps looking for anything that was potentially secured information. As an employee you had a three strikes and you were out rule, third infraction was termination. As a contractor you had a two strikes rule. I got my first strike the first week I was there, before I knew about the policy, because I had a notebook in a desk drawer that wasn't locked.
Stupid.
Re:It's fully functional.
on
Safari 5 Released
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
I assure you, when porn browsing is over you'll know it. It's kind of a spent feeling.
Traditionally stocks were based on taking partial ownership in a company and as a share holder getting part of the company's profits in the form of dividends. The markets provided a way for people to sell off their shares when they no longer wanted them and for new people to acquire those shares. There was speculation but it was not the primary driver for stock ownership. Company's did not need to have continual growth in order to have a valuable stock they just needed to generate consistent annual profits. In recent decades new theories around finance have resulted in increased demands for shorter terms results while many "new economy" companies no longer offer dividends. This means that investors can only profit by an increase in share price which demands year over year growth in perpetuity. It's no longer enough for companies to be successful, they must be more successful than last year's success. Like a giant start that continually expands before collapsing upon itself this dependence upon perpetual growth will eventually bring things to a catastrophic end. And no, neither 2008 nor 2010 (so far) qualify as catastrophic compared to what will eventually happen unless some sanity returns to the market.
Okay, in a response to a previous comment I went off on a rant about managers not needing to be from IT to be good. I think this is a perfect example of what I was talking about. Nothing in this comment indicates that the manager was a techie (he may very well have been but you can't tell that from what's stated here). He identified a problem that truly needed to be solved and took a stand in order to get that problem addressed. He didn't do anything technically brilliant, he just did something that was right for the company and right for his people in the long term, that's leadership and integrity. Unfortunately it is in damn short supply just about everywhere.
This is because IT is managed by managers, not engineers. If all managers had coalface IT backgrounds at least (even to the point of just helpdesk) the problem would not be there...
Bullshit.
I've seen organizations where the managers were IT staff promoted into management, their leve of success did not exceed that which I've typically encountered. Some of these promoted IT folks were lousy managers (for a long list of reasons that typically mirrored why other non-IT originating managers were lousy) and some of them were hobbled by a variety of forces that originated one or more steps above their pay grade. A good manager will understand the need to produce value from IT in order to get the status of the IT organization recognized as something more than a cost center. They won't single handedly come up with the solutions that do this but they will try and drive the organization in that direction.
Good managers are hard to find, period. The myth that exists among the IT labor force that all problems would be solved if management came from within their ranks is just plain wrong.
Sales weasels don't know IT, but they aren't necessarily dumb either. If they've been doing it for any period of time they're good at their task, which is finding the decision maker and geting them to choose their product. You can try and use red herrings to keep the weasels away from those with signing authority but they'll figure it out eventually. If they don't figure it out they won't get the sale and eventually they'll be out of the business, natural selection at work.
Decreasing production in response to decreased demand is a fairly typical business practice, it's just good operations. Likewise, most organizations are going to decline to make major investments on new operational capacity during a down economy (there is a school of thought that says that's the exact right thing to do, taking advantage of lower costs during a recession and preparing yourself for the upshot out of recession but we'll leave that argument for another time). This is not collusion it's intelligent business operations. I know that we as consumers would like all businesses to spew out as much product as they can at the lowest price possible and margins be damned but that simply isn't realistic to always expect in all circumstances. It's a luxury that the tech consumers have largely enjoyed but that doesn't mean that it has to be that way.
Now, if all the makers of SSDs established an agreement between themselves that they would constrain production to a certain level (and I'm not saying this isn't happening) then it's collusion. There's a decent chance it's happening here, just don't automatically equate a business trying to maintain a decent margin on a product to unfair business tactics.
Ahem... it might be helpful if you knew what you were talking about.
Oh my, awkward. You see, Microlith was responding to the statement "grow your own tobacco and you'll be fine" and you rather jumped down his throat on an entirely unrelated matter. Seems that someone is having a bit of a nic fit:-D
Same as most bureaucracies, their agenda is the continuance of the bureaucracy. Organizations like this have a tendency to take on a life of their own and as their goals become closer to being achieved they need to expand their scope to ensure there is still a reason for their existence.
Since 9001 doesn't really define anything in terms of requirements you'll probably want to spend some time putting together what it is your organization wants to do with this content. Does your organization need/want a content management system? You're referencing revisioning on documents, so I'm guessing yes. Is this going to be a one off for the engineering/manufacturing folks? You could so something like this in subversion and have reasonably simple versioning of your documents. A wiki model works if you're just trying to do knowledge capture but I'm guessing you've got structured documents you need to manage. If you've got people who are fairly technical and can handle the caveats that come with something like that it's cheap and easy. However, these types of implementations frequently turn into folks in marketing or somewhere else saying "well we have FOO over in engineering we can probably use it too", next thing you know you've got the whole company using something that was kind of cobbled together for one group. Sounds like you've already got SharePoint, it's usable but I'm not a big fan of it as a content management system. Works decently as a collaboration platform. I haven't seen their latest stuff and I know they're trying to make moves in that direction so it might be better, but at last view I was underwhelmed. It's very platform specific, the search functionality was poor, it was difficult or impossible to get a good metadata model together and security was goofy.
Try and look towards the future and see if your organization is going to need to take it up a notch in their content management needs. How complex is your security model going to be? How much content are you expecting to manage? Are you going to want a full text search capable system or would a metadata search be good enough? Think about a metadata model for your organization, then research the topic and rethink it. A good or bad metadata model can completely change the fate of a content management system implementation.
What I've seen of Alfresco I like, it's free software so if you're budget constrained or just value that type of thing you've got that going for you. Someone else mentioned Knowledge Tree for a FOSS product, I haven't touched that so I can't comment. If you're going to go commercial I really think Oracle has a great product with their UCM platform (used to work there), but it's gotten god awful expensive and they suck as a company to deal with. Documentum seems like a massive resource hog and maintenance intensive from what I've discussed with people who've done work with it. I had an install of TRIM under my care at a previous gig, HP owns them now, and that had some quirks but was generally good. If you're focusing on records management capabilities this probably deserves a closer look as that's what they kinda specialize in. OpenText is pretty highly regarded, but I haven't touched it or known anyone directly who has.
Nobody internally uses Metalink (at least not the folks who have figured out how to navigate the system), it's crap and they know it. When I was there most folks in support used a mish-mash of independently developed tools to perform support tasks. Metalink was used to communicate with customers only, and was typically the only way used to communicate with customers.
you only need to lie tomanagers that our "solution" (including support etc) will cover their ass should anything go wrong.
FTFY.
I worked support at a company that Oracle acquired and we went from having the best support money could buy to having the most expensive answering service money could buy. Oracle works very hard to make sure that their support process is consistent, repeatable and efficient at handling the volume of issues submitted. You'll notice I didn't say anything about being good at handling issues, that is not a concern for them. Most of the folks who were any good at all found jobs elsewhere and were replaced by offshore staf with little to no knowledge of the product whose primary purpose was to shuffle requests around while they drowned the few remaining decent support staff with inane questions. This is my understanding at least based on talking with folks who are still there, I was one of the first rats who fled that sinking ship.
No matter how bad Sun's support may have been in recent years* you can rest assured that it will be worse under Oracle's ownership.
All the being said, AC is right, Oracle sells to management not to the geeks. There's still a general perception amongst the management types that "you can't be fired for buying Oracle".
*I've never used Sun's support, no idea if it's been decent or not.
Yep, run don't walk away from anything Oracle owned you can. They have bending people over a barrel down to a science. Two jobs ago I was at a company that Oracle acquired, watching the change from a customer focused orginazation to a big cash vacuum designed to suck as many dollars from customers as possible was disheartening. I took a contract gig at a large local company supporting the software that Oracle acquired at my old company and got to watch the big O come in and try to shake them down for huge increases in their support contracts. The web team were running Aqualogic for an app server and going through the same contortions after the BEA acquisition. The fewer Oracle products you can have under your roof the better off your organization will be.
I don't see them killing Open Office, they don't have anything that competes with it and it is a minor thorn in the side to Microsoft, both things that Oracle likes. They have an SSO product, they have a database product so these would not be surprising targets for them. I'm very interested in finding out what's going to happen to OpenSolaris, I've recently been doing a proof of concept with Nexenta to replace our aging proprietary storage system and I really like it. Hard to say what tactic they'll take with that but I don't think it's going to go exceptionally well for OpenSolaris either. Oracle has been supporting Linux simply because they needed an operating system in order to supply the full stack for an enterprise solution (my estimate of what Oracle's goal has been). I don't necessarily think that Oracle will continue supporting an open source operating system if they have a proprietary one, and I think that includes OpenSolaris. So I would likely see that following the same pattern of decreased support and resources that MySQL open source will likely get as well.
Banks used to make their money by loaning the money you deposit to other people at higher prices. Interest rates being what they are today it's hard to make the kind of profits that banks are accustomed to that way. They're far more likely to make money by charging various fees, paying you nothing for your deposits and investing your deposits in high paying (assuming they don't fail) risky investment opportunities. In spite of the promise of financial system reform this is very likely to continue.
For a forensic pathologist this actually seems like a somewhat valuable piece of information to have. I'd say that's the one paper on that list with some amount of value.
Because certain people just don't want to understand it. They would like to believe that they are serving some higher calling, protecting the halls of gondor or some other ridiculous nerd fantasy, as opposed to maintaining infrastructure in an organization to which they are beholden. At the end of the day us admins serve the organization and management are the agents of the organization as much as any of us would like to deny it. Sometimes they'll make stupid decisions or decisions which are detrimental to us but serve the overall goals of the organization. We can make suggestions and voice disagreements (generally) but at the end of the day management is the one to make those calls. Seems a lot of Slashdotters don't like that but an equal number are unwilling to get involved in the PITA that is management. Sure we have fun with the likes of BOFH but it's all BS and many folks would be better off to recognize it as such.
Doesn't change the fact that Childs is being mistreated horribly for no reason that I can see other than the embarrassment of his superiors. That's inexcusable and should be the crux of this discussion rather than the rest of this foolishness.
I see no reason why Childs shouldn't have surrendered his passwords when they were asked for, if he was a decent admin (as opposed to a technically skilled man-child) he would have had these documented somewhere for management. But I can't seriously see how all this should have resulted in criminal charges, let alone his incarceration for 2 years on $5 million bail. The whole things seems like a gross over reaction to a situation that was poorly handled. If this were involving a private company as opposed to a government I question whether police would have ever gotten involved in the matter. I don't generally jump to these types of conclusions but this stinks of abuse of power to me.
Per capita GDP is lower but has generally been on the increase, hence why China is still considered an emerging market. Couple this with the fact that you have a potential audience of over 1 billion people in a single market and it is a powerful attraction to advertisers. It may not have immediate payoff but most larger companies see it as a crucial market in which to establish a foothold.
Schneier has an nice write up of why those unencrypted feeds are in fact not a big deal, pretty interesting read. His logic seems pretty good, I'd actually agree with him that it is no big deal at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Every year we here in Minnesota hear of folks who were out ice fishing on Lake Superior too late in the season and had to be rescued because the ice broke up and sent them adrift. As I recall these folks get a bill for the cost of the rescue effort from the Coast Guard. I'm not sure if they only bill people who are out on the ice after it's been declared unsafe or if it's a general policy that people get billed for these rescues.
I think you are in fact agreeing with the GP, he disagrees with the author's conclusion that we should regulate less. It seems that your opinion is also that less regulation of this area would not provide positive outcomes. Unless I am completely misreading your opinion, in which case I apologize.
Too long.
At a place I was a contractor they had a locked desk policy. Anything that was considered secured information, which included anything involving the most minute of company operating details, had to be in a secured location at the end of the day. The would periodically do sweeps looking for anything that was potentially secured information. As an employee you had a three strikes and you were out rule, third infraction was termination. As a contractor you had a two strikes rule. I got my first strike the first week I was there, before I knew about the policy, because I had a notebook in a desk drawer that wasn't locked.
Stupid.
I assure you, when porn browsing is over you'll know it. It's kind of a spent feeling.
Last I knew they produced Dell's networking gear, not sure if that is still the case.
Traditionally stocks were based on taking partial ownership in a company and as a share holder getting part of the company's profits in the form of dividends. The markets provided a way for people to sell off their shares when they no longer wanted them and for new people to acquire those shares. There was speculation but it was not the primary driver for stock ownership. Company's did not need to have continual growth in order to have a valuable stock they just needed to generate consistent annual profits. In recent decades new theories around finance have resulted in increased demands for shorter terms results while many "new economy" companies no longer offer dividends. This means that investors can only profit by an increase in share price which demands year over year growth in perpetuity. It's no longer enough for companies to be successful, they must be more successful than last year's success. Like a giant start that continually expands before collapsing upon itself this dependence upon perpetual growth will eventually bring things to a catastrophic end. And no, neither 2008 nor 2010 (so far) qualify as catastrophic compared to what will eventually happen unless some sanity returns to the market.
Okay, in a response to a previous comment I went off on a rant about managers not needing to be from IT to be good. I think this is a perfect example of what I was talking about. Nothing in this comment indicates that the manager was a techie (he may very well have been but you can't tell that from what's stated here). He identified a problem that truly needed to be solved and took a stand in order to get that problem addressed. He didn't do anything technically brilliant, he just did something that was right for the company and right for his people in the long term, that's leadership and integrity. Unfortunately it is in damn short supply just about everywhere.
This is because IT is managed by managers, not engineers.
If all managers had coalface IT backgrounds at least (even to the point of just helpdesk) the problem would not be there...
Bullshit.
I've seen organizations where the managers were IT staff promoted into management, their leve of success did not exceed that which I've typically encountered. Some of these promoted IT folks were lousy managers (for a long list of reasons that typically mirrored why other non-IT originating managers were lousy) and some of them were hobbled by a variety of forces that originated one or more steps above their pay grade. A good manager will understand the need to produce value from IT in order to get the status of the IT organization recognized as something more than a cost center. They won't single handedly come up with the solutions that do this but they will try and drive the organization in that direction.
Good managers are hard to find, period. The myth that exists among the IT labor force that all problems would be solved if management came from within their ranks is just plain wrong.
Sales weasels don't know IT, but they aren't necessarily dumb either. If they've been doing it for any period of time they're good at their task, which is finding the decision maker and geting them to choose their product. You can try and use red herrings to keep the weasels away from those with signing authority but they'll figure it out eventually. If they don't figure it out they won't get the sale and eventually they'll be out of the business, natural selection at work.
Why would anyone who isn't able to wave the rules be getting pampered by a sales weasel?
Decreasing production in response to decreased demand is a fairly typical business practice, it's just good operations. Likewise, most organizations are going to decline to make major investments on new operational capacity during a down economy (there is a school of thought that says that's the exact right thing to do, taking advantage of lower costs during a recession and preparing yourself for the upshot out of recession but we'll leave that argument for another time). This is not collusion it's intelligent business operations. I know that we as consumers would like all businesses to spew out as much product as they can at the lowest price possible and margins be damned but that simply isn't realistic to always expect in all circumstances. It's a luxury that the tech consumers have largely enjoyed but that doesn't mean that it has to be that way.
Now, if all the makers of SSDs established an agreement between themselves that they would constrain production to a certain level (and I'm not saying this isn't happening) then it's collusion. There's a decent chance it's happening here, just don't automatically equate a business trying to maintain a decent margin on a product to unfair business tactics.
Ahem... it might be helpful if you knew what you were talking about.
Oh my, awkward. You see, Microlith was responding to the statement "grow your own tobacco and you'll be fine" and you rather jumped down his throat on an entirely unrelated matter. Seems that someone is having a bit of a nic fit :-D
Same as most bureaucracies, their agenda is the continuance of the bureaucracy. Organizations like this have a tendency to take on a life of their own and as their goals become closer to being achieved they need to expand their scope to ensure there is still a reason for their existence.
Since 9001 doesn't really define anything in terms of requirements you'll probably want to spend some time putting together what it is your organization wants to do with this content. Does your organization need/want a content management system? You're referencing revisioning on documents, so I'm guessing yes. Is this going to be a one off for the engineering/manufacturing folks? You could so something like this in subversion and have reasonably simple versioning of your documents. A wiki model works if you're just trying to do knowledge capture but I'm guessing you've got structured documents you need to manage. If you've got people who are fairly technical and can handle the caveats that come with something like that it's cheap and easy. However, these types of implementations frequently turn into folks in marketing or somewhere else saying "well we have FOO over in engineering we can probably use it too", next thing you know you've got the whole company using something that was kind of cobbled together for one group. Sounds like you've already got SharePoint, it's usable but I'm not a big fan of it as a content management system. Works decently as a collaboration platform. I haven't seen their latest stuff and I know they're trying to make moves in that direction so it might be better, but at last view I was underwhelmed. It's very platform specific, the search functionality was poor, it was difficult or impossible to get a good metadata model together and security was goofy.
Try and look towards the future and see if your organization is going to need to take it up a notch in their content management needs. How complex is your security model going to be? How much content are you expecting to manage? Are you going to want a full text search capable system or would a metadata search be good enough? Think about a metadata model for your organization, then research the topic and rethink it. A good or bad metadata model can completely change the fate of a content management system implementation.
What I've seen of Alfresco I like, it's free software so if you're budget constrained or just value that type of thing you've got that going for you. Someone else mentioned Knowledge Tree for a FOSS product, I haven't touched that so I can't comment. If you're going to go commercial I really think Oracle has a great product with their UCM platform (used to work there), but it's gotten god awful expensive and they suck as a company to deal with. Documentum seems like a massive resource hog and maintenance intensive from what I've discussed with people who've done work with it. I had an install of TRIM under my care at a previous gig, HP owns them now, and that had some quirks but was generally good. If you're focusing on records management capabilities this probably deserves a closer look as that's what they kinda specialize in. OpenText is pretty highly regarded, but I haven't touched it or known anyone directly who has.
Nobody internally uses Metalink (at least not the folks who have figured out how to navigate the system), it's crap and they know it. When I was there most folks in support used a mish-mash of independently developed tools to perform support tasks. Metalink was used to communicate with customers only, and was typically the only way used to communicate with customers.
you only need to lie to managers that our "solution" (including support etc) will cover their ass should anything go wrong.
FTFY.
I worked support at a company that Oracle acquired and we went from having the best support money could buy to having the most expensive answering service money could buy. Oracle works very hard to make sure that their support process is consistent, repeatable and efficient at handling the volume of issues submitted. You'll notice I didn't say anything about being good at handling issues, that is not a concern for them. Most of the folks who were any good at all found jobs elsewhere and were replaced by offshore staf with little to no knowledge of the product whose primary purpose was to shuffle requests around while they drowned the few remaining decent support staff with inane questions. This is my understanding at least based on talking with folks who are still there, I was one of the first rats who fled that sinking ship.
No matter how bad Sun's support may have been in recent years* you can rest assured that it will be worse under Oracle's ownership.
All the being said, AC is right, Oracle sells to management not to the geeks. There's still a general perception amongst the management types that "you can't be fired for buying Oracle".
*I've never used Sun's support, no idea if it's been decent or not.
Yep, run don't walk away from anything Oracle owned you can. They have bending people over a barrel down to a science. Two jobs ago I was at a company that Oracle acquired, watching the change from a customer focused orginazation to a big cash vacuum designed to suck as many dollars from customers as possible was disheartening. I took a contract gig at a large local company supporting the software that Oracle acquired at my old company and got to watch the big O come in and try to shake them down for huge increases in their support contracts. The web team were running Aqualogic for an app server and going through the same contortions after the BEA acquisition. The fewer Oracle products you can have under your roof the better off your organization will be.
I don't see them killing Open Office, they don't have anything that competes with it and it is a minor thorn in the side to Microsoft, both things that Oracle likes. They have an SSO product, they have a database product so these would not be surprising targets for them. I'm very interested in finding out what's going to happen to OpenSolaris, I've recently been doing a proof of concept with Nexenta to replace our aging proprietary storage system and I really like it. Hard to say what tactic they'll take with that but I don't think it's going to go exceptionally well for OpenSolaris either. Oracle has been supporting Linux simply because they needed an operating system in order to supply the full stack for an enterprise solution (my estimate of what Oracle's goal has been). I don't necessarily think that Oracle will continue supporting an open source operating system if they have a proprietary one, and I think that includes OpenSolaris. So I would likely see that following the same pattern of decreased support and resources that MySQL open source will likely get as well.
Banks used to make their money by loaning the money you deposit to other people at higher prices. Interest rates being what they are today it's hard to make the kind of profits that banks are accustomed to that way. They're far more likely to make money by charging various fees, paying you nothing for your deposits and investing your deposits in high paying (assuming they don't fail) risky investment opportunities. In spite of the promise of financial system reform this is very likely to continue.
For a forensic pathologist this actually seems like a somewhat valuable piece of information to have. I'd say that's the one paper on that list with some amount of value.
Because certain people just don't want to understand it. They would like to believe that they are serving some higher calling, protecting the halls of gondor or some other ridiculous nerd fantasy, as opposed to maintaining infrastructure in an organization to which they are beholden. At the end of the day us admins serve the organization and management are the agents of the organization as much as any of us would like to deny it. Sometimes they'll make stupid decisions or decisions which are detrimental to us but serve the overall goals of the organization. We can make suggestions and voice disagreements (generally) but at the end of the day management is the one to make those calls. Seems a lot of Slashdotters don't like that but an equal number are unwilling to get involved in the PITA that is management. Sure we have fun with the likes of BOFH but it's all BS and many folks would be better off to recognize it as such.
Doesn't change the fact that Childs is being mistreated horribly for no reason that I can see other than the embarrassment of his superiors. That's inexcusable and should be the crux of this discussion rather than the rest of this foolishness.
I see no reason why Childs shouldn't have surrendered his passwords when they were asked for, if he was a decent admin (as opposed to a technically skilled man-child) he would have had these documented somewhere for management. But I can't seriously see how all this should have resulted in criminal charges, let alone his incarceration for 2 years on $5 million bail. The whole things seems like a gross over reaction to a situation that was poorly handled. If this were involving a private company as opposed to a government I question whether police would have ever gotten involved in the matter. I don't generally jump to these types of conclusions but this stinks of abuse of power to me.
Per capita GDP is lower but has generally been on the increase, hence why China is still considered an emerging market. Couple this with the fact that you have a potential audience of over 1 billion people in a single market and it is a powerful attraction to advertisers. It may not have immediate payoff but most larger companies see it as a crucial market in which to establish a foothold.
Schneier has an nice write up of why those unencrypted feeds are in fact not a big deal, pretty interesting read. His logic seems pretty good, I'd actually agree with him that it is no big deal at all.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/intercepting_pr.html