I believe you're correct. I think it's Rogers that's GSM... and I want to say Bell Mobility that uses CDMA? I can't remember all the providers in Canada...
That's correct. Also, look at the retail business. Merchandise management, loss prevention, warehousing and distribution... And we're not talking arcane software packages.
Here's an example: A retail chain has payroll, merchandising, and warehousing/distribution systems, all on the mainframe. The point of sale interfaces with the mainframe as well. A store starts to run low on an item? The mainframe knows because the POS sends its inventory data constantly. The MMS then tells the warehousing system that that store needs more. A pick list is automatically printed by the warehousing system. The warehouse worker picks the item off the shelf, puts it on a conveyor belt which runs through an RFID portal, linked to the mainframe, that then routes the item to the proper truck in the dock so it gets to the correct store - automatically. The truck delivers the item to the store, and the driver enters that into a wireless device which (you guessed it!) tells the warehousing system and merchandise management system that the item has been received by the store, so the MMS always knows the inventory levels in the store. The associate sells that item, and the MMS sees that from the POS data... it also knows that this particular item pays out a spiff to the associate and sends the information directly to the payroll system, which interfaces with a company who handles payroll (like ADP), and automatically adds the spiff to their next paycheck.
Uh oh - the chain is growing and adding new stores, with increasing volumes of data to process, and the nightly batch processing is taking too long... what to do? Call IBM, license another processor... They activate it immediately for you.
But oh no! A disk is failing... no need to worry, because IBM already knows about it and has dispatched a technician to diagnose and replace the faulty hardware.
New versions of this software are being released all the time, and just about every retailer with more than a few stores uses them. These systems are modern. Don't think a big room full of giant cabinets, reel-to-reel tapes and punch cards. Some of the current IBM iSeries (AS/400) models have a form factor that looks more like a PC than a mainframe.
Show me a Windows or Linux system that can do all that, 24x7, for hundreds or thousands of stores.
Now how the FUCK can you fail a SAS-70 audit? You get to set your own damn criteria for passing!
That's a good point, I stand corrected. Fortunately for my company, I don't deal with any of the controls or auditing as I'm not in the IT or Finance groups....
However, with the way I've seen some companies run, I'm sure they could some how manage to find a way:)
It's more common than you think. Some of it is due to laziness, some due to a lack of knowledge, and some due to time constraints. Fortunately, for the really sensitive information, management at my company finally put into place very strict policies on how we handle the data: How we store it, erase it, encrypt it, and display it. Granted, most of these policies are actually put in place by vendors that require it, but we've taken those standards and extended them across all sensitive information.
If you're failing SOX/SAS-70/404 audits (or whatever types of audits apply to you)... that's bad, although you've already identified that.
We formed a data security team - it's just one dedicated person right now, but since he's really only involved with the policy stuff, that's enough for us - however, he does hold frequent and regular meetings with management across all departments. The DS team recently published our "best practices" which every developer now has posted at his/her desk.
Because management took this very seriously, we became one of the first companies in our industry to have all of the current versions of our software fully compliant with industry security standards.
If there are no standards set forth for you, I suggest you make your own. It takes time and they must be well thought out, and no comprimises can be made (that's a bad pun, sorry). Use your audit results (the actual audit results, not the strong-armed ones) as a baseline for improvement. Dedicate a resource to data security. Whatever you have to do. Since you're a senior level person, you should be able to convince people to allow you to do it.
If you have security issues and a breach occurs, well... I think you know what could happen.
I, too, have a great experience with one of our IT guys... if anyone cares. Before I go into this, I'll start out by saying that I actually like and respect the guy, and I've hung out with him outside of work and, while geeky (aren't we all?), he's pretty cool. He just gets a little bit lippy at the office and I thought it needed to stop.
I can't go into too many details because we're a public company. But my position at the time was on a customer-facing team. I did a mix of IT stuff and programming, and I'm a pretty knowledgeable person. I'm not an IT guy (programmer by trade), but I am a geek, and I can hold my own. Anyway, my team was in charge of some services that we hosted for our customers. The deal at that time was that while we ran the servers and software, our internal IT group managed the internet connectivity and our firewall. Of course, the IT group managed the internal corporate servers, network, active directory, etc.
We previously had a manager that was a control freak, and would not let the IT group near our hardware, nor give them access to our systems - even though our systems were in their datacenter - this was the true source of the friction. The way it really should have been was that the IT group should have managed not only the customer hosting network and firewall, the hardware and OS on the servers too. We should simply have been administering the software that runs on those systems. The IT group is the most qualified group to handle the hardware and OS, and it would have made less non-billable work for my team. We all agreed on this, but because of time constraints, we were unable to change things and set them up the "right" way.
I was the senior engineer in the group, and was generally the person handling our internal hosted services. The senior engineer in the IT group was constantly giving me crap about the way things were set up, and basically treated me like I was an idiot (and even called me an idiot once or twice). Where my case differs from the original poster, however, is that his boss is actually a really reasonable guy, and helped us resolve our differences.
How did I fix the problem? I sent the following e-mail and CC:'d his boss and mine. From then on, we had a very smooth working relationship. Sure, he was probably still talking crap behind my back, but I'm not there to make friends - I have a job that I need to get done, and from then on, interfacing with the IT group became a lot easier for me. The straw that broke the camel's back for me was when he quoted me a particular non-security-related, unwritten IT policy that we were planning on implementing in the future to make everyones' lives easier, but again due to time constraints, we simply hadn't gotten to it yet.
Here's the e-mail. Pay close attention to the last paragraph before "No hard feelings" - it sums up my opinion about this type of thing perfectly.
---
The next time you decide to quote policies and procedures to me, please don't forget that I regularly go out of my way to make sure I do things the way that you prefer, and I try to follow all of your standards by example.
Datacomm and MIS have always had to work closely because of the current division of responsibilities when it comes to our internal information systems. I look back on the 2+ years that I have spent working in this department, and see that I have always been treated like a second-class citizen. I understand that you are an expert in your field, and you have the certifications to prove it, and I respect that. I'm sure it took a lot of work. That does not mean that others are not as smart as you, or not as good as you, yet you seem to have no compunction treating people in this way.
Our groups both have similar purposes: To implement information systems, and then maintain and support them so that they run smoothly for the users. While you do a fantastic job of this implementation and maintenance, your customer service skills are, quite frankly, horrifying. You are con
When I receive an e-mail (corporate or personal), the email shows up on my handset before it does on my computer, and it has a physical keyboard with actual buttons - tactile feedback. When I add an appointment to the calendar on my computer or on my device, it syncs almost instantaneously. So the BlackBerry addresses the features that I want, and the iPhone doesn't. Therefore, I don't want an iPhone.
So what?
If you think it's a bad device, don't buy it. If you like it, buy it. Why argue about it? Who cares what types of devices other people are using. I don't care whether you're calling me from a bag phone, as long as I can hear you. I don't care how you see the web when you browse from your phone, it doesn't affect my life in any way. I don't care that you can see your voice mail on your screen. If those are features that are useful for you, buy the thing and get on with your life. If you don't care about those things, or don't want to pay $399, or if you don't like it for whatever reason, buy something else... it's your choice.
I do have to say though - one thing that does bother me to no end - is the "look at my iPhone" people. Not every iPhone owner is like this, but there are some out there. You know who you are, and if you're not, you've met one. These are the people who show off the device whenever the opportunity arises. Example: You mention a funny video you saw on YouTube. You may get this reaction - "I saw that too... wait, let me pull it up on my iPhone.
It would probably be easier, and possibly cheaper to build nautical cities. We'd still have to create an environment in a dome (or whatever shape you prefer), but it's a lot easier and cheaper to get underwater than it is into space.
I have to say that that's a pretty pessimistic view on things. Yes, it wouldn't surprise me, but shouldn't we have more faith than that? They're really not such a bad company.
I wouldn't pay them for that (mainly because I like my email address and my spam filter works very well), but I know a lot of people who most certainly would.
You're absolutely right. I don't have much of a problem with Windows. I'll argue the merits of running FreeBSD on a server platform all day and all night, but for the desktop, the fact is, windows works very well.
The only thing I have a major problem with is the cost of the software... I'm sure most of us don't really need to care about what it costs, but the fact that they want to charge so much for it just seems a bit unreasonable to me.
Just as a side note,/home is not *always* a separate partition. In FreeBSD, the home directories are in/usr/home (which is just in the/usr partition), and there is a symbolic link from/home to/usr/home.
Re:But Microsoft will decide to invent their own..
on
New Mail RFCs Released
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· Score: 1
To tell you the truth, as much as I might dislike Microsoft as a corporation, I will say that Outlook is still the one of best PIMs out there, and even it's E-mail capabilities aren't that behind.
Hey, I don't like Michael Jackson as a person either, but he made some damn great music.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe you're correct. I think it's Rogers that's GSM... and I want to say Bell Mobility that uses CDMA? I can't remember all the providers in Canada...
You probably don't have a GSM handset.
Absolutely. One of my coworkers, who travels internationally quite a bit, is surprised when his bill is "only $12,000."
That's correct. Also, look at the retail business. Merchandise management, loss prevention, warehousing and distribution... And we're not talking arcane software packages.
Here's an example: A retail chain has payroll, merchandising, and warehousing/distribution systems, all on the mainframe. The point of sale interfaces with the mainframe as well. A store starts to run low on an item? The mainframe knows because the POS sends its inventory data constantly. The MMS then tells the warehousing system that that store needs more. A pick list is automatically printed by the warehousing system. The warehouse worker picks the item off the shelf, puts it on a conveyor belt which runs through an RFID portal, linked to the mainframe, that then routes the item to the proper truck in the dock so it gets to the correct store - automatically. The truck delivers the item to the store, and the driver enters that into a wireless device which (you guessed it!) tells the warehousing system and merchandise management system that the item has been received by the store, so the MMS always knows the inventory levels in the store. The associate sells that item, and the MMS sees that from the POS data... it also knows that this particular item pays out a spiff to the associate and sends the information directly to the payroll system, which interfaces with a company who handles payroll (like ADP), and automatically adds the spiff to their next paycheck.
Uh oh - the chain is growing and adding new stores, with increasing volumes of data to process, and the nightly batch processing is taking too long... what to do? Call IBM, license another processor... They activate it immediately for you.
But oh no! A disk is failing... no need to worry, because IBM already knows about it and has dispatched a technician to diagnose and replace the faulty hardware.
New versions of this software are being released all the time, and just about every retailer with more than a few stores uses them. These systems are modern. Don't think a big room full of giant cabinets, reel-to-reel tapes and punch cards. Some of the current IBM iSeries (AS/400) models have a form factor that looks more like a PC than a mainframe.
Show me a Windows or Linux system that can do all that, 24x7, for hundreds or thousands of stores.
... Is that ISP's won't dare to inject ads for porno sites... and ads just aren't ads if they're not for porn.
... having their house burn down will encourage them to stop playing so many video games and get outside more :)
"Technology: Google fills your backend database with garbage"
Now how the FUCK can you fail a SAS-70 audit? You get to set your own damn criteria for passing!
That's a good point, I stand corrected. Fortunately for my company, I don't deal with any of the controls or auditing as I'm not in the IT or Finance groups....However, with the way I've seen some companies run, I'm sure they could some how manage to find a way
It's more common than you think. Some of it is due to laziness, some due to a lack of knowledge, and some due to time constraints. Fortunately, for the really sensitive information, management at my company finally put into place very strict policies on how we handle the data: How we store it, erase it, encrypt it, and display it. Granted, most of these policies are actually put in place by vendors that require it, but we've taken those standards and extended them across all sensitive information.
If you're failing SOX/SAS-70/404 audits (or whatever types of audits apply to you)... that's bad, although you've already identified that.
We formed a data security team - it's just one dedicated person right now, but since he's really only involved with the policy stuff, that's enough for us - however, he does hold frequent and regular meetings with management across all departments. The DS team recently published our "best practices" which every developer now has posted at his/her desk.
Because management took this very seriously, we became one of the first companies in our industry to have all of the current versions of our software fully compliant with industry security standards.
If there are no standards set forth for you, I suggest you make your own. It takes time and they must be well thought out, and no comprimises can be made (that's a bad pun, sorry). Use your audit results (the actual audit results, not the strong-armed ones) as a baseline for improvement. Dedicate a resource to data security. Whatever you have to do. Since you're a senior level person, you should be able to convince people to allow you to do it.
If you have security issues and a breach occurs, well... I think you know what could happen.
My ID is in the 70,000s... does that count? :)
I, too, have a great experience with one of our IT guys... if anyone cares. Before I go into this, I'll start out by saying that I actually like and respect the guy, and I've hung out with him outside of work and, while geeky (aren't we all?), he's pretty cool. He just gets a little bit lippy at the office and I thought it needed to stop.
I can't go into too many details because we're a public company. But my position at the time was on a customer-facing team. I did a mix of IT stuff and programming, and I'm a pretty knowledgeable person. I'm not an IT guy (programmer by trade), but I am a geek, and I can hold my own. Anyway, my team was in charge of some services that we hosted for our customers. The deal at that time was that while we ran the servers and software, our internal IT group managed the internet connectivity and our firewall. Of course, the IT group managed the internal corporate servers, network, active directory, etc.
We previously had a manager that was a control freak, and would not let the IT group near our hardware, nor give them access to our systems - even though our systems were in their datacenter - this was the true source of the friction. The way it really should have been was that the IT group should have managed not only the customer hosting network and firewall, the hardware and OS on the servers too. We should simply have been administering the software that runs on those systems. The IT group is the most qualified group to handle the hardware and OS, and it would have made less non-billable work for my team. We all agreed on this, but because of time constraints, we were unable to change things and set them up the "right" way.
I was the senior engineer in the group, and was generally the person handling our internal hosted services. The senior engineer in the IT group was constantly giving me crap about the way things were set up, and basically treated me like I was an idiot (and even called me an idiot once or twice). Where my case differs from the original poster, however, is that his boss is actually a really reasonable guy, and helped us resolve our differences.
How did I fix the problem? I sent the following e-mail and CC:'d his boss and mine. From then on, we had a very smooth working relationship. Sure, he was probably still talking crap behind my back, but I'm not there to make friends - I have a job that I need to get done, and from then on, interfacing with the IT group became a lot easier for me. The straw that broke the camel's back for me was when he quoted me a particular non-security-related, unwritten IT policy that we were planning on implementing in the future to make everyones' lives easier, but again due to time constraints, we simply hadn't gotten to it yet.
Here's the e-mail. Pay close attention to the last paragraph before "No hard feelings" - it sums up my opinion about this type of thing perfectly.
---
The next time you decide to quote policies and procedures to me, please don't forget that I regularly go out of my way to make sure I do things the way that you prefer, and I try to follow all of your standards by example.
Datacomm and MIS have always had to work closely because of the current division of responsibilities when it comes to our internal information systems. I look back on the 2+ years that I have spent working in this department, and see that I have always been treated like a second-class citizen. I understand that you are an expert in your field, and you have the certifications to prove it, and I respect that. I'm sure it took a lot of work. That does not mean that others are not as smart as you, or not as good as you, yet you seem to have no compunction treating people in this way.
Our groups both have similar purposes: To implement information systems, and then maintain and support them so that they run smoothly for the users. While you do a fantastic job of this implementation and maintenance, your customer service skills are, quite frankly, horrifying. You are con
When I receive an e-mail (corporate or personal), the email shows up on my handset before it does on my computer, and it has a physical keyboard with actual buttons - tactile feedback. When I add an appointment to the calendar on my computer or on my device, it syncs almost instantaneously. So the BlackBerry addresses the features that I want, and the iPhone doesn't. Therefore, I don't want an iPhone.
So what?
If you think it's a bad device, don't buy it. If you like it, buy it. Why argue about it? Who cares what types of devices other people are using. I don't care whether you're calling me from a bag phone, as long as I can hear you. I don't care how you see the web when you browse from your phone, it doesn't affect my life in any way. I don't care that you can see your voice mail on your screen. If those are features that are useful for you, buy the thing and get on with your life. If you don't care about those things, or don't want to pay $399, or if you don't like it for whatever reason, buy something else... it's your choice.
I do have to say though - one thing that does bother me to no end - is the "look at my iPhone" people. Not every iPhone owner is like this, but there are some out there. You know who you are, and if you're not, you've met one. These are the people who show off the device whenever the opportunity arises. Example: You mention a funny video you saw on YouTube. You may get this reaction - "I saw that too... wait, let me pull it up on my iPhone.
It would probably be easier, and possibly cheaper to build nautical cities. We'd still have to create an environment in a dome (or whatever shape you prefer), but it's a lot easier and cheaper to get underwater than it is into space.
It's a game, folks.
I've been successfully using my T68i through AT&T for IMAP/SMTP access and it works very well.
I think this is a pretty great idea. And think of all the opportunities and new markets for spam!
I say we all get out torches and pitchforks and go on a good old-fashioned witchhunt.
I have to say that that's a pretty pessimistic view on things. Yes, it wouldn't surprise me, but shouldn't we have more faith than that? They're really not such a bad company.
I wouldn't pay them for that (mainly because I like my email address and my spam filter works very well), but I know a lot of people who most certainly would.
My friends and I have been having LAN parties since Quake II (LM CTF baby!). I'm glad more people are catching on... the bigger, the better!
... of how much porn you could fit on one of these. :)
You're absolutely right. I don't have much of a problem with Windows. I'll argue the merits of running FreeBSD on a server platform all day and all night, but for the desktop, the fact is, windows works very well.
The only thing I have a major problem with is the cost of the software... I'm sure most of us don't really need to care about what it costs, but the fact that they want to charge so much for it just seems a bit unreasonable to me.
Just as a side note, /home is not *always* a separate partition. In FreeBSD, the home directories are in /usr/home (which is just in the /usr partition), and there is a symbolic link from /home to /usr/home.
- Dave
There could be one good thing about the new office (XP): They're getting rid of clippy! http://www.microsoft.com/office/clippy/
To tell you the truth, as much as I might dislike Microsoft as a corporation, I will say that Outlook is still the one of best PIMs out there, and even it's E-mail capabilities aren't that behind.
Hey, I don't like Michael Jackson as a person either, but he made some damn great music.
- Dave