maybe, but coming from symantec this is just marketing tripe for their own services or future services. As an approach to security this already takes place. Think of firefox or a firewall asking you "are you sure you would like to run this program?"
Though it does seem like they are position themselves to be the gatekeepers of all software, good or bad. Want to run a program? Don't ask the user, ask Symantec. People wont stand for that though. There is a certain level of control over a computer most users are willing to give up in certain circumstances to the OS or an outside party or the like, but this is total control. Even novice users would probably find some piece of software they wanted to run that wasn't in the system and get annoyed at symantec for breaking their computer while more technical users would likely never want to be early adopters of something like this.
not only that, but I wonder.... wouldn't the list of "good" software be unimaginably larger than the list of malicious trojans and viruses?
Think about that number for a second. The only way they would ever look good would be if every single one of the users only ever ran software on the list. So for each user that uses dozens of applications, if even just one of those dozens isn't on the list, they are going to blame symantec.
sadly i don't think this will stop them from trying to pull this off anyways and at least getting a small userbase of complete novices and maybe corporate IT depts that want to lock down the drones.
except that people do actually use things like youtube and yahoo maps and pretty much every graphical ad and every blog video player is in flash. intros aren't annoying because flash is a bad technology, they are annoying because they are intros. your rant sounds like it is from 2001. get over it.
Simple answer is that you don't. Productivity in terms of IT and related fields has become a dirty little word but more than that it is a business term, not technical. If you aren't a director or higher in title, and your duties don't include justifying expenses and planning resources for solutions, then it isn't really your realm to measure something like productivity. If this guy has an MBA or similar qualifications, it is he who should know how to measure productivity. But alas the word productivity has become corrupted by half-assed business journalists trying to write articles about over all productivity and how your employees waste too much time on facebook. If this guy just wants a number and gives you no guidelines as to how to come up with the number, then my guess is that he just wants to kiss up to the CEO that "productivity" is up 40% or he wants a number to justify laying off people. Either way, if he cant tell you how he reached his number, I would suggest getting your resume ready.
Also ideally, a CTO wouldn't be asking those in the trenches how to measure productivity, but rather how to improve it. As someone in the trenches, you probably know where the snags are in efficiency, or what software you would need to purchase to help smooth things along or even where people are over worked or over looked. This is the positive way to improve productivity. Basically he should be asking you what you need in order to get your job done, and he should get it for you (within reason of course)
basically, they were created as an arm of the RIAA and then spun off to a independent (and I use the characterization lightly here) non-profit and the government designated them to collect royalties for all artists. I think it boils down to the fact that this allows for small artists to know where they need to go to find out if anyone has been playing their music and to get paid for it. how well this part works i have no idea -- but that is the justification behind it I think. And because of this, it made a bunch of lawmakers feel better about passing the DMCA.
As much as I would like to agree with you, there isn't anything that says they won't re-introduce DRM later in the negotiations. DRM was ALWAYS a bargaining chip and it was always in play. What they did at first was to say "well here are these exorbitantly high rates -- accept them or else." Then they pretended to throw a bone by saying "well, we'll delay the rate but you need to include DRM" but now they are just going right back to where they started, just this time it's the other way around. They are using DRM as a bargaining chip to push high rates. They don't appear to be making any compromises here other than cosmetic PR junk.
This easily could have been SoundExchange's plan all along. Somehow I think we're just going around in circles here until the issue fizzsles from public outrage to public apathy. People will get tired of hearing about it and start to wonder why all these whiny radio stations dont just pay. And since SoundExchange will (and is demanding) that the deal be retroactive, it wont matter much to them. The only real threat to SoundExchange is the Internet Radio Equality Act
I think we need to rebrand the discussion. What we need is computer assisted voting. Basically, the touch screen just provides an interface where the computer prints out your ballot which you review for accuracy and deposit in the ballot box. Later, ballots can be counted by hand or some type of scan-tron. Tabulations can be kept in both machines and in the event of mismatches, the paper ballot is recounted providing the official count (or if the numbers are far enough off, a re-vote). The scanning process could be observed and run at such a speed that humans can watch the count in real time and with enough people watching the possibility of count errors going undetected would approach 0. This would take care of most of your concerns about magic happening behind the screen. Nevertheless, the source code should still be freely available.
It's not a perfect system but it provides the basis for a system that's pretty much on par with paper. That is, the problems with election fraud we would see would be the same types of problems paper ballots suffer from (ie people voting twice, someone stealing a ballot box, some poll running out of paper).
This is what is in the draft proposal for New York State voting machines (among many other requirements regarding privacy and the disabled etc). But I only found this out recently by clicking on a signature from a slashdot poster. I encourage everyone to take a few minutes and visit http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ and check what sort of voting machines your state has, is testing, or is thinking about getting.
Also, for those new yorkers out there, you may want to visit this page about the testing underway for NYS eletronic voting machines for 2008.
yes, indeed relevant evidence during trials and discovery should certainly be permissible, and I think it makes sense to have leeway during discovery, but there should be a limit i think. Like if the RIAA was prosecuting me and wanted to call my landlord, my second cousin, my housekeeper, the guy i buy my coffee from in the morning and so on there is a point at which it's not discovery but intimidation. I'm not saying this particular case is intimidation, but rather just responding to it being called "lawyering" and commenting on it as a tactic.
But it should be (and maybe is?) an illegal tactic. Calling a defendant to the stand and everyone that defendant knows or had contact with just to troll for evidence and harass/intimidate the defendant could land a lawyer in contempt i would bet. I gather the blurry line is in deciding as to how much constitutes harassment.
Just from reading the summary I kind of had the pessimistic thought that maybe it was stolen not for the data, but to keep the data out of the courts. or maybe it wasn't stolen at all but rather one of those cases where a company "accidentally loses" self incriminating evidence or evidence that hurts the police's cases.
While Califoria's change in regulations caused a terrible system that could be exploited, it doesn't prove regulations are bad in general. Part of the problem is that those regulations were written with the energy co's interests and the Federal regulators (FERC) "...stayed out of the fray and they blocked attempts by the California Independent System Operator to control prices and to take actions that would have helped."
"The FERC could have intervened and certainly lessened the crisis. I think that, to completely avoid the problems... we really needed to have a retail price increase in California as well, and we haven't seen that...."
"...The FERC has dropped the ball on the wholesale market, and the California Public Utilities Commission has dropped the ball on the retail market.... "
"The FERC is supposed to make sure that prices are just and reasonable in the wholesale electricity market. The FERC has not done its job. They, by and large, were uninterested in reviewing and carefully thinking about whether this market would work. And then when it became clear that it didn't work, even to FERC, who in November said the prices were not just and reasonable, their response was to say, "Yes, but we're not going to do anything about it."
"The chairman of the FERC now is somebody who doesn't really understand economics and doesn't really understand how businesses operate. In many speeches very recently, he's said, "You have to just let the market work," which is of more religion than understanding of economics. In any market in the United States, we don't just "let the market work." Every market is regulated to some extent by antitrust laws, by health and safety laws, etc. The question is, how much intervention should there be? And that, when done right, is a careful policy question, and not one that can be addressed by campaign slogans." *Quotes from Severin Borenstein
Director of the University of California Energy Institute and a professor of business at the Haas School of Business
I'm not sure what IDF means but from TFA:
The State Department detected its first break-in immediately, Reid said, and worked to block suspected communications with the hackers. But during its investigation, it discovered new break-ins at its Washington headquarters and other offices in eastern Asia, Reid said.
At first, the hackers did not immediately appear to try stealing any U.S. government data. Authorities quietly monitored the hackers' activity, then tripwires severed Internet connections in the region after a limited amount of data was detected being stolen, Reid said.
Even if what you said is true, which I highly doubt (since from what I understand packet filtering and QoS is more expensive to run than adding bandwidth, and end to end encryption would defeat it I would think), who is to say the money saved from such an endeavor will go back into the Pell grants and the like?
Technical arguments aside, taking money away from student loans to finance this seems risky at best. If there is no clause that requires accounting of the money saved, and it's redirecting back towards student loans, this is certainly a Bad Investment(tm).
That also doesnt even begin touch on how it's morally wrong to use education money for the private interests of copyright holders.
Just because you dont see a market for these types of products doesn't mean there isn't one. as an AC pointed out, though a bit harshly, there are people who want just a few features and would love a quick web editor to fix up some of their pics. In the article it mentioned how a lot of the programs offered easy integration with sites like flickr or some type of browser integration. Certainly there are people who would like this kind of feature -- although for me I prefer photoshop.
Users have a funny way of deciding for themselves how they like to use technology, and that doesnt always mean the best utilization of multi-core processors. Sometimes it just means a few less clicks to get out the red eye from photos of your dog Floofly.
/have to say too the incessant AJAX and Flash bashing is tiresome on/. sometimes. And no I dont have a dog named Floofly.
Doesnt even need to be chaeper. It's entirely possible that they don't want diebold due to their ties to political parties or because of controversy over sercurity.
And now oddly enough, I think Diebold has given states yet another reason to not want to use their machines: they sue their customers to get what they want.
I think flash has a bit of a bad rep with regards to speed. if you look at yahoo maps or youtube. these apps do very well speed wise. there are some better alternatives, but they generally are competative in terms of speed.
As for compiling there is a new method that speeds flash compile times to almost nil. (say from 15 seconds to.15 seconds) it uses a kind of method of "injecting only what's different." try googling HaXe and MTASC.
Also, while flash may be "slow" in some senses, it supports full streaming video with alpha channels, serialized data remoting, a robust OOP language with classes, and now even quake 2 style 3d ala Papervision3D (an opensouce 3d engine in actionscript)
why anyone would want to compile html or javascript is beyond me though:) and i cant speak for flex as it never really caught my attention enough to want to learn it.
well said, glad to see some voices of reason in this thread.
question though, you say as a flex developer someone would already feel like an apollo developer, but did you feel the same way as a flash developer? already possesing the knowledge you need to get started?
isnt that a pretty standard clause in just about all proprietary software? I'm not sure why this is some kind of new drawback. Don't get me wrong the whole "you agree to let us audit you" thing is dirty and should be unlawful imho, but it's not like adobe is looking to become the next SCO.
You're assuming that web aps can somehow control the apollo aps. I think you're worry is in the right place but a bit alarmist. Adobe certainly has this in mind. In fact Macromedia and the flash devlopment team has always been big on security. The difference here is, these aps will function like desktop apps but in no way is adobe going to create any type of "fly by" web based intaller for the framework, or ever in a million years let the web flash apps connect to the desktop one. They already prevent this with their XSS security sandbox model in flash.
If he claims his manager wont let him, it's very likely true -and- an act all at the same time. for whatever reason he is scared to push his manager for what he is telling you deserve. so either he's lying to his manager that he can run his deparment on a low budget, or he's lying to you about how much he thinks you are worth.
But dont let him get away with the "my hands are tied" argument. as your manager, if he is the one who can talk about your salary with you, then his hands are not tied. if he claims that his boss wont let him, then his boss is the one you should be talking to with merely a written review or reccomendation from your manager.
dont go over his head though, that will just cause animosity. what you should do is respectfully (and this part isnt easy, so dont kid yourself) request that you have a meeting with both your manager AND his boss. Again though, be careful, dont make it about him just say that you believe him but since rent is tough, or some other reason, you would like to take a crack at talking with the boss yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
maybe, but coming from symantec this is just marketing tripe for their own services or future services. As an approach to security this already takes place. Think of firefox or a firewall asking you "are you sure you would like to run this program?"
Though it does seem like they are position themselves to be the gatekeepers of all software, good or bad. Want to run a program? Don't ask the user, ask Symantec. People wont stand for that though. There is a certain level of control over a computer most users are willing to give up in certain circumstances to the OS or an outside party or the like, but this is total control. Even novice users would probably find some piece of software they wanted to run that wasn't in the system and get annoyed at symantec for breaking their computer while more technical users would likely never want to be early adopters of something like this.
not only that, but I wonder.... wouldn't the list of "good" software be unimaginably larger than the list of malicious trojans and viruses?
Think about that number for a second. The only way they would ever look good would be if every single one of the users only ever ran software on the list. So for each user that uses dozens of applications, if even just one of those dozens isn't on the list, they are going to blame symantec.
sadly i don't think this will stop them from trying to pull this off anyways and at least getting a small userbase of complete novices and maybe corporate IT depts that want to lock down the drones.
except that people do actually use things like youtube and yahoo maps and pretty much every graphical ad and every blog video player is in flash. intros aren't annoying because flash is a bad technology, they are annoying because they are intros. your rant sounds like it is from 2001. get over it.
except that they make more picking up new fares because of the initial per ride fee
Simple answer is that you don't. Productivity in terms of IT and related fields has become a dirty little word but more than that it is a business term, not technical. If you aren't a director or higher in title, and your duties don't include justifying expenses and planning resources for solutions, then it isn't really your realm to measure something like productivity. If this guy has an MBA or similar qualifications, it is he who should know how to measure productivity. But alas the word productivity has become corrupted by half-assed business journalists trying to write articles about over all productivity and how your employees waste too much time on facebook. If this guy just wants a number and gives you no guidelines as to how to come up with the number, then my guess is that he just wants to kiss up to the CEO that "productivity" is up 40% or he wants a number to justify laying off people. Either way, if he cant tell you how he reached his number, I would suggest getting your resume ready.
Also ideally, a CTO wouldn't be asking those in the trenches how to measure productivity, but rather how to improve it. As someone in the trenches, you probably know where the snags are in efficiency, or what software you would need to purchase to help smooth things along or even where people are over worked or over looked. This is the positive way to improve productivity. Basically he should be asking you what you need in order to get your job done, and he should get it for you (within reason of course)
I was digging around and just noticed that SaveNetRadio.org is claiming an agreement has been reached.
Here is the press release (pdf)
And more on their homepage
Note: it looks like this is just one detail that has been agreed upon but negotiations are ongoing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundExchange
basically, they were created as an arm of the RIAA and then spun off to a independent (and I use the characterization lightly here) non-profit and the government designated them to collect royalties for all artists. I think it boils down to the fact that this allows for small artists to know where they need to go to find out if anyone has been playing their music and to get paid for it. how well this part works i have no idea -- but that is the justification behind it I think. And because of this, it made a bunch of lawmakers feel better about passing the DMCA.
As much as I would like to agree with you, there isn't anything that says they won't re-introduce DRM later in the negotiations. DRM was ALWAYS a bargaining chip and it was always in play. What they did at first was to say "well here are these exorbitantly high rates -- accept them or else." Then they pretended to throw a bone by saying "well, we'll delay the rate but you need to include DRM" but now they are just going right back to where they started, just this time it's the other way around. They are using DRM as a bargaining chip to push high rates. They don't appear to be making any compromises here other than cosmetic PR junk.
This easily could have been SoundExchange's plan all along. Somehow I think we're just going around in circles here until the issue fizzsles from public outrage to public apathy. People will get tired of hearing about it and start to wonder why all these whiny radio stations dont just pay. And since SoundExchange will (and is demanding) that the deal be retroactive, it wont matter much to them. The only real threat to SoundExchange is the Internet Radio Equality Act
I think we need to rebrand the discussion. What we need is computer assisted voting. Basically, the touch screen just provides an interface where the computer prints out your ballot which you review for accuracy and deposit in the ballot box. Later, ballots can be counted by hand or some type of scan-tron. Tabulations can be kept in both machines and in the event of mismatches, the paper ballot is recounted providing the official count (or if the numbers are far enough off, a re-vote). The scanning process could be observed and run at such a speed that humans can watch the count in real time and with enough people watching the possibility of count errors going undetected would approach 0. This would take care of most of your concerns about magic happening behind the screen. Nevertheless, the source code should still be freely available.
It's not a perfect system but it provides the basis for a system that's pretty much on par with paper. That is, the problems with election fraud we would see would be the same types of problems paper ballots suffer from (ie people voting twice, someone stealing a ballot box, some poll running out of paper).
This is what is in the draft proposal for New York State voting machines (among many other requirements regarding privacy and the disabled etc). But I only found this out recently by clicking on a signature from a slashdot poster. I encourage everyone to take a few minutes and visit http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ and check what sort of voting machines your state has, is testing, or is thinking about getting.
Also, for those new yorkers out there, you may want to visit this page about the testing underway for NYS eletronic voting machines for 2008.
yes, indeed relevant evidence during trials and discovery should certainly be permissible, and I think it makes sense to have leeway during discovery, but there should be a limit i think. Like if the RIAA was prosecuting me and wanted to call my landlord, my second cousin, my housekeeper, the guy i buy my coffee from in the morning and so on there is a point at which it's not discovery but intimidation. I'm not saying this particular case is intimidation, but rather just responding to it being called "lawyering" and commenting on it as a tactic.
But it should be (and maybe is?) an illegal tactic. Calling a defendant to the stand and everyone that defendant knows or had contact with just to troll for evidence and harass/intimidate the defendant could land a lawyer in contempt i would bet. I gather the blurry line is in deciding as to how much constitutes harassment.
And yes, I watch too much TV.
3. the answer is always C
This is pretty cool but what happens when you think "sex" though -- I'm not so sure I could train my brain to avoid such thoughts.
Maybe I wouldn't have to though...
[Me thinking]:....
[Fembot]: Honey, i have a headache, maybe later.
[me]: doh
Hmm on second thought, maybe the future isnt so bright
c kout/themes/california.html
"The FERC could have intervened and certainly lessened the crisis. I think that, to completely avoid the problemsRead more here here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/bla
JarJar Links? really? no seriously, don't kinda around. really. someone named an application that? i mean really? really?
Even if what you said is true, which I highly doubt (since from what I understand packet filtering and QoS is more expensive to run than adding bandwidth, and end to end encryption would defeat it I would think), who is to say the money saved from such an endeavor will go back into the Pell grants and the like?
Technical arguments aside, taking money away from student loans to finance this seems risky at best. If there is no clause that requires accounting of the money saved, and it's redirecting back towards student loans, this is certainly a Bad Investment(tm).
That also doesnt even begin touch on how it's morally wrong to use education money for the private interests of copyright holders.
Users have a funny way of deciding for themselves how they like to use technology, and that doesnt always mean the best utilization of multi-core processors. Sometimes it just means a few less clicks to get out the red eye from photos of your dog Floofly.
/have to say too the incessant AJAX and Flash bashing is tiresome on /. sometimes. And no I dont have a dog named Floofly.
Doesnt even need to be chaeper. It's entirely possible that they don't want diebold due to their ties to political parties or because of controversy over sercurity. And now oddly enough, I think Diebold has given states yet another reason to not want to use their machines: they sue their customers to get what they want.
Thank you, b4h :)
I think flash has a bit of a bad rep with regards to speed. if you look at yahoo maps or youtube. these apps do very well speed wise. there are some better alternatives, but they generally are competative in terms of speed. As for compiling there is a new method that speeds flash compile times to almost nil. (say from 15 seconds to .15 seconds) it uses a kind of method of "injecting only what's different." try googling HaXe and MTASC.
Also, while flash may be "slow" in some senses, it supports full streaming video with alpha channels, serialized data remoting, a robust OOP language with classes, and now even quake 2 style 3d ala Papervision3D (an opensouce 3d engine in actionscript)
why anyone would want to compile html or javascript is beyond me though :) and i cant speak for flex as it never really caught my attention enough to want to learn it.
question though, you say as a flex developer someone would already feel like an apollo developer, but did you feel the same way as a flash developer? already possesing the knowledge you need to get started?
isnt that a pretty standard clause in just about all proprietary software? I'm not sure why this is some kind of new drawback. Don't get me wrong the whole "you agree to let us audit you" thing is dirty and should be unlawful imho, but it's not like adobe is looking to become the next SCO.
You're assuming that web aps can somehow control the apollo aps. I think you're worry is in the right place but a bit alarmist. Adobe certainly has this in mind. In fact Macromedia and the flash devlopment team has always been big on security. The difference here is, these aps will function like desktop apps but in no way is adobe going to create any type of "fly by" web based intaller for the framework, or ever in a million years let the web flash apps connect to the desktop one. They already prevent this with their XSS security sandbox model in flash.
If he claims his manager wont let him, it's very likely true -and- an act all at the same time. for whatever reason he is scared to push his manager for what he is telling you deserve. so either he's lying to his manager that he can run his deparment on a low budget, or he's lying to you about how much he thinks you are worth.
But dont let him get away with the "my hands are tied" argument. as your manager, if he is the one who can talk about your salary with you, then his hands are not tied. if he claims that his boss wont let him, then his boss is the one you should be talking to with merely a written review or reccomendation from your manager.
dont go over his head though, that will just cause animosity. what you should do is respectfully (and this part isnt easy, so dont kid yourself) request that you have a meeting with both your manager AND his boss. Again though, be careful, dont make it about him just say that you believe him but since rent is tough, or some other reason, you would like to take a crack at talking with the boss yourself.