Your emails are routed through an awful lot of servers on their way to the final destination. If you're sending sensitive information through plaintext email at all, it's a liability.
On a mostly unrelated note, we were asked to bid on a web project a while back where the client was taking credit card orders online and emailing the plaintext payment details to their office. Then, one of the employees (part-time high school students, mostly) were processing them on a physical terminal. When they refused to change that process or implement any security measures, we refused to help them. *sigh*
That's a blog post by someone else who's doing something similar to our own. I don't post my own domain on/. because I don't want my clients to search for me or my company and find my ranting, drunken posts on Slashdot.:)
My small business is dealing with so much spam - plus the difficulty of using several machines to check our mail on - that we're actually forwarding our stuff through Gmail in order to filter spam. Not only that, but the interface is far more usable than alternatives we've used.
I keep saying "I wish we could use Gmail for our business email without having an @gmail.com in there."
The problem isn't that it's not within their rights (in my state, we have at-will employment and you can be fired for damn near anything). The problem is that some employers fail to recognize that eight full hours of productivity isn't a realistic goal. In this case, he claims to use solitaire for a "quick distraction." When I'm stuck on a problem, I take a walk, play a game of Sudoku, or check Slashdot. Sometimes it's a change of scenery that refreshes me. Other times its simply a change of perspective. In either case, it's important to realize that any employee who consistently claims to be productive for 100% of his time is lying.
I've worked for employers that didn't understand this. Burnout and turnover rates were astonishingly high. Meanwhile, I've worked for employers that recognized the value of this kind of freedom/flexibility. They also realized the non-value of an employee that needs to get away.
Solitaire/minesweeper/Sudoku or the occasional "why don't you go home early" often translates to a refreshed and more productive employee tomorrow.
Seriously, I'm really impressed by their success so far. Many of my non-geek friends and family are starting to use Vonage - it beats the heck out of SBC.
Something that frustrates me, though, is the apparent lack of VOIP for small businesses. I have a small company where my partner and I work from our home offices and on the road, about an hour away from each other. Every call is long distance. We're paying through the nose for our cell phones, which barely work in our houses anyway. Looking around, I've only found a handful of VOIP companies that are affordable, and most of them don't seem to be very helpful for my situation. We were talking about how cool it would be to set up an Asterisk box so we could have the voicemail, forwarding, etc. It's just not something I have time for.
The Vonage business service doesn't seem like much more than a residential+fax line. Another place I saw sent you a box you had to set up but it was pricy. It's like there's no in-between.
It's cynical, but I believe they do this to make all of their applicants underqualified. That gives them a reason to pay them less than top of the scale. Where they list the job as $50,000-$75,000, you don't have the required 14 years of.Net experience so you're going to have to accept the $52,000.
On the other hand, I know that some managers just don't understand it well enough to write a good position description. I've had to write several PDs (sometimes for a job I was leaving, sometimes for a position I was hiring, and finally sometimes because the higher-ups didn't like my level of job security). It's usually best done by someone who can do the job himself, but the next best thing is to define the roles and very basic requirements - will need to create web applications in a Linux-based environment.
Just because it could be done in PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, or Java doesn't mean you have to list all of those. And if the language hasn't been selected yet, why bother listing it at all? There are excellent developers with PHP and Ruby experience that will be turned off from the suggestion that they need to use Java.
Two important points, one of which you've already made:
1. Outsource to another company, don't hire them directly. Doing this will cost you more per hour (my company charges $75/hour and we're considering a rate increase). You can find developers from $20-$50/hour, too. But hiring a company means you get the resources of their whole team, the accountability of their staff to their bosses/contract, and you avoid paying benefits, insurance, taxes, equipment, and office space. Hiring two developers might cost you $60-100k/year - but that doesn't include the resources of a designer, IA, QA, etc.
2. In my area (not even the boonies), there are very few local companies that produce standards-based websites. Let's flash back to 1995 and explore the font tags and frames that plagued the web. Ten years later, any company that isn't doing XHTML/CSS should NOT be hired. If you can't find a local company that meets this minimal level of ability, go find a company that can.
Microsoft violated the patent, not me. I bought a copy of the software as it was - and if they have to alter it because they made a mistake then that's their problem. I should not be required to change the software in order to help them cover.
Are you required to install security patches? Many sysadmins have a wait-and-see approach to major updates for good reason. Is this any different?
Am I using infringing code? Yes. Is it my responsibility to ensure that I'm not? I don't believe so. Not only is this software that I've licensed from Microsoft, but it's not like I have the option of reviewing the source code.
I'm curious if there's a precedent regarding this kind of situation.
Really brilliant people (not just scientifically, but in any discipline or industry) surround themselves with other brilliant people. They enjoy being challenged by peers. They are secure in their abilities and know that other brilliant people will not threaten their place but help to elevate it.
I am finding, early in my business career, that working with other talented people makes me work harder and aspire to greater things. The constant challenges put a perspective on the obstacles I used to face - ones I now overcome easily.
I'm beginning to believe that "genius" is just a frame of mind.
I know a guy that uses the Slimp3 web server for a similar setup.
I use kplaylist. With some modifications (web standards, static image files, etc.) it runs pretty fast. Too bad Comcast's upstream is so poor that ***BUFFERING***
It alsohas user management, so I've even opened it up to my friends and family to listen all they like.
My step-brother is 12. He's at that age where he's interested in girls and thought he'd look online to find some girls.
So he searched for "12 year old naked girls." As my father (his step-dad) is a network and systems admin (and because 12-year-olds are careless), he discovered this soon after.
He was more than a little concerned about getting a knock on the door.
You have a definite point, but you also underestimate the power of branding.
For some businesses, marketing is what gets the word out. Your name/brand is tied to that, making it valuable. Nike isn't a shoe company, it's a branding company. Most people don't go to the store and ask for sneakers, they go in and ask for Nikes.
The majority of search engine traffic for some of my clients' websites are name searches - "MyCompanyName" or "Smith and Associates." It's part of the online marketing battle. Not just so that people find you when they search for your product, but also so that they associate your name with the product. ("Online books" translates to Amazon, "auction" and Ebay.)
"Mainstream Support" was end-of-lifed on 6/30/2005. Now it's one thing to make software that only works with a newer version of an OS, but it's another to put artificial blocks on compatibility.
As a web developer, I don't support older browsers. I do, however, let them load up my sites in whatever they like. As long as users realize that they may not be seeing the same thing or interacting in the same way, they're free to use Netscape 4 or whatever they like.
So if the Age of Empires developers decided that Win2K was a drastic minority with no mainstream support from MS, I can understand them not testing and support their product on 2000. But if the product works fine and users want to try it (unsupported) then they should let 'em do it.
I made the mistake - once - of forcing visitors to my site to use a specific browser. I did a browser detection and showed them a message requiring that they upgrade their browser in order to use the site. The problem with this is that the site worked fine in a lot of browsers that I was too lazy or ignorant to test or support. Eventually I learned the term "gracefully degrade."
I've had no shortage of Gmail invites for even longer, but that hasn't encouraged my friends to sign up. They just don't want the account. Most have Yahoo! or AIM; while I consider the GoogleTalk a faster and cleaner option, I've had little success convincing people they need to adopt yet another messaging client.
GTalk needs some serious attention if they want it to be accepted by the public. But that makes me wonder... do they really want it to be accepted by the public? The voice chat feature is the best part of it for me; the quality is superb compared to other clients I've tried. Still, limiting it to Gmail users means that most people I know aren't eligible. And not having rich text, file transfers, and options for conversation logging are a good reason to find another client.
You can still open "AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs" if you're running Firefox. (email trojans/viruses)
Adware and spyware can still be downloaded in Firefox or Opera.
When someone tells you they just inheritied money and need your help in order to get the cash, your response is browser-independent.
You can even be using a Firefox, anti-virus, firewall, and anti-spyware tools at work - but leave your password on a Post-It on the monitor for anyone to see.
The problem isn't Internet Explorer. It's the people.
Is it a first amendment case, no. Is it illegal, no. Is it wrong? Yes.
"...it's still an abuse of power that will have a chilling effect on free speech."
I agree - it does impact our freedom of speech because future students will see this as a warning to them as well.
This debate happens every time someone gets fired for blogging, too. But this is an issue of common sense, too - if you're dumb enough to say negative things about your employer, you might get fired. It doesn't matter if it's on a blog or not.
Based on what I've read in the media, this kid did some dumb stuff but didn't deserve any kind of discipline for it. In reality, it's probably just a matter of PR - the University (or a couple of boneheads within the administration) considered the blog a negative depiction. So they shut it down by any means necessary.
Sometime legal threats don't do anything. Some companies and organizations are far more afraid of negative press. And apparently Marquette is one of those.
As a business owner, I can attest to the fact that some things do not require cash. While hiring good people certainly does, there are ways you can make your environment more conducive to quality work.
I know a lot of people who feel under-appreciated at their jobs. I've also been in positions where the boss saw employees as a tool to get a job done. In my experience, happy employees work harder and are more productive. And unhappy employees are more likely to cut corners, complain, gossip, etc. This doesn't mean every company should have an executive chef creating free lunches for the employees, but there are little things that don't require a lot of cash that go a long way toward making happy employees stay happy.
I think he really means that "that's what people expect" is not the same as "that's the most usable." If it were, we'd abandon a lot of UI improvements - tabbed browsing or multiple desktops, for a couple of examples. Sure, sometimes consistency translates to usability - but innovation is a way of saying that the status quo is not good enough.
A basic search function that can quickly and efficiently (the focus of this conversation) return relevant results without needing to refresh the browser can be a huge improvement over the current method.
In iTunes, you can search for a song, artist, album, etc. without submitting your entry - it searches automatically. Recently, I took that concept and added it to a web-based file server application. You can still submit your search for certain advanced criteria, but now you can also quickly search without waiting for a refresh. It's not amazingly efficient (I've got about 5 total users, very few of them concurrent). But it's an example of an improved interface. With proper indexing, caching, and some application limits, that feature could be workable for a much larger audience.
Right now, I consider this a way for us to experiment with improved user experience. Five years from now, we might wonder how we got by without these conveniences.
Slashdot Mirror
coughcoughencryptioncoughcough
Your emails are routed through an awful lot of servers on their way to the final destination. If you're sending sensitive information through plaintext email at all, it's a liability.
On a mostly unrelated note, we were asked to bid on a web project a while back where the client was taking credit card orders online and emailing the plaintext payment details to their office. Then, one of the employees (part-time high school students, mostly) were processing them on a physical terminal. When they refused to change that process or implement any security measures, we refused to help them. *sigh*
That's a blog post by someone else who's doing something similar to our own. I don't post my own domain on /. because I don't want my clients to search for me or my company and find my ranting, drunken posts on Slashdot. :)
My small business is dealing with so much spam - plus the difficulty of using several machines to check our mail on - that we're actually forwarding our stuff through Gmail in order to filter spam. Not only that, but the interface is far more usable than alternatives we've used.
I keep saying "I wish we could use Gmail for our business email without having an @gmail.com in there."
This is very exciting to me.
The problem isn't that it's not within their rights (in my state, we have at-will employment and you can be fired for damn near anything). The problem is that some employers fail to recognize that eight full hours of productivity isn't a realistic goal. In this case, he claims to use solitaire for a "quick distraction." When I'm stuck on a problem, I take a walk, play a game of Sudoku, or check Slashdot. Sometimes it's a change of scenery that refreshes me. Other times its simply a change of perspective. In either case, it's important to realize that any employee who consistently claims to be productive for 100% of his time is lying.
I've worked for employers that didn't understand this. Burnout and turnover rates were astonishingly high. Meanwhile, I've worked for employers that recognized the value of this kind of freedom/flexibility. They also realized the non-value of an employee that needs to get away.
Solitaire/minesweeper/Sudoku or the occasional "why don't you go home early" often translates to a refreshed and more productive employee tomorrow.
We do use Google Talk to talk to each other, but talking to my clients isn't going to happen over an IM client or in-network mobile carrier.
The whole thing stinks of amateurishness, and that's something we (as a small business) are trying to avoid.
Thanks... I'll check it out.
I must say, I'm already impressed that you guys have pricing on your website. The other places I've found usually make me call to get info like that.
No link to Vonage?
Seriously, I'm really impressed by their success so far. Many of my non-geek friends and family are starting to use Vonage - it beats the heck out of SBC.
Something that frustrates me, though, is the apparent lack of VOIP for small businesses. I have a small company where my partner and I work from our home offices and on the road, about an hour away from each other. Every call is long distance. We're paying through the nose for our cell phones, which barely work in our houses anyway. Looking around, I've only found a handful of VOIP companies that are affordable, and most of them don't seem to be very helpful for my situation. We were talking about how cool it would be to set up an Asterisk box so we could have the voicemail, forwarding, etc. It's just not something I have time for.
The Vonage business service doesn't seem like much more than a residential+fax line. Another place I saw sent you a box you had to set up but it was pricy. It's like there's no in-between.
Anyone have a suggestion?
It's cynical, but I believe they do this to make all of their applicants underqualified. That gives them a reason to pay them less than top of the scale. Where they list the job as $50,000-$75,000, you don't have the required 14 years of .Net experience so you're going to have to accept the $52,000.
On the other hand, I know that some managers just don't understand it well enough to write a good position description. I've had to write several PDs (sometimes for a job I was leaving, sometimes for a position I was hiring, and finally sometimes because the higher-ups didn't like my level of job security). It's usually best done by someone who can do the job himself, but the next best thing is to define the roles and very basic requirements - will need to create web applications in a Linux-based environment.
Just because it could be done in PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, or Java doesn't mean you have to list all of those. And if the language hasn't been selected yet, why bother listing it at all? There are excellent developers with PHP and Ruby experience that will be turned off from the suggestion that they need to use Java.
Two important points, one of which you've already made:
1. Outsource to another company, don't hire them directly. Doing this will cost you more per hour (my company charges $75/hour and we're considering a rate increase). You can find developers from $20-$50/hour, too. But hiring a company means you get the resources of their whole team, the accountability of their staff to their bosses/contract, and you avoid paying benefits, insurance, taxes, equipment, and office space. Hiring two developers might cost you $60-100k/year - but that doesn't include the resources of a designer, IA, QA, etc.
2. In my area (not even the boonies), there are very few local companies that produce standards-based websites. Let's flash back to 1995 and explore the font tags and frames that plagued the web. Ten years later, any company that isn't doing XHTML/CSS should NOT be hired. If you can't find a local company that meets this minimal level of ability, go find a company that can.
Microsoft violated the patent, not me. I bought a copy of the software as it was - and if they have to alter it because they made a mistake then that's their problem. I should not be required to change the software in order to help them cover.
Are you required to install security patches? Many sysadmins have a wait-and-see approach to major updates for good reason. Is this any different?
Am I using infringing code? Yes. Is it my responsibility to ensure that I'm not? I don't believe so. Not only is this software that I've licensed from Microsoft, but it's not like I have the option of reviewing the source code.
I'm curious if there's a precedent regarding this kind of situation.
That's because the car thought you said "break." You should speak more clearly.
Really brilliant people (not just scientifically, but in any discipline or industry) surround themselves with other brilliant people. They enjoy being challenged by peers. They are secure in their abilities and know that other brilliant people will not threaten their place but help to elevate it.
I am finding, early in my business career, that working with other talented people makes me work harder and aspire to greater things. The constant challenges put a perspective on the obstacles I used to face - ones I now overcome easily.
I'm beginning to believe that "genius" is just a frame of mind.
I know a guy that uses the Slimp3 web server for a similar setup.
I use kplaylist. With some modifications (web standards, static image files, etc.) it runs pretty fast. Too bad Comcast's upstream is so poor that ***BUFFERING***
It alsohas user management, so I've even opened it up to my friends and family to listen all they like.
My step-brother is 12. He's at that age where he's interested in girls and thought he'd look online to find some girls.
So he searched for "12 year old naked girls." As my father (his step-dad) is a network and systems admin (and because 12-year-olds are careless), he discovered this soon after.
He was more than a little concerned about getting a knock on the door.
You have a definite point, but you also underestimate the power of branding.
For some businesses, marketing is what gets the word out. Your name/brand is tied to that, making it valuable. Nike isn't a shoe company, it's a branding company. Most people don't go to the store and ask for sneakers, they go in and ask for Nikes.
The majority of search engine traffic for some of my clients' websites are name searches - "MyCompanyName" or "Smith and Associates." It's part of the online marketing battle. Not just so that people find you when they search for your product, but also so that they associate your name with the product. ("Online books" translates to Amazon, "auction" and Ebay.)
"Mainstream Support" was end-of-lifed on 6/30/2005. Now it's one thing to make software that only works with a newer version of an OS, but it's another to put artificial blocks on compatibility.
As a web developer, I don't support older browsers. I do, however, let them load up my sites in whatever they like. As long as users realize that they may not be seeing the same thing or interacting in the same way, they're free to use Netscape 4 or whatever they like.
So if the Age of Empires developers decided that Win2K was a drastic minority with no mainstream support from MS, I can understand them not testing and support their product on 2000. But if the product works fine and users want to try it (unsupported) then they should let 'em do it.
I made the mistake - once - of forcing visitors to my site to use a specific browser. I did a browser detection and showed them a message requiring that they upgrade their browser in order to use the site. The problem with this is that the site worked fine in a lot of browsers that I was too lazy or ignorant to test or support. Eventually I learned the term "gracefully degrade."
I've had no shortage of Gmail invites for even longer, but that hasn't encouraged my friends to sign up. They just don't want the account. Most have Yahoo! or AIM; while I consider the GoogleTalk a faster and cleaner option, I've had little success convincing people they need to adopt yet another messaging client.
GTalk needs some serious attention if they want it to be accepted by the public. But that makes me wonder... do they really want it to be accepted by the public? The voice chat feature is the best part of it for me; the quality is superb compared to other clients I've tried. Still, limiting it to Gmail users means that most people I know aren't eligible. And not having rich text, file transfers, and options for conversation logging are a good reason to find another client.
You can still open "AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs" if you're running Firefox. (email trojans/viruses)
Adware and spyware can still be downloaded in Firefox or Opera.
When someone tells you they just inheritied money and need your help in order to get the cash, your response is browser-independent.
You can even be using a Firefox, anti-virus, firewall, and anti-spyware tools at work - but leave your password on a Post-It on the monitor for anyone to see.
The problem isn't Internet Explorer. It's the people.
Is it a first amendment case, no.
Is it illegal, no.
Is it wrong? Yes.
"...it's still an abuse of power that will have a chilling effect on free speech."
I agree - it does impact our freedom of speech because future students will see this as a warning to them as well.
This debate happens every time someone gets fired for blogging, too. But this is an issue of common sense, too - if you're dumb enough to say negative things about your employer, you might get fired. It doesn't matter if it's on a blog or not.
Based on what I've read in the media, this kid did some dumb stuff but didn't deserve any kind of discipline for it. In reality, it's probably just a matter of PR - the University (or a couple of boneheads within the administration) considered the blog a negative depiction. So they shut it down by any means necessary.
Sometime legal threats don't do anything. Some companies and organizations are far more afraid of negative press. And apparently Marquette is one of those.
As a business owner, I can attest to the fact that some things do not require cash. While hiring good people certainly does, there are ways you can make your environment more conducive to quality work.
I know a lot of people who feel under-appreciated at their jobs. I've also been in positions where the boss saw employees as a tool to get a job done. In my experience, happy employees work harder and are more productive. And unhappy employees are more likely to cut corners, complain, gossip, etc. This doesn't mean every company should have an executive chef creating free lunches for the employees, but there are little things that don't require a lot of cash that go a long way toward making happy employees stay happy.
Let's see here...
m
http://www.boysschoolscoalition.org/
http://www.ncgs.org/
http://www.scouting.org/
http://www.girlscouts.org/
Information on the discrimination areas you're thinking of...
http://www.dol.gov/oasam/regs/statutes/titleix.ht
Finally, an excerpt which is the most relevant part of this entire discussion:
"...subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance..."
Private schools, clubs, groups - the first amendment is not relevant to such entities.
What makes you so sure that 1-10 aren't why they have huge piles of cash?
I think he really means that "that's what people expect" is not the same as "that's the most usable." If it were, we'd abandon a lot of UI improvements - tabbed browsing or multiple desktops, for a couple of examples. Sure, sometimes consistency translates to usability - but innovation is a way of saying that the status quo is not good enough.
A basic search function that can quickly and efficiently (the focus of this conversation) return relevant results without needing to refresh the browser can be a huge improvement over the current method.
In iTunes, you can search for a song, artist, album, etc. without submitting your entry - it searches automatically. Recently, I took that concept and added it to a web-based file server application. You can still submit your search for certain advanced criteria, but now you can also quickly search without waiting for a refresh. It's not amazingly efficient (I've got about 5 total users, very few of them concurrent). But it's an example of an improved interface. With proper indexing, caching, and some application limits, that feature could be workable for a much larger audience.
Right now, I consider this a way for us to experiment with improved user experience. Five years from now, we might wonder how we got by without these conveniences.
So that's why they call it "time-shifting."