Symantec have an enterprise version which they recommend to any organisation with more than 5 PCs.
It is small, unobtrusive, easy to manage and doesn't gobble up CPU and RAM like it's going out of fashion. So they clearly have some perfectly competent developers on staff.
Just a bit of a shame that none of these developers go anywhere near the Norton product.
Yes, but the purpose of those companies that they outsource to is to be better at the task and be cheaper than doing it in-house. The main purpose of most of the HR/accounting/other outsourcing companies isn't generally to data mine all of the data it can find for its own benefit!
Google may mine the data for personal gmail accounts but were you aware that they explicitly state that they do not in their apps for domains service?
The terms specifically state that the only thing they go through your data for is so they can index it so they can provide a functional search service within the domain for authenticated users.
Sounds like they need a better quality cacheing system, or get some of the pr0n served on a locally hosted CDN. Or stick it on their LAN fileservers. Let's get practical here!
More likely that the $58k is based on his annual salary worked into an hourly figure then multiplied by the number of hours he spent downloading pr0n.
Companies have been outsourcing the processing of enormous amounts of vital, confidential information for time immemorial.
Lots of companies outsource HR, payroll, legal, some aspects of accounting, bookkeeping and IT. Indeed, entire industries exist based around the idea that most companies don't really need someone who understands HR law|accounting|IT on staff for 37.5 hours/week.
An inevitable side-effect of this is that vitally important, incredibly confidential information is already held by outside organisations. Frankly, some of the companies offering managed Exchange services (and there are loads) come across as downright shady compared with Google.
A switch is distinctly non-trivial for a very simple reason:
Solutions which involve changing the problem to fit the solution rather than the other way around are inevitably poorly received. This explains the continued popularity of Sharepoint - it allows people to continue to email documents around (even if those documents are never likely to be printed) in exactly the same way as they used to before web-based services became common.
Today, thousands of businesses have software in place where there's an uneasy truce which may well involve some minor problem changes but by and large the software suits the problem.
But a lot of F/OSS software is developed to solve a particular (maybe rather specific) problem and the suggestion that it could be modified to solve both the original problem and another, new problem winds up getting shot down in flames. Example:
Personnel costs. Personnel costs are higher than software costs. If changing to OSS means that you have to pay for more admin time, then your software savings will be eaten up by salaries. Much as I like Linux, the fact is that Windows AD/GPO tools are more usable "out of the box".
Won't argue with this one here. Lots of people will come up with suggestions like puppet or cfengine, which inevitably mean spending 5 times longer configuring because "you can configure it to so much more". The idea of even supplying a basic template simply doesn't seem to occur.
Legacy software. One widely-used, legacy application that won't run under Linux, and the costs aren't even a factor anymore. Terminal server, or other kludged solutions are not user friendly.
However, concerning this you really ought to speak to my former employer. They found that the 300 branches they had with Linux desktops running KDE and simply sticking an icon on the desktop that fired up the Citrix ICA client and automagically started the application worked fine. I'm sure something similar can be done today with TS.
They should have trained their employees to understand that recalling e-mails doesn't work more often than it does.
This is the most important point. Recalling email is a function of some commercial systems which generally do a lot more than just email (eg. Exchange) and you can only expect it to work when the following hold true:
1. The recipient is using the same type of email system, preferably within the same organisation.
2. The recipient opens the request to recall the email and it isn't filed as spam.
3. The recipient opens the request before they've read the original email.
4. If prompted "do you want to allow this?", the recipient clicks "Yes".
Most IMAP clients cache some or all of the email you receive. (Outlook's a particularly good example - though it doesn't download the email until you actually go to read it, once downloaded it keeps a copy in cache until you delete the email. And IIRC the 2 GB local pst file limit still applies to Outlook if you're using it with an IMAP server - it's only with Exchange server that the limit doesn't exist).
Fisker is essentially outsourcing every aspect of their development..... People need to get over the fact that the US is now a post-industrial nation who's future lies in innovation rather than manufacturing.
Are you aware that the UK went through the exact same thing in the 1980's when a lot of car companies moved some or all of their manufacturing offshore?
Today there isn't a single UK-owned car manufacturer left to innovate (outside of a few very exclusive companies that probably produce about a hundred cars per year between them).
perhaps some of the minimum wage pigs and grunts they hire to pose in their security theatre are stupid enough to believe "checking" a laptop is going to prevent information getting into Mexico and help them create a rival utopia
In my experience, those hired for such jobs are specifically chosen not to have the intelligence to question such orders even in their own mind.
Target, Citibank, and Visa don't have the power to put me in prison for one....
Erm, I hate to tell you this but yes. Yes they do.
Well, Citibank and Visa certainly do. All they need to do is put through a false transaction on your credit card, insist their systems are foolproof and refuse to refund you. Continue complaining?
Well, as far as the bank is concerned their systems are foolproof. Therefore, you definitely carried out the transaction. Therefore, you are trying to gain financially (ie. avoid paying) for something you did. Therefore, you are attempting to defraud the bank and they will report you to the police. It doesn't take much thought to see that without some very good legal representation, you're going to prison.
(before you accuse me of being a conspiracy nut, something like this has already happened, though who was responsible for the original transaction I don't know - unfortunately googling for man arrested fraud tends to bring up hundreds of cases where real fraudsters have been arrested).
I've worked in an office where you get fired for doing stupid things. In particular, I've worked at an ISP where I'd be the one firing you for doing this particular stupid thing.
Then you haven't worked anywhere in Europe. Save for a few things (eg. gross misconduct), you can't sack somebody with zero notice and zero warnings.
You could argue that this comes under the heading of gross negligence, which may be something you can be summarily sacked for, but then the question arises - who was grossly negligent? The person who sent out such a spreadsheet or the person who specified a system which allowed such a spreadsheet to exist?
Things get even more complicated if after such a system comes into play, one or more people raise concerns about it with management.
Except in this context there was a human being involved to whom launch authority was delegated (in a very heavily armoured bunker). The only thing that was automated was the delegation of launch authority.
I think it makes sense in a crazy kind of way - not that I think such weaponry is a good idea in the first place but I can understand the logic.
The hotheads they were defending against wasn't the US. It was their own generals.
Question: Let us assume that those at the top are a little jumpy. So jumpy, in fact, that it's probably a bad idea to give them loud alarm clocks. Now, MAD is all well and good but nobody wants to press the button first. How do you make sure you don't press the button first for fear that you're under attack when in fact it's nothing of the sort?
Well, one way would be to devise a system so that MAD was still possible even if they were all dead.
There have been small battles and wars since time immemorial. In fact, I seriously doubt there has been a period of a decade at any point in the last two centuries where no first-world country was involved in a war of some sort.
Considering most money laundering processes can easily have an efficiency of only 10-20% (ie. you lose up to 80% of the money), I reckon losing 30-40% is a pretty sweet deal.
Yes we know. Hell, you could cobble together your own with cron and a few scripts easily enough.
But not a single Linux distribution I am aware of makes this quick and easy, and it is most certainly not something you can be reasonably confident is so widely deployed that finding help online (or for that matter your PHB finding a replacement when you move on) is going to be easy.
I don't know about top flight, but I can tell you this for nothing:
The industry is full of bottom-flight system admins. People who heard there was money in computing, people who got an MCSE through a company that "guarantees an MCSE in 3 weeks!!11", people who have all the experience that they should be great but still seem to be unable to do even the most basic tasks.
And a lot of employers can't tell the difference between these people and those who really do know what they're doing, even after they've hired them.
Obviously I don't know how they managed the migration, but I'm looking at doing the same thing myself and I can see one glaringly obvious way how this could happen.
One of the migration mechanisms Google provide is you enable IMAP on your mail server and give them a CSV file listing IMAP usernames, the corresponding Google account username and IMAP passwords. Google's system then brings all the email across and puts it in the relevant accounts.
Of course, if the mechanism you use to generate the CSV file is slightly broken.....
What the FSCK! How lame is your college that it can't run an email system?
When you finally get out you might want to check and see if your diploma is signed.
Higher education is all about money these days. It's not so much "can they do it?" as "can they do it for anywhere near the same price?"
A highly available email system for any large organisation like a college pretty much means a SAN and a cluster of some sort, which immediately implies a fair bit of hardware and a hell of a lot of work to get everything tied together. Even using free software everywhere you can, the hardware costs money and so does the engineer time to set up and manage it.
Google, OTOH, will provide the whole lot free. Leaving more money in the budget for that ivory back scratcher.
(FWIW, I've recently looked into this for my employer and reached a similar conclusion. At the price Google charges, the level of reliability they are hypothetically able to offer, spam-filtering that actually works and the extra features that don't have a UI that makes people want to gouge out their own eyes, I can't provide this any cheaper than what Google do. Hell, my co-located secondary MX server costs more per year than Google for every single member of staff)
Slashdot Mirror
You know the biggest joke?
Symantec have an enterprise version which they recommend to any organisation with more than 5 PCs.
It is small, unobtrusive, easy to manage and doesn't gobble up CPU and RAM like it's going out of fashion. So they clearly have some perfectly competent developers on staff.
Just a bit of a shame that none of these developers go anywhere near the Norton product.
Yes, but the purpose of those companies that they outsource to is to be better at the task and be cheaper than doing it in-house. The main purpose of most of the HR/accounting/other outsourcing companies isn't generally to data mine all of the data it can find for its own benefit!
Google may mine the data for personal gmail accounts but were you aware that they explicitly state that they do not in their apps for domains service?
The terms specifically state that the only thing they go through your data for is so they can index it so they can provide a functional search service within the domain for authenticated users.
Sounds like they need a better quality cacheing system, or get some of the pr0n served on a locally hosted CDN. Or stick it on their LAN fileservers. Let's get practical here!
More likely that the $58k is based on his annual salary worked into an hourly figure then multiplied by the number of hours he spent downloading pr0n.
Companies have been outsourcing the processing of enormous amounts of vital, confidential information for time immemorial.
Lots of companies outsource HR, payroll, legal, some aspects of accounting, bookkeeping and IT. Indeed, entire industries exist based around the idea that most companies don't really need someone who understands HR law|accounting|IT on staff for 37.5 hours/week.
An inevitable side-effect of this is that vitally important, incredibly confidential information is already held by outside organisations. Frankly, some of the companies offering managed Exchange services (and there are loads) come across as downright shady compared with Google.
A switch is distinctly non-trivial for a very simple reason:
Solutions which involve changing the problem to fit the solution rather than the other way around are inevitably poorly received. This explains the continued popularity of Sharepoint - it allows people to continue to email documents around (even if those documents are never likely to be printed) in exactly the same way as they used to before web-based services became common.
Today, thousands of businesses have software in place where there's an uneasy truce which may well involve some minor problem changes but by and large the software suits the problem.
But a lot of F/OSS software is developed to solve a particular (maybe rather specific) problem and the suggestion that it could be modified to solve both the original problem and another, new problem winds up getting shot down in flames. Example:
http://www.watersprings.org/pub/id/draft-zeilenga-ldup-harmful-02.txt
(notwithstanding the fact that by this time virtually every major LDAP server on the planet except for OpenLDAP supported multimaster replication)
Personnel costs. Personnel costs are higher than software costs. If changing to OSS means that you have to pay for more admin time, then your software savings will be eaten up by salaries. Much as I like Linux, the fact is that Windows AD/GPO tools are more usable "out of the box".
Won't argue with this one here. Lots of people will come up with suggestions like puppet or cfengine, which inevitably mean spending 5 times longer configuring because "you can configure it to so much more". The idea of even supplying a basic template simply doesn't seem to occur.
Legacy software. One widely-used, legacy application that won't run under Linux, and the costs aren't even a factor anymore. Terminal server, or other kludged solutions are not user friendly.
However, concerning this you really ought to speak to my former employer. They found that the 300 branches they had with Linux desktops running KDE and simply sticking an icon on the desktop that fired up the Citrix ICA client and automagically started the application worked fine. I'm sure something similar can be done today with TS.
They should have trained their employees to understand that recalling e-mails doesn't work more often than it does.
This is the most important point. Recalling email is a function of some commercial systems which generally do a lot more than just email (eg. Exchange) and you can only expect it to work when the following hold true:
1. The recipient is using the same type of email system, preferably within the same organisation.
2. The recipient opens the request to recall the email and it isn't filed as spam.
3. The recipient opens the request before they've read the original email.
4. If prompted "do you want to allow this?", the recipient clicks "Yes".
Most IMAP clients cache some or all of the email you receive. (Outlook's a particularly good example - though it doesn't download the email until you actually go to read it, once downloaded it keeps a copy in cache until you delete the email. And IIRC the 2 GB local pst file limit still applies to Outlook if you're using it with an IMAP server - it's only with Exchange server that the limit doesn't exist).
Fisker is essentially outsourcing every aspect of their development..... People need to get over the fact that the US is now a post-industrial nation who's future lies in innovation rather than manufacturing.
Are you aware that the UK went through the exact same thing in the 1980's when a lot of car companies moved some or all of their manufacturing offshore?
Today there isn't a single UK-owned car manufacturer left to innovate (outside of a few very exclusive companies that probably produce about a hundred cars per year between them).
perhaps some of the minimum wage pigs and grunts they hire to pose in their security theatre are stupid enough to believe "checking" a laptop is going to prevent information getting into Mexico and help them create a rival utopia
In my experience, those hired for such jobs are specifically chosen not to have the intelligence to question such orders even in their own mind.
Target, Citibank, and Visa don't have the power to put me in prison for one....
Erm, I hate to tell you this but yes. Yes they do.
Well, Citibank and Visa certainly do. All they need to do is put through a false transaction on your credit card, insist their systems are foolproof and refuse to refund you. Continue complaining?
Well, as far as the bank is concerned their systems are foolproof. Therefore, you definitely carried out the transaction. Therefore, you are trying to gain financially (ie. avoid paying) for something you did. Therefore, you are attempting to defraud the bank and they will report you to the police. It doesn't take much thought to see that without some very good legal representation, you're going to prison.
(before you accuse me of being a conspiracy nut, something like this has already happened, though who was responsible for the original transaction I don't know - unfortunately googling for man arrested fraud tends to bring up hundreds of cases where real fraudsters have been arrested).
I've worked in an office where you get fired for doing stupid things. In particular, I've worked at an ISP where I'd be the one firing you for doing this particular stupid thing.
Then you haven't worked anywhere in Europe. Save for a few things (eg. gross misconduct), you can't sack somebody with zero notice and zero warnings.
You could argue that this comes under the heading of gross negligence, which may be something you can be summarily sacked for, but then the question arises - who was grossly negligent? The person who sent out such a spreadsheet or the person who specified a system which allowed such a spreadsheet to exist?
Things get even more complicated if after such a system comes into play, one or more people raise concerns about it with management.
Remember the bug finding is automated. There are only some classes of bugs that can be automatically found.
Except in this context there was a human being involved to whom launch authority was delegated (in a very heavily armoured bunker). The only thing that was automated was the delegation of launch authority.
I think it makes sense in a crazy kind of way - not that I think such weaponry is a good idea in the first place but I can understand the logic.
The hotheads they were defending against wasn't the US. It was their own generals.
Question: Let us assume that those at the top are a little jumpy. So jumpy, in fact, that it's probably a bad idea to give them loud alarm clocks. Now, MAD is all well and good but nobody wants to press the button first. How do you make sure you don't press the button first for fear that you're under attack when in fact it's nothing of the sort?
Well, one way would be to devise a system so that MAD was still possible even if they were all dead.
Hence Reagan's irresponsible spending and gloating lead to even more irresponsible spending and gloating in the USSR
In other words, it was a big game of "Let's see who runs out of money first! Loser is the one who runs out first".
With on one side: A bunch of communists who believe that money is the root of all evil
And on the other side: A bunch of free-market people who believe money makes the world go round.
Hmm, I wonder who would win that one?
No, you introduce gorillas. They thrive on snake meat.
I understand that there is a species of lizard that feasts on this grass. Maybe that is an option.
And the introduce Chinese Needle Snakes when you're overrun with lizards, yes?
There have been small battles and wars since time immemorial. In fact, I seriously doubt there has been a period of a decade at any point in the last two centuries where no first-world country was involved in a war of some sort.
Considering most money laundering processes can easily have an efficiency of only 10-20% (ie. you lose up to 80% of the money), I reckon losing 30-40% is a pretty sweet deal.
Yes we know. Hell, you could cobble together your own with cron and a few scripts easily enough.
But not a single Linux distribution I am aware of makes this quick and easy, and it is most certainly not something you can be reasonably confident is so widely deployed that finding help online (or for that matter your PHB finding a replacement when you move on) is going to be easy.
I don't know about top flight, but I can tell you this for nothing:
The industry is full of bottom-flight system admins. People who heard there was money in computing, people who got an MCSE through a company that "guarantees an MCSE in 3 weeks!!11", people who have all the experience that they should be great but still seem to be unable to do even the most basic tasks.
And a lot of employers can't tell the difference between these people and those who really do know what they're doing, even after they've hired them.
In what way is requiring firmware to be signed with a particular key not DRM?
Obviously I don't know how they managed the migration, but I'm looking at doing the same thing myself and I can see one glaringly obvious way how this could happen.
One of the migration mechanisms Google provide is you enable IMAP on your mail server and give them a CSV file listing IMAP usernames, the corresponding Google account username and IMAP passwords. Google's system then brings all the email across and puts it in the relevant accounts.
Of course, if the mechanism you use to generate the CSV file is slightly broken.....
What the FSCK! How lame is your college that it can't run an email system?
When you finally get out you might want to check and see if your diploma is signed.
Higher education is all about money these days. It's not so much "can they do it?" as "can they do it for anywhere near the same price?"
A highly available email system for any large organisation like a college pretty much means a SAN and a cluster of some sort, which immediately implies a fair bit of hardware and a hell of a lot of work to get everything tied together. Even using free software everywhere you can, the hardware costs money and so does the engineer time to set up and manage it.
Google, OTOH, will provide the whole lot free. Leaving more money in the budget for that ivory back scratcher.
(FWIW, I've recently looked into this for my employer and reached a similar conclusion. At the price Google charges, the level of reliability they are hypothetically able to offer, spam-filtering that actually works and the extra features that don't have a UI that makes people want to gouge out their own eyes, I can't provide this any cheaper than what Google do. Hell, my co-located secondary MX server costs more per year than Google for every single member of staff)