That's not difficult, as many countries are quite happy with you doing all the work in one country and having "head office" be a mailbox in a totally different country. Set up a new mailbox, fill in the relevant legal forms and abracadabra! Your company is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of another company in a tax haven.
Jersey's a common choice - if every company that claims to be "based" in Jersey actually had an office there, even if it was just a few square feet, I suspect the entire island would be one very large tower block.
And if they were so passive that they let their management demand that they release it on that day, they deserve to have to work over the weekend to fix it. Starting to see the pattern here?
It's a communications issue as much as anything.
Where you've got management that doesn't really understand what they're talking about, they often gauge how important something is by how worked up people get over it. When an engineer says "We shouldn't release something on a Friday immediately before a holiday weekend because if it goes wrong it'll ruin a lot of people's weekends", the manager may say "I'll take that chance. Do it."
When an engineer goes off on one about how releasing on a Friday is a Really Bad Idea, how it will result in chaos, destruction, dogs and cats living together - you'd be amazed the difference that makes.
They're not moving any data to public storage. This is a service that you essentially proxy all your Internet traffic through and you can then apply various rules to the traffic that goes through it to detect and block anything that looks like it shouldn't be there.
You've been able to buy appliances that do something like this for some time, the only difference here is that you don't get the appliance, you route your traffic over the provider's systems instead.
Easily dealt with - the contract states that "as part of this contract, you grant an irrevocable, perpetual, royalty-free license to any patents you develop while working for us".
That will reduce the load of the PTO massively all on its own.
Have you ever watched "Yes, Minister" or "Yes, Prime Minister"?
The one thing that no government department wants is for their workload to be reduced. If that were to happen, all the little empire builders would be in trouble - and seeing as the man at the top of each department (who may or may not be appointed by the political system) is almost certainly an empire builder in his own right, he won't allow that. Far better to keep the workload artificially high so you can constantly demand more staff.
Not true. They can safely exist in Europe. I guess he (and all pro-patent people) want all tech innovation to move to Europe. I'm fine with that.
Not necessarily true. While software cannot be patented under European law, the UK patent office (and, I suspect, many others in Europe) have been applying some creative interpretation to this for years, expecting the law to be "clarified" (read: "Clarified so that our interpretation stands") sooner or later - and that patents granted before the law is changed will be allowed to stand.
Many UK software firms are preparing themselves for this by patenting their work.
There's nothing wrong with disagreeing with Putin or Cheney, but to pretend they're laughing madly while formulating their next insane plot is to deny basic human nature - I strongly believe that even the most crazed power-hungry loonies are absolutely convinced that what they are doing is somehow for the greater good.
Nope. But the US has shown willingness to use the guns it has. Now explain to me again how this makes the US the "good guys" again.
The villain you see in Bond films stroking a white cat and saying "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die" doesn't really exist in real life. Not on a personal level, not on a national or international level. Everyone thinks they're the good guy, everyone thinks they're doing the right thing.
Hell, Osama bin Laden seemed pretty convinced that what he stood for was right. At the risk of invoking Godwin, as far as anyone can tell Hitler honestly thought that attempting to rid the world of the Jews was the right thing to do. And I bet you Kim Jong Il thinks he's doing a pretty damn good job of keeping his country well looked after.
Doing a quick Google search it appears CM/ECF is not compatible with Firefox 4, 5, or IE 9. Neveda is in a servre financial housing crises still and the government probably is using old versions of the software too as a result.
I wish people were not so self defensive and quick to blame, point fingers, or sue. Shit happens and maybe if we were not so harsh to judge others we would not be so self defensive. Just because some MBA professor is an a**hole does not mean everyone else should be one too. In other cultures outside of North America people do not act like that and life is much less stressful.
It's likely not some MBA professor making up the rule, certainly when I was at university it was drilled into us in no uncertain terms that university-wide policy was very clear - computer failure was NEVER an acceptable reason to ask for an extension or extenuating circumstances. You're a grown adult, you're meant to account for this sort of possibility and be able to come up with some sort of plan B.
I'm failing to grok this. My two year old Velociraptor can sustain something close to 138MB/s transfer with no tweaking (the speed needed to read 500GB in an hour).
Is there really no enterprise-level drive that can manage this...?
I'm hazarding a guess here, but I suspect that sustained transfer rate is for contiguous data - and even then it sounds a little high. As soon as you have to move the head to read the data (because large contiguous reads are really rare), you can expect to see the sustained rate plummet like a suicidal lemming.
Until such time as a major component fails, that is. The point of cloud hosting is that the system is designed so that's a non-issue.
(Of course, that assumes your provider has actually designed their systems to account for component failure. I can't count the number of companies that don't appear to have done so.)
Here's the thing, I don't even initially understand what they're trying to sell with that message. It takes a few seconds of thought to parse the words, but before that time my internal mental gibberish recognition filter has kicked in, and my brain is already saying "gibberish == spam, hit delete".
I suppose if someone is desperate to figure out every word that's emailed to them, they'd spend the time, but what kind of person responds?
I heard a rumour some time ago - don't know how true it is - that they aren't selling anything. The whole thing is essentially a big scam, which works like this:
Company advertises a "way to make money fast". What the victim is buying is an application to send bulk email, a list of email addresses and a list of companies willing to dropship generic viagra. The list of email addresses may or may not be any good, ditto the list of companies - I daresay many have already gone to the wall or aren't even prepared to acknowledge anyone asking them to dropship viagra.
Victim falls for it. Installs software and start sending out spam. They probably don't make any money at all; if they get any orders in those orders as likely as not aren't honoured by the dropshipper so they don't carry the business out for very long, but it's long enough for others to notice the spam and sure as eggs is eggs, at least one or two others think "My goodness, that must work or they wouldn't do it." People who think that are setting themselves up to be the next victim.
The only person making a profit is the person selling the bulk mail app and the list of email addresses
Canada and the EU (or at least the UK) have intelligence sharing treaties with the US so they can get access to the data but only if they ask and convince the local government first and it is in compliance with local law.
I wonder - how long does it take such a request to be processed and how often on average do they fail to convince the local government?
So what's the difference between this botnet data, an SSL connection to a bank, or an encrypted email/file?
The answer is you can't tell, and neither can the ISP.
Not strictly true, actually. IIRC it's already been shown that while SSL hides the content of the connection, it does a lousy job at hiding the protocol/likely payload; you can generally deduce this with remarkable accuracy by looking at the patterns the traffic follows.
For instance: Voice will have a more-or-less constant stream of small packets going in both directions, an interactive HTTP session will have bursts of data with packets of varying size in both directions, the total amount downloaded in each burst being up to a few hundred K at a time, a file being downloaded over HTTP will have a number of large packets in one direction and a constant stream of much smaller packets going in the other direction. It's a bit more sophisticated than this but AIUI that's the general gist.
It isn't 100% accurate, but for most practical purposes it's close enough.
I agree with all the Sharepoint stuff. And cloud hosted documents is not a one-size-fits-all... although I can see the benifit. But ignore all that. Just look at Exchange Hosting. A company I'm with is paying about $14/month per user for Exchange hosting with ActiveSync (for iphone syncing) and a "vast" limit of 150MB/user mailbox.
IIRC the licensing for companies wanting to run hosted exchange is quite dear - you got a bargain at $14/month, my guess is that the reason you had such a tight quota is because the only way the hosting company could make it work is by offering a cheap headline price then charging through the nose for an increased quota.
What this means, of course, is that anyone who went out and bought the necessary software licenses to offer hosted Exchange to their customers has been screwed because all of a sudden the product they are offering has to compete with something offered by Microsoft themselves that has three times the features for half the money.
Because a Microsoft sales drone took your CIO out golfing, then to a ritzy strip club? Or was that a trick question?
I would dearly love to know the origin of this idea that Microsoft have a battalion of salesmen who take CIOs out to strip clubs. As far as I can tell, they're total fiction.
They may have been true twenty years ago, but today Microsoft don't really need to. Quite enough CIOs take the "nobody got fired for buying Microsoft" approach that it'd be a pointless extravagance.
Myself, I lump the "Salesman with an expense account at Spearmint Rhino" in the same file as the "CEO whose kneejerk reaction whenever anything goes slightly awry is to fire everyone in sight" - something that may have happened occasionally, but for the most part owes more to folklore than fact.
It's my understanding - correct me if I'm wrong - that out of the box, Sharepoint brings very little to the table. Well, very little that you wouldn't already get with, say, Google Apps for Business.
What it does give you is an extremely capable platform on which you can develop your own business systems relatively easily.
(If I'm right, this would explain virtually every failed Sharepoint installation in history - it was put in by someone who thought they were buying a house when in actual fact they were buying several tons of bricks, concrete, joists and roof tiles).
Come on, this is only one step above the people who run eBay auctions advertising expensive items, describe the item in great detail then put in small writing at the bottom "please note you are buying a picture of the item, not the item itself". Would you not describe those as scams?
At least at the end of the article, the author discusses having enterprise releases and internal updates. But the kiddies running this show need to realize that the big boy adults (i.e. the enterprise) are going to be the ones that drive the significant majority of sites/work on the web. Just saying, "oh go away I don't want to deal with you" only leads us right back to supporting IE6.
I dunno, y'know.
See, I can't remember the last time I saw a site on the public Internet that demanded IE. But there are most definitely sites that are only available to corporates - maybe through a VPN, maybe through something as simple as HTTP authentication - that are IE only. I wouldn't describe them as the majority of sites by any means.
Yeah, I have no sympathy for IT or their severely myopic BS testing cycles. I don't think FF5 vs FF4 even shows up on their radar.
There's an extremely good reason for this - business drives IT, not the other way around.
What do I mean by this? I mean the IT department only really gets a say in how money and time is spent where it can explain a genuine business benefit. Otherwise it's very much at the beck and call of others within the business, who aren't going to change how something works because it inconveniences someone else.
"System N is getting on a bit" is not a genuine business benefit, and as such will never be taken seriously by any self-respecting manager.
"System N is getting on a bit and as a result is causing problems A, B and C." is not necessarily a business benefit. It may sound like one, but it's really an IT benefit.
"System N is getting on a bit and as a result is (costing more money than it needs to|impacting productivity|exposing the business to great risk) (delete as necessary)" - is substantially better, but I've yet to meet a senior manager who wants to do everything for himself - usually, s/he would much rather you come to him with a couple of possible solutions.
"System N is getting on a bit and as a result is (costing more money than it needs to|impacting productivity|exposing the business to great risk). We can resolve these issues by upgrading to System P, it's going to cost us £X in the first year, £Y in subsequent years and will (save|improve productivity by|reduce risk by) £Z over its expected lifespan. The risks involved in such an upgrade are A, B and C." is perfect.
I don't disagree with the notion that you shouldn't migrate to a new OS for the sake of migrating but licensing is complex. Migrating to save on licensing and maintenance fees is a legitimate cost savings measure especially if you reduce the number of CALs required.
Indeed, but it was a web application so with the right version of Windows Server there would be no need for CALs.
Slashdot Mirror
Most Linux kernel users today are probably modern television or set-top box users.
That's not difficult, as many countries are quite happy with you doing all the work in one country and having "head office" be a mailbox in a totally different country. Set up a new mailbox, fill in the relevant legal forms and abracadabra! Your company is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of another company in a tax haven.
Jersey's a common choice - if every company that claims to be "based" in Jersey actually had an office there, even if it was just a few square feet, I suspect the entire island would be one very large tower block.
And if they were so passive that they let their management demand that they release it on that day, they deserve to have to work over the weekend to fix it. Starting to see the pattern here?
It's a communications issue as much as anything.
Where you've got management that doesn't really understand what they're talking about, they often gauge how important something is by how worked up people get over it. When an engineer says "We shouldn't release something on a Friday immediately before a holiday weekend because if it goes wrong it'll ruin a lot of people's weekends", the manager may say "I'll take that chance. Do it."
When an engineer goes off on one about how releasing on a Friday is a Really Bad Idea, how it will result in chaos, destruction, dogs and cats living together - you'd be amazed the difference that makes.
They're not moving any data to public storage. This is a service that you essentially proxy all your Internet traffic through and you can then apply various rules to the traffic that goes through it to detect and block anything that looks like it shouldn't be there.
You've been able to buy appliances that do something like this for some time, the only difference here is that you don't get the appliance, you route your traffic over the provider's systems instead.
You can continue to license your patents to other people after you leave your employer?
But I can't see many businesses (who, lest we forget, are powerful lobbyists) going for it as it creates a conflict of interest for their staff.
Easily dealt with - the contract states that "as part of this contract, you grant an irrevocable, perpetual, royalty-free license to any patents you develop while working for us".
That will reduce the load of the PTO massively all on its own.
Have you ever watched "Yes, Minister" or "Yes, Prime Minister"?
The one thing that no government department wants is for their workload to be reduced. If that were to happen, all the little empire builders would be in trouble - and seeing as the man at the top of each department (who may or may not be appointed by the political system) is almost certainly an empire builder in his own right, he won't allow that. Far better to keep the workload artificially high so you can constantly demand more staff.
Not true. They can safely exist in Europe. I guess he (and all pro-patent people) want all tech innovation to move to Europe. I'm fine with that.
Not necessarily true. While software cannot be patented under European law, the UK patent office (and, I suspect, many others in Europe) have been applying some creative interpretation to this for years, expecting the law to be "clarified" (read: "Clarified so that our interpretation stands") sooner or later - and that patents granted before the law is changed will be allowed to stand.
Many UK software firms are preparing themselves for this by patenting their work.
I strongly disagree.
There's nothing wrong with disagreeing with Putin or Cheney, but to pretend they're laughing madly while formulating their next insane plot is to deny basic human nature - I strongly believe that even the most crazed power-hungry loonies are absolutely convinced that what they are doing is somehow for the greater good.
Nope. But the US has shown willingness to use the guns it has. Now explain to me again how this makes the US the "good guys" again.
The villain you see in Bond films stroking a white cat and saying "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die" doesn't really exist in real life. Not on a personal level, not on a national or international level. Everyone thinks they're the good guy, everyone thinks they're doing the right thing.
Hell, Osama bin Laden seemed pretty convinced that what he stood for was right. At the risk of invoking Godwin, as far as anyone can tell Hitler honestly thought that attempting to rid the world of the Jews was the right thing to do. And I bet you Kim Jong Il thinks he's doing a pretty damn good job of keeping his country well looked after.
Doing a quick Google search it appears CM/ECF is not compatible with Firefox 4, 5, or IE 9. Neveda is in a servre financial housing crises still and the government probably is using old versions of the software too as a result.
I wish people were not so self defensive and quick to blame, point fingers, or sue. Shit happens and maybe if we were not so harsh to judge others we would not be so self defensive. Just because some MBA professor is an a**hole does not mean everyone else should be one too. In other cultures outside of North America people do not act like that and life is much less stressful.
It's likely not some MBA professor making up the rule, certainly when I was at university it was drilled into us in no uncertain terms that university-wide policy was very clear - computer failure was NEVER an acceptable reason to ask for an extension or extenuating circumstances. You're a grown adult, you're meant to account for this sort of possibility and be able to come up with some sort of plan B.
I'm failing to grok this. My two year old Velociraptor can sustain something close to 138MB/s transfer with no tweaking (the speed needed to read 500GB in an hour).
Is there really no enterprise-level drive that can manage this...?
I'm hazarding a guess here, but I suspect that sustained transfer rate is for contiguous data - and even then it sounds a little high. As soon as you have to move the head to read the data (because large contiguous reads are really rare), you can expect to see the sustained rate plummet like a suicidal lemming.
Until such time as a major component fails, that is. The point of cloud hosting is that the system is designed so that's a non-issue.
(Of course, that assumes your provider has actually designed their systems to account for component failure. I can't count the number of companies that don't appear to have done so.)
And somehow it doesn't have the normal cisco price tag.
Care to bet on that? According to TFA:
"Cisco will sell it along with related services and infrastructure"
Who wants to bet that the management tools will cost more?
Here's the thing, I don't even initially understand what they're trying to sell with that message. It takes a few seconds of thought to parse the words, but before that time my internal mental gibberish recognition filter has kicked in, and my brain is already saying "gibberish == spam, hit delete".
I suppose if someone is desperate to figure out every word that's emailed to them, they'd spend the time, but what kind of person responds?
I heard a rumour some time ago - don't know how true it is - that they aren't selling anything. The whole thing is essentially a big scam, which works like this:
(Seriously, slashcode? No ordered list support?)
Canada and the EU (or at least the UK) have intelligence sharing treaties with the US so they can get access to the data but only if they ask and convince the local government first and it is in compliance with local law.
I wonder - how long does it take such a request to be processed and how often on average do they fail to convince the local government?
So what's the difference between this botnet data, an SSL connection to a bank, or an encrypted email/file?
The answer is you can't tell, and neither can the ISP.
Not strictly true, actually. IIRC it's already been shown that while SSL hides the content of the connection, it does a lousy job at hiding the protocol/likely payload; you can generally deduce this with remarkable accuracy by looking at the patterns the traffic follows.
For instance: Voice will have a more-or-less constant stream of small packets going in both directions, an interactive HTTP session will have bursts of data with packets of varying size in both directions, the total amount downloaded in each burst being up to a few hundred K at a time, a file being downloaded over HTTP will have a number of large packets in one direction and a constant stream of much smaller packets going in the other direction. It's a bit more sophisticated than this but AIUI that's the general gist.
It isn't 100% accurate, but for most practical purposes it's close enough.
I agree with all the Sharepoint stuff. And cloud hosted documents is not a one-size-fits-all ... although I can see the benifit.
But ignore all that. Just look at Exchange Hosting. A company I'm with is paying about $14/month per user for Exchange hosting with ActiveSync (for iphone syncing) and a "vast" limit of 150MB/user mailbox.
IIRC the licensing for companies wanting to run hosted exchange is quite dear - you got a bargain at $14/month, my guess is that the reason you had such a tight quota is because the only way the hosting company could make it work is by offering a cheap headline price then charging through the nose for an increased quota.
What this means, of course, is that anyone who went out and bought the necessary software licenses to offer hosted Exchange to their customers has been screwed because all of a sudden the product they are offering has to compete with something offered by Microsoft themselves that has three times the features for half the money.
Because a Microsoft sales drone took your CIO out golfing, then to a ritzy strip club? Or was that a trick question?
I would dearly love to know the origin of this idea that Microsoft have a battalion of salesmen who take CIOs out to strip clubs. As far as I can tell, they're total fiction.
They may have been true twenty years ago, but today Microsoft don't really need to. Quite enough CIOs take the "nobody got fired for buying Microsoft" approach that it'd be a pointless extravagance.
Myself, I lump the "Salesman with an expense account at Spearmint Rhino" in the same file as the "CEO whose kneejerk reaction whenever anything goes slightly awry is to fire everyone in sight" - something that may have happened occasionally, but for the most part owes more to folklore than fact.
It's my understanding - correct me if I'm wrong - that out of the box, Sharepoint brings very little to the table. Well, very little that you wouldn't already get with, say, Google Apps for Business.
What it does give you is an extremely capable platform on which you can develop your own business systems relatively easily.
(If I'm right, this would explain virtually every failed Sharepoint installation in history - it was put in by someone who thought they were buying a house when in actual fact they were buying several tons of bricks, concrete, joists and roof tiles).
I think it fairly unlikely he'll breed them in the first place.
Come on, this is only one step above the people who run eBay auctions advertising expensive items, describe the item in great detail then put in small writing at the bottom "please note you are buying a picture of the item, not the item itself". Would you not describe those as scams?
At least at the end of the article, the author discusses having enterprise releases and internal updates. But the kiddies running this show need to realize that the big boy adults (i.e. the enterprise) are going to be the ones that drive the significant majority of sites/work on the web. Just saying, "oh go away I don't want to deal with you" only leads us right back to supporting IE6.
I dunno, y'know.
See, I can't remember the last time I saw a site on the public Internet that demanded IE. But there are most definitely sites that are only available to corporates - maybe through a VPN, maybe through something as simple as HTTP authentication - that are IE only. I wouldn't describe them as the majority of sites by any means.
Yeah, I have no sympathy for IT or their severely myopic BS testing cycles. I don't think FF5 vs FF4 even shows up on their radar.
There's an extremely good reason for this - business drives IT, not the other way around.
What do I mean by this? I mean the IT department only really gets a say in how money and time is spent where it can explain a genuine business benefit. Otherwise it's very much at the beck and call of others within the business, who aren't going to change how something works because it inconveniences someone else.
"System N is getting on a bit" is not a genuine business benefit, and as such will never be taken seriously by any self-respecting manager.
"System N is getting on a bit and as a result is causing problems A, B and C." is not necessarily a business benefit. It may sound like one, but it's really an IT benefit.
"System N is getting on a bit and as a result is (costing more money than it needs to|impacting productivity|exposing the business to great risk) (delete as necessary)" - is substantially better, but I've yet to meet a senior manager who wants to do everything for himself - usually, s/he would much rather you come to him with a couple of possible solutions.
"System N is getting on a bit and as a result is (costing more money than it needs to|impacting productivity|exposing the business to great risk). We can resolve these issues by upgrading to System P, it's going to cost us £X in the first year, £Y in subsequent years and will (save|improve productivity by|reduce risk by) £Z over its expected lifespan. The risks involved in such an upgrade are A, B and C." is perfect.
I don't disagree with the notion that you shouldn't migrate to a new OS for the sake of migrating but licensing is complex. Migrating to save on licensing and maintenance fees is a legitimate cost savings measure especially if you reduce the number of CALs required.
Indeed, but it was a web application so with the right version of Windows Server there would be no need for CALs.