It's good that we have drivers that know a little bit about how autos work. They don't have to know cam lifter tolerances, and optimal cx ratios.
Microsoft's Registry is a travesty against humanity, and the source of endless madness.
My long argument says that it's ok for civilians to choose the discipline they desire. Some will gravitate towards technology. Others will not. Bully for freedom to choose a desired path while trying to struggle with the world.
If you're implying that Barack Obama is German, and perhaps Hitler-like, you've already succumbed to a rightist view that makes further discussion vastly more difficult. This man is no more Hitler than you are.
We disagree. Civilians will always be mainstream. You mistake your love and savvy with technology as what everyone should want. It will please you, but it's damn foolish and narcissistic to believe that.
Certainly we live in a more complex world, but although I love tomatoes, I'm not becoming a farmer. You can reapply this metaphor as many times as you want until you convince yourself it's true.
A mistake that geeks, coders, hackers, (I'm all) is that everyone is like us. They're absolutely not. Yes, coders and hackers often have tons of brainpower. That doesn't mean that everyone else does at all. Others have brainpower that's manifested in different disciplines, the arts, even in body-motive and they aren't going to make good technologists.
It's hubris to believe that people think like 'we' do. It's a HUGE mistake. Know them, and you'll understand. I like technology, but fuck technology. I have work to do, and if technology helps, so much the better. That I'm very good at it and can make a living at it is meaningless, if I'm irresponsible towards those who can't do what I do. Or don't want to.
Our paths of personal development are paralleled. I built crappy little truth table matrices on coffee cans before I hit puberty. BFD. I had a TV repair license at 16, ham at 17, FCC 1st Phone at 19, blah blah blah. Changes nothing. One of my best friends is a concert violinist and over the years has memorized untold number of works and can play them perfect from memory, beautifully. His wife can't play a note, but she can tell you very accurately how much an oriental rug is worth. The thread here is that both of them use their computer systems for some pretty sophisticated uses. And when they break, I get the call after they've exhausted their patience. That's ok. I love to listen to them, and in turn they watch in awe as I scrape their registry clean.
They have no interest in what a Registry is, and shouldn't need to know. On Microsoft's part, the Registry is an unbelievably bad idea that only recently has gotten protection from root object manipulation. They don't know the difference between root and a live hand grenade, and shouldn't have to.
There is a place where you can apply the same values to both open and closed source, in terms of professionalism, responsibility, and diligence. Some hacked projects are sucky code that somehow gets popular. Other are works of art. The motives of these projects can be myriad, but at some point, they get used by others.
The common denominator in whatever case is that techniques are used that protect the hapless, fools, and just plain civilian users of the apps and their data-- and allows them to use other apps alongside them where needed.
I get to see source to see how well done things are in one case, and not likely in the other, where I'm dependent on other organizations sense of property. The hapless, fools, and civilians have no clue about how to judge these things and should NEVER NEED TO. Quality is a responsibility. Some take that responsibility seriously and others don't for whatever reasons.
The denominator of quality in a lot of F/OSS is great. Some simply is not. The other portions of a product have to include reasonable docs/help/howtos for the masses, unless the target is for the advanced user, even coder. Half-assed code is still just that.
Linux-the-kernel is very well done and is professional, but is one major important component of a working service instance. The rest of those components are equally important from an availability perspective. Otherwise, I get a call: my (fill in this blank) isn't working. My personal decision then becomes: is this a charity case, or do I make money doing it? We go from there.
Teaching war can be a defense. There will be no peace until mothers tell their sons to abandon the wars of their fathers. All of them.
The fee Microsoft charges for MSDN is a pittance; that's not really an issue. Android is a different market altogether.
The telcos have their own dev market.
Oracle has its own dev market, as does Microsoft, VMWare, and dozens of others.
That doesn't mean I agree with what you have to do to get Microsoft's thunderstorm cloud, but to make it rain, you'll have to spend money and time somewhere. My preference would be in an open environment with lots of choices. But even LAMP is a committment choice-- it just has an open source concept that I personally like to live with. MSDN enforces a discipline that takes a different kind of investment with a different kind of developer and a different potential market.
There are lots of choices in this world; I'm not choosing this one for these and other reasons.
Then there's:The Congress shall have power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
And there's the perversion in IP law that SCOTUS might have to deal with. That's what I fear: new legislation, and the IP battle of titans to get software patents more deeply entrenched, or other business 'theory' concepts established in any way.
It's important to pick the right battles, that's for sure-- but this one already has years, and lots of money spent on it. Maybe it's not the right time for them to pursue it, we'll agree, but there's a lot invested here-- including those patents that summarily become invalidated should it be tested again. Only SCOTUS has the final say beyond a new law-- that's the thing to fear most. Big guns will cry in a bad economy, and get sympathetic ears. That frightens the hell out of me.
It's not a full victory, as mentioned. But it's a step in the direction of sanity versus a congress that's been overly influenced by the IP troll communities.
The victory seems solid, but SCOTUS has a different palette of judges to look at this with. We'll see if it becomes the law of the land or not, then, a few years from now should it be appealed-- and my guess is that it will be despite its strong tone.
If you're looking to save power, try using cpufreq on Linux, or power settings in Windows Server instead. If you simply shutdown everything by building policy, then have chron or schedular sync the file systems, then do a shut down at the chosen hour, then power them up ten minutes before the start of day (unless you have backups, reports, etc. to run
If the power cost doesn't make any difference, power them down 2x per quarter to blow the dust and crap out of them. Then keep them on if you're already green. Otherwise, power cycling is somewhat traumatic and in my belief shortens the life of disk drives more than anything else, then power supplies. Just my 2c.
If you ask me, and no one is, TrueCrypt is an excellent candidate for a business plan. My implementations have been clean and not scary at all, but I will admit to them being 1) small and 2) script-automated [my own].
If you're looking for an excuse not to protect the data, that's one thing. But TrueCrypt has lots of support and does a good job. PGP in general is well-known and has been refined frequently. That's the reason you don't find a lot of negative criticism-- there isn't any because it works fairly seemlessly. You'll find hard disk controllers don't help the process much, but if the machine does work in batches, and you backup frequently (presuming you're backing up an encrypted partition) and you use a UPS (or your controller supports battery-backed write cache), you can use various write cacheing driver options and techniques to boost performance dramatically. What write cacheing *can* do is to also cause transactional integrity problems if there's a machine hickup. Otherwise, writes are queued up and get batched onto disk. Performance can be 10x, so long as you understand the potential evils involved. It takes the sting out of the disk I/O degradation, but how much will vary with the duty cycles of your application's I/O profile.
could use maybe a pdf, but I'm thinking xml makes tracking data changes too difficult. So:
1) put the US budget proposals, including all the fat and pork online for one week before it gets a vote or passage 2) put all expenditures (except the dark stuff) online in lists that can be viewed; maybe streamed. 3) mandate all legislation gets to be downloaded for one week before it can be voted on, for public scrutiny 4) mandate all trade agreements, and all bi-lateral information is published for a week prior to signing 5) require a planned versus actual listing of all major budget expenditures, including all military expenditures
Wanna read something scary? Pick any one of the above.
You probably already do a large fraction of your work online. Nothing changed, they just called their competitive service to Amazon's, a cloud resource with a 'blue sky' sort of name. If you're server's in another city, you use a lights-out method of rebooting it. It gets a PxE or other kind of image, then goes from there. You're already doing cloud computing with Microsoft, whether you like it or not. Microsoft's behind in this game, along with dozens of other games that they're late to dinner with. The list is long and embarrassing for them.
The cloud already exists. Some of it's inside your data center. Maybe it's a virtualized server in Iceland (where they need the money right now, really badly) in a cheapo green NOC. Like most things Microsoft, it's not ready yet, but when it is, it'll resemble generic data centers across the planet.
Situational ethics can be difficult, we'll agree. Yet the obligations really don't waver. Anecdotally, the ethics appear to be pretty clear in this case. Common practices are sometimes useful to understand in such cases, and it would appear that the legality is also pretty clear as well.
I'm reminded of the old aphorism that says that wrestling with pigs will get you dirty, and the pig likes it.
One's first duty is familial protection, as you cite in your example, tilted as it is. How does one get out of that entrapment? The first viable road out is the best way. Documenting what's going on is useful, too, should litigation ensue. There's a bit of shield in doing this if he/she's a W2 employee, and not a 1099 contractor. If a contractor, then there's an assumption of liability, however IANAL.
While ethics seems to be aside from moral action, instead it's a derivative of morality. We use common/best practices to decide these, just as we use juries of peers in other areas. The standards used have to be comprised of all of the parties in a common denominator against these industry common/best practices to derive meaning. Otherwise, as you say, everyone has their own answer, and a million people will have as many answers; that's why ethical standards need apply here.
There are many answers, but the ones that fit best are the ones he/she has to live with. It would appear that the citation gives merit to the individual concern, and one shouldn't be enslaved to do what one considers evil. Does that mean that a CA pharmacist should sell an abortion pill if they believe that abortion is wrong? This has been tested in the courts, along with selling contraceptives, and so on. Clearly, a person has to live with themselves, but there may be a legal and seemingly moral reason for the contention. Ethics would hopefully supply the answer. Sometimes, it does not.
You can reject that, and start out immediately as a civil person at no penalty to you, and as an improvement to the rest of us. Yes, esprit de corps is at a terrible low, but if you join those that are trying to ally efforts to civility, you become an active, rather than accidental beneficiary.
It's not vanished. It's less easy to find unless you're expecting it. Expecting it seems to discipline giving it, too. It's kind of like love that way.
"When there are no negative consequences for doing the right thing, ethics is mostly a curiosity. Ethics exist to guide you when the right path isn't easy. And yes, you are personally responsible for your own ethical behavior, regardless of whether someone with a bigger paycheck -- or even someone who signs your paycheck -- says otherwise."
No, just because you don't get spanked doesn't mean that an ethical obligation can be ignored. Were that the case, civility would evaporate. The OP is in a tenuous position, and clearly feels the ethical breach at hand. Sleeping at night, and staying with one's own moral and ethical code takes courage. I'm hoping he/she finds a work around. Thieves are everywhere on the Internet, and scraping is just over the 'line' of cross-linking, which is nominally fair-use.
It's my opinion that if you don't want it linked, then say so or don't post/write the page. Scraping involves more issues related to copyright, which the OP says aren't involved. If they are, then it's a different legal story. Asking an employee to commit an illegal act is conspiracy. If the act has dubious or unclear ethical implications, then it needs to be documented (see above posts about throwing the boss under the wheels) and executed presuming the recourse is the corporation's, not the employee. If the employee is a contractor, then I'm guessing the contractor probably needs liability indemnification to proceed. IANAL.
Makes me wonder. I suppose as long as there's a human brain controlling that person's internal computer enhancements, it's the brain controlling the enhancements. After all, I can't shoot the robot's programmer.
It'll be interesting to see how fast Google reacts to this. Their quality assurance has been questioned recently in the light of GMail going down, oddities with Google Ads, and so on. With luck they'll become software heros, but they also risk a huge backlash if they don't pay attention to quality issues in the face of others that are trying.
He made many people rich. His shares mushroomed. His heirs are now rich. You can't take it with you. His shareholders did very well, just like Gates did. Both Gates and Walton are very strongly criticized for evil business practices, too. The example is to try and show that a CEO's job is to value his/her customers, and then his stockholders.
We agree on the need for more than two parties. However, that might be seditious thinking these days.
In terms of 1 - 3 tailored outfits, I'll relay the sentiments of a Fortune 500 female exec that I know. She does a ten day road trip visiting top clients with just two carry-ons, beginning to end, for roughly eight top-level meetings. Her spouse does it with just one.
Twenty-one outfits at $1000/ea is $21,000. Including shoes. How many female/. readers have a budget that comes even close to half that for professional clothing? This isn't a queen we're dressing, it's the Gov of Alaska, who presumably already had sufficient toggery.
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It's good that we have drivers that know a little bit about how autos work. They don't have to know cam lifter tolerances, and optimal cx ratios.
Microsoft's Registry is a travesty against humanity, and the source of endless madness.
My long argument says that it's ok for civilians to choose the discipline they desire. Some will gravitate towards technology. Others will not. Bully for freedom to choose a desired path while trying to struggle with the world.
If you're implying that Barack Obama is German, and perhaps Hitler-like, you've already succumbed to a rightist view that makes further discussion vastly more difficult. This man is no more Hitler than you are.
We disagree. Civilians will always be mainstream. You mistake your love and savvy with technology as what everyone should want. It will please you, but it's damn foolish and narcissistic to believe that.
Certainly we live in a more complex world, but although I love tomatoes, I'm not becoming a farmer. You can reapply this metaphor as many times as you want until you convince yourself it's true.
A mistake that geeks, coders, hackers, (I'm all) is that everyone is like us. They're absolutely not. Yes, coders and hackers often have tons of brainpower. That doesn't mean that everyone else does at all. Others have brainpower that's manifested in different disciplines, the arts, even in body-motive and they aren't going to make good technologists.
It's hubris to believe that people think like 'we' do. It's a HUGE mistake. Know them, and you'll understand. I like technology, but fuck technology. I have work to do, and if technology helps, so much the better. That I'm very good at it and can make a living at it is meaningless, if I'm irresponsible towards those who can't do what I do. Or don't want to.
Our paths of personal development are paralleled. I built crappy little truth table matrices on coffee cans before I hit puberty. BFD. I had a TV repair license at 16, ham at 17, FCC 1st Phone at 19, blah blah blah. Changes nothing. One of my best friends is a concert violinist and over the years has memorized untold number of works and can play them perfect from memory, beautifully. His wife can't play a note, but she can tell you very accurately how much an oriental rug is worth. The thread here is that both of them use their computer systems for some pretty sophisticated uses. And when they break, I get the call after they've exhausted their patience. That's ok. I love to listen to them, and in turn they watch in awe as I scrape their registry clean.
They have no interest in what a Registry is, and shouldn't need to know. On Microsoft's part, the Registry is an unbelievably bad idea that only recently has gotten protection from root object manipulation. They don't know the difference between root and a live hand grenade, and shouldn't have to.
There is a place where you can apply the same values to both open and closed source, in terms of professionalism, responsibility, and diligence. Some hacked projects are sucky code that somehow gets popular. Other are works of art. The motives of these projects can be myriad, but at some point, they get used by others.
The common denominator in whatever case is that techniques are used that protect the hapless, fools, and just plain civilian users of the apps and their data-- and allows them to use other apps alongside them where needed.
I get to see source to see how well done things are in one case, and not likely in the other, where I'm dependent on other organizations sense of property. The hapless, fools, and civilians have no clue about how to judge these things and should NEVER NEED TO. Quality is a responsibility. Some take that responsibility seriously and others don't for whatever reasons.
The denominator of quality in a lot of F/OSS is great. Some simply is not. The other portions of a product have to include reasonable docs/help/howtos for the masses, unless the target is for the advanced user, even coder. Half-assed code is still just that.
Linux-the-kernel is very well done and is professional, but is one major important component of a working service instance. The rest of those components are equally important from an availability perspective. Otherwise, I get a call: my (fill in this blank) isn't working. My personal decision then becomes: is this a charity case, or do I make money doing it? We go from there.
Teaching war can be a defense. There will be no peace until mothers tell their sons to abandon the wars of their fathers. All of them.
The fee Microsoft charges for MSDN is a pittance; that's not really an issue. Android is a different market altogether.
The telcos have their own dev market.
Oracle has its own dev market, as does Microsoft, VMWare, and dozens of others.
That doesn't mean I agree with what you have to do to get Microsoft's thunderstorm cloud, but to make it rain, you'll have to spend money and time somewhere. My preference would be in an open environment with lots of choices. But even LAMP is a committment choice-- it just has an open source concept that I personally like to live with. MSDN enforces a discipline that takes a different kind of investment with a different kind of developer and a different potential market.
There are lots of choices in this world; I'm not choosing this one for these and other reasons.
And somehow, the FCC remains silent. Joy.
We agree on 35 USC 101.
Then there's:The Congress shall have power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
And there's the perversion in IP law that SCOTUS might have to deal with. That's what I fear: new legislation, and the IP battle of titans to get software patents more deeply entrenched, or other business 'theory' concepts established in any way.
Why should there be one at all? Having even one would seem to violate lots of tenets and philosophies.
It's important to pick the right battles, that's for sure-- but this one already has years, and lots of money spent on it. Maybe it's not the right time for them to pursue it, we'll agree, but there's a lot invested here-- including those patents that summarily become invalidated should it be tested again. Only SCOTUS has the final say beyond a new law-- that's the thing to fear most. Big guns will cry in a bad economy, and get sympathetic ears. That frightens the hell out of me.
It's not a full victory, as mentioned. But it's a step in the direction of sanity versus a congress that's been overly influenced by the IP troll communities.
The victory seems solid, but SCOTUS has a different palette of judges to look at this with. We'll see if it becomes the law of the land or not, then, a few years from now should it be appealed-- and my guess is that it will be despite its strong tone.
If you're looking to save power, try using cpufreq on Linux, or power settings in Windows Server instead. If you simply shutdown everything by building policy, then have chron or schedular sync the file systems, then do a shut down at the chosen hour, then power them up ten minutes before the start of day (unless you have backups, reports, etc. to run
If the power cost doesn't make any difference, power them down 2x per quarter to blow the dust and crap out of them. Then keep them on if you're already green. Otherwise, power cycling is somewhat traumatic and in my belief shortens the life of disk drives more than anything else, then power supplies. Just my 2c.
If you ask me, and no one is, TrueCrypt is an excellent candidate for a business plan. My implementations have been clean and not scary at all, but I will admit to them being 1) small and 2) script-automated [my own].
I second that.
If you're looking for an excuse not to protect the data, that's one thing. But TrueCrypt has lots of support and does a good job. PGP in general is well-known and has been refined frequently. That's the reason you don't find a lot of negative criticism-- there isn't any because it works fairly seemlessly. You'll find hard disk controllers don't help the process much, but if the machine does work in batches, and you backup frequently (presuming you're backing up an encrypted partition) and you use a UPS (or your controller supports battery-backed write cache), you can use various write cacheing driver options and techniques to boost performance dramatically. What write cacheing *can* do is to also cause transactional integrity problems if there's a machine hickup. Otherwise, writes are queued up and get batched onto disk. Performance can be 10x, so long as you understand the potential evils involved. It takes the sting out of the disk I/O degradation, but how much will vary with the duty cycles of your application's I/O profile.
That's too simple.
And it doesn't reward anyone for the groundbreaking, keyboard-breaking work already done.
Not that's ok to just march in, seemingly (didn't) coopt a project, and march it on.
Oh, wait.....
could use maybe a pdf, but I'm thinking xml makes tracking data changes too difficult. So:
1) put the US budget proposals, including all the fat and pork online for one week before it gets a vote or passage
2) put all expenditures (except the dark stuff) online in lists that can be viewed; maybe streamed.
3) mandate all legislation gets to be downloaded for one week before it can be voted on, for public scrutiny
4) mandate all trade agreements, and all bi-lateral information is published for a week prior to signing
5) require a planned versus actual listing of all major budget expenditures, including all military expenditures
Wanna read something scary? Pick any one of the above.
You probably already do a large fraction of your work online. Nothing changed, they just called their competitive service to Amazon's, a cloud resource with a 'blue sky' sort of name. If you're server's in another city, you use a lights-out method of rebooting it. It gets a PxE or other kind of image, then goes from there. You're already doing cloud computing with Microsoft, whether you like it or not. Microsoft's behind in this game, along with dozens of other games that they're late to dinner with. The list is long and embarrassing for them.
The cloud already exists. Some of it's inside your data center. Maybe it's a virtualized server in Iceland (where they need the money right now, really badly) in a cheapo green NOC. Like most things Microsoft, it's not ready yet, but when it is, it'll resemble generic data centers across the planet.
Therefore: no big news. You can move along.
Situational ethics can be difficult, we'll agree. Yet the obligations really don't waver. Anecdotally, the ethics appear to be pretty clear in this case. Common practices are sometimes useful to understand in such cases, and it would appear that the legality is also pretty clear as well.
I'm reminded of the old aphorism that says that wrestling with pigs will get you dirty, and the pig likes it.
One's first duty is familial protection, as you cite in your example, tilted as it is. How does one get out of that entrapment? The first viable road out is the best way. Documenting what's going on is useful, too, should litigation ensue. There's a bit of shield in doing this if he/she's a W2 employee, and not a 1099 contractor. If a contractor, then there's an assumption of liability, however IANAL.
While ethics seems to be aside from moral action, instead it's a derivative of morality. We use common/best practices to decide these, just as we use juries of peers in other areas. The standards used have to be comprised of all of the parties in a common denominator against these industry common/best practices to derive meaning. Otherwise, as you say, everyone has their own answer, and a million people will have as many answers; that's why ethical standards need apply here.
There are many answers, but the ones that fit best are the ones he/she has to live with. It would appear that the citation gives merit to the individual concern, and one shouldn't be enslaved to do what one considers evil. Does that mean that a CA pharmacist should sell an abortion pill if they believe that abortion is wrong? This has been tested in the courts, along with selling contraceptives, and so on. Clearly, a person has to live with themselves, but there may be a legal and seemingly moral reason for the contention. Ethics would hopefully supply the answer. Sometimes, it does not.
Just because you disagree with the parent doesn't mean the post deserves 'troll'. It wasn't a flamebait, either.
You can reject that, and start out immediately as a civil person at no penalty to you, and as an improvement to the rest of us. Yes, esprit de corps is at a terrible low, but if you join those that are trying to ally efforts to civility, you become an active, rather than accidental beneficiary.
It's not vanished. It's less easy to find unless you're expecting it. Expecting it seems to discipline giving it, too. It's kind of like love that way.
We strenuously agree. Ethics aren't cheap; but they have to be abstracted from their motivational cost.
"When there are no negative consequences for doing the right thing, ethics is mostly a curiosity. Ethics exist to guide you when the right path isn't easy. And yes, you are personally responsible for your own ethical behavior, regardless of whether someone with a bigger paycheck -- or even someone who signs your paycheck -- says otherwise."
No, just because you don't get spanked doesn't mean that an ethical obligation can be ignored. Were that the case, civility would evaporate. The OP is in a tenuous position, and clearly feels the ethical breach at hand. Sleeping at night, and staying with one's own moral and ethical code takes courage. I'm hoping he/she finds a work around. Thieves are everywhere on the Internet, and scraping is just over the 'line' of cross-linking, which is nominally fair-use.
It's my opinion that if you don't want it linked, then say so or don't post/write the page. Scraping involves more issues related to copyright, which the OP says aren't involved. If they are, then it's a different legal story. Asking an employee to commit an illegal act is conspiracy. If the act has dubious or unclear ethical implications, then it needs to be documented (see above posts about throwing the boss under the wheels) and executed presuming the recourse is the corporation's, not the employee. If the employee is a contractor, then I'm guessing the contractor probably needs liability indemnification to proceed. IANAL.
Makes me wonder. I suppose as long as there's a human brain controlling that person's internal computer enhancements, it's the brain controlling the enhancements. After all, I can't shoot the robot's programmer.
It'll be interesting to see how fast Google reacts to this. Their quality assurance has been questioned recently in the light of GMail going down, oddities with Google Ads, and so on. With luck they'll become software heros, but they also risk a huge backlash if they don't pay attention to quality issues in the face of others that are trying.
I would never use a gun to shoot an animal or human for any reason.
But a robot-- there is no hesitation if it came to that. Indeed, one good potshot at an Intel robot deserves a full clip. AMD, I'm not so sure.
He made many people rich. His shares mushroomed. His heirs are now rich. You can't take it with you. His shareholders did very well, just like Gates did. Both Gates and Walton are very strongly criticized for evil business practices, too. The example is to try and show that a CEO's job is to value his/her customers, and then his stockholders.
We agree on the need for more than two parties. However, that might be seditious thinking these days.
In terms of 1 - 3 tailored outfits, I'll relay the sentiments of a Fortune 500 female exec that I know. She does a ten day road trip visiting top clients with just two carry-ons, beginning to end, for roughly eight top-level meetings. Her spouse does it with just one.
Twenty-one outfits at $1000/ea is $21,000. Including shoes. How many female /. readers have a budget that comes even close to half that for professional clothing? This isn't a queen we're dressing, it's the Gov of Alaska, who presumably already had sufficient toggery.