The business schools, to a certain extent, teach managers to cut themselves off from the details of operations, to abstract the operations of a company to a certain number of parameters. I am arguing that this is not a good methodology, and will not usually lead to an agile and innovative company.
I agree, and just to tie this back in: techies often also cut themselves off from the details of operation under the justification of "I'm just the IT guy. I make the computers run, but don't want to deal with the business stuff."
When I was first hired to the company I work for, I looked around and immediately identified 20 things (making the number up just for the sake of discussion) that the company was doing which seemed absolutely retarded to me. These things weren't IT decisions, but they immediately popped out as, "why do they have people doing this work when a computer could do it in 1/100th of the time?"
I asked the director of operations about some of these things, and he said (I'm paraphrasing), "I understand you're just a computer guy and couldn't possibly understand how all these things work, but we absolutely have to do things this way. Having the computers do these things won't work." I accepted that I didn't understand the company well enough to argue with him, and I shut up.
So I spent my first year working there learning all about the company. I talked to almost everyone who worked there about their job, what they did, and why they did it that way. Not only did I learn from the individual employees why they followed the procedures that they did, but I talked to management about how they viewed their business and what their strategies were.
After a year of learning, I was able to work with management to redesign a lot of their operations. It turned out that of the 20 things that I thought were retarded, only 7 were actually retarded. Of the other 13, it was absolutely necessary to do 5 of those the "retarded" way that they had been doing it. The remaining 8 couldn't be done the way that I had imagined when I first joined the company, but could be done much more efficiently than how they had been doing things.
We all worked together to revise our workflow and in the end made the company much more efficient. I wouldn't have been able to be so helpful if I hadn't learned the existing processes in great detail.
Yeah, the real difficulty is in presenting, "This is what your business would be like without the current IT setup."
Yeah, well part of the difficulty in making the value of the IT department understood is that when everything is working properly, it seems transparent. When the mail server just keeps running and running without any problems, people sometimes get the idea that mail servers set themselves up and will always continue running without problems until they're disturbed. When everyone's desktop machine is always up and running, it sure looks like the IT department isn't doing any work. They aren't running around fixing things, so they must not be doing anything useful to the company.
It's only when the IT department goes away that its value starts to present itself. Eventually you find out that the mail server is broken, half the staff can't run anything on their computers because of virus infections, and for some reason the Internet isn't working.
One of the questions companies should ask themselves when evaluating their IT departments is, "How well can my business run without any computers or Internet access?" Also, you should understand that the whole computer revolution hasn't stopped. If your business is right now completely dependent on computer technology developed in the past 10 years, then there's a decent chance that in 10 years your business will be dependent on some technology that hasn't even been developed yet. You need your IT people to help you keep up.
By the way, most of the time people seem to assume doing the whole integrated thing will automatically be more productive and satisfying.
Well I think more generally it's a mistake to believe that implementing a new system or organizational structure will suddenly make things work perfectly. That's part of the mistake for the "traditional model", too. It's like, "Oh, if we treat the IT department as though it were an outside business which services us, it would suddenly become completely simple to evaluate the costs and benefits of IT, the IT department will become simple to manage, and the IT department will become as efficient as it could possibly be!"
Running a business is difficult. There isn't a set of rules that you can follow that will make everything work out well. Comprehending all of the true costs and benefits of a thing is hard, and there isn't a magic equation that will always give you a complete sense of what things are worth. Good management takes work, knowledge, experience, and even a little wisdom, and even the best managers will still have problems keeping things running smoothly. Stop looking for a magic bullet.
I also don't understand why he thinks that artists 'need' record labels. What they 'need' is to grow organically...
Well I'm sure that at least part of the problem is that you "need" the labels because the labels exist. Ok, that's a weird way of putting it, but here's the thing: to some extent, industries also need to grow organically. They need to develop business models and trade organizations and conventional ways of doing things and bla bla bla. Right now, record labels are filling that void, and we won't develop real alternatives until there's nothing filling that void.
Imagine your a musician. You're not a businessman. You don't want to be a businessman. You don't want to have to figure out international distribution deals, which deal with different laws across hundreds of countries. You don't want to have to figure out how to get yourself on the radio and on MTV (oh, wait... MTV doesn't have music anymore... well, whatever the modern equivalent is of MTV). You just want to play your music and let someone else figure that stuff out. Maybe you have a manager, but that's still a lot of work for one person. You don't have the money to hire a team of people, or at least you don't yet. Who figures out your pathways into those things?
Sure, you have the option of simply living without that stuff, but if you want that stuff, the labels still hold the keys to the kingdom. Sometime in the future, if running a record label ceases to be profitable and they all go out of business, some other businesses or organizations will step up to the plate.
Also maybe it increases your chances of death by heart attack so much because it also drastically decreases your chances of dying from anything else. For every hour you're sitting at home watching TV, that's an hour that you won't be in a car accident, aren't involved in a gunfight, and won't catch an STD from unprotected sex.
Abandoning the concept of IT being a business relegates it to what... a hobby?
Well it's abandoning the concept of IT as a separate business. I've seen it in several companies to various degrees, where the management treats IT as a totally separate company that provides a well-defined service, even when it's an internal IT staff. It's like, "these are just the people we hire to buy our computers and install them," and that's it.
Of course, that's fine if your company could not be made more efficient through appropriate use of computers, or else if the people in your company are computer savvy enough to always make best use of your computers. Otherwise, it might be beneficial to have your IT staff more tightly integrated with your operations. In this way of looking at things, your IT department doesn't cease to be a business. It's just that the IT department truly becomes part of your business.
I've said this many times before: As an IT guy, it doesn't offend me if you think of IT guys as janitors. It bothers me more to think that you don't respect your janitors.
No, neither IT nor janitors directly bring in revenue. Generally management doesn't bring in revenue either. In a certain sense, developers don't even bring in revenue. The only people who bring in revenue are sales people, and everyone else costs money. But you can't have a business with all salesmen and no product, can you?
Try running your business without your janitors and see how much revenue you bring in. Bring a client into a meeting where trash is all over the ground and the entire office smelling like someone took a dump under the front desk. Keep your employees from quitting when the bathrooms haven't been cleaned in 5 years. It's true that janitors don't produce revenue, but only enable developers to do their jobs, but developers only enable salesmen to do their job by giving them a product to sell.
But then again, salesmen only enable developers to do their jobs by finding someone to buy the software the developers create. And they're all getting paid from income to the company that wouldn't exist if not for the janitors. Janitors get paid little enough in money; the least we can do is pay them a little in respect.
IT is a service, a service that makes your business run better. And the better that service is shaped to your business, the more adapted to how you work, the more efficiently your business operates.
But I think part of the point here is that IT and "your business" aren't really that separable. Not only can your business be more efficient by shaping IT to it, but sometimes you have to shape your business based on what efficiencies can be gained through IT.
Yes, it depends on the business. Still, for many businesses, if you think of IT as a service that is provided to you so that you can continue doing business-as-usual, then you might be missing out on a lot of the benefits IT can provide. Computers and the Internet can provide a lot of increases in efficiency, but in order to attain those increases you need your business people to be computer savvy and your IT people to be business savvy.
Yeah, I stumbled across that passage too, but you can understand what he's getting at if you strip out the buzzwords. What he's pointing out is that there's this mode of dealing with IT where businesses make requests on IT like, "Make a web app that do exactly this," and then the IT department goes about producing those regardless of whether it's the best solution to the problem. The IT department doesn't necessarily ever learn what it is that the business is trying to accomplish; all the IT department does is follow orders as though they're independent contractors and the rest of the business is a customer.
What he's suggesting instead is that the IT department takes the time to learn what it is that the business is trying to do and why and is involved in business discussions. From there, IT is in a position to help develop the business processes to be more efficient. If the IT management is working more directly with the other managers, then when the managers say, "I want a web app that does exactly this," then IT can say, "Actually you don't. I know exactly what you're trying to do, but because I know more about computers than you do, I know that the web app you're suggesting isn't the best solution. It would be better if we could do [whatever-- insert appropriate buzzwords here]. Then we could get all the benefits from the web app you propose, but it would be more efficient and easier to maintain."
Basically what he's pointing out is that computers have become so central to the operations of many businesses that you can't have business decisions and IT decisions made by two separate management teams that aren't really talking to each other. You have to try to make IT a full member of the team, and not an in-house outside contractor.
He lacked both detailed knowledge of production methods, and had a poor understanding of scientific principles. Under the ideology of business school, this person's management skills should have been directly transferrable between many different fields. The reality on the ground was quite different
I think this really gets at the point of the article, and it seems to me like a lot of people are missing it. The point is that IT often isn't a service that can be offered uniformly between different businesses in different industries. At the level of a helpdesk tech running around servicing desktop computers, yes, he can probably switch from one industry to another without too much extra learning. However, when you get into IT management, you can't just know IT stuff an operate independently from the rest of the company.
Part of the problem is with treating IT as an independent business servicing your business (or actually outsourcing) is that the non-IT part of the business often doesn't know what it really wants from IT. In short, if they knew enough about IT to know what to ask for, then they wouldn't need the IT department.
If you're running a business and aren't much of a computer expert, then you don't necessarily know what computers can do for your business. You don't know what parts of your business processes can be controlled and audited automatically by computers, and which ones can't. You need the IT people to learn your business and be part of it so that they understand the ins and outs of your process, and then they can tell you how to best use computers to maximize productivity.
I think that's the message the article is trying to put out. The article blames companies that have pushed outsourcing as a solution, since they have something to gain from convincing people that IT should operate independently. There may be some truth to that, but I've seen a different culprit. I think part of the problem is that the IT department is sometimes too quick to take the attitude of, "I just want to fix your computer and ignore all that business stuff," while the MBAs think, "Those IT guys are so wrapped up in their computers that they can't be trusted with business decisions."
The ease of copying things digitally doesn't negate the need for copyrights.
I'm sorry, but geeze, did you even read my post? Seriously?
I didn't say it negated the need for copyrights. I said copyright law needed to be updated to deal with these issues. Even if you think the answer is better enforcement and better DRM, that raises a whole lot of issues. Are the current laws sufficient to enforce copyrights in the digital age? Are the current laws enough to protect DRM schemes?
On the other side of things, are the current laws enough to protect consumers from overly-restrictive DRM? Often the licensing terms on digital content are so one-sided that the store can simply deny you access to content you've bought without any justification. Is that fair?
Now we might not agree on what the best solution was, but my post didn't even get into that. My only point was that it's complicated. It's more complicated than people here tend to acknowledge.
As for licensing, that's entirely a different topic all together and outside the scope of my original post.
Licensing is an essential part of the difference between digital copies and physical copies. How could it be outside of the scope of this discussion? If I loan a physical copy and the person xeroxes the book, then people would generally agree that I didn't commit copyright infringement because I only loaned the book. However, if I "loan" someone a digital copy and they "return it" but they retain a copy, then many people would say that I did commit copyright infringement.
Part of the difference is that our concept of content ownership in the digital age has changed. In the past, when you bought a book, you bought a particular copy. Today, when we buy an MP3, we don't think of it as buying that particular copy. We think of it as buying the right to own a copy for our own personal use. These are different ideas. The difference comes down the purchasing a copy vs. purchasing a license.
No, it's not the same. The way I see it, you have a good point, but TheRaven64 has a good point too. There is some kind of disconnect going on.
The concept of "copyrights" makes perfect sense in a world post-printing-press and pre-Internet. Before the printing press, copyrights were completely unnecessary. After the Internet, copyrights become problematic-- not nonsensical, just problematic. These works are constantly being "copied" in that they're cached, stored on several devices, backed up, etc. The idea of "selling a copy" that made so much sense 20 years ago doesn't work anymore. Now we have to sell "licenses", and that gets pretty hairy.
The point I try to make in these discussions is that it's just not as simple as "copyright is good" or "copyright is evil". Copyright was an invention, not an innate right. It was invented during a specific historical period in the hopes of achieving certain goals. However, inventions sometimes need to be updated and sometimes go entirely obsolete. We don't calculate using abacuses anymore. We don't start our cars with cranks. Somehow or another, the invention of the "copyright" needs to be updated in a way that achieves its intended goals, given the realities of our current historical period.
So while you may only observe that two people downloaded your copy, you can't tell how many people downloaded copies originating from those 2 downloads...
When I loan a book to 10 people, I don't necessarily know how many people they loan the book to. I don't even know if someone copied the whole book and distributed it.
Anyway copyright laws weren't intended to place limits on who could read books, so there's nothing wrong if I lend the book out to hundreds or thousands of people. They were intended to protect authors from publishers as well as protecting publishers from other publishers.
To me, this raises a more interesting issue: where would you be if you didn't have the library when you were younger? How would it have shaped your life to not-have access to books at a young age? Maybe you wouldn't be able to afford them now.
It's in society's best interest to make books and educational materials as available as possible. That's why we have libraries in the first place. That relatively small investment in getting little TheWizardTim access to books has now turned him into a successful [whatever-you-are], which provides a huge return on investment.
We may someday see arguments that stricter copyrights are good for the economy because it allows more profits for publishers. What we shouldn't forget to include in those calculations is all the economic waste of having little TheWizardTims everywhere grow up to be poor stupid criminals instead of upstanding and productive members of society.
The serious idea embedded in the joke is that, aside from playing video, I don't want to view any of the content that's currently being displayed in Flash. Video should be done with HTML5, and then Flash is completely useless. I like the idea of getting rid of the Flash plugin, but even more I like the idea of not seeing any of the content people use Flash to display.
Also standardize ebooks. Part of the reason I don't get into ebooks is that if I buy a Kindle, then I'm stuck with a Kindle. I have no reason to believe that if I buy a Nook v2 in 2 years that I'll be able to read the books I bought on my Kindle.
This is a problem caused largely by DRM, but I'm not trying to get into an ant-DRM rant. (I could. I'm anti-DRM.) My point is that this is a real problem that prevents me from buying ebooks. If I buy a paperback book for $10, I know I can keep it for 20 years, loan it, or even give it away to a friend. If I buy an ebook for $10, I might not be able to get access to it in a couple years. The paperback is a better product in my opinion.
Often they don't bother mentioning how this multi-person readership happens, but it doesn't take much questioning to learn: libraries.
I'm sure that's not the only way it happens. I often buy books, read them, and loan them or give them away to others. I like doing that, and it's part of the reason I buy books. In fact, it's entirely possible that I'd stop buying books if I weren't able to do that. I like to read, but the joy of reading is inhibited by not being able to share.
That might sound crazy, but a lot of what I enjoy about reading is talking to others who have read the book. Sometimes they way I find someone else who has read the book is to create one by getting someone else to read the book. It's much easier to get someone to read a book if you can give them a copy. Ergo, I'd be less likely to buy a book if I couldn't share.
That's not to say I wouldn't read things. I'd just direct more attention towards things I could read online for free. And then I'd send links to people, get them to read it, and create a discussion that way.
I'm not sure what to think. I love the idea of not needing to install Flash, but I also like being able to block annoying animations by not installing Flash.
I think overall, this isn't where things should head. It'd be much better if Flash were to simply work by exporting valid HTML5, CSS, and Javascript. Maybe there are some other advantages to the SWF format, but I'm not aware of them.
I think you may have missed my point. Of course Android is a serious competitor to the iPhone, and of course having similar features makes it a more threating competitor. The iPhone would be much safer if the iPhone had Google Maps and Android-based phones didn't.
However, people seem to be trying to argue that, because the iPhone's competitors are using Google, Apple would be better off not using Google so that they can set themselves apart and offer something different. That position doesn't make a lot of sense unless that "something different" is actually better than Google. If it is not better than Google, then they'll be hurting themselves by switching away from Google.
So that's all I was saying there. Sure, there are other reasons why a person might want to buy a Droid or Nexus One instead of the iPhone. Price, however, probably isn't a big determining factor. The 16GB iPhone and 16GB Droid are the same price ($199) with 2-year contracts. I saw the Nexus One advertised for $179 with the contract, but I don't know how much storage is included.
Perhaps you should take a look at what the bulk of say TV shows are available in for download from "fill in your source" here. AVI
Ok, I'm going to "fill in my source" with the only source I can think of that provides legal purchasing of TV shows: iTunes. Whoa, look what happens; turns out the bulk of the TV shows are h264.
We shouldn't be stuck with legacy formats just because pirates don't know what they're doing.
Is a standard definition TV set obsolete?
I certainly wouldn't buy a new standard definition TV from Best Buy. Flat panel HDTVs are much better and plenty cheap enough.
Am I supposed to throw out my DVD players that can play AVI out and buy new ones because the Handbrake guys say so.
No, but if you're writing movies to DVD in AVI format in order to play them on your TV, then you're already behind the curve. Sure, if you want to stick with old ways of doing things, you're free to do that. No one is going to complain if you want to watch TV on a black and white TV from 1970 or if you want to listen to vinyl on a record player. Hell, you can play your old 8 track tapes for as long as they'll hold up. I don't mind. Just don't expect the rest of society to stop progress in its tracks in order to support that old stuff.
Bittorrent is right now used a lot for illegal files.
This is very tangential to what you're talking about, but I'd still like to point out that Bittorrent is right now used for a lot of legal files too. FTP is used to transfer both illegal files and legal files. HTTP and NNTP too. It doesn't make sense to blame the protocol.
Make that port/application/end-point and I'll agree.
I would actually sooner give in on letting ISPs throttle ports/applications than endpoints. If Verizon wants to do some kind of traffic-shaping which prioritizes HTTP and VOIP over bittorrent, that at least seems like it might be reasonable. I think it should be prioritization rather than straight-up throttling, but certain kinds of communications are less tolerant to lag than others. However, what I *don't* think is fair is for Verizon to give special priority to their own services and their partner's services.
The issue, in my mind, comes down to the monopoly/duopoly that the phone company and cable company have over the infrastructure coming into homes and businesses. My company has absolutely no choice but to use Verizon for our Internet access. Verizon should not be able to use this position to restrict our choices in VOIP providers.
Really, most things which should be encrypted - are.
First, I'll tell you that I don't think that's true. Even in the past few years, I've seen a ridiculous amount of confidential/sensitive/secure information pass over the Internet via unencrypted channels. A lot of people still use FTP and send sensitive information via email without any additional protection. Perhaps you're encrypting everything you should be, but many people aren't.
But even if it were the case, the idea that we should only encrypt the things "which should be encrypted" is problematic too. I'm posting my response here, but I mean to respond to all the people who are saying encryption is generally unnecessary. I'm not saying it's wrong; you may be 100% right that "There's no reason to push encryption everywhere," but it's not so simple; there are also drawbacks to this approach.
The first drawback is perhaps a little paranoid, but it's a little simpler to wrap your head around: by only encrypting sensitive information, you're giving potential attackers a clear target. Metaphorically, if you're trying to protect a bunch of solid gold needles, it may be better to hide them in a haystack rather than in a locked box with the words "SOLID GOLD NEEDLES" printed on the side. Relying on "security through obscurity" alone is a bad idea, but that doesn't mean that you want to share more information with your attackers than you need to.
The second (potential) problem with your line of thinking becomes clear if you translate it into real-world terms: "I have all my valuables locked in a safe in my bedroom, so there's no point in locking my house. After all, there's no point in pushing locks everywhere, especially if it's going to make people think that everything is safe just because it's locked." See some problems here? No, the lock on my house doesn't do much to stop a determined and skilled thief, and most people don't want steal my non-valuable stuff. On the other hand, we don't think it's too silly to want to employ a basic level of security for our physical property. (It may be worth noting, however, that there are people who believe it's a shame that we all lock our houses. I've known people in small towns who don't lock their houses.)
The third possible problem is much more vague and perhaps paranoid, but I believe it's still worth considering: we don't really know what the value is of the information being passed around unencrypted. I'm not talking about people accidentally posting something sensitive through unencrypted channels (though obviously that's a potential problem); I'm talking about people posting seemingly harmless information that may still be useful for nefarious purposes.
Again, I'd like to take this back to real-world terms. Imagine a thief wants to steal something very valuable from me, and there's only one place that I go where there's any security. It's a very secure room with an unpickable lock, and because this is the only secured location, I've already given him a pretty good idea where my valuables are hidden. How can he get in?
Well he doesn't have to pick the lock if he can pick my coat pocket and get the key. He doesn't need to pick my pocket if he can get me to take off my coat. He doesn't need to get me to take off my coat if he has access to the closet where I store my coat. Basically, he doesn't need to confront my security measures head-on, he just needs to find the weakest point and exploit it.
So let's go back to computer security. Let's say I want access to your bank account. I don't need your password if I know the answers to your secret questions. What's your mother's maiden name? Well, I can read your email, and I see there's an email to a guy named "John Smith" where you call him "Grandpa". Since your last name isn't Smith, it's a pretty good guess that your mom's maiden is Smith.
I know, in real-world cases hacking a bank account isn't quite that simple, but I only mean to illustrate how seemingly inn
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The business schools, to a certain extent, teach managers to cut themselves off from the details of operations, to abstract the operations of a company to a certain number of parameters. I am arguing that this is not a good methodology, and will not usually lead to an agile and innovative company.
I agree, and just to tie this back in: techies often also cut themselves off from the details of operation under the justification of "I'm just the IT guy. I make the computers run, but don't want to deal with the business stuff."
When I was first hired to the company I work for, I looked around and immediately identified 20 things (making the number up just for the sake of discussion) that the company was doing which seemed absolutely retarded to me. These things weren't IT decisions, but they immediately popped out as, "why do they have people doing this work when a computer could do it in 1/100th of the time?"
I asked the director of operations about some of these things, and he said (I'm paraphrasing), "I understand you're just a computer guy and couldn't possibly understand how all these things work, but we absolutely have to do things this way. Having the computers do these things won't work." I accepted that I didn't understand the company well enough to argue with him, and I shut up.
So I spent my first year working there learning all about the company. I talked to almost everyone who worked there about their job, what they did, and why they did it that way. Not only did I learn from the individual employees why they followed the procedures that they did, but I talked to management about how they viewed their business and what their strategies were.
After a year of learning, I was able to work with management to redesign a lot of their operations. It turned out that of the 20 things that I thought were retarded, only 7 were actually retarded. Of the other 13, it was absolutely necessary to do 5 of those the "retarded" way that they had been doing it. The remaining 8 couldn't be done the way that I had imagined when I first joined the company, but could be done much more efficiently than how they had been doing things.
We all worked together to revise our workflow and in the end made the company much more efficient. I wouldn't have been able to be so helpful if I hadn't learned the existing processes in great detail.
Yeah, the real difficulty is in presenting, "This is what your business would be like without the current IT setup."
Yeah, well part of the difficulty in making the value of the IT department understood is that when everything is working properly, it seems transparent. When the mail server just keeps running and running without any problems, people sometimes get the idea that mail servers set themselves up and will always continue running without problems until they're disturbed. When everyone's desktop machine is always up and running, it sure looks like the IT department isn't doing any work. They aren't running around fixing things, so they must not be doing anything useful to the company.
It's only when the IT department goes away that its value starts to present itself. Eventually you find out that the mail server is broken, half the staff can't run anything on their computers because of virus infections, and for some reason the Internet isn't working.
One of the questions companies should ask themselves when evaluating their IT departments is, "How well can my business run without any computers or Internet access?" Also, you should understand that the whole computer revolution hasn't stopped. If your business is right now completely dependent on computer technology developed in the past 10 years, then there's a decent chance that in 10 years your business will be dependent on some technology that hasn't even been developed yet. You need your IT people to help you keep up.
By the way, most of the time people seem to assume doing the whole integrated thing will automatically be more productive and satisfying.
Well I think more generally it's a mistake to believe that implementing a new system or organizational structure will suddenly make things work perfectly. That's part of the mistake for the "traditional model", too. It's like, "Oh, if we treat the IT department as though it were an outside business which services us, it would suddenly become completely simple to evaluate the costs and benefits of IT, the IT department will become simple to manage, and the IT department will become as efficient as it could possibly be!"
Running a business is difficult. There isn't a set of rules that you can follow that will make everything work out well. Comprehending all of the true costs and benefits of a thing is hard, and there isn't a magic equation that will always give you a complete sense of what things are worth. Good management takes work, knowledge, experience, and even a little wisdom, and even the best managers will still have problems keeping things running smoothly. Stop looking for a magic bullet.
I also don't understand why he thinks that artists 'need' record labels. What they 'need' is to grow organically...
Well I'm sure that at least part of the problem is that you "need" the labels because the labels exist. Ok, that's a weird way of putting it, but here's the thing: to some extent, industries also need to grow organically. They need to develop business models and trade organizations and conventional ways of doing things and bla bla bla. Right now, record labels are filling that void, and we won't develop real alternatives until there's nothing filling that void.
Imagine your a musician. You're not a businessman. You don't want to be a businessman. You don't want to have to figure out international distribution deals, which deal with different laws across hundreds of countries. You don't want to have to figure out how to get yourself on the radio and on MTV (oh, wait... MTV doesn't have music anymore... well, whatever the modern equivalent is of MTV). You just want to play your music and let someone else figure that stuff out. Maybe you have a manager, but that's still a lot of work for one person. You don't have the money to hire a team of people, or at least you don't yet. Who figures out your pathways into those things?
Sure, you have the option of simply living without that stuff, but if you want that stuff, the labels still hold the keys to the kingdom. Sometime in the future, if running a record label ceases to be profitable and they all go out of business, some other businesses or organizations will step up to the plate.
Also maybe it increases your chances of death by heart attack so much because it also drastically decreases your chances of dying from anything else. For every hour you're sitting at home watching TV, that's an hour that you won't be in a car accident, aren't involved in a gunfight, and won't catch an STD from unprotected sex.
Abandoning the concept of IT being a business relegates it to what... a hobby?
Well it's abandoning the concept of IT as a separate business. I've seen it in several companies to various degrees, where the management treats IT as a totally separate company that provides a well-defined service, even when it's an internal IT staff. It's like, "these are just the people we hire to buy our computers and install them," and that's it.
Of course, that's fine if your company could not be made more efficient through appropriate use of computers, or else if the people in your company are computer savvy enough to always make best use of your computers. Otherwise, it might be beneficial to have your IT staff more tightly integrated with your operations. In this way of looking at things, your IT department doesn't cease to be a business. It's just that the IT department truly becomes part of your business.
I've said this many times before: As an IT guy, it doesn't offend me if you think of IT guys as janitors. It bothers me more to think that you don't respect your janitors.
No, neither IT nor janitors directly bring in revenue. Generally management doesn't bring in revenue either. In a certain sense, developers don't even bring in revenue. The only people who bring in revenue are sales people, and everyone else costs money. But you can't have a business with all salesmen and no product, can you?
Try running your business without your janitors and see how much revenue you bring in. Bring a client into a meeting where trash is all over the ground and the entire office smelling like someone took a dump under the front desk. Keep your employees from quitting when the bathrooms haven't been cleaned in 5 years. It's true that janitors don't produce revenue, but only enable developers to do their jobs, but developers only enable salesmen to do their job by giving them a product to sell.
But then again, salesmen only enable developers to do their jobs by finding someone to buy the software the developers create. And they're all getting paid from income to the company that wouldn't exist if not for the janitors. Janitors get paid little enough in money; the least we can do is pay them a little in respect.
IT is a service, a service that makes your business run better. And the better that service is shaped to your business, the more adapted to how you work, the more efficiently your business operates.
But I think part of the point here is that IT and "your business" aren't really that separable. Not only can your business be more efficient by shaping IT to it, but sometimes you have to shape your business based on what efficiencies can be gained through IT.
Yes, it depends on the business. Still, for many businesses, if you think of IT as a service that is provided to you so that you can continue doing business-as-usual, then you might be missing out on a lot of the benefits IT can provide. Computers and the Internet can provide a lot of increases in efficiency, but in order to attain those increases you need your business people to be computer savvy and your IT people to be business savvy.
Yeah, I stumbled across that passage too, but you can understand what he's getting at if you strip out the buzzwords. What he's pointing out is that there's this mode of dealing with IT where businesses make requests on IT like, "Make a web app that do exactly this," and then the IT department goes about producing those regardless of whether it's the best solution to the problem. The IT department doesn't necessarily ever learn what it is that the business is trying to accomplish; all the IT department does is follow orders as though they're independent contractors and the rest of the business is a customer.
What he's suggesting instead is that the IT department takes the time to learn what it is that the business is trying to do and why and is involved in business discussions. From there, IT is in a position to help develop the business processes to be more efficient. If the IT management is working more directly with the other managers, then when the managers say, "I want a web app that does exactly this," then IT can say, "Actually you don't. I know exactly what you're trying to do, but because I know more about computers than you do, I know that the web app you're suggesting isn't the best solution. It would be better if we could do [whatever-- insert appropriate buzzwords here]. Then we could get all the benefits from the web app you propose, but it would be more efficient and easier to maintain."
Basically what he's pointing out is that computers have become so central to the operations of many businesses that you can't have business decisions and IT decisions made by two separate management teams that aren't really talking to each other. You have to try to make IT a full member of the team, and not an in-house outside contractor.
He lacked both detailed knowledge of production methods, and had a poor understanding of scientific principles. Under the ideology of business school, this person's management skills should have been directly transferrable between many different fields. The reality on the ground was quite different
I think this really gets at the point of the article, and it seems to me like a lot of people are missing it. The point is that IT often isn't a service that can be offered uniformly between different businesses in different industries. At the level of a helpdesk tech running around servicing desktop computers, yes, he can probably switch from one industry to another without too much extra learning. However, when you get into IT management, you can't just know IT stuff an operate independently from the rest of the company.
Part of the problem is with treating IT as an independent business servicing your business (or actually outsourcing) is that the non-IT part of the business often doesn't know what it really wants from IT. In short, if they knew enough about IT to know what to ask for, then they wouldn't need the IT department.
If you're running a business and aren't much of a computer expert, then you don't necessarily know what computers can do for your business. You don't know what parts of your business processes can be controlled and audited automatically by computers, and which ones can't. You need the IT people to learn your business and be part of it so that they understand the ins and outs of your process, and then they can tell you how to best use computers to maximize productivity.
I think that's the message the article is trying to put out. The article blames companies that have pushed outsourcing as a solution, since they have something to gain from convincing people that IT should operate independently. There may be some truth to that, but I've seen a different culprit. I think part of the problem is that the IT department is sometimes too quick to take the attitude of, "I just want to fix your computer and ignore all that business stuff," while the MBAs think, "Those IT guys are so wrapped up in their computers that they can't be trusted with business decisions."
The ease of copying things digitally doesn't negate the need for copyrights.
I'm sorry, but geeze, did you even read my post? Seriously?
I didn't say it negated the need for copyrights. I said copyright law needed to be updated to deal with these issues. Even if you think the answer is better enforcement and better DRM, that raises a whole lot of issues. Are the current laws sufficient to enforce copyrights in the digital age? Are the current laws enough to protect DRM schemes?
On the other side of things, are the current laws enough to protect consumers from overly-restrictive DRM? Often the licensing terms on digital content are so one-sided that the store can simply deny you access to content you've bought without any justification. Is that fair?
Now we might not agree on what the best solution was, but my post didn't even get into that. My only point was that it's complicated. It's more complicated than people here tend to acknowledge.
As for licensing, that's entirely a different topic all together and outside the scope of my original post.
Licensing is an essential part of the difference between digital copies and physical copies. How could it be outside of the scope of this discussion? If I loan a physical copy and the person xeroxes the book, then people would generally agree that I didn't commit copyright infringement because I only loaned the book. However, if I "loan" someone a digital copy and they "return it" but they retain a copy, then many people would say that I did commit copyright infringement.
Part of the difference is that our concept of content ownership in the digital age has changed. In the past, when you bought a book, you bought a particular copy. Today, when we buy an MP3, we don't think of it as buying that particular copy. We think of it as buying the right to own a copy for our own personal use. These are different ideas. The difference comes down the purchasing a copy vs. purchasing a license.
No, it's not the same. The way I see it, you have a good point, but TheRaven64 has a good point too. There is some kind of disconnect going on.
The concept of "copyrights" makes perfect sense in a world post-printing-press and pre-Internet. Before the printing press, copyrights were completely unnecessary. After the Internet, copyrights become problematic-- not nonsensical, just problematic. These works are constantly being "copied" in that they're cached, stored on several devices, backed up, etc. The idea of "selling a copy" that made so much sense 20 years ago doesn't work anymore. Now we have to sell "licenses", and that gets pretty hairy.
The point I try to make in these discussions is that it's just not as simple as "copyright is good" or "copyright is evil". Copyright was an invention, not an innate right. It was invented during a specific historical period in the hopes of achieving certain goals. However, inventions sometimes need to be updated and sometimes go entirely obsolete. We don't calculate using abacuses anymore. We don't start our cars with cranks. Somehow or another, the invention of the "copyright" needs to be updated in a way that achieves its intended goals, given the realities of our current historical period.
So while you may only observe that two people downloaded your copy, you can't tell how many people downloaded copies originating from those 2 downloads...
When I loan a book to 10 people, I don't necessarily know how many people they loan the book to. I don't even know if someone copied the whole book and distributed it.
Anyway copyright laws weren't intended to place limits on who could read books, so there's nothing wrong if I lend the book out to hundreds or thousands of people. They were intended to protect authors from publishers as well as protecting publishers from other publishers.
To me, this raises a more interesting issue: where would you be if you didn't have the library when you were younger? How would it have shaped your life to not-have access to books at a young age? Maybe you wouldn't be able to afford them now.
It's in society's best interest to make books and educational materials as available as possible. That's why we have libraries in the first place. That relatively small investment in getting little TheWizardTim access to books has now turned him into a successful [whatever-you-are], which provides a huge return on investment.
We may someday see arguments that stricter copyrights are good for the economy because it allows more profits for publishers. What we shouldn't forget to include in those calculations is all the economic waste of having little TheWizardTims everywhere grow up to be poor stupid criminals instead of upstanding and productive members of society.
It was a joke. (sort of)
The serious idea embedded in the joke is that, aside from playing video, I don't want to view any of the content that's currently being displayed in Flash. Video should be done with HTML5, and then Flash is completely useless. I like the idea of getting rid of the Flash plugin, but even more I like the idea of not seeing any of the content people use Flash to display.
Also standardize ebooks. Part of the reason I don't get into ebooks is that if I buy a Kindle, then I'm stuck with a Kindle. I have no reason to believe that if I buy a Nook v2 in 2 years that I'll be able to read the books I bought on my Kindle.
This is a problem caused largely by DRM, but I'm not trying to get into an ant-DRM rant. (I could. I'm anti-DRM.) My point is that this is a real problem that prevents me from buying ebooks. If I buy a paperback book for $10, I know I can keep it for 20 years, loan it, or even give it away to a friend. If I buy an ebook for $10, I might not be able to get access to it in a couple years. The paperback is a better product in my opinion.
Often they don't bother mentioning how this multi-person readership happens, but it doesn't take much questioning to learn: libraries.
I'm sure that's not the only way it happens. I often buy books, read them, and loan them or give them away to others. I like doing that, and it's part of the reason I buy books. In fact, it's entirely possible that I'd stop buying books if I weren't able to do that. I like to read, but the joy of reading is inhibited by not being able to share.
That might sound crazy, but a lot of what I enjoy about reading is talking to others who have read the book. Sometimes they way I find someone else who has read the book is to create one by getting someone else to read the book. It's much easier to get someone to read a book if you can give them a copy. Ergo, I'd be less likely to buy a book if I couldn't share.
That's not to say I wouldn't read things. I'd just direct more attention towards things I could read online for free. And then I'd send links to people, get them to read it, and create a discussion that way.
First of all, the main usage of Flash (for me) is video and I don't expect anyone to write h.232 codec using javascript and canvas anytime soon.
But why should they when your OS already has a perfectly good decoder? Using Flash for video playback was an ugly hack to begin with.
I'm not sure what to think. I love the idea of not needing to install Flash, but I also like being able to block annoying animations by not installing Flash.
I think overall, this isn't where things should head. It'd be much better if Flash were to simply work by exporting valid HTML5, CSS, and Javascript. Maybe there are some other advantages to the SWF format, but I'm not aware of them.
I think you may have missed my point. Of course Android is a serious competitor to the iPhone, and of course having similar features makes it a more threating competitor. The iPhone would be much safer if the iPhone had Google Maps and Android-based phones didn't.
However, people seem to be trying to argue that, because the iPhone's competitors are using Google, Apple would be better off not using Google so that they can set themselves apart and offer something different. That position doesn't make a lot of sense unless that "something different" is actually better than Google. If it is not better than Google, then they'll be hurting themselves by switching away from Google.
So that's all I was saying there. Sure, there are other reasons why a person might want to buy a Droid or Nexus One instead of the iPhone. Price, however, probably isn't a big determining factor. The 16GB iPhone and 16GB Droid are the same price ($199) with 2-year contracts. I saw the Nexus One advertised for $179 with the contract, but I don't know how much storage is included.
No need to take pot-shots at "Apple fanboys."
Perhaps you should take a look at what the bulk of say TV shows are available in for download from "fill in your source" here. AVI
Ok, I'm going to "fill in my source" with the only source I can think of that provides legal purchasing of TV shows: iTunes. Whoa, look what happens; turns out the bulk of the TV shows are h264.
We shouldn't be stuck with legacy formats just because pirates don't know what they're doing.
Is a standard definition TV set obsolete?
I certainly wouldn't buy a new standard definition TV from Best Buy. Flat panel HDTVs are much better and plenty cheap enough.
Am I supposed to throw out my DVD players that can play AVI out and buy new ones because the Handbrake guys say so.
No, but if you're writing movies to DVD in AVI format in order to play them on your TV, then you're already behind the curve. Sure, if you want to stick with old ways of doing things, you're free to do that. No one is going to complain if you want to watch TV on a black and white TV from 1970 or if you want to listen to vinyl on a record player. Hell, you can play your old 8 track tapes for as long as they'll hold up. I don't mind. Just don't expect the rest of society to stop progress in its tracks in order to support that old stuff.
I thought part of the point of ReactOS was to achieve driver compatibility with Windows.
Bittorrent is right now used a lot for illegal files.
This is very tangential to what you're talking about, but I'd still like to point out that Bittorrent is right now used for a lot of legal files too. FTP is used to transfer both illegal files and legal files. HTTP and NNTP too. It doesn't make sense to blame the protocol.
Make that port/application/end-point and I'll agree.
I would actually sooner give in on letting ISPs throttle ports/applications than endpoints. If Verizon wants to do some kind of traffic-shaping which prioritizes HTTP and VOIP over bittorrent, that at least seems like it might be reasonable. I think it should be prioritization rather than straight-up throttling, but certain kinds of communications are less tolerant to lag than others. However, what I *don't* think is fair is for Verizon to give special priority to their own services and their partner's services.
The issue, in my mind, comes down to the monopoly/duopoly that the phone company and cable company have over the infrastructure coming into homes and businesses. My company has absolutely no choice but to use Verizon for our Internet access. Verizon should not be able to use this position to restrict our choices in VOIP providers.
Really, most things which should be encrypted - are.
First, I'll tell you that I don't think that's true. Even in the past few years, I've seen a ridiculous amount of confidential/sensitive/secure information pass over the Internet via unencrypted channels. A lot of people still use FTP and send sensitive information via email without any additional protection. Perhaps you're encrypting everything you should be, but many people aren't.
But even if it were the case, the idea that we should only encrypt the things "which should be encrypted" is problematic too. I'm posting my response here, but I mean to respond to all the people who are saying encryption is generally unnecessary. I'm not saying it's wrong; you may be 100% right that "There's no reason to push encryption everywhere," but it's not so simple; there are also drawbacks to this approach.
The first drawback is perhaps a little paranoid, but it's a little simpler to wrap your head around: by only encrypting sensitive information, you're giving potential attackers a clear target. Metaphorically, if you're trying to protect a bunch of solid gold needles, it may be better to hide them in a haystack rather than in a locked box with the words "SOLID GOLD NEEDLES" printed on the side. Relying on "security through obscurity" alone is a bad idea, but that doesn't mean that you want to share more information with your attackers than you need to.
The second (potential) problem with your line of thinking becomes clear if you translate it into real-world terms: "I have all my valuables locked in a safe in my bedroom, so there's no point in locking my house. After all, there's no point in pushing locks everywhere, especially if it's going to make people think that everything is safe just because it's locked." See some problems here? No, the lock on my house doesn't do much to stop a determined and skilled thief, and most people don't want steal my non-valuable stuff. On the other hand, we don't think it's too silly to want to employ a basic level of security for our physical property. (It may be worth noting, however, that there are people who believe it's a shame that we all lock our houses. I've known people in small towns who don't lock their houses.)
The third possible problem is much more vague and perhaps paranoid, but I believe it's still worth considering: we don't really know what the value is of the information being passed around unencrypted. I'm not talking about people accidentally posting something sensitive through unencrypted channels (though obviously that's a potential problem); I'm talking about people posting seemingly harmless information that may still be useful for nefarious purposes.
Again, I'd like to take this back to real-world terms. Imagine a thief wants to steal something very valuable from me, and there's only one place that I go where there's any security. It's a very secure room with an unpickable lock, and because this is the only secured location, I've already given him a pretty good idea where my valuables are hidden. How can he get in?
Well he doesn't have to pick the lock if he can pick my coat pocket and get the key. He doesn't need to pick my pocket if he can get me to take off my coat. He doesn't need to get me to take off my coat if he has access to the closet where I store my coat. Basically, he doesn't need to confront my security measures head-on, he just needs to find the weakest point and exploit it.
So let's go back to computer security. Let's say I want access to your bank account. I don't need your password if I know the answers to your secret questions. What's your mother's maiden name? Well, I can read your email, and I see there's an email to a guy named "John Smith" where you call him "Grandpa". Since your last name isn't Smith, it's a pretty good guess that your mom's maiden is Smith.
I know, in real-world cases hacking a bank account isn't quite that simple, but I only mean to illustrate how seemingly inn