So yeah, I have reasonably fast internet for a Canadian, but at what price?
As a Canadian expat living in the developing world, you have my sympathy. But you need to put things in perspective. I just wrote a rant about the paucity of Internet in my part of the world that might make you feel a little better.
TL;DR - There are people in Seoul – and countless other cities in the world – who have more bandwidth at their personal disposal than a quarter of a million people here in the Pacific.
They're gonna take the use the event as a front to get ideas...
Who fucking cares?
If they're good ideas, and they enable people to act quickly and efficiently in times of crisis, who cares about attribution?
I've spent the last 7 years living and working in what the UN classifies as a Least Developed Country. I've read through the specific challenges being presented to hackers at these events and, truth be told, I'd be hard pressed to come up with a better list.
There are shortcomings, to be sure. One of the biggest is that communications is one of the first things to suffer when (most) disasters strike. Where I live, most of the country only just got mobile service in the last year or two, and the service is flaky, to say the least. Bad weather affects out most of the microwave hops between communities, so right when we need it most (i.e. hurricane season), it's at its least reliable.
I'd love to see more attention paid to groups like Telecom Sans Frontières, who arrive on short notice and set up emergency communications. Ironically, I'm not eligible to work for them, as my residence in a developing country makes rapid deployment difficult. It would be nice, though, to see an international volunteer registry that would allow NGOs such as this to react rapidly and efficiently to problems.
The other major liability I see in a project like this is the Hollywood Effect. Everyone wants to be the firefighter saving the baby from the burning building. Not many want to be the volunteer who builds the house in the first place, or the contractor who simply makes sure the house remains up to spec and therefore never burns.
Most development work is tedious, repetitive and endlessly frustrating. It consists largely of continually fighting ignorance, inadequacy and petty corruption in order to take tiny steps in the right direction. All the important changes happen from one generation to the next. So where, I would like to know, are the software and the volunteers for that kind of work?
I recognize that Linux changes, but the operating system calls work well and API is quite stable. I have used UNIX for a long time and I have compiled programs from 25 years ago under Linux. There have been some additions since then, but the basics of Linux work like the basics of UNIX from 25 years ago.
I agree that open systems (and the *nix toolkit approach) can make a big difference when it comes to living with legacy code. But, as others have said elsewhere, process matters more than anything.
I speak from bitter experience. I'm currently maintaining a Linux-based infrastructure that has many strengths and is overall quite robust and remarkably efficient. However, it has all the warts that over a decade of living in a production environment can produce. There's one particular bug that I'm taking a break from right now that's causing data loss because it made naive assumptions about the way state would be maintained between two machines. For my sins, I get to dig through ~9000 lines of half-designed code, trying to find the logic behind the state maintenance mechanism (such as it is) and somehow figure out how to stop the problem from happening in the future.
To their credit, management are very understanding and supportive, but within a couple of days I have to go and tell them whether we refactor the existing application or rewrite it. The fact that it's a design flaw means that I lean toward the latter, but how do I cope with this show-stopper bug during the two months it's going to take me to get new code into production? We can't exactly shut down.
There are no easy answers to this question. The fact that I'm working with Linux and FOSS means at least that I can do something about the code, and that I can make changes in smaller increments. But when all is said and done, a lived-in house is inevitably messy. Unless you have monitoring, diagnostics, troubleshooting and maintenance routines developed as formal processes, you will inevitably stagger from crisis to crisis.
Someone want to explain to me what makes this "Interesting?" Or for that matter, what makes it at all relevant...
Because the people providing the operating systems for mobile devices are discovering, to nobody's surprise but their own (and apparently yours), that being able to manage and maintain a software base over a diverse number of architectures and platforms is a non-trivial task.
In my professional experience, the inventors of apt-get were the first to create an adequate means of maintaining a largely stable system, managing compatibility and dependency issues over tens of thousands of applications, utilities and drivers.
The implication of my statement, therefore, is that Google should be giving more thought to package management issues as a means of reducing their own software maintenance overheads.
Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen in any useful way, because all the phone suppliers only dream of being Apple, so they're intent only on controlling every means of access to the apps and other software that runs on their phone.
Therefore, these vendors - who fail to understand why apt-get is important - are condemned to creating their own proprietary update services and interfaces, and because they are neither unified nor open, it's quite likely that each of them will get it wrong in unique and entertaining ways.
That one little sentence took a bit of unpacking, but there you go.
Cognitive dissonance, I expect. Read on for the reason...
I'm running W2K8R2 x64 as a Workstation OS, it is rock stable, possibly the best OS MS ever produced. Yet I'm sure there are _plenty_ of bugs like this one.
You might want to look at those two sentences again and reconsider one of them.
>Doesn't Microsoft issue bug reports like this every month?
Yes. But this one has no patch yet, only a work-around.
Doesn't _any_ OS company produce bug reports like this every month?
No. Most Linux distros, for example, issue fixes as soon as they're available, not holding them back to suit other's schedules.
You can argue the pros and cons of either approach, but calendar-based security updates are not the norm.
Why is this one so special?
Because it's a privilege escalation exploit in a rendering layer that is completely superfluous on a server machine. That leads some people to ask:
Why are graphics still in Ring 0 on a server OS? Did MS learn nothing from NT4/2000?
Why are they shipping Aero on a server OS?
Do they test their software at all?
Happily, some other measures they've taken (e.g. memory address randomisation) make this harder than it might have been to usefully exploit. Still, it's clear that this can be used at very least to DOS a server. Given that it's an escalation attack from userland, it's not at all difficult to imagine how this could be (ab)used over the wire.
As much as we hate Apple's walled-garden approach to an app store, having a central authority with a kill switch for any app, [etc....] are all things that stand in the way of a would be trojan spyware author.
Perhaps, but if you cast your net a little wider, you'll realise that the main thing required is a viable process. Autocratic centralised control is just one of a number of different and equally effective means of managing security for end users. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and countless other community-maintained repositories have historically sustained a commendable level of security in their vast software collections. They've built up so much trust, in fact, that the trust itself has become a peculiar kind of strength.
[I]t's not terribly controversial to emphasize the strong Christian views of many of America's founders.
On the contrary, it's terribly important to understand that many of the early settlers were from dissident Christian factions fleeing religious and political persecution. It's also critical to the understanding of the US Constitution that people understand that it was expressly to avoid such State-sponsored repression that the Founding Fathers decided to make sure there would never be a state religion.
It also bears mentioning that one of the other motivating factors for the explicit separation of Church and State was the influence of Enlightenment values from the European Continent (mostly France). A small but very influential faction including Jefferson and Ben Franklin put significant emphasis on freedom of speech and conscience. Hence, the First Amendment was... well, First, and the others followed logically from there, more or less as corollaries to this one.
Somehow, though, I suspect these crucial points are less than adequately conveyed in the new textbooks....
You would be if you'd were curious enough to consider the issue a little more. 8^)
These products have reached a certain critical mass, where a business analyst from Company A can easily integrate into Company B's workflow without too much training.
'Critical mass' is exactly my point. Companies A & B call their awkward, borderline anarchic process of batting emails and Word attachments back and forth a 'Workflow'. And to some degree they're right. But they never consider how else the information exchange could happen. They don't have to, because nobody else does, either.
Efficiency or appropriateness are not important. Word isn't the tool of choice because it's Good. It's not the tool of choice at all. It's just What We Use.
And that, children, is why geeks inevitably find themselves at odds with most of humanity: They simply cannot comprehend why someone would choose to continue polishing turds when there's so much else that could be done.
And they're fools, because they think there's a choice involved, when in fact what's important to most people is that no-one ever be forced to choose.
Employers aren't interested in your ideologies. When they are paying you, they expect you to stay within the bounds of your job description and your interests should be put aside and the company's interests should come to the fore.
I love the way the term 'ideology' is used to co-opt the debate.
There are correct uses of the term, of course. But in this example, it means, "I don't care if you're right and I'm wrong. I'm paying you to do your job my way, so shut up and do it."
In any area of business, this makes the employee exactly as smart -or as stupid- as the boss. Statistically speaking, therefore, it's a stupid approach.
Let's be clear, though: Here on Slashdot, 'Ideology' is really just code for FOSS and the principle that there is indeed a Right Tool For The Job, but that tool isn't always the most expedient. 'Ideology', therefore, sometimes means more work and potentially delayed gratification.
Of course, sometimes it means the opposite. Sometimes it means, 'quit floundering about using third-rate tools. Apply a little original thought for once in your life and accept that there are better ways to get things done.'
The wise boss knows about the risks on both sides of this equation and remains open to persuasion (though appropriately skeptical). The unwise boss, labels every thought not originating between his ears 'ideology' and ignores it.
MS products are good in firms that have the resources to insure all machines are homogeneous and up to date, firms that require a high level of collaborations of complex non-technical documents(This does not include most educational places).
Nothing could be further from the truth. MS products are generally terrible for the creation of collaborative, complex, non-technical documents. It's just that organisations are for the most part incurious and unwilling to depart from the well-trodden path.
This isn't exclusively Microsoft's fault. Almost without exception[*], WYSIWYG editors suck.
This is just another example of a phenomenon that remain inscrutable to hackers and geeks the world over. Generally speaking, people are incurious. They don't particularly care about the best or even the right way to do something. In fact, as long as they create the surface impression of having done something (e.g. using Word to create an unparseable, ungodly hodge-podge of visual formatting and calling it a 'complex document'), they're generally satisfied to let things lie.
Of course, this is the fundamental principle that animates the Dilbert universe and makes it the serio-comic tragedy that it is.
--------------
[*] I only say 'almost' because I'm willing to admit that in some parallel universe, some Leonardo of the keyboard might conceivably have invented a WYSIWYG word processor that actually does an adequate job at non-trivial tasks. In that same alternate universe, however, I can skate across a giant butter lake wearing a frilly orange tutu, then mount my flying unicorn and float away over cotton-candy clouds to my home in an enchanted toadstool.
There have been many times in the United States where our government will push something like Social Security, saying "This is to help the widows with children", which, yes, is a noble cause that many can't argue with. But look at it now, it is a system used to hook the societal leeches and give paychecks to fat-asses who are too lazy to get up and work.
[What follows will seem to be flame bait to some. That's because the subject seems to have so warped some people's perspectives that they cannot conceive of any error in their logic.]
This may amaze you, but proponents of the welfare state knew all along that helping 'widows with children' would also help 'social leeches' and 'fat-asses who are too lazy to get up and work'. Not only did they know that, but they knew that the system would be wasteful and inefficient. They knew that your hard-earned tax dollars would get thrown away by semi-human middle managers unqualified to work in the private sector. They knew that big, meddlesome government sticking its fat, greasy fingers into every part of the pie would get things wrong just as often as it got them right.
You know what else? We don't fucking care. Well, okay, we do care. We don't care about the shitheads in society, because every society has them; they exist at all stations in life, in every culture. But we do care about the widows with children, the elderly and the indigent. We even care about the lazy, fat-assed ones who won't lift a finger to help themselves.
You know why we care? Because the alternative is a crime- and poverty-ridden society with huge inequities of privilege and power. A society where someone can park their $100,000 car beside a homeless man in rags and never see him. Because the alternative is that the shitheads of the lower class, instead of hanging on the steps and waiting for the pogey check, are coming in through your back window to steal your things and, possibly, terrorise you and your family. A society where the wealthy minority simply run away from the problem, fleeing to gated suburbs and blissful ignorance of just how harsh life in that society can be. (Sound familiar?)
But you know what? Caring about everyone (including the the shitheads) works. Go to Vancouver's east side some day. It's a hellhole, the end of the line for a lot of people. But it would be so much worse if it weren't for a few national and local policies that reduced crime and public health care costs just by making sure people got clean needles and a bite to eat occasionally. This is one of the worst neighbourhoods in Canada, but you can still walk it end to end in near-complete safety.
Now, to bring things back on topic: Your view that government is innately inefficient, as prone to failure as to success, as likely to benefit those who (according to you) don't deserve others' help... that view isn't entirely inaccurate. But you're dead wrong to think that that point alone is enough reason not to want government to do what it was established to do: In this case, to mandate certain minimum standards of conduct in order to ensure a relatively level playing field that won't be subverted by external influences.
Then the company is stupid. We have decades' worth of scientific and anecdotal evidence that putting human monkeys in tight little boxes is Not A Good Thing, both for the monkey and the maker of the box.
Amen.
The only thing we need to do to get a proper perspective on this problem to change the headline slightly:
Businesses Struggle to Control Their Staff
Suddenly, it becomes crystal clear that this is an administrative issue more than it is a technical one. Yes, compliance with federal regulation is a daunting task. It's not even reasonable to attempt it without active buy-in participation of the employees. I don't want to go all Princess Leia on you, but there's a point to be made about tightening one's grasp too far.
Consent and a collective sense of responsibility are far more powerful tools when dealing with issues like confidentiality and corporate ethics.
To be fair however PDF has a reasonable chance of surviving way past your requirement of 25 years.
No, 25 years was an example of the simplest manifestation of the problem. For documents of historical significance, 250 and 2500 years also matter.
It's just that with time frames like those, it's almost impossible to usefully imagine what the world will be like, so we mostly encourage printing using the right paper and inks as well as proper storage.
What you say is right but not relevant to this discussion. The parent had commented on the comment of the GP that once you have a file in MS format, your ass belongs to them.
Yes, that was exactly the intent when MS created its own proprietary document formats. There was a time when WordPerfect was happy to convert to and from Ami Pro, when Star Writer exported just fine to Word. Microsoft changed all that by relentlessly leveraging compatibility to feed their revenue stream.
This may be true whether it is a file in Word format, PDF or an even more proprietary format from Apple. So it is not something unique to MS.
Agreed. That's why I mentioned both Adobe and Word formats in the same sentence. I don't think either one is particularly appropriate (although PDF as a published specification is a great deal easier to work with when doing document conversion).
And as to your 25 year time frame, I can still read the oldest document produced by Word on the latest MS Office.
That's hard to believe, and not entirely relevant. What I'm talking about -as a minimal scenario- is a situation where the original software just doesn't exist any more. Twenty-five years ago in 1985, Word was something called Multi-Tool. I sincerely doubt one of its files would open in Office 2010 without significant effort from a developer.
And lastly, who's stopping you from storing files in XML format in Office?
Nobody. That's exactly what we do. The problem is that we work with legal documents from over 20 countries and hundreds of different sources. We have a limited amount of development resources (mostly just me) and we need these documents to be available forever, effectively. If people could actually settle on a standard that really was a standard, if people could actually agree to look slightly farther down the track than their own desktops, we could actually spend time building new searching capabilities, ontologies and frameworks to make the data way, way more useful than it is today.
Instead, I spend all my time dealing with half-assed, unstructured formatting brought about by the fact that people are content to use a second-rate implementation of a deliberately obfuscated format.
Other vendors may be guilty of this, too. But Microsoft has done it longer and more effectively than most.
I don't really understand this FUD. Even if Microsoft does have a slightly different flavor of OXML it's not like it's impossible to convert them to something more neutral even if Microsoft took a play from Steve Job's playbook and completely went to the dark side.
Man, you must be really, really new here.
This is exactly the problem (and the same facile response) we've been coping with since the mid-90s, and I can tell you from experience that things are never as simple as you describe.
Let's take one client I'm working with right now. They're a national institution, responsible for archiving court documents in perpetuity. That means, effectively, forever. Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?
If, however, these documents were stored in plain text markup (e.g. XML) following an open, formal and workable specification whose definitions are slightly more robust than "Do this formatting the way we did in Word 97" and which consists of slightly more than dumping blobs of binary data inside tags, we might stand a chance. It would still be a bit of an ask, but in the worst case scenario, we could probably infer (or ignore) the parts that puzzled us most.
Document formats matter because a great many of them -especially those produced by the public sector- have historical value and need to be preserved for a very long time.
This generation of the internet was initially dismissed as a toy by most companies and governments and the genie got out of the bottle. They won't make that mistake with the next generation.
I disagree with your diagnosis, but I agree wholeheartedly with your conclusion.
Having worked on the Internet since the early 90s, and having benefited from the massive ignorance of how the Internet works that pervaded business past the end of the decade, I feel it's more like business was able to characterise the symptoms but didn't understand the nature of the disease.
In the 90s, people talked a lot about Disruptive Technologies and (forgive me) Paradigm Shifts. They knew that early adopters reaped the greatest rewards, but beyond that they were more or less aimless.
I think of it as the difference between cleverness and intelligence. The people who actually built the Internet had vision, but only learned how to be clever over time. Businesses working on the Internet got clever first, but even today they're just barely beginning to develop a vision about what they want it to be.
Given that their vision resembles Iran- and China-style Internet more than anywhere else, I too find it a troubling one. I worry that some day I'll be the moral equivalent of an aged hippie, longing for the lost freedom of my youth....
Yeah..but if you go up there and and say publicly that "I think [insert racial, sexual orientation, etc type slang] suck" and you can actually get busted for "hate speech".
No you can't.
Hate speech requires that you make actual threats against a given group. In fact, even saying 'All ${FOO}s should die!' isn't enough to get you busted. It has to be clear that you are actually advocating for their collective demise. You could even say, 'I'm going to kill that ${FOO} right now!' and not be guilty of hate speech, because your hatred was aimed at an individual whom you incidentally were calling names.
But way, way before you get to the point of being arrested, you'll be shunned for being the bigot that you are, if you don't get punched in the face for your efforts. See, we Canadians value free speech so much that we try[*] to be polite and respectful when we use it.
If you want to be a know-nothing, racist fuckwit in Canada, you can. But it'll be a pretty lonely existence.
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[*] All bets are off at a hockey game.
Plus a straightforward way of figuring out how to best assign processes to particular cores? (which ones are faster and which are slower)
Heh, trick question. You almost got me there.
You see, Intel stack their cores from fastest to slowest in order to maximise heat dissipation. This is known as a High-Endian architecture. AMD, on the other hand, use a Low-Endian architecture, stacking their cores from slowest to fastest because they claim it lowers power usage. So the real trick when trying to figure out which cores are faster is finding a cross-platform approach that won't penalise any given processor.
The Slaughterhouse-5[*] method says that with a non-randomised Tralfamadorean transform, you can infer where your sample data is going to end up before you actually send it there. So you just measure the incipient idiopathic latency of your unsent bytes and then apply a parsimonious lectern to the results and voilà!
... Why, yes, I am in Marketing. Why do you ask?
------------------ [*] As developed by Billy Pilgrim. Po tee-weet
Slashdot Mirror
As a Canadian expat living in the developing world, you have my sympathy. But you need to put things in perspective. I just wrote a rant about the paucity of Internet in my part of the world that might make you feel a little better.
TL;DR - There are people in Seoul – and countless other cities in the world – who have more bandwidth at their personal disposal than a quarter of a million people here in the Pacific.
They're gonna take the use the event as a front to get ideas...
Who fucking cares?
If they're good ideas, and they enable people to act quickly and efficiently in times of crisis, who cares about attribution?
I've spent the last 7 years living and working in what the UN classifies as a Least Developed Country. I've read through the specific challenges being presented to hackers at these events and, truth be told, I'd be hard pressed to come up with a better list.
There are shortcomings, to be sure. One of the biggest is that communications is one of the first things to suffer when (most) disasters strike. Where I live, most of the country only just got mobile service in the last year or two, and the service is flaky, to say the least. Bad weather affects out most of the microwave hops between communities, so right when we need it most (i.e. hurricane season), it's at its least reliable.
I'd love to see more attention paid to groups like Telecom Sans Frontières, who arrive on short notice and set up emergency communications. Ironically, I'm not eligible to work for them, as my residence in a developing country makes rapid deployment difficult. It would be nice, though, to see an international volunteer registry that would allow NGOs such as this to react rapidly and efficiently to problems.
The other major liability I see in a project like this is the Hollywood Effect. Everyone wants to be the firefighter saving the baby from the burning building. Not many want to be the volunteer who builds the house in the first place, or the contractor who simply makes sure the house remains up to spec and therefore never burns.
Most development work is tedious, repetitive and endlessly frustrating. It consists largely of continually fighting ignorance, inadequacy and petty corruption in order to take tiny steps in the right direction. All the important changes happen from one generation to the next. So where, I would like to know, are the software and the volunteers for that kind of work?
I agree that open systems (and the *nix toolkit approach) can make a big difference when it comes to living with legacy code. But, as others have said elsewhere, process matters more than anything.
I speak from bitter experience. I'm currently maintaining a Linux-based infrastructure that has many strengths and is overall quite robust and remarkably efficient. However, it has all the warts that over a decade of living in a production environment can produce. There's one particular bug that I'm taking a break from right now that's causing data loss because it made naive assumptions about the way state would be maintained between two machines. For my sins, I get to dig through ~9000 lines of half-designed code, trying to find the logic behind the state maintenance mechanism (such as it is) and somehow figure out how to stop the problem from happening in the future.
To their credit, management are very understanding and supportive, but within a couple of days I have to go and tell them whether we refactor the existing application or rewrite it. The fact that it's a design flaw means that I lean toward the latter, but how do I cope with this show-stopper bug during the two months it's going to take me to get new code into production? We can't exactly shut down.
There are no easy answers to this question. The fact that I'm working with Linux and FOSS means at least that I can do something about the code, and that I can make changes in smaller increments. But when all is said and done, a lived-in house is inevitably messy. Unless you have monitoring, diagnostics, troubleshooting and maintenance routines developed as formal processes, you will inevitably stagger from crisis to crisis.
Gah, undoing a mistaken 'redundant' mod. Someday, Slashdot will support transations....
Someone want to explain to me what makes this "Interesting?" Or for that matter, what makes it at all relevant...
Because the people providing the operating systems for mobile devices are discovering, to nobody's surprise but their own (and apparently yours), that being able to manage and maintain a software base over a diverse number of architectures and platforms is a non-trivial task.
In my professional experience, the inventors of apt-get were the first to create an adequate means of maintaining a largely stable system, managing compatibility and dependency issues over tens of thousands of applications, utilities and drivers.
The implication of my statement, therefore, is that Google should be giving more thought to package management issues as a means of reducing their own software maintenance overheads.
Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen in any useful way, because all the phone suppliers only dream of being Apple, so they're intent only on controlling every means of access to the apps and other software that runs on their phone.
Therefore, these vendors - who fail to understand why apt-get is important - are condemned to creating their own proprietary update services and interfaces, and because they are neither unified nor open, it's quite likely that each of them will get it wrong in unique and entertaining ways.
That one little sentence took a bit of unpacking, but there you go.
HTH, HAND.
With apologies to... Henry Spencer:
"Those who fail to understand apt-get are condemned to re-invent it, poorly."
If your designer is hard, you've got other issues.
Yeah, it means you're working for Apple, for starters....
I suppose it would be a worthy sacrifice.
I am willing to expend my life in pursuit of turtlenecks if it means Openness for all.
No! Not in a thousand lifetimes, no! What do you think I am, you sick twisted fuck?!?
Cognitive dissonance, I expect. Read on for the reason...
You might want to look at those two sentences again and reconsider one of them.
Yes. But this one has no patch yet, only a work-around.
No. Most Linux distros, for example, issue fixes as soon as they're available, not holding them back to suit other's schedules.
You can argue the pros and cons of either approach, but calendar-based security updates are not the norm.
Because it's a privilege escalation exploit in a rendering layer that is completely superfluous on a server machine. That leads some people to ask:
Happily, some other measures they've taken (e.g. memory address randomisation) make this harder than it might have been to usefully exploit. Still, it's clear that this can be used at very least to DOS a server. Given that it's an escalation attack from userland, it's not at all difficult to imagine how this could be (ab)used over the wire.
Perhaps, but if you cast your net a little wider, you'll realise that the main thing required is a viable process. Autocratic centralised control is just one of a number of different and equally effective means of managing security for end users. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and countless other community-maintained repositories have historically sustained a commendable level of security in their vast software collections. They've built up so much trust, in fact, that the trust itself has become a peculiar kind of strength.
On the contrary, it's terribly important to understand that many of the early settlers were from dissident Christian factions fleeing religious and political persecution. It's also critical to the understanding of the US Constitution that people understand that it was expressly to avoid such State-sponsored repression that the Founding Fathers decided to make sure there would never be a state religion.
It also bears mentioning that one of the other motivating factors for the explicit separation of Church and State was the influence of Enlightenment values from the European Continent (mostly France). A small but very influential faction including Jefferson and Ben Franklin put significant emphasis on freedom of speech and conscience. Hence, the First Amendment was... well, First, and the others followed logically from there, more or less as corollaries to this one.
Somehow, though, I suspect these crucial points are less than adequately conveyed in the new textbooks....
You would be if you'd were curious enough to consider the issue a little more. 8^)
'Critical mass' is exactly my point. Companies A & B call their awkward, borderline anarchic process of batting emails and Word attachments back and forth a 'Workflow'. And to some degree they're right. But they never consider how else the information exchange could happen. They don't have to, because nobody else does, either.
Efficiency or appropriateness are not important. Word isn't the tool of choice because it's Good. It's not the tool of choice at all. It's just What We Use.
And that, children, is why geeks inevitably find themselves at odds with most of humanity: They simply cannot comprehend why someone would choose to continue polishing turds when there's so much else that could be done.
And they're fools, because they think there's a choice involved, when in fact what's important to most people is that no-one ever be forced to choose.
I love the way the term 'ideology' is used to co-opt the debate.
There are correct uses of the term, of course. But in this example, it means, "I don't care if you're right and I'm wrong. I'm paying you to do your job my way, so shut up and do it."
In any area of business, this makes the employee exactly as smart -or as stupid- as the boss. Statistically speaking, therefore, it's a stupid approach.
Let's be clear, though: Here on Slashdot, 'Ideology' is really just code for FOSS and the principle that there is indeed a Right Tool For The Job, but that tool isn't always the most expedient. 'Ideology', therefore, sometimes means more work and potentially delayed gratification.
Of course, sometimes it means the opposite. Sometimes it means, 'quit floundering about using third-rate tools. Apply a little original thought for once in your life and accept that there are better ways to get things done.'
The wise boss knows about the risks on both sides of this equation and remains open to persuasion (though appropriately skeptical). The unwise boss, labels every thought not originating between his ears 'ideology' and ignores it.
Nothing could be further from the truth. MS products are generally terrible for the creation of collaborative, complex, non-technical documents. It's just that organisations are for the most part incurious and unwilling to depart from the well-trodden path.
This isn't exclusively Microsoft's fault. Almost without exception[*], WYSIWYG editors suck.
This is just another example of a phenomenon that remain inscrutable to hackers and geeks the world over. Generally speaking, people are incurious. They don't particularly care about the best or even the right way to do something. In fact, as long as they create the surface impression of having done something (e.g. using Word to create an unparseable, ungodly hodge-podge of visual formatting and calling it a 'complex document'), they're generally satisfied to let things lie.
Of course, this is the fundamental principle that animates the Dilbert universe and makes it the serio-comic tragedy that it is.
--------------
[*] I only say 'almost' because I'm willing to admit that in some parallel universe, some Leonardo of the keyboard might conceivably have invented a WYSIWYG word processor that actually does an adequate job at non-trivial tasks. In that same alternate universe, however, I can skate across a giant butter lake wearing a frilly orange tutu, then mount my flying unicorn and float away over cotton-candy clouds to my home in an enchanted toadstool.
Strips of steel with holes in them? You're kidding, right?
Yeah, so what? I mean what could possibly go wro
Less is, well, less...
... More or less.
[What follows will seem to be flame bait to some. That's because the subject seems to have so warped some people's perspectives that they cannot conceive of any error in their logic.]
This may amaze you, but proponents of the welfare state knew all along that helping 'widows with children' would also help 'social leeches' and 'fat-asses who are too lazy to get up and work'. Not only did they know that, but they knew that the system would be wasteful and inefficient. They knew that your hard-earned tax dollars would get thrown away by semi-human middle managers unqualified to work in the private sector. They knew that big, meddlesome government sticking its fat, greasy fingers into every part of the pie would get things wrong just as often as it got them right.
You know what else? We don't fucking care. Well, okay, we do care. We don't care about the shitheads in society, because every society has them; they exist at all stations in life, in every culture. But we do care about the widows with children, the elderly and the indigent. We even care about the lazy, fat-assed ones who won't lift a finger to help themselves.
You know why we care? Because the alternative is a crime- and poverty-ridden society with huge inequities of privilege and power. A society where someone can park their $100,000 car beside a homeless man in rags and never see him. Because the alternative is that the shitheads of the lower class, instead of hanging on the steps and waiting for the pogey check, are coming in through your back window to steal your things and, possibly, terrorise you and your family. A society where the wealthy minority simply run away from the problem, fleeing to gated suburbs and blissful ignorance of just how harsh life in that society can be. (Sound familiar?)
But you know what? Caring about everyone (including the the shitheads) works. Go to Vancouver's east side some day. It's a hellhole, the end of the line for a lot of people. But it would be so much worse if it weren't for a few national and local policies that reduced crime and public health care costs just by making sure people got clean needles and a bite to eat occasionally. This is one of the worst neighbourhoods in Canada, but you can still walk it end to end in near-complete safety.
Now, to bring things back on topic: Your view that government is innately inefficient, as prone to failure as to success, as likely to benefit those who (according to you) don't deserve others' help... that view isn't entirely inaccurate. But you're dead wrong to think that that point alone is enough reason not to want government to do what it was established to do: In this case, to mandate certain minimum standards of conduct in order to ensure a relatively level playing field that won't be subverted by external influences.
Amen.
The only thing we need to do to get a proper perspective on this problem to change the headline slightly:
Businesses Struggle to Control Their Staff
Suddenly, it becomes crystal clear that this is an administrative issue more than it is a technical one. Yes, compliance with federal regulation is a daunting task. It's not even reasonable to attempt it without active buy-in participation of the employees. I don't want to go all Princess Leia on you, but there's a point to be made about tightening one's grasp too far.
Consent and a collective sense of responsibility are far more powerful tools when dealing with issues like confidentiality and corporate ethics.
No, 25 years was an example of the simplest manifestation of the problem. For documents of historical significance, 250 and 2500 years also matter.
It's just that with time frames like those, it's almost impossible to usefully imagine what the world will be like, so we mostly encourage printing using the right paper and inks as well as proper storage.
Yes, that was exactly the intent when MS created its own proprietary document formats. There was a time when WordPerfect was happy to convert to and from Ami Pro, when Star Writer exported just fine to Word. Microsoft changed all that by relentlessly leveraging compatibility to feed their revenue stream.
Agreed. That's why I mentioned both Adobe and Word formats in the same sentence. I don't think either one is particularly appropriate (although PDF as a published specification is a great deal easier to work with when doing document conversion).
That's hard to believe, and not entirely relevant. What I'm talking about -as a minimal scenario- is a situation where the original software just doesn't exist any more. Twenty-five years ago in 1985, Word was something called Multi-Tool. I sincerely doubt one of its files would open in Office 2010 without significant effort from a developer.
Nobody. That's exactly what we do. The problem is that we work with legal documents from over 20 countries and hundreds of different sources. We have a limited amount of development resources (mostly just me) and we need these documents to be available forever, effectively. If people could actually settle on a standard that really was a standard, if people could actually agree to look slightly farther down the track than their own desktops, we could actually spend time building new searching capabilities, ontologies and frameworks to make the data way, way more useful than it is today.
Instead, I spend all my time dealing with half-assed, unstructured formatting brought about by the fact that people are content to use a second-rate implementation of a deliberately obfuscated format.
Other vendors may be guilty of this, too. But Microsoft has done it longer and more effectively than most.
Man, you must be really, really new here.
This is exactly the problem (and the same facile response) we've been coping with since the mid-90s, and I can tell you from experience that things are never as simple as you describe.
Let's take one client I'm working with right now. They're a national institution, responsible for archiving court documents in perpetuity. That means, effectively, forever. Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?
If, however, these documents were stored in plain text markup (e.g. XML) following an open, formal and workable specification whose definitions are slightly more robust than "Do this formatting the way we did in Word 97" and which consists of slightly more than dumping blobs of binary data inside tags, we might stand a chance. It would still be a bit of an ask, but in the worst case scenario, we could probably infer (or ignore) the parts that puzzled us most.
Document formats matter because a great many of them -especially those produced by the public sector- have historical value and need to be preserved for a very long time.
This generation of the internet was initially dismissed as a toy by most companies and governments and the genie got out of the bottle. They won't make that mistake with the next generation.
I disagree with your diagnosis, but I agree wholeheartedly with your conclusion.
Having worked on the Internet since the early 90s, and having benefited from the massive ignorance of how the Internet works that pervaded business past the end of the decade, I feel it's more like business was able to characterise the symptoms but didn't understand the nature of the disease.
In the 90s, people talked a lot about Disruptive Technologies and (forgive me) Paradigm Shifts. They knew that early adopters reaped the greatest rewards, but beyond that they were more or less aimless.
I think of it as the difference between cleverness and intelligence. The people who actually built the Internet had vision, but only learned how to be clever over time. Businesses working on the Internet got clever first, but even today they're just barely beginning to develop a vision about what they want it to be.
Given that their vision resembles Iran- and China-style Internet more than anywhere else, I too find it a troubling one. I worry that some day I'll be the moral equivalent of an aged hippie, longing for the lost freedom of my youth....
So we can make improbability machines and then in 10 years an infinite improbability drive?
Magic 8 Ball sez: UNCERTAIN
Yeah..but if you go up there and and say publicly that "I think [insert racial, sexual orientation, etc type slang] suck" and you can actually get busted for "hate speech".
No you can't.
Hate speech requires that you make actual threats against a given group. In fact, even saying 'All ${FOO}s should die!' isn't enough to get you busted. It has to be clear that you are actually advocating for their collective demise. You could even say, 'I'm going to kill that ${FOO} right now!' and not be guilty of hate speech, because your hatred was aimed at an individual whom you incidentally were calling names.
But way, way before you get to the point of being arrested, you'll be shunned for being the bigot that you are, if you don't get punched in the face for your efforts. See, we Canadians value free speech so much that we try[*] to be polite and respectful when we use it.
If you want to be a know-nothing, racist fuckwit in Canada, you can. But it'll be a pretty lonely existence.
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[*] All bets are off at a hockey game.
Plus a straightforward way of figuring out how to best assign processes to particular cores? (which ones are faster and which are slower)
Heh, trick question. You almost got me there.
You see, Intel stack their cores from fastest to slowest in order to maximise heat dissipation. This is known as a High-Endian architecture. AMD, on the other hand, use a Low-Endian architecture, stacking their cores from slowest to fastest because they claim it lowers power usage. So the real trick when trying to figure out which cores are faster is finding a cross-platform approach that won't penalise any given processor.
The Slaughterhouse-5[*] method says that with a non-randomised Tralfamadorean transform, you can infer where your sample data is going to end up before you actually send it there. So you just measure the incipient idiopathic latency of your unsent bytes and then apply a parsimonious lectern to the results and voilà!
... Why, yes, I am in Marketing. Why do you ask?
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[*] As developed by Billy Pilgrim. Po tee-weet