There hasn't been for decades. Until recently what you had was the illusion of someone making the decision. However, in most cases, they didn't actually have much of a choice. Company regulations, guidelines, processes and other external factors have been guiding much of the "decisions" at large companies for a long time now. The reason you can't get decisions overturned or things done in a non-standard way in most cases isn't that it would require your contact to change his mind, it is that it requires your contact to go to major efforts, because everything is streamlined to the standard case.
Sounds interesting, but right now the role of identity provider seems to be limited to (to quote the page itself) "dudes like Yahoo!, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and even github".
Well, thank you, but I run my own server and I own my own domain and I want to provide my own identity.
So, call me again when there's a Debian package for that. Until that happens, I'm not interested.
If you only ever have to build a new server twice a year, what the heck are you doing employing someone full-time for that anyways? Yes, of course in that case you're better outsourcing that.
But the example extends to more than just that. Too many managers look at how busy people are instead of how productive they are. That means that being efficient is a top-priority item up there in the company goals or top management vision, but actually a stupid thing to do in the levels where the actual work is being done.
For example, I know from marketing directors who had a strange focus on how many customer appointments the sales force people had. I agreed that it's a valid metric to watch and if someone deviates from the average considerably, it may be a topic for the next meeting. But setting an actual goal number for such a metric is pure stupidity. Some sales people may have fewer appointments, but a higher close rate and thus end up with the same (or better) revenue generated. Forcing them to make more appointments may very well worsen their close rate, reduce the total numbers, and demotivate them.
People who are efficient at their jobs in their own ways should be treasured higher than people who are merely busy. Someone who gets the job done in 6 hours and then spends two hours surfing and playing Facebook games may not be your personal vision of a good employee - but he got the job done. And contrary to the guy who gets the job done in 10 hours without complaining about the overtime - i.e. the kind of person that most low-level managers prefer, because they are so hard-working. Well, when the shit hits the fan and the work load goes up, the laid-back efficient guy can put in 2 additional hours of work without breaking a sweat for 33% more output. Or he can put in 4 more hours with acceptable overtime - 66% more output. For the same gain in output, the "hard-working" guy would have to stay 13.3 and 16.6 hours. You think that's going to happen? Either his health or the union will intervene if you try to push him this hard.
Give me the efficient, laid-back guy who knows his stuff any time over an amateur who tries to compensate expertise with "hard work".
I've wanted an App like that on my iPhone ever since I got it. Actually, I've wanted one for wearable computing since the first prototypes.
See, I have a great memory for faces, and a horrible memory for names and other details. I see people all the time and know that I know them - but I can't recall anything about them. Sometimes, a minute or two of hard thinking and it comes back to me. Sometimes I have to start up a conversation and hope that hints drop.
I'd love to death an App that I can point at someone and it matches their face to my database and shows me the Contacts entry with name, birthday and notes.
Either way, if you were gone for about 3 weeks, and no one really needed you for that time off, your job was going to be axed shortly.
A surefire sign of MBA-idiots with no real-world life experience in long-term viability. That should do for the buzzword bingo, but the problem is real.
If I can leave for 3 weeks and nothing breaks down, you absolutely want to keep me, because I know how to build reliable systems that don't fall over as soon as someone looks at them funny. You may not need me to keep them running, but you will need me to build the next system that is low-maintainance.
Of course, you can probably employ 2-3 fresh out of college tech junkies for my salary. Problem is that you'll need 4 of them to build your systems instead of just me and my partner, and 6 of them to keep the crap running instead of just me and my partner. You do the math.
I've been buying my personal computers following the same formula for more than 20 years now: Spend a big chunk of money on the almost-top-of-the-line thing today, and save on upgrades for the next two years. In the 3rd year I feel that the machine doesn't quite cut it anymore. Instead of upgrading, repeat step one. It's served me well and I've spent considerably less over the years than any friends who constantly buy new harddrives, more memory, better graphics cards, etc. etc. etc.
I also noticed that companies who aren't afraid to hire top talent for appropriate salaries tend to do a lot better than those always trying to get people for the lowest possible price. Very few companies have ever done the math on what a high turnover costs them. A new employee in a tech job takes months to be up to speed, until he knows everything he needs to know about the company network, servers, procedures, etc. - add hiring costs, the additional time it costs management, HR, etc. and the figure is quite substantial.
The reason for this distinction is that you can get yourself into (and remain in) a monopoly position without harming the public.
Actually, you can't. Economics 101.
However, the reason acquiring a monopoly per se isn't illegal is that it is so profitable for the monopoly holder (you outline some reasons yourself) that everyone aspires to it. Outlawing the monopoly itself would dramatically reduce the incentives to take risk and invest in business endeavours. That's why politics doesn't do it, they don't want to reduce the incentives for big companies to invest further. If monopolies were outlawed, large companies would seek a "still safely legal" optimum point and at that point stop investing, innovating and growing and instead optimize the amount of profit they extract from the market. The detrimental effect of that happening would be far worse than a few temporary near-monopolies.
Just sounds like they're using "testing" titles to cover their asses when things inevitably go wrong.
I'd rather they label an almost-finished product "testing" or "beta" than doing it the Microsoft way and selling a clear-still-beta product as "finished".
Giving up vacation days because you couldn't use them, interrupting vacations or cutting them short for work - if you find yourself anywhere near that list, you're a fucking idiot, and the one you're fucking is yourself. And that was the polite way of putting it.
A few years ago, I've had to become a bit of an expert in vacations for business reasons (negotiations regarding vacation times, rules, company procedures, etc.). Two things are absolutely frightening when you do that. One is that we need vacations at all - for thousands of years, there was no such thing. That's because work has become condensed to a point where it's detrimental to health at good times. Two is how little almost everyone, employers, employees, even most union people, realize how important vacations and other free times are. I've seen many people crash and burn in those years and lack of vacations, interruptions of off-work time and not being able to "shut down" when you leave work were almost always present and at least contributing factors.
In all those years, I have encountered one group of people who can do that, who can go on without vacations and free days and suffer no ill consequences. These people share two important characteristics: One is that their time is self-determined to a large degree. In other words: They could close up shop and go away for a few days at any time if only they wanted. They have no boss pressure and no customer pressure that would stop them, because they've organized their work so that if they ever need to, they can. Obviously, most of them are self-employed, but not all. A great example is a cobbler who has his shop down the street from where I live: The official opening times of his shop, as posted in the window, are: "When I'm here." Two, these people work their dream. They do what they want to do, they have meaning in their jobs, and they've cut out as much of the crap as possible, and some that other people thought would not be possible to cut. They never ask themselves "what the fuck am I doing here?".
None of them make a killing. But they make a living. And I try to be one of them over being rich, but hollow. I've worked with too many so-called "successful" people and seen their dull eyes. Five minutes with someone from the group above and you can never go back into the machinery.
nope, the/. mod system still works well. It's got a starting advantage of 10 years or so with all us old-timers having karma that's somewhere well beyond anything the astroturfers can accumulate in the short times they've had so far.
But it'll change.
Anyways, to the point: I sincerely hope that Google resists the temptation of bringing in Zynga et al. - the games spam is one of the reasons I left FB long before Google+ showed up. In fact, I consider that a measure of the evolution of social media. When something is new, we use it for anything that it could potentially be used for, because we don't really care about the results, we just want to play with the new toy. But once it's no longer the new toy, we use it for what it's actually useful for. I've long wanted for a self-updating online address book with grouping and maybe messaging (though a good e-mail interface could replace that) and events/invitations management.
Spam makes up around 90% of all e-mails sent, according to pretty much any source that publishes guesses about spam volume. The total cost of the infrastructure alone, even if not a single spam mail were ever read by anyone, is staggering. Those filters that shield you from the spam don't come for free, you know? They don't fall from the sky. People actually build them, configure them, maintain them. These people cost money. Their time could be spent on something productive.
You don't solve global warming by turning up your air conditioning by two degrees. Better filters mean one thing: More spam. If you double the efficiency of the filters, the spammers will send out twice as much spam.
What he doesn't do is explain why a common email management scheme is hell.
Due to the same rule that is at work with friends vs. enemies. Regular mail tappers off once things are done with, spam accumulates.
I've had my current e-mail address since 1998. If I were to stop using it today, and switch to a new one, it would take a few days for my friends to change, a few weeks for the people I have less contact with, and maybe a few months for all the low-volume stuff like password reminders from sites I'm signed up with etc. But spam would never stop, because spammers never delete addresses no matter what.
Now I don't switch addresses, but over the years, you lose friends, business contacts move on, you stop using sites, etc. - the circle of regular people you communicate with changes. But the circle of spammers who spam you only ever grows. Your address gets added to yet another list, yet another spammer buys the old lists, etc.
All our spam filters and such are only shielding us from the worst part of the issue, they do not and never will solve the spam problem.
In fact, I think if we were to do just two things: a) disabled and disallow all spam filters world-wide for just one week, b) force everyone to read their own e-mail, especially politicians, one of two things would happen: Either, people would stop using e-mail completely, or something would finally be done about spam.
Actually, as you may have noticed in the article, the guy uses e-mail for work.
Work is the 2nd major source for e-mail aside from spam. And frankly, in lots of places much of the work-email isn't all that different from spam. For some reason, whenever "cover your ass" has become the working principle of a company, people start to grow the recipient list on every round of an e-mail exchange, including more and more people in it.
Then there's all the chat messages that people push through mail when no IM is available. Stuff like "lunch at 12 as always?".
No, 400 really isn't all that much in that context.
I think maybe if some kind of financial liability was introduced, companies would take notice.
No, they wouldn't.
That's what I was saying about humans being horrible at risk assessment.
There's a reason we didn't make car manufacturers responsible for accident injuries, but instead forced them to build in airbags, no matter what their in-house crash statistics might have said.
We need regulation like that for IT as well. Make it a (very costly) offense to store passwords unencrypted, no matter if there's a breach or not. Stuff like that. Go through the best practice lists - there are a number of well-done collections out there - pick out the stuff everyone agrees on, and make it mandatory by law. Make the IT director personally liable for following that set of minimal security requirements, with jail time for intentional and/or blatant violations.
Oh yes, and make sure that you don't accept "it was too expensive" as a reason. I don't know about the US courts, but I very much enjoy the german courts' general approach to those excuses: "Geld hat man zu haben" is the saying - translates roughly as "you ought to have money". The legal version is that if you don't have money for a required expense, you would have had to file for bancruptcy (because you ran out of liquidity). Since you didn't at that time, you now can't claim in court that you didn't have the money. Simple, yet brilliant.
I guess it still needs a decade or two 'til people want the same in their computers, and done to their data in other people's computers.
My point exactly.
I think we need to force security on people. Once they have to do it, they will come around to appreciating the benefits of doing it right.
Because once the option "ignore it" is taken away, doing it right is often the next-best one, and a more effective use of budget than doing a half-assed job that may blow up in your face.
Securing your house the same as a bank vault is unreasonable, because the physical changes required are massive, and costly, and require infrastructure.
Removing telnet and moving to SSH is not even in the same category.
Many of the "soft targets" are not soft because someone decided that a lock and a deadbolt are enough for their threat scenario, and the windows don't need to be reinforced - they are soft because nobody thought about threat scenarios at all.
Also, because quite frankly, developers suck. We don't let people who know about beauty and composition, but not about structural analysis build houses. But we do let people who know nothing about writing secure software write our e-commerce applications. No surprise they're breaking down left, right and center. There is something to the old saying that if architects would build houses the way programmers write software, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
And that's why LulzSec is important. Exactly because they didn't hit the hit-profile targets, but the second or third tier - the servers of some importance, not your personal blog, but not the White House, either. Because those are the people who commonly think the least about security. The bullshit mantra "we are not a target" is still strong in those circles. If that changes, that alone and nothing else, it would be a huge step forward.
Disclaimer: I've worked in compliance until recently, but my background is security.
The problem you outline is real, but you are missing a point: Compliance got traction because companies don't invest in security. The risk/reward just doesn't work out. A million credit cards lost? The PR to fix that is a lot cheaper than the security investment to prevent it. And the real damage isn't for you, it's for the credit card holders and their companies.
That's why compliance became so big, because too many people realized that unless you force them, companies won't do security. The same way that airbags in cars didn't become standard issue until some laws were passed. Human beings are horrible at risk management for everything that falls outside our daily experience.
The quality of your compliance managers determines if you're just following the book, or actually bringing an advantage to the company. I proud myself on IT management being happy they had me (I wasn't part of IT, to them I was an outsider from the finance department, the compliance hand of the CFO). You can do compliance in a way that IT doesn't hate and that gives you actual benefits.
Unfortunately, too few compliance managers are IT people, much less IT security experts. Which leads to them doing things "by the book". Or, as it's called in other contexts: Work-to-rule. As we all know, that's not work, that's sabotage.
Actually, I do think twice, but I've decided that the alternatives are too troublesome and don't justify the small risk.
Because, quite honestly, the "if you don't do anything illegal" line makes a faulty assumption: Namely that the police and justice system are perfect. They aren't. There are police officers who will make a copy of your porn collection or your intimate conversation with your girlfriend. There are prosecutors who will make your life difficult even though you didn't do anything illegal - because sometimes it takes several courts and many years to figure out if this borderline case was, or wasn't.
Maybe instead of the "evil bit" we should propose a "good guy flag" that you and I can use so the police doesn't waste time and precious resources on going after us.,-)
Hahahahaha. Seriously, you think Microsoft is on the way out just because people love iPads or something?
No, you need to learn how to read and understand these difficult words. Like "monopoly". I said MS is on the way out if their monopoly starts to fall apart.
And Microsoft is right in there. Microsoft loves the cloud. The cloud means Microsoft can lock you into their software even if you are accessing that software from an iPad.
Good point. And yes, MS is big about cloud. I watched a couple talks by them, and my summary is that they don't get it. What they advertise as "cloud services" is basically "look you can rent windows servers instead of buying them". Much of the flexibility and dedication of, say, Amazon's offering is missing. But maybe that's just the talks I saw, I must admit I've not actually used the MS service, nor do I plan to.
Sure, there are other cloud providers. So there'll be a little more competition. But only Microsoft can say "we're the people you've been trusting for decades -- can you really risk going with anyone else?"
Actually, yes. 10 years ago, they could've pulled the IBM stunt. But these days, their competitors are just as famous and respected within the top management circles.
The broader concept of the cloud as something that provides compute power rather than software is more amenable to freedom, but that's not the vision pushed by the likes of Apple.
Your point is valid, but your conclusion isn't. Because Apple if anyone knows how much money you can make by leveraging other people's work. In other words: Apple will certainly provide compute power - to their App developers. Because they make as much money from selling other people's Apps as they make from selling their own.
Hahahahaha. Seriously, you think Microsoft is on the way out just because people love iPads or something?
No, you need to learn how to read and understand these difficult words. Like "monopoly". I said MS is on the way out if their monopoly starts to fall apart.
And Microsoft is right in there. Microsoft loves the cloud. The cloud means Microsoft can lock you into their software even if you are accessing that software from an iPad.
Good point. And yes, MS is big about cloud. I watched a couple talks by them, and my summary is that they don't get it. What they advertise as "cloud services" is basically "look you can rent windows servers instead of buying them". Much of the flexibility and dedication of, say, Amazon's offering is missing. But maybe that's just the talks I saw, I must admit I've not actually used the MS service, nor do I plan to.
Sure, there are other cloud providers. So there'll be a little more competition. But only Microsoft can say "we're the people you've been trusting for decades -- can you really risk going with anyone else?"
Actually, yes. 10 years ago, they could've pulled the IBM stunt. But these days, their competitors are just as famous and respected within the top management circles.
The broader concept of the cloud as something that provides compute power rather than software is more amenable to freedom, but that's not the vision pushed by the likes of Apple.
Really? Your point is valid, but your conclusion isn't. Because Apple if anyone knows how much money you can make by leveraging other people's work. In other words: Apple will certainly provide compute power - to their App developers. Because they make as much money from selling other people's Apps as they make from selling their own.
That's the real problem here. Apple lost the desktop wars a long LONG time ago.
That is why "war" is such a bad analogy for markets. What makes you think this "war" is over - or ever will be? Competition in a market place is continuous. Apple is still there, making more money in that market that you say they "lost" than you'll likely ever see in your life, and their market share has actually been growing for years.
If anything, they've proven that they're in it for the whole nine yards. If they kept it alive when market share was shrinking, what insanity would have to befall them to kill it when market share is growing?
No surprises there. Geeks have been predicting the downfall of MS for 15 years and more, essentially saying that once their monopoly falls apart, it's game over for them.
We see it happening. Their market share doesn't have to go to less than 50% for the monopoly to break apart. Once it's low enough for the lock-in effects to go away (which means you need to look at the Windows/Office market share, and not the Windows share alone), it will accelerate dramatically.
Oh out of your ass, I see. Sorry, that's not a credible source, not even by Wikipedia standards.
PS: Even if it's true, yes I would. The iMac I'm writing this on was the top-of-the-line machine late last year when I bought it and came in at almost $6000. I've been buying the top-level machine available at that time for almost 20 years now, and from everything I see around me, I spend less money overall than my friends who upgrade every year. Look at the used market and you see how much Apple computers retain their value over time. A Sony/Toshiba/Acer/whatever notebook you buy today has lost half its value by the time you get it home. Apple hardware regularily sells used for almost the new price after a year or so. This machine will probably last me 3-4 years and still have used value when I buy a new one.
So even if your pulled-out-of-my-ass numbers were correct - which is unlikely because Apple's low-end computer prices have been coming down for five years now - then if you calculate actual value and factor in time, you still end up pretty well. In fact, if you search for it, this discussion has been had here on/. about every time Apple releases new hardware.
Err... not even close. What you're doing is a wide interpretation. What Bill meant was the "thin client" model, a big hype in the 90s. He was far, far away from predicting cloud computing or iDevices.
OS X is the backend of the entire Apple world. While you could theoretically run things like iTunes on an iOS device as an app, where do you think all those apps come from? Hint: They don't grow on trees.
There is no 30% cut if people don't have development machines. And that means Xcode, and engines and frameworks. And that means a general-purpose OS. Namely, OS X.
Really, how dumb do you have to be to think that a car company is going to sell its future models without engines just because they focus on the design of the body and the exquisite interior?
Please, the record companies never hated music downloads. They hated not being paid for them. Preferably multiple times. With as little going to the artist as possible. And with a tax on blank media just because they can. And control over the distribution channels. Well, you get the idea. Basically: They are greedy bastards, so money can buy their cooperation. It really is that simple.
Slashdot Mirror
there isn't even a person that you can get mad at
There hasn't been for decades. Until recently what you had was the illusion of someone making the decision. However, in most cases, they didn't actually have much of a choice. Company regulations, guidelines, processes and other external factors have been guiding much of the "decisions" at large companies for a long time now. The reason you can't get decisions overturned or things done in a non-standard way in most cases isn't that it would require your contact to change his mind, it is that it requires your contact to go to major efforts, because everything is streamlined to the standard case.
Sounds interesting, but right now the role of identity provider seems to be limited to (to quote the page itself) "dudes like Yahoo!, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and even github".
Well, thank you, but I run my own server and I own my own domain and I want to provide my own identity.
So, call me again when there's a Debian package for that. Until that happens, I'm not interested.
If you only ever have to build a new server twice a year, what the heck are you doing employing someone full-time for that anyways? Yes, of course in that case you're better outsourcing that.
But the example extends to more than just that. Too many managers look at how busy people are instead of how productive they are. That means that being efficient is a top-priority item up there in the company goals or top management vision, but actually a stupid thing to do in the levels where the actual work is being done.
For example, I know from marketing directors who had a strange focus on how many customer appointments the sales force people had. I agreed that it's a valid metric to watch and if someone deviates from the average considerably, it may be a topic for the next meeting. But setting an actual goal number for such a metric is pure stupidity. Some sales people may have fewer appointments, but a higher close rate and thus end up with the same (or better) revenue generated. Forcing them to make more appointments may very well worsen their close rate, reduce the total numbers, and demotivate them.
People who are efficient at their jobs in their own ways should be treasured higher than people who are merely busy. Someone who gets the job done in 6 hours and then spends two hours surfing and playing Facebook games may not be your personal vision of a good employee - but he got the job done. And contrary to the guy who gets the job done in 10 hours without complaining about the overtime - i.e. the kind of person that most low-level managers prefer, because they are so hard-working.
Well, when the shit hits the fan and the work load goes up, the laid-back efficient guy can put in 2 additional hours of work without breaking a sweat for 33% more output. Or he can put in 4 more hours with acceptable overtime - 66% more output. For the same gain in output, the "hard-working" guy would have to stay 13.3 and 16.6 hours. You think that's going to happen? Either his health or the union will intervene if you try to push him this hard.
Give me the efficient, laid-back guy who knows his stuff any time over an amateur who tries to compensate expertise with "hard work".
I've wanted an App like that on my iPhone ever since I got it. Actually, I've wanted one for wearable computing since the first prototypes.
See, I have a great memory for faces, and a horrible memory for names and other details. I see people all the time and know that I know them - but I can't recall anything about them. Sometimes, a minute or two of hard thinking and it comes back to me. Sometimes I have to start up a conversation and hope that hints drop.
I'd love to death an App that I can point at someone and it matches their face to my database and shows me the Contacts entry with name, birthday and notes.
Either way, if you were gone for about 3 weeks, and no one really needed you for that time off, your job was going to be axed shortly.
A surefire sign of MBA-idiots with no real-world life experience in long-term viability. That should do for the buzzword bingo, but the problem is real.
If I can leave for 3 weeks and nothing breaks down, you absolutely want to keep me, because I know how to build reliable systems that don't fall over as soon as someone looks at them funny. You may not need me to keep them running, but you will need me to build the next system that is low-maintainance.
Of course, you can probably employ 2-3 fresh out of college tech junkies for my salary. Problem is that you'll need 4 of them to build your systems instead of just me and my partner, and 6 of them to keep the crap running instead of just me and my partner. You do the math.
I've been buying my personal computers following the same formula for more than 20 years now: Spend a big chunk of money on the almost-top-of-the-line thing today, and save on upgrades for the next two years. In the 3rd year I feel that the machine doesn't quite cut it anymore. Instead of upgrading, repeat step one.
It's served me well and I've spent considerably less over the years than any friends who constantly buy new harddrives, more memory, better graphics cards, etc. etc. etc.
I also noticed that companies who aren't afraid to hire top talent for appropriate salaries tend to do a lot better than those always trying to get people for the lowest possible price. Very few companies have ever done the math on what a high turnover costs them. A new employee in a tech job takes months to be up to speed, until he knows everything he needs to know about the company network, servers, procedures, etc. - add hiring costs, the additional time it costs management, HR, etc. and the figure is quite substantial.
The reason for this distinction is that you can get yourself into (and remain in) a monopoly position without harming the public.
Actually, you can't. Economics 101.
However, the reason acquiring a monopoly per se isn't illegal is that it is so profitable for the monopoly holder (you outline some reasons yourself) that everyone aspires to it. Outlawing the monopoly itself would dramatically reduce the incentives to take risk and invest in business endeavours. That's why politics doesn't do it, they don't want to reduce the incentives for big companies to invest further. If monopolies were outlawed, large companies would seek a "still safely legal" optimum point and at that point stop investing, innovating and growing and instead optimize the amount of profit they extract from the market. The detrimental effect of that happening would be far worse than a few temporary near-monopolies.
Just sounds like they're using "testing" titles to cover their asses when things inevitably go wrong.
I'd rather they label an almost-finished product "testing" or "beta" than doing it the Microsoft way and selling a clear-still-beta product as "finished".
Giving up vacation days because you couldn't use them, interrupting vacations or cutting them short for work - if you find yourself anywhere near that list, you're a fucking idiot, and the one you're fucking is yourself. And that was the polite way of putting it.
A few years ago, I've had to become a bit of an expert in vacations for business reasons (negotiations regarding vacation times, rules, company procedures, etc.). Two things are absolutely frightening when you do that.
One is that we need vacations at all - for thousands of years, there was no such thing. That's because work has become condensed to a point where it's detrimental to health at good times.
Two is how little almost everyone, employers, employees, even most union people, realize how important vacations and other free times are. I've seen many people crash and burn in those years and lack of vacations, interruptions of off-work time and not being able to "shut down" when you leave work were almost always present and at least contributing factors.
In all those years, I have encountered one group of people who can do that, who can go on without vacations and free days and suffer no ill consequences. These people share two important characteristics: One is that their time is self-determined to a large degree. In other words: They could close up shop and go away for a few days at any time if only they wanted. They have no boss pressure and no customer pressure that would stop them, because they've organized their work so that if they ever need to, they can. Obviously, most of them are self-employed, but not all. A great example is a cobbler who has his shop down the street from where I live: The official opening times of his shop, as posted in the window, are: "When I'm here."
Two, these people work their dream. They do what they want to do, they have meaning in their jobs, and they've cut out as much of the crap as possible, and some that other people thought would not be possible to cut. They never ask themselves "what the fuck am I doing here?".
None of them make a killing. But they make a living. And I try to be one of them over being rich, but hollow. I've worked with too many so-called "successful" people and seen their dull eyes. Five minutes with someone from the group above and you can never go back into the machinery.
nope, the /. mod system still works well. It's got a starting advantage of 10 years or so with all us old-timers having karma that's somewhere well beyond anything the astroturfers can accumulate in the short times they've had so far.
But it'll change.
Anyways, to the point: I sincerely hope that Google resists the temptation of bringing in Zynga et al. - the games spam is one of the reasons I left FB long before Google+ showed up. In fact, I consider that a measure of the evolution of social media. When something is new, we use it for anything that it could potentially be used for, because we don't really care about the results, we just want to play with the new toy.
But once it's no longer the new toy, we use it for what it's actually useful for. I've long wanted for a self-updating online address book with grouping and maybe messaging (though a good e-mail interface could replace that) and events/invitations management.
You're an idiot.
Spam makes up around 90% of all e-mails sent, according to pretty much any source that publishes guesses about spam volume. The total cost of the infrastructure alone, even if not a single spam mail were ever read by anyone, is staggering. Those filters that shield you from the spam don't come for free, you know? They don't fall from the sky. People actually build them, configure them, maintain them. These people cost money. Their time could be spent on something productive.
You don't solve global warming by turning up your air conditioning by two degrees. Better filters mean one thing: More spam. If you double the efficiency of the filters, the spammers will send out twice as much spam.
What he doesn't do is explain why a common email management scheme is hell.
Due to the same rule that is at work with friends vs. enemies. Regular mail tappers off once things are done with, spam accumulates.
I've had my current e-mail address since 1998. If I were to stop using it today, and switch to a new one, it would take a few days for my friends to change, a few weeks for the people I have less contact with, and maybe a few months for all the low-volume stuff like password reminders from sites I'm signed up with etc.
But spam would never stop, because spammers never delete addresses no matter what.
Now I don't switch addresses, but over the years, you lose friends, business contacts move on, you stop using sites, etc. - the circle of regular people you communicate with changes. But the circle of spammers who spam you only ever grows. Your address gets added to yet another list, yet another spammer buys the old lists, etc.
All our spam filters and such are only shielding us from the worst part of the issue, they do not and never will solve the spam problem.
In fact, I think if we were to do just two things:
a) disabled and disallow all spam filters world-wide for just one week,
b) force everyone to read their own e-mail, especially politicians,
one of two things would happen: Either, people would stop using e-mail completely, or something would finally be done about spam.
Actually, as you may have noticed in the article, the guy uses e-mail for work.
Work is the 2nd major source for e-mail aside from spam. And frankly, in lots of places much of the work-email isn't all that different from spam. For some reason, whenever "cover your ass" has become the working principle of a company, people start to grow the recipient list on every round of an e-mail exchange, including more and more people in it.
Then there's all the chat messages that people push through mail when no IM is available. Stuff like "lunch at 12 as always?".
No, 400 really isn't all that much in that context.
I think maybe if some kind of financial liability was introduced, companies would take notice.
No, they wouldn't.
That's what I was saying about humans being horrible at risk assessment.
There's a reason we didn't make car manufacturers responsible for accident injuries, but instead forced them to build in airbags, no matter what their in-house crash statistics might have said.
We need regulation like that for IT as well. Make it a (very costly) offense to store passwords unencrypted, no matter if there's a breach or not. Stuff like that. Go through the best practice lists - there are a number of well-done collections out there - pick out the stuff everyone agrees on, and make it mandatory by law. Make the IT director personally liable for following that set of minimal security requirements, with jail time for intentional and/or blatant violations.
Oh yes, and make sure that you don't accept "it was too expensive" as a reason. I don't know about the US courts, but I very much enjoy the german courts' general approach to those excuses: "Geld hat man zu haben" is the saying - translates roughly as "you ought to have money". The legal version is that if you don't have money for a required expense, you would have had to file for bancruptcy (because you ran out of liquidity). Since you didn't at that time, you now can't claim in court that you didn't have the money. Simple, yet brilliant.
I guess it still needs a decade or two 'til people want the same in their computers, and done to their data in other people's computers.
My point exactly.
I think we need to force security on people. Once they have to do it, they will come around to appreciating the benefits of doing it right.
Because once the option "ignore it" is taken away, doing it right is often the next-best one, and a more effective use of budget than doing a half-assed job that may blow up in your face.
I claim that a good part of that is a myth.
Securing your house the same as a bank vault is unreasonable, because the physical changes required are massive, and costly, and require infrastructure.
Removing telnet and moving to SSH is not even in the same category.
Many of the "soft targets" are not soft because someone decided that a lock and a deadbolt are enough for their threat scenario, and the windows don't need to be reinforced - they are soft because nobody thought about threat scenarios at all.
Also, because quite frankly, developers suck. We don't let people who know about beauty and composition, but not about structural analysis build houses. But we do let people who know nothing about writing secure software write our e-commerce applications. No surprise they're breaking down left, right and center. There is something to the old saying that if architects would build houses the way programmers write software, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
And that's why LulzSec is important. Exactly because they didn't hit the hit-profile targets, but the second or third tier - the servers of some importance, not your personal blog, but not the White House, either. Because those are the people who commonly think the least about security. The bullshit mantra "we are not a target" is still strong in those circles. If that changes, that alone and nothing else, it would be a huge step forward.
Disclaimer: I've worked in compliance until recently, but my background is security.
The problem you outline is real, but you are missing a point: Compliance got traction because companies don't invest in security. The risk/reward just doesn't work out. A million credit cards lost? The PR to fix that is a lot cheaper than the security investment to prevent it. And the real damage isn't for you, it's for the credit card holders and their companies.
That's why compliance became so big, because too many people realized that unless you force them, companies won't do security. The same way that airbags in cars didn't become standard issue until some laws were passed. Human beings are horrible at risk management for everything that falls outside our daily experience.
The quality of your compliance managers determines if you're just following the book, or actually bringing an advantage to the company. I proud myself on IT management being happy they had me (I wasn't part of IT, to them I was an outsider from the finance department, the compliance hand of the CFO). You can do compliance in a way that IT doesn't hate and that gives you actual benefits.
Unfortunately, too few compliance managers are IT people, much less IT security experts. Which leads to them doing things "by the book". Or, as it's called in other contexts: Work-to-rule. As we all know, that's not work, that's sabotage.
Actually, I do think twice, but I've decided that the alternatives are too troublesome and don't justify the small risk.
Because, quite honestly, the "if you don't do anything illegal" line makes a faulty assumption: Namely that the police and justice system are perfect. They aren't. There are police officers who will make a copy of your porn collection or your intimate conversation with your girlfriend. There are prosecutors who will make your life difficult even though you didn't do anything illegal - because sometimes it takes several courts and many years to figure out if this borderline case was, or wasn't.
Maybe instead of the "evil bit" we should propose a "good guy flag" that you and I can use so the police doesn't waste time and precious resources on going after us. ,-)
Hahahahaha. Seriously, you think Microsoft is on the way out just because people love iPads or something?
No, you need to learn how to read and understand these difficult words. Like "monopoly". I said MS is on the way out if their monopoly starts to fall apart.
And Microsoft is right in there. Microsoft loves the cloud. The cloud means Microsoft can lock you into their software even if you are accessing that software from an iPad.
Good point. And yes, MS is big about cloud. I watched a couple talks by them, and my summary is that they don't get it. What they advertise as "cloud services" is basically "look you can rent windows servers instead of buying them". Much of the flexibility and dedication of, say, Amazon's offering is missing. But maybe that's just the talks I saw, I must admit I've not actually used the MS service, nor do I plan to.
Sure, there are other cloud providers. So there'll be a little more competition. But only Microsoft can say "we're the people you've been trusting for decades -- can you really risk going with anyone else?"
Actually, yes. 10 years ago, they could've pulled the IBM stunt. But these days, their competitors are just as famous and respected within the top management circles.
The broader concept of the cloud as something that provides compute power rather than software is more amenable to freedom, but that's not the vision pushed by the likes of Apple.
Your point is valid, but your conclusion isn't. Because Apple if anyone knows how much money you can make by leveraging other people's work. In other words: Apple will certainly provide compute power - to their App developers. Because they make as much money from selling other people's Apps as they make from selling their own.
Hahahahaha. Seriously, you think Microsoft is on the way out just because people love iPads or something?
No, you need to learn how to read and understand these difficult words. Like "monopoly". I said MS is on the way out if their monopoly starts to fall apart.
And Microsoft is right in there. Microsoft loves the cloud. The cloud means Microsoft can lock you into their software even if you are accessing that software from an iPad.
Good point. And yes, MS is big about cloud. I watched a couple talks by them, and my summary is that they don't get it. What they advertise as "cloud services" is basically "look you can rent windows servers instead of buying them". Much of the flexibility and dedication of, say, Amazon's offering is missing. But maybe that's just the talks I saw, I must admit I've not actually used the MS service, nor do I plan to.
Sure, there are other cloud providers. So there'll be a little more competition. But only Microsoft can say "we're the people you've been trusting for decades -- can you really risk going with anyone else?"
Actually, yes. 10 years ago, they could've pulled the IBM stunt. But these days, their competitors are just as famous and respected within the top management circles.
The broader concept of the cloud as something that provides compute power rather than software is more amenable to freedom, but that's not the vision pushed by the likes of Apple.
Really? Your point is valid, but your conclusion isn't. Because Apple if anyone knows how much money you can make by leveraging other people's work. In other words: Apple will certainly provide compute power - to their App developers. Because they make as much money from selling other people's Apps as they make from selling their own.
That's the real problem here. Apple lost the desktop wars a long LONG time ago.
That is why "war" is such a bad analogy for markets. What makes you think this "war" is over - or ever will be? Competition in a market place is continuous. Apple is still there, making more money in that market that you say they "lost" than you'll likely ever see in your life, and their market share has actually been growing for years.
If anything, they've proven that they're in it for the whole nine yards. If they kept it alive when market share was shrinking, what insanity would have to befall them to kill it when market share is growing?
No surprises there. Geeks have been predicting the downfall of MS for 15 years and more, essentially saying that once their monopoly falls apart, it's game over for them.
We see it happening. Their market share doesn't have to go to less than 50% for the monopoly to break apart. Once it's low enough for the lock-in effects to go away (which means you need to look at the Windows/Office market share, and not the Windows share alone), it will accelerate dramatically.
I can't wait to see it.
And you get your numbers from where?
Oh out of your ass, I see. Sorry, that's not a credible source, not even by Wikipedia standards.
PS: Even if it's true, yes I would. The iMac I'm writing this on was the top-of-the-line machine late last year when I bought it and came in at almost $6000. I've been buying the top-level machine available at that time for almost 20 years now, and from everything I see around me, I spend less money overall than my friends who upgrade every year. Look at the used market and you see how much Apple computers retain their value over time. A Sony/Toshiba/Acer/whatever notebook you buy today has lost half its value by the time you get it home. Apple hardware regularily sells used for almost the new price after a year or so. This machine will probably last me 3-4 years and still have used value when I buy a new one.
So even if your pulled-out-of-my-ass numbers were correct - which is unlikely because Apple's low-end computer prices have been coming down for five years now - then if you calculate actual value and factor in time, you still end up pretty well. In fact, if you search for it, this discussion has been had here on /. about every time Apple releases new hardware.
Err... not even close. What you're doing is a wide interpretation. What Bill meant was the "thin client" model, a big hype in the 90s. He was far, far away from predicting cloud computing or iDevices.
What a piece of nonsense.
OS X is the backend of the entire Apple world. While you could theoretically run things like iTunes on an iOS device as an app, where do you think all those apps come from? Hint: They don't grow on trees.
There is no 30% cut if people don't have development machines. And that means Xcode, and engines and frameworks. And that means a general-purpose OS. Namely, OS X.
Really, how dumb do you have to be to think that a car company is going to sell its future models without engines just because they focus on the design of the body and the exquisite interior?
Surprised?
Please, the record companies never hated music downloads. They hated not being paid for them. Preferably multiple times. With as little going to the artist as possible. And with a tax on blank media just because they can. And control over the distribution channels. Well, you get the idea. Basically: They are greedy bastards, so money can buy their cooperation. It really is that simple.