Re:No one notices a well done security job...
on
Security's Shaky State
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Sigh. I've learned "I don't understand why we need X" is all too often a warning from a superior that continuing to push for X (including by providing the supposedly requested info) may be a career-limiting move. OTOH, if X turns out to have been needed after all, not having gotten it is hard to explain to that same superior.
I've experienced worse. At one company I worked at, I warned of the pitfalls of a particular implementation my boss had been sold on. I was ignored. When the problems I predicted showed up, I was then blamed for creating them.
I quit that job as soon as a chance to move to a reasonably solid company came along...
-JMP
No one notices a well done security job...
on
Security's Shaky State
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
A major part of the problem is that CFO types don't like spending money on things they don't see a need for. By the time they see a need for security, it's past the point at which throwing money at the problem will fix things.
Likewise, the security side of an I.T. department is the sort of job that is hard to justify to people who assume that if they don't notice results, the job isn't really doing much.
Of course, we only hear about the ones stupid enough to get caught. I wonder what percentage of people attempting barcode scams aren't caught (or publicized, to save the store embarrassment). Similarly, I wonder if stories like this increase or reduce the number of people trying these scams...
-JMP
It wouldn't necessarily decimate Hawaii. Most of the seismic activity is on the east side of Mauna Loa, meaning the most likely coast to see the debris would be the southeast coast of the Big Island, where the voclanic activity is currently centered. A tsunami from the big island would have to travel northwest to do damage to the other Hawaiian islands.
-JMP
ESPN is already one of the most expensive channels for a cable service to carry, because they know that no cable service can really be a major success without it. They then require carriage of ESPN2, ESPN Classic and ESPN News if the cable company wants to carry ESPN.
Unless you watch all of the channels you currently receive, look for your cable bill to stay about the same, while you end up paying for only the channels you want...
-JMP
It would be useless for the FCC to simply allow a la carte pricing. They have to modify their existing rules on tiers and bundling.
Right now, unlike the FTC which ruled that Microsoft was out of line when they bundled software, the FCC rules specifically allow channel owners to sell bundles of channels to cable carriers, specifying in the contract which channels need to be in which tiers. On my local cable system, this results in having lots of channels in the broader digital tiers that no one ever watches. In order for my cable carrier to carry The Discovery Channel, they also need to carry Discovery Health, Discovery Military, etc...
If there's true a la carte pricing, with cable carriers charging whatever the channel provider wants to charge per customer plus a fee for carriage and bandwidth, there will be a major shakeout in the number of channels out there. Suddenly, the only cable channels out there will be the ones that customers are willing to pay for. (shudder)
The upshot of this would be an increase in HDTV offerings on cable. One of the major problems cable providers have right now is insufficient bandwidth for all the HDTV channels that they might otherwise want to offer, many of which HDTV owners would be willing to pay for. You'll see the dropped SDTV channels replaced by more HDTV channels and on demand services as the market sorts out what people are willing to pay for.
If this happens, it's long overdue. I'm not holding my breath.
-JMP
It's good that we've got so many morally upright people in this country to make sure that people understand that modern secularized entertainment is solely responsible for the proliferation of violence in our society. After all, there would be no violence or crime if people only read the Bible like God intended.
Of course, most of these people haven't read the Bible sufficiently closely to notice that it's chock full of sex and violence, much of it downright gratuitous.
-JMP
Re:In 1918, the young and healthy were dead by nig
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
But we have no natural immunity to an entirely new strain, and some can kill before our immune system can develop an effective response.
Sure, if there really is such a thing as a new strain. Everyone knows that the current administration has placed a ban on evolution. Without evolution, there can be no new strains of the flue. Without new strains, there can be no pandemic.
See? The Bush administration is protecting us from the pandemic!
-JMP
There's a slight twist here. The complaint is that Google is linking to sites that are stealing their images. They wouldn't mind if the traffic for images they created was going to sites they control.
The problem is that they're going after Google, not the sites that are trying to profit from copyrighted material...
-JMP
There must be at least one brewer that's planning on putting up the cash to be an official sponsor, and if not, there should be. All they need to do is print signs which are then distributed to pubs that sell their beer that have their brand, the Olympic brand (authorized because they paid), and say that the games can be viewed here. The big American brewers do this all the time for big events...
-JMP
Amazon has the clear advantage here. They already operate distribution centers in several locations around the US, have experience in inventory management and quick shipping, and can even rent videos at a slight loss for a while, using it to drive business to the rest of their operations.
Of course, if all that fails, they can follow their usual MO and file a patent for the idea of unlimited online rentals for a monthly fee and drive Netflix out of business that way.
-JMP
Providing more information than requested is also a pretty standard way of stalling an investigation without being technically guilty of obstruction. The tactic goes something like this:
Government requests some small piece of crucial information, probably a single document.
Target of the subpoena turns over 30-40 unlabelled boxes full of hard copies of documents.
Government asks where the thing they requested is
Target says "it's in there somewhere. Enjoy finding it."
(This tactic also works with IRS auditors. In the 1980's the IRS asked my father for documentation of a few of his transactions. He gave them a full list of all his transactions for that tax year, which was a stack of tractor-feed paper as thick as a phone book with a transaction on each line, single spaced. The IRS has pretty much left him alone since then.)
Also, the article says that Indymedia gave copies of the drives, not the drives themselves. Last time I checked, copying a drive from a server didn't shut down the server...
-JMP
The problem that we encountered that I think will be encountered here is the usefulness of the web to display content that has been created for a different medium.
A good test would be the subscriber statistics from MLB.tv, where Major Leage Baseball allows people to subscribe for a day, month, or full season to watch games live via Real or WindowsMedia. It's far from perfect watching a baseball broadcast designed for tv shown in a 320x240 window, but the number of people who come back and pay again after paying for a single day or single month is probably a good predictor of how many fans would be willing to watch hilights on the sort of screen a vPod is likely to have.
-JMP
While I wouldn't want to watch feature films on a 45 minute bus ride to work, it would be great to have a podcast of the hilights of last night's games to watch...
-JMP
Of course, and they were building on the idea of distributed information browsed via hypertext which wowed us all in Gopher. Remember back in the early 90's when Gopher seemed like the coolest thing ever? Of course, it took a GUI (thanks to Mosaic) for hypertext to catch on...
-JMP
I remember when my father set up a new office in 1981...
He got a system sold by Datapoint. There was the computer itself, and terminals at various places around the office. They also had a printer room, which had a dot matrix printer for each of the news wire services.
The Datapoint computer had a 10" floppy drive, but the tour de force was the "Cynthia," a 10MB drive with a removable cartridge. At the time, my father couldn't imagine any way they would ever use so much space.
25 years later, he still uses descendants of the transaction tracking software he wrote for that Datapoint system. Of course, now it runs under Windows, on a system with far more than 10MB of storage...
-JMP
Yes, it makes sense, but it sounds to me like they aren't allowing the ability to simply use an existing wi-fi network if one is already in place in your home...
-JMP
Most NYC taxis have a barrier, designed to protect the driver from the passengers. The barrier takes up quite a bit of legroom.
A few years ago, Ford introduced a slightly stretched version of the Crown Vic specifically to offset the thickness of the barrier. The unstretched version sometimes gives less than six inches of knee room between the front of the backseat and the barrier. This has nothing to do with obesity and everything to do with people liking their knees...
-JMP
This article ends up being more of a guide for how to start and build a company, and how to be a software engineer.
Anyone who can't figure out that you should seek advice from an accountant and lawyer to protect against getting audited or sued probably shouldn't be running a company.
Anyone who can't figure out that you shouldn't reinvent the wheel when coding, or that you should get rid of those pesky O(N^2) algorithms probably shouldn't be overseeing a software development venture.
The rest of the talk seems to present like a substitute for the sort of things I would imagine should be taught in business schools, but probably isn't.
-JMP
You walk into your neighborhood shop. The proprietor knows you and your purchasing history. Upon seeing you, you're greeted with a suggestion of things you might want to purchase based on your previous purchases and the buying patterns of other regular customers with similar preferences. This has been going on more or less since the creation of a currency based purchasing system. All Amazon did was create an algorithm to automate the process.
The problem is that the algorithm is obvious to anyone who understands the process, and the process is too well known to be subject to a patent. (Even so, that patent would have expired sometime well before the USPTO was created.)
I suppose if Amazon can't put well run stores out of business by taking all their customers away, they can patent the concept of good retail instead...
-JMP
Digital cable is a step in that direction already. Cablevision freed up a huge amount of bandwidth over the last few years by forcing all their subscribers to switch to digital cable boxes rather than the old analog ones. Now, all of the channels over their cable are transmitted digitally, which takes up far less bandwidth than the old analog scheme.
Some of the resulting bandwidth goes to increasing the number of channels (and HD channels), while some of it goes to additional Internet bandwidth. Add to that any upgrades of their network's bandwidth capacity and add switched video to reduce the bandwidth usage for channel offerings, and you get a much more robust set of offerings over cable TV.
-JMP
Apple might not see a direct profit stream from podcasting. Instead, they may envision iTMS as THE portal for browsing podcasts. Just look at the big link in the middle of the iTMS podcast page allowing any old user to publish their own podcast through Apple.
Do this successfully and it's more traffic for iTMS, and yet more incentive for consumers to choose iPods.
-JMP
Conversely, wait for the next generation of cable upgrades, then have the FCC reclassify the cablecos as common carriers.
The idea of a common carrier is simple. The carrier has no ability to decide what it will or won't carry, and as such has no liability for such either. It started with the railroads, and was carried over into telecom. As a very simple example of the advantages of this, imagine if phone companies were liable for every illegal act carried out over a phone connection. Likewise, imagine if every cable company carrying a network were fined every time that network went afoul of the FCC.
Right now, the FCC allows cable companies to sell service tiers rather than a la carte channels to their subscribers. As a result, their carriage contracts with the channel owners stipulate that in order to carry the more desirable channels, they must also carry less desirable channels as parts of various service tiers. This means that channels with relatively low viewership that happen to be owned by companies that also own popular channels take up bandwidth that would be more efficiently used on other tasks.
The cablecos are planning on fixing this bandwidth crunch by moving to switched broadcast video, which will have bandwidth used only by the channels people are actually watching.
Once that's implemented, a strong argument could be made that the cableco is a common carrier, merely acting as the intermediary between the viewer and the channel owner. Of course it would probably take an act of Congress to force that change in classification.
-JMP
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh. I've learned "I don't understand why we need X" is all too often a warning from a superior that continuing to push for X (including by providing the supposedly requested info) may be a career-limiting move. OTOH, if X turns out to have been needed after all, not having gotten it is hard to explain to that same superior.
I've experienced worse. At one company I worked at, I warned of the pitfalls of a particular implementation my boss had been sold on. I was ignored. When the problems I predicted showed up, I was then blamed for creating them.
I quit that job as soon as a chance to move to a reasonably solid company came along...
-JMP
A major part of the problem is that CFO types don't like spending money on things they don't see a need for. By the time they see a need for security, it's past the point at which throwing money at the problem will fix things.
Likewise, the security side of an I.T. department is the sort of job that is hard to justify to people who assume that if they don't notice results, the job isn't really doing much.
Ah the glory of an invisible job.
-JMP
Just in time for the next wave of 70's nostalgia.
-JMP
Of course, we only hear about the ones stupid enough to get caught. I wonder what percentage of people attempting barcode scams aren't caught (or publicized, to save the store embarrassment). Similarly, I wonder if stories like this increase or reduce the number of people trying these scams...
-JMP
It wouldn't necessarily decimate Hawaii. Most of the seismic activity is on the east side of Mauna Loa, meaning the most likely coast to see the debris would be the southeast coast of the Big Island, where the voclanic activity is currently centered. A tsunami from the big island would have to travel northwest to do damage to the other Hawaiian islands.
-JMP
ESPN is already one of the most expensive channels for a cable service to carry, because they know that no cable service can really be a major success without it. They then require carriage of ESPN2, ESPN Classic and ESPN News if the cable company wants to carry ESPN.
Unless you watch all of the channels you currently receive, look for your cable bill to stay about the same, while you end up paying for only the channels you want...
-JMP
It would be useless for the FCC to simply allow a la carte pricing. They have to modify their existing rules on tiers and bundling.
Right now, unlike the FTC which ruled that Microsoft was out of line when they bundled software, the FCC rules specifically allow channel owners to sell bundles of channels to cable carriers, specifying in the contract which channels need to be in which tiers. On my local cable system, this results in having lots of channels in the broader digital tiers that no one ever watches. In order for my cable carrier to carry The Discovery Channel, they also need to carry Discovery Health, Discovery Military, etc...
If there's true a la carte pricing, with cable carriers charging whatever the channel provider wants to charge per customer plus a fee for carriage and bandwidth, there will be a major shakeout in the number of channels out there. Suddenly, the only cable channels out there will be the ones that customers are willing to pay for. (shudder)
The upshot of this would be an increase in HDTV offerings on cable. One of the major problems cable providers have right now is insufficient bandwidth for all the HDTV channels that they might otherwise want to offer, many of which HDTV owners would be willing to pay for. You'll see the dropped SDTV channels replaced by more HDTV channels and on demand services as the market sorts out what people are willing to pay for.
If this happens, it's long overdue. I'm not holding my breath.
-JMP
There is a very powerful security tool in Windows. If used properly, the machine is completely immune to any security problems.
It's called the power switch.
-JMP
It's good that we've got so many morally upright people in this country to make sure that people understand that modern secularized entertainment is solely responsible for the proliferation of violence in our society. After all, there would be no violence or crime if people only read the Bible like God intended.
Of course, most of these people haven't read the Bible sufficiently closely to notice that it's chock full of sex and violence, much of it downright gratuitous.
-JMP
Sure, if there really is such a thing as a new strain. Everyone knows that the current administration has placed a ban on evolution. Without evolution, there can be no new strains of the flue. Without new strains, there can be no pandemic.
See? The Bush administration is protecting us from the pandemic!
-JMP
The problem is that they're going after Google, not the sites that are trying to profit from copyrighted material...
-JMP
There must be at least one brewer that's planning on putting up the cash to be an official sponsor, and if not, there should be. All they need to do is print signs which are then distributed to pubs that sell their beer that have their brand, the Olympic brand (authorized because they paid), and say that the games can be viewed here. The big American brewers do this all the time for big events...
-JMP
Of course, if all that fails, they can follow their usual MO and file a patent for the idea of unlimited online rentals for a monthly fee and drive Netflix out of business that way.
-JMP
- Government requests some small piece of crucial information, probably a single document.
- Target of the subpoena turns over 30-40 unlabelled boxes full of hard copies of documents.
- Government asks where the thing they requested is
- Target says "it's in there somewhere. Enjoy finding it."
(This tactic also works with IRS auditors. In the 1980's the IRS asked my father for documentation of a few of his transactions. He gave them a full list of all his transactions for that tax year, which was a stack of tractor-feed paper as thick as a phone book with a transaction on each line, single spaced. The IRS has pretty much left him alone since then.)Also, the article says that Indymedia gave copies of the drives, not the drives themselves. Last time I checked, copying a drive from a server didn't shut down the server...
-JMP
A good test would be the subscriber statistics from MLB.tv, where Major Leage Baseball allows people to subscribe for a day, month, or full season to watch games live via Real or WindowsMedia. It's far from perfect watching a baseball broadcast designed for tv shown in a 320x240 window, but the number of people who come back and pay again after paying for a single day or single month is probably a good predictor of how many fans would be willing to watch hilights on the sort of screen a vPod is likely to have.
-JMP
While I wouldn't want to watch feature films on a 45 minute bus ride to work, it would be great to have a podcast of the hilights of last night's games to watch...
-JMP
Of course, and they were building on the idea of distributed information browsed via hypertext which wowed us all in Gopher. Remember back in the early 90's when Gopher seemed like the coolest thing ever? Of course, it took a GUI (thanks to Mosaic) for hypertext to catch on...
-JMP
He got a system sold by Datapoint. There was the computer itself, and terminals at various places around the office. They also had a printer room, which had a dot matrix printer for each of the news wire services.
The Datapoint computer had a 10" floppy drive, but the tour de force was the "Cynthia," a 10MB drive with a removable cartridge. At the time, my father couldn't imagine any way they would ever use so much space.
25 years later, he still uses descendants of the transaction tracking software he wrote for that Datapoint system. Of course, now it runs under Windows, on a system with far more than 10MB of storage...
-JMP
Yes, it makes sense, but it sounds to me like they aren't allowing the ability to simply use an existing wi-fi network if one is already in place in your home...
-JMP
A few years ago, Ford introduced a slightly stretched version of the Crown Vic specifically to offset the thickness of the barrier. The unstretched version sometimes gives less than six inches of knee room between the front of the backseat and the barrier. This has nothing to do with obesity and everything to do with people liking their knees...
-JMP
Anyone who can't figure out that you should seek advice from an accountant and lawyer to protect against getting audited or sued probably shouldn't be running a company.
Anyone who can't figure out that you shouldn't reinvent the wheel when coding, or that you should get rid of those pesky O(N^2) algorithms probably shouldn't be overseeing a software development venture.
The rest of the talk seems to present like a substitute for the sort of things I would imagine should be taught in business schools, but probably isn't.
-JMP
The problem is that the algorithm is obvious to anyone who understands the process, and the process is too well known to be subject to a patent. (Even so, that patent would have expired sometime well before the USPTO was created.)
I suppose if Amazon can't put well run stores out of business by taking all their customers away, they can patent the concept of good retail instead...
-JMP
Some of the resulting bandwidth goes to increasing the number of channels (and HD channels), while some of it goes to additional Internet bandwidth. Add to that any upgrades of their network's bandwidth capacity and add switched video to reduce the bandwidth usage for channel offerings, and you get a much more robust set of offerings over cable TV.
-JMP
Do this successfully and it's more traffic for iTMS, and yet more incentive for consumers to choose iPods.
-JMP
The idea of a common carrier is simple. The carrier has no ability to decide what it will or won't carry, and as such has no liability for such either. It started with the railroads, and was carried over into telecom. As a very simple example of the advantages of this, imagine if phone companies were liable for every illegal act carried out over a phone connection. Likewise, imagine if every cable company carrying a network were fined every time that network went afoul of the FCC.
Right now, the FCC allows cable companies to sell service tiers rather than a la carte channels to their subscribers. As a result, their carriage contracts with the channel owners stipulate that in order to carry the more desirable channels, they must also carry less desirable channels as parts of various service tiers. This means that channels with relatively low viewership that happen to be owned by companies that also own popular channels take up bandwidth that would be more efficiently used on other tasks.
The cablecos are planning on fixing this bandwidth crunch by moving to switched broadcast video, which will have bandwidth used only by the channels people are actually watching.
Once that's implemented, a strong argument could be made that the cableco is a common carrier, merely acting as the intermediary between the viewer and the channel owner. Of course it would probably take an act of Congress to force that change in classification.
-JMP