1) If you haven't already done so, get all assignments you are given that are connected with this incident in writing, for your own protection; keep a written diary of what you do, and report regularly. From what you are saying, the matter is sufficiently sensitive that your concern to ensure that you are working with clearly-stated terms of reference and the knowledge of the responsible company staff should be immediately understood and accepted. If it is not, be scared: something is not right.
2) Just a thought, and probably not one to speculate about openly at your workplace, but if the police are brought in and informed that sensitive information is missing, they will certainly entertain the possibility that the culprit is the CIO himself - if he's dumb enough to leave important information lying around overnight waiting to be stolen, he's probably also dumb enough to think he can get away with the theft himself.
3) Updating your CV would be a good move; immediately starting a search for a new job with a company possessing a reasonably full set of clues may well place you under suspicion. Be patient and wait for the worst of this to blow over before making a move.
Personally, I'm waiting for someone to come out with the "Bulova Dali" that Larry Niven mentioned in one of his tales of Known Space. The technology to weave a working (analog) watch face into a shirt-cuff shouldn't be that far off, now.
Interesting. The British government is currently ramming its so-called Regulation of Investigatory Powers (aka RIP) Bill through a largely supine Parliament. "Regulation" in this instance being a weasel word for providing legislative justification for a communications interception infrastructure designed to maximise scope and administrative convenience and to minimise judicial supervision and democratic accountability.
Amongst other things, the RIP Bill requires ISPs to install remote monitoring equipment on their infrastructures. No information has been forthcoming about the design, construction, or source of these boxes. So it's been odd that the government has been so vehement that the cost estimates for this part of the bill which have been made by people with knowledge of the industry are totally exaggerated.
And now we hear the the FBI has some sort of el-cheapo on-site tapping box that can't do its job without causing trouble to the ISP's normal traffic.
Indeed. And this time it's the owner of the trade secret who has made it available, in a public place, of their own free will, with precautions to maintain confidentiality that anyone familiar with the place would know are totally inadequate. And I don't think even MS's lawyers would have the affrontery to claim that the company was unfamiliar with the way things happen on the 'Net....
Oh, wonderful, just what the world needs.
on
Democratizing Space
·
· Score: 1
Being in a somewhat jaundiced mood at the moment, my first reaction to this story was that MS Research's time would be much better spent on identifying and correcting the reasons for the lack of professionalism that seems to be endemic at all levels in the company. Top officers clearly believe the company has no obligation to behave as a good corporate citizen; communications engineers cheerfully appropriate previously unused fields in the Kerboros protocol for their own use without bothering to discuss it first in the appropriate IETF forum; code-bashers incorporate elaborate toys and juvenile jibes at rivals into software that is sold for serious business use; amd quality control is so slack that the mischief isn't caught.... Arrrgh.
Sorry about the rant, normal service will be resumed after imbibing a beer or two.
I don't know about the company you keep, but I'm pretty offended by organisations that assume that I can't be trusted to follow the spirit of copyright law, so I must either purchase additional "services" whose only function is to prevent me offending (copy protection schemes) or must pay a tax to compensate for my alledged dishonesty (levies on blank recording media).
HF (was: hard to pin down?)
on
The Truth
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· Score: 1
Hogfather was indeed a great book.
I've never understood why so many of Pterry's fans rate Hogfather so highly. I thought it was the most disappointing in the series so far - too many aspects were minor variations of themes from previous books, too many loose ends in the plot details... plus, I just don't find Susan D a particularly interesting character: she's too sensible and competent to fail at anything she sets herself to achieve, especially when Grandfather is around to nudge the outcome. It's a pity; shorn of the padding, HF could have made a glintingly dark novella.
Thanks to everyone for the other comments, though, it sounds as though The Truth is worth picking up if I happen to see it on sale somewhere.
Start the implementation before the functionality and overall design are settled and agreed. This guarantees that different parts of the product (preferably the responsibilities of different independent contractors) will be constructed according to different tradeoffs and in extreme cases will be based on mutually inconsistent goals. This can confuse and impede even the rare maintainance programmer who is able to quickly pick up the overall purpose and structure of the product, and the style(s) of writing.
Note that this method is common in the Real World because it seldom has to be resorted to deliberately: it is a natural consequence of the additional (that is, changed) requirements typically imposed by paying customers in the middle of a project's implementation, or of a budget freeze that means that the first proof-of-concept prototype has to be extended into production rather than being thrown away in favour of doing the job properly, as the original project plan specified.
Sigh. After 20 years in the business I wish I were joking about this.
...it's been going on for many years. The fastest boot sequence of any reasonably general purpose OS I've encountered was on Univac 494/Omega that I worked on back in the early 70s (when it was already nearing the end of its lifetime): given suitable peripherals it could boot and have the online workload running again in under 10 seconds - because it had been designed for a target market which could not tolerate extended outages. And because the machine had a maximum of 262Kwords of memory, and ran at only about 1.2Mips, there was a premium on careful programming that used resources efficiently. Even then, though, it was clear that the trend was towards the cost of implementation and maintainance of application software exceeding that of the raw processing power, so that it became increasingly cost-effective to use less expert implementors and to provide them with tools that traded implementation time against run-time performance. And that is a perfectly reasonable and defensible way of proceeding, provided that the various costs are taken fully into account.
However, there's a big difference between making a considered guestimate of the price of processing power over the likely lifecyle of a project and using these resources accordingly, and making the mistake of thinking that "cheap" resources are "free", and placing no constraints on their use (or, equivalently, blindly assuming that available systems will be fast enough to run the product by the time it is released). In the old days, if you did this you were liable to fail to meet contractual performance criteria, so there was a fairly direct feedback mechanism that kept product performance reasonably compatible with the capabilities of the platforms on which the products ran. More recently, with commodity pricing for software products, this feedback loop has been broken, and the costs of poor implementation practices are now born disproportionally by the customers - whether by being forced to replace systems more frequently, or with outages after major software failures becoming longer, or by finding that the newest products increasingly manifest inconsistent and unpredictable failure modes.
It's interesting, in this regard, that there have been rumours that MS may be considering leasing of its products rather than (or more likely in addition to) the customary "shrink-wrapped" sales. Major corporate users might just be interested in this approach, if it gave them some contractual leverage when the fitness for use of a particular product was less than satisfactory.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh well, perhaps he was just deliberately trying to demonstrate the scientific illiteracy of his superiors.
2) Just a thought, and probably not one to speculate about openly at your workplace, but if the police are brought in and informed that sensitive information is missing, they will certainly entertain the possibility that the culprit is the CIO himself - if he's dumb enough to leave important information lying around overnight waiting to be stolen, he's probably also dumb enough to think he can get away with the theft himself.
3) Updating your CV would be a good move; immediately starting a search for a new job with a company possessing a reasonably full set of clues may well place you under suspicion. Be patient and wait for the worst of this to blow over before making a move.
Good luck.
(And yes, I do know Bulova is a trade mark.)
Interesting. The British government is currently ramming its so-called Regulation of Investigatory Powers (aka RIP) Bill through a largely supine Parliament. "Regulation" in this instance being a weasel word for providing legislative justification for a communications interception infrastructure designed to maximise scope and administrative convenience and to minimise judicial supervision and democratic accountability.
Amongst other things, the RIP Bill requires ISPs to install remote monitoring equipment on their infrastructures. No information has been forthcoming about the design, construction, or source of these boxes. So it's been odd that the government has been so vehement that the cost estimates for this part of the bill which have been made by people with knowledge of the industry are totally exaggerated.
And now we hear the the FBI has some sort of el-cheapo on-site tapping box that can't do its job without causing trouble to the ISP's normal traffic.
Nah - there can't be any connection, can there?
...we can't use "Lamprey-brain" as a description of a follow road-user any more.
Indeed. And this time it's the owner of the trade secret who has made it available, in a public place, of their own free will, with precautions to maintain confidentiality that anyone familiar with the place would know are totally inadequate. And I don't think even MS's lawyers would have the affrontery to claim that the company was unfamiliar with the way things happen on the 'Net....
Being in a somewhat jaundiced mood at the moment, my first reaction to this story was that MS Research's time would be much better spent on identifying and correcting the reasons for the lack of professionalism that seems to be endemic at all levels in the company. Top officers clearly believe the company has no obligation to behave as a good corporate citizen; communications engineers cheerfully appropriate previously unused fields in the Kerboros protocol for their own use without bothering to discuss it first in the appropriate IETF forum; code-bashers incorporate elaborate toys and juvenile jibes at rivals into software that is sold for serious business use; amd quality control is so slack that the mischief isn't caught.... Arrrgh.
Sorry about the rant, normal service will be resumed after imbibing a beer or two.
I don't know about the company you keep, but I'm pretty offended by organisations that assume that I can't be trusted to follow the spirit of copyright law, so I must either purchase additional "services" whose only function is to prevent me offending (copy protection schemes) or must pay a tax to compensate for my alledged dishonesty (levies on blank recording media).
I've never understood why so many of Pterry's fans rate Hogfather so highly. I thought it was the most disappointing in the series so far - too many aspects were minor variations of themes from previous books, too many loose ends in the plot details... plus, I just don't find Susan D a particularly interesting character: she's too sensible and competent to fail at anything she sets herself to achieve, especially when Grandfather is around to nudge the outcome. It's a pity; shorn of the padding, HF could have made a glintingly dark novella.
Thanks to everyone for the other comments, though, it sounds as though The Truth is worth picking up if I happen to see it on sale somewhere.
One other very general and very common method:
Start the implementation before the functionality and overall design are settled and agreed. This guarantees that different parts of the product (preferably the responsibilities of different independent contractors) will be constructed according to different tradeoffs and in extreme cases will be based on mutually inconsistent goals. This can confuse and impede even the rare maintainance programmer who is able to quickly pick up the overall purpose and structure of the product, and the style(s) of writing.
Note that this method is common in the Real World because it seldom has to be resorted to deliberately: it is a natural consequence of the additional (that is, changed) requirements typically imposed by paying customers in the middle of a project's implementation, or of a budget freeze that means that the first proof-of-concept prototype has to be extended into production rather than being thrown away in favour of doing the job properly, as the original project plan specified.
Sigh. After 20 years in the business I wish I were joking about this.
...it's been going on for many years. The fastest boot sequence of any reasonably general purpose OS I've encountered was on Univac 494/Omega that I worked on back in the early 70s (when it was already nearing the end of its lifetime): given suitable peripherals it could boot and have the online workload running again in under 10 seconds - because it had been designed for a target market which could not tolerate extended outages. And because the machine had a maximum of 262Kwords of memory, and ran at only about 1.2Mips, there was a premium on careful programming that used resources efficiently. Even then, though, it was clear that the trend was towards the cost of implementation and maintainance of application software exceeding that of the raw processing power, so that it became increasingly cost-effective to use less expert implementors and to provide them with tools that traded implementation time against run-time performance. And that is a perfectly reasonable and defensible way of proceeding, provided that the various costs are taken fully into account.
:-(
However, there's a big difference between making a considered guestimate of the price of processing power over the likely lifecyle of a project and using these resources accordingly, and making the mistake of thinking that "cheap" resources are "free", and placing no constraints on their use (or, equivalently, blindly assuming that available systems will be fast enough to run the product by the time it is released). In the old days, if you did this you were liable to fail to meet contractual performance criteria, so there was a fairly direct feedback mechanism that kept product performance reasonably compatible with the capabilities of the platforms on which the products ran. More recently, with commodity pricing for software products, this feedback loop has been broken, and the costs of poor implementation practices are now born disproportionally by the customers - whether by being forced to replace systems more frequently, or with outages after major software failures becoming longer, or by finding that the newest products increasingly manifest inconsistent and unpredictable failure modes.
It's interesting, in this regard, that there have been rumours that MS may be considering leasing of its products rather than (or more likely in addition to) the customary "shrink-wrapped" sales. Major corporate users might just be interested in this approach, if it gave them some contractual leverage when the fitness for use of a particular product was less than satisfactory.
Just don't hold your breath