Of course this is the trend. It's happened in every major industry since time immemorial. That's how we came about the anti-trust laws, after Big Oil sucked up smaller companies and competition narrowed to a handful of oil barons who could set market prices pretty much at will.
Oil. Automobiles. Aircraft. When some segment of industry first starts out, everyone has a bright idea and tries to exploit it to make money and grow their company. Eventually, companies merge as they find advantages in buying up the good ideas of the competition or exploiting resources they can't develop themselves. Eventually the number of companies shrinks and their size grows.
And now it's the Internet's turn. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo... they're all absorbing the innovation they see around them, trying to maintain a competitive advantage. But all that will happen is that as small company innovation is eroded, the larger comapnies will become more homogenous and begin to look more and more like each other. At that point, things will stagnate, until the Next Big Thing comes along.
And yet, Lara Croft as a character was a strong, acrobatic and highly educated woman. Women went ballistic over her measurements, glossing over the fact that as a female character in a video game, she overcame extreme odds against environmental dangers, puzzles, male antagonists, etc. to accomplish her goals.
Which I think goes back to the point of the article somewhat. The gaming industry perpetuates the "buxom babe" stereotype through its characters, but at the same time they take on new proportions (e.g. Lara Croft). Unfortunately, the feministas are too busy deriding her female attributes to realize that she represents a woman who goes far beyond her sexuality, using it as well as putting it aside. There's no reason to look at these characters solely for the physical attributes unless you have an agenda or are out to prove a point.
Go back to the beginning of the comic book or look at the covers of old pulp fiction novels. Women have generally always been drawn as buxom and willowy, giving off that hint of repressed sexuality just waiting to come out. Guys ate it up and still do. Would Wonder Woman be as big a draw if she were flat-chested? Girls would still like her but guys would look elsewhere for their eye candy.
So now that gaming and the Internet are the places you find hordes of adolescent males, is it any wonder the trend continues? And so Lara Croft picks up where Wonder Woman leaves off. It may be the 21st Century, but some things aren't going to change anytime soon, not without some sort of ground-swell by woman gamers/artists.
But where is the Never trust content from this provider ever again checkbox?
Good point. Instead of wasting time on "zones", let the user decide what is and isn't trusted content. Build site-blocking right in, and then allow the user to set levels of blocking, so you could for example browse a site but accept no cookies or downloads or ActiveX from that site. Basically, migrating a firewall into the browser to set an extra level of protection.
Re:simple way to avoid, for consumers at least
on
The Podjacker Threat
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· Score: 1
Do we need constant streams of info, on topics as diverse as the people creating podcasts?
Perhaps, perhaps not. On one hand, I think it's a great way to get in touch with people who have more specialized interests that you're not going to find in regular news or information sources.
On the other hand, people take this stuff too seriously. It's brain candy, the narcotic of the microculture. Once you find people who think like you do and share your ideas, you want to connect with them more and more. And podcasters are all too happy to oblige. Apparently some people have too much time on their hands.
The phrase "at will" is standard in most contracts nowadays, especially in IT. It basically means that they can let you go at any time and you can decide to leave at any time. It's always best to give the standard two weeks notice and tidy everything up before you go, but these days companies really don't care much. They'll let you go, hand you a severance check, and by the end of the day, they've locked you out of their systems.
This just goes to the whole shift in corporate culture, where employees are no longer people, but FTEs, to be tallied, shifted around like pieces on a Risk board, and disposed of when their usefulness is up. I was raised to believe in the old school company, the kind that valued employees and celebrated longevity, but the only way you get to stay past 5 years anymore is to move up the corporate ladder or refuse your yearly pay raise. And even then, with the advent of outsourcing, job security is a fasing concept.
...totally boring, usually incorrect, massively ignored, whiners...then yes.
I'm not sure I'd go that far, as some of the bloggers in Techland do seem to have a grasp of the fundamentals. Whether I would call them members of the "elite" is debateable. If news organizations are losing out to bloggers, what does that say about the newspeople? And if these bloggers are the "elite", doesn't that mean they'll eventually fall prey to courting by big interests (Microsoft, Oracle, etc.)?
Everyone has an opinion. Anyone can start a blog. Chaos ensues.
I see this as being a boon to SETI. If there was ever a needle in a haystack, it's trying to tease a possible intelligent signal out of the cosmic background noise. If you have an idea what the background is like in general, then it's far easier to detect an abnormality in that background noise. The question will end up being, are we simply detecting more false positives or are these real signals?
Fred's House of Flowers wouldn't be doing the credit card processing though. That would be done through a bank or e-commerce firm, and they would supposedly be using the more secure domain. If not, I doubt anybody would do business with them. Social and business pressure would start to force unwilling companies to switch to the more secure format.
From Computer Business Review: Some registrars talk of adding a "significant" add-on fee for DNSsec "expert services", while others talk of making domain registration a case of picking from two services -- a domain name and a "secure domain name", the latter costing more.
So in the end, economics will drive SecDNS more than anything else. It seems like a good idea though for some institutions to go to a more secure DNS format. Let's face it: Fred's House of Flowers probably doesn't need as secure a domain as Citicorp or the CIA. The Internet ends up becoming a two-level affair, with the majority of sites being regular DNS sites and corporations and such using the more secure DNS setup.
Microsoft is certainly not out there to help India.
But shouldn't they be? Shouldn't any company be out to make the lives of the people better in the places where they do business? Oh sorry... that's the idealist in me.
It will do whatever its good for its business.
Which includes sending perfectly good jobs overseas where the labor is cheaper. Why pay $80K per year for a programmer, when you can pay half that? And not just sending away the job, but depriving the US of the social security and tax revenue that job would have generated here. Good for Microsoft, bad for America.
I guess you also want microsoft to find a cure for cnacer and erdiate world poverty.
You bet I do! I want the full resources of Fortune 500 companies and world governments pooled and the best and brightest minds from all over the globe funded with this money to try and solve all the world's problems. Too much to ask?
And as far as jobs not being available for dalits in india, there are reservations and scholarships for backward classes in schools and also government jobs.
It takes a lot temerity and audacity to use words like "backwards classes" and "reservations". We have reservations here in the US; it's where the Founding Fathers tried to send the shattered remnants of the native tribes (those that weren't wiped out by disease, alcohol, and bullets), so they cound be "re-educated" and kept out of the way of natural expansion and progress. Oh by the way, how did the Dalit become so "backward"? I seem to remember from my reading that they had some help in that regard. And if I read things right, things aren't changing too rapidly.
I'm a user. All I want is the web page to load and to contain the information I'm looking for. Simple really. Does it matter what is used to generate the page? No. AJAX, XML, HTML, CGI... they're just tools for developers to use. AJAX has its place and if it's not the best tool, then either people will stop using it, figure out how to use it better, or it will be enhanced to work better. Why all the fuss?
Not true. It has a lot of poverty, but it also has a lot of people with a fairly good standard of living, and some extremely wealthy people.
You could use the same blanket statement about the US. I refer you to this little tidbit: Poverty in India. And I quote: "India still has the world's largest number of poor people in a single country. Of its nearly 1 billion inhabitants, an estimated 350-400 million are below the poverty line, 75 per cent of them in the rural areas."
When I was travelling in Mumbai I met some people who had been working as software engineers in San Francisco but returned to India because they said the standard of living was better for a software engineer.
Or perhaps because they knew their US jobs would soon be shipped there. And when you live amongst that much poverty, of course your standard of living is better.
GDP is just an economist's smokescreen. They trot those numbers out like somehow that money is making it's way into everyone's pockets, when in fact the poor are still getting poorer, the rich are still getting richer, and the middle class is still footing the bill.
From rediff.com:World's largest software maker Microsoft on Wednesday said it will scale up its India operations by increasing the local headcount by 3,000 over three to four years, taking the total strength to 7,000.
Let's see, population of approximately 1.1 billion... 7,000 total Microsoft jobs. Yes, I can see where that helps immensely!
India is poor, dirt poor. Even with the fairly decent number of jobs we've shipped there, it doesn't even begin to make a dent in the poverty level. And of course these jobs aren't available to the greater majority of the population, especially to the Dalit (formerly known as "untouchable") segment. Gates may be a big Kahuna in Africa but he isn't going to make much of a difference to India.
...it might be related to one of these anniversaries. I'm pulling for: 1900 - Irish leader John Edward Redmond calls for a revolt against British rule.
It makes perfect sense, when you take into account Microsoft is being punished here. If you follow the law, you don't have to advertise for your competitors. You break the law, you suffer the consequences.
Microsoft being punished? Getting free publicity? Yes, that's pretty severe all right.
So what if Windows Messenger comes bundled? You don't have to use it! You can open your favorite web-browser (or IE, since that too comes bundled with Windows!) and download AIM or Yahoo! IM or IRC or whatever your favorite program is, and run that instead. Microsoft has not made it impossible for you to make other choices; they simply hand you their messaging software and say "here it is if you want it." The don't block links to the others, they don't make it so Windows will not install them, and they certainly don't launch DDoS against their competitors when you try to download them.
This is just the same argument that fanatical groups against violence on TV and pornography use. They seem to think there's someone with a gun to my head making me do things that are bad for me. They're not! I have a choice. And if I don't want to watch something, I can turn the TV off. Same principle applies here.
From EFF: "We're pleased that SONY BMG responded quickly and responsibly when we drew their attention to this security problem," said EFF staff attorney Kurt Opsahl. "Consumers should take immediate steps to protect their computers."
As if Sony, which already has a boatload of negative publicity, could do anything else. I think even the stuffed shirts there must now realize that they can't let anything else fall through the cracks or their music business might collapse. Don't be surprised in Sony divests itself of BMG music at some point in the future, to keep from losing customers for its home electronics business.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Even assuming a speedy trial (perhaps 6 months, if they get a jury/judge that can stay awake through all the technical arguments), then come the appeals. This whole SCO/Linux brouhaha is just a battle of attrition now. It'll be interesting to see who cracks first and when.
The only mistake this blogger made, was publishing it. If he'd kept it to himself, or written in the diary in his nightstand, or even if the only place he said it was at some frat party, none of this would have happened. I think the school is probably over-reacting and they're in for a firestorm of protest, but this guy will probably transfer to another school, keep his nose clean, and graduate. In the end it comes to nothing, and the Earth keeps turning.
I believe you meant "addressed" not "address", but who am I to quibble over grammar in the age of Netspeak.
Look, it's simple: if we take it as read that we're all individuals with our own likes and dislikes, where does an IT department get off trying to play social engineer? I don't have to like people or even respect them to work with them, although it makes it a lot easier if I can. And yes, I have a low tolerance for obvious, flaming stupidity, which seems rampant in IT now. I'm not the chit-chatty type; I come to work to work. When I need help I ask, but I'd prefer to stay on task and get things done than talk about meaningless fluff. If I want to socialize, I can do it after work. And I don't see why I have to wear headphones or shuffle off to a conference room (something I can't do with a desktop machine!) just to get my work done.
Everyone is different. I don't expect anyone to ascribe to my way of thinking. I'm stating my general feeling on the subject, which is what/. is all about. Maybe I'm resonating with you, maybe you think I'm a loon. If I really cared what everybody thought about me, I'd probably go mental. What I do care about is that I do good work, get it done on time, get it done during regular business hours, then go home and get to have a life. And I'd prefer the company did as much as it could to allow me to do that, instead of labelling me as Employee # 2894735093403, sticking me in a non-descript cube, and surrounding me with the cacophony that is office life.
Almost every project at Google is a team project, and teams have to communicate. The best way to make communication easy is to put team members within a few feet of each other. The result is that virtually everyone at Google shares an office. This way, when a programmer needs to confer with a colleague, there is immediate access: no telephone tag, no e-mail delay, no waiting for a reply. Of course, there are many conference rooms that people can use for detailed discussion so that they don't disturb their office mates. Even the CEO shared an office at Google for several months after he arrived. Sitting next to a knowledgeable employee was an incredibly effective educational experience.
Someday I would like to find the person who came up with this concept and shoot them in the head. I find nothing enhances my productivity more than having to listen to other people's meaningless personal phone conversations or conference calls that have nothing to do with what I'm working on, the assorted smells and sounds the human body makes that are not pleasant, the incesant pinging and chiming of IMs and email alerts, not to mention having my personal business available to anyone who wishes to stare over my shoulder.
Oh to have an office! And if I needed a co-worker's help and/or advice and they won't return emails/phone calls, I would simply get my butt out of my chair, go to their cubicle, grab them by the lapels (or goatee if there are no lapels) and tell them we need to have a little chat. There's nothing like the personal approach! And then I could return to my office, close the door, crank the Rush, and get back to doing what I'm supposed to be doing, which is coding.
What standards would those be?
on
Google Fixes IE Bug
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· Score: 4, Insightful
From CIO Today: The incident does raise important questions about Google as a desktop software vendor and its plans for rolling out future security fixes, said MacDonald.
"Since Google is providing end-user software, it must be held to the same standards that you would hold other desktop software vendors to," he said.
Standards? What standards would those be? Last I checked, most software manufacturers are sending out buggy copies of their code hoping you won't notice, patching it up continuously, then going ahead and doing it repeatedly. And let's not forget that Microsoft is the king of them all!
And exactly how are we to hold them to these "standards"? So many people use Microsoft routinely that they have the lion's share of the market, and their competitors are left with the spoils. And while you may not like MS, many of their programs work just well enough that you believe you've got a decent, everday product. Of course they break down, and people scream and rant, but in the end what do they do? Do they immediately switch to something else? No! They patch up their flawed software and keep the status quo.
It's a classic case of addiction, a lot like gambling but in reverse. You use the software every day and most days it works. The one time it doesn't, you fret, but because you restart it or patch it and it works, you go right back to it, rather than exploring alternatives. And Microsoft counts on this. That's why they dominate - they have everybody "addicted" to their software.
Good news, to be added to the possibility that caffeine is is linked to protection from Parkinson's disease. Makes those first couple of mugs of coffee taste that much sweeter... well, that and 2 heaping tablesoons of sugar and all the packets of Splenda® I can find.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course this is the trend. It's happened in every major industry since time immemorial. That's how we came about the anti-trust laws, after Big Oil sucked up smaller companies and competition narrowed to a handful of oil barons who could set market prices pretty much at will.
Oil. Automobiles. Aircraft. When some segment of industry first starts out, everyone has a bright idea and tries to exploit it to make money and grow their company. Eventually, companies merge as they find advantages in buying up the good ideas of the competition or exploiting resources they can't develop themselves. Eventually the number of companies shrinks and their size grows.
And now it's the Internet's turn. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo... they're all absorbing the innovation they see around them, trying to maintain a competitive advantage. But all that will happen is that as small company innovation is eroded, the larger comapnies will become more homogenous and begin to look more and more like each other. At that point, things will stagnate, until the Next Big Thing comes along.
Which I think goes back to the point of the article somewhat. The gaming industry perpetuates the "buxom babe" stereotype through its characters, but at the same time they take on new proportions (e.g. Lara Croft). Unfortunately, the feministas are too busy deriding her female attributes to realize that she represents a woman who goes far beyond her sexuality, using it as well as putting it aside. There's no reason to look at these characters solely for the physical attributes unless you have an agenda or are out to prove a point.
Go back to the beginning of the comic book or look at the covers of old pulp fiction novels. Women have generally always been drawn as buxom and willowy, giving off that hint of repressed sexuality just waiting to come out. Guys ate it up and still do. Would Wonder Woman be as big a draw if she were flat-chested? Girls would still like her but guys would look elsewhere for their eye candy.
So now that gaming and the Internet are the places you find hordes of adolescent males, is it any wonder the trend continues? And so Lara Croft picks up where Wonder Woman leaves off. It may be the 21st Century, but some things aren't going to change anytime soon, not without some sort of ground-swell by woman gamers/artists.
Good point. Instead of wasting time on "zones", let the user decide what is and isn't trusted content. Build site-blocking right in, and then allow the user to set levels of blocking, so you could for example browse a site but accept no cookies or downloads or ActiveX from that site. Basically, migrating a firewall into the browser to set an extra level of protection.
Perhaps, perhaps not. On one hand, I think it's a great way to get in touch with people who have more specialized interests that you're not going to find in regular news or information sources.
On the other hand, people take this stuff too seriously. It's brain candy, the narcotic of the microculture. Once you find people who think like you do and share your ideas, you want to connect with them more and more. And podcasters are all too happy to oblige. Apparently some people have too much time on their hands.
Podjacking... spew... Hehehehe ;)
The phrase "at will" is standard in most contracts nowadays, especially in IT. It basically means that they can let you go at any time and you can decide to leave at any time. It's always best to give the standard two weeks notice and tidy everything up before you go, but these days companies really don't care much. They'll let you go, hand you a severance check, and by the end of the day, they've locked you out of their systems.
This just goes to the whole shift in corporate culture, where employees are no longer people, but FTEs, to be tallied, shifted around like pieces on a Risk board, and disposed of when their usefulness is up. I was raised to believe in the old school company, the kind that valued employees and celebrated longevity, but the only way you get to stay past 5 years anymore is to move up the corporate ladder or refuse your yearly pay raise. And even then, with the advent of outsourcing, job security is a fasing concept.
You did the right thing; your company did not.
I'm not sure I'd go that far, as some of the bloggers in Techland do seem to have a grasp of the fundamentals. Whether I would call them members of the "elite" is debateable. If news organizations are losing out to bloggers, what does that say about the newspeople? And if these bloggers are the "elite", doesn't that mean they'll eventually fall prey to courting by big interests (Microsoft, Oracle, etc.)?
Everyone has an opinion. Anyone can start a blog. Chaos ensues.
I see this as being a boon to SETI. If there was ever a needle in a haystack, it's trying to tease a possible intelligent signal out of the cosmic background noise. If you have an idea what the background is like in general, then it's far easier to detect an abnormality in that background noise. The question will end up being, are we simply detecting more false positives or are these real signals?
Fred's House of Flowers wouldn't be doing the credit card processing though. That would be done through a bank or e-commerce firm, and they would supposedly be using the more secure domain. If not, I doubt anybody would do business with them. Social and business pressure would start to force unwilling companies to switch to the more secure format.
So in the end, economics will drive SecDNS more than anything else. It seems like a good idea though for some institutions to go to a more secure DNS format. Let's face it: Fred's House of Flowers probably doesn't need as secure a domain as Citicorp or the CIA. The Internet ends up becoming a two-level affair, with the majority of sites being regular DNS sites and corporations and such using the more secure DNS setup.
But shouldn't they be? Shouldn't any company be out to make the lives of the people better in the places where they do business? Oh sorry... that's the idealist in me.
It will do whatever its good for its business.Which includes sending perfectly good jobs overseas where the labor is cheaper. Why pay $80K per year for a programmer, when you can pay half that? And not just sending away the job, but depriving the US of the social security and tax revenue that job would have generated here. Good for Microsoft, bad for America.
I guess you also want microsoft to find a cure for cnacer and erdiate world poverty.You bet I do! I want the full resources of Fortune 500 companies and world governments pooled and the best and brightest minds from all over the globe funded with this money to try and solve all the world's problems. Too much to ask?
And as far as jobs not being available for dalits in india, there are reservations and scholarships for backward classes in schools and also government jobs.It takes a lot temerity and audacity to use words like "backwards classes" and "reservations". We have reservations here in the US; it's where the Founding Fathers tried to send the shattered remnants of the native tribes (those that weren't wiped out by disease, alcohol, and bullets), so they cound be "re-educated" and kept out of the way of natural expansion and progress. Oh by the way, how did the Dalit become so "backward"? I seem to remember from my reading that they had some help in that regard. And if I read things right, things aren't changing too rapidly.
I'm a user. All I want is the web page to load and to contain the information I'm looking for. Simple really. Does it matter what is used to generate the page? No. AJAX, XML, HTML, CGI... they're just tools for developers to use. AJAX has its place and if it's not the best tool, then either people will stop using it, figure out how to use it better, or it will be enhanced to work better. Why all the fuss?
You could use the same blanket statement about the US. I refer you to this little tidbit: Poverty in India. And I quote: "India still has the world's largest number of poor people in a single country. Of its nearly 1 billion inhabitants, an estimated 350-400 million are below the poverty line, 75 per cent of them in the rural areas."
When I was travelling in Mumbai I met some people who had been working as software engineers in San Francisco but returned to India because they said the standard of living was better for a software engineer.Or perhaps because they knew their US jobs would soon be shipped there. And when you live amongst that much poverty, of course your standard of living is better.
GDP is just an economist's smokescreen. They trot those numbers out like somehow that money is making it's way into everyone's pockets, when in fact the poor are still getting poorer, the rich are still getting richer, and the middle class is still footing the bill.
Let's see, population of approximately 1.1 billion... 7,000 total Microsoft jobs. Yes, I can see where that helps immensely!
India is poor, dirt poor. Even with the fairly decent number of jobs we've shipped there, it doesn't even begin to make a dent in the poverty level. And of course these jobs aren't available to the greater majority of the population, especially to the Dalit (formerly known as "untouchable") segment. Gates may be a big Kahuna in Africa but he isn't going to make much of a difference to India.
...it might be related to one of these anniversaries. I'm pulling for: 1900 - Irish leader John Edward Redmond calls for a revolt against British rule.
Someone will turn the old Eliza program into a virus.
Virus: How do you feel?You: I'm all right.
Virus: Just all right?You: Yeah.
Virus: How do you feel about your mother?Microsoft being punished? Getting free publicity? Yes, that's pretty severe all right.
So what if Windows Messenger comes bundled? You don't have to use it! You can open your favorite web-browser (or IE, since that too comes bundled with Windows!) and download AIM or Yahoo! IM or IRC or whatever your favorite program is, and run that instead. Microsoft has not made it impossible for you to make other choices; they simply hand you their messaging software and say "here it is if you want it." The don't block links to the others, they don't make it so Windows will not install them, and they certainly don't launch DDoS against their competitors when you try to download them.
This is just the same argument that fanatical groups against violence on TV and pornography use. They seem to think there's someone with a gun to my head making me do things that are bad for me. They're not! I have a choice. And if I don't want to watch something, I can turn the TV off. Same principle applies here.
From EFF: "We're pleased that SONY BMG responded quickly and responsibly when we drew their attention to this security problem," said EFF staff attorney Kurt Opsahl. "Consumers should take immediate steps to protect their computers."
As if Sony, which already has a boatload of negative publicity, could do anything else. I think even the stuffed shirts there must now realize that they can't let anything else fall through the cracks or their music business might collapse. Don't be surprised in Sony divests itself of BMG music at some point in the future, to keep from losing customers for its home electronics business.
Y2K - Nuff said.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Even assuming a speedy trial (perhaps 6 months, if they get a jury/judge that can stay awake through all the technical arguments), then come the appeals. This whole SCO/Linux brouhaha is just a battle of attrition now. It'll be interesting to see who cracks first and when.
The only mistake this blogger made, was publishing it. If he'd kept it to himself, or written in the diary in his nightstand, or even if the only place he said it was at some frat party, none of this would have happened. I think the school is probably over-reacting and they're in for a firestorm of protest, but this guy will probably transfer to another school, keep his nose clean, and graduate. In the end it comes to nothing, and the Earth keeps turning.
I believe you meant "addressed" not "address", but who am I to quibble over grammar in the age of Netspeak.
Look, it's simple: if we take it as read that we're all individuals with our own likes and dislikes, where does an IT department get off trying to play social engineer? I don't have to like people or even respect them to work with them, although it makes it a lot easier if I can. And yes, I have a low tolerance for obvious, flaming stupidity, which seems rampant in IT now. I'm not the chit-chatty type; I come to work to work. When I need help I ask, but I'd prefer to stay on task and get things done than talk about meaningless fluff. If I want to socialize, I can do it after work. And I don't see why I have to wear headphones or shuffle off to a conference room (something I can't do with a desktop machine!) just to get my work done.
Everyone is different. I don't expect anyone to ascribe to my way of thinking. I'm stating my general feeling on the subject, which is what /. is all about. Maybe I'm resonating with you, maybe you think I'm a loon. If I really cared what everybody thought about me, I'd probably go mental. What I do care about is that I do good work, get it done on time, get it done during regular business hours, then go home and get to have a life. And I'd prefer the company did as much as it could to allow me to do that, instead of labelling me as Employee # 2894735093403, sticking me in a non-descript cube, and surrounding me with the cacophony that is office life.
Someday I would like to find the person who came up with this concept and shoot them in the head. I find nothing enhances my productivity more than having to listen to other people's meaningless personal phone conversations or conference calls that have nothing to do with what I'm working on, the assorted smells and sounds the human body makes that are not pleasant, the incesant pinging and chiming of IMs and email alerts, not to mention having my personal business available to anyone who wishes to stare over my shoulder.
Oh to have an office! And if I needed a co-worker's help and/or advice and they won't return emails/phone calls, I would simply get my butt out of my chair, go to their cubicle, grab them by the lapels (or goatee if there are no lapels) and tell them we need to have a little chat. There's nothing like the personal approach! And then I could return to my office, close the door, crank the Rush, and get back to doing what I'm supposed to be doing, which is coding.
From CIO Today: The incident does raise important questions about Google as a desktop software vendor and its plans for rolling out future security fixes, said MacDonald.
"Since Google is providing end-user software, it must be held to the same standards that you would hold other desktop software vendors to," he said.
Standards? What standards would those be? Last I checked, most software manufacturers are sending out buggy copies of their code hoping you won't notice, patching it up continuously, then going ahead and doing it repeatedly. And let's not forget that Microsoft is the king of them all!
And exactly how are we to hold them to these "standards"? So many people use Microsoft routinely that they have the lion's share of the market, and their competitors are left with the spoils. And while you may not like MS, many of their programs work just well enough that you believe you've got a decent, everday product. Of course they break down, and people scream and rant, but in the end what do they do? Do they immediately switch to something else? No! They patch up their flawed software and keep the status quo.
It's a classic case of addiction, a lot like gambling but in reverse. You use the software every day and most days it works. The one time it doesn't, you fret, but because you restart it or patch it and it works, you go right back to it, rather than exploring alternatives. And Microsoft counts on this. That's why they dominate - they have everybody "addicted" to their software.
Good news, to be added to the possibility that caffeine is is linked to protection from Parkinson's disease. Makes those first couple of mugs of coffee taste that much sweeter... well, that and 2 heaping tablesoons of sugar and all the packets of Splenda® I can find.