Besides, Sony is the undisputed king of pushing new proprietary formats. Name one major piece of Sony electronics released in the last 5 years that hasn't had at least one port that takes a proprietary Sony storage format. Remember when they were pushing those god awful gumstick flash things? You couldn't find a single piece of Sony kit that didn't have a port for them, although if you were lucky it also had ports for other sane formats.
I wonder why the 360 didn't come out with built in HD-DVD? I beleive it HD-DVD would have dominated had that been the case. Because the X-Box division wanted immediate sales figures. They were sure that being the "first next-gen" console to market would give them such an advantage that they decided to forgo the HD-DVD which would have set back shipping schedules and increased the price of the console. It's essentially the reverse of the decision that cost Sony so many sales during the Christmas season. Sony, as is their way, opted to use their shiny new piece of electronics to foist their proprietary format on the masses, where as MS decided it rather have higher short-term sales figures.
Even if Vista itself is a flop and they lose money on it, they could still end up making a net profit due to the extra software sales it generates. To be clear what I mean by flop in this case is not selling enough units to cover the initial investment in development. Assuming that a sufficient number of those units are then actually sold to consumers the loses from Vista could then be made up by sales of software that customers would otherwise have not needed. That is, the value of a Vista system to MS is not just Vista, but Vista + any other MS software the customer buys that runs on Vista + a percentage of any non-MS software that was developed using MS development tools.
Did the effort required to produce Vista yield anything that would not have occured anyways (with zero cost)? Yes, it's part of the upgrade treadmill. They need to continue to put out not just new applications, but new OSes in order to stay on top. This is because they leverage one item to force people to get another. It's the same as why a lot of people continue to upgrade their computers even though they've never really used the full capacity of their current system (excluding what's used by the bot nets and such they're infected with). In order to have the latest X you need to upgrade all your Y and Z. Even if Vista itself is a flop and they lose money on it, they could still end up making a net profit due to the extra software sales it generates. Lets also not forget that every one of those OEM installs of Vista also comes with the latest version of Office bundled as well, which is more profit as well as added lockin.
Really? Has Microsoft really made back 5 years of development effort from Vista sales? I find it hard to believe with most sales coming from bundled (i.e. low profit) type sales. Most of Microsoft's sales come from the OEMs who buy licenses in bulk. Even if they can't offload them onto end consumers MS still made the money because the OEM fronted it. What MS does lose with poor Vista uptake is the leverage a large install base can give them, so rather then using pre-installed apps on Vista to gain a foothold they have to use "requires vista" on apps as a carrot to force Vista onto people. It's all about leverage, and unfortunately MS is holding 90% of the sticks (god, that works on so many levels). Our only real hope at this point is that they hurry up and release Windows 7, and we can go ahead and stick Vista on the same shelf that ME is using to collect dust.
Any programmed virus can't really be that much worse then what has already evolved as is. I mean, are they really going to top Ebola or HIV? The real danger to a virus is in the delivery system, without a way to effectively distribute it within a population it's mostly an academic exercise.
I think my children would disagree with you as to whether or not I had any role in creating two of the billions of lives on Earth. The mailman probably agrees though. Just because you can jump off a cliff doesn't mean you created gravity. And before anyone gets all pedantic on me, yes I know mass creates gravity, and therefore everyone is creating a bit of gravity, but you get my point. Also, this is not in any way shape or form a car analogy, so don't even mention them.
Whenever I think somebody, anyone, not just supreme cosmic beings, is trying to piss me off, I think: am I really that important? Why, exactly, would anyone make an effort to piss me off? Nah, probably just a coincidence. You're trying to piss me off aren't you?
Basically they should outlaw any gun under five feet long. And bullets should be ridiculously priced, like $10k or something (although every 5ft or longer gun would come with one free bullet). That keeps the right for self defence but gets rid of the morons shooting at each other for fun.
And all the criminals would carry sawed off weapons and go around mugging people for their ammo. Forget the wallet, the bullets are worth way more. It's these sort of poorly thought out ideas that cause problems. You have to consider all implications of decisions you make. Bear in mind that no matter what you decide to do, there will be people out there looking to see how they can exploit it to their ends, including getting around restrictions, and more importantly, making a profit off said restrictions. It's worth remembering that organized crime in America didn't really take off till prohibition, when they suddenly found something illegal that was very profitable with minimal risk. Always remember the law of unintended consequences.
Look at it this way, CEOs are always going to want some sort of format they can put extraneous clipart and other useless eye candy into, so they'll never accept plain text. The advantage to xml, is when you get something from them, you can just s/<[^>]+/\n/g and get a semi-legible file out of the other end no matter what document viewer you use. Even better, you can find the XMLish equivalent of paragraph and header tags and use XSLT to strip everything but those.
I take it all back, the engineers at Microsoft are utter morons that just do not get it. They took a perfectly good suggestion (the one outlined on alistapart.com) and managed to break it as only MS can. All they would have had to do is make the default mode the standards compliant mode, that's it. Instead we get more of the same. I still like the meta tag for the reasons listed on alistapart.com, but IE8's implementation of it is completely wrong (imagine that, IE implementing something wrong).
P.S. To anyone with some mod points, mod up parent with some informatives, that's a good link and highly relevant to this discussion.
How is running something on top of Vista supposed to make Vista faster? I think it's the same principle as how putting stickers, a spoiler, and a giant muffler on your car is supposed to make it faster. Although this apparently only works if you drive a low end Japanese made car, preferably with a four cylinder engine.
Yeah, I'd be fine with that, but that is unfortunately not how it works. IE8 will default to IE7 mode, and will only be standards compliant if you add the tag telling it you want it to be.
Do we know for sure one way or another about this? Everything I've seen is extrapolated off the announcement that there would be a new meta tag to select the rendering behavior. I've yet to see a single source that says what rendering behavior IE8 will default to.
Any have a link that actually states with certainty one way or another, or is everything just speculation at this point?
I admit when I first heard about this in a previous article (in which it was claimed IE8 wouldn't used standards mode UNLESS the meta tag was added), I figured it was business as usual for MS, but after reading the full rational behind this, I think people have misinterpreted the intention. As long as the browser defaults to standards compliant, and only switches to a particular rendering mode in the presence of the meta tag, then this is a useful way to force a page to be rendered in a way you actually intended. This also appears to be a design originating from outside of MS, they asked other developers for suggestions of how to tackle this problem, and the meta tag solution was the one recommended to them.
So I wonder, how much has the Parent's Television Council donated to various congresspeople? The technical term for them is congresscritters. If you call them people, others might get the wrong idea and expect things like morals out of them.
Seriously, where is the benefit to the web devs to turn on this mode? The benefit is in only having to write a web page once, instead of 2 or 3 times to accommodate all the differences in the various browsers. I much rather write one standards compliant web page with one extra meta tag that gets ignored by all the correct browsers, if that means that IE finally does what it's supposed to do. Of course, I also think that IE8 should fail the Acid 2 test, because they shouldn't be allowed to add their magic meta tag to the test file. If it can't pass the test normally, it doesn't count as a pass.
Judge: Produce the contents of your IMs from Jan 2006-Mar 2007
Orclevegam: Here you go
Judge: These are encrypted
Orclevegam: So?
Judge: 5 years in the slammer! Close, but not quite.
Judge: Produce the contents of your IMs from Jan 2006-Mar 2007
Orclevegam: Here you go
Judge: These are encrypted
Orclevegam: That is the content of the IMs. What you have there is exactly what was transmitted over our network.
Judge: Why are they encrypted?
Orclevegam: It varies by the IM, but in general it's a security and privacy thing. Some of them are private communications between co-workers, others may have sensitive information that shouldn't be shared within the company or to anyone that may have managed to break in to the network.
Sadly I can't give you a good answer to that one. I for one always setup a few rules to filter my incoming mail. If it's sent to more then 10 people, I auto-sort it into a spam folder. If I'm not in the To field, just the CC field, it gets dumped into another folder. Emails from certain people, like the CEO who I never talk to, and who's about 6 levels above me in the hierarchy also gets dumped into a special folder. Certain regular automated mailings likewise go into special folders, or else just get deleted outright.
The biggest problem I guess is one of trying to second guess what other people actually are interested in. In your example, the employee doesn't know who all is interested, so sends it to everyone on the off chance that they are interested. On the other hand had he only sent it to a handful of people someone may have gotten annoyed that they weren't part of the discussion. It's a tough problem. I think maybe as some have pointed out already, an e-mail client with excellent threading like gmail offers might be one way of tackling it, but that still doesn't help the people who suffer the most which are the ones dealing with push e-mail clients on blackberries and the like. If it weren't totally impractical I'd almost suggest having two mail servers and two mail accounts for everyone, one for informal things, and the other for directly job related activities. Financial updates, birthdays, etc. could all go to the informal, or if you prefer informative accounts, and more or less only things directly relevant to you would be sent to the job related accounts. Of course, this setup also increases everyones headaches, because now you have two parallel systems to maintain.
However, you can't prove a negative. When the court requests the records, and you produce a pile of encrypted garbage or no logs at all and assert they weren't relevant anyway,... well, don't drop the soap in the showers when doing time for contempt.
I would happily hand over the pile of encrypted messages and tell them "Yes sir, this is exactly what was sent over our IM network. No sir, I don't know what it means, your guess is as good as mine. No, I don't know why someone would send that, I suppose you would have to ask them.". And if I was asked about a message I had sent, I would tell him that the message was encoded for security reasons, and that it was a private conversation, but if he would like to know the content of that conversation I'd be happy to swear under oath that it was me telling my co-worker how pissed off I was about the latest idiotic requirement being added to our use cases because of a perceived requirement of Sarbanes-Oxley.
FYI, you can't be charged for contempt for complying with a court order to the best of your ability.
Hmm, that is a tough one then. Maybe a clue to the solution is in the symptoms. From the sounds of it, maybe a streamlining of the chain of command might help? It seems like a lot of the problem is to many people trying to communicate with each other and thus you end up with chaos. How viable would it be to slim down the teams and eliminate mailing lists (not outright, but cut the numbers down to something manageable)? I know every company has some junk e-mail that comes out (junk is of course a matter of perception, I for instance always round filed the weekly financial report that was sent out company wide), but maybe you could encourage people to be more specific in e-mails and reserve company wide mailing lists for things that REALLY do need to go out to the entire company.
Is there a specific reason why people are being included on e-mails that don't really matter to them? I guess really the question is, what's causing the problem in the first place?
No, this isn't a technological problem, and technology won't solve it.
Technology can be used to solve social problems as well. In this case it's often caused by people using reply all out of habit, and simply not taking the time to consider the implications. If they had a warning dialog when they used it, they might stop to think about it first. No you can't prevent it outright using technology, but you can alter peoples behavior and perceptions which ultimately can prevent it.
Excellent article which only goes to prove my point. Reread that carefully. All the regulations require logging only in select cases. For most of them, it requires that only conversations between employees and the public be logged. The one for SOX 404, is for financial reporting, not general messages. Unless you're sending the CEO stock updates in IM, it doesn't need to be logged. Most of the other ones only require that the messages be logged and that it's easy to find a particular message. It doesn't say anything about being able to understand those messages. If I send an e-mail that I've used PGP on, or that I've attached a image with steganography used to embed a message, so long as it's logged on the server and retained it's still valid.
It's important to note that at least one of those regulations is concerned with ensuring that information discussed internally is secure from snooping. Obviously, if it's encrypted, it's reasonably secure from outside snooping, so using something like OTR is an automatic pass on that regulation.
Nevermind the fact, that it may get your employer in trouble and most likely get you fired.
Jeez, if you are doing something that may get you or your employer in trouble then stop doing it (or better yet don't do it in the first place). Having an ethical workplace does not mean doing a better job of hiding your bad deeds. If you are concerned about privacy then wait until you get home.
Maybe get me fired, but no way in hell it can get the employer in trouble. Private conversation is a private conversation, just because it went on over IM doesn't mean it needs to be logged. They don't require audio recordings of every room in the building to be logged 24/7, so why should they require IM to be logged? Do they record your inter-office phone calls (not counting things like help desk phone lines, that's slightly different)? Why the hell should it be not only a right but a requirement that your employer record everything employees say to each other? I could lean over to the next cube over and say "My boss is a giant prick.", but if I IM that to the guy in the next cube over that's somehow different?
You can't control what employees say to each other, all you can do is limit certain mediums from being used. It's better to allow a personal one on one medium like IM to be used privately then to require them to talk with each other where things can be overheard or where they need to take time off to go find someplace private. You can also emphasize that e-mail should be considered an official statement, and that if they don't want it on the record, do it in IM. Even in legal proceedings the courts recognize the difference between a private conversation, and an official statement.
You can enable logging on the client side even with the encryption. Likewise it's unlikely you'll have access to the servers IM logs and be able to find one specific IM that was sent to you 3 months ago, among all the other IMs for the entire company.
Oh, GOD no! We have one, and we have way too many people that waste their time talking on Jabber as if it was AIM. And they won't let us force software that will prevent people from installing modifications like Off The Record (Pidgin app that prevents convos from being logged), and we can't really use our logs for shit. OTR is usually one of the first things I install. What do you need the logs for anyway? If it's important you should require documentation. An IM conversation, or even e-mail doesn't count as documentation even though companies often use them that way. Look at it this way, if they didn't have IM, instead of sitting at their desk and working/IMing people, they'd be over at the water cooler chatting and drinking. Would you rather they chat in between working on things, or chat while not doing anything? It's much faster to shoot someone an IM asking what that one command was to do something, then it is to send them an e-mail which, even in the best case will take at least 30 seconds. With IM you could have a response inside of 5 seconds.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, Sony is the undisputed king of pushing new proprietary formats. Name one major piece of Sony electronics released in the last 5 years that hasn't had at least one port that takes a proprietary Sony storage format. Remember when they were pushing those god awful gumstick flash things? You couldn't find a single piece of Sony kit that didn't have a port for them, although if you were lucky it also had ports for other sane formats.
Any programmed virus can't really be that much worse then what has already evolved as is. I mean, are they really going to top Ebola or HIV? The real danger to a virus is in the delivery system, without a way to effectively distribute it within a population it's mostly an academic exercise.
Basically they should outlaw any gun under five feet long. And bullets should be ridiculously priced, like $10k or something (although every 5ft or longer gun would come with one free bullet). That keeps the right for self defence but gets rid of the morons shooting at each other for fun.
And all the criminals would carry sawed off weapons and go around mugging people for their ammo. Forget the wallet, the bullets are worth way more. It's these sort of poorly thought out ideas that cause problems. You have to consider all implications of decisions you make. Bear in mind that no matter what you decide to do, there will be people out there looking to see how they can exploit it to their ends, including getting around restrictions, and more importantly, making a profit off said restrictions. It's worth remembering that organized crime in America didn't really take off till prohibition, when they suddenly found something illegal that was very profitable with minimal risk. Always remember the law of unintended consequences.Look at it this way, CEOs are always going to want some sort of format they can put extraneous clipart and other useless eye candy into, so they'll never accept plain text. The advantage to xml, is when you get something from them, you can just s/<[^>]+/\n/g and get a semi-legible file out of the other end no matter what document viewer you use. Even better, you can find the XMLish equivalent of paragraph and header tags and use XSLT to strip everything but those.
*bangs head on keyboard*
I take it all back, the engineers at Microsoft are utter morons that just do not get it. They took a perfectly good suggestion (the one outlined on alistapart.com) and managed to break it as only MS can. All they would have had to do is make the default mode the standards compliant mode, that's it. Instead we get more of the same. I still like the meta tag for the reasons listed on alistapart.com, but IE8's implementation of it is completely wrong (imagine that, IE implementing something wrong).
P.S. To anyone with some mod points, mod up parent with some informatives, that's a good link and highly relevant to this discussion.
Yeah, I'd be fine with that, but that is unfortunately not how it works. IE8 will default to IE7 mode, and will only be standards compliant if you add the tag telling it you want it to be.
Do we know for sure one way or another about this? Everything I've seen is extrapolated off the announcement that there would be a new meta tag to select the rendering behavior. I've yet to see a single source that says what rendering behavior IE8 will default to. Any have a link that actually states with certainty one way or another, or is everything just speculation at this point?Someone mod parent up.
I admit when I first heard about this in a previous article (in which it was claimed IE8 wouldn't used standards mode UNLESS the meta tag was added), I figured it was business as usual for MS, but after reading the full rational behind this, I think people have misinterpreted the intention. As long as the browser defaults to standards compliant, and only switches to a particular rendering mode in the presence of the meta tag, then this is a useful way to force a page to be rendered in a way you actually intended. This also appears to be a design originating from outside of MS, they asked other developers for suggestions of how to tackle this problem, and the meta tag solution was the one recommended to them.
Orclevegam: Here you go
Judge: These are encrypted
Orclevegam: So?
Judge: 5 years in the slammer! Close, but not quite.
Judge: Produce the contents of your IMs from Jan 2006-Mar 2007
Orclevegam: Here you go
Judge: These are encrypted
Orclevegam: That is the content of the IMs. What you have there is exactly what was transmitted over our network.
Judge: Why are they encrypted?
Orclevegam: It varies by the IM, but in general it's a security and privacy thing. Some of them are private communications between co-workers, others may have sensitive information that shouldn't be shared within the company or to anyone that may have managed to break in to the network.
Sadly I can't give you a good answer to that one. I for one always setup a few rules to filter my incoming mail. If it's sent to more then 10 people, I auto-sort it into a spam folder. If I'm not in the To field, just the CC field, it gets dumped into another folder. Emails from certain people, like the CEO who I never talk to, and who's about 6 levels above me in the hierarchy also gets dumped into a special folder. Certain regular automated mailings likewise go into special folders, or else just get deleted outright.
The biggest problem I guess is one of trying to second guess what other people actually are interested in. In your example, the employee doesn't know who all is interested, so sends it to everyone on the off chance that they are interested. On the other hand had he only sent it to a handful of people someone may have gotten annoyed that they weren't part of the discussion. It's a tough problem. I think maybe as some have pointed out already, an e-mail client with excellent threading like gmail offers might be one way of tackling it, but that still doesn't help the people who suffer the most which are the ones dealing with push e-mail clients on blackberries and the like. If it weren't totally impractical I'd almost suggest having two mail servers and two mail accounts for everyone, one for informal things, and the other for directly job related activities. Financial updates, birthdays, etc. could all go to the informal, or if you prefer informative accounts, and more or less only things directly relevant to you would be sent to the job related accounts. Of course, this setup also increases everyones headaches, because now you have two parallel systems to maintain.
I would happily hand over the pile of encrypted messages and tell them "Yes sir, this is exactly what was sent over our IM network. No sir, I don't know what it means, your guess is as good as mine. No, I don't know why someone would send that, I suppose you would have to ask them.". And if I was asked about a message I had sent, I would tell him that the message was encoded for security reasons, and that it was a private conversation, but if he would like to know the content of that conversation I'd be happy to swear under oath that it was me telling my co-worker how pissed off I was about the latest idiotic requirement being added to our use cases because of a perceived requirement of Sarbanes-Oxley.
FYI, you can't be charged for contempt for complying with a court order to the best of your ability.
Hmm, that is a tough one then. Maybe a clue to the solution is in the symptoms. From the sounds of it, maybe a streamlining of the chain of command might help? It seems like a lot of the problem is to many people trying to communicate with each other and thus you end up with chaos. How viable would it be to slim down the teams and eliminate mailing lists (not outright, but cut the numbers down to something manageable)? I know every company has some junk e-mail that comes out (junk is of course a matter of perception, I for instance always round filed the weekly financial report that was sent out company wide), but maybe you could encourage people to be more specific in e-mails and reserve company wide mailing lists for things that REALLY do need to go out to the entire company.
Is there a specific reason why people are being included on e-mails that don't really matter to them? I guess really the question is, what's causing the problem in the first place?
No, this isn't a technological problem, and technology won't solve it.
Technology can be used to solve social problems as well. In this case it's often caused by people using reply all out of habit, and simply not taking the time to consider the implications. If they had a warning dialog when they used it, they might stop to think about it first. No you can't prevent it outright using technology, but you can alter peoples behavior and perceptions which ultimately can prevent it.Excellent article which only goes to prove my point. Reread that carefully. All the regulations require logging only in select cases. For most of them, it requires that only conversations between employees and the public be logged. The one for SOX 404, is for financial reporting, not general messages. Unless you're sending the CEO stock updates in IM, it doesn't need to be logged. Most of the other ones only require that the messages be logged and that it's easy to find a particular message. It doesn't say anything about being able to understand those messages. If I send an e-mail that I've used PGP on, or that I've attached a image with steganography used to embed a message, so long as it's logged on the server and retained it's still valid.
It's important to note that at least one of those regulations is concerned with ensuring that information discussed internally is secure from snooping. Obviously, if it's encrypted, it's reasonably secure from outside snooping, so using something like OTR is an automatic pass on that regulation.
Nevermind the fact, that it may get your employer in trouble and most likely get you fired.
Jeez, if you are doing something that may get you or your employer in trouble then stop doing it (or better yet don't do it in the first place). Having an ethical workplace does not mean doing a better job of hiding your bad deeds. If you are concerned about privacy then wait until you get home.
Maybe get me fired, but no way in hell it can get the employer in trouble. Private conversation is a private conversation, just because it went on over IM doesn't mean it needs to be logged. They don't require audio recordings of every room in the building to be logged 24/7, so why should they require IM to be logged? Do they record your inter-office phone calls (not counting things like help desk phone lines, that's slightly different)? Why the hell should it be not only a right but a requirement that your employer record everything employees say to each other? I could lean over to the next cube over and say "My boss is a giant prick.", but if I IM that to the guy in the next cube over that's somehow different?
You can't control what employees say to each other, all you can do is limit certain mediums from being used. It's better to allow a personal one on one medium like IM to be used privately then to require them to talk with each other where things can be overheard or where they need to take time off to go find someplace private. You can also emphasize that e-mail should be considered an official statement, and that if they don't want it on the record, do it in IM. Even in legal proceedings the courts recognize the difference between a private conversation, and an official statement.
You can enable logging on the client side even with the encryption. Likewise it's unlikely you'll have access to the servers IM logs and be able to find one specific IM that was sent to you 3 months ago, among all the other IMs for the entire company.