Wow. The scariest part of your story is people think this guy is a top performer.
Now, on the one hand, you can say he was very competent in operating his workstation. He knew how to install software. He knew how to configure said software the way he wanted. He knew how to change OS settings to make sure his software worked the way he wanted. He did all this without having to contact anyone else for support
Really? So 1) he owns the company? Or is the president or CEO? If not, why the fark should the world revolve around the way he wants his system to work?
2) Why is it a good thing he can get his system to work the way he wants, when he wants every hacker on the planet to get in to your company's systems through his laptop? And if that's not what he wants, then his software is not configured the way he wants.
Seriously, this guy is a menace. I can grab a chain saw and rip open someone's chest, that does not make me a competent heart surgeon. Yes, this guy made changes, but in no way should anyone say he is competent in operating his workstation.
There's really two different issues. Reboot (or do anything to) a production server? Change ticket with approvals. Although in the best case developers should have no access to production. Updates should be packaged and passed off to a deployment team. (After QA and testing of course.) Reboots are handled by the infrastructure team managing the servers.
But for my personal workstation and sandbox servers outside of the formal path of changes from test to prod? If I needed any sort of approvals to make changes in those systems, I'd never get anything done.
Thought experiment:
World without content pirates gives you access to X life enriching pieces of content.
World without content producers gives you access to X life enriching pieces of content.
Choose the world where X is greater.
The problem with your experiment is the party you leave out: the content distributors.
Remember, when you're dealing with MPAA, RIAA, Sony, even Disney these days, you are not dealing with content producers. You are dealing with distributors.
These companies are not interested in ensuring the future production of creative works. They certainly do not care about the quality of the works produced. They only care about distribution, and specifically about reducing your options to get content.
The MPAA does not want a world where more movies are produced. They want a world where you can only get movies from the MPAA and its members.
He's a sign of how much of an ideological split we have in this country, that we have certain people flinging accusations of treason against those who question our new overlord. (Or who ask crazy questions like "Where in the Constitution do the feds get the power to...?") The same people also have a tendency to be rude to the point of vileness.
For all the acronym- and jargon-laden summaries which barely qualify as English, and inevitable posts of 'WTF?', and the even more inevitable follow ups of 'Google, ya wanker," is it really necessary to qualify Intel as a "microprocessor maker"?
Anyone here not know what Intel is or what it does? Anyone?
Innovations in methods of creation and distribution of copyrighted works would not be covered by copyright, and as such the frequency or quality of these innovations would not be a product of the copyright industry or necessarily a measure of how well copyright is working.
Such innovations would be subject to the patent system.
To look at copyrighted works and say there have been no significant results--out of thousands upon thousands of music compositions, books, movies, radio plays, scripts, graphic novels, and so on--nothing of any significance produced?
When it comes to copyrights, the author of the original story and most of the folks posting in this thread are idiots.
I guess I'm like the guy who goes in to the "X" thread just to say "X sucks." I really should resist these threads on copyright, patents, and trademarks.
95% of the folks posting on/. have exactly zero clue (if not less) on these subjects and have stubbornly refused to learn anything from the 5% who do know what they are talking about.
I found the quote about appealing to 20-somethings particularly funny for a couple reasons.
A 20-something has never seen a relevant current issue of Playboy, and likely cannot remember a relevant current episode of The Simpsons.
I mean, I think The Simpsons is still funny, but the time when it was ground breaking entertainment spurring on social examination of how the modern American family is portrayed on television, those days are long gone.
And I don't mean to make a lot of folks feel old, but Simpsons has been on the air for 20 years. The big fans are not 20-somethings anymore. We're 30- and 40-somethings.
Why would you hope for someone with similar biases?
For something like game reviews, yes, if the reviewer and I have liked the same games in the past then I have a better shot at liking the new game that just got the good review.
However for political and social commentary, what do I get from reading a web log written from the point of view of my own biases? Someone to tell me what I already believe so I can respond with how insightful the poster is?
If I read a web log written from a different perspective, I might actually learn something (I know--scary thought).
At least then when I walk away with my same old biases, they've been positively reenforced by standing up to counterargument rather than coming out of the echo chamber of people who all agree.
Whatever. Yes, it's too hard. Years to understand.
Only I've done it. And it did take weeks, not years. And I'm not that smart.
Remember, we're not talking about being able to save changes to the SharePoint database. The database is designed to work on through the app and contains no user serviceable parts.
In just addressing the issue of lock-in and being able to get your data and documents out of SharePoint, between the API and SQL, there isn't anything you can't get out programmatically.
If CAML and XML are outside of your understanding, then this isn't the job for you.
There is no out of the box mass export, but coming up with a script to stream binary objects from the database to the file system is a trivial exercise.
What is this lock in? I RTFA and skimmed the linked wikipedia article, and couldn't find any details.
Everything in SharePoint is a list in the database. A calendar is just a list of events with start and end times. A address book is a list of contacts. All you need is some basic SQL, and your information is free.
Documents are also in the database as binary objects. Pulling them out and saving to the local file system can be an exercise for your intern or first year programmer.
The API for SharePoint is fairly well documented. If you wanted to migrate a site from SharePoint to another platform, recreating the look and feel may be a challenge--likely depending on your design skills--but getting your data out will not be.
The way to do usability testing is to watch lots of users work with the product and pay attention to the most common problems they have, but not necessarily to listen to what they say. If they say "I don't understand feature X", then fine. If they say "You know what would make this better, you should add feature Y", then you should probably ignore them.
Not that you ignore those comments completely, but if you are to control the development process (your only hope of getting a final product with any sanity) you absolutely must separate requirements gathering and user/usability testing.
So when the user says "You know what would make this better, you should add feature Y", you make a note of it and switch the focus back to the features the product does have.
If it turns out later 4 out 5 users ask about feature Y, then maybe it goes in to the next version. But testing is not requirements gathering.
For all the references to popular esteem of the sciences the 1950s and '60s, no one is asking, 'why?'
I think the answers goes to why we follow spectator sports. It also goes to why we have the current political environment.
People like Us v Them. We like having winners and losers, even if it means sometimes begin a loser.
Fox News and MSMBC have the following they do not because the common man wants to get in to the minutia of the government sausage factory. We are not a nation of policy wonks. It's Democrat v Republican; conservative v liberal.
Science was the same way after WWII. It was our scientists v their scientists. Our bomb v their bomb. Our rocket v their rocket.
The problem with science, though, is that it isn't sexy. By the time you're an elite scientist, you're old and grey whereas elite sportsmen are young and vigourous and all the things our hindbrains crave.
Not true. While a successful scientist is usually able to maintain a productive level of performance longer than an athlete, the physical sciences and mathematics are very much a young persons game.
And science is slow - you can't follow Fermilab like some do a baseball team. Let's face it: science is slow and tedious and not very exciting day-to-day.
Again I disagree. Sports are slow. Sunday on the pitch is exciting. Perhaps the highlights of training camp are exciting. But the thousands of hours in the gym, lifting the same weights or climbing the same stairs for hours are just as boring as thousands of hours of practice a musician goes through or the preparation a scientist goes through.
The difference is not the speed and the amount of drudgery to achieve excellence.
The difference is scheduling. For the sports fan, the practice is boring but come Sunday noon, there will be excitement. For the music fan, the practice is boring but come Saturday night, there will be excitement.
For the science fan, we don't know when the excitement will come. Science doesn't work on a schedule the same way.
You want people to be able to discuss science the same way they discuss politics? You want the public adoration for scientists bestowed upon athletes? Just make science the Us v Them competition it was during the height of the cold war.
Oh, I'm sure on the back end it's some web 2.0 dynamic XCSS crap, but on the front end, it looks like a frame, it walks like a frame, it quacks like a frame.
It's a frame.
In firefox 3, I go to slashdot.org. Then I click a link to the IT section. Browser address bar still reads "slashdot.org" (no IT.)
I click a story link, then click the back button.
The browser goes back to slashdot.org, not it.slashdot.org.
Well, no. You would not use this to decide when to go to the airport for your flight. In that case, you're not interested in likelihoods, you're interested in the specific condition of your flight.
When you would use this is in the flight booking stage. For example, your itinerary involves connecting flights. You don't to be stuck with hours to kill in the airport between flights, but you also don't want to miss the connection.
If the schedule says I'll have 30 minutes between flights, what are the odds I miss my connection?
Some analysis of handwriting can be useful. In forgery, for instance, a signature can show as false when compared to an authentic one by the presence of a "forger's tremor", because the forger must proceed more slowly to produce the signature than the person to whom it properly belongs.
Perfect example! What you've detected is the speed and deliberation of the signer. In using this method to detect forgeries, you must make many assumptions regarding the state of mind of the signer.
Using myself as an example, my marriage certificate is one of the very examples of my verified signature. That is, it was signed in front of witnesses, including a photographer, so there's no doubt I signed that piece of paper.
But that is not my typical signature. In addition to the audience and the occasion, I knew the certificate would be framed. So I didn't do my usual get-it-over-with quick illegible scrawl.
Since then, I've signed many checks, credit receipts, etc. when there was no witness. I'd guess the difference between my everyday signature and my wedding day signature could cast doubt on whether they were all signed by the same person.
The signatures are different, but forgery is just one explanation of that difference.
Polygraphs have the same weakness. Yes the person's heart rate or skin conductivity changes, but deception is just one explanation of that difference.
My only question would be how this affects their ability to collect pollen and make honey back at the hive. If it allows them to pollinate more flowers, then hell, I'm all for it.
Except if the source of that sweet, sweet sugar is more convenient to the hive than the flowers (and it would have to be, if it is intended to help the bees get to the flowers) then why go to the flowers?
It's like saying, I'm hungry but the McDonalds is too far away. So I'll stop at the Burger Kind on the way. Only after stopping at Burger King, there's no need to go to McDonalds.
I'm guessing if such assistance to the bees becomes widespread, fewer flowers will be pollinated.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. The scariest part of your story is people think this guy is a top performer.
Now, on the one hand, you can say he was very competent in operating his workstation. He knew how to install software. He knew how to configure said software the way he wanted. He knew how to change OS settings to make sure his software worked the way he wanted. He did all this without having to contact anyone else for support
Really? So 1) he owns the company? Or is the president or CEO? If not, why the fark should the world revolve around the way he wants his system to work?
2) Why is it a good thing he can get his system to work the way he wants, when he wants every hacker on the planet to get in to your company's systems through his laptop? And if that's not what he wants, then his software is not configured the way he wants.
Seriously, this guy is a menace. I can grab a chain saw and rip open someone's chest, that does not make me a competent heart surgeon. Yes, this guy made changes, but in no way should anyone say he is competent in operating his workstation.
There's really two different issues. Reboot (or do anything to) a production server? Change ticket with approvals. Although in the best case developers should have no access to production. Updates should be packaged and passed off to a deployment team. (After QA and testing of course.) Reboots are handled by the infrastructure team managing the servers.
But for my personal workstation and sandbox servers outside of the formal path of changes from test to prod? If I needed any sort of approvals to make changes in those systems, I'd never get anything done.
What happened to SSIA?
World without content pirates gives you access to X life enriching pieces of content.
World without content producers gives you access to X life enriching pieces of content.
Choose the world where X is greater.
The problem with your experiment is the party you leave out: the content distributors.
Remember, when you're dealing with MPAA, RIAA, Sony, even Disney these days, you are not dealing with content producers. You are dealing with distributors.
These companies are not interested in ensuring the future production of creative works. They certainly do not care about the quality of the works produced. They only care about distribution, and specifically about reducing your options to get content.
The MPAA does not want a world where more movies are produced. They want a world where you can only get movies from the MPAA and its members.
He's a sign of how much of an ideological split we have in this country, that we have certain people flinging accusations of treason against those who question our new overlord. (Or who ask crazy questions like "Where in the Constitution do the feds get the power to...?") The same people also have a tendency to be rude to the point of vileness.
You're either with us or against us, right?
Off-topic and not for nothing...
For all the acronym- and jargon-laden summaries which barely qualify as English, and inevitable posts of 'WTF?', and the even more inevitable follow ups of 'Google, ya wanker," is it really necessary to qualify Intel as a "microprocessor maker"?
Anyone here not know what Intel is or what it does? Anyone?
Seriously, take a picture of the board/screen/whatever, and import the image in to your notes.
More seriously, right tool for the right job. Leave the expensive hardware at home and invest in a pad of paper and a pen.
You really don't see the connection?
Yesterday, you put all your cell phone contacts and calendar data up in the "cloud".
Today, your data is lost.
Tomorrow, the same companies responsible for losing your cell phone data now want to take over all your Office documents.
Well, since this is /., you take your car in for a routine oil change. The mechanic botches the job.
Are you going to go back to the same mechanic for a transmission rebuild?
I came in to comment on the same sentence.
Innovations in methods of creation and distribution of copyrighted works would not be covered by copyright, and as such the frequency or quality of these innovations would not be a product of the copyright industry or necessarily a measure of how well copyright is working.
Such innovations would be subject to the patent system.
To look at copyrighted works and say there have been no significant results--out of thousands upon thousands of music compositions, books, movies, radio plays, scripts, graphic novels, and so on--nothing of any significance produced?
When it comes to copyrights, the author of the original story and most of the folks posting in this thread are idiots.
I guess I'm like the guy who goes in to the "X" thread just to say "X sucks." I really should resist these threads on copyright, patents, and trademarks.
95% of the folks posting on /. have exactly zero clue (if not less) on these subjects and have stubbornly refused to learn anything from the 5% who do know what they are talking about.
Playboy jumped the shark loooooong time ago.
I found the quote about appealing to 20-somethings particularly funny for a couple reasons.
A 20-something has never seen a relevant current issue of Playboy, and likely cannot remember a relevant current episode of The Simpsons.
I mean, I think The Simpsons is still funny, but the time when it was ground breaking entertainment spurring on social examination of how the modern American family is portrayed on television, those days are long gone.
And I don't mean to make a lot of folks feel old, but Simpsons has been on the air for 20 years. The big fans are not 20-somethings anymore. We're 30- and 40-somethings.
(And we get our pr0n on the internet.)
Doesn't Al Jaffee do the Mad magazine fold-ins?
Why would you hope for someone with similar biases?
For something like game reviews, yes, if the reviewer and I have liked the same games in the past then I have a better shot at liking the new game that just got the good review.
However for political and social commentary, what do I get from reading a web log written from the point of view of my own biases? Someone to tell me what I already believe so I can respond with how insightful the poster is?
If I read a web log written from a different perspective, I might actually learn something (I know--scary thought).
At least then when I walk away with my same old biases, they've been positively reenforced by standing up to counterargument rather than coming out of the echo chamber of people who all agree.
Whatever. Yes, it's too hard. Years to understand.
Only I've done it. And it did take weeks, not years. And I'm not that smart.
Remember, we're not talking about being able to save changes to the SharePoint database. The database is designed to work on through the app and contains no user serviceable parts.
In just addressing the issue of lock-in and being able to get your data and documents out of SharePoint, between the API and SQL, there isn't anything you can't get out programmatically.
If CAML and XML are outside of your understanding, then this isn't the job for you.
There is no out of the box mass export, but coming up with a script to stream binary objects from the database to the file system is a trivial exercise.
What is this lock in? I RTFA and skimmed the linked wikipedia article, and couldn't find any details.
Everything in SharePoint is a list in the database. A calendar is just a list of events with start and end times. A address book is a list of contacts. All you need is some basic SQL, and your information is free.
Documents are also in the database as binary objects. Pulling them out and saving to the local file system can be an exercise for your intern or first year programmer.
The API for SharePoint is fairly well documented. If you wanted to migrate a site from SharePoint to another platform, recreating the look and feel may be a challenge--likely depending on your design skills--but getting your data out will not be.
Not that you ignore those comments completely, but if you are to control the development process (your only hope of getting a final product with any sanity) you absolutely must separate requirements gathering and user/usability testing.
So when the user says "You know what would make this better, you should add feature Y", you make a note of it and switch the focus back to the features the product does have.
If it turns out later 4 out 5 users ask about feature Y, then maybe it goes in to the next version. But testing is not requirements gathering.
For all the references to popular esteem of the sciences the 1950s and '60s, no one is asking, 'why?'
I think the answers goes to why we follow spectator sports. It also goes to why we have the current political environment.
People like Us v Them. We like having winners and losers, even if it means sometimes begin a loser.
Fox News and MSMBC have the following they do not because the common man wants to get in to the minutia of the government sausage factory. We are not a nation of policy wonks. It's Democrat v Republican; conservative v liberal.
Science was the same way after WWII. It was our scientists v their scientists. Our bomb v their bomb. Our rocket v their rocket.
The problem with science, though, is that it isn't sexy. By the time you're an elite scientist, you're old and grey whereas elite sportsmen are young and vigourous and all the things our hindbrains crave.
Not true. While a successful scientist is usually able to maintain a productive level of performance longer than an athlete, the physical sciences and mathematics are very much a young persons game.
And science is slow - you can't follow Fermilab like some do a baseball team. Let's face it: science is slow and tedious and not very exciting day-to-day.
Again I disagree. Sports are slow. Sunday on the pitch is exciting. Perhaps the highlights of training camp are exciting. But the thousands of hours in the gym, lifting the same weights or climbing the same stairs for hours are just as boring as thousands of hours of practice a musician goes through or the preparation a scientist goes through.
The difference is not the speed and the amount of drudgery to achieve excellence.
The difference is scheduling. For the sports fan, the practice is boring but come Sunday noon, there will be excitement. For the music fan, the practice is boring but come Saturday night, there will be excitement.
For the science fan, we don't know when the excitement will come. Science doesn't work on a schedule the same way.
You want people to be able to discuss science the same way they discuss politics? You want the public adoration for scientists bestowed upon athletes? Just make science the Us v Them competition it was during the height of the cold war.
viruses are packets of DNA or RNA 'packedup' into envelopes of protein. They are like a letter you'd send to anyone:
Um...the letter needs a writer. Who "writes" the virus?
If the letter was written by another letter, and could in turn write more letters, then I would say the letter met some definition of life.
If viruses come from other viruses, and in turn create more viruses, then they are alive.
Speaking of going back to the '90s...
Why is /. using frames?
Oh, I'm sure on the back end it's some web 2.0 dynamic XCSS crap, but on the front end, it looks like a frame, it walks like a frame, it quacks like a frame.
It's a frame.
In firefox 3, I go to slashdot.org. Then I click a link to the IT section. Browser address bar still reads "slashdot.org" (no IT.)
I click a story link, then click the back button.
The browser goes back to slashdot.org, not it.slashdot.org.
Seriously, WTF?
Shouldn't T to A be 2:1?
Absolutely nothing, huh! Say it again...
Well, no. You would not use this to decide when to go to the airport for your flight. In that case, you're not interested in likelihoods, you're interested in the specific condition of your flight.
When you would use this is in the flight booking stage. For example, your itinerary involves connecting flights. You don't to be stuck with hours to kill in the airport between flights, but you also don't want to miss the connection.
If the schedule says I'll have 30 minutes between flights, what are the odds I miss my connection?
Some analysis of handwriting can be useful. In forgery, for instance, a signature can show as false when compared to an authentic one by the presence of a "forger's tremor", because the forger must proceed more slowly to produce the signature than the person to whom it properly belongs.
Perfect example! What you've detected is the speed and deliberation of the signer. In using this method to detect forgeries, you must make many assumptions regarding the state of mind of the signer.
Using myself as an example, my marriage certificate is one of the very examples of my verified signature. That is, it was signed in front of witnesses, including a photographer, so there's no doubt I signed that piece of paper.
But that is not my typical signature. In addition to the audience and the occasion, I knew the certificate would be framed. So I didn't do my usual get-it-over-with quick illegible scrawl.
Since then, I've signed many checks, credit receipts, etc. when there was no witness. I'd guess the difference between my everyday signature and my wedding day signature could cast doubt on whether they were all signed by the same person.
The signatures are different, but forgery is just one explanation of that difference.
Polygraphs have the same weakness. Yes the person's heart rate or skin conductivity changes, but deception is just one explanation of that difference.
How about a spoiler alert?
While you're in Cambridge, hit the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Boston Children's Museum, and Museum of Science.
My only question would be how this affects their ability to collect pollen and make honey back at the hive. If it allows them to pollinate more flowers, then hell, I'm all for it.
Except if the source of that sweet, sweet sugar is more convenient to the hive than the flowers (and it would have to be, if it is intended to help the bees get to the flowers) then why go to the flowers?
It's like saying, I'm hungry but the McDonalds is too far away. So I'll stop at the Burger Kind on the way. Only after stopping at Burger King, there's no need to go to McDonalds.
I'm guessing if such assistance to the bees becomes widespread, fewer flowers will be pollinated.