The whole system is broken, and this is just another symptom in a sea of them. The entire system has been co-opted and subverted to protect the monetary interests of the few. Whenever anyone steps up to threaten those interests, the DoJ and various other law enforcement entities step in to wreak havoc on those who dare to step out of line.
Anyone who has been in the computer underground, or who has had a single thought of wanting freedom or a life free from a government that grows more and more oppressive with each new law that they pass, completely understands this. The system is not setup to do the best for the most. It is setup to protect the few from the many.
Computer security is the perfect example. Rather than invest the money in education and technical training to go out and fix the flaws, the system decides to divert that money into lawyers and laws. A murderer is a threat to a single person. A hacker on the other hand can bring down the entire system, and "must be punished appropriately, so that others who might consider doing the same are given cause to think twice and decide against doing so". Unfortunately Aaron learned that the hard way. He probably thought that what he was doing was good, and right. And it probably was. Information that was paid for by tax dollars should not be locked up behind pay walls. But that is not the way the system works. The system maintains order with punishment and fear. It crushes lives by placing insane debt burdens upon those who stray from the rules, no matter how inane or obtuse those rules might be. For those too poor to be fined, there are prisons.
Aaron Swartz gets chalked up in the column of bright minds crushed by the system. The system does not want visionaries. It does not want bright minds who can conceive of better ways to live. It wants sheep, who will consume and die to protect their way of life. It wants a population that fears the rest of the world, because it sustains policies that anger the rest of the world... that steal from that world, to maintain the system. The system that sacrifices the many, for the benefit of the few.
I wonder how differently this tragic situation might have turned out if Jury Nullification were a part of the popular discourse. If Aaron had known that there would be people in front of the court during his trial, urging the jury to do the right thing and aquit him. That is where change really has to start. The system only continues to work because people who should know better, do not and they continue to convict. It only requires 2 people to change the system... 1 to challenge the law, and 1 to refuse to convict.
With the 787, Boeing went from being an engineering firm to an assembly firm. They outsourced the various pieces to a bunch of third parties and then assembled them in house to create the final product. Oddly enough, the various parts that were never tested as a complete system are now having problems.
Nobody could have seen that coming....
I am almost certain that if they do an after the fact accounting of what they will end up spending on fixing all of these issues, they are going to realize that they spent as much, if not more than they would have spent if they had done it all in house.
(sarc) Why would we want to handle the future of our company in house? It is so much more profitable for our share holders if we derive operational synergies by engaging our trusted partners to collaborate with us on this monumentous undertaking. As our friends in Redmond have shown us, it is not done until SP1. The 787 is a true, 21st century airliner. We can leverage agile development methodologies to push numerous, incremental improvements to key systems once the product has been successfully launched. (/sarc)
I started my IT career doing in house IT. That gig lasted for three years and then I began consulting in the employ of a former KPMG guy who started his practice in 1989. I began working for him just in 2000, more or less as the dotcom bubble was beginning to burst. He had a very diverse client base and we were able to ride out the down turn. In 2007 I was tired of the feast or famine culture of small business consulting so I went to work full time for one of our clients. After three years there, I moved to my current job. I now work for a medium sized (~2000 employees, ~$500 million market cap) consulting (non-IT) company as an in house IT resource.
My experience as a consultant shaped my attitude towards professional development and IT. I following insights still stick with me.
Good, competent IT talent is hard to come by. At my first consulting job working for the KPMG guy, we were often times the third or fourth consulting company called in. Our rates were high because my boss was extremely good at what he did and we were able to fix the problems that others left behind. After spending a good 7 years cleaning up other people's messes and dealing with incompetent vendors, I became a bit jaded.
More important than pure IT talent is the ability to explain to clients why they can benefit from technology. Most companies do not want to spend on IT. It is the very bottom of the spending priority list. Therefore I had to learn all of that PM garbage. Project plans, budgets, ROI, leases, CapEx, OpEx... blah blah blah
Vendor management. Either vendors that we brought in, or vendors who clients already had engagements with. More PM stuff here... defining project scope, deliverables, contracts, etc
Work as a Project - This is the most important one because it has been the most valuable for me. IT works in cycles. It takes so long to implement a system. So long to migrate an application. So long to troubleshoot an issue. Etc, etc. You have to maintain an eye on the job boards and understand what the projects you are doing are worth. What's it worth to be a Linux admin? How about one with Netapp experience? What about an Exchange guy with experience migrating to and/or from Lotus Notes? Virtualizing an entire data center? Smart enough to know when to, and when not to, virtualize a massive SQL server? Every skill you have is worth something. Every success you have had increases your net worth. As a consultant, you understand what you are worth.
Knowing your worth gives you as much security as you are ever going to get in this market. It gives you the ability to look your employer in the eye and say, "Pay me. There are plenty of other opportunities out there. This is what I am worth. This is my proven track record of success, and I will be happy to continue to help you move your company forward, if you PAY ME WHAT I'M WORTH."
In fifteen years I've gone from a part time IT gig while going to college, to dropping out of college, consulting and now running a couple of massive applications that generate close to $100 million in revenue a year. IT really is a discipline in which success is rewarded, and failure is punished.... albeit perhaps not as much as it should be, given the shortage of competent IT people. I have done it by approaching the job one project at a time, like a consultant would.
As IT professionals, we are one of the few sectors this economy with any job portability. After years of dealing with the specter of outsourcing hanging over our heads, I say kudos to the ex-HP, current GM employees. If companies respect IT talent and want to keep it, the ought to start treating IT employees better.
I think we have all, at one point or another during our careers, thought something along the lines of... "If I leave this place, they are going to be in trouble and have a real hard time replacing me." or "This place sucks, I am going to go somewhere else where I will get better (pay, benefits, respect, etc)"
Thanks for the update. According to Rockstar's website you cannot pre-order the PC version. Also, the linked article mentions that it was not going to be available for the PC.
I was really looking forward to playing GTA:V on the PC in order to take advantage of the enhanced graphics and CPU power. It turns out that Rockstar is not going to release it on the PC. When one of the largest game studios cannot get the development resources together to put out a PC version of their most popular game, it does not bode well for the platform.
I will have to find something else to do with those 8 CPU cores and 2GB of video RAM. Like, like.... finally transcoding my CD collection?
This is great. Now they just need to overlay violent crime statistics and we can get another data point as to whether or not certain communities are more or less safe based on the density of personal firearm ownership.
I used to have 100+wpm typing abilities, in my late teens and early twenties. My speed has remained roughly the same, but my accuracy has been slipping lately (I'm turning 35 this year). If you are going to go for the record, just do it. Do not wait.
Even before I clicked the link, I had a feeling it was going to be North Hollywood.
The body armor there was SWAT body armor. That was serious tactical body armor. The kind of vest that your average citizen can get is not of that magnitude. Even the best stuff you can obtain legally, (NIJ level 3... like this http://www.armorco.com/shop/item.aspx?itemid=385) will stop a 9mm but not a rifle round. Even stopping a 9mm is going to result in some serious bruising, and if at close enough range... broken / cracked ribs.
Now keep in mind, I have never been shot. This is all second hand information that I have received from guys who work in law enforcement (LA Sheriff's Department and LAPD). Unless a person is on pain killers or drugs (meth, pcp, etc), they are not going to take more than a couple of rounds, even if they do have a vest.
This is accurate. You have to appeal to the PM's self interest. If you think the extra layer of people will only complicate things, figure out a way to explain that to them. Show them that you have the key parts of it under control. Meet them half way.
"If you want to bring people in, bring people in who are going to take care of X, Y and Z."
Retain as much control over it as you absolutely can. That is the only way to stay sane. Once you get PM's in the middle of things, everyone gets bogged down in meetings. The more people involved in the project, the more people there will be who have to justify their salary by "being involved" (looking busy).
The power dynamic that you need to contend with is you are going to quickly go from the owner of the project, to the bitch who gets everything done and gets little recognition for it. You need to delegate as many tasks to as many people as the PM brings in as you can. Make the PM report to you. Make sure to thank the PM for doing such a good job whenever you are on conference calls with more senior management. "You're doing a good job Bob. I really appreciate you handling all of the little details and freeing me up to do the heavy lifting that needs to be done. By the way, can you get me some more coffee? I really code better when I'm properly caffeinated.";)
If you have not already read it, I suggest picking up a copy of The 48 Laws of Power. Do not waste your time and mental energy on trying to climb to the top of the power structure, life is too short. However, awareness of how the game is played is invaluable so that you can notice when others around you might have an agenda.
1) The systems I work with are niche like I said. We do electronic discovery. In that model, the systems are designed to get data out. During litigation, the data is forensically collected and then uploaded into the system for review. Once it is reviewed, it is produced and provided to counsel and the court. The applications themselves are COTS. The market is highly competitive and it is relatively easy to move data between vendors (provided they are using the same application). We also have a lot of custom SharePoint applications. Data in those systems is less portable, but due to the nature of litigation, most of it is only useful for the duration of the case. Again, the market is highly competitive and if people do not like our offering, there is nothing locking them in (other than familiarity with the solution). Believe me when I say that lawyers are a bunch of penny pinching, nit picking assholes. They are constantly looking for SLA slip ups and other slights, real or perceived, in order to negotiate fee reductions.
2) As you mentioned, in this day and age nobody can guarantee 100% data security. You take the appropriate measures, and validate those measures frequently. We deal with a lot of financial services companies and healthcare entities. As a third party provider, we are subject to the same regulations that they are. We take it very seriously, and spend stupid amounts of money on data security. Everything from physical security in the data centers (geographically dispersed, fully redundant), to encryption at rest on the SAN, encryption on the key database fields. To secure coding practices, regular code reviews by external security firms. Regular pen tests of the application, both internally and by third parties. Those tests are not just black box tests, but also test the system from the perspective of an authorized user trying to escalate privilege, etc. The list goes on and on... packet analysis, both ingress and egress. Privileged user monitoring. Token based authentication for employees as well as clients.
We probably have more control over our environment than you do over yours. Ours is a purpose built, isolated environment that has been designed to securely host one application. We do not have to worry about Joe the Sales Schmoe bringing his porn infected laptop into the office and connecting it to the network. We don't have to worry about Susy the Secretary clicking on some lolcats link and getting her box pwnd. We do not have to worry about the spear phishing attack that opens the network to the Chinese. We don't have to worry about Bob the Angry IT guy downloading the data onto Dropbox. Well that's not true, we do have to worry about that but we have controls in place to make it really hard to do and if it does happen, it is logged and alerts go out so that the incident can be resolved. We leverage Citrix heavily because we can lock it down (no internet access, no external devices, no access to network shares, etc). No environment is ever perfect or 100% secure, but we have ours dialed in to the point that we have had certain personality types quit because they couldn't deal with the tight controls and absolutely having to do things the one byzantine way that it had to be done. The response to those people is always the same. "Our clients pay us to keep their data secure, not to make your life easy." Corresponding to that, we do pay more than other firms due to the acknowledgement that the controls do suck, they are frustrating and people do get burnt out.
We are probably the exception to the rule though. The market we are in is highly competitive, and due to that, the company can make the investment in security because it becomes a competitive differentiator in the marketplace. All of it costs money. You'd probably balk at what we charge per gigabyte for storage. Security has a serious price tag attached to it. In all but the most heavily regulated industries, people will not pay what it costs. They will go with the provider who claims to have it, and cross their fingers while p
Similar tale here. We have a couple of Iomega StorCenter px12-450r's. Total junk compared to the rest of the kit in the data center. Of course the rest of the stuff is EMC Clariion and Symmetrix, with a smattering of Dell PowerVault. Still, I would have though the Iomega would be close to the Dell. No way. Crappy interface. Very temperamental. I do have to give them a plus for their AD integration though. It worked surprisingly well.
SaaS seems way off base. Is there a particular SaaS market that you see fizzling out? All of the clients I deal with are in love with the SaaS model because they can outsource the risk and the cost of running the applications themselves.
I am a bit biased. The company I work for is doing very well with SaaS offerings and has seen revenue triple in the last two years with growth projections continuing that trend. We are also in a fairly niche market, with specific offerings targeted at a growing market.
As always in these situations, there are multiple hundreds of posts on both sides of the gun control issue. There is the inevitable discussion on whether or not having armed teachers would make a difference or not. Here is a useful link and some information about "Active Shooters"
"SEALE Police Academy (Bedford OH) manager Ron Borsch reports their research has determined that aggressive action — by even a single individual — is the most effective countermeasure in stopping the active shooter. For example, initially single unarmed civilians have accounted for half of mass-murder preventions."
Guns suck, but they are a fact of life in America. We have to deal with that reality. We cannot disarm the entire population. There will always be nut jobs out there with the willingness to harm others. The only sane and compassionate response is to allow people to defend themselves, while doing everything possible to create a loving society that diminishes the likelihood of these behaviors emerging in the first place.
He is referring to the reality that even though a vest might stop the bullet from penetrating the body, there is still a large amount of blunt force trauma that results from the impact.
As long as we're focusing on the negatives, lets not forget about all of the transportation jobs that will be lost. Without the need to ship the products from China back to the States to sell them, those ship crews are going to have to find something else to transport. Or maybe the ships will sit idle. Think of those poor fuel producers whose diesel will not be consumed. Then the poor environmentalists who will have less to complain about due to the reduced carbon emissions.
Wait, hang on... this is not a zero sum equation. There could be some good in here. I'm going to stop before I become too positive about Apple.
The important thing is that they are jobs, period. The employees are being paid, but more importantly the company is paying payroll taxes. Every job created is one less person on welfare. "Living wage" is good and all, but let's be honest with ourselves. Even a "poor" person in America has a higher standard of living than a large portion of the world enjoys.
I like the land line because of the call quality. I do not need it, but I absolutely prefer it. I like my Plantronics headset too. I could get one for my cellphone, but again it goes back to call quality. I do a lot of international calling, and the poor quality of a cell phone connection just compounds the communication challenges introduced by the international delay, and the often poor quality of overseas phone lines.
In my line of work, communication falls into a few different buckets. For discussions that need to be preserved, or when they need to be crystal clear, email is still the best tool. For quick, informal conversations with people in remote offices then IM works. The telephone is good for conference calls, bridges and discussions that require a lot of back and forth that would otherwise be slowed down by email.
This is kind of a two part question. Or more like one statement and one question.
We see Apple growing in market share and one of the memes that has been accepted by a large part of the community is that Apple is not targeted by malware authors in part because the return on investment is not as high as it is for Windows machines. To put it another way, if a malware author targets Windows they get millions of home users, but more importantly, they also have the potential to infect corporate systems, server farms, etc. If they go after OSX, they get a bunch of home computers and some audio visual professionals.
Apple's market share is growing, and they also have converted their OS over to run on Intel chips. It now shares the same hardware base as PCs that run Windows. Given that all of the really advanced malware code (rootkits, polymorphism, etc) is written in Assembly, do you foresee any tipping point coming where OSX will be targeted on a large scale like Windows has been? Or is there simply not enough of a payoff there for the malware creators, given the ease of exploitation and wide spread deployment of Windows?
That's an interesting anecdote. My experience was just the opposite. I work in Southern California and at the time was doing consulting. That business often required finding new locations when we brought new clients into the fold. The only map app at that time was MapQuest, and while it was better than using the paper map book, it did give bad results quite frequently. It had a tendency to try to send you down the wrong way on a one way street for instance. Or a funny one I remember is there was a street that was broken up into multiple chunks all over the city... the 100 block was here, the 200 block was over there.. the 500 block... etc. MapQuest freaked out and tried to route through all of them and produced a good 500 steps to get to the destination.
When Google Maps came out, I was blown away by how good the directions were. It boggled my mind that Google got it right while MapQuest had a few years to refine their product and their directions still sucked.
The organization that I work for is building up our data center presence in the UK specifically to target that market, and to some extend, the whole of the EU. They do not want their data kept in the States. I do not blame them. With a global network like the Internet, it still strikes me as odd that it matters where the servers are physically located and why that matters for law. I mean, I get it... physical presence, search and seizure and all of that. But when you are dealing with encrypted SAN arrays and "secure" communications, the only difference between the US and the UK (or anywhere else) is latency on the connection to get there. It's not like the NSA is not snooping packets going into the UK the same way they are snooping packets in the US. Or if not the NSA, then British intelligence... or the Israeli's, Chinese, Russians... The entire network is compromised anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole system is broken, and this is just another symptom in a sea of them. The entire system has been co-opted and subverted to protect the monetary interests of the few. Whenever anyone steps up to threaten those interests, the DoJ and various other law enforcement entities step in to wreak havoc on those who dare to step out of line.
Anyone who has been in the computer underground, or who has had a single thought of wanting freedom or a life free from a government that grows more and more oppressive with each new law that they pass, completely understands this. The system is not setup to do the best for the most. It is setup to protect the few from the many.
Computer security is the perfect example. Rather than invest the money in education and technical training to go out and fix the flaws, the system decides to divert that money into lawyers and laws. A murderer is a threat to a single person. A hacker on the other hand can bring down the entire system, and "must be punished appropriately, so that others who might consider doing the same are given cause to think twice and decide against doing so". Unfortunately Aaron learned that the hard way. He probably thought that what he was doing was good, and right. And it probably was. Information that was paid for by tax dollars should not be locked up behind pay walls. But that is not the way the system works. The system maintains order with punishment and fear. It crushes lives by placing insane debt burdens upon those who stray from the rules, no matter how inane or obtuse those rules might be. For those too poor to be fined, there are prisons.
Aaron Swartz gets chalked up in the column of bright minds crushed by the system. The system does not want visionaries. It does not want bright minds who can conceive of better ways to live. It wants sheep, who will consume and die to protect their way of life. It wants a population that fears the rest of the world, because it sustains policies that anger the rest of the world... that steal from that world, to maintain the system. The system that sacrifices the many, for the benefit of the few.
I wonder how differently this tragic situation might have turned out if Jury Nullification were a part of the popular discourse. If Aaron had known that there would be people in front of the court during his trial, urging the jury to do the right thing and aquit him. That is where change really has to start. The system only continues to work because people who should know better, do not and they continue to convict. It only requires 2 people to change the system... 1 to challenge the law, and 1 to refuse to convict.
With the 787, Boeing went from being an engineering firm to an assembly firm. They outsourced the various pieces to a bunch of third parties and then assembled them in house to create the final product. Oddly enough, the various parts that were never tested as a complete system are now having problems.
Nobody could have seen that coming....
I am almost certain that if they do an after the fact accounting of what they will end up spending on fixing all of these issues, they are going to realize that they spent as much, if not more than they would have spent if they had done it all in house.
(sarc) Why would we want to handle the future of our company in house? It is so much more profitable for our share holders if we derive operational synergies by engaging our trusted partners to collaborate with us on this monumentous undertaking. As our friends in Redmond have shown us, it is not done until SP1. The 787 is a true, 21st century airliner. We can leverage agile development methodologies to push numerous, incremental improvements to key systems once the product has been successfully launched. (/sarc)
I started my IT career doing in house IT. That gig lasted for three years and then I began consulting in the employ of a former KPMG guy who started his practice in 1989. I began working for him just in 2000, more or less as the dotcom bubble was beginning to burst. He had a very diverse client base and we were able to ride out the down turn. In 2007 I was tired of the feast or famine culture of small business consulting so I went to work full time for one of our clients. After three years there, I moved to my current job. I now work for a medium sized (~2000 employees, ~$500 million market cap) consulting (non-IT) company as an in house IT resource.
My experience as a consultant shaped my attitude towards professional development and IT. I following insights still stick with me.
Good, competent IT talent is hard to come by. At my first consulting job working for the KPMG guy, we were often times the third or fourth consulting company called in. Our rates were high because my boss was extremely good at what he did and we were able to fix the problems that others left behind. After spending a good 7 years cleaning up other people's messes and dealing with incompetent vendors, I became a bit jaded.
More important than pure IT talent is the ability to explain to clients why they can benefit from technology. Most companies do not want to spend on IT. It is the very bottom of the spending priority list. Therefore I had to learn all of that PM garbage. Project plans, budgets, ROI, leases, CapEx, OpEx... blah blah blah
Vendor management. Either vendors that we brought in, or vendors who clients already had engagements with. More PM stuff here... defining project scope, deliverables, contracts, etc
Work as a Project - This is the most important one because it has been the most valuable for me. IT works in cycles. It takes so long to implement a system. So long to migrate an application. So long to troubleshoot an issue. Etc, etc. You have to maintain an eye on the job boards and understand what the projects you are doing are worth. What's it worth to be a Linux admin? How about one with Netapp experience? What about an Exchange guy with experience migrating to and/or from Lotus Notes? Virtualizing an entire data center? Smart enough to know when to, and when not to, virtualize a massive SQL server? Every skill you have is worth something. Every success you have had increases your net worth. As a consultant, you understand what you are worth.
Knowing your worth gives you as much security as you are ever going to get in this market. It gives you the ability to look your employer in the eye and say, "Pay me. There are plenty of other opportunities out there. This is what I am worth. This is my proven track record of success, and I will be happy to continue to help you move your company forward, if you PAY ME WHAT I'M WORTH."
In fifteen years I've gone from a part time IT gig while going to college, to dropping out of college, consulting and now running a couple of massive applications that generate close to $100 million in revenue a year. IT really is a discipline in which success is rewarded, and failure is punished.... albeit perhaps not as much as it should be, given the shortage of competent IT people. I have done it by approaching the job one project at a time, like a consultant would.
As IT professionals, we are one of the few sectors this economy with any job portability. After years of dealing with the specter of outsourcing hanging over our heads, I say kudos to the ex-HP, current GM employees. If companies respect IT talent and want to keep it, the ought to start treating IT employees better.
I think we have all, at one point or another during our careers, thought something along the lines of... "If I leave this place, they are going to be in trouble and have a real hard time replacing me." or "This place sucks, I am going to go somewhere else where I will get better (pay, benefits, respect, etc)"
Thanks for the update. According to Rockstar's website you cannot pre-order the PC version. Also, the linked article mentions that it was not going to be available for the PC.
I was really looking forward to playing GTA:V on the PC in order to take advantage of the enhanced graphics and CPU power. It turns out that Rockstar is not going to release it on the PC. When one of the largest game studios cannot get the development resources together to put out a PC version of their most popular game, it does not bode well for the platform.
I will have to find something else to do with those 8 CPU cores and 2GB of video RAM. Like, like.... finally transcoding my CD collection?
This is great. Now they just need to overlay violent crime statistics and we can get another data point as to whether or not certain communities are more or less safe based on the density of personal firearm ownership.
I used to have 100+wpm typing abilities, in my late teens and early twenties. My speed has remained roughly the same, but my accuracy has been slipping lately (I'm turning 35 this year). If you are going to go for the record, just do it. Do not wait.
Even before I clicked the link, I had a feeling it was going to be North Hollywood.
The body armor there was SWAT body armor. That was serious tactical body armor. The kind of vest that your average citizen can get is not of that magnitude. Even the best stuff you can obtain legally, (NIJ level 3 ... like this http://www.armorco.com/shop/item.aspx?itemid=385) will stop a 9mm but not a rifle round. Even stopping a 9mm is going to result in some serious bruising, and if at close enough range... broken / cracked ribs.
Now keep in mind, I have never been shot. This is all second hand information that I have received from guys who work in law enforcement (LA Sheriff's Department and LAPD). Unless a person is on pain killers or drugs (meth, pcp, etc), they are not going to take more than a couple of rounds, even if they do have a vest.
This is accurate. You have to appeal to the PM's self interest. If you think the extra layer of people will only complicate things, figure out a way to explain that to them. Show them that you have the key parts of it under control. Meet them half way.
"If you want to bring people in, bring people in who are going to take care of X, Y and Z."
Retain as much control over it as you absolutely can. That is the only way to stay sane. Once you get PM's in the middle of things, everyone gets bogged down in meetings. The more people involved in the project, the more people there will be who have to justify their salary by "being involved" (looking busy).
The power dynamic that you need to contend with is you are going to quickly go from the owner of the project, to the bitch who gets everything done and gets little recognition for it. You need to delegate as many tasks to as many people as the PM brings in as you can. Make the PM report to you. Make sure to thank the PM for doing such a good job whenever you are on conference calls with more senior management. "You're doing a good job Bob. I really appreciate you handling all of the little details and freeing me up to do the heavy lifting that needs to be done. By the way, can you get me some more coffee? I really code better when I'm properly caffeinated." ;)
If you have not already read it, I suggest picking up a copy of The 48 Laws of Power. Do not waste your time and mental energy on trying to climb to the top of the power structure, life is too short. However, awareness of how the game is played is invaluable so that you can notice when others around you might have an agenda.
1) The systems I work with are niche like I said. We do electronic discovery. In that model, the systems are designed to get data out. During litigation, the data is forensically collected and then uploaded into the system for review. Once it is reviewed, it is produced and provided to counsel and the court. The applications themselves are COTS. The market is highly competitive and it is relatively easy to move data between vendors (provided they are using the same application). We also have a lot of custom SharePoint applications. Data in those systems is less portable, but due to the nature of litigation, most of it is only useful for the duration of the case. Again, the market is highly competitive and if people do not like our offering, there is nothing locking them in (other than familiarity with the solution). Believe me when I say that lawyers are a bunch of penny pinching, nit picking assholes. They are constantly looking for SLA slip ups and other slights, real or perceived, in order to negotiate fee reductions.
2) As you mentioned, in this day and age nobody can guarantee 100% data security. You take the appropriate measures, and validate those measures frequently. We deal with a lot of financial services companies and healthcare entities. As a third party provider, we are subject to the same regulations that they are. We take it very seriously, and spend stupid amounts of money on data security. Everything from physical security in the data centers (geographically dispersed, fully redundant), to encryption at rest on the SAN, encryption on the key database fields. To secure coding practices, regular code reviews by external security firms. Regular pen tests of the application, both internally and by third parties. Those tests are not just black box tests, but also test the system from the perspective of an authorized user trying to escalate privilege, etc. The list goes on and on... packet analysis, both ingress and egress. Privileged user monitoring. Token based authentication for employees as well as clients.
We probably have more control over our environment than you do over yours. Ours is a purpose built, isolated environment that has been designed to securely host one application. We do not have to worry about Joe the Sales Schmoe bringing his porn infected laptop into the office and connecting it to the network. We don't have to worry about Susy the Secretary clicking on some lolcats link and getting her box pwnd. We do not have to worry about the spear phishing attack that opens the network to the Chinese. We don't have to worry about Bob the Angry IT guy downloading the data onto Dropbox. Well that's not true, we do have to worry about that but we have controls in place to make it really hard to do and if it does happen, it is logged and alerts go out so that the incident can be resolved. We leverage Citrix heavily because we can lock it down (no internet access, no external devices, no access to network shares, etc). No environment is ever perfect or 100% secure, but we have ours dialed in to the point that we have had certain personality types quit because they couldn't deal with the tight controls and absolutely having to do things the one byzantine way that it had to be done. The response to those people is always the same. "Our clients pay us to keep their data secure, not to make your life easy." Corresponding to that, we do pay more than other firms due to the acknowledgement that the controls do suck, they are frustrating and people do get burnt out.
We are probably the exception to the rule though. The market we are in is highly competitive, and due to that, the company can make the investment in security because it becomes a competitive differentiator in the marketplace. All of it costs money. You'd probably balk at what we charge per gigabyte for storage. Security has a serious price tag attached to it. In all but the most heavily regulated industries, people will not pay what it costs. They will go with the provider who claims to have it, and cross their fingers while p
Similar tale here. We have a couple of Iomega StorCenter px12-450r's. Total junk compared to the rest of the kit in the data center. Of course the rest of the stuff is EMC Clariion and Symmetrix, with a smattering of Dell PowerVault. Still, I would have though the Iomega would be close to the Dell. No way. Crappy interface. Very temperamental. I do have to give them a plus for their AD integration though. It worked surprisingly well.
You have your clients throwing up on displays all over campus? I like it.
SaaS seems way off base. Is there a particular SaaS market that you see fizzling out? All of the clients I deal with are in love with the SaaS model because they can outsource the risk and the cost of running the applications themselves.
I am a bit biased. The company I work for is doing very well with SaaS offerings and has seen revenue triple in the last two years with growth projections continuing that trend. We are also in a fairly niche market, with specific offerings targeted at a growing market.
As always in these situations, there are multiple hundreds of posts on both sides of the gun control issue. There is the inevitable discussion on whether or not having armed teachers would make a difference or not. Here is a useful link and some information about "Active Shooters"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_shooter
"SEALE Police Academy (Bedford OH) manager Ron Borsch reports their research has determined that aggressive action — by even a single individual — is the most effective countermeasure in stopping the active shooter. For example, initially single unarmed civilians have accounted for half of mass-murder preventions."
Guns suck, but they are a fact of life in America. We have to deal with that reality. We cannot disarm the entire population. There will always be nut jobs out there with the willingness to harm others. The only sane and compassionate response is to allow people to defend themselves, while doing everything possible to create a loving society that diminishes the likelihood of these behaviors emerging in the first place.
He is referring to the reality that even though a vest might stop the bullet from penetrating the body, there is still a large amount of blunt force trauma that results from the impact.
As long as we're focusing on the negatives, lets not forget about all of the transportation jobs that will be lost. Without the need to ship the products from China back to the States to sell them, those ship crews are going to have to find something else to transport. Or maybe the ships will sit idle. Think of those poor fuel producers whose diesel will not be consumed. Then the poor environmentalists who will have less to complain about due to the reduced carbon emissions.
Wait, hang on... this is not a zero sum equation. There could be some good in here. I'm going to stop before I become too positive about Apple.
The important thing is that they are jobs, period. The employees are being paid, but more importantly the company is paying payroll taxes. Every job created is one less person on welfare. "Living wage" is good and all, but let's be honest with ourselves. Even a "poor" person in America has a higher standard of living than a large portion of the world enjoys.
I like the land line because of the call quality. I do not need it, but I absolutely prefer it. I like my Plantronics headset too. I could get one for my cellphone, but again it goes back to call quality. I do a lot of international calling, and the poor quality of a cell phone connection just compounds the communication challenges introduced by the international delay, and the often poor quality of overseas phone lines.
In my line of work, communication falls into a few different buckets. For discussions that need to be preserved, or when they need to be crystal clear, email is still the best tool. For quick, informal conversations with people in remote offices then IM works. The telephone is good for conference calls, bridges and discussions that require a lot of back and forth that would otherwise be slowed down by email.
This is kind of a two part question. Or more like one statement and one question.
We see Apple growing in market share and one of the memes that has been accepted by a large part of the community is that Apple is not targeted by malware authors in part because the return on investment is not as high as it is for Windows machines. To put it another way, if a malware author targets Windows they get millions of home users, but more importantly, they also have the potential to infect corporate systems, server farms, etc. If they go after OSX, they get a bunch of home computers and some audio visual professionals.
Apple's market share is growing, and they also have converted their OS over to run on Intel chips. It now shares the same hardware base as PCs that run Windows. Given that all of the really advanced malware code (rootkits, polymorphism, etc) is written in Assembly, do you foresee any tipping point coming where OSX will be targeted on a large scale like Windows has been? Or is there simply not enough of a payoff there for the malware creators, given the ease of exploitation and wide spread deployment of Windows?
+1 for the second battery, and a third if you can afford it.
The more important and related story is that due to this, the EPA has suspended BP from any further contracts with the Federal government.
http://blog.chron.com/lorensteffy/2012/11/in-suspending-bp-epa-does-what-drilling-regulators-would-not/
I'm sure it will not be long before BP is crying about unions and regulation and it being too expensive to do business in America.
You got your second wish. The EPA denied BP the right to bid on oil contracts.
http://blog.chron.com/lorensteffy/2012/11/in-suspending-bp-epa-does-what-drilling-regulators-would-not/
That's an interesting anecdote. My experience was just the opposite. I work in Southern California and at the time was doing consulting. That business often required finding new locations when we brought new clients into the fold. The only map app at that time was MapQuest, and while it was better than using the paper map book, it did give bad results quite frequently. It had a tendency to try to send you down the wrong way on a one way street for instance. Or a funny one I remember is there was a street that was broken up into multiple chunks all over the city... the 100 block was here, the 200 block was over there.. the 500 block... etc. MapQuest freaked out and tried to route through all of them and produced a good 500 steps to get to the destination.
When Google Maps came out, I was blown away by how good the directions were. It boggled my mind that Google got it right while MapQuest had a few years to refine their product and their directions still sucked.
The organization that I work for is building up our data center presence in the UK specifically to target that market, and to some extend, the whole of the EU. They do not want their data kept in the States. I do not blame them. With a global network like the Internet, it still strikes me as odd that it matters where the servers are physically located and why that matters for law. I mean, I get it... physical presence, search and seizure and all of that. But when you are dealing with encrypted SAN arrays and "secure" communications, the only difference between the US and the UK (or anywhere else) is latency on the connection to get there. It's not like the NSA is not snooping packets going into the UK the same way they are snooping packets in the US. Or if not the NSA, then British intelligence... or the Israeli's, Chinese, Russians... The entire network is compromised anyway.