Americans are theoretically better suited and/or able to change their governments. From what I've read, a large portion of Russians and former Eastern Block residents remember Communism fondly. It was more stable than "color coded" revolutions.
Re:Personal experiences with the social side of MM
on
The Ethics of Social Games
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The danger about developing social relations inside a video game with a monthly payment plan is that the social circle might become the reason you keep on paying a gaming company.
Re-write this...
The danger about developing social relations at a coffee house with a per cup payment plan is that the social circle might become the reason you keep on paying a coffee house.
Feel free to replace coffee house with any "acceptable" (non-Internet) based "social circle" and see if it really matters anymore.
Let's see. They live under an oppressive government / invading force. They find themselves ecnomically fucked with no hope of advancing themselves or their family. They find their way of life and/or religion maligned as evil. Then one day they decide, "Fuck it. My life can't be any worse. Maybe I can make things better for the next generation by fighting what has fucked up my generation."
Even better than that, there is an RSA SecureID application for smartphones (Blackberry and iPhone). You do not even need the dongle anymore. Just fire up the app on your cellphone to get the current PIN.
I've had it happened and it sucked for about 24 hours. I called up Wells Fargo, they investigated and determined that my account was compromised and they gave me my money back. Now granted, it was only a couple thousand dollars, but it was still all of the money that I had.
You're just ignorant to compare a minor inconvenience like not having access to money for a couple of days, to physical assault and rape. In the latter case, you're completely helpless and at the mercy of someone else. In the former, you can't buy anything for a day or two.
methinks its all just a lot of FUD in order to ply the citizenry into allowing "greater government oversight" of the internet and private networks.
+1.
If the media has mentioned it more than once, you can safely assume that there is an agenda there. All of these stories about "cyber security" that have surfaced in the last few months are all about regulating the internet. Between the corporations, *AA organizations and the telcos, everyone is doing a full court press on internet regulation. Nobody wants the net to remain what it has been. They want it shaped into what they want it to be... another controlled broadcast media, a la television. The only difference is that instead of a remote control, we get a web browser.
"I've been hired by a small NGO. They have about 20 employees. I do not yet know enough about what I have been hired to do, so I am turning to Slashdot. Please, do my job for me and help me look good."
What scares the crap out of me is that it allows more marketing people to "nebulize" further anything specific with SLA's whereas before they had to call the ball and own it - or definitively point to who does. It turns hard lines of responsibility into vague, fuzzy outlines of shared agreements if you're not careful. Calling it a "Cloud" just makes it another way for the whole village to take blame when the local idiot does something stupid.
How so? An SLA is an SLA. Whether you are talking about a virtualized instance on a VMware box or a physical server hosting the OS, uptime is uptime. Either the vendor agrees to it or not. It should not matter how they present the service to you. All the matters is that the service is available.
Number two is how I came up also. I started at a small company (5 servers, about 50 users) in 1996. After a couple of years everything there was stable and I was out of things to do. That is one of the "problems" with a small company. They only have so much budget for IT. Once you get everything squared away, you have a lot of down time. That is great for relaxation but not so good for career advancement.
From there I went into consulting. As a consultant I learned more, but basically did what I did for the original company for lots of different companies in different sectors. Each company / sector has their own applications, but the underlying network OS and infrastructure is pretty consistent. Here I picked up all of the design, architecture and project management skills that look good on a resume.
After ten years of consulting I had enough experience to land a "management" level job. I still do a lot of hands on work with server and application provisioning, but networking and security is outsourced. I know enough to direct other people but do not have to get my hands dirty with the implementation. There are times when I wish we were handling the network in house though. Waiting 24 hours to get a port turned up, or to get a firewall ACL change made is stupid. Managing is a good gig but a dangerous position to be in. Managers are easier to replace than technicians. Competent technicians are rare, and that is the point of the original article. With "the cloud" (bah) getting bigger, those with experience in large scale virtualization projects are in demand.
I think path 2 is the best way if you can get it. You have enough autonomy to be your own master to a certain extent. For the first and third options, you are too beholden to others. Your only real bet for career advancement is to develop job experience and move into progressively more senior roles with other companies every 3-5 years. After two or three moves, a person should have enough practical experience to land somewhere stable.
30 days is nothing. A person like Ballmer has insights into where Microsoft is going five plus years from now. If he looks down the road and sees tough times ahead, a 30 day delay on divestiture is a minor inconvenience. Like the OP said, when the CEO divests 25% of his holdings, that is not a good sign. He's basically admitting that in the long run, Microsoft is not the best investment.
I just might. I had been looking forward to it for the last couple of years. All of the bad reviews scared me off. Now that it is free I will probably check it out.
I was reading an article about a year ago that was comparing soliders from urban areas and rural areas. Video game use is obviously fairly universal among enlistment age males. The hypothesis that was stated was that the soliders who had played video games would be more alert and more effective on patrol. It turned out to be the exact opposite. The kids who played games were more of a liability because their attention was narrowly focused and they would have problems recognizing things that were out of place. On the other hand, the "rural" enlistees who hunted and spent time outside significantly out performed the urban "video game" kids when it came to noticing IEDs and other threats.
And on mobile clients - at least for BB -- you can't filter any of it.
This is misleading. If you apply a filter using a desktop client, the mobile client will respect that filter. So you are only partially true in that you cannot filter from your mobile client. You cannot setup filters on the mobile client.
I have to hand it to the government on this one. They have completely reframed the idea of "privacy" online and separated it from anonymity. We all know that to have true privacy, you have to have anonymity. That aspect of the debate has already been marginalized and will never be addressed. Instead what we are getting is a regulatory regime that proposes to protect our real identities online. What happens if you do not want to use your real identity? It seems like the path that we are going down is to make it more and more difficult not to.
The battle has been lost. We're already in the aftermath; the laws are now being codified to solidify the decisions that have already been made.
It would be nice to see some push back against the government on this. I'm of the opinion that if they want me to be me online, I want a cryptographically secure authentication mechanism. I want two factor RSA. I don't want a single piece of unsolicited email. Unless I have opted in by signing with my digital key, I don't want to hear one peep from advertisers.
If the government is going to get involved, it better go one of two ways. Either A, let me be anonymous or B, make it so damn burdensome for anyone who I don't want to talk to talk to me that they decide it isn't worth the hassle to initiate communication unless I solicit it.
Tell me again why OSS is so great? One of the benefits often touted has been that OSS is not held hostage by a single vendor and no matter what happens, you will always be able to do what you want with your applications and data. Does this current situation with Java cast doubt on that meme? In some ways it seems to re-enforce it. If Oracle did not buy Sun, nobody would be worried about Java. Here we have a single corporation that is upsetting a very large apple cart. Java is all over the place. Countless companies and developers are fully invested in the platform.
I bet Microsoft execs are cackling with glee right now. As much as they are maligned, they have a stable product roadmap. They can tell you what is coming out in 2015. They have plans for the next version of SQL server, Exchange,.net, IIS, etc, etc.
They say that time will tell. You get what you pay for. There is no such thing as a free lunch. So many cliche's, all of them relevant.
Your job as the IT resource for the organization is to give the staff the tools that they need to do their job. Do the sales people want new tools, or are you trying to force new tools upon them? The sales staff pays your salary. As much as it sucks to hear it, that is the bottom line. They have a workflow and a way of doing things that is centered on the tools they have. Why are you trying to upset the apple cart?
Linux has matured to the point where if you are starting from scratch, it is a viable path to take. You can get the functionality you need at a fraction of the cost. Linux is not enough better than Windows (or OSX) to migrate onto it (for most organizations). If you like Linux, bring it in where you can. If you need to develop a new application, consider a LAMP stack instead of SQL and IIS. If your boss randomly starts whining about licensing costs for Office, suggest OpenOffice.
Do not take it upon yourself to "make things better" if you are the only person who seems to care. Let the users tell you what they need, and help guide them to the best solution. I have seen careers ruined by people who truly wanted to make things better, but were too caught up in their own heads to realize that nobody else seemed to care. They end up "solving" problems that do not need to be solved, and in the process create a lot of upset and headaches. Migrations are never simple. Often times going from one version of an application to another is a big enough headache, nevermind one OS to another.
These companies are situated in the center of one of the largest changes in human history. Computers and software applications have enabled numerous advances in civilization and benefitted society in countless ways. Despite all the good that has come from computers, it seems like without exception, every single large computer company is lead by a bunch of douche bags who apparently have little concern for anything beyond themselves and their vision of how they want things to be.
Wait until you get into college, where you'll be so far ahead in most of your classes that you can spend your time doing really important college things... like drinking.
It is getting to the point where outsourcing will start costing US companies money. In my current employment situation, we outsource the management of the network infrastructure to AT&T. They manage the firewalls, load balancers and switches. However everything is managed from Singapore. Whenever I need to discuss network design decisions or changes with a real Cisco certified engineer, I have to do it on Singapore time. They don't have any engineers in America anymore. All of their project managers seem to be in India. They must be a getting a great discount, because my PM doesn't know jack. Every time I need a question answered, he has to ask someone else.
Anyone who has dealt with AT&T knows that getting change orders processed is a complete PITA. When you add a 12 hour time difference on top of it, it is amazing that anything gets done at all.
Our solution is that we are going to hire a network engineer here in America. AT&T can bugger off. We are an American company. We are hosting our servers in an American data center on US soil. Our vendor should have people who can work with us during our regular business hours. I'm all for having people on the other side of the world who can do things during a midnight (local time) maintenance window. I'm not all for having to wait until 9pm to have a conference call to discuss things. I'm even more put off by dealing with people who barely speak my language and don't have the technical competence to keep up.
What do you mean? You can still bring your MBP into the data center, and listen to your iPod while glancing at your iPad and texting on your iPhone. There is ample opportunity for iDouchery no matter where you are.
That's a good point. The banks haven't secured the communications channel. Geeks know that email isn't secure, but John Q Public still needs to learn the lesson. Whenever my bank sends me an email, it is little more than a notice that there is a message waiting for me. I have to access my online account to read the message. That creates a problem though, because it conditions the response to expect email communications from the bank.
What is the angle of the banks? They want to get away from having to send out regular mail because sending physical paper through the mail is an expense. There are probably regulatory requirements that demand customers be notified when certain events take place. The banks want/have to notify the customers but don't want the expense of sending mail to them, so they turn to email.
The only way around it that I can see is to require two factor authentication. People already receive an ATM card and a PIN number when they open an account. If they want access to online banking, they should get a dongle and/or smart phone app.
There is absolutely nothing illegal about me turning to the person next to me and asking them for their banking credentials. The only difference is that if I do it in real life, they will laugh at me. If I do it on the internet, I am more likely to succeed.
On another tangent here, the author misses the point. The real crime is that the banks make it too easy for someone other than the account holder to access the account. They make it too easy to get credit based on stolen credentials. The banks should demand token based authentication for online transactions. There are solutions that will send a one time PIN to a smart phone so a separate dongle isn't even necessary. The mechanisms for nearly bullet proof online commerce are available. The system is simply setup in a way that it is more affordable to write off fraud than it is to actively combat it.
Slashdot Mirror
Americans are theoretically better suited and/or able to change their governments. From what I've read, a large portion of Russians and former Eastern Block residents remember Communism fondly. It was more stable than "color coded" revolutions.
The danger about developing social relations inside a video game with a monthly payment plan is that the social circle might become the reason you keep on paying a gaming company.
Re-write this...
The danger about developing social relations at a coffee house with a per cup payment plan is that the social circle might become the reason you keep on paying a coffee house.
Feel free to replace coffee house with any "acceptable" (non-Internet) based "social circle" and see if it really matters anymore.
So basically just don't browse the web.
Let's see. They live under an oppressive government / invading force. They find themselves ecnomically fucked with no hope of advancing themselves or their family. They find their way of life and/or religion maligned as evil. Then one day they decide, "Fuck it. My life can't be any worse. Maybe I can make things better for the next generation by fighting what has fucked up my generation."
Even better than that, there is an RSA SecureID application for smartphones (Blackberry and iPhone). You do not even need the dongle anymore. Just fire up the app on your cellphone to get the current PIN.
I've had it happened and it sucked for about 24 hours. I called up Wells Fargo, they investigated and determined that my account was compromised and they gave me my money back. Now granted, it was only a couple thousand dollars, but it was still all of the money that I had.
You're just ignorant to compare a minor inconvenience like not having access to money for a couple of days, to physical assault and rape. In the latter case, you're completely helpless and at the mercy of someone else. In the former, you can't buy anything for a day or two.
methinks its all just a lot of FUD in order to ply the citizenry into allowing "greater government oversight" of the internet and private networks.
+1.
If the media has mentioned it more than once, you can safely assume that there is an agenda there. All of these stories about "cyber security" that have surfaced in the last few months are all about regulating the internet. Between the corporations, *AA organizations and the telcos, everyone is doing a full court press on internet regulation. Nobody wants the net to remain what it has been. They want it shaped into what they want it to be... another controlled broadcast media, a la television. The only difference is that instead of a remote control, we get a web browser.
Do my job for me?
"I've been hired by a small NGO. They have about 20 employees. I do not yet know enough about what I have been hired to do, so I am turning to Slashdot. Please, do my job for me and help me look good."
What scares the crap out of me is that it allows more marketing people to "nebulize" further anything specific with SLA's whereas before they had to call the ball and own it - or definitively point to who does. It turns hard lines of responsibility into vague, fuzzy outlines of shared agreements if you're not careful. Calling it a "Cloud" just makes it another way for the whole village to take blame when the local idiot does something stupid.
How so? An SLA is an SLA. Whether you are talking about a virtualized instance on a VMware box or a physical server hosting the OS, uptime is uptime. Either the vendor agrees to it or not. It should not matter how they present the service to you. All the matters is that the service is available.
Number two is how I came up also. I started at a small company (5 servers, about 50 users) in 1996. After a couple of years everything there was stable and I was out of things to do. That is one of the "problems" with a small company. They only have so much budget for IT. Once you get everything squared away, you have a lot of down time. That is great for relaxation but not so good for career advancement.
From there I went into consulting. As a consultant I learned more, but basically did what I did for the original company for lots of different companies in different sectors. Each company / sector has their own applications, but the underlying network OS and infrastructure is pretty consistent. Here I picked up all of the design, architecture and project management skills that look good on a resume.
After ten years of consulting I had enough experience to land a "management" level job. I still do a lot of hands on work with server and application provisioning, but networking and security is outsourced. I know enough to direct other people but do not have to get my hands dirty with the implementation. There are times when I wish we were handling the network in house though. Waiting 24 hours to get a port turned up, or to get a firewall ACL change made is stupid. Managing is a good gig but a dangerous position to be in. Managers are easier to replace than technicians. Competent technicians are rare, and that is the point of the original article. With "the cloud" (bah) getting bigger, those with experience in large scale virtualization projects are in demand.
I think path 2 is the best way if you can get it. You have enough autonomy to be your own master to a certain extent. For the first and third options, you are too beholden to others. Your only real bet for career advancement is to develop job experience and move into progressively more senior roles with other companies every 3-5 years. After two or three moves, a person should have enough practical experience to land somewhere stable.
30 days is nothing. A person like Ballmer has insights into where Microsoft is going five plus years from now. If he looks down the road and sees tough times ahead, a 30 day delay on divestiture is a minor inconvenience. Like the OP said, when the CEO divests 25% of his holdings, that is not a good sign. He's basically admitting that in the long run, Microsoft is not the best investment.
I just might. I had been looking forward to it for the last couple of years. All of the bad reviews scared me off. Now that it is free I will probably check it out.
I was reading an article about a year ago that was comparing soliders from urban areas and rural areas. Video game use is obviously fairly universal among enlistment age males. The hypothesis that was stated was that the soliders who had played video games would be more alert and more effective on patrol. It turned out to be the exact opposite. The kids who played games were more of a liability because their attention was narrowly focused and they would have problems recognizing things that were out of place. On the other hand, the "rural" enlistees who hunted and spent time outside significantly out performed the urban "video game" kids when it came to noticing IEDs and other threats.
And on mobile clients - at least for BB -- you can't filter any of it.
This is misleading. If you apply a filter using a desktop client, the mobile client will respect that filter. So you are only partially true in that you cannot filter from your mobile client. You cannot setup filters on the mobile client.
I have to hand it to the government on this one. They have completely reframed the idea of "privacy" online and separated it from anonymity. We all know that to have true privacy, you have to have anonymity. That aspect of the debate has already been marginalized and will never be addressed. Instead what we are getting is a regulatory regime that proposes to protect our real identities online. What happens if you do not want to use your real identity? It seems like the path that we are going down is to make it more and more difficult not to.
The battle has been lost. We're already in the aftermath; the laws are now being codified to solidify the decisions that have already been made.
It would be nice to see some push back against the government on this. I'm of the opinion that if they want me to be me online, I want a cryptographically secure authentication mechanism. I want two factor RSA. I don't want a single piece of unsolicited email. Unless I have opted in by signing with my digital key, I don't want to hear one peep from advertisers.
If the government is going to get involved, it better go one of two ways. Either A, let me be anonymous or B, make it so damn burdensome for anyone who I don't want to talk to talk to me that they decide it isn't worth the hassle to initiate communication unless I solicit it.
Tell me again why OSS is so great? One of the benefits often touted has been that OSS is not held hostage by a single vendor and no matter what happens, you will always be able to do what you want with your applications and data. Does this current situation with Java cast doubt on that meme? In some ways it seems to re-enforce it. If Oracle did not buy Sun, nobody would be worried about Java. Here we have a single corporation that is upsetting a very large apple cart. Java is all over the place. Countless companies and developers are fully invested in the platform.
I bet Microsoft execs are cackling with glee right now. As much as they are maligned, they have a stable product roadmap. They can tell you what is coming out in 2015. They have plans for the next version of SQL server, Exchange, .net, IIS, etc, etc.
They say that time will tell. You get what you pay for. There is no such thing as a free lunch. So many cliche's, all of them relevant.
Your job as the IT resource for the organization is to give the staff the tools that they need to do their job. Do the sales people want new tools, or are you trying to force new tools upon them? The sales staff pays your salary. As much as it sucks to hear it, that is the bottom line. They have a workflow and a way of doing things that is centered on the tools they have. Why are you trying to upset the apple cart?
Linux has matured to the point where if you are starting from scratch, it is a viable path to take. You can get the functionality you need at a fraction of the cost. Linux is not enough better than Windows (or OSX) to migrate onto it (for most organizations). If you like Linux, bring it in where you can. If you need to develop a new application, consider a LAMP stack instead of SQL and IIS. If your boss randomly starts whining about licensing costs for Office, suggest OpenOffice.
Do not take it upon yourself to "make things better" if you are the only person who seems to care. Let the users tell you what they need, and help guide them to the best solution. I have seen careers ruined by people who truly wanted to make things better, but were too caught up in their own heads to realize that nobody else seemed to care. They end up "solving" problems that do not need to be solved, and in the process create a lot of upset and headaches. Migrations are never simple. Often times going from one version of an application to another is a big enough headache, nevermind one OS to another.
These companies are situated in the center of one of the largest changes in human history. Computers and software applications have enabled numerous advances in civilization and benefitted society in countless ways. Despite all the good that has come from computers, it seems like without exception, every single large computer company is lead by a bunch of douche bags who apparently have little concern for anything beyond themselves and their vision of how they want things to be.
The more likely scenario is that the "graffitti punk" will also be armed. Most graffitti is gang related.
If I had the balls to break into somebody's home, I'd probably just take the robot to spite them.
Wait until you get into college, where you'll be so far ahead in most of your classes that you can spend your time doing really important college things... like drinking.
It is getting to the point where outsourcing will start costing US companies money. In my current employment situation, we outsource the management of the network infrastructure to AT&T. They manage the firewalls, load balancers and switches. However everything is managed from Singapore. Whenever I need to discuss network design decisions or changes with a real Cisco certified engineer, I have to do it on Singapore time. They don't have any engineers in America anymore. All of their project managers seem to be in India. They must be a getting a great discount, because my PM doesn't know jack. Every time I need a question answered, he has to ask someone else.
Anyone who has dealt with AT&T knows that getting change orders processed is a complete PITA. When you add a 12 hour time difference on top of it, it is amazing that anything gets done at all.
Our solution is that we are going to hire a network engineer here in America. AT&T can bugger off. We are an American company. We are hosting our servers in an American data center on US soil. Our vendor should have people who can work with us during our regular business hours. I'm all for having people on the other side of the world who can do things during a midnight (local time) maintenance window. I'm not all for having to wait until 9pm to have a conference call to discuss things. I'm even more put off by dealing with people who barely speak my language and don't have the technical competence to keep up.
What do you mean? You can still bring your MBP into the data center, and listen to your iPod while glancing at your iPad and texting on your iPhone. There is ample opportunity for iDouchery no matter where you are.
That's a good point. The banks haven't secured the communications channel. Geeks know that email isn't secure, but John Q Public still needs to learn the lesson. Whenever my bank sends me an email, it is little more than a notice that there is a message waiting for me. I have to access my online account to read the message. That creates a problem though, because it conditions the response to expect email communications from the bank.
What is the angle of the banks? They want to get away from having to send out regular mail because sending physical paper through the mail is an expense. There are probably regulatory requirements that demand customers be notified when certain events take place. The banks want/have to notify the customers but don't want the expense of sending mail to them, so they turn to email.
The only way around it that I can see is to require two factor authentication. People already receive an ATM card and a PIN number when they open an account. If they want access to online banking, they should get a dongle and/or smart phone app.
There is absolutely nothing illegal about me turning to the person next to me and asking them for their banking credentials. The only difference is that if I do it in real life, they will laugh at me. If I do it on the internet, I am more likely to succeed.
On another tangent here, the author misses the point. The real crime is that the banks make it too easy for someone other than the account holder to access the account. They make it too easy to get credit based on stolen credentials. The banks should demand token based authentication for online transactions. There are solutions that will send a one time PIN to a smart phone so a separate dongle isn't even necessary. The mechanisms for nearly bullet proof online commerce are available. The system is simply setup in a way that it is more affordable to write off fraud than it is to actively combat it.