Mostly my list of desirable qualities is similar. I disagree about the "meaningless" part though. The one about "Any particular process artifact is probably irrelevant." is instantly clear to me. He's saying that it's the result of process that matters, not the specific bits that go into it, which is something more managers need to grasp. You need to use what works for the way your team works together, and you can't get so attached to one particular thing that you can't throw it out and replace it if it's not going to be a good fit with your team. The goal, after all, isn't to fit a set of specific methods together in a certain order, is it? No, it's to get the software done on time, to spec and without errors.

Sometimes that can be a good thing. Cox hasn't said they have IPv6 active in San Diego, but their head-end in fact advertises an IPv6 network prefix suitable for autoconfig. The problem is, it's only got connectivity within Cox's network. They're lighting pieces up as they go, but the whole thing's not ready yet so you're not supposed to be using it until they say to.

As long as consumer ISPs aren't enabling IPv6, it's a catch-22-22: services won't switch until there's demand for it, consumers can't demand it because it doesn't work for them, and ISPs won't spend the money to get it working because there's no services that require IPv6 that consumers are threatening to quit over.

Windows 7 and up, Mac and Linux are all ready today. Most consumer routers are ready (seeing as how they're mostly based on DD-WRT) and just need a checkbox checked, same for most of the WiFi routers consumer ISPs are giving to customers. If you don't have NAT to contend with, there really isn't any configuration needed on consumer equipment and it's not that complex on the upstream side (at least not for a competent netadmin, I won't speak for places where their admins got their MCSEs from a certification mill). Even my smartphone's using IPv6 when it's operating on T-Mobile's LTE network, I can see the connections via IPv6 addresses on my own servers. But the consumer ISPs won't spend a penny on infrastructure that they could take in profits unless someone all but literally holds a gun to their heads. They may not have a choice much longer, though. IANA's exhausted, the RIRs are exhausted or all but (ARIN will hit exhaustion on 20-Jul-2015, AFRINIC has 2.5 /8s left, the rest are on empty). The only chunk that can be recovered would be the unadvertised blocks (basically public IP addresses that companies are using internally or have reserved for future use), the largest set of those are in ARIN (North America) and the Opportunity rover will hear the screaming if you start telling large corporations that they're going to have to renumber their internal networks to use the private netblocks because you're taking any public netblocks that they aren't publicly using back.

Me, I've given up on my ISP. Hurricane Electric's IPv6 tunnels work just fine, and I'll worry about the state of Cox's network when they get around to telling me my head-end's got IPv6 active. If they ever get around to it. I'd say I've got better things to do than worry about it like washing my dog, except I don't have a dog. Maybe I can convince the coyote out back he'd like a good scrub...

The Nmap project at https://sourceforge.net/projec... appears empty and run by Fyodor. However, there's another Nmap project at https://sourceforge.net/projec... that says clearly "Brought to you by: sf-editor1, sf-editor3".

There's one special case: if you clear the cache after having learned that you're under investigation. That's because once you know you're under investigation, you have an obligation to preserve any evidence relevant to that investigation (regardless of what that evidence is or whether it's exculpatory or incriminating) including the obligation to evaluate anything for relevance before you destroy or dispose of it. Before you know of an investigation the prosecution has to prove intent, but after you know of it they only have to prove relevance and that you did it. This applies to civil as well as criminal cases, that's why companies are so uptight about document retention policies and control of e-mail and computer files. Believe me, after years in the software industry the words "legal hold" are one of my banes.

This is why my policy has always been to obtain downloads only from the author's or package's official site or an official download named on the official site. Apparently that policy's saved me from a lot of malware/crapware.

Odds on the reason the WEG side retains SMS is the G portion. The government's a huge bureaucracy with a lot of inertia, and there's probably tons of places in their rules and procedures where SMS is specifically required (it may not be the sole option, but it has to be an available option). A lot of the time it makes sense: many government employees (think emergency services) have pagers because they can pick up a basic alert signal in situations where they can't get a usable data signal (all they have to do is detect carrier-present, they don't have to be able to decode data from it), and since most of those pagers can also receive SMS it's simple to piggyback text messages on top of the required pager without making the employee carry a second device.

Most of the kids these days have smartphones of some sort, either Android or iPhone. If they use Google Calendar at all, they almost certainly also have a calendar app that would handle the notification. So why would they even need SMS? I'd even bet they don't use SMS for talking to their friends, they probably use one or another messaging or social-media app.

And app-based notifications have one advantage: since the app has the calendar data cached locally, it can generate notifications even when the phone can't get a signal or network connection.

They didn't exactly duplicate his pieces, they did to his pieces exactly what he did to theirs: copied the piece exactly except for adding their own comment(s) at the bottom. That'd put him in a bind, he can't win against them without guaranteeing everyone whose work he appropriated a win against him. IMO Meyer's fear-mongering on that point.

There's another twist too. The only part Prince significantly changed is the comments on the images. But the comments and the copyrights on them aren't owned by the Instagram users whose images Prince used, they're owned by the people who posted them. Certainly I can use work A for purposes of commentary on work A, but can I use work A for purposes of commentary on work B by a different creator?

For the first, tough. If they can't properly handle other people's financial information like credit-card numbers and PINs, they shouldn't be handling that information. Just like with a restaurant that claims they can't afford to maintain proper sanitary conditions to prepare food for customers.

As for the second, in larger organizations there's never any reason to have a general-purpose computer on the POS network that can access or be accessed from the outside world. I know, I helped build and maintain a national network of POS systems that maintained that separation. If corporate IT and the software vendor can't make it work, I'll be happy to quote an hourly rate for the work.

So, WTF is an e-mail client doing on a POS terminal in the first place? It doesn't need one, it shouldn't have one. Ditto a Web browser. You don't have to worry about vulnerabilities in software that isn't present on the machine in the first place. There are of course other things to be looked at, but those are a good starting point.

Unless, of course, one competitor says "Hey, I'm making a 20% profit margin currently. If I let that slip to 18% I can absorb the tax, keep my prices the same while my competition increases theirs, and gain 10% more sales as people go for my lower prices.". Certain investors, particularly the ones who don't want the business to succeed, will undoubtedly complain, but by the time they manage to wrangle the board into doing anything the first new sales and profit numbers will probably be in and most investors won't go along with them if the numbers are holding up while the competition are losing ground. If the competition don't raise prices, well, you pretty much have to hold them steady and investors who want to raise them are easy to neuter by pointing out that they're advocating giving away sales and profit to the competition.

It's not that big a deal to set Chrome up to not send data to Google. A couple of minutes on the settings page does the trick. Of course if you go ahead and use Google for search or the like then all the tweaking in the world won't keep Google from getting your requests...

That assumes that the business can raise prices without consequence, which is an invalid assumption. Amazon has to account for what consumers will do if faced with higher prices through Amazon, and what the effect of that will be on revenues. There's also the behavior of competitors to consider, as Amazon's prices go up it encourages other companies run by people willing to accept lower profits to step in and take Amazon's business away.

You also have to account for the fact that raising prices to cover taxes is a no-win proposition. Taxes are a percentage of profits, and are not deductible from revenue when calculating profits. So if Amazon raises their prices (and, assuming no change in consumer behavior, their revenue) by 10%, they also increase the amount of taxes they owe by 10%. So now they have to raise their prices again to cover the additional tax, lather rinse repeat. Consumers tend to get fed up with this cycle and vote in politicians willing to increase the tax rates as profits go up, which leaves companies facing a choice between accepting the taxes and somewhat lower profits or closing down and accepting zero profit.

Google's Chrome would be a good example. Google's business is not selling browsers. Their business is selling advertising. Many of the services they offer to attract eyeballs (and data) for their business require a good browser. So they don't lose any revenue by giving their browser away and letting other people build browsers based on the code, in fact the more modern browsers out there that're all compatible the better for Google. In that situation it makes sense to open-source their Chrome code. For any business, if the code's utility code that's necessary for the business but not a significant part of the parts that separate your offering from everyone else's it'd make sense to open-source it. You don't lose anything, you gain brownie points, and you may be able to use the bug fixes and enhancements others make without having to spend your own resources on them.

You don't, however, see Google open-sourcing the details of their analytics algorithms, or the exact code that drives PageRank, or the other things that set them apart from other search engines. Those things they need to keep secret because if they got out Google would lose a competitive advantage. Open-sourcing code like that would cost a business revenue, so it shouldn't be open-sourced.