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Comment: Developer view vs. manger view (Score 1) 107

Schmidt stated the obvious, but if you are a developer and you took the bait and thought the rumors might be true, you already read enough of Google Chrome or Google Android documentation before Schmidt's clarification and confirmed that consolidating the two products would be, well, stupid."

Yes. Developers who read documentaiton may have known it. Mangers however may get excited on the idea that they understand the world know that everything is open source and linux.

Comment: Re:Lessosn learned (i hope) (Score 1) 1145

by drolli (#43244277) Attached to: SendGrid Fires Employee After Firestorm Over Inappropriate Jokes

Well I live in europe. Recently a very similar case happened. a sportswoman publically mentioned on facebook that somebody send her emails with his naked photos against her will, and as far as i can tell the only thing which happened was a shitstorm, but no lawsuit against her, but she sued him. A journalist who was getting remarks very similar to the ones as the woman in the article from a politician in a semi-professional setting made it public and was not sued.

I find it ok to make people making offensive jokes public. Iff its no problem to make the joke public, then its no problem to tell it. However the male fraction of the population who finds these ok when they are applied to women, probably would stop finding these ok if their female manager would make remarks over the size of their **** in their presence - well knowing that the really insensitive remarks start when the corresponding gender has left the room.

They would call it unprofessional, and that is what it is. I (male) work under a quite young male manager from a country with less sensitivity in these issues, and even if he is really ok he manages to piss me off in that respect. For example when he in one minute talks about the looks of women and in the next one ask us if we would not need a woman in our team. Even vaguely hinting that my professional opinion and at the same time my jugdement about former employees may be affected by the gender pisses me off. Especially because we recently had some young female colleague in the team of which i professionally think very highly due her skills in mathematics.

However i see that certain levels of certain professions come with an increased contact with morons and an required increased tolerance to inacceptable behaviour. I personally would count anything with social media in that category. If you have some function like this and you are somewhere in this function, you need to balance the actions exactly as carefully as when you would make jokes on a public conference. Both show a lack of jugdement of appropitate behaviour, your standing and your possibility to represent your employer properly.

When it comes to employer an sexual harrassment (which i count offensive jokes as), they alway would like to settle it in private. For a multitiude of reasons, the most important one that each public case means a "the company sends women to places where they are harrased" and that the public does not distinct between "realities of the trade" and "active participation". If not everything is well withing a company this can be a public relations desaster beyond what the company deserves. E.g. in this case a hostess working for the compnay on some fair could tune in and unse the media attention for her five minutes of fame, and the media would be very happy to paint the picture of "company sends women to nerds to be harrased there".

So what to do if you encounter inappropriate behaviour? In a company with good governance, just report to the superior of the corresponding person or to the ombudsman. If not, then its more difficult and i guess pressing for a lawsuit may be a good idea since that will stimulate the laziest of the bosses.

Comment: Lessosn learned (i hope) (Score 3, Interesting) 1145

by drolli (#43240935) Attached to: SendGrid Fires Employee After Firestorm Over Inappropriate Jokes

a) A conference is a public place. Taking photos there is no crime and reporting what you could hear by natural hearing neither.

b) If you have twitter followers for some reason, what you write will be observed

c) If you are somewhere representing a company on social media, and you use this channel for other things, no matter if you did it for the best and the worst, and these other things start to interfere with your capability to efficiently represent the company in a solely positive way, you will be fired. And rightly so. A company does not judge if you are right or wrong in doing something. They see somebody who can create a positive image for them. If you have such a job, then you have to know that creating unwanted attention which prevents you from doing the job gets you fired. Sorry thatâ(TM)s life. If you have a Job behind a desk, programming, you can do whatever you want on twitter.
 

Comment: I am not fond of DRM (Score 1) 351

by drolli (#43232439) Attached to: Defend the Open Web: Keep DRM Out of W3C Standards

and that is exactly the reason why i believe it must be standardized. When i get a program or a file i want to answer the question "does it use DRM" easily.

I had recently a very bad experience with an deployment tool, which did not mention DRM at all but actually used DRM methods to protect code from being changed without telling so. I got a little suspicious and after drilling the support for 1h they admitted that the real purpose of the "encryption" was not to "protect the code on the way to the customer" (as the advertisements loosely suggested), but to prevent modification without their deployment tool, in order to protect their freely distributed (powerful) runtime from being used by people not in possession of the deployment tool. Was not so funny since we needed to exclude this part from the builds in order to fulfill GPLv3 requirements.

So: yes, ok, if you like to DRM, please use it. But at least give me the option to systematically see/avoid these parts. Dont fuck me with "you have to buy device x because its technologically so brilliant" if you really mean "to push our own media store, we used a lot of engineering to hide the keys for decryption deep in the device". I would like to see a warning label on things which use DRM which say "this content can not be used anywhere. You dont posess it.".

A small side remark: Are HTML5 files with DRM as documentation GPL3 compliant? I think not....

Comment: It sucks. (Score 2) 39

by drolli (#43227209) Attached to: Open-Xchange Launches "Open Source" Browser-Based Office Suite

Online text editors all suck. Forgive me the formulation. I can not say it in another way. They have capabilies somwhere between word 5.0 running from 3.5 inch floppy disk on ms-dos and ami pro running on win3.1 a 4MB 386sx 22years ago, I have actually not seen a single one which would outdo ami pro from back then, on a machine with 1/1000 of the ram and 1/1000 of the computational power.

My top ten of fuckups in the online text editos (actually some also many android office suites:

1) Formulas
2) Focus on decent style sheet support
3) Decent floatign objects
4) Decent Table of content etc. support
5) Serial letter functions?
6) Integrated thesaurus (yes, word 5.0 for dos had that)
7) Decent working in non-WYSIWIG modes
8) Equivalent of draft mode/outline mode ....

Comment: Re:The worst thing (Score 1) 284

by drolli (#43222311) Attached to: Schneier: Security Awareness Training 'a Waste of Time'

the dialog is pointless becaus nobody does it right. The people would pretty quickly learn that it does not kill 1000 kittens in average.

Correct would be to write: in one of hundred times, clicking on this will cause a malware infection. If it does, it department will send 1000 killed kittens via in-house mail to your table. That's 10 kittens in average per click. Good luck.

I am sure after one or two times burying the desktop of some office assistant under dead kittens and posting it on the companies homepage you may have your employees attention.

Comment: The worst thing (Score 4, Insightful) 284

by drolli (#43221955) Attached to: Schneier: Security Awareness Training 'a Waste of Time'

is that many companies are too lazy to even get the most fundamental things right. Why on earth would you not distribute your own CA fro your internal web services? Do you really want to train yout employees that clicking on the "accept certificate" button is an everyday thing to do? Why dont you manage to get the security settings in a way that "content from an unknown source" is not "content from you own file server"? how the hell shoud the office assistant know that this is dangerous and theoretically unusual if in everyday work the instruciton says to accepti it several times per day? why yould you enable macros in office documents for no reason and not sign the document?

All security training, hints like "be careful when opening attachements from unknown sources" are anihilated if you train your employees everyday to do the exact opposite thing, namely constructing worflows and selecting toolsets which are requiring exactly that.

My 2 cents on this

a) If there is a "do not use/do x" in your security education, then something is wrong. The right way is "use/do y"

b) Construct your standard processes in a way that your users/employees can work secure *AND* efficient.

c) If there are new tools and your users demand these, keep an open ear! Note to the management: reserve some bugdet for it. If users find dropbox an efficient service, the right way is not to forbid it but to ask yourself why you cant provide any decent file sharing on your own servers.

Comment: Re:You're a contractor. Your "secrets" are yours (Score 1) 292

by drolli (#43218453) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How To (or How NOT To) Train Your Job Replacement?

My thoughts: Besides i dont know if the contrector also does education: Do they know in how many billable hours teaching "all secrects of your code" may result? If yes: CYA, get it in writing that you are paid for "teaching all secrets of the code" instead of "automating and stnadardizing your build/packaging/deployment processes". After the new guy tries to graps "all secrets of your code" and fails to get the first proper build, bill them for the rest.

Comment: Google wave (Score 1) 383

by drolli (#43206225) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Which Google Project Didn't Deserve To Die?

I am not sure why goolge wave was killed. My suspicion is that they did not find an unintrusive way of placing advertisements.

IMHO google wave was what i expect of collaboration. Many emlais, revisions sendind forward and backwards document formats designed to fit on a 3.5 inch floppy disk could be avoided.....

Comment: Depends what you want to do (Score 1) 218

by drolli (#43196645) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best 3-D Design Software?

Each of the tools you mentioned has a scope of applications in mind, some very specific and specialized.

If you really mention Autocad and Blender or sketchup in one sentence, then think first about

-what you want to create (technical CAD database for drawings/CAE/CAM, nice graphics, prototypically designed enclosures for things)
-in which process step you are (manufaturing/different design phases)
-in which business you are working (and to whom you have to send your files)
-how much money you want to invest (nothing = just playign around; moderate = below 500 Euro; professional = how much it takes)

That said, in the moderate semi-prefessional regime i had good experiences with varicad.

Comment: A surveillance state chosen by yourself (Score 1) 333

by drolli (#43196391) Attached to: Schneier: The Internet Is a Surveillance State

Yes, i use google. Yes, i use andorid. Yes, i shop at amazon.

However i use VPNs, the private mode of my browser, and local storage for many things. I strictly separate between social networks with real name (google plus, xing) which i use for business communication and keeping contact with real friends and social networks for telling my opinion freely (even if i have only a single identity there). I never mention my real identity on the latter ones and i never mention my alias (drolli) on the first ones. I regularly verify that searching with trivial methods will not link my identities, and i have no indication that google managed to do so. I can extrapolate whenever they get a new information about me when the contacts they suggest me on google plus get more targeted.

I use google maps, but turn it off when i consider it important.

So: You have control over what you put into the internet. But if you consider a the "one size fits all" approach that everything about you is stored at facebook and you don't distinct in you life whom you want to tell what, good luck. "Oh its so convenient" is not a good staring point for all of this, i fear.

Comment: increased number of active gadgets (Score 4, Informative) 278

by drolli (#43189717) Attached to: Where Have All the Gadgets Gone?

a) I still own all electronic devices which i owned in 2005, so the absolute number has increased

b) I did not have three dozens of Gadgets in 2005

c) Not even the number of "active" gadgets has decreased. active back then:
* camera (compact)
* mobile phone (Nokia 6310i)
* palm (z31) (replaced also a stolen mp3 player)

Now:
*camera (compact)
*mobile phone #1 (galaxy note II) - playing/reading documents/consuming media/surfing the web/feeds/google+
*mobile phone #2 (nokia e63) - workhorse for phone calls and emails
*ebook reader (sony) - use it when in eant a quite time in a bright place on a bench to read a good book (leave the other devices at home)
*mp3 player (Used for sports/biking - before owning the galaxy note used also everyday)
*tablet (galazy tab - surfing on th couch)

I like that the gadgets got more diversified. Its just convenient.

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