Re: [tlug] Google Apps for Work

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Curt Sampson writes:

 > > I know that they charge for companies, but I don't think it is very
 > > much, and I still think all your data is belong to them.
 > 
 > No. Now I don't now how far this goes if you don't actually try to take
 > advantage of what they offer in this area, but Google's done the work to
 > allow companies to conform to things like HIPPA and the European privacy
 > laws while using Google Apps for Work.

That's good to know!

 > [1]: Oh, God, did I really just start using acronyms like "SME"?
 > Shoot me now!

Sploosh!  (Consider yourself supersoaked.)

 > On 2016-05-10 17:42 +0900 (Tue), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

 > >  > That you don't make copies to give to people is a huge, huge
 > >  > feature, though it seems that most people don't understand that.
 > > 
 > > Do "most people" need to understand that? I mean, if you don't trim
 > > your email...
 > 
 > Yes, actually I think that they do. I think it's kind of like the
 > programming problem of aliasing in reverse.

Interesting analogy.

 > Stuff breaks because people are working from wrong information.

Agreed, but you trimmed too much.  My real point is that it seems like
much of the time none of the information actually matters to any of
the participants, except whatever they're currently writing.

As I said to one of my colleagues yesterday, "the folks upstairs get
positive evaluations for making work, not for helping us get it
done".  One suspects that a lot of paperwork drones would be put out
of work if only the documents actually needed were created!

 > Note that this is different from not trimming your e-mail
 > responses.

True, but my point is that people who don't trim typically don't write
much, if anything, worth reading in my experience.  Caveat:

 > (For which, by the way, Google is hugely to blame:

As well as most mail apps for handheld devices, which is already close
to killing trimming on most of the lists I read.

 > > one of the motivations for IMAP was allowing multiple users to
 > > share one copy of a message and its attachments on the server
 > 
 > Interesting. But did he intend that if someone, e.g., deleted an
 > attachment it should be deleted for all the other users, too? That
 > sounds...sub-optimal.

We didn't talk about that.  It was a coffee break thing, I asked about
storage efficiency of IMAP servers.  I think his model was basically
write-once, read-many.  You might have needed wheel privilege to
delete an attachment from a "public" message, or the message itself.

 > > On the other, in my experience, it's still painful, because I'm
 > > always tripping over colleagues' poor taste in organization -- if
 > > you try to fix it, they get [mad] because they can't find "their
 > > stuff".
 > 
 > Well, in some ways I could consider that beneficial: it exposes
 > friction in working methods that should probably be smoothed out.

Maybe.  I've found that the kind of thing I'm thinking about needs to
be talked about, but it only needs to be done immediately before
presentation to third parties.  When the committee goes into
presentation preparation mode, it's usually easy to get my way.  I
just find it easier to work on content with a different organization
than some of the people I work with, and VCS branching allows doing
reconciliation at an appropriate point in time (at some expense of
extra effort in merging others' work into my branch).

 > But I'm totally anal-retentive, so probably not a good exemplar.

Is that what your mother means by telling you you're special? :-)

 > I've spent enough time over the past dozen years battling with other
 > programmers who are apparently desperate to keep things like Subversion
 > and Git out of the hands of "business people"

Wow.  I guess I'm fortunate that I've never tried to develop software
in a "we all work within a 20m radius of the boss" context.  I don't
know anyone who wouldn't benefit from using VCS if they were willing
to learn it.