It's about time judges start to see these campaigns as the mass extortion cases that they are. If this was being done by anyone else there would have been RICO charges filed long ago. These cases have nothing to do with preserving copyright and everything to do with extorting the public. A $7500 settlement instead of a $150,000 for a $10 movie, how on earth can this possibly be anything other than sheer extortion?
The single biggest question is whether or not they will address feedback from the masses on two things that they have been repeatedly told were very bad ideas?
Restore the start menu (not just bounce you back to TIFNAM) Boot directly to the desktop
If they don't address these two issues with an option to allow both the enterprise is going to continue their mass boycott of Windows 8 for years to come. Microsoft has been particularly stubborn on these points, even though they are dragging the PC industry down with them by being pig headed about things. Microsoft, can your arrogance be overcome?
If you can't explain it with a straight face to a judge it shouldn't go in writing. This is a simple rule of conducting business that applies to many, many things. Perhaps Prenda never heard of this basic rule of courtroom survival?
This removes the phone from being buried in the cost of the contract and brings us in line with the rest of the world for cell phone standards. Now if only we can get unlocked cell phones and the ability to simply have our service tied to our SIM card instead of our phone and we'd be golden. This country desperately needs competition and this is a great first step in that direction and a very consumer friendly move.
I'm out of mod points or I'd would be adding another +1 insightful to your comment. Branches of the government should not be used as weapons of political parties.
This isn't the first or last time the Federal Government has used international treaties as an end run around constitutional rights. They attempted the same thing with several intellectual property rights treaties. People have to be vigilant or their rights will taken away as we all stand by complaining that we don't like the people that are being targeted and therefore it's okay never realizing that were establishing legal precedent to be used against ourselves.
All I know is if they have zombie humans, cats, wolves and other such critters than they must inevitably also have zombie planets. Now one would assume that zombie planets munch on the brains of other planets, but the unfortunate thing is that this isn't covered in any of the zombie survival guides! Locking yourself in a nice zombie proof chamber isn't going to do any good when the planet next door comes gobbling away you know.
Let's face it, your going to need a really, really big gun and how can you possibly put a planet killing gun in your back yard without having to explain things to the neighbors and or the United Nations? So many questions, so many scenarios and so few bad movies that have been made by Hollywood. Someone should get cracking on this.
I used to work for one of these consulting companies for a few years that performed migrations as part of its practice. The only person your getting from them for less than $10,000 grand a week is either an outsourced operator or a floor technician.
You sure as hell aren't going to get a consultant for less money than that. Even in the worst of the economic downturn the consulting agencies charged that because there are only a few that are qualified to do this level of work.
There is no chance on earth that a fortune 500 is going to put their migration in the hands of a fly by night operation. Bob from the corner shop might charge less to migrate Suzanne sewing shop, but than he isn't working anywhere beyond a 10 mile radius.
Your more right than you, that or you work in security for a living. You can get a degree in the process you just described with said risk analysis. You can even get specialized certifications that require years of working in risk management before your allowed to qualify for the exam. It's a black art that you just described with a touch of voodoo, a shake of science and hedge of experience against the battle of the budget and wildcard called the professional hacker. Standards like HIPAA, PCI, FERPA, SOX and the like all help because they give the IT department the bludgeon needed to say, yes I actually do need the resources do things this way, dammit. Without these standards (all ITIL variants) you would be in a world where it was hackers versus corporate accountants./rant off.
IT departments are often forced into using things that they don't want to use. Do not confuse explaining why something is done with defending the thing. Where I have had the ability I have actually implemented Firefox or Chrome and actively discourages the use of Internet Explorer.
The problem with running in the XP mode as you suggested is that you still have the additional complexity of testing for the mode for both Windows 7 and XP. It will work as an interim bridge, but it isn't something you want to live with for any length of time if you can help it. I have very rarely ever seen any place be willing to adopt this, even though in theory you would think it should be more common. At any rate it is all a moot point as XP (and XP mode) support are going away in less than a year and this is what is finally forcing companies to spend the millions of dollars to perform the upgrades.
I was answering the question of why things were done, I was not defending the use of IE 6. I have more than once been the one advocating for IE's removal and replacement with Firefox.
In order to upgrade the systems they also have to upgrade the back end applications that were hard coded to require IE6. These applications were often merely the front ends to legacy financial, database, purchasing, ERP and so on. You have to upgrade all of the middleware systems as well as the back end systems fed by the middle ware systems. IE 6 often required custom hacks in order to get it to work at all, and once you got it working it was your head if you messed with it.
You also had things like right management through Internet Explorer for Windows based systems that only worked in version 6. In short you could easily spend millions of dollars upgrading back end systems in order to get them to work with something newer than Internet Explorer 6. The larger the enterprise / agency the more systems that were dependent on it that very version and the worse the problem was.
All of which discounts traditional migration costs of migrating computers, licenses, testing software, hardware, implementing a hardware independent image, creating packages, testing with new versions, testing new versions with old versions etc, etc, etc. For most IT departments a migration is the largest project that they will do every few years. The consultants that work migration and that know what their doing are few and far between. You could probably fit every single qualified consultant from every agency in the country in a single conference room with room to spare. Needless to say you can generally count on paying over $10,000 a week per consultant to get someone that knows what their doing.
Migrations are very complex work that involve a lot of details, project management, hardware expertise, vendor relationships, management consultation, software license issues, SQL database work, OS work, infrastructure work and so on. Point being it's a bit more involved than rolling out the newest version of Internet Explorer from the Microsoft update site and you sound like you desperately need a consulting company before you cost your company far more money than you would pay in their fees.
I work in IT, I am well aware of just how fallible software is and how many problems there are with firmware, hardware, malware and everything else that impacts the whole works. The last thing I want is a computer driving my car. I'll stick with computers managing my fuel, brakes, handling, engine, air, exhaust, entertainment, electronics and maintenance tracking. Let a computer fly a 747 up in the sky, full of passengers, sure, it's miles from anything with professional pilots ready to take over. Let a computer drive my car on the ground with all of the idiots driving around, hell no!
Get off your Anti-American high horse jackass. The Chinese freely hack people the world over and I never claimed that this was either exclusively an American problem or that American were the worlds only inventors.
I'm not defending the BSA or the like here so stop putting words in my mouth already. By Intellectual Property I'm talking about things like formulas, trade secrets, manufacturing processes and so on. I'm not defending Congresses BSA based math from the **aa's and never would or will.
My point was that the US has been putting it's eggs into the IP basket and then refusing to guard it. After abandoning a manufacturing economy to switch to an IP based economy our leadership is being incredibly foolish. An IP based economy is incredibly fragile and susceptible to being taken over with entirely too much ease.
How long do we uphold the polite pretense that China isn't behind the overwhelming majority of real world hacking? How long are we supposed to avoid to avoid offending them and continue to allow them to steal all of our intellectual property that we supposedly value? At least the Chinese government actually bothers to protect Chinese businesses from foreigners unlike the US government which only protects big business. Turn the other cheek, what if your out of cheeks?
You see my point then, from a sheer logistical standpoint the idea that this could be feasible is simply impractical. There is simply/too much/ in every manner for this to actually be a true story. It isn't logistically possible to capture, process, or work the data at the scale proposed.
Even capturing the data to store it would require the building of the largest storage in history and that doesn't take into account details like getting the data. You would have to build an entire separate set of infrastructure in places to handle the bandwidth alone. It simply isn't logistically possible. Once you had the data there would be no meaningful way to possibly process the data. The whole thing is scaremongering of the public without cause and nothing more.
The system needs a judge like this who can plainly see what the public at large has been complaining about for well over a decade. Astronomical awards are used as nothing more than a hammer to force people to pay thousands of dollars per infraction and avoid going to court. The entire thing is a sham on the public and the court system and never intended to represent anything resembling justice.
Unfortunately the Supreme Court refused to take up the absurd statutory award that was put forward in the Jamie Thomas case despite overturning the much (smaller proportionally speaking) Exxon Valdez award. We're going to need a series of court cases like this one to bring some sanity back in the system.
Seriously, you mean a data center like this can't handle the traffic?
The NSA data center being built in Utah is designed to handle traffic outside the United States. You would need more data centers than that to capture all traffic as claimed, a lot more.
and the 5 million people (as of 2011) with security clearances aren't enough?
Not a chance on earth considering most of those people have qualifications that have nothing to do with IT work.
and the NSA recruiting at Defcon and math colleges all around the country isn't happening?
I never doubted that, but it isn't going to be close to what would be required to monitor every citizen and all of their communications. When the East Germans were doing this kind of thing they had a significant number of their population involved in spying on their population. It's a logistical issue that you can't get around, you have to have people to process all of the data.
These guys have cash and are all of their activities are shielded under FISA and the National Security Act and State Secrets Privilege.
Legal shield doesn't change logistical practicalities from being an issue. I don't care how much cover you have, you still have to actually process everything and that takes more resources than are available.
It's happening, it is a reality, and it is more than possible. Even with an inside whistle blower, the courts will not limit the power of the government to spy on us.
I was addressing the logistical practicalities of the claims, not the constitutional issues. You'll find I'm a strong Constitutional rights advocate, however that is different from whether or not the claims are actually possible. There is a world of difference between doing a given thing to some people some of the time and doing it to all of the people all of the time.
Storage is far from solved, let's look at that with your proposed theoretical limit of 1 exabyte and see how that works out. The bottom line is can you buy something like that and use it, it's a little more complicated than buying a bunch of hard drives and sticking them in a several cases and pushing the power button. You've also got to have a lot more drive overhead available to compress all this data to begin with, so you'll need more than an exabyte of working drive space.
Let's start with a company that is well know for making storage arrays. To put this in perspective Drobo in aggregate has sold n Exabyte of storage to/all/ of it's customers. How about backing up this enormous amount of data that you propose is being captured? StorageTek announced the worlds first Exabyte capable Tape drive backup only two years ago.
Now let's look at something from are pie in the sky friends over at DARPA and see what they are doing. It seems they recently announced that they will build a 4 Exabyte system in the for military surveillance. Now let's really go out there and look at marketing for a company claiming to meet the governments theoretical future demand for a really, really large array to be used for data mining and you will find contemplating a 10 exabyte capacity of storage and inquiring what it would costmodel that could meet that demand in the future.
To put some perspective on the logistics of actually doing this look at Cleversafe, they are creating a 10 exabyte array that will be housed in 8 different data centers in 8 different states and use 4.5 million disks.
I doubt this, not because I believe the goodness of the government as such, but because of the logistical impracticalities it would entail. Think of the sheer amount of storage, electricity, infrastructure, personal, computing resources and so on that you would need in order to perform this feat. The numbers would be boggling and would account for a significant portion of the worldwide sales of all hard drives, tape back ups etc, etc.
You would then have to work with the absolute enormous amount of data in a usable manner which as anyone who has ever worked with very large data sets knows is easier said than done. When you have this much data it's a little more complicated than running a few SQL queries against a given person. The sheer volume of data would make this entirely unusable even if they could pull it altogether.
You would also need personnel from IT types to human resources and so on. This would be one of the largest projects in the country and would have a noticeable impact on unemployment. Physically, where would you put this and get the electricity to run it all? Where would you get all the people with clearances? The logistical realities make this a non-event for domestic communications, it just isn't possible. I'm not even talking about the largest wholesale violation of the Constitution in history if this were true. Sorry, but this doesn't pass the sniff test.
People think that by abolishing a government agency that they will get rid of the functionality. It's as foolish as thinking that you'll stop having to pay income tax if you get rid of the IRS. Getting rid of the agency that is doing dumb things won't change the dumb things, it will simply change who is doing them. Stop going after the people doing the dumb things and start going after the dumb things themselves...
You sound like a kid fresh out of college that just hit the real world. You don't want to come across as a whiny brat as you'll sink your own career. Instead of taking an attitude that he is doing it wrong, take the attitude of there is something to learn here. Ask him why he does certain things the way that he does, are there reasons he doesn't do things the way you learned?
It's okay to say you've got a mismatch, admit your own ignorance and ask why someone does or doesn't do something. You'll get a lot more respect than if you passively aggressively file bug reports and do things 'behind' his back. Once you ask you may discover that he has good reasons for doing some things, but gets sloppy on other things for reasons such as a perceived lack of time. Ask him how you can help or do better and remember that reality and school almost never match.
I say this as a guy who works at a very large University that has a background in the private sector. I'm surrounded by student workers / interns that think they know how something ought to be done. Listen and learn and you can keep a good head about things you might gain a mentor out of the deal. Of course he might be deadwood whose blackmailed management into his position, but chances are he earned his position by knowing to make things work - even if they aren't pretty.
Your examples are certainly good ones. My point was more about there being some people that simply won't care what it looks like and those are the ones to target with a $1500 toy.
It has any number of potential uses that could be good. Think of someone working at an airport, auction house, mechanic, technician, construction worker and so on. However it's going to have steep hurdles getting accepted at the price they are selling it and looking as it does. I can easily see this being used on trading floor at exchanges if it can be made SEC compliant.
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It's about time judges start to see these campaigns as the mass extortion cases that they are. If this was being done by anyone else there would have been RICO charges filed long ago. These cases have nothing to do with preserving copyright and everything to do with extorting the public. A $7500 settlement instead of a $150,000 for a $10 movie, how on earth can this possibly be anything other than sheer extortion?
The single biggest question is whether or not they will address feedback from the masses on two things that they have been repeatedly told were very bad ideas?
Restore the start menu (not just bounce you back to TIFNAM)
Boot directly to the desktop
If they don't address these two issues with an option to allow both the enterprise is going to continue their mass boycott of Windows 8 for years to come. Microsoft has been particularly stubborn on these points, even though they are dragging the PC industry down with them by being pig headed about things. Microsoft, can your arrogance be overcome?
If you can't explain it with a straight face to a judge it shouldn't go in writing. This is a simple rule of conducting business that applies to many, many things. Perhaps Prenda never heard of this basic rule of courtroom survival?
This removes the phone from being buried in the cost of the contract and brings us in line with the rest of the world for cell phone standards. Now if only we can get unlocked cell phones and the ability to simply have our service tied to our SIM card instead of our phone and we'd be golden. This country desperately needs competition and this is a great first step in that direction and a very consumer friendly move.
I'm out of mod points or I'd would be adding another +1 insightful to your comment. Branches of the government should not be used as weapons of political parties.
This isn't the first or last time the Federal Government has used international treaties as an end run around constitutional rights. They attempted the same thing with several intellectual property rights treaties. People have to be vigilant or their rights will taken away as we all stand by complaining that we don't like the people that are being targeted and therefore it's okay never realizing that were establishing legal precedent to be used against ourselves.
All I know is if they have zombie humans, cats, wolves and other such critters than they must inevitably also have zombie planets. Now one would assume that zombie planets munch on the brains of other planets, but the unfortunate thing is that this isn't covered in any of the zombie survival guides! Locking yourself in a nice zombie proof chamber isn't going to do any good when the planet next door comes gobbling away you know.
Let's face it, your going to need a really, really big gun and how can you possibly put a planet killing gun in your back yard without having to explain things to the neighbors and or the United Nations? So many questions, so many scenarios and so few bad movies that have been made by Hollywood. Someone should get cracking on this.
I used to work for one of these consulting companies for a few years that performed migrations as part of its practice. The only person your getting from them for less than $10,000 grand a week is either an outsourced operator or a floor technician.
You sure as hell aren't going to get a consultant for less money than that. Even in the worst of the economic downturn the consulting agencies charged that because there are only a few that are qualified to do this level of work.
There is no chance on earth that a fortune 500 is going to put their migration in the hands of a fly by night operation. Bob from the corner shop might charge less to migrate Suzanne sewing shop, but than he isn't working anywhere beyond a 10 mile radius.
Your more right than you, that or you work in security for a living. You can get a degree in the process you just described with said risk analysis. You can even get specialized certifications that require years of working in risk management before your allowed to qualify for the exam. It's a black art that you just described with a touch of voodoo, a shake of science and hedge of experience against the battle of the budget and wildcard called the professional hacker. Standards like HIPAA, PCI, FERPA, SOX and the like all help because they give the IT department the bludgeon needed to say, yes I actually do need the resources do things this way, dammit. Without these standards (all ITIL variants) you would be in a world where it was hackers versus corporate accountants. /rant off.
IT departments are often forced into using things that they don't want to use. Do not confuse explaining why something is done with defending the thing. Where I have had the ability I have actually implemented Firefox or Chrome and actively discourages the use of Internet Explorer.
The problem with running in the XP mode as you suggested is that you still have the additional complexity of testing for the mode for both Windows 7 and XP. It will work as an interim bridge, but it isn't something you want to live with for any length of time if you can help it. I have very rarely ever seen any place be willing to adopt this, even though in theory you would think it should be more common. At any rate it is all a moot point as XP (and XP mode) support are going away in less than a year and this is what is finally forcing companies to spend the millions of dollars to perform the upgrades.
I was answering the question of why things were done, I was not defending the use of IE 6. I have more than once been the one advocating for IE's removal and replacement with Firefox.
In order to upgrade the systems they also have to upgrade the back end applications that were hard coded to require IE6. These applications were often merely the front ends to legacy financial, database, purchasing, ERP and so on. You have to upgrade all of the middleware systems as well as the back end systems fed by the middle ware systems. IE 6 often required custom hacks in order to get it to work at all, and once you got it working it was your head if you messed with it.
You also had things like right management through Internet Explorer for Windows based systems that only worked in version 6. In short you could easily spend millions of dollars upgrading back end systems in order to get them to work with something newer than Internet Explorer 6. The larger the enterprise / agency the more systems that were dependent on it that very version and the worse the problem was.
All of which discounts traditional migration costs of migrating computers, licenses, testing software, hardware, implementing a hardware independent image, creating packages, testing with new versions, testing new versions with old versions etc, etc, etc. For most IT departments a migration is the largest project that they will do every few years. The consultants that work migration and that know what their doing are few and far between. You could probably fit every single qualified consultant from every agency in the country in a single conference room with room to spare. Needless to say you can generally count on paying over $10,000 a week per consultant to get someone that knows what their doing.
Migrations are very complex work that involve a lot of details, project management, hardware expertise, vendor relationships, management consultation, software license issues, SQL database work, OS work, infrastructure work and so on. Point being it's a bit more involved than rolling out the newest version of Internet Explorer from the Microsoft update site and you sound like you desperately need a consulting company before you cost your company far more money than you would pay in their fees.
I'll finish hashing this one out with you offline over Chinese.
I work in IT, I am well aware of just how fallible software is and how many problems there are with firmware, hardware, malware and everything else that impacts the whole works. The last thing I want is a computer driving my car. I'll stick with computers managing my fuel, brakes, handling, engine, air, exhaust, entertainment, electronics and maintenance tracking. Let a computer fly a 747 up in the sky, full of passengers, sure, it's miles from anything with professional pilots ready to take over. Let a computer drive my car on the ground with all of the idiots driving around, hell no!
Get off your Anti-American high horse jackass. The Chinese freely hack people the world over and I never claimed that this was either exclusively an American problem or that American were the worlds only inventors.
I'm not defending the BSA or the like here so stop putting words in my mouth already. By Intellectual Property I'm talking about things like formulas, trade secrets, manufacturing processes and so on. I'm not defending Congresses BSA based math from the **aa's and never would or will.
My point was that the US has been putting it's eggs into the IP basket and then refusing to guard it. After abandoning a manufacturing economy to switch to an IP based economy our leadership is being incredibly foolish. An IP based economy is incredibly fragile and susceptible to being taken over with entirely too much ease.
How long do we uphold the polite pretense that China isn't behind the overwhelming majority of real world hacking? How long are we supposed to avoid to avoid offending them and continue to allow them to steal all of our intellectual property that we supposedly value? At least the Chinese government actually bothers to protect Chinese businesses from foreigners unlike the US government which only protects big business. Turn the other cheek, what if your out of cheeks?
You see my point then, from a sheer logistical standpoint the idea that this could be feasible is simply impractical. There is simply /too much/ in every manner for this to actually be a true story. It isn't logistically possible to capture, process, or work the data at the scale proposed.
Even capturing the data to store it would require the building of the largest storage in history and that doesn't take into account details like getting the data. You would have to build an entire separate set of infrastructure in places to handle the bandwidth alone. It simply isn't logistically possible. Once you had the data there would be no meaningful way to possibly process the data. The whole thing is scaremongering of the public without cause and nothing more.
The system needs a judge like this who can plainly see what the public at large has been complaining about for well over a decade. Astronomical awards are used as nothing more than a hammer to force people to pay thousands of dollars per infraction and avoid going to court. The entire thing is a sham on the public and the court system and never intended to represent anything resembling justice.
Unfortunately the Supreme Court refused to take up the absurd statutory award that was put forward in the Jamie Thomas case despite overturning the much (smaller proportionally speaking) Exxon Valdez award. We're going to need a series of court cases like this one to bring some sanity back in the system.
Seriously, you mean a data center like this can't handle the traffic?
The NSA data center being built in Utah is designed to handle traffic outside the United States. You would need more data centers than that to capture all traffic as claimed, a lot more.
and the 5 million people (as of 2011) with security clearances aren't enough?
Not a chance on earth considering most of those people have qualifications that have nothing to do with IT work.
and the NSA recruiting at Defcon and math colleges all around the country isn't happening?
I never doubted that, but it isn't going to be close to what would be required to monitor every citizen and all of their communications. When the East Germans were doing this kind of thing they had a significant number of their population involved in spying on their population. It's a logistical issue that you can't get around, you have to have people to process all of the data.
These guys have cash and are all of their activities are shielded under FISA and the National Security Act and State Secrets Privilege.
Legal shield doesn't change logistical practicalities from being an issue. I don't care how much cover you have, you still have to actually process everything and that takes more resources than are available.
It's happening, it is a reality, and it is more than possible. Even with an inside whistle blower, the courts will not limit the power of the government to spy on us.
I was addressing the logistical practicalities of the claims, not the constitutional issues. You'll find I'm a strong Constitutional rights advocate, however that is different from whether or not the claims are actually possible. There is a world of difference between doing a given thing to some people some of the time and doing it to all of the people all of the time.
Storage is far from solved, let's look at that with your proposed theoretical limit of 1 exabyte and see how that works out. The bottom line is can you buy something like that and use it, it's a little more complicated than buying a bunch of hard drives and sticking them in a several cases and pushing the power button. You've also got to have a lot more drive overhead available to compress all this data to begin with, so you'll need more than an exabyte of working drive space.
Let's start with a company that is well know for making storage arrays. To put this in perspective Drobo in aggregate has sold n Exabyte of storage to /all/ of it's customers. How about backing up this enormous amount of data that you propose is being captured? StorageTek announced the worlds first Exabyte capable Tape drive backup only two years ago.
Now let's look at something from are pie in the sky friends over at DARPA and see what they are doing. It seems they recently announced that they will build a 4 Exabyte system in the for military surveillance. Now let's really go out there and look at marketing for a company claiming to meet the governments theoretical future demand for a really, really large array to be used for data mining and you will find contemplating a 10 exabyte capacity of storage and inquiring what it would costmodel that could meet that demand in the future.
To put some perspective on the logistics of actually doing this look at Cleversafe, they are creating a 10 exabyte array that will be housed in 8 different data centers in 8 different states and use 4.5 million disks.
I doubt this, not because I believe the goodness of the government as such, but because of the logistical impracticalities it would entail. Think of the sheer amount of storage, electricity, infrastructure, personal, computing resources and so on that you would need in order to perform this feat. The numbers would be boggling and would account for a significant portion of the worldwide sales of all hard drives, tape back ups etc, etc.
You would then have to work with the absolute enormous amount of data in a usable manner which as anyone who has ever worked with very large data sets knows is easier said than done. When you have this much data it's a little more complicated than running a few SQL queries against a given person. The sheer volume of data would make this entirely unusable even if they could pull it altogether.
You would also need personnel from IT types to human resources and so on. This would be one of the largest projects in the country and would have a noticeable impact on unemployment. Physically, where would you put this and get the electricity to run it all? Where would you get all the people with clearances? The logistical realities make this a non-event for domestic communications, it just isn't possible. I'm not even talking about the largest wholesale violation of the Constitution in history if this were true. Sorry, but this doesn't pass the sniff test.
People think that by abolishing a government agency that they will get rid of the functionality. It's as foolish as thinking that you'll stop having to pay income tax if you get rid of the IRS. Getting rid of the agency that is doing dumb things won't change the dumb things, it will simply change who is doing them. Stop going after the people doing the dumb things and start going after the dumb things themselves...
You sound like a kid fresh out of college that just hit the real world. You don't want to come across as a whiny brat as you'll sink your own career. Instead of taking an attitude that he is doing it wrong, take the attitude of there is something to learn here. Ask him why he does certain things the way that he does, are there reasons he doesn't do things the way you learned?
It's okay to say you've got a mismatch, admit your own ignorance and ask why someone does or doesn't do something. You'll get a lot more respect than if you passively aggressively file bug reports and do things 'behind' his back. Once you ask you may discover that he has good reasons for doing some things, but gets sloppy on other things for reasons such as a perceived lack of time. Ask him how you can help or do better and remember that reality and school almost never match.
I say this as a guy who works at a very large University that has a background in the private sector. I'm surrounded by student workers / interns that think they know how something ought to be done. Listen and learn and you can keep a good head about things you might gain a mentor out of the deal. Of course he might be deadwood whose blackmailed management into his position, but chances are he earned his position by knowing to make things work - even if they aren't pretty.
Your examples are certainly good ones. My point was more about there being some people that simply won't care what it looks like and those are the ones to target with a $1500 toy.
It has any number of potential uses that could be good. Think of someone working at an airport, auction house, mechanic, technician, construction worker and so on. However it's going to have steep hurdles getting accepted at the price they are selling it and looking as it does. I can easily see this being used on trading floor at exchanges if it can be made SEC compliant.