And re-reading TFA, there's no mention that they're planning to do anything about it. And since they won't tell us what program it is, WP7 owners are fairly SOL at this point.
Actually, the problem is that they're over-trained. CSRs are expected to follow that script to the letter. And while some of them are secretaries who got the crash-course in IT, there's a lot of smart people who get in trouble if they jump over questions. And those questions are sorted from "cheapest to most expensive", not "most to least likely".
Had a few friends in Dell tech support for a while - one was fired for being too helpful (as in, kept fixing the problem the first time using a more expensive part instead of making the customer jump through hoops).
When people talk about 'second amendment solutions' or the 'ammo box',
.. Once, *just once*, I'd like to see a reporter turn to that person and ask "So, what are you advocating, specifically?"
I'd even settle for it happening on a televised debate - but just once, I want to see the Tea Party called out and asked *exactly* what they mean by "second amendment solution". Make them confirm or deny that they're advocating the overthrow of the government by force.
Heck, do you need to invent new ways to harvest data, when after your 4-6 weeks you get unfettered access to the entire database? Seems like a security/privacy nightmare (for us, anyway - FB doesn't seem to care.)
And as someone who used to bring his home laptop to work (it was either that or be without a computer for half the day - a whole other WTF story), my Rule 1 was: my computer, my software. You want anti-virus on there? OK, that's reasonable - but I control the settings.
When we got proper IT staff, the first thing they did was get me a work laptop (for the obvious reasons you mention above). And I was OK with that. But I definitely burned out my machine faster than it normally would have (considering it was on and running 16 hours a day for two and a half years, not surprising).
I think the "bring your own stuff to work" idea is a non-starter. Peripherals on your computer (mice, etc)? Sure. Smartphones? Maaybe. But actual laptop/desktops? I doubt it.
Might just be my personal experience, then - other than being a bit of a memory hog, I've never had any real issues with iTunes. Most annoying thing it's done was require a wipe/reset when I changed my computer (rather than just a compare/contrast).
Its possible that he's working for the US government to get Assange to the US where he (Assange) can be promptly arrested and per^H^H^Hprosecuted for some crime that hasn't been committed.
Not going to judge, but if this guy is the best the government can come up with, y'all are in a lot more trouble than I thought - I'm going to bet that the judge dismisses the whole thing at the first hearing (for lack of jurisdiction, if nothing else). Pretty positive that WikiLeaks will politely ignore the whole thing.
(Although come to think of it, the best "Republican female" apparently is Sarah Palin, so you never know...)
(Seriously - Sarah Palin is the best the Republicans can come up with as an answer to Clinton? Does this not scare people?)
Steve Jobs has no place in his company for allowing any external influence one upon anything related to design and user experience. Not even the user. This means he will control everything. Where you stand on the spectrum of freedom vs walled garden will determine whether you go all-in on Apple products or not.
Well, I'll tell you why I'm using Apple products - they worked with the least amount of futzing. My wife went through a few mp3 players, and just the basic matter of moving songs to/from the device ranged from annoying to hellish - it was sad when it was easier to copy/paste the files directly to the drive than to navigate the half-baked interface that Sony was pushing a few years back.
I plug in my iPod, it works. Yeah, iTunes isn't the sleekish program around - but it works. It keeps my files where they're supposed to be, and it keeps my devices updated the way I want them to be without manually screwing around for an hour.
Yeah, Steve gets weird about some things, but you can't deny that the polish and ease-of-use comes as a result.
Wikipedia does not hold control of every detail this tightly. They encourage outsiders to influence everything about the site and it's content. Same thing with Android. You can do anything you want to your device with no fear of reprisal from Google. Not so with Apple. Make Jobs mad and you'll wake up to your new iBrick.
I'm not sure if wikipedia is as open as advertised (at least, I hear a heckuva lot more horror stories than happy ones - my favorite being the guy who can't fix a simple factual error on his own bio page because he's "not an objective source". He then has to give an interview with a local paper (about the fact he can't change it), and then can make the change, referring to the interview he himself gave.) But to be honest, I don't have time to deal with the politics over there, so I decline to care.
Android stuff looks cool, but I honestly don't have the time these days to tweak my gizmos anymore (kids, wife, etc.). I haven't even needed to jailbreak the 'pod yet, because... I haven't run into something I needed to do and couldn't yet. (If I do, I'll happily break it.) I haven't seen any Jobs-brigades breaking down doors yet, so I don't think Steve cares as much as you think he does if you jailbreak.
I’m personally not a fan of the whole “app” thing. Feels like we are going backwards.
And I was thinking we were finally moving forwards. One of the best features of Ubuntu in my mind is the repository system (which I would consider the prototypical "app store"). I need an application? Click the easy button on my desktop, get a nice sortable list of programs, click one, and it nicely installs. Unclick the box, it uninstalls.
The one thing that iPod/Pad/Phone/Widgets are missing is the built-in ability to install outside the store - but jailbreaking has become so terribly trivial that it's hardly an obstacle anymore (i.e. if you really need to get an off-brand app onto your device, you're already savvy enough to know how.)
We already do that. We segregate our homes by income, and run the "poor kids schools" like a wannabe jail, complete with guards, searches, lockdowns, locked doors, yard/exercise time, tight schedules, solitary confinement, guard patrols, sometimes uniforms, ID numbers instead of names... All they need is some bars on the windows.
Your schools don't have bars on the windows? Ours have for years.
Of course, it was to protect the *windows* from errant balls...
I'm torn, to be honest. On one hand, I know that there is nothing more powerful than the sex drive and suppressing it hardly, if ever, works.
According to any red state that promotes abstinence-only education, sure it works. Just tell the felons that it's Very Naughty and God Won't Love Them, and ta-da! Problem solved.
I agree, but this "solution" is just a bit over the top. I didn't RTFA, but is there some kind of time limit to this (red zone for 5 mins = police)? Can it detect intentions (did the pedo try to travel near that playground or did it just happen to be along a route he was taking)?
And more importantly, do they stop and see what's going on before they go nuts? (Yes, he's crossing a playground. It's also 1am, for instance).
The idea of "we're going to be alerted if you go certain places" isn't *necessarily* a bad idea, but I can easily see this becoming a "my bus got two feet too close to the school and now I'm arrested" thing.
General Rule of thumb if you are older (Age/2)+7 is the minimum age you should date for the US Culture.
Pretty sure xkcd doesn't (yet) qualify as a "general rule of thumb"
As a rule of thumb, it doesn't work too badly though: no-one can date until 13 (because the min-age you can date isn't allowed to date *you*). Has the usual boundary problems around 18/21, though (where we get all our sex offenders from)
And we make it suitably difficult for someone to get that designation, as well. (Which leads to somewhat predictable whinging by the families involved whenever someone doesn't get that designation, but we seem to do a good job ignoring them).
Recharging at night would be fine, but you would be needing to get sixteen hours of work out of six or eight hours of charge - I'd hate to have to tell my boss "sorry, can't work - my glasses are dead".
Well, put a zoom on this, maybe a camera, and I'd be a happy camper.
My biggest pet peeve about wearing glasses is that they'll only correct you to 20/20 (in the hopes that your eyes will fix themselves over time). I've been wearing glasses for almost thirty years now. It's a safe bet that I'll always need them, so why not start giving me 20/15 lenses at least?
I've seen lately that the "trend" is indeed to make employees use their own phone. This seems to be happening (slowly) in many sectors. I attend some regular conferences with 30 - 50 large companies and more and more of them are cancelling phone plans and having employees provide their own phones. It certainly isn't ALL companies by any stretch, but it has grown from where it was a few years ago.
And that's where I'd have a problem with it - if my position isn't important enough to warrant a cell phone, then it's not important enough that you need me to be available 24/7.
You're right - a lot of companies are taking HR's "contact info" and using it for on call purposes.
Besides, $20M sounds like a lot, but Brown's going to need a lot of those to balance the budget. Might be time to cut back rep salaries.
The trick is to make sure that you're asking for the right thing - if you want $CRAZY_PUNITIVE_DAMAGES, you get vouchers and crap. What you push for is actionable items - forcing re-enabling of OtherOS, for instance.
(Answer to your sig: Because the US has never, and will never submit to international authority, because they feel They're Just Too Awesome.)
No no, the implication is that if I send my friends 1000 copywritten mp3s...
I'm sending 1000 instances of a "Number" (composed of 1s and 0s.)
Now if numbers can't be patented/copywritten... then there's no copyright WHATSOEVER - what I'm doing is legal.
Now I know that this sort of thing would make the world better - but that disputes the legality of that sentence.
Which is the problem with digital media - I can take my mp3 and interpret those 1s and 0s differently, turning it into ASCII or UUENCODE or whatever. Is it still the song? And if it is, then does that mean there's some guy out there with a Word document that happens to infringe on Michael's latest song?
My mother signed a do-not-compete clause and then left for a competing business. The first business sued her assuming they were clearly in the right and wanted to prevent other people from leaving for competing companies. The judge ruled that the do-not-compete clause was not fair and struck it down, paving the way for others to leave. The company paid for an expensive lawsuit that hurt them.
I don't know how much of a parallel you can draw there, though. My understanding (from what I've gleaned from my multi-national corporation) is that it's very hard to actually enforce a do-not-compete. Unless you can show a direct line from "guy leaving to competition" and "guy's customers moving to competition" (in the "stealing secrets" sense), judges tend to prefer not to tell people they can't earn a living.
The potential bug is that it is resending the same information over and over, hence the large amount.
This doesn't negate the fact that it likely is profit motive driven, and nefarious.
The other thing I could see is that it's sending raw usage data (under the thought that it's better to do the number crunching at the destination rather than slowing the device down).
Either way, it's Microsoft - I'm willing to bet it's gross stupidity at this point (at least until we see what's in the packets for sure).
I'm far more interested in what those 3-5 MB/hr contain - that's a lot of data, far more than you need for research data. Hopefully someone gets into the guts of this thing and figures out exactly what your phone is telling it's Corporate Overlords about you.
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And re-reading TFA, there's no mention that they're planning to do anything about it. And since they won't tell us what program it is, WP7 owners are fairly SOL at this point.
Actually, the problem is that they're over-trained. CSRs are expected to follow that script to the letter. And while some of them are secretaries who got the crash-course in IT, there's a lot of smart people who get in trouble if they jump over questions. And those questions are sorted from "cheapest to most expensive", not "most to least likely".
Had a few friends in Dell tech support for a while - one was fired for being too helpful (as in, kept fixing the problem the first time using a more expensive part instead of making the customer jump through hoops).
When people talk about 'second amendment solutions' or the 'ammo box',
.. Once, *just once*, I'd like to see a reporter turn to that person and ask "So, what are you advocating, specifically?"
I'd even settle for it happening on a televised debate - but just once, I want to see the Tea Party called out and asked *exactly* what they mean by "second amendment solution". Make them confirm or deny that they're advocating the overthrow of the government by force.
Heck, do you need to invent new ways to harvest data, when after your 4-6 weeks you get unfettered access to the entire database? Seems like a security/privacy nightmare (for us, anyway - FB doesn't seem to care.)
... why Facebook was suddenly after my phone number for "security purposes".
And as someone who used to bring his home laptop to work (it was either that or be without a computer for half the day - a whole other WTF story), my Rule 1 was: my computer, my software. You want anti-virus on there? OK, that's reasonable - but I control the settings.
When we got proper IT staff, the first thing they did was get me a work laptop (for the obvious reasons you mention above). And I was OK with that. But I definitely burned out my machine faster than it normally would have (considering it was on and running 16 hours a day for two and a half years, not surprising).
I think the "bring your own stuff to work" idea is a non-starter. Peripherals on your computer (mice, etc)? Sure. Smartphones? Maaybe. But actual laptop/desktops? I doubt it.
"adding that the specifics of the relationship will remain in the employees file"
Hopefully they just mean "started relationship on date X, ended on date Y" and not something like:
If I was one of those employees, I would be sorely tempted to start all those reports with "I never thought I'd be writing in..."
Might just be my personal experience, then - other than being a bit of a memory hog, I've never had any real issues with iTunes. Most annoying thing it's done was require a wipe/reset when I changed my computer (rather than just a compare/contrast).
That actually makes my point - I don't *need* to know the details: it's there, and It Just Works.
Ah, I see it's now called the "Ubuntu Software Centre" - that's the term I should have used.
Its possible that he's working for the US government to get Assange to the US where he (Assange) can be promptly arrested and per^H^H^Hprosecuted for some crime that hasn't been committed.
Not going to judge, but if this guy is the best the government can come up with, y'all are in a lot more trouble than I thought - I'm going to bet that the judge dismisses the whole thing at the first hearing (for lack of jurisdiction, if nothing else). Pretty positive that WikiLeaks will politely ignore the whole thing.
(Although come to think of it, the best "Republican female" apparently is Sarah Palin, so you never know...)
(Seriously - Sarah Palin is the best the Republicans can come up with as an answer to Clinton? Does this not scare people?)
Steve Jobs has no place in his company for allowing any external influence one upon anything related to design and user experience. Not even the user. This means he will control everything. Where you stand on the spectrum of freedom vs walled garden will determine whether you go all-in on Apple products or not.
Well, I'll tell you why I'm using Apple products - they worked with the least amount of futzing. My wife went through a few mp3 players, and just the basic matter of moving songs to/from the device ranged from annoying to hellish - it was sad when it was easier to copy/paste the files directly to the drive than to navigate the half-baked interface that Sony was pushing a few years back.
I plug in my iPod, it works. Yeah, iTunes isn't the sleekish program around - but it works. It keeps my files where they're supposed to be, and it keeps my devices updated the way I want them to be without manually screwing around for an hour.
Yeah, Steve gets weird about some things, but you can't deny that the polish and ease-of-use comes as a result.
Wikipedia does not hold control of every detail this tightly. They encourage outsiders to influence everything about the site and it's content. Same thing with Android. You can do anything you want to your device with no fear of reprisal from Google. Not so with Apple. Make Jobs mad and you'll wake up to your new iBrick.
I'm not sure if wikipedia is as open as advertised (at least, I hear a heckuva lot more horror stories than happy ones - my favorite being the guy who can't fix a simple factual error on his own bio page because he's "not an objective source". He then has to give an interview with a local paper (about the fact he can't change it), and then can make the change, referring to the interview he himself gave.) But to be honest, I don't have time to deal with the politics over there, so I decline to care.
Android stuff looks cool, but I honestly don't have the time these days to tweak my gizmos anymore (kids, wife, etc.). I haven't even needed to jailbreak the 'pod yet, because... I haven't run into something I needed to do and couldn't yet. (If I do, I'll happily break it.) I haven't seen any Jobs-brigades breaking down doors yet, so I don't think Steve cares as much as you think he does if you jailbreak.
I’m personally not a fan of the whole “app” thing. Feels like we are going backwards.
And I was thinking we were finally moving forwards. One of the best features of Ubuntu in my mind is the repository system (which I would consider the prototypical "app store"). I need an application? Click the easy button on my desktop, get a nice sortable list of programs, click one, and it nicely installs. Unclick the box, it uninstalls.
The one thing that iPod/Pad/Phone/Widgets are missing is the built-in ability to install outside the store - but jailbreaking has become so terribly trivial that it's hardly an obstacle anymore (i.e. if you really need to get an off-brand app onto your device, you're already savvy enough to know how.)
We already do that. We segregate our homes by income, and run the "poor kids schools" like a wannabe jail, complete with guards, searches, lockdowns, locked doors, yard/exercise time, tight schedules, solitary confinement, guard patrols, sometimes uniforms, ID numbers instead of names ... All they need is some bars on the windows.
Your schools don't have bars on the windows? Ours have for years.
Of course, it was to protect the *windows* from errant balls...
I'm torn, to be honest. On one hand, I know that there is nothing more powerful than the sex drive and suppressing it hardly, if ever, works.
According to any red state that promotes abstinence-only education, sure it works. Just tell the felons that it's Very Naughty and God Won't Love Them, and ta-da! Problem solved.
(/sarcasm)
I agree, but this "solution" is just a bit over the top. I didn't RTFA, but is there some kind of time limit to this (red zone for 5 mins = police)? Can it detect intentions (did the pedo try to travel near that playground or did it just happen to be along a route he was taking)?
And more importantly, do they stop and see what's going on before they go nuts? (Yes, he's crossing a playground. It's also 1am, for instance).
The idea of "we're going to be alerted if you go certain places" isn't *necessarily* a bad idea, but I can easily see this becoming a "my bus got two feet too close to the school and now I'm arrested" thing.
General Rule of thumb if you are older (Age/2)+7 is the minimum age you should date for the US Culture.
Pretty sure xkcd doesn't (yet) qualify as a "general rule of thumb"
As a rule of thumb, it doesn't work too badly though: no-one can date until 13 (because the min-age you can date isn't allowed to date *you*). Has the usual boundary problems around 18/21, though (where we get all our sex offenders from)
In Canada we do keep dangerous offenders in prison.
And we make it suitably difficult for someone to get that designation, as well. (Which leads to somewhat predictable whinging by the families involved whenever someone doesn't get that designation, but we seem to do a good job ignoring them).
Recharging at night would be fine, but you would be needing to get sixteen hours of work out of six or eight hours of charge - I'd hate to have to tell my boss "sorry, can't work - my glasses are dead".
Well, put a zoom on this, maybe a camera, and I'd be a happy camper.
My biggest pet peeve about wearing glasses is that they'll only correct you to 20/20 (in the hopes that your eyes will fix themselves over time). I've been wearing glasses for almost thirty years now. It's a safe bet that I'll always need them, so why not start giving me 20/15 lenses at least?
I've seen lately that the "trend" is indeed to make employees use their own phone. This seems to be happening (slowly) in many sectors. I attend some regular conferences with 30 - 50 large companies and more and more of them are cancelling phone plans and having employees provide their own phones. It certainly isn't ALL companies by any stretch, but it has grown from where it was a few years ago.
And that's where I'd have a problem with it - if my position isn't important enough to warrant a cell phone, then it's not important enough that you need me to be available 24/7.
You're right - a lot of companies are taking HR's "contact info" and using it for on call purposes.
Besides, $20M sounds like a lot, but Brown's going to need a lot of those to balance the budget. Might be time to cut back rep salaries.
The trick is to make sure that you're asking for the right thing - if you want $CRAZY_PUNITIVE_DAMAGES, you get vouchers and crap. What you push for is actionable items - forcing re-enabling of OtherOS, for instance.
(Answer to your sig: Because the US has never, and will never submit to international authority, because they feel They're Just Too Awesome.)
No no, the implication is that if I send my friends 1000 copywritten mp3s...
I'm sending 1000 instances of a "Number" (composed of 1s and 0s.)
Now if numbers can't be patented/copywritten... then there's no copyright WHATSOEVER - what I'm doing is legal.
Now I know that this sort of thing would make the world better - but that disputes the legality of that sentence.
Which is the problem with digital media - I can take my mp3 and interpret those 1s and 0s differently, turning it into ASCII or UUENCODE or whatever. Is it still the song? And if it is, then does that mean there's some guy out there with a Word document that happens to infringe on Michael's latest song?
My mother signed a do-not-compete clause and then left for a competing business. The first business sued her assuming they were clearly in the right and wanted to prevent other people from leaving for competing companies. The judge ruled that the do-not-compete clause was not fair and struck it down, paving the way for others to leave. The company paid for an expensive lawsuit that hurt them.
I don't know how much of a parallel you can draw there, though. My understanding (from what I've gleaned from my multi-national corporation) is that it's very hard to actually enforce a do-not-compete. Unless you can show a direct line from "guy leaving to competition" and "guy's customers moving to competition" (in the "stealing secrets" sense), judges tend to prefer not to tell people they can't earn a living.
The potential bug is that it is resending the same information over and over, hence the large amount.
This doesn't negate the fact that it likely is profit motive driven, and nefarious.
The other thing I could see is that it's sending raw usage data (under the thought that it's better to do the number crunching at the destination rather than slowing the device down).
Either way, it's Microsoft - I'm willing to bet it's gross stupidity at this point (at least until we see what's in the packets for sure).
I'm far more interested in what those 3-5 MB/hr contain - that's a lot of data, far more than you need for research data. Hopefully someone gets into the guts of this thing and figures out exactly what your phone is telling it's Corporate Overlords about you.