Reason? We just wanted to see how much we could get away with because we are slimy worms.
Could well be an attorney or Attorney General or Powerful Industry Lobby Group or very well placed janitor convinced they they would be wise to bin the idea.
Hardly. The Attorneys General and Powerful Industry Lobbies would love a ruling that lets them heroically take down the ne'er-do-wells of the Internet without all those messy judges and their "due process" nonsense screwing things up. After all, we all know cyberterrorists don't have rights, and they'd promise never to misuse the process. They even pinky-swore.
Seriously, I don't know that they were intentionally being slimy worms, or if they were just trying to do something to "help fight teh ebil wikileakers" without thinking through all the negative ramifications that would grant any old TomDickAndHarrystan the "right" to take down sites like freeTibet.org. Or maybe they didn't care because they are slimy worms. It's hard to know for sure as I'm not a Versign employee, and last time I checked I wasn't a slimy worm, either.
That's why I said, unless the team release everything, which hopefully they won't do.
It's another form of security through obscurity to believe that this team is the only one who is capable of doing DPA, or timing attacks, or RF emission sniffing. These were just the first to announce their break publicly.
I don't doubt the bad guys can do this already. I chatted with a guy whose firm was offering DPA cracking services last year. Mostly they wanted to do it so you'd know your hardware was weak and theirs was better and so you'd upgrade to their product; but still, these researchers don't have an exclusive on these kinds of attacks.
HP used to innovate. Not that their engineers are even allowed to today, but once upon a time they were creative.
If they haven't driven every competent person from their payroll already, there might still be some people who could come up with ideas that would improve their products. If not, they could try exclusively licensing some creative patents that are already out there, in hopes of building up some market differentiators. Projectors built into laptop screens. Trackpads that don't suck. Specialty embedded systems like car computers that use your home's wifi in your garage to sync your contacts and music, because $(deity) knows Microsoft's SYNC is filled with fail. Silent computing solutions. There are tons of places where HP could step up and create a market for themselves.
The thing is they're still big enough to be a leader in innovation, but I don't think HP will let itself innovate anymore. I think they've "managed risk" to the point where they instruct their employees how to wipe their asses to avoid contaminating the toilet paper dispensers. The best thing that could happen to them is a complete house cleaning, starting with the top and scouring down to every middle manager who begins a sentence with "we need to define a process to..."
This is interesting and you make a good point there. From a pure number crunching perspective, they should sell their PC division. This is just because they lack vision, innovation and general guidance. This happens all the time when you put a shitty MBA at the top of a company that only understands profits.
The problem is (was) not just Apotheker at the helm, but the steady stream of inept, incompetent barbarians that the board has brought in seemingly to burn the place to the ground, because someone had the brilliant idea to charge admission to the firefighters. Hewlett and Packard must both be spinning in their graves, writhing in agony watching their empire fall like Rome.
The best thing they could do for their shareholders would be to auction off every asset they own, divvy up the loot, and go their separate ways. At least they'd stop further damage.
You only have to profile the architecture one time, which this team has already done. Any MIFARE system can now be cracked in 7 hours. Once the POS system's card is analyzed, they'd be able to crack the keys on your particular canteen in 7 hours. And even then, multiple keys is a big problem. If your canteen is operated by some big chain, and that big chain also runs my canteen, what are the chances they have the same keys? I'd bet lots of money on it.
The core of the security problem is that because an implementation is hard and expensive, it's done infrequently. That means companies want to scale them up to drive down the unit costs of implementing them. Vendor X won't invent a new POS card for each client. Your food service company won't even deploy a separate key for each store.
Crack once, steal anywhere. It's an implementation issue. And that's why selling cards vulnerable to side channel attacks is a recipe for failure.
My current tactic is that I plan to write a macro that files any mail in my inbox older than 1 month into the relevant archive folder, i.e. 2011-Q1 - I want this done automatically, as I will almost definitely forget.
You probably won't forget. What I've noticed is that over time my inbox becomes so densely populated that performance suffers, at which time I have a "duh" moment, and clean it up manually. Since our email volumes and other habits are so similar, this probably isn't far from how you handle it, either.:-) Anyway, if it really bothers you, schedule yourself a monthly "clean up Outlook" reminder task. It takes no coding to accomplish, even if it does take some of your time.
For now, I've stopped worrying about optimizing Outlook any further. Search barely-but-adequately meets my needs, to the point where additional attention won't bring additional value. I figure I can keep going the way I have been at least until the next version of Windows and Office is installed on the corporate machinery. Maybe they'll do search better.
Anyway, for other things to try, one of my coworkers swore by using Xobni as an Outlook "search enhancer". It's an Outlook plug-in plus an NT service that indexes everything in Outlook, including all your PST files, making search instant. I tried it but didn't care much for the performance hit to my laptop. I also refuse to install Google Desktop, as Google was discovered to be harvesting personal search data back up to the mothership, including things like sooper-sekrit internal URLs.
SuperSpeed USB has been installed on 10 billion pieces of hardware
No it hasn't. USB may have been installed on 10 billion pieces of hardware, but SuperSpeed USB is nowhere near as ubiquitous yet. SuperSpeed USB may be able to compatibly downgrade to full-speed USB communication, but that doesn't mean that anything you plug a SuperSpeed device into is magically SuperSpeed.
Anyway, I like the idea of Thunderbolt, especially the thought that it could become the holy grail of single cable interconnects. But just because I like a thing and it's technically better doesn't mean the world will adopt it. Unfortunately, I've learned that politics and money will drive the decision, not technology.
I think those "fringe" groups act the way they do because the pattern of amplifying the visible contrast is proven to work. Consider that homosexuality had been repressed for a very long time, with everyone from governments and religions advocating violence against or shunning them. Closeted gays lived quiet lives, while the few peaceful pleas for acceptance got people beaten or dragged to their death behind four-wheel-drive pickup trucks. So then came the Pride Parade with the over-the-top offensive characters like Timmy the Testicle and hundreds of supporters shouting in the faces of the public "we're here, we're queer, get over it." When the parade ended, the normal people left behind were seen for what they are: just normal people.
Their intent isn't to have you accept their stupid and offensive antics. It's to show you that not everyone is that stupid and offensive. You can draw lines and say "Oh, Stallman is one of those kinds of activists. I can still hate him, but I guess the rest of these guys aren't so bad after all."
It's like Jon Stewart once noted: nobody ever got re-elected by standing on a chair in Congress and shouting "be reasonable!" Humans understand shading better when the contrast encompasses a broad spectrum.
The problem is that unless the sorting mechanism is perfect you can wind up in the situation where you never see an email and don't know that it's even arrived.
Outlook (assuming you are using outlook) has an "Unread Mail" pseudo-folder that shows every unread email in every folder, not just your inbox. I automatically filter the automated build notices, the lesser-importance statistics reports, mailing lists, etc., into their own folders so they don't show up on the mobile phone. Daily when I'm at my desk I'll scan the unread mail folder looking at the statistics and reports. Otherwise, everything just stays in the Inbox, which I archive quarterly.
If I'm reading on the phone and realize I'm going to need my desktop machine to answer the question, I'll mark the email unread, then pick it up later.
I auto-categorize email from my boss (and up the chain to the VP) with a red color. If I'm scheduled for conflicting meetings, it helps me quickly decide which one I'll be attending.
I have tried project folders a couple of times, but folders really work poorly for me. Folders make me choose at read-time the most important attribute that I will later search on, but that's never how I will refer them later. And quite often an email will bridge two folders: which to stick it in? That's unproductive.
When it comes time to look up an old email, I remember people and time frames best. I'll open the proper quarter's archive and sort by person or subject, and most often will find what I need in less than five seconds. I also generally know a keyword in the email I'm looking for, allowing effective searches of the archive, but Outlook's search is pathetically slow so it's my weapon of last resort.
I used to be all worried about filtering and deleting spam, but really it didn't prove to be worth my time; and the false positives in the automated filters caused me to miss some important messages making the effort have a net negative value. And it turned out not to matter. When I'm searching, the keywords I search on aren't in the spam messages, nor are the authors or Cc:s, so the spam doesn't actually interfere with me. When I archive, I will occasionally sort by attachment and/or size and delete spam with attachments; and once a year or so I may sort the archive by author and delete the spammy names, but that's about the maximum effort I'll waste.
I think you are overly optimistic about the ability of most governments to correct their own abuses of power. I doubt they'll fire anyone or even stop using the Trojan, they'll just have someone correct some of the deficiencies the CCC found.
At the most, they may take the Undersecretary for Purposes of Scapegoating out and publicly fire him. They might terminate the contract with the software company who developed it. But don't expect "many heads" to roll.
Really? A knockout slug jumped over an inch to stick to a desk? That's an incredibly bold claim.
I just did some quick desktop experiments with a bunch of different magnets recovered from hard drives. One was a half inch diameter neodymium disk, one was a broken half of a half-inch diameter neodymium disk, one was a 1.75 x.5 x.375 ceramic bar (it was from a very old MFM hard drive from the 1980s), and one was a one inch thick stack of neodymium magnets of varying shapes, with a half inch disk as the final magnet. The magnets were affixed to a vertical metal surface. A plastic ruler served as the test bed. A steel binder clip was used as the test subject. The arms of the clip were angled slightly down in such a way that allowed the clip to ride on the rounded edge of the spring steel portion and the back end was supported by one curve of the arms, minimizing the points of contact on the ruler and the resulting friction. The ruler was held horizontally in the air, and I slid the binder clip slowly towards each magnet's pole, measuring the distance between the clip and the magnet at the point where the binder clip was attracted to it. Here are my results.
As a double-check, I stood one of the whole neodymium disk magnets on edge, and slid it along the ruler with the flat side (pole) facing the vertical metal surface, and it jumped to the metal at a distance of 1-1/8 inch. The half-disk was able to make the jump at 1 inch. That's an actual neodymium magnet performing the same feat you claimed of a mild steel knockout slug.
So you're telling me that this office furniture, also no doubt made of mild carbon steel, had a stronger magnetic field than an actual rare earth magnet created with the express purpose of being a powerful magnet? You were literally sitting on a revolution in magnetic technology, but didn't sell the furniture to Seagate for millions of dollars?
Instead, you claim to us that this improbably super-magnetic furniture was at fault for the PCs going corrupt. That is, the PCs that you set up going corrupt. Since you described this as PCs in the mid 1990s, you're probably talking about Windows 95 or Windows 3.1 or 3.11 on DOS 6.2. You had just installed them, and they went corrupt within a few days.
Occam's razor is going to suggest that while it's possible that a stray magnetic field magnetized the mask causing the color distortion you saw on the monitors, with the field possibly even originating from magnetized furniture, it's highly likely that the software of the day was corrupt all on its own for one of many very common reasons: new hardware with new and poorly tested or not-current driver software, bad installation media, unclean installation with a virus, infant mortality of the drives, or any of a half dozen non-magnetic reasons for corruption.
There's just not enough truth in your story to believe that "unbelievably powerful magnets corrupted your computers".
Given the HP board of directors' track record in making good decisions, one could speculate that they would invest in TTL chip technology for the same reason.
Yes, hundreds of wafers ahead of schedule is good, but they haven't even sold one chip yet. It's hardly time to go all in and throw the car keys on the table, too.
I lost all respect for Sony after Sony Entertainment Group pushed the hardware teams into implementing DRM. I don't buy Sony anymore, nor do I recommend it to friends and family.
Because they are filing a lawsuit claiming that the magnetized steel beams are affecting their hard disks. "Ninjas snuck into my house and erased them" would at least be statistically possible.
The only effect a magnetized steel beam could have on a hard disk is if were used to crush it.
And this would affect their hard drives and TV how, exactly?
Seriously, if the beams were magnetic enough to cause the claimed damage to the contents of the house, they wouldn't have been able to separate them from each other in this construction pile you've theoretically stacked up. They wouldn't even have been delivered, because they wouldn't have been able to scrape them off the forklifts, or lift them from the truck beds. Other vehicles passing them on the roads would have been stuck to the sides of their trailers. Once delivered, the carpenters' hammers would have flown through the air, heads permanently affixed to the beams.
Yes, they could be magnetic enough to disrupt a compass reading. The earth's field is maybe 60 microteslas, so it's not a high bar to pass. But strong enough to erase a bit in a hard drive? The coercivity of the media is about 1700 Oe for cobalt, which takes a lot stronger field than that.
I agree, triple damages for barratry. Their lawyer is indeed typical scum, trying to screw the little guy.
So let's see, that works out to... $0.00 * 3 ==... umm... multiply the borrow... carry the zero... remainder of, uh... zero.
Magnets don't work like that, nor do steel beams. Steel beams could disrupt RF, but probably not in any way that would cause a distorted image on their TV, especially if their TV broadcasters are transmitting ATSC. The only artifacts they'd likely be able to see would be pixelation or dropped frames, not "distortion".
As far as the rest of the problems they're claiming, given their outlandish claims on damages due to the "magnetized steel beams", they would all have to be treated as equally suspect, and would require strong proof. Consider a doctor who has a patient say "Yeah, I've got an invisible pink unicorn bite here, a bruise from a yeti that hurts a lot but it faded yesterday, and two witches cast a headache spell on me." The only thing that doctor can do is refer the patient to a psychiatrist, because there's nothing to treat but his damaged mind.
It's America, so you're free to sue Santa Claus for letting his reindeer shit on your roof, but there's no guarantee the courts will find in your favor; rather, there's a substantial risk that your attorney will get in trouble for filing a frivolous lawsuit on your behalf. A lawyer should know better.
Usability is just like any other software quality attribute. It can and should be tested. I've used usability labs quite a few times in the past 20 years, and they've always been of great value. I strongly recommend them, especially for a product that will go in front of random people. Our company has a permanent lab where they will test anything from a software application to operation instructions for a forklift.
The key is to have the designers themselves observe how ordinary people use their product. You can stuff all the books that fit into your brain, you can second guess what you think your mom wants to see, but nothing compares to seeing regular people actually try to use it. They should watch the subject get angry as they repeatedly click a button that gives no feedback that it did something. They should see the puzzlement in their faces as they try to figure out which of the eighteen choices will do what they want. They should see them wince at the awful color choices or tiny fonts, or ignore the blinking box labeled "click me" because they thought it looked like a web advertisement.
A valid experiment requires a good facilitator who understands usability, who can help you set up the test environment for optimum observation, and can select fair test subjects. He or she will keep you from unintentionally introducing bias. They can serve to intervene, when required. And they can teach you how to observe the subjects, while leaving the interpretation up to you.
I suspect you will learn more from running one valid experiment than you will from any book.
Ever seen what advertisements were like before radio/TV? They used to be rather large areas full of text.
People would READ them.
The dumbing down of media is an ongoing problem.
Ask yourself why these soundbites and short ads exist? The answer can only be because they are more effective than long blocks of text.
Marketers aren't interested in informing you of anything. They are interested only in selling as many units as possible. If you are turned off by the lack of information because you only heard the singers sing the product's jingle, you are one person who says no. There are 99 people who picked up the brand name from the message and bought Taystee-Weet as a result. Logic and rational thought had nothing to do with it. Marketers are taught the experimental method: try everything, measure the results, and repeat the stuff that works.
Your only defense against this tactic is education. You need to teach the majority of people to search for information, to want to know details before they buy, at which point the advertisers will change their behavior accordingly.
The problem is that will never actually work. Too many people accept an appeal by authority as opposed to an appeal by experts, regardless of the topic. Why? Because it's the easy path, and people will generally be as lazy as they can get away with. Consider the differences between these two scenarios:
Me: I am hungry. TV: Generalissimo Franco says you should eat Taystee-Weet. Me: Yummy, off to the store for Taystee-Weet!
Me: I am hungry. TV: Scientific research has shown that nutritious breakfasts contribute to classroom success, and Goatmeal is a nutritious breakfast food. Your child will succeed due to the 12 vitamins and minerals in a delicious blend of... *Click!* TV Channel 2: Generalissimo Franco says you should eat Taystee-Weet. Me: Yummy, off to the store for Taystee-Weet!
As a matter of fact, I do carry a Zune and a smart phone. The reason? Battery life. I really don't want to run down the battery on my phone so I can listen to audio books and music. As a dedicated device, the Zune seems to handle that sort of thing much more efficiently than my phone. I go days of heavy use of my Zune before I have to recharge.
To restate: you're carrying an extra battery in an expensive, music-playing, non-phone-or-network-integrated shell.
If you honestly believe you have a power problem with your phone, try a power-based solution. Additional batteries are cheap and ubiquitous, and they can be used only when you actually need them. I found I didn't like the heft of the built-in-add-on battery cases, so instead I keep a small cheap battery from Rat Shack in my backpack for those times when I need topping off (such as on the train ride home.) I carry nothing extra in my pockets in order to have both the smartphone and all my music, the integrated player means the music automatically fades and pauses when the phone rings, and I only dig out the external battery when the internal one needs topping off. If that wasn't convenient enough for me, nothing would stop me from carrying the battery in my pocket, as it's still smaller than a Zune.
I also found that music playing is very power efficient on my smartphone. When I put it in airplane mode and just listened, I discovered music playing drains my battery much more slowly than any activity using the screen or radios. It's just hard to notice when the radios seem to be continually sucking power for cellular, 3G, wi-fi, GPS, and/or Bluetooth.
I'm not saying you should trash your Zune and buy a battery. If you like carrying both, good for you. If you like the Zune player interface, or anything else about it, that's fine. But I am saying that when it comes time to replace your Zune, you'll likely go the smartphone-only route, and you'll find a more appropriate solution to your power problem. And Microsoft recognized that, which is why they're killing the Zune.
I'm not talking about the last few years. I deliberately used the word "recently" as my entire point was referring to the July announcement of the closure of Google Labs as an indication they're currently retracting, not expanding. Some of the projects you listed above are among the casualties.
Google seems to be going off in a million different directions lately, with no apparent overarching plan. They seem to be taking a "throw every dart at the board and hope one hits the bullseye" approach (similar to MS). Apple takes more the "throw a small number of darts, but aim them well and throw them hard" approach.
A direct quote from his call: "Greater focus has also been another big feature for me this quarter--more wood behind fewer arrows". You guys are even using similar analogies!
Google has changed. If you're going to complain about where they're going today, at least complain about the direction they're going now, not the direction they were going last year.
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Reason? We just wanted to see how much we could get away with because we are slimy worms.
Could well be an attorney or Attorney General or Powerful Industry Lobby Group or very well placed janitor convinced they they would be wise to bin the idea.
Hardly. The Attorneys General and Powerful Industry Lobbies would love a ruling that lets them heroically take down the ne'er-do-wells of the Internet without all those messy judges and their "due process" nonsense screwing things up. After all, we all know cyberterrorists don't have rights, and they'd promise never to misuse the process. They even pinky-swore.
Seriously, I don't know that they were intentionally being slimy worms, or if they were just trying to do something to "help fight teh ebil wikileakers" without thinking through all the negative ramifications that would grant any old TomDickAndHarrystan the "right" to take down sites like freeTibet.org. Or maybe they didn't care because they are slimy worms. It's hard to know for sure as I'm not a Versign employee, and last time I checked I wasn't a slimy worm, either.
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That's why I said, unless the team release everything, which hopefully they won't do.
It's another form of security through obscurity to believe that this team is the only one who is capable of doing DPA, or timing attacks, or RF emission sniffing. These were just the first to announce their break publicly.
I don't doubt the bad guys can do this already. I chatted with a guy whose firm was offering DPA cracking services last year. Mostly they wanted to do it so you'd know your hardware was weak and theirs was better and so you'd upgrade to their product; but still, these researchers don't have an exclusive on these kinds of attacks.
HP used to innovate. Not that their engineers are even allowed to today, but once upon a time they were creative.
If they haven't driven every competent person from their payroll already, there might still be some people who could come up with ideas that would improve their products. If not, they could try exclusively licensing some creative patents that are already out there, in hopes of building up some market differentiators. Projectors built into laptop screens. Trackpads that don't suck. Specialty embedded systems like car computers that use your home's wifi in your garage to sync your contacts and music, because $(deity) knows Microsoft's SYNC is filled with fail. Silent computing solutions. There are tons of places where HP could step up and create a market for themselves.
The thing is they're still big enough to be a leader in innovation, but I don't think HP will let itself innovate anymore. I think they've "managed risk" to the point where they instruct their employees how to wipe their asses to avoid contaminating the toilet paper dispensers. The best thing that could happen to them is a complete house cleaning, starting with the top and scouring down to every middle manager who begins a sentence with "we need to define a process to..."
This is interesting and you make a good point there. From a pure number crunching perspective, they should sell their PC division. This is just because they lack vision, innovation and general guidance. This happens all the time when you put a shitty MBA at the top of a company that only understands profits.
The problem is (was) not just Apotheker at the helm, but the steady stream of inept, incompetent barbarians that the board has brought in seemingly to burn the place to the ground, because someone had the brilliant idea to charge admission to the firefighters. Hewlett and Packard must both be spinning in their graves, writhing in agony watching their empire fall like Rome.
The best thing they could do for their shareholders would be to auction off every asset they own, divvy up the loot, and go their separate ways. At least they'd stop further damage.
You only have to profile the architecture one time, which this team has already done. Any MIFARE system can now be cracked in 7 hours. Once the POS system's card is analyzed, they'd be able to crack the keys on your particular canteen in 7 hours. And even then, multiple keys is a big problem. If your canteen is operated by some big chain, and that big chain also runs my canteen, what are the chances they have the same keys? I'd bet lots of money on it.
The core of the security problem is that because an implementation is hard and expensive, it's done infrequently. That means companies want to scale them up to drive down the unit costs of implementing them. Vendor X won't invent a new POS card for each client. Your food service company won't even deploy a separate key for each store.
Crack once, steal anywhere. It's an implementation issue. And that's why selling cards vulnerable to side channel attacks is a recipe for failure.
My current tactic is that I plan to write a macro that files any mail in my inbox older than 1 month into the relevant archive folder, i.e. 2011-Q1 - I want this done automatically, as I will almost definitely forget.
You probably won't forget. What I've noticed is that over time my inbox becomes so densely populated that performance suffers, at which time I have a "duh" moment, and clean it up manually. Since our email volumes and other habits are so similar, this probably isn't far from how you handle it, either. :-) Anyway, if it really bothers you, schedule yourself a monthly "clean up Outlook" reminder task. It takes no coding to accomplish, even if it does take some of your time.
For now, I've stopped worrying about optimizing Outlook any further. Search barely-but-adequately meets my needs, to the point where additional attention won't bring additional value. I figure I can keep going the way I have been at least until the next version of Windows and Office is installed on the corporate machinery. Maybe they'll do search better.
Anyway, for other things to try, one of my coworkers swore by using Xobni as an Outlook "search enhancer". It's an Outlook plug-in plus an NT service that indexes everything in Outlook, including all your PST files, making search instant. I tried it but didn't care much for the performance hit to my laptop. I also refuse to install Google Desktop, as Google was discovered to be harvesting personal search data back up to the mothership, including things like sooper-sekrit internal URLs.
SuperSpeed USB has been installed on 10 billion pieces of hardware
No it hasn't. USB may have been installed on 10 billion pieces of hardware, but SuperSpeed USB is nowhere near as ubiquitous yet. SuperSpeed USB may be able to compatibly downgrade to full-speed USB communication, but that doesn't mean that anything you plug a SuperSpeed device into is magically SuperSpeed.
Anyway, I like the idea of Thunderbolt, especially the thought that it could become the holy grail of single cable interconnects. But just because I like a thing and it's technically better doesn't mean the world will adopt it. Unfortunately, I've learned that politics and money will drive the decision, not technology.
I think half the people in the news media are true believers that what they do is print the truth.
The other half are the editors and producers.
I think those "fringe" groups act the way they do because the pattern of amplifying the visible contrast is proven to work. Consider that homosexuality had been repressed for a very long time, with everyone from governments and religions advocating violence against or shunning them. Closeted gays lived quiet lives, while the few peaceful pleas for acceptance got people beaten or dragged to their death behind four-wheel-drive pickup trucks. So then came the Pride Parade with the over-the-top offensive characters like Timmy the Testicle and hundreds of supporters shouting in the faces of the public "we're here, we're queer, get over it." When the parade ended, the normal people left behind were seen for what they are: just normal people.
Their intent isn't to have you accept their stupid and offensive antics. It's to show you that not everyone is that stupid and offensive. You can draw lines and say "Oh, Stallman is one of those kinds of activists. I can still hate him, but I guess the rest of these guys aren't so bad after all."
It's like Jon Stewart once noted: nobody ever got re-elected by standing on a chair in Congress and shouting "be reasonable!" Humans understand shading better when the contrast encompasses a broad spectrum.
There's plenty of other ways to get your news.
Exactly. Get your news like this great story, Apple User Acting Like His Dad Just Died from The Onion, America's Finest News Source.
What's the difference between The Onion and mainstream media? Everyone at The Onion knows their product is 100% fictional.
The problem is that unless the sorting mechanism is perfect you can wind up in the situation where you never see an email and don't know that it's even arrived.
Outlook (assuming you are using outlook) has an "Unread Mail" pseudo-folder that shows every unread email in every folder, not just your inbox. I automatically filter the automated build notices, the lesser-importance statistics reports, mailing lists, etc., into their own folders so they don't show up on the mobile phone. Daily when I'm at my desk I'll scan the unread mail folder looking at the statistics and reports. Otherwise, everything just stays in the Inbox, which I archive quarterly.
If I'm reading on the phone and realize I'm going to need my desktop machine to answer the question, I'll mark the email unread, then pick it up later.
I auto-categorize email from my boss (and up the chain to the VP) with a red color. If I'm scheduled for conflicting meetings, it helps me quickly decide which one I'll be attending.
I have tried project folders a couple of times, but folders really work poorly for me. Folders make me choose at read-time the most important attribute that I will later search on, but that's never how I will refer them later. And quite often an email will bridge two folders: which to stick it in? That's unproductive.
When it comes time to look up an old email, I remember people and time frames best. I'll open the proper quarter's archive and sort by person or subject, and most often will find what I need in less than five seconds. I also generally know a keyword in the email I'm looking for, allowing effective searches of the archive, but Outlook's search is pathetically slow so it's my weapon of last resort.
I used to be all worried about filtering and deleting spam, but really it didn't prove to be worth my time; and the false positives in the automated filters caused me to miss some important messages making the effort have a net negative value. And it turned out not to matter. When I'm searching, the keywords I search on aren't in the spam messages, nor are the authors or Cc:s, so the spam doesn't actually interfere with me. When I archive, I will occasionally sort by attachment and/or size and delete spam with attachments; and once a year or so I may sort the archive by author and delete the spammy names, but that's about the maximum effort I'll waste.
I think you are overly optimistic about the ability of most governments to correct their own abuses of power. I doubt they'll fire anyone or even stop using the Trojan, they'll just have someone correct some of the deficiencies the CCC found.
At the most, they may take the Undersecretary for Purposes of Scapegoating out and publicly fire him. They might terminate the contract with the software company who developed it. But don't expect "many heads" to roll.
You're welcome. I just imagined how stupid it would look if Michael Bay made a movie about it, then started typing. :-)
Agreed, CRT color distortion due to magnets (and permanent distortion due to magnetizing the mask) is certainly possible.
But corruption of data? There are a dozen far more believable reasons than "magnets".
Really? A knockout slug jumped over an inch to stick to a desk? That's an incredibly bold claim.
I just did some quick desktop experiments with a bunch of different magnets recovered from hard drives. One was a half inch diameter neodymium disk, one was a broken half of a half-inch diameter neodymium disk, one was a 1.75 x .5 x .375 ceramic bar (it was from a very old MFM hard drive from the 1980s), and one was a one inch thick stack of neodymium magnets of varying shapes, with a half inch disk as the final magnet. The magnets were affixed to a vertical metal surface. A plastic ruler served as the test bed. A steel binder clip was used as the test subject. The arms of the clip were angled slightly down in such a way that allowed the clip to ride on the rounded edge of the spring steel portion and the back end was supported by one curve of the arms, minimizing the points of contact on the ruler and the resulting friction. The ruler was held horizontally in the air, and I slid the binder clip slowly towards each magnet's pole, measuring the distance between the clip and the magnet at the point where the binder clip was attracted to it. Here are my results.
Whole disk: 3/4 inch.
Half disk: 1/2 inch.
Ceramic bar: 1-1/4 inch.
Stack: 1-3/4 inch.
As a double-check, I stood one of the whole neodymium disk magnets on edge, and slid it along the ruler with the flat side (pole) facing the vertical metal surface, and it jumped to the metal at a distance of 1-1/8 inch. The half-disk was able to make the jump at 1 inch. That's an actual neodymium magnet performing the same feat you claimed of a mild steel knockout slug.
So you're telling me that this office furniture, also no doubt made of mild carbon steel, had a stronger magnetic field than an actual rare earth magnet created with the express purpose of being a powerful magnet? You were literally sitting on a revolution in magnetic technology, but didn't sell the furniture to Seagate for millions of dollars?
Instead, you claim to us that this improbably super-magnetic furniture was at fault for the PCs going corrupt. That is, the PCs that you set up going corrupt. Since you described this as PCs in the mid 1990s, you're probably talking about Windows 95 or Windows 3.1 or 3.11 on DOS 6.2. You had just installed them, and they went corrupt within a few days.
Occam's razor is going to suggest that while it's possible that a stray magnetic field magnetized the mask causing the color distortion you saw on the monitors, with the field possibly even originating from magnetized furniture, it's highly likely that the software of the day was corrupt all on its own for one of many very common reasons: new hardware with new and poorly tested or not-current driver software, bad installation media, unclean installation with a virus, infant mortality of the drives, or any of a half dozen non-magnetic reasons for corruption.
There's just not enough truth in your story to believe that "unbelievably powerful magnets corrupted your computers".
Given the HP board of directors' track record in making good decisions, one could speculate that they would invest in TTL chip technology for the same reason.
Yes, hundreds of wafers ahead of schedule is good, but they haven't even sold one chip yet. It's hardly time to go all in and throw the car keys on the table, too.
I lost all respect for Sony after Sony Entertainment Group pushed the hardware teams into implementing DRM. I don't buy Sony anymore, nor do I recommend it to friends and family.
Because they are filing a lawsuit claiming that the magnetized steel beams are affecting their hard disks. "Ninjas snuck into my house and erased them" would at least be statistically possible.
The only effect a magnetized steel beam could have on a hard disk is if were used to crush it.
And this would affect their hard drives and TV how, exactly?
Seriously, if the beams were magnetic enough to cause the claimed damage to the contents of the house, they wouldn't have been able to separate them from each other in this construction pile you've theoretically stacked up. They wouldn't even have been delivered, because they wouldn't have been able to scrape them off the forklifts, or lift them from the truck beds. Other vehicles passing them on the roads would have been stuck to the sides of their trailers. Once delivered, the carpenters' hammers would have flown through the air, heads permanently affixed to the beams.
Yes, they could be magnetic enough to disrupt a compass reading. The earth's field is maybe 60 microteslas, so it's not a high bar to pass. But strong enough to erase a bit in a hard drive? The coercivity of the media is about 1700 Oe for cobalt, which takes a lot stronger field than that.
Anybody here have a large mallet I can borrow? I think that I can fix this one real cheap!
Why, are you going to smack the couple on their heads? That's where the defective part is located, not the house.
I agree, triple damages for barratry. Their lawyer is indeed typical scum, trying to screw the little guy.
So let's see, that works out to ... $0.00 * 3 == ... umm... multiply the borrow ... carry the zero ... remainder of, uh ... zero.
Magnets don't work like that, nor do steel beams. Steel beams could disrupt RF, but probably not in any way that would cause a distorted image on their TV, especially if their TV broadcasters are transmitting ATSC. The only artifacts they'd likely be able to see would be pixelation or dropped frames, not "distortion".
As far as the rest of the problems they're claiming, given their outlandish claims on damages due to the "magnetized steel beams", they would all have to be treated as equally suspect, and would require strong proof. Consider a doctor who has a patient say "Yeah, I've got an invisible pink unicorn bite here, a bruise from a yeti that hurts a lot but it faded yesterday, and two witches cast a headache spell on me." The only thing that doctor can do is refer the patient to a psychiatrist, because there's nothing to treat but his damaged mind.
It's America, so you're free to sue Santa Claus for letting his reindeer shit on your roof, but there's no guarantee the courts will find in your favor; rather, there's a substantial risk that your attorney will get in trouble for filing a frivolous lawsuit on your behalf. A lawyer should know better.
For an online resource, the Usability Body of Knowledge can be found here: http://www.usabilitybok.org/
Usability is just like any other software quality attribute. It can and should be tested. I've used usability labs quite a few times in the past 20 years, and they've always been of great value. I strongly recommend them, especially for a product that will go in front of random people. Our company has a permanent lab where they will test anything from a software application to operation instructions for a forklift.
The key is to have the designers themselves observe how ordinary people use their product. You can stuff all the books that fit into your brain, you can second guess what you think your mom wants to see, but nothing compares to seeing regular people actually try to use it. They should watch the subject get angry as they repeatedly click a button that gives no feedback that it did something. They should see the puzzlement in their faces as they try to figure out which of the eighteen choices will do what they want. They should see them wince at the awful color choices or tiny fonts, or ignore the blinking box labeled "click me" because they thought it looked like a web advertisement.
A valid experiment requires a good facilitator who understands usability, who can help you set up the test environment for optimum observation, and can select fair test subjects. He or she will keep you from unintentionally introducing bias. They can serve to intervene, when required. And they can teach you how to observe the subjects, while leaving the interpretation up to you.
I suspect you will learn more from running one valid experiment than you will from any book.
Ever seen what advertisements were like before radio/TV? They used to be rather large areas full of text.
People would READ them.
The dumbing down of media is an ongoing problem.
Ask yourself why these soundbites and short ads exist? The answer can only be because they are more effective than long blocks of text.
Marketers aren't interested in informing you of anything. They are interested only in selling as many units as possible. If you are turned off by the lack of information because you only heard the singers sing the product's jingle, you are one person who says no. There are 99 people who picked up the brand name from the message and bought Taystee-Weet as a result. Logic and rational thought had nothing to do with it. Marketers are taught the experimental method: try everything, measure the results, and repeat the stuff that works.
Your only defense against this tactic is education. You need to teach the majority of people to search for information, to want to know details before they buy, at which point the advertisers will change their behavior accordingly.
The problem is that will never actually work. Too many people accept an appeal by authority as opposed to an appeal by experts, regardless of the topic. Why? Because it's the easy path, and people will generally be as lazy as they can get away with. Consider the differences between these two scenarios:
Me: I am hungry. TV: Generalissimo Franco says you should eat Taystee-Weet. Me: Yummy, off to the store for Taystee-Weet!
Me: I am hungry. TV: Scientific research has shown that nutritious breakfasts contribute to classroom success, and Goatmeal is a nutritious breakfast food. Your child will succeed due to the 12 vitamins and minerals in a delicious blend of ... *Click!* TV Channel 2: Generalissimo Franco says you should eat Taystee-Weet. Me: Yummy, off to the store for Taystee-Weet!
In other words, tl;dr.
As a matter of fact, I do carry a Zune and a smart phone. The reason? Battery life. I really don't want to run down the battery on my phone so I can listen to audio books and music. As a dedicated device, the Zune seems to handle that sort of thing much more efficiently than my phone. I go days of heavy use of my Zune before I have to recharge.
To restate: you're carrying an extra battery in an expensive, music-playing, non-phone-or-network-integrated shell.
If you honestly believe you have a power problem with your phone, try a power-based solution. Additional batteries are cheap and ubiquitous, and they can be used only when you actually need them. I found I didn't like the heft of the built-in-add-on battery cases, so instead I keep a small cheap battery from Rat Shack in my backpack for those times when I need topping off (such as on the train ride home.) I carry nothing extra in my pockets in order to have both the smartphone and all my music, the integrated player means the music automatically fades and pauses when the phone rings, and I only dig out the external battery when the internal one needs topping off. If that wasn't convenient enough for me, nothing would stop me from carrying the battery in my pocket, as it's still smaller than a Zune.
I also found that music playing is very power efficient on my smartphone. When I put it in airplane mode and just listened, I discovered music playing drains my battery much more slowly than any activity using the screen or radios. It's just hard to notice when the radios seem to be continually sucking power for cellular, 3G, wi-fi, GPS, and/or Bluetooth.
I'm not saying you should trash your Zune and buy a battery. If you like carrying both, good for you. If you like the Zune player interface, or anything else about it, that's fine. But I am saying that when it comes time to replace your Zune, you'll likely go the smartphone-only route, and you'll find a more appropriate solution to your power problem. And Microsoft recognized that, which is why they're killing the Zune.
I'm not talking about the last few years. I deliberately used the word "recently" as my entire point was referring to the July announcement of the closure of Google Labs as an indication they're currently retracting, not expanding. Some of the projects you listed above are among the casualties.
Here's Larry Page's blog where he included the text of his quarterly earnings call that talks about addressing your concerns exactly: https://plus.google.com/106189723444098348646/posts/dRtqKJCbpZ7
Google seems to be going off in a million different directions lately, with no apparent overarching plan. They seem to be taking a "throw every dart at the board and hope one hits the bullseye" approach (similar to MS). Apple takes more the "throw a small number of darts, but aim them well and throw them hard" approach.
A direct quote from his call: "Greater focus has also been another big feature for me this quarter--more wood behind fewer arrows". You guys are even using similar analogies!
Google has changed. If you're going to complain about where they're going today, at least complain about the direction they're going now, not the direction they were going last year.