Who said anything about personal e-mail? Even the summary explains that they're talking about automated analysis of language patterns, not "reading employees' mail". From TFA:
"If you start to feel differently about the company you work for and the people you work with, you'd be surprised how your language changes,".... Common red flags include a dramatic change in the length of a person's emails. For example, someone may start writing emails of half a dozen words when their messages used to read like novels. Other tip-offs: a rise in the number of anger-related phrases, greater use of the word "me," and signs of more-polarized thinking, like the words "never" and "always."
What if an IT employee suddenly has relationship problems or family issues? Will they then be flagged by HR as potentially troublesome or even a data security risk?
I got suddenly canned from a sysadmin job when I showed signs of irritability and started requesting half-days off here and there. Except in this case it was because my boyfriend was critically ill, and they knew that. They just didn't give a fuck.
I once used physics to argue that a speeding ticket I received was bogus. I explained that even if I was traveling at the speed the officer claimed (unlikely in the underpowered subcompact I was driving, since I'd just gotten on the freeway), he could not have caught up with me and paced me at that speed in that short distance. I also suggested that a more likely explanation for the ticket was a bumper sticker which identified me as gay, and the fact that I was leaving a (peaceful) civil rights demonstration. (This was in the Midwest, in the 90s.) I was still found guilty, but the full fine and points on my license were not assessed.
To be fair, the 10" 1024x768 screen on the Compaq TC1100 was a cut above most other small-laptop displays at the time, which were usually either 10" 800x600 or 12" 1024x768.
Because the influence of the iPad 3 hasn't rippled out into the display industry yet. And it will. Pretty soon all of those The New iPad owners are going to start looking at their desktop/laptop displays and realize that the pixel density on them hasn't improved much since the 1990s. When that happens, the demand for full-size >200dpi screens will expand dramatically, OS and app developers will have to start supporting proper resolution-independent graphics to solve the "it's too small" complaints, and the march toward 3840x2160 displays will be on.
But how many ____x1200 monitors are out there to choose from, and what do they cost? Not many, and too much. The mass-produced models are all ____x1080 or less.
Yes, demonstrating that our computers are slowly being turned into movie-playback devices. For pretty much any other use, a closer-to-square aspect ratio such as 4:3 (or 3:4) makes more sense, a general format that has stood the test of centuries of use. The default UI configurations of desktop/laptop OSes are all designed for screens in that ratio, most web pages work best on narrower/taller screens, and you need a pretty big monitor before a word-processor's widescreen two-page-spread mode makes sense. In order to make better use of these damn wide-format no-vertical-headroom displays, I've had to move my OS X docks and Win taskbars to the left edge of the screen, and I opted for the larger MacBook Air because the screen was about the same width, but another inch taller.
"Troll"? I was serious. On one hand you have the libertarians freaking out at the idea of the government mandating vaccinations, and on the other hand you have the social-welfare advocates freaking out about child abuse. It seems to me that a solution that gives people a theoretical "out" while still having the desired effect in most cases would be a classic compromise.
Don't force parents to vaccinate their children against ___, but for them to opt out, require them to put a deposit in escrow to cover the child's future medical expenses up to the age of 18 in the event the child becomes ill with ___, the balance refundable only upon the death of the child or its 18th birthday. Make it clear to them that neither the government nor their health insurer should have to pay for their decision to deny their child preventative medical care.
A good interpreter and filter of information is worth 1000 raw sources.
And a bad interpreter is worse than having no raw sources at all. (A fact backed up by a recent study that showed that people who watched Fox News were less informed about current events than people who didn't regularly watch/read any news source.)
IANAL, but it seems to me that backers of a project that doesn't actually happen (not referring to your Musopen example, which is merely progressing slower than promised, in part due to expanded goals from its high funding) might have grounds for a breach-of-contract suit, and possibly outright fraud charges could be filed.
As part of the deal between and backer and the project, the backer is promised one of various rewards, typically including a copy of the finished work. If I fulfilled my side of the deal, but they didn't deliver the promised reward, that's breach. Although I'm sure there are terms in the Kickstarter agreement to prevent suits like this, the courts get to rule on whether those terms are enforceable. Similarly, if someone says that they're raising money to do one thing, then take the money and immediately do something entirely different with it (e.g. going on a tropical vacation), then they solicited the money under false pretenses, and that's fraud. In either case, the $5/10/20/50-level backers individually don't have a practical recourse to get their money back. But major backers or backers as a class might in fact be able to take legal action.
It could be worse. A former employer of mine gave us gift certificates for Christmas. For the company's stores. Which sold only high-priced women's clothing.
There's also a limited selection of computer hardware at places like Office Max and Office Despot, but otherwise Best Buy is pretty much it for need-it-now purchases around here... and I live in a county of nearly a million people. If not for the Apple store (which has an understandably limited selection) it would be the only "computer store" in the city.
The point is that she would be embarrassed if you told her the truth. That's what "white lies" are for.
Kind of like now, when I tell you that the term "white lie" is an obscure one known only to ethicists and logicians, and that they are told mostly by experienced psychologists and hostage negotiators.
Re:If your customers aren't always right...
on
IT Calls of Shame
·
· Score: 1
That's a totally false equivalency. I don't expect a nurse or an artist (I've had jobs doing tech support for populations of both) to have even a fraction of my technical skills, in much the same way that I don't have anything close to their clinical or artistic skills.* But in 2012, I do think that they should be able to follow the over-the-phone troubleshooting instruction "see if you can go to the web site yahoo dot com" without further hand-holding. Many of them cannot. Just today I spent five whole minutes trying unsuccessfully to get to a user to a specific web site she needed to see. I patiently walked her through it, using nothing but words found in a 1990 dictionary ("click on the flag in the lower left corner...."). She couldn't do it, and gave up. By the way, this was using her own home computer.
It's fair to expect some basic level of competence from people at various things. Someone with no medical training should be able to "take two aspirin with a glass of water, and check your temperature in two hours". Someone with no artistic talent should be able to draw a rough floor plan of the furniture in a room. Someone who understands nothing about automotive mechanics should be able to drive a car and put gas in it. Someone with no clerical experience should be able to retype a list of names in alphabetical order. These are fundamental skills that (barring physical handicaps) any adult in any job should be able to handle. But I can't go a week in my Help Desk job without encountering someone who does not know how to pull up a web site. And they laugh about it, chuckling "I'm so computer illiterate" rather than being justifiably worried that their incompetence will be counted against them. My 75-year-old mother (a retired musician) could do it (with no help from me); why can't they?
In 1982 (when I got into this line of work) someone could say "I don't know how to turn a computer on" and I'd say "that's OK, I'll show you". In 1992 they could say "I don't know how to use a mouse" and I'd say it was OK. In 2002 they could say "I don't know how to use the internet" and I'd still have some patience with them. But it's 2012. It's time to grow the hell up and learn. Or get out of the way so someone who's willing to learn such basic entry-level skills can have the job. I'm not expecting them to do my job; I'm expecting them to do theirs.
*a little false modesty on that point; I'm actually a pretty good designer and illustrator.
Re:If your customers aren't always right...
on
IT Calls of Shame
·
· Score: 1
If you really believe the customer is always right, you are incompetent. Not just to provide tech support, but legally incompetent: you need to be appointed a guardian.
But of course you don't really believe it. Which means you're just a glad-handing liar who'll tell anyone whatever they want to hear.
Either way, any customer who hires you just made the wrong choice.
Evidently you're one of those people who can't grasp the concept that not everyone is just like them, and therefore doesn't bother to listen when other people describe their needs from their perspective. But has no problem with imposing his point of view on others. I'll try explaining again why the reasons you are sold on Windows 7 are unpersuasive to me, in my situation, for my uses, or this computer.
Windows 7 is many times more secure than XP,
XP is secure enough. I generally practice safe computing with my laptop, usually using it behind good firewalls or offline, with antimalware software running.
has a better UI with better usability,
As I clearly explained, I interact with the UI very little on this computer. And I know all of the parts that I use to the point that they are effortless. (And if you'll permit a brief digression: making the "shutdown" option harder to get to - especially via the keyboard - is not "better usability".)
better handling of wireless networks,
See above. XP knows all of the wireless networks I use and handles them transparently. (Another digression: Win7's "Network and Sharing Center" is - in my professional opinion - a usability clusterfuck.)
better handling of external projectors,
I can't imagine any situation in which I'd want to hook this laptop up to a projector. Why would you assume that I care about this? Because you do it?
can be upgraded to IE9 (vastly more secure than IE6/7/8, even if you don't use it)...
IE9 represents the latest in Microsoft's desperate efforts to oversimplify the UI to the point of obscurity. It's a trainwreck I hate having to use at work. And security: see above.
I use Win7 at work and at home. Every time I have to go back to using XP, it's like trying to work with mittens on, or use stone knives and bear-skins. It's so ancient and obsolete and difficult to use I can't even stand it. Win7 is just better in every single way I can imagine.
"I... I... I... I.... " But I am not you. I'm sorry to hear you have so much trouble remembering how to use XP. I don't. So go on with your love affair with Win7, and let me continue doing what works for me.
I have an old Win98 box with some historical files in poorly-supported legacy file formats (WordPerfect/Paradox/Quattro) that I fire up from time to time. A mere half-gigahertz processor, quarter-gigabyte of RAM, and it's still so responsive it feels like it's anticipating my commands.
I am writing this on a laptop (TabletPC) running Windows XP. It's a 5-year-old machine, but aside from the battery life getting low (a $40 fix I'm considering, for convenience) it does everything I need a laptop to do. It runs *office. It runs Chrome. It runs Manga Studio (my main drawing program) with full support for the built-in stylus/digitizer. I have no reason whatsoever to replace it. I'm familiar with Windows 7; I work with it at the office. If I had a desktop PC instead of an iMac, I'd probably use W7 on that. But I cannot think of a single feature of W7 that I would benefit from on this computer, and I can think of several factors (speed, mostly) that argue against upgrading. Windows is just an OS: software that acts as an intermediary between my applications and the hardware. WXP does that job quite adequately. To "put a mercy bullet in WXP" is nothing more than deliberate, willful, unnecessary obsolescence.
As a rule of thumb, any organization with the word "Family" in their name is probably a clavern of fag-bashing, misogynist, usually-racist sociopaths and lunatics, who would fit right in with the Taliban if not for their disagreement about what God's name is, whether Mohammed was His prophet, and maybe five or six other minor points of theology:
American Family Association (and state claverns) Family Research Council Focus on the Family Colorado for Family Values Family Institute of Connecticut etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Who said anything about personal e-mail? Even the summary explains that they're talking about automated analysis of language patterns, not "reading employees' mail". From TFA:
I got suddenly canned from a sysadmin job when I showed signs of irritability and started requesting half-days off here and there. Except in this case it was because my boyfriend was critically ill, and they knew that. They just didn't give a fuck.
I once used physics to argue that a speeding ticket I received was bogus. I explained that even if I was traveling at the speed the officer claimed (unlikely in the underpowered subcompact I was driving, since I'd just gotten on the freeway), he could not have caught up with me and paced me at that speed in that short distance. I also suggested that a more likely explanation for the ticket was a bumper sticker which identified me as gay, and the fact that I was leaving a (peaceful) civil rights demonstration. (This was in the Midwest, in the 90s.) I was still found guilty, but the full fine and points on my license were not assessed.
One of many great lines ad-libbed by the late Stephen Stucker.
To be fair, the 10" 1024x768 screen on the Compaq TC1100 was a cut above most other small-laptop displays at the time, which were usually either 10" 800x600 or 12" 1024x768.
Because the influence of the iPad 3 hasn't rippled out into the display industry yet. And it will. Pretty soon all of those The New iPad owners are going to start looking at their desktop/laptop displays and realize that the pixel density on them hasn't improved much since the 1990s. When that happens, the demand for full-size >200dpi screens will expand dramatically, OS and app developers will have to start supporting proper resolution-independent graphics to solve the "it's too small" complaints, and the march toward 3840x2160 displays will be on.
But how many ____x1200 monitors are out there to choose from, and what do they cost?
Not many, and too much. The mass-produced models are all ____x1080 or less.
Yes, demonstrating that our computers are slowly being turned into movie-playback devices. For pretty much any other use, a closer-to-square aspect ratio such as 4:3 (or 3:4) makes more sense, a general format that has stood the test of centuries of use. The default UI configurations of desktop/laptop OSes are all designed for screens in that ratio, most web pages work best on narrower/taller screens, and you need a pretty big monitor before a word-processor's widescreen two-page-spread mode makes sense. In order to make better use of these damn wide-format no-vertical-headroom displays, I've had to move my OS X docks and Win taskbars to the left edge of the screen, and I opted for the larger MacBook Air because the screen was about the same width, but another inch taller.
"Troll"? I was serious. On one hand you have the libertarians freaking out at the idea of the government mandating vaccinations, and on the other hand you have the social-welfare advocates freaking out about child abuse. It seems to me that a solution that gives people a theoretical "out" while still having the desired effect in most cases would be a classic compromise.
Don't force parents to vaccinate their children against ___, but for them to opt out, require them to put a deposit in escrow to cover the child's future medical expenses up to the age of 18 in the event the child becomes ill with ___, the balance refundable only upon the death of the child or its 18th birthday. Make it clear to them that neither the government nor their health insurer should have to pay for their decision to deny their child preventative medical care.
Cue the folks who don't want the outside world intruding into their mothers' basements shrieking "This isn't news for nerds!"
And a bad interpreter is worse than having no raw sources at all. (A fact backed up by a recent study that showed that people who watched Fox News were less informed about current events than people who didn't regularly watch/read any news source.)
They are contributions from the people who paid the developers. Duh.
IANAL, but it seems to me that backers of a project that doesn't actually happen (not referring to your Musopen example, which is merely progressing slower than promised, in part due to expanded goals from its high funding) might have grounds for a breach-of-contract suit, and possibly outright fraud charges could be filed.
As part of the deal between and backer and the project, the backer is promised one of various rewards, typically including a copy of the finished work. If I fulfilled my side of the deal, but they didn't deliver the promised reward, that's breach. Although I'm sure there are terms in the Kickstarter agreement to prevent suits like this, the courts get to rule on whether those terms are enforceable. Similarly, if someone says that they're raising money to do one thing, then take the money and immediately do something entirely different with it (e.g. going on a tropical vacation), then they solicited the money under false pretenses, and that's fraud. In either case, the $5/10/20/50-level backers individually don't have a practical recourse to get their money back. But major backers or backers as a class might in fact be able to take legal action.
"Open source solution or not, if you're a U.S. taxpayer, the deadline for filing is nearly to hand."
Except that, if you're a U.S. taxpayer, you would instead say "the deadline for filing is nearly at hand." :P
It could be worse. A former employer of mine gave us gift certificates for Christmas. For the company's stores. Which sold only high-priced women's clothing.
There's also a limited selection of computer hardware at places like Office Max and Office Despot, but otherwise Best Buy is pretty much it for need-it-now purchases around here... and I live in a county of nearly a million people. If not for the Apple store (which has an understandably limited selection) it would be the only "computer store" in the city.
The point is that she would be embarrassed if you told her the truth. That's what "white lies" are for.
Kind of like now, when I tell you that the term "white lie" is an obscure one known only to ethicists and logicians, and that they are told mostly by experienced psychologists and hostage negotiators.
That's a totally false equivalency. I don't expect a nurse or an artist (I've had jobs doing tech support for populations of both) to have even a fraction of my technical skills, in much the same way that I don't have anything close to their clinical or artistic skills.* But in 2012, I do think that they should be able to follow the over-the-phone troubleshooting instruction "see if you can go to the web site yahoo dot com" without further hand-holding. Many of them cannot. Just today I spent five whole minutes trying unsuccessfully to get to a user to a specific web site she needed to see. I patiently walked her through it, using nothing but words found in a 1990 dictionary ("click on the flag in the lower left corner...."). She couldn't do it, and gave up. By the way, this was using her own home computer.
It's fair to expect some basic level of competence from people at various things. Someone with no medical training should be able to "take two aspirin with a glass of water, and check your temperature in two hours". Someone with no artistic talent should be able to draw a rough floor plan of the furniture in a room. Someone who understands nothing about automotive mechanics should be able to drive a car and put gas in it. Someone with no clerical experience should be able to retype a list of names in alphabetical order. These are fundamental skills that (barring physical handicaps) any adult in any job should be able to handle. But I can't go a week in my Help Desk job without encountering someone who does not know how to pull up a web site. And they laugh about it, chuckling "I'm so computer illiterate" rather than being justifiably worried that their incompetence will be counted against them. My 75-year-old mother (a retired musician) could do it (with no help from me); why can't they?
In 1982 (when I got into this line of work) someone could say "I don't know how to turn a computer on" and I'd say "that's OK, I'll show you". In 1992 they could say "I don't know how to use a mouse" and I'd say it was OK. In 2002 they could say "I don't know how to use the internet" and I'd still have some patience with them. But it's 2012. It's time to grow the hell up and learn. Or get out of the way so someone who's willing to learn such basic entry-level skills can have the job. I'm not expecting them to do my job; I'm expecting them to do theirs.
*a little false modesty on that point; I'm actually a pretty good designer and illustrator.
If you really believe the customer is always right, you are incompetent. Not just to provide tech support, but legally incompetent: you need to be appointed a guardian.
But of course you don't really believe it. Which means you're just a glad-handing liar who'll tell anyone whatever they want to hear.
Either way, any customer who hires you just made the wrong choice.
Evidently you're one of those people who can't grasp the concept that not everyone is just like them, and therefore doesn't bother to listen when other people describe their needs from their perspective. But has no problem with imposing his point of view on others. I'll try explaining again why the reasons you are sold on Windows 7 are unpersuasive to me, in my situation, for my uses, or this computer.
XP is secure enough. I generally practice safe computing with my laptop, usually using it behind good firewalls or offline, with antimalware software running.
As I clearly explained, I interact with the UI very little on this computer. And I know all of the parts that I use to the point that they are effortless. (And if you'll permit a brief digression: making the "shutdown" option harder to get to - especially via the keyboard - is not "better usability".)
See above. XP knows all of the wireless networks I use and handles them transparently. (Another digression: Win7's "Network and Sharing Center" is - in my professional opinion - a usability clusterfuck.)
I can't imagine any situation in which I'd want to hook this laptop up to a projector. Why would you assume that I care about this? Because you do it?
IE9 represents the latest in Microsoft's desperate efforts to oversimplify the UI to the point of obscurity. It's a trainwreck I hate having to use at work. And security: see above.
"I... I... I... I.... " But I am not you. I'm sorry to hear you have so much trouble remembering how to use XP. I don't. So go on with your love affair with Win7, and let me continue doing what works for me.
I have an old Win98 box with some historical files in poorly-supported legacy file formats (WordPerfect/Paradox/Quattro) that I fire up from time to time. A mere half-gigahertz processor, quarter-gigabyte of RAM, and it's still so responsive it feels like it's anticipating my commands.
I am writing this on a laptop (TabletPC) running Windows XP. It's a 5-year-old machine, but aside from the battery life getting low (a $40 fix I'm considering, for convenience) it does everything I need a laptop to do. It runs *office. It runs Chrome. It runs Manga Studio (my main drawing program) with full support for the built-in stylus/digitizer. I have no reason whatsoever to replace it. I'm familiar with Windows 7; I work with it at the office. If I had a desktop PC instead of an iMac, I'd probably use W7 on that. But I cannot think of a single feature of W7 that I would benefit from on this computer, and I can think of several factors (speed, mostly) that argue against upgrading. Windows is just an OS: software that acts as an intermediary between my applications and the hardware. WXP does that job quite adequately. To "put a mercy bullet in WXP" is nothing more than deliberate, willful, unnecessary obsolescence.
Yeah, well I hate it when those quiet scenes from art films in adjacent theaters bleed through and suck up the stupid from my Michael Bay films!
As a rule of thumb, any organization with the word "Family" in their name is probably a clavern of fag-bashing, misogynist, usually-racist sociopaths and lunatics, who would fit right in with the Taliban if not for their disagreement about what God's name is, whether Mohammed was His prophet, and maybe five or six other minor points of theology:
American Family Association (and state claverns)
Family Research Council
Focus on the Family
Colorado for Family Values
Family Institute of Connecticut
etc.