They just have some serious issues with their marketing folks that they need to get under control. I don't know if you've ever worked for a major company, but a lot of them have the same issue. Marketing is really the only wing of the company that brings money in, as the higher-ups see it. Since most of them are from marketing themselves. Whatever they say is gold, and they run the show. They make promises, and the rest of the company is supposed to bend over backwards to make it happen, or make the marketing department look like fools.
In this case, a lower-level in the marketing department probably decided it was a good idea to say, "Look, my ideas can make us some money too!" and went ahead and sent it to the technical team. No money, of course, was given for testing, since this wouldn't affect game play itself, but rather, loading screens. Oh yes, it worked, people noticed the ads. And they noticed them for longer-than-normal, because it was probably the way it was programmed.
Now their marketing department looks like fools, minus one fool that just got transferred to the janitorial staff's bathroom division.
It's a problem with all companies, really. The techs will design a beautiful system with excellent hardware for an affordable price, and the marketing department will fuck it up by telling them to do it even cheaper, and even better, even if they have to buy no-name chips from a Chinese manufacturer. Someone will design a beautiful and fun video game, only to have logos smeared everywhere by the marketing department, that can't be destroyed like everything else in said beautiful game world.
Companies have a long history of this. Pretty much all of them. In America, the marketing department sits firmly above the heads of the rest of the company. I assure you, the technical department probably isn't evil. They're just guilty-by-association-by-force with the marketing department.
You have to admit, at least some people have been forced into an early death as the result of such failures.
"I realize that you're thirty minutes away from pension and health insurance for the rest of your days, but I need another payment for my boat. Get the fuck out."
Just remember, when you get hit by a blind driver driving one of these, don't sue them.
Sue the companies that came up with such wonderful ideas.
Now, I have nothing against the handicapped, but driving is a primarily visual task. Putting someone behind the wheel just isn't a good idea, yet. I say yet, because there might come a day to where you can think of every possible circumstance a driver could get themselves into, and plan for it, but our cars would have to run on tracks and all at set speeds, sheltered from the weather and pedestrians.
Verizon, like most cell phone companies, limit their expenses by skimping on customer service.
This includes the systems that their support technicians, customer service agents, and billing agents use. If it's not in the system, as far as they're concerned, it doesn't exist. Meaning that you'll never get resolution out of tier 1 support unless it's something they handle 50 times a day.
I pretty much know what's going to happen to Yahoo in Japan.
If Microsoft ever fully takes Yahoo over, they're going to change everything around, and it's going to end up unpopular in Japan, or just die out. This is because Microsoft will no doubt enforce their own policies and code onto Yahoo, so that we'll be forced to use the shitty hotmail engine, the shitty MSN engine, and the shitty Bing search engine who's very name sounds like something a parent would use to describe what excrement is to a toddler.
Generally when Microsoft takes over a company, the company pretty much disappears, and MS incorporates whatever technology they had into their latest bloatware release or patch.
In reality, you can ask for pretty much any amount you want. I could sprain my ankle on your property and ask for ten million. Sadly, this might not even get instantly thrown out of most courts. Ten million to me might be actual losses. Maybe I trained for the Olympics for my whole life and now can't do it because of the nature of the sprain. Now all of that training is useless, and you're responsible, because you owned a lawn.
Or at least, I'm trying to make you APPEAR responsible. Often, actual wages/funds/etc of the person being sued aren't even taken into account. That's why all of those uninsured motorists that hit someone and then don't pay up are so far in debt. Some ambulance chaser lawyer gets wind of the case and decides that $500,000 is a fair amount to sue someone when they ruin your $20,000 car. Not taking into account injuries, of course.
It's the same case here. I wouldn't be surprised if they pressed to get this fine 'inherited' to the next generation of Tenenbaum's family. It's not all about money, they might settle for a few thousand. Maybe ten thousand. Ten thousand is a great number when you can scare everyone else into paying it without actually going to court.
I don't think it's as easy as hacking through a single fiber line with a knife.
Imagine, if you will, 50 years in the future where there's 100 fiber-level ways into and out of a country. Each one of those may be controlled by a different and possibly uncooperative company, who will lose millions and millions for each day that their foreign connection is cut. Imagine here in America, Sprint or Comcast telling the government to come back with a warrant.
No, the easiest thing isn't to cut off 100% access to everything. The easiest thing is just to lock down all of the border routers of your facility, where nothing gets out, and nothing gets in. That's only about 90% safe from outside attacks, though, as someone might have found a way to get through even that. The solution for that is to just shut down your own connection.
Security concerns should be handled on a site-specific basis. Don't like people getting into your government system? Lock it down, turn it off, etc, but don't fuck up the rest of the country's communication infrastructure because you suck at locking things down.
I'm guessing some lawyer told them that if the call isn't answered by someone at the home, then it can't be prosecuted under the Do Not Call list provisions, and that if someone calls THEM, they're fair game and down on a list of 'known good' numbers.
This is false. Calling and hanging up is just the same as calling and staying on the line. When they trace the number back to a commercial entity that should have followed DNC rules, the company can and will still be held liable, assuming the consumer is savvy enough to get a lawyer.
Remember, you're entitled to money under DNC provisions if someone violates the DNC.
All they need to do is link together a couple of radar stations to share data, and that blip the size of a small pigeon becomes a series of blips in the same jet-sized area, which are also the size of small pigeons, and can be targeted with even ancient surface-to-air missiles.
Having true stealth on a fighter jet is next to impossible, due to the performance requirements placed on the airframe, coating, parts, etc. The stealth on the F-22 is decent, and may provide a few minutes of confusion for the enemy, or a surprise attack, but it won't be untouchable.
If it's a RAM problem, and there's no way to tell in this case without further testing, it can manifest itself in all kinds of unusual ways. Random errors like this can happen. Instant reboots can happen, blue screens, general failures to boot, corrupted data, etc.
Easy enough to take the chip out and test it in a known-good computer using memtest, though.
Motherboard RAM-handling issues can sometimes pop up as well, especially if that particular RAM is the straw that broke the camel's back and overloads your power supply. If the port or controller is damaged, it can look similar to wonky RAM.
Of course, we all know that Windows is perfectly stable, too.
Either of those options they gave could possibly be correct. There's no way to tell without troubleshooting, though.
If they were being paid a decent wage, maybe they'd actually care about their jobs. Or, God forbid, take a little pride in it. Substandard pay will get you substandard workers. Even in this shitty economy we're in, there's no free lunch when it comes to the wage-worthiness continuum.
There's a difference between things that are in plain view, and things that are hidden properly. Plain view means it's sitting there on the desktop for the world to see, or that it's in some ambiguously named folder that you have to open to see if it has anything to backup. Hidden means it's in the usual suspects as far as places that store information/pictures, as well as aptly-named folders.
There's no way to prevent accidental viewing of pictures sometimes, but there's no reason someone should be loading up media/documents/passwords onto their own personal flash drive for later review.
Technicians like that give computer shops a bad name, as if they didn't already have one, $400-refurb-10GB hard drives and all.
Hopefully they at least get taken to court for destruction of property, with a little fraud/theft-by-deception on the side.
But hey, if auto mechanics can't be held civilly/criminally responsible for repairing/replacing things that don't need to be replaced, or saying they've done work but haven't, then there's a good chance Evnova Computers won't be held responsible for their actions, either.
Yeah, people do snoop and overcharge. It's a fact of life, but it's a fact of life that can get you sued, put in jail, or worse.
Add to that the fact that any half-way decent technician would testify that testing the seating/connection of things is the first or second thing on the list they do when it comes to hardware troubleshooting, and you're already deep into scam territory.
I'd bet the places involved would have been happy to sell you $400 refurb 100GB hard drives, re-sticker CPUs, and sell pirated copies of Windows, too.
This is what happens when you skip over qualified technicians to hire high school students or college dropouts who are 'good with computers' to save a little money.
Perhaps these companies should be sued, each and every one of them, for privacy violations. Maybe when the risk of hiring unqualified technicians is too high, they'll actually start to hire people with certifications and/or degrees for a sane amount of money.
No, $7.25/hr isn't a sane amount of money for a computer technician in the US.
If yes, then you've already purchased a product that is deliberately broken.
Example: A lot of phones have GPS capability, but the capability is locked away so that only authorized retail programs can access them. Due to encryption or the firmware editing them out.
Another example: Any phone with bluetooth has the capability to upload/download data from other bluetooth devices, but 99% of the time, this is disabled. So you'll have to buy their $40 data cable, or pay $1+ for ringtones that you could make or download yourself for free.
Actually, the power grid was thought up by very intelligent people.
I'm honestly surprised that it hasn't required a complete overhaul yet.
The system of regional and local power plants is a great one. A power plant for every couple of cities. The issue we're facing is that we're simply not producing enough power locally in quite a few areas. The solution? Pipe the power in, as the good engineers had already designed the system for! The problem? We're piping in so much power that the chances of a catastrophic failure of the national power grid is becoming more and more likely.
We're overstressing the lines, the switching stations, and the plants.
The solution is simple, but costly.
First, we need to generate more electricity. This can be done through efficiency upgrades, new plants, or distributed generation. I'm putting my money on modular nuclear reactors, like B&W's mPower. That would alleviate the immediate local demand for electricity.
Second, we need to upgrade the infrastructure to handle more power and to be more efficient. This includes possible use of high voltage DC lines (aka HVDC), superconductors, and the usual incremental upgrades to switching stations.
Third, we need to start an initiative to get people to save more power. A lot of power is wasted by companies that keep their PCs on and running 3dpipes all night, people keeping their houses at a balmy 64F during the summer when they're away on vacation, and products that waste a noticeable amount of power when turned off and idle.
When we do all of those things, then we can be ready for electric cars, replicators, and all of that other stuff that you had seen on Beyond 2000 or Star Trek.
The reason that people are so concerned is that the various interest groups here (corporations, music associations, basically anyone who would have profited from the legal sale of the aforementioned media) are not above proving (aka faking) that each instance of copyright infringement actually cost them a few thousand dollars. So if she has a few thousand uploads from her computer, well, that's enough to put most medium-sized companies well into bankruptcy.
The first step of tightening the noose of this multi-million dollar fine is for the judge to decide in the favor of the RIAA, and award them any kind of compensation on a per-proven-instance basis. The second is allowing the RIAA to decide or argue the case on what the per-proven-instance damages are.
This could easily be cured if they brought the price of their memory cards down a little. Maybe they could have a loading/staging system built into the PSP, say, 4GB, and you could use standard thumb-drives to load it up on the go so you could play the games. Instead of, you know, paying $10+/gb for their 'special' memory stick.
Pets don't have any kind of mystical powers when it comes to detecting disease, it all comes from the powers of observation.
She knew that your mother was sick, and she wanted to take care of her. She probably knew that your mother was hurting in that area, because maybe your mother was holding that area or guarding it, much like how cats will guard cuts/sores/etc on their body when they get hurt. She had probably watched her for a while through the whole ordeal, so she thought, maybe there was a sore place there and she wanted your mother to get better.
They say that dogs can sometimes detect lung cancer, and this is true, because lung cancer can alter the makeup of your exhalations, cause sounds in your breathing that weren't there before, make you tired, sick, etc. They pick up on this. Also, dogs and cats are great at noticing skin cancer. If you ever have a pet that sniffs at a mole continuously or licks at it or whatever, get it checked out, because something has changed to where the mundane mole is now attracting the attention of your pet.
People should be exactly as honest to companies, as the companies are to them. If the company said, "Look, this phone is $200, and you can pay for it now, or you can pay half of it now, and we can lock you into an agreement for two years and recoup the cost tenfold" it might be fine, but they instead say, "Look, this phone is $600, and you can pay for it now, or we can give you $500 off the retail price*."
Cell phone companies make it clear that it's just about the mighty dollar, and why should we treat them any differently?
*Must sign up for two year agreement full of bells and whistles that you probably won't use much of, and if you do use them, they're capped, throttled, and reduced to near uselessness to save a few bucks per account-year.
People that would rather make a buck today than ten bucks next week.
People that would collapse an entire industry so they could retire nicely, despite the fact that they were all but guaranteed a nice retirement anyway.
There are artists that don't believe in art, musicians who don't believe in music, and there are for-profit corporations that don't believe in sustainable profit. It's a sad, sad world.
Slashdot Mirror
Sony isn't totally evil.
They just have some serious issues with their marketing folks that they need to get under control. I don't know if you've ever worked for a major company, but a lot of them have the same issue. Marketing is really the only wing of the company that brings money in, as the higher-ups see it. Since most of them are from marketing themselves. Whatever they say is gold, and they run the show. They make promises, and the rest of the company is supposed to bend over backwards to make it happen, or make the marketing department look like fools.
In this case, a lower-level in the marketing department probably decided it was a good idea to say, "Look, my ideas can make us some money too!" and went ahead and sent it to the technical team. No money, of course, was given for testing, since this wouldn't affect game play itself, but rather, loading screens. Oh yes, it worked, people noticed the ads. And they noticed them for longer-than-normal, because it was probably the way it was programmed.
Now their marketing department looks like fools, minus one fool that just got transferred to the janitorial staff's bathroom division.
It's a problem with all companies, really. The techs will design a beautiful system with excellent hardware for an affordable price, and the marketing department will fuck it up by telling them to do it even cheaper, and even better, even if they have to buy no-name chips from a Chinese manufacturer. Someone will design a beautiful and fun video game, only to have logos smeared everywhere by the marketing department, that can't be destroyed like everything else in said beautiful game world.
Companies have a long history of this. Pretty much all of them. In America, the marketing department sits firmly above the heads of the rest of the company. I assure you, the technical department probably isn't evil. They're just guilty-by-association-by-force with the marketing department.
You have to admit, at least some people have been forced into an early death as the result of such failures.
"I realize that you're thirty minutes away from pension and health insurance for the rest of your days, but I need another payment for my boat. Get the fuck out."
Just remember, when you get hit by a blind driver driving one of these, don't sue them.
Sue the companies that came up with such wonderful ideas.
Now, I have nothing against the handicapped, but driving is a primarily visual task. Putting someone behind the wheel just isn't a good idea, yet. I say yet, because there might come a day to where you can think of every possible circumstance a driver could get themselves into, and plan for it, but our cars would have to run on tracks and all at set speeds, sheltered from the weather and pedestrians.
Verizon, like most cell phone companies, limit their expenses by skimping on customer service.
This includes the systems that their support technicians, customer service agents, and billing agents use. If it's not in the system, as far as they're concerned, it doesn't exist. Meaning that you'll never get resolution out of tier 1 support unless it's something they handle 50 times a day.
I pretty much know what's going to happen to Yahoo in Japan.
If Microsoft ever fully takes Yahoo over, they're going to change everything around, and it's going to end up unpopular in Japan, or just die out. This is because Microsoft will no doubt enforce their own policies and code onto Yahoo, so that we'll be forced to use the shitty hotmail engine, the shitty MSN engine, and the shitty Bing search engine who's very name sounds like something a parent would use to describe what excrement is to a toddler.
Generally when Microsoft takes over a company, the company pretty much disappears, and MS incorporates whatever technology they had into their latest bloatware release or patch.
Ahh, yes, the joys of dealing with civil cases.
In reality, you can ask for pretty much any amount you want. I could sprain my ankle on your property and ask for ten million. Sadly, this might not even get instantly thrown out of most courts. Ten million to me might be actual losses. Maybe I trained for the Olympics for my whole life and now can't do it because of the nature of the sprain. Now all of that training is useless, and you're responsible, because you owned a lawn.
Or at least, I'm trying to make you APPEAR responsible. Often, actual wages/funds/etc of the person being sued aren't even taken into account. That's why all of those uninsured motorists that hit someone and then don't pay up are so far in debt. Some ambulance chaser lawyer gets wind of the case and decides that $500,000 is a fair amount to sue someone when they ruin your $20,000 car. Not taking into account injuries, of course.
It's the same case here. I wouldn't be surprised if they pressed to get this fine 'inherited' to the next generation of Tenenbaum's family. It's not all about money, they might settle for a few thousand. Maybe ten thousand. Ten thousand is a great number when you can scare everyone else into paying it without actually going to court.
I don't think it's as easy as hacking through a single fiber line with a knife.
Imagine, if you will, 50 years in the future where there's 100 fiber-level ways into and out of a country. Each one of those may be controlled by a different and possibly uncooperative company, who will lose millions and millions for each day that their foreign connection is cut. Imagine here in America, Sprint or Comcast telling the government to come back with a warrant.
No, the easiest thing isn't to cut off 100% access to everything. The easiest thing is just to lock down all of the border routers of your facility, where nothing gets out, and nothing gets in. That's only about 90% safe from outside attacks, though, as someone might have found a way to get through even that. The solution for that is to just shut down your own connection.
Security concerns should be handled on a site-specific basis. Don't like people getting into your government system? Lock it down, turn it off, etc, but don't fuck up the rest of the country's communication infrastructure because you suck at locking things down.
Actually, poisoning P2P networks as a commercial venture could be prosecuted as theft-by-deception.
Stealing bandwidth is a crime. Downloading songs isn't, if you aren't profiting form it.
The damage would have been much more severe if they had been caught/forced to turn it over to open source.
I'm guessing some lawyer told them that if the call isn't answered by someone at the home, then it can't be prosecuted under the Do Not Call list provisions, and that if someone calls THEM, they're fair game and down on a list of 'known good' numbers.
This is false. Calling and hanging up is just the same as calling and staying on the line. When they trace the number back to a commercial entity that should have followed DNC rules, the company can and will still be held liable, assuming the consumer is savvy enough to get a lawyer.
Remember, you're entitled to money under DNC provisions if someone violates the DNC.
Really? You think so?
All they need to do is link together a couple of radar stations to share data, and that blip the size of a small pigeon becomes a series of blips in the same jet-sized area, which are also the size of small pigeons, and can be targeted with even ancient surface-to-air missiles.
Having true stealth on a fighter jet is next to impossible, due to the performance requirements placed on the airframe, coating, parts, etc. The stealth on the F-22 is decent, and may provide a few minutes of confusion for the enemy, or a surprise attack, but it won't be untouchable.
If it's a RAM problem, and there's no way to tell in this case without further testing, it can manifest itself in all kinds of unusual ways. Random errors like this can happen. Instant reboots can happen, blue screens, general failures to boot, corrupted data, etc.
Easy enough to take the chip out and test it in a known-good computer using memtest, though.
Motherboard RAM-handling issues can sometimes pop up as well, especially if that particular RAM is the straw that broke the camel's back and overloads your power supply. If the port or controller is damaged, it can look similar to wonky RAM.
Of course, we all know that Windows is perfectly stable, too.
Either of those options they gave could possibly be correct. There's no way to tell without troubleshooting, though.
If they were being paid a decent wage, maybe they'd actually care about their jobs. Or, God forbid, take a little pride in it. Substandard pay will get you substandard workers. Even in this shitty economy we're in, there's no free lunch when it comes to the wage-worthiness continuum.
There's a difference between things that are in plain view, and things that are hidden properly. Plain view means it's sitting there on the desktop for the world to see, or that it's in some ambiguously named folder that you have to open to see if it has anything to backup. Hidden means it's in the usual suspects as far as places that store information/pictures, as well as aptly-named folders.
There's no way to prevent accidental viewing of pictures sometimes, but there's no reason someone should be loading up media/documents/passwords onto their own personal flash drive for later review.
Technicians like that give computer shops a bad name, as if they didn't already have one, $400-refurb-10GB hard drives and all.
Hopefully they at least get taken to court for destruction of property, with a little fraud/theft-by-deception on the side.
But hey, if auto mechanics can't be held civilly/criminally responsible for repairing/replacing things that don't need to be replaced, or saying they've done work but haven't, then there's a good chance Evnova Computers won't be held responsible for their actions, either.
Yeah, people do snoop and overcharge. It's a fact of life, but it's a fact of life that can get you sued, put in jail, or worse.
Add to that the fact that any half-way decent technician would testify that testing the seating/connection of things is the first or second thing on the list they do when it comes to hardware troubleshooting, and you're already deep into scam territory.
I'd bet the places involved would have been happy to sell you $400 refurb 100GB hard drives, re-sticker CPUs, and sell pirated copies of Windows, too.
This is what happens when you skip over qualified technicians to hire high school students or college dropouts who are 'good with computers' to save a little money.
Perhaps these companies should be sued, each and every one of them, for privacy violations. Maybe when the risk of hiring unqualified technicians is too high, they'll actually start to hire people with certifications and/or degrees for a sane amount of money.
No, $7.25/hr isn't a sane amount of money for a computer technician in the US.
Do you have a cell phone?
If yes, then you've already purchased a product that is deliberately broken.
Example: A lot of phones have GPS capability, but the capability is locked away so that only authorized retail programs can access them. Due to encryption or the firmware editing them out.
Another example: Any phone with bluetooth has the capability to upload/download data from other bluetooth devices, but 99% of the time, this is disabled. So you'll have to buy their $40 data cable, or pay $1+ for ringtones that you could make or download yourself for free.
Actually, the power grid was thought up by very intelligent people.
I'm honestly surprised that it hasn't required a complete overhaul yet.
The system of regional and local power plants is a great one. A power plant for every couple of cities. The issue we're facing is that we're simply not producing enough power locally in quite a few areas. The solution? Pipe the power in, as the good engineers had already designed the system for! The problem? We're piping in so much power that the chances of a catastrophic failure of the national power grid is becoming more and more likely.
We're overstressing the lines, the switching stations, and the plants.
The solution is simple, but costly.
First, we need to generate more electricity. This can be done through efficiency upgrades, new plants, or distributed generation. I'm putting my money on modular nuclear reactors, like B&W's mPower. That would alleviate the immediate local demand for electricity.
Second, we need to upgrade the infrastructure to handle more power and to be more efficient. This includes possible use of high voltage DC lines (aka HVDC), superconductors, and the usual incremental upgrades to switching stations.
Third, we need to start an initiative to get people to save more power. A lot of power is wasted by companies that keep their PCs on and running 3dpipes all night, people keeping their houses at a balmy 64F during the summer when they're away on vacation, and products that waste a noticeable amount of power when turned off and idle.
When we do all of those things, then we can be ready for electric cars, replicators, and all of that other stuff that you had seen on Beyond 2000 or Star Trek.
The reason that people are so concerned is that the various interest groups here (corporations, music associations, basically anyone who would have profited from the legal sale of the aforementioned media) are not above proving (aka faking) that each instance of copyright infringement actually cost them a few thousand dollars. So if she has a few thousand uploads from her computer, well, that's enough to put most medium-sized companies well into bankruptcy.
The first step of tightening the noose of this multi-million dollar fine is for the judge to decide in the favor of the RIAA, and award them any kind of compensation on a per-proven-instance basis. The second is allowing the RIAA to decide or argue the case on what the per-proven-instance damages are.
This could easily be cured if they brought the price of their memory cards down a little. Maybe they could have a loading/staging system built into the PSP, say, 4GB, and you could use standard thumb-drives to load it up on the go so you could play the games. Instead of, you know, paying $10+/gb for their 'special' memory stick.
Pets don't have any kind of mystical powers when it comes to detecting disease, it all comes from the powers of observation.
She knew that your mother was sick, and she wanted to take care of her. She probably knew that your mother was hurting in that area, because maybe your mother was holding that area or guarding it, much like how cats will guard cuts/sores/etc on their body when they get hurt. She had probably watched her for a while through the whole ordeal, so she thought, maybe there was a sore place there and she wanted your mother to get better.
They say that dogs can sometimes detect lung cancer, and this is true, because lung cancer can alter the makeup of your exhalations, cause sounds in your breathing that weren't there before, make you tired, sick, etc. They pick up on this. Also, dogs and cats are great at noticing skin cancer. If you ever have a pet that sniffs at a mole continuously or licks at it or whatever, get it checked out, because something has changed to where the mundane mole is now attracting the attention of your pet.
Oh, come off it.
People should be exactly as honest to companies, as the companies are to them. If the company said, "Look, this phone is $200, and you can pay for it now, or you can pay half of it now, and we can lock you into an agreement for two years and recoup the cost tenfold" it might be fine, but they instead say, "Look, this phone is $600, and you can pay for it now, or we can give you $500 off the retail price*."
Cell phone companies make it clear that it's just about the mighty dollar, and why should we treat them any differently?
*Must sign up for two year agreement full of bells and whistles that you probably won't use much of, and if you do use them, they're capped, throttled, and reduced to near uselessness to save a few bucks per account-year.
There are different people in charge now.
People that would rather make a buck today than ten bucks next week.
People that would collapse an entire industry so they could retire nicely, despite the fact that they were all but guaranteed a nice retirement anyway.
There are artists that don't believe in art, musicians who don't believe in music, and there are for-profit corporations that don't believe in sustainable profit. It's a sad, sad world.
Much like how gas prices of over $2/gallon are just fine now, because we went to $4+ a gallon for a short time.
Every time someone complains about gas prices now, everyone says, "At least it's not $4+ a gallon again!"