I was at the apple store in Sacramento CA and I struck up a conversation with one of their door people, who by the way was bizarrely gender-neutral.
I said I was involved in IT and PC's and asked about their repair desk and how it was different.
They said that the priority #1 of the help desk personnel is to ensure the well-being of the customer. Make sure they are happy, not stressed, calmed, not worried about the damaged product.
The well-being of the customer paramount over actually fixing the product.
Many traditions of slavery involve periodic payments from the master to the slave that the slave can spend as he wish or even save to buy his freedom one day. While the slave is ostensibly at the mercy of his master, in order to maintain face among his society, the master has to provide something to those under him. This is how it worked in ancient Rome, for instance.
I can confirm that in the last week I have helped 3 people with Mac malware. I haven't even met anyone with Mac malware installed until last week. I didn;t see naything incredibly harmful, but it pretended to be an anti-virus software and repeatedly opened up various porn sites in Safari without user interaction.
Mac has fake a/v now? Yikes! Maybe 2012 is the end of the world, lol.
Wow, this is a great idea. And, just the other day I thought of an idea that would solve the texting while driving problem - Instead of having to TYPE everything OUT, they should invent a communications medium that would take the spoken words themselves from one cell phone and transmit it to another, and then the recipient of the voice message could listen to the voice message either when it comes in, or at some later time! Think of the lives that could be saved by not texting while driving!
Yeah, worrying what OS the general populace uses with the premise of "security" would be more likely the responsibility of homeland security, not the NSA. This smells like a ploy to me. The best lies are those with a grain of truth in them. Win7 is much better than XP or vista, but... What does the NSA care?
I think the next gen backdoor that 7 comes with is full-on RAT. They get webcam, mic, screen, passwords and registry, just like cybergate or darkcomet.
I just thought of one other thing, to be fair to the NSA I imagine they do have some burden of counter-intelligence and preventing us being spied upon as a nation. So, maybe having all the unpatched XP machines is actually a national security risk. lol. Having a nation of botted xp boxes out there might hinder their covert operations?
Or maybe if everyone is on 7 then there's the US Patriot Botnet at the hands of the NSA so as one we all take on the evil Chinese and Russian botnets, nation against nation, DDOS against DDOS...
All while grandma plays sudoku on yahoo with her $300 walmart windows 7 box, none the wiser as her machine silently joins the ranks of other US Patriot Botnet machines, cranking out packets through her usually idle 12 Mbps Comcast connection.
Viewsonics android tablets (V-pad) are somewhat neat but overall pretty much crap. Part of their problem might be that they don't use the latest OS version (not even close). Otherwise it's sorta like using a giant phone without the phone.
I didn't reveal my personal opinion above, just posed the question. I think that good design is nothing without good maintenance and support, and vice versa.
I don't know about "old codger logic" but I think the engineers from the 60's did some great things, (just like engineers in the 70's and 80's and 90's and 00's and....) but the engineers from the mid 20'th century are always quick to say "Yeah, yeah, but we did things WITH SLIDE RULES..." and that's really the only feather in their cap. (Oh, and they went to the moon and invented the nuclear bomb and a few other trinkets)
Engineers from today, what have they done? Pfft.. Handheld supercomputers (comparatively) and instant global communications for "free" and ubiquitous access to global knowledge and information at the drop of a hat. Pish Posh. Most engineers today don't even know how to use a slide rule. Bah.
Personally I wish the old-school new-school pissing matches would stop, I think both generations could learn from each other. In college I had profs who had us to EVERYTHING on computer using the computer algebra software Mathematica on our NeXT workstations. Other profs made us do everything by hand using pencil on engineering paper, so far as to have us do Laplace transforms BY HAND (don't trust the sshhhoftwaaare). At any rate it made us appreciate modern technology and we moved on.
Yet... to get philosophical, achieving true longevity in a design isn't simple, is it? Is it luck? Brilliance? Trial and error?
My point is that the fact that the thing is still on at all deserves quite a lot of credit to the original engineering. Even if it is fragile and has required work to keep going - it is still... on.
Who deserves more credit? The guys that have figured out the system updates and changes to KEEP it going, or the people that designed the thing so well in the first place that it has lasted long enough so that there is a thing to even keep going?
I have Mediacom So-Called Cable So-Called Internet and I have not noticed this happening - of course I use ABP and No-Script.
Makes me want to use something like Ultrasurf which reportedly encrypts traffic anyway.
The tv service is "whatever" and the internet is 10 Mbps peak and sometimes bogs down to nearly nothing at always the wrong time. Up speed is 1.0 to 1.5 Mbps and is crap - meaning if I monitor a large upload via FTP it will constantly be breaking and resuming connection. Uploading to Youtube is very difficult due to broken connections.
The alternative is vanilla and overpriced DSL over crap AT+T copper. Do not want.
There is still a demand for typewriters - For instance, I know that some law enforcement organizations need to type things onto cards. Also certain insurance agents type things onto cards.
These things break, they get dropped, they are simple and generally built to a price.. No-one knows how to or wants to repair them - with the exception of one wholesaler I dealt with, Carolina Wholesale. They sell typewriters and also can repair them. The demand is low, sure, but if you look you will see typewriters out there.
Two uses for that data:
1. Advertisements
2. Police
and of course the 3rd one that Apple do not want to think about:
3. Thieves can use it, to know when your house is empty.
It's not this file with their GPS that will help thieves, it's those stupid apps that post to Facebook and Twitter saying "BillyBob is at Starbucks on the corner of Main and Market with SusieQ!" Whee! That means BillyBob isn't HOME and I know from a status update last week that he has a new 50" plasma he just got from BestBuy! And from all the PICTURES he posts on his profile I have a workable map of his HOUSE and I know he lives ALONE and only has a lazy cat and not a vicious dog.
How many crooks will go through the trouble to leverage this file when there is so much low hanging fruit? None. The eerie thing about this file is a) What is it REALLY used for? I mean today. Advertising my ass. and b) Potential use of this data. To me it smells just like ISP log files and Dropbox back door encryption keys.
Each day I see things come about that makes the "fictional" big brother tracking technology shown on movies and tv like Enemy of the State and 24 look a little less like fiction.
Apparently having an iPhone will make it conceivable to know not only where you are now, but where you have been. Every day. For a long time. Couple this with those cell phone analyzers the Michigan police reportedly have. Think about it. http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/34/3458.asp
"But if you don't have anything to hide, then you have nothing to worry about". Ok, what about the reports I see where the TSA somehow finds out about outspoken people who complain publicly about the TSA? What about how they have people who watch for people IN THE LINES who are frustrated with being herded like cattle and groped like whores? http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/04/15/2051220/TSA-Investigates-People-Who-Complain-About-TSA
If you have no opinion AND have nothing to hide THEN you have nothing to worry about. God help us.
I'm in the US. You tip the barber but not a "hairdresser" at a salon.
But this is a barber. Big chair, bottles of blue mystery fluid with the combs in it, warm foamy shave cream dispenser, straight blade razor sharpener on the side of the chair. He will use the straight razor on the sideburns.
The barber's price is 1/2 to 2/3 that of a "male haircut" at a salon. Of course, the barber haircut looks pretty much always the same for everyone no matter what you "request" and it takes 5 minutes.
The style options are off the ears, on the ears, part on the left, right or middle. Awesome.
I know you don't fancy a 5gb volume but keep in mind that lots of little files are often more vulnerable to attack than a single big one, unless you use different keys. Which would be pain for your to remember. So it probably is best to stick everything in a single blob.
trying to remember if DB uploads only the parts of files that change, so then a multi GB truecrypt wad would not have to upload in entirety when only changing some files within...
The parent comment is underrated. Dropbox is a very good service, and I don't see why this new revelation of theirs couldn't be properly handled by just encrypting everything you put on it - yourself.
So if you become a person of interest, and the powers that be make DB cough up your filez, they still won't see anything because YOU encrypted it too.
Anyone have any suggestions on a quick and painless encryption product or approach to apply to your dropbox folders? I use DB extensively, have a lot of extra free space, and I don't fancy a 5 GB truecrypt file. I imagine a bunch of small truecrypt files would be a pain as well.
In hindsight, seems to me that HD-DVD should have been the "winner" of the format war - IIRC cheaper all around, just as good. But since Sony bought the market away from them and forced the issue, now the next progression forward is fizzling. That'll teach 'em.
Of course, the above is assuming that HD-DVD would have caught on due to lower cost. My guess is that the price delta of HD-DVD would have quickly dissolved and once the drives started appearing "everywhere" just like DVD drives did. At no real price increase (after a while), they would have been widely adopted with a shrug and a "sure why not, it's $10".
But since blue ray is STILL multiple times more expensive, instead of just a small percentage more expensive, it's just not going to happen.
Blue ray is going to be like those old giant laser optical disks. "Oh yeah, I remember those!" Personally I don't know anyone who has a Blue-ray.
Leave it to Sony to create a square peg "Standard" in a world of round holes. Their proprietary flash memory standard is annoying too.
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 1
Ah, a refreshingly insightful comment. I think many people would be astonished if they got "off" all sugar, or at least all refined sugar, including HFCS (Which is difficult) for 3 weeks to a month. I think they would be astonished for how they feel, and also astonished for how they feel once going back "on" sugar and HFCS.
It isn't that sugar is evil itself. The problem is how pervasive it is once you consider HFCS and how much we consume.
I've gone off sugars and caffeine for a month, it literally is like detoxing. I need to do it again, I think.... The problem is it's a monumental hassle. And with Caffeine.... the week of butt dragging is a hassle too. And a pain...
Given the possibility of needing to comply with healthcare regulations you might as well give him a limited login (it is HIS network, not yours, dept head or not), but they should be able to configure it in the dmz or some other fashion as to isolate it from confidential information as well as to keep it from affecting anything if it gets compromised.
The real can of worms is that YOU brought it into the building, so if it blows up (so to speak) it's your fault. I'm surprised the IT guy even is allowing this, period, login or not. I can hear it now...
You attached WHAT to my network and want to do WHAT with WHAT? Why, I never, this flies in the face of...... blah blah blah....
Thank you for posting this. Do you not agree that more black folks need to stand up and publicly disown their victim-minded entitlement-society brethren and kick Mr. Jackson and his ilk to the curb? Even though I stand across the racial divide and cannot truly understand things, I personally recognized years ago that he and his ilk are not doing the black folks any favors...
>I fail to see why IE 10 would not run on vista which is like 98% the same as Windows 7. What could there possibly be in Windows 7 that Vista lacks? It even has DX11. So hardware acceleration is not the issue.... I mean seriously. There is probably some mere flag in the installer that forces it to only work on Windows 7 and that is likely the only thing preventing it from running on Vista.
Lets say vista and 7 are actually 98% the same. Aren't primates and humans DNA supposedly like 90-some percent the same? Yet there are some major differences between humans and monkeys.
MS bashers say how similar vista and 7 are supposed to be under the hood. I've heard stuff like "they just tweaked UAC and put in some tricks to fool the user regarding speed" but they are NOT the same.
I was fortunate enough to avoid vista on my main machines, went right from XP to 7. But I just recently am doing some work where I have to use vista all day every day. IT IS NOT THE SAME AS WIN7. NOT THE SAME. And this is a 3.2 GHZ xeon with 8 gigs of ram, with vista 64. It is a newer install of vista, less than 6 months. And IT IS A TURD. Give me an old C2D with 2 gigs of ram with win7 over ANYTHING with vista.
I don't know what it is, something is just wrong with vista. This proves it, when they can and/or have to differentiate between 7 and vista even at the browser level, there are fundamental differences.
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Why is an elderly person using an iPhone in the first place?
Potential converts - which also goes along with the other reply to my post...
I was at the apple store in Sacramento CA and I struck up a conversation with one of their door people, who by the way was bizarrely gender-neutral.
I said I was involved in IT and PC's and asked about their repair desk and how it was different.
They said that the priority #1 of the help desk personnel is to ensure the well-being of the customer. Make sure they are happy, not stressed, calmed, not worried about the damaged product.
The well-being of the customer paramount over actually fixing the product.
Huh. Makes sense.
Many traditions of slavery involve periodic payments from the master to the slave that the slave can spend as he wish or even save to buy his freedom one day. While the slave is ostensibly at the mercy of his master, in order to maintain face among his society, the master has to provide something to those under him. This is how it worked in ancient Rome, for instance.
Huh. Sorta like a .... job.
I can confirm that in the last week I have helped 3 people with Mac malware. I haven't even met anyone with Mac malware installed until last week. I didn;t see naything incredibly harmful, but it pretended to be an anti-virus software and repeatedly opened up various porn sites in Safari without user interaction.
Mac has fake a/v now? Yikes! Maybe 2012 is the end of the world, lol.
Wow, this is a great idea. And, just the other day I thought of an idea that would solve the texting while driving problem - Instead of having to TYPE everything OUT, they should invent a communications medium that would take the spoken words themselves from one cell phone and transmit it to another, and then the recipient of the voice message could listen to the voice message either when it comes in, or at some later time! Think of the lives that could be saved by not texting while driving!
So the question remains: what kind of a thing is it?
DNS?
Yeah, worrying what OS the general populace uses with the premise of "security" would be more likely the responsibility of homeland security, not the NSA. This smells like a ploy to me. The best lies are those with a grain of truth in them. Win7 is much better than XP or vista, but ... What does the NSA care?
I think the next gen backdoor that 7 comes with is full-on RAT. They get webcam, mic, screen, passwords and registry, just like cybergate or darkcomet.
I just thought of one other thing, to be fair to the NSA I imagine they do have some burden of counter-intelligence and preventing us being spied upon as a nation. So, maybe having all the unpatched XP machines is actually a national security risk. lol. Having a nation of botted xp boxes out there might hinder their covert operations?
Or maybe if everyone is on 7 then there's the US Patriot Botnet at the hands of the NSA so as one we all take on the evil Chinese and Russian botnets, nation against nation, DDOS against DDOS...
All while grandma plays sudoku on yahoo with her $300 walmart windows 7 box, none the wiser as her machine silently joins the ranks of other US Patriot Botnet machines, cranking out packets through her usually idle 12 Mbps Comcast connection.
Not square.
Besides, a square pi is more of a cobbler, don't you think?
They should calculate pi*e. Knowing that number to such detail would be... delicious.
That's a pretty sweet comment
Viewsonics android tablets (V-pad) are somewhat neat but overall pretty much crap. Part of their problem might be that they don't use the latest OS version (not even close). Otherwise it's sorta like using a giant phone without the phone.
I didn't reveal my personal opinion above, just posed the question. I think that good design is nothing without good maintenance and support, and vice versa.
I don't know about "old codger logic" but I think the engineers from the 60's did some great things, (just like engineers in the 70's and 80's and 90's and 00's and....) but the engineers from the mid 20'th century are always quick to say "Yeah, yeah, but we did things WITH SLIDE RULES..." and that's really the only feather in their cap. (Oh, and they went to the moon and invented the nuclear bomb and a few other trinkets)
Engineers from today, what have they done? Pfft.. Handheld supercomputers (comparatively) and instant global communications for "free" and ubiquitous access to global knowledge and information at the drop of a hat. Pish Posh. Most engineers today don't even know how to use a slide rule. Bah.
Personally I wish the old-school new-school pissing matches would stop, I think both generations could learn from each other. In college I had profs who had us to EVERYTHING on computer using the computer algebra software Mathematica on our NeXT workstations. Other profs made us do everything by hand using pencil on engineering paper, so far as to have us do Laplace transforms BY HAND (don't trust the sshhhoftwaaare). At any rate it made us appreciate modern technology and we moved on.
Yet ... to get philosophical, achieving true longevity in a design isn't simple, is it? Is it luck? Brilliance? Trial and error?
... on.
My point is that the fact that the thing is still on at all deserves quite a lot of credit to the original engineering. Even if it is fragile and has required work to keep going - it is still
Who deserves more credit? The guys that have figured out the system updates and changes to KEEP it going, or the people that designed the thing so well in the first place that it has lasted long enough so that there is a thing to even keep going?
I have Mediacom So-Called Cable So-Called Internet and I have not noticed this happening - of course I use ABP and No-Script.
Makes me want to use something like Ultrasurf which reportedly encrypts traffic anyway.
The tv service is "whatever" and the internet is 10 Mbps peak and sometimes bogs down to nearly nothing at always the wrong time. Up speed is 1.0 to 1.5 Mbps and is crap - meaning if I monitor a large upload via FTP it will constantly be breaking and resuming connection. Uploading to Youtube is very difficult due to broken connections.
The alternative is vanilla and overpriced DSL over crap AT+T copper. Do not want.
There is still a demand for typewriters - For instance, I know that some law enforcement organizations need to type things onto cards. Also certain insurance agents type things onto cards.
These things break, they get dropped, they are simple and generally built to a price.. No-one knows how to or wants to repair them - with the exception of one wholesaler I dealt with, Carolina Wholesale. They sell typewriters and also can repair them. The demand is low, sure, but if you look you will see typewriters out there.
Two uses for that data: 1. Advertisements 2. Police
and of course the 3rd one that Apple do not want to think about: 3. Thieves can use it, to know when your house is empty.
It's not this file with their GPS that will help thieves, it's those stupid apps that post to Facebook and Twitter saying "BillyBob is at Starbucks on the corner of Main and Market with SusieQ!" Whee! That means BillyBob isn't HOME and I know from a status update last week that he has a new 50" plasma he just got from BestBuy! And from all the PICTURES he posts on his profile I have a workable map of his HOUSE and I know he lives ALONE and only has a lazy cat and not a vicious dog.
How many crooks will go through the trouble to leverage this file when there is so much low hanging fruit? None. The eerie thing about this file is a) What is it REALLY used for? I mean today. Advertising my ass. and b) Potential use of this data. To me it smells just like ISP log files and Dropbox back door encryption keys.
Each day I see things come about that makes the "fictional" big brother tracking technology shown on movies and tv like Enemy of the State and 24 look a little less like fiction.
Apparently having an iPhone will make it conceivable to know not only where you are now, but where you have been. Every day. For a long time. Couple this with those cell phone analyzers the Michigan police reportedly have. Think about it. http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/34/3458.asp
"But if you don't have anything to hide, then you have nothing to worry about". Ok, what about the reports I see where the TSA somehow finds out about outspoken people who complain publicly about the TSA? What about how they have people who watch for people IN THE LINES who are frustrated with being herded like cattle and groped like whores? http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/04/15/2051220/TSA-Investigates-People-Who-Complain-About-TSA
If you have no opinion AND have nothing to hide THEN you have nothing to worry about. God help us.
I'm in the US. You tip the barber but not a "hairdresser" at a salon.
But this is a barber. Big chair, bottles of blue mystery fluid with the combs in it, warm foamy shave cream dispenser, straight blade razor sharpener on the side of the chair. He will use the straight razor on the sideburns.
The barber's price is 1/2 to 2/3 that of a "male haircut" at a salon. Of course, the barber haircut looks pretty much always the same for everyone no matter what you "request" and it takes 5 minutes.
The style options are off the ears, on the ears, part on the left, right or middle. Awesome.
of Dropped Calls!
I know you don't fancy a 5gb volume but keep in mind that lots of little files are often more vulnerable to attack than a single big one, unless you use different keys. Which would be pain for your to remember. So it probably is best to stick everything in a single blob.
trying to remember if DB uploads only the parts of files that change, so then a multi GB truecrypt wad would not have to upload in entirety when only changing some files within...
Just Encrypt it
The parent comment is underrated. Dropbox is a very good service, and I don't see why this new revelation of theirs couldn't be properly handled by just encrypting everything you put on it - yourself.
So if you become a person of interest, and the powers that be make DB cough up your filez, they still won't see anything because YOU encrypted it too.
Anyone have any suggestions on a quick and painless encryption product or approach to apply to your dropbox folders? I use DB extensively, have a lot of extra free space, and I don't fancy a 5 GB truecrypt file. I imagine a bunch of small truecrypt files would be a pain as well.
In hindsight, seems to me that HD-DVD should have been the "winner" of the format war - IIRC cheaper all around, just as good. But since Sony bought the market away from them and forced the issue, now the next progression forward is fizzling. That'll teach 'em.
Of course, the above is assuming that HD-DVD would have caught on due to lower cost. My guess is that the price delta of HD-DVD would have quickly dissolved and once the drives started appearing "everywhere" just like DVD drives did. At no real price increase (after a while), they would have been widely adopted with a shrug and a "sure why not, it's $10".
But since blue ray is STILL multiple times more expensive, instead of just a small percentage more expensive, it's just not going to happen.
Blue ray is going to be like those old giant laser optical disks. "Oh yeah, I remember those!" Personally I don't know anyone who has a Blue-ray.
Leave it to Sony to create a square peg "Standard" in a world of round holes. Their proprietary flash memory standard is annoying too.
Ah, a refreshingly insightful comment. I think many people would be astonished if they got "off" all sugar, or at least all refined sugar, including HFCS (Which is difficult) for 3 weeks to a month. I think they would be astonished for how they feel, and also astonished for how they feel once going back "on" sugar and HFCS.
.... the week of butt dragging is a hassle too. And a pain ...
It isn't that sugar is evil itself. The problem is how pervasive it is once you consider HFCS and how much we consume.
I've gone off sugars and caffeine for a month, it literally is like detoxing. I need to do it again, I think.... The problem is it's a monumental hassle. And with Caffeine
Given the possibility of needing to comply with healthcare regulations you might as well give him a limited login (it is HIS network, not yours, dept head or not), but they should be able to configure it in the dmz or some other fashion as to isolate it from confidential information as well as to keep it from affecting anything if it gets compromised.
...... blah blah blah ....
The real can of worms is that YOU brought it into the building, so if it blows up (so to speak) it's your fault. I'm surprised the IT guy even is allowing this, period, login or not. I can hear it now...
You attached WHAT to my network and want to do WHAT with WHAT? Why, I never, this flies in the face of
Thank you for posting this. Do you not agree that more black folks need to stand up and publicly disown their victim-minded entitlement-society brethren and kick Mr. Jackson and his ilk to the curb? Even though I stand across the racial divide and cannot truly understand things, I personally recognized years ago that he and his ilk are not doing the black folks any favors...
>I fail to see why IE 10 would not run on vista which is like 98% the same as Windows 7. What could there possibly be in Windows 7 that Vista lacks? It even has DX11. So hardware acceleration is not the issue.... I mean seriously. There is probably some mere flag in the installer that forces it to only work on Windows 7 and that is likely the only thing preventing it from running on Vista.
Lets say vista and 7 are actually 98% the same. Aren't primates and humans DNA supposedly like 90-some percent the same? Yet there are some major differences between humans and monkeys.
MS bashers say how similar vista and 7 are supposed to be under the hood. I've heard stuff like "they just tweaked UAC and put in some tricks to fool the user regarding speed" but they are NOT the same.
I was fortunate enough to avoid vista on my main machines, went right from XP to 7. But I just recently am doing some work where I have to use vista all day every day. IT IS NOT THE SAME AS WIN7. NOT THE SAME. And this is a 3.2 GHZ xeon with 8 gigs of ram, with vista 64. It is a newer install of vista, less than 6 months. And IT IS A TURD. Give me an old C2D with 2 gigs of ram with win7 over ANYTHING with vista.
I don't know what it is, something is just wrong with vista. This proves it, when they can and/or have to differentiate between 7 and vista even at the browser level, there are fundamental differences.