Anybody got a link to the swarm of news reports about the millions they spend on Vista's startup sound? I'm Googling it and apparently it's been deleted from the Internet.
I can't be the only one who remembers that theatre of the absurd. And really - how do you delete stuff from the Internet, anyway?
The problem here is that what you need is a dispatcher support system, not a helpdesk support system.
A dispatcher support system has things like maps to objects and a website for checking inventory levels. Your dispatchers are experts who field questions about that sort of thing, and are keyed into the systems where the questions are answered. The previous poster is correct that chat rooms work well for this. If your reps are local, radio works well too.
A helpdesk system creates trouble tickets that are tracked, assigned to service reps and accounted for. They're for blocking issues where nontechnical workers need technical help. If you had 5,000 customers and you're seeing two calls a minute, there's a major network outage and your call center stops entering tickets in minute two - if they can enter tickets at all with the network down. For a normal tech shop one or two tickets a year for the average customer is a pretty reasonable expectation.
A trouble ticket system would work well for those questions that need escalation and all of the available trouble ticket systems can support thousands of trouble tickets per minute because they're automated technology solutions. Your problem will be not letting the tickets get out of control. You'll need to teach your dispatchers not to create tickets if they can find an answer in less than a few minutes.
That said, have you tried sourceforge? They have about 500 CRM systems with trouble ticket tracking. Search for "CRM".
I'm still at a loss to understand why FAT and ASCII still persist in modern society.
Ask Michael Hart. I think he knows the answer to the ASCII part of your question. It turns out the answer is in some ways similar to the answer for the FAT part of your question.
Now anybody can read this and then ask themselves, "What's the purpose for Moonlight?" Could the reason Microsoft paid all that money to Novell be to get them to hire some impressionable engineer to import Microsoft IP into Linux? Say it ain't so.
That light left that galaxy 12.88 billion years ago, when the universe was 750 million years old. The universe is expanding, and has been for all of those nearly 13 billion years. Whatever distance this object was then, it's a good country mile further down the road now. It's reasonable to expect that light leaving it today will never arrive here because the relative vectors currently exceed the speed of light, or will before it arrives here. The Y'krith of IOK-1/septus/keorf/3 have left our light cone. No doubt if they knew, they would flutter their gelsacs with relief.
Is that some new try at epaper I haven't heard of yet? Kind of like Kindle for current events? I hope they get their business model figred out up front. It costs a lot of money to gather and collect current events, for a product that's so ephemeral it might as well be radioactive.
I can't imagine trying to raise any venture capital for a startup with that goal.
So you're saying that the fact that you have to buy it, and go through this to get your money back, represents evidence that this is a market where a monopoly is not of control? Really?
If they hadn't killed their partner Sendo. A shame really, that Sendo made a partnership deal with Microsoft that included Microsoft getting their IP if their company went under. Tactical error, that.
Dude. Even I know GPUs are optimised for compositing. Ray tracing is a way different thing. It has to have a way different system. Pretending it doesn't will not help you here.
Wake me when Microsoft gots somethin that runs on stuff somebody wants. Even I know Vista is the suckage.
No, don't. I really could pass a purple twinkie about what Microsoft thinks is good stuff even if they buy adds in my mags that say it's good enough. If you want to get on my stuff then wise up.
Thankfully, Intel is hearing me, yo. Otherwise I'd be waiting like until Jasmine textes me back, which is like for ev-er.
You're not going to get any traction here. I understand your feelings, but you've chosen your own hardship and it's my hope I can help you choose something else. We're going to talk about the love, the hate, and the life. Then we'll have the talk.
The love:
I really don't think the majority of/.ers have a problem with compensating artists. I sure don't. My kids got iPod Touch for Christmas, and they're allowed (and subsidised) to buy all the music they want. We're over $500 already, and in some places that's a lot of money. Those iPods hold a lot of money. Maybe that's why people are so eager to steal them. My family has only one rule: they're not allowed to buy a track with DRM, ever, for any reason. My family buys several thousand dollars worth of content a year*, and we're not a unique American family. We are perhaps odd in that we require that when we buy content, we get to own our local copy and use it however we like within reason.
The hate:
The RIAA, their international partners, their lobbyists and the lawmakers in their employ are harming us (everybody) in numerous and tangible ways. They are buying representation and buying law in ways that offend even the most passive citizen. They've bought the President of the United States for FSM's sake. The scope of their effort far exceeds the importance of their goods. Because they're solely focused on maximizing their profits, they're unaware of and uncaring of the harm their efforts are doing to our civil liberties, our political system and our longevity as a union. It is not in any American's best interest to fund this effort. Where possible I counter my family's contributions to their funds with small countering offsetting contributions and of course with our votes. That wasn't possible in the last election cycle because there were far more pressing issues, but we haven't forgotten this issue. The friends of the prosecution in this case are not the artists' friend. They exploit the vast majority of artists and give them a pittance. They're in the court to enforce their system of enslaving artists, and that's a bad thing.
The life:
There's no way the pirate bay is going to be convicted of anything here. The whole trial is a show to let the government of Sweden show the US they're trying to comply with the ridiculous demands of their lobbies. It's a theatre of the absurd not only because of the cultural dissonance between the RIAA and Sweden, but because the claims have no support in fact or law.
The talk:
More to the point: The RIAA and the MPAA are harming us. The harm is real. It's tangible. If you choose them as your hero, you'll find no friends anywhere except in the camp of your artist friends who have for now also bought into the idea that your exploiters are your representatives and that's a losing proposition. Their problem is that there's a lot of turnover in that group, for obvious reasons.
There's a middle ground here. You can choose different representation. If your art is marketable you can sell it to someone less offensive - someone who exploits artists less and aims to harm the rest of us less. You can do that. Do it and we'll prefer your art -- if it's good. The choice is yours. We can't force you to choose that, but we can make fun of you when you scream "Waaaaaaah! I'm retarded! Give money to somebody that isn't going to give it to me!" After all - that's fair.
* - Somebody's going to hate on me for this - starving children in Somalia and all that. Yeah, we give too - in amounts appropriate for our income both locally and globally, in both organized and personal ways, in amounts that meet the demands of our conscience, and encourage others to do the same. This isn't about that, so burn your torch somewhere else, ok? We're talking about something else.
While I agree with you that here in the US with Obama appointing people to the peak of law enforcement we're in a bad way, this trial isn't in the US. It's in Sweden. Different strokes for different folks.
The Pirate party is actually a political force in Sweden. In particular the salient points of their platform were adopted by several political parties in the last election due to a groundswell of support. We could learn from them. They're in no danger.
Now I've posted enough on-topic stuff. Let's have an excerpt from TFA:
Sony complained in court that The Pirate Bay never remove torrents on copyright holders request, but that they have the ability to do so since they remove torrents that are named in a way that doesn't reflect the material they link to. They note that The Pirate Bay has a bad attitude to complaints and ridicules the complainer.
Aw... the pirate bay makes fun of takedown requests and that makes Sony sad. I think there's something in my eye.
For the last 4 billion years the Earth has shed some 2 billion metric tons of genetic material per day. Solar winds have pressed some
of this material more, and some less. Some of this material has been captured by extrasolar objects and carried away. Some of it has been
captured by comets over which the sun no longer holds sway. Some of it has been so light and so thin that the solar winds have carried it
far from home.
These solar systems polluted by life? How could they not be?
These are useful terms. A simile is where you say "this thing is like this other thing". A metaphor is where you say "this thing is this other thing". Hyperbole is when you say "I told you a billion times this was going to happen".
I doubt China needed to include a satellite killing device in a satellite that weighed half a ton that intersected the orbital path of another satellite at 6 kilometers per second. That would be redundant. The chinese are not famous for wasting money.
Of course, if you don't have anyone working in your offices over the weekend, nobody's likely to come in and plug in infected USB devices.
If you're counting on this, you're not working IT in the Enterprise. Enterprise ops are a 24/7 operation.
It appears I was wrong though. If activation day was last Friday, we'd have heard by now.
If you read the domains it's likely you can find activation day by checking already registered domains. Of course, fast flux DNS can defeat the preregistered domains, as can various DNS hijacking techniques. This threat isn't done yet. A botnet might not even be the intended purpose of this threat. It's possible the random domain generator was engineered to put a perfectly legitimate domain offline, and the prevention techniques in place are the expected execution mechanism.
Why?
If you want to ask this question I have to ask if you were not better off asking yourself "Why not?". If you spent as much time and effort examining how and why these things happen, how the bad guys operate and where they might go next, than defending this malpractice on/. you might not have this problem.
Here are some free tips:
Allow neither open ports nor listening services on end-user desktops - ever. Not ever. Not for any reason. It's deliberate neglect of best practice going back 20 years at least. If I didn't have practical experience as well as theoretical I wouldn't believe this wasn't a mandatory pass interview question for enterprise IT. There is no justification for this practice and there never has been. Anybody who suggests such a thing should be summarily terminated for being an idiot, assuming the idea occured to him after he got past the interview in the first place.
Autorun. There hasn't been a less secure idea since Outlook executed attachments in the preview pane. People who don't know why this is a bad idea should be prohibited from practice as IT professionals. If you don't know the methods by which the prevention of autorun by group policy is prevented by accident or by purpose you shouldn't be allowed to edit GPO's, nor to give guidance to people who manage IT at the executive level in the enterprise.
USB. Its broad utility is its trap. Imagine you have a USB keyboard. If you can configure a PC to boot to USB you can insert a device in the keyboard includes a USB hub that includes both a keyboard attachment and an SSD that's bootable that chain boots to the HDD. That gives you a workable computer in a VM that looks like it's doing what you tell it to, but that is completely and totally owned by an intruder. Likewise a mouse. There's plenty of room in both a keyboard and a mouse. And then there's all those spare USB ports just waiting to be exploited. It's sad how easy this is. Here... let me send you a sample of our latest Ergonomic Human Interface Device. No, let me just share this Zune app with you. Hey, this iPod Touch video requires a codec. You download it from this website...
Oh, God. You're hosed.
I wonder if there's some other system we could use... some system that doesn't have the malware ecosystem that Windows has... Some system which might or might not theoretically be less secure depending on who you ask, but which is known to be less exploited in practice...
If you think you can get 38 states to sign off on a DRM banning amendment then I guess all the power to you.
The relevant section is Article 1, Section 8: To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
Why cure the symptom when you can cure the disease? These "rights" no longer "promote the progress of science and the useful arts" so they are no longer justified. The text of the amendment is simple and clear: "Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution is repealed."
How is this change not to the public benefit? Shall our future ever be held hostage to the patent troll? Shall expression ever be limited by the ??AA? Are we done exploring the undiscovered countries of creativity, mathematics, science and cleverness? I think not. Do you?
Slashdot Mirror
That was fair.
Anybody got a link to the swarm of news reports about the millions they spend on Vista's startup sound? I'm Googling it and apparently it's been deleted from the Internet.
I can't be the only one who remembers that theatre of the absurd. And really - how do you delete stuff from the Internet, anyway?
Let's chat about this again after they announce they spent $15M researching the perfect W7 sound theme, only to get "win-dows sev-en".
I'd be reviewing those expense accounts. Do they always hold focus group meetings in a strip club? Couldn't they use a local one?
The problem here is that what you need is a dispatcher support system, not a helpdesk support system.
A dispatcher support system has things like maps to objects and a website for checking inventory levels. Your dispatchers are experts who field questions about that sort of thing, and are keyed into the systems where the questions are answered. The previous poster is correct that chat rooms work well for this. If your reps are local, radio works well too.
A helpdesk system creates trouble tickets that are tracked, assigned to service reps and accounted for. They're for blocking issues where nontechnical workers need technical help. If you had 5,000 customers and you're seeing two calls a minute, there's a major network outage and your call center stops entering tickets in minute two - if they can enter tickets at all with the network down. For a normal tech shop one or two tickets a year for the average customer is a pretty reasonable expectation.
A trouble ticket system would work well for those questions that need escalation and all of the available trouble ticket systems can support thousands of trouble tickets per minute because they're automated technology solutions. Your problem will be not letting the tickets get out of control. You'll need to teach your dispatchers not to create tickets if they can find an answer in less than a few minutes.
That said, have you tried sourceforge? They have about 500 CRM systems with trouble ticket tracking. Search for "CRM".
Very nice, but should have been "penguin"
Fear the penguin.
I'm still at a loss to understand why FAT and ASCII still persist in modern society.
Ask Michael Hart. I think he knows the answer to the ASCII part of your question. It turns out the answer is in some ways similar to the answer for the FAT part of your question.
And now it's sprung.
Now anybody can read this and then ask themselves, "What's the purpose for Moonlight?" Could the reason Microsoft paid all that money to Novell be to get them to hire some impressionable engineer to import Microsoft IP into Linux? Say it ain't so.
That light left that galaxy 12.88 billion years ago, when the universe was 750 million years old. The universe is expanding, and has been for all of those nearly 13 billion years. Whatever distance this object was then, it's a good country mile further down the road now. It's reasonable to expect that light leaving it today will never arrive here because the relative vectors currently exceed the speed of light, or will before it arrives here. The Y'krith of IOK-1/septus/keorf/3 have left our light cone. No doubt if they knew, they would flutter their gelsacs with relief.
Is that some new try at epaper I haven't heard of yet? Kind of like Kindle for current events? I hope they get their business model figred out up front. It costs a lot of money to gather and collect current events, for a product that's so ephemeral it might as well be radioactive.
I can't imagine trying to raise any venture capital for a startup with that goal.
Panasonic is working on a 64GB SDXC in the SD form factor. This would make a nice carry home from the supermarket format for HD video.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes.
So you're saying that the fact that you have to buy it, and go through this to get your money back, represents evidence that this is a market where a monopoly is not of control? Really?
If they hadn't killed their partner Sendo. A shame really, that Sendo made a partnership deal with Microsoft that included Microsoft getting their IP if their company went under. Tactical error, that.
Not even close. The universe extends so far in every direction that no matter where you look, you get objects receding from you at the speed of light.
On the upside though, congratulations! You are once again at the center of the known universe.
I found an antivirus that prevents this problem from recurring. It's here. Works 100%.
Is that like a hotmail login?
They probably have some super secret Microsoft IP in this one. Proabably loaded with patents, it's so creative.
Dude. Even I know GPUs are optimised for compositing. Ray tracing is a way different thing. It has to have a way different system. Pretending it doesn't will not help you here.
Wake me when Microsoft gots somethin that runs on stuff somebody wants. Even I know Vista is the suckage.
No, don't. I really could pass a purple twinkie about what Microsoft thinks is good stuff even if they buy adds in my mags that say it's good enough. If you want to get on my stuff then wise up.
Thankfully, Intel is hearing me, yo. Otherwise I'd be waiting like until Jasmine textes me back, which is like for ev-er.
You're not going to get any traction here. I understand your feelings, but you've chosen your own hardship and it's my hope I can help you choose something else. We're going to talk about the love, the hate, and the life. Then we'll have the talk.
The love:
I really don't think the majority of /.ers have a problem with compensating artists. I sure don't. My kids got iPod Touch for Christmas, and they're allowed (and subsidised) to buy all the music they want. We're over $500 already, and in some places that's a lot of money. Those iPods hold a lot of money. Maybe that's why people are so eager to steal them. My family has only one rule: they're not allowed to buy a track with DRM, ever, for any reason. My family buys several thousand dollars worth of content a year*, and we're not a unique American family. We are perhaps odd in that we require that when we buy content, we get to own our local copy and use it however we like within reason.
The hate:
The RIAA, their international partners, their lobbyists and the lawmakers in their employ are harming us (everybody) in numerous and tangible ways. They are buying representation and buying law in ways that offend even the most passive citizen. They've bought the President of the United States for FSM's sake. The scope of their effort far exceeds the importance of their goods. Because they're solely focused on maximizing their profits, they're unaware of and uncaring of the harm their efforts are doing to our civil liberties, our political system and our longevity as a union. It is not in any American's best interest to fund this effort. Where possible I counter my family's contributions to their funds with small countering offsetting contributions and of course with our votes. That wasn't possible in the last election cycle because there were far more pressing issues, but we haven't forgotten this issue. The friends of the prosecution in this case are not the artists' friend. They exploit the vast majority of artists and give them a pittance. They're in the court to enforce their system of enslaving artists, and that's a bad thing.
The life:
There's no way the pirate bay is going to be convicted of anything here. The whole trial is a show to let the government of Sweden show the US they're trying to comply with the ridiculous demands of their lobbies. It's a theatre of the absurd not only because of the cultural dissonance between the RIAA and Sweden, but because the claims have no support in fact or law.
The talk:
More to the point: The RIAA and the MPAA are harming us. The harm is real. It's tangible. If you choose them as your hero, you'll find no friends anywhere except in the camp of your artist friends who have for now also bought into the idea that your exploiters are your representatives and that's a losing proposition. Their problem is that there's a lot of turnover in that group, for obvious reasons.
There's a middle ground here. You can choose different representation. If your art is marketable you can sell it to someone less offensive - someone who exploits artists less and aims to harm the rest of us less. You can do that. Do it and we'll prefer your art -- if it's good. The choice is yours. We can't force you to choose that, but we can make fun of you when you scream "Waaaaaaah! I'm retarded! Give money to somebody that isn't going to give it to me!" After all - that's fair.
* - Somebody's going to hate on me for this - starving children in Somalia and all that. Yeah, we give too - in amounts appropriate for our income both locally and globally, in both organized and personal ways, in amounts that meet the demands of our conscience, and encourage others to do the same. This isn't about that, so burn your torch somewhere else, ok? We're talking about something else.
While I agree with you that here in the US with Obama appointing people to the peak of law enforcement we're in a bad way, this trial isn't in the US. It's in Sweden. Different strokes for different folks.
The Pirate party is actually a political force in Sweden. In particular the salient points of their platform were adopted by several political parties in the last election due to a groundswell of support. We could learn from them. They're in no danger.
Now I've posted enough on-topic stuff. Let's have an excerpt from TFA:
Sony complained in court that The Pirate Bay never remove torrents on copyright holders request, but that they have the ability to do so since they remove torrents that are named in a way that doesn't reflect the material they link to. They note that The Pirate Bay has a bad attitude to complaints and ridicules the complainer.
Aw... the pirate bay makes fun of takedown requests and that makes Sony sad. I think there's something in my eye.
My guess might have been a wee bit high. What's four or five orders of magnitude among friends, eh?
For the last 4 billion years the Earth has shed some 2 billion metric tons of genetic material per day. Solar winds have pressed some of this material more, and some less. Some of this material has been captured by extrasolar objects and carried away. Some of it has been captured by comets over which the sun no longer holds sway. Some of it has been so light and so thin that the solar winds have carried it far from home.
These solar systems polluted by life? How could they not be?
These are useful terms. A simile is where you say "this thing is like this other thing". A metaphor is where you say "this thing is this other thing". Hyperbole is when you say "I told you a billion times this was going to happen".
I doubt China needed to include a satellite killing device in a satellite that weighed half a ton that intersected the orbital path of another satellite at 6 kilometers per second. That would be redundant. The chinese are not famous for wasting money.
Microsoft has published a KB article covering various ways to prevent it.
Of course they skipped the obvious one: Get a Mac. Or at least use some other OS software.
Of course, if you don't have anyone working in your offices over the weekend, nobody's likely to come in and plug in infected USB devices.
If you're counting on this, you're not working IT in the Enterprise. Enterprise ops are a 24/7 operation.
It appears I was wrong though. If activation day was last Friday, we'd have heard by now.
If you read the domains it's likely you can find activation day by checking already registered domains. Of course, fast flux DNS can defeat the preregistered domains, as can various DNS hijacking techniques. This threat isn't done yet. A botnet might not even be the intended purpose of this threat. It's possible the random domain generator was engineered to put a perfectly legitimate domain offline, and the prevention techniques in place are the expected execution mechanism.
Why?
If you want to ask this question I have to ask if you were not better off asking yourself "Why not?". If you spent as much time and effort examining how and why these things happen, how the bad guys operate and where they might go next, than defending this malpractice on /. you might not have this problem.
Here are some free tips:
Allow neither open ports nor listening services on end-user desktops - ever. Not ever. Not for any reason. It's deliberate neglect of best practice going back 20 years at least. If I didn't have practical experience as well as theoretical I wouldn't believe this wasn't a mandatory pass interview question for enterprise IT. There is no justification for this practice and there never has been. Anybody who suggests such a thing should be summarily terminated for being an idiot, assuming the idea occured to him after he got past the interview in the first place.
Autorun. There hasn't been a less secure idea since Outlook executed attachments in the preview pane. People who don't know why this is a bad idea should be prohibited from practice as IT professionals. If you don't know the methods by which the prevention of autorun by group policy is prevented by accident or by purpose you shouldn't be allowed to edit GPO's, nor to give guidance to people who manage IT at the executive level in the enterprise.
USB. Its broad utility is its trap. Imagine you have a USB keyboard. If you can configure a PC to boot to USB you can insert a device in the keyboard includes a USB hub that includes both a keyboard attachment and an SSD that's bootable that chain boots to the HDD. That gives you a workable computer in a VM that looks like it's doing what you tell it to, but that is completely and totally owned by an intruder. Likewise a mouse. There's plenty of room in both a keyboard and a mouse. And then there's all those spare USB ports just waiting to be exploited. It's sad how easy this is. Here... let me send you a sample of our latest Ergonomic Human Interface Device. No, let me just share this Zune app with you. Hey, this iPod Touch video requires a codec. You download it from this website...
Oh, God. You're hosed.
I wonder if there's some other system we could use... some system that doesn't have the malware ecosystem that Windows has... Some system which might or might not theoretically be less secure depending on who you ask, but which is known to be less exploited in practice...
Why cure the symptom when you can cure the disease? The cure isn't an addition. It's a deletion. The section is Article 1, Section 8.
If you think you can get 38 states to sign off on a DRM banning amendment then I guess all the power to you.
The relevant section is Article 1, Section 8: To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
Why cure the symptom when you can cure the disease? These "rights" no longer "promote the progress of science and the useful arts" so they are no longer justified. The text of the amendment is simple and clear: "Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution is repealed."
How is this change not to the public benefit? Shall our future ever be held hostage to the patent troll? Shall expression ever be limited by the ??AA? Are we done exploring the undiscovered countries of creativity, mathematics, science and cleverness? I think not. Do you?
But not either the video game nor porn industries. Which makes one wonder who's driving technology anyway.
What's with the tail wagging the dog here?
Quite.