It's incumbent on you to demonstrate that any non specific 'feeling' about the general qualifications of a whole class of candidates invalidates them. It's easy to look at someone's criminal record for example and exclude them, or their citizenship or any number of other real facts, but the existence of a photograph is shaky ground. You of course are free to do that but you better be prepared to monitor all of your employees 24/7 to more or less the same standards. For instance, you need to craft a policy that states categorically that any online presence of any employee at any time, under any guise whatsoever is actional grounds for dismissal at any time, without notice or appeal. Again, I am fine with that, but I'm sceptical you'll find many willing employees or candidates who would volunteer for that scruntiny.
As long as you can reliably demonstrate that one has to do with the other, that's fine. If you're all working on is a vague prejudice then just call it that.
It seems to be that anything that employers want to use to exclude you and depress wages they will do. That's common sense but in a way it's pretty creepy. After social networking, maybe they can say no based on where you live, or if any of your relatives are in jail, or the number of speeding tickets you have or your medical history.
Actually my employer is the former owner of Lenovo. I actually have some insight into how this works. Next, Lenovo support for consumer machines is in fact different from support provided for corporate customers. That difference is a hugely complex iteration of all the customizations that corporate customers demand such as custom hardware and software images. Believe me, it's real and one of the drivers for why Lenovo no longer belongs to IBM. The overhead to keep those corporate customers is enormous. Next, the point you missed is that there are 2 different product lines. One is the Lenovo line which Lenovo has done a good if not great job with on their own for years. The other is their newly acquired Thinkpad line. One need only go their own support pages to understand that big problem is the almost limitless expansion of models and submodels. There are for example more then 50 different variants of the Thinkpad T-40 alone. But corporate customers really don't care because they offload that level of support to the vendor. Corporate customers try to recycle their hardware on 3-5 year intervals because FASB rules allow them to depreciate them over 3 years but the hardware probably has up to 2 more years of technical life beyond their financial life.
So stuffing the channel up front with a new expensive model is generally not going to be attractive to corporate customers. With a 3-5 lifecycle they can only utilize at best 20-33% of their projected inventory turnover per year. And next year, the new model is now different, and the year after that and so on.
You can purchase different repair service contracts which is where the warranty becomes worthwhile. Otherwise they just stare at you and tell you to ship the machine back to them.
I purchased a 3 year local depot drop off repair service contract as well as Lojack for Laptops. They added about 170$ to the cost but if the unit is dropped, broken at least I can go somewhere locally and get it fixed, they know who I am, what the terms of the agreement are and so on. And if it's stolen or lost, Lojack makes and attempt to track it down and alert the cops for you. I guess if you lose the data you're screwed unless you backup regularly. I have a big USB drive just for that purpose.
Color me cynical but when I hear something is long overdue I wonder if it's been thrown together quickly out of desperation. This model or models which check in at 4+lbs are not ultraportable. One would think that with a smallish screen it would come in a little lighter.
Moreover, Lenovo clearly has a demarc between consumer models (N series, V series, etc.) and their corporate customer brand (Thinkpad). I have to wonder how they're going to support a consumer model like this out of the corporate channel since obviously there are zero corporations out there who are going to stock their inventories with this. It's at least $900 too high for that. I'm sorry but to me this sounds like another one of those glitzy PC's your Director gets while you toil away on a 3 year old T-40. Frankly I'm shocked they haven't built seamless functionality with a Blackberry and/or Treo 700 into it since that's the sweet spot of the people who are bound to get one of these. And of course it needs a docking station and massive audio.
But in either case, if you Joe Shmoe picks one of these up for your own use, what kind of support are you going to get from the channel that typically handles big customers who buy hundreds or thousands of units at a clip? Think they'll put your pissant problem at the top of the queue?/Yes I am bitter and slaving away on a 3 year old T-40 while my managment chain tells me that anyone with a 900Mhz CPU or higher is not eligible for a hardware upgrade, indefinitely. That puts my 3 year old machine at least 2 more years from replacement. That ought to be fun trying to run, support and patch XP Pro on a 5 year old machine in the 2008-9 timeframe while MS has its hands full trying to keep Vista from running off the rails.
And for the record. I have a Lenovo N100 as well and while I love it, someone needs to shoot the person in the head who decided on the price points for hard drive upgrades. Lenovo wants more than $120 to upgrade an 80GB drive for a 120GB. That is patently insane.
Google's interface is vastly richer than most people understand. If Google created cribsheets or had better assisted help that explained the richness of their entry syntax then people would be better at using it.
Now having said that, a few other issues -
Tech literacy in schools devolves to teaching kids how to use Microsoft applications like Office. And most of the problem with that is that MS has created overly complex beasts that are hard to use in the first place. Moreover, none of them was created with a student in mind.
People have short attention spans. If you're going to force people to 'use' the internet for school work then you're going to have to get Google and their ilk to partner with schools to provide more elegant and faster and more limited results windows to students.
You are going to have to understand that just like teachers teach to the test, students use tools to answer the specific question and no more. No one, or almost no one is going to surf the web to casually learn more about Rene Decartes or the history of wool. They are looking for the answers to questions 1, 3, 7 etc. on their worksheet. And if the result could spit back the exact sentence they could then write on their sheet, that would be great.
Next you're going to have to pare down technical complexity. My flat screen TV has a 63 page users manual (just the English). My phone's user's guide is more than 240 pages. Neither of them does exactly what I want nor do they do exctly what their vast tomes of documentation say they should do. Similarly if your computer apps are buggy, broken, poorly documented or overly documented then it means you probably did a poor job yourself on the fit and finish of the apps.
Last but not least, the general interface on computers is junk. In the broader sense, it assumes that the application you had me install is very important and has to be front and center all the time. My son's computer has so many icons in the system tray I don't even know what most of them are. Why would anyone in their right mind even screw with them and risk breaking something? I wouldn't.
If you give a phone tracking device to your.....what? 10 year old? Then that will allow to do.....what precisely? Compare that with your 16-17-18 year old whose movements you will track and that will allow.....what again? Seems to me if you have a kid who refuses to callback or answer their phone you've lost either way. And if you want to use this as a passive device to track them in spite of their own behavior, well, let's just say I'm glad I don't have to sit down with your family at dinner.
See, let's just set aside the squishy implications of whether you think this is an ethical thing to do. That's your decision to make, not mine. Instead, as a practical matter, if your kid tells you they're at "A's" house and you doublecheck and discover they're not, then what do you do? And below a certain age if your kid is out of your sight and lying to you about it, then you have bigger problems than technology can solve, unless of course you plan on subjecting your kids to drug tests and lie detector tests the moment you drag them home. On the other hand, if your kid is almost 18, then the same behavior really says more about you as a parent and maybe your anal retentive, passive aggressive borderline paranoid martyr complex than it does about your kids.
Let's just say that as a parent of teenagers who routinely do not like to be interrupted when they are doing exactly what they told me they were going to do, that whether I can verify where they are at all times will just make them that much less eager to talk to me and answer their phone. As I've said many many times;
Sometimes the greatest revenge you can wreak on a control freak is to actually give them total control. It will piss them off and burn them out faster than resistance.
An interesting political polemic, but patently false as far as the real world of consumer products is concerned. Otherwise we in the US would have GOOD cell phone service and GOOD cell phones, not OLD CRAPPY services and products on par with Japan or Europe circa 1995. Otherwise we would in the US have a medical delivery system that didn't cost 20% of the GDP and manage to kill 250,000 people a year through accidents and mistakes. See all the Libertarians in the world always miss the fact that it is not they who are in charge, it's the companies they worship.
I have all of those features today. There is zero need to reinvent the wheel. It used to be that MS would scour the marketplace to find companies that had interesting features to add to Windows then they would buy the company. Now MS simply reinvents what's already there, usually no better than anyone else and calls it new and improved. It's just lock in, because as I said, I already have all those features today. Buying a new PC with a new OS to give what I already have in fact is trivial. And in reality, we will all find that instead of simply bolting on applications, all these replicated features embedded in the OS will get in the way of themselves and create what we all understand is more fragile, inflexible system, not less.
Every touted improvement in Vista exists to make Microsoft's life and the life of their media and hardware partners better and more enriched. It is not, I repeat, not for your benefit or enjoyment. Recently MS stated this would be last 'turn of the crank' for an OS like this. I agree. This is because the only logical step next would be to lease you the OS and the hardware, only, and bar you from doing anything on your own with it. Since that's not bound to fly, yet (let's see how they react to Google) then the alternative is to lock you into their content, at least.
Treo 700 phones come in Palm and Windows. But they're not exactly the same hardware. The Palm based unit has a higher res screen; 320x320 vs 240x240. The Palm unit has less talktime; 4.5hrs vs 5. Other than that and the apps that come with them, they are the same. Comes down to personal preference I guess.
Depends on what you think cheap is. I just bought a 'cheap' 1/8th inch stereo plug on both ends 6ft cable for $6 from Radio Shack. I think that's overpriced. but I see your point. I guess if everyone had a prong power plug it would sort of standardize things.
But I tend to think that phone companies are all corrupt bastards who want to nickle and dime you to death so what they'll do is stop including any form of charger with the phone at all. I mean I have a bunch of phones now with some form of data port for which that phone manufacturer themselves doesn't even make a cable to mate to it.
And all Samsung phones that I see have two power ports - one for the jazzy flat connector and one for a pole connector. I wonder why the complexity?
A lost cable is a lost cable. Whether it's a standard prong or not, still has to be replaced. I don't see Best Buy for instance charging a fair, e.g. cheap price for either.
But I don't care what's on the phone side if all I have to worry about is a cable. That is, if I take the wall side out of the equation altogether then who cares? There is no need to put the same connector into the phone side of all phones where the onlt removeable part, as such, is a cable. I could get a USB out-splitter and plug one adapter into the wall and have multiple cables out to any kind of phone. If it's a weird Nokia or a Samsung or a more common pole type, then so what?
My CEO makes a billion dollars and truly believes he is a god. No one tells him or his top 50 reports anything. They bark, you sit up on your hind legs.
There will be 40-50 megawebsites who proudly call themselves MS Antiphishing Certified. They'll have a little logo. It's all a crossbranding strategy. And everyone else will happily stumble along as they do today.
Let's see the likely candidates:
Wal*Mart Target Amazon Barnes and Noble Petsmart Victoria's Secret Abercrombie and Fitch Dell and so on.....
None of the financial companies will go for this nor will TicketMaster, etc.
WTF does that mean? I have an iPod aftermarket charger that plugs into the wall and accepts the iPod's standard USB cable. Is that what they mean? Because at the least that would mean I could use a cheap wallplug unit for all my phone regardless of what stupid unique connector they use on the phone end. Of course that means that USB cables will triple in price.
Otherwise if they mean that all phones have to be charged by a USB port to a computer alone that would make less than zero sense. Considering, as others here have pointed out, not all USB ports draw enough current, it doubly makes less than zero sense.
I went to Home Depot's website 2 days ago and the whole thing was down because and I quote "high volumes because of the holiday season". I don't know whether that's really funny or really sad.
But in a more insidious vein, the #1 website killer to me is registration. I am sick of registration. I am dropping real products because of their website's registration. I am cancelling sales in process because of last second registration requirements. I have stopped magazine and newspaper subscriptions because of registration to their websites. I am not doing registration anymore:
Your website is free, you don't need registration I am paying my money to you for your product/service, you don't need registration I already registered the product, you don't need registration I am paying with a credit card, you don't need registration
and so on. Not gonna do registration anymore.
Not gonna jump through hoops to figure out another password you will accept that will allow me to give you my money. Not gonna worry about you emailing me my forgotten password anymore. You lost that sale, I hope you are thrilled with that.
In the corporate arena standards are for other people and the result is that you get hundreds of disconnected so called standards. Moreover the executives get their own infrastructure and support and are so disconnected from the sweaty minions that they truly have zero concept of how well or poorly the rest of their infrastructure works. So hells yeah, let's have Google impose standardization on us. The fact is, there really isn't much of a support overhead for all those canned apps. The fact is that those are not the key security holes. It's all the other shit they implement. And that's not going to change.
Ok so now we're in the 26th Century. Time travel, trading bodies on demand, immortality, whatnot. The further you push this stuff into the future the more it becomes a Science Fantasy Chick Flick Soap Opera. Everything will get magically solved with magic science at the end of every episode. Engines going to blow up? Push the 17th dimension button that supercools them to 1 billion degrees below absolute zero. Then fly through the sun with your sun protector shield. Naturally.
My corporate environment is close to implosion from the unending requirements for yet more passwords. You need a password to power up your machine, a password to start Windows, a password for Lotus Notes, a VPN dialer password, an intranet password for web apps, timecard apps, expenses, etc, an IM password (generally the intranet password), a password for HR apps, a password for benefits information. And we check for all of them and they expire but not at the same time and various password delivery subsystems employ different rules with different strengths. So it's almost impossible to keep it all straight without your own database. Once you find a new password that meets a given criterion you really just want to reset all of them to the same password - even though they are on different systems. So you wind up either with a lot of different passwords or exactly the same one. Or some messed up place in between.
I don't suspect MyAss users have more than two passwords to worry about - IM and MyAss. So they can afford to get creative. I don't, if I screw it up it's huge pain in the ass to get a reset.
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It's incumbent on you to demonstrate that any non specific 'feeling' about the general qualifications of a whole class of candidates invalidates them. It's easy to look at someone's criminal record for example and exclude them, or their citizenship or any number of other real facts, but the existence of a photograph is shaky ground. You of course are free to do that but you better be prepared to monitor all of your employees 24/7 to more or less the same standards. For instance, you need to craft a policy that states categorically that any online presence of any employee at any time, under any guise whatsoever is actional grounds for dismissal at any time, without notice or appeal. Again, I am fine with that, but I'm sceptical you'll find many willing employees or candidates who would volunteer for that scruntiny.
As long as you can reliably demonstrate that one has to do with the other, that's fine. If you're all working on is a vague prejudice then just call it that.
It seems to be that anything that employers want to use to exclude you and depress wages they will do. That's common sense but in a way it's pretty creepy. After social networking, maybe they can say no based on where you live, or if any of your relatives are in jail, or the number of speeding tickets you have or your medical history.
Actually my employer is the former owner of Lenovo. I actually have some insight into how this works. Next, Lenovo support for consumer machines is in fact different from support provided for corporate customers. That difference is a hugely complex iteration of all the customizations that corporate customers demand such as custom hardware and software images. Believe me, it's real and one of the drivers for why Lenovo no longer belongs to IBM. The overhead to keep those corporate customers is enormous. Next, the point you missed is that there are 2 different product lines. One is the Lenovo line which Lenovo has done a good if not great job with on their own for years. The other is their newly acquired Thinkpad line. One need only go their own support pages to understand that big problem is the almost limitless expansion of models and submodels. There are for example more then 50 different variants of the Thinkpad T-40 alone. But corporate customers really don't care because they offload that level of support to the vendor. Corporate customers try to recycle their hardware on 3-5 year intervals because FASB rules allow them to depreciate them over 3 years but the hardware probably has up to 2 more years of technical life beyond their financial life.
So stuffing the channel up front with a new expensive model is generally not going to be attractive to corporate customers. With a 3-5 lifecycle they can only utilize at best 20-33% of their projected inventory turnover per year. And next year, the new model is now different, and the year after that and so on.
Are you starting to get it yet?
You can purchase different repair service contracts which is where the warranty becomes worthwhile. Otherwise they just stare at you and tell you to ship the machine back to them.
I purchased a 3 year local depot drop off repair service contract as well as Lojack for Laptops. They added about 170$ to the cost but if the unit is dropped, broken at least I can go somewhere locally and get it fixed, they know who I am, what the terms of the agreement are and so on. And if it's stolen or lost, Lojack makes and attempt to track it down and alert the cops for you. I guess if you lose the data you're screwed unless you backup regularly. I have a big USB drive just for that purpose.
Color me cynical but when I hear something is long overdue I wonder if it's been thrown together quickly out of desperation. This model or models which check in at 4+lbs are not ultraportable. One would think that with a smallish screen it would come in a little lighter.
/Yes I am bitter and slaving away on a 3 year old T-40 while my managment chain tells me that anyone with a 900Mhz CPU or higher is not eligible for a hardware upgrade, indefinitely. That puts my 3 year old machine at least 2 more years from replacement. That ought to be fun trying to run, support and patch XP Pro on a 5 year old machine in the 2008-9 timeframe while MS has its hands full trying to keep Vista from running off the rails.
Moreover, Lenovo clearly has a demarc between consumer models (N series, V series, etc.) and their corporate customer brand (Thinkpad). I have to wonder how they're going to support a consumer model like this out of the corporate channel since obviously there are zero corporations out there who are going to stock their inventories with this. It's at least $900 too high for that. I'm sorry but to me this sounds like another one of those glitzy PC's your Director gets while you toil away on a 3 year old T-40. Frankly I'm shocked they haven't built seamless functionality with a Blackberry and/or Treo 700 into it since that's the sweet spot of the people who are bound to get one of these. And of course it needs a docking station and massive audio.
But in either case, if you Joe Shmoe picks one of these up for your own use, what kind of support are you going to get from the channel that typically handles big customers who buy hundreds or thousands of units at a clip? Think they'll put your pissant problem at the top of the queue?
And for the record. I have a Lenovo N100 as well and while I love it, someone needs to shoot the person in the head who decided on the price points for hard drive upgrades. Lenovo wants more than $120 to upgrade an 80GB drive for a 120GB. That is patently insane.
Google's interface is vastly richer than most people understand. If Google created cribsheets or had better assisted help that explained the richness of their entry syntax then people would be better at using it.
Now having said that, a few other issues -
Tech literacy in schools devolves to teaching kids how to use Microsoft applications like Office. And most of the problem with that is that MS has created overly complex beasts that are hard to use in the first place. Moreover, none of them was created with a student in mind.
People have short attention spans. If you're going to force people to 'use' the internet for school work then you're going to have to get Google and their ilk to partner with schools to provide more elegant and faster and more limited results windows to students.
You are going to have to understand that just like teachers teach to the test, students use tools to answer the specific question and no more. No one, or almost no one is going to surf the web to casually learn more about Rene Decartes or the history of wool. They are looking for the answers to questions 1, 3, 7 etc. on their worksheet. And if the result could spit back the exact sentence they could then write on their sheet, that would be great.
Next you're going to have to pare down technical complexity. My flat screen TV has a 63 page users manual (just the English). My phone's user's guide is more than 240 pages. Neither of them does exactly what I want nor do they do exctly what their vast tomes of documentation say they should do. Similarly if your computer apps are buggy, broken, poorly documented or overly documented then it means you probably did a poor job yourself on the fit and finish of the apps.
Last but not least, the general interface on computers is junk. In the broader sense, it assumes that the application you had me install is very important and has to be front and center all the time. My son's computer has so many icons in the system tray I don't even know what most of them are. Why would anyone in their right mind even screw with them and risk breaking something? I wouldn't.
and thanks for all the fish.
mad props to the first person who posted that here. Kudos.
If you give a phone tracking device to your.....what? 10 year old? Then that will allow to do.....what precisely? Compare that with your 16-17-18 year old whose movements you will track and that will allow.....what again? Seems to me if you have a kid who refuses to callback or answer their phone you've lost either way. And if you want to use this as a passive device to track them in spite of their own behavior, well, let's just say I'm glad I don't have to sit down with your family at dinner.
See, let's just set aside the squishy implications of whether you think this is an ethical thing to do. That's your decision to make, not mine. Instead, as a practical matter, if your kid tells you they're at "A's" house and you doublecheck and discover they're not, then what do you do? And below a certain age if your kid is out of your sight and lying to you about it, then you have bigger problems than technology can solve, unless of course you plan on subjecting your kids to drug tests and lie detector tests the moment you drag them home. On the other hand, if your kid is almost 18, then the same behavior really says more about you as a parent and maybe your anal retentive, passive aggressive borderline paranoid martyr complex than it does about your kids.
Let's just say that as a parent of teenagers who routinely do not like to be interrupted when they are doing exactly what they told me they were going to do, that whether I can verify where they are at all times will just make them that much less eager to talk to me and answer their phone. As I've said many many times;
Sometimes the greatest revenge you can wreak on a control freak is to actually give them total control. It will piss them off and burn them out faster than resistance.
An interesting political polemic, but patently false as far as the real world of consumer products is concerned. Otherwise we in the US would have GOOD cell phone service and GOOD cell phones, not OLD CRAPPY services and products on par with Japan or Europe circa 1995. Otherwise we would in the US have a medical delivery system that didn't cost 20% of the GDP and manage to kill 250,000 people a year through accidents and mistakes. See all the Libertarians in the world always miss the fact that it is not they who are in charge, it's the companies they worship.
I have all of those features today. There is zero need to reinvent the wheel. It used to be that MS would scour the marketplace to find companies that had interesting features to add to Windows then they would buy the company. Now MS simply reinvents what's already there, usually no better than anyone else and calls it new and improved. It's just lock in, because as I said, I already have all those features today. Buying a new PC with a new OS to give what I already have in fact is trivial. And in reality, we will all find that instead of simply bolting on applications, all these replicated features embedded in the OS will get in the way of themselves and create what we all understand is more fragile, inflexible system, not less.
Every touted improvement in Vista exists to make Microsoft's life and the life of their media and hardware partners better and more enriched. It is not, I repeat, not for your benefit or enjoyment. Recently MS stated this would be last 'turn of the crank' for an OS like this. I agree. This is because the only logical step next would be to lease you the OS and the hardware, only, and bar you from doing anything on your own with it. Since that's not bound to fly, yet (let's see how they react to Google) then the alternative is to lock you into their content, at least.
After all, everyone is infringing on sentient robots life intellectual property.
Treo 700 phones come in Palm and Windows. But they're not exactly the same hardware. The Palm based unit has a higher res screen; 320x320 vs 240x240. The Palm unit has less talktime; 4.5hrs vs 5. Other than that and the apps that come with them, they are the same. Comes down to personal preference I guess.
Depends on what you think cheap is. I just bought a 'cheap' 1/8th inch stereo plug on both ends 6ft cable for $6 from Radio Shack. I think that's overpriced. but I see your point. I guess if everyone had a prong power plug it would sort of standardize things.
But I tend to think that phone companies are all corrupt bastards who want to nickle and dime you to death so what they'll do is stop including any form of charger with the phone at all. I mean I have a bunch of phones now with some form of data port for which that phone manufacturer themselves doesn't even make a cable to mate to it.
And all Samsung phones that I see have two power ports - one for the jazzy flat connector and one for a pole connector. I wonder why the complexity?
A lost cable is a lost cable. Whether it's a standard prong or not, still has to be replaced. I don't see Best Buy for instance charging a fair, e.g. cheap price for either.
But I don't care what's on the phone side if all I have to worry about is a cable. That is, if I take the wall side out of the equation altogether then who cares? There is no need to put the same connector into the phone side of all phones where the onlt removeable part, as such, is a cable. I could get a USB out-splitter and plug one adapter into the wall and have multiple cables out to any kind of phone. If it's a weird Nokia or a Samsung or a more common pole type, then so what?
My CEO makes a billion dollars and truly believes he is a god. No one tells him or his top 50 reports anything. They bark, you sit up on your hind legs.
There will be 40-50 megawebsites who proudly call themselves MS Antiphishing Certified. They'll have a little logo. It's all a crossbranding strategy. And everyone else will happily stumble along as they do today.
Let's see the likely candidates:
Wal*Mart
Target
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Petsmart
Victoria's Secret
Abercrombie and Fitch
Dell
and so on.....
None of the financial companies will go for this nor will TicketMaster, etc.
WTF does that mean? I have an iPod aftermarket charger that plugs into the wall and accepts the iPod's standard USB cable. Is that what they mean? Because at the least that would mean I could use a cheap wallplug unit for all my phone regardless of what stupid unique connector they use on the phone end. Of course that means that USB cables will triple in price.
Otherwise if they mean that all phones have to be charged by a USB port to a computer alone that would make less than zero sense. Considering, as others here have pointed out, not all USB ports draw enough current, it doubly makes less than zero sense.
I went to Home Depot's website 2 days ago and the whole thing was down because and I quote "high volumes because of the holiday season". I don't know whether that's really funny or really sad.
But in a more insidious vein, the #1 website killer to me is registration. I am sick of registration. I am dropping real products because of their website's registration. I am cancelling sales in process because of last second registration requirements. I have stopped magazine and newspaper subscriptions because of registration to their websites. I am not doing registration anymore:
Your website is free, you don't need registration
I am paying my money to you for your product/service, you don't need registration
I already registered the product, you don't need registration
I am paying with a credit card, you don't need registration
and so on. Not gonna do registration anymore.
Not gonna jump through hoops to figure out another password you will accept that will allow me to give you my money. Not gonna worry about you emailing me my forgotten password anymore. You lost that sale, I hope you are thrilled with that.
In the corporate arena standards are for other people and the result is that you get hundreds of disconnected so called standards. Moreover the executives get their own infrastructure and support and are so disconnected from the sweaty minions that they truly have zero concept of how well or poorly the rest of their infrastructure works. So hells yeah, let's have Google impose standardization on us. The fact is, there really isn't much of a support overhead for all those canned apps. The fact is that those are not the key security holes. It's all the other shit they implement. And that's not going to change.
C'mon those are all toys. If you really want to get hurt, buy a weapon.
Ok so now we're in the 26th Century. Time travel, trading bodies on demand, immortality, whatnot. The further you push this stuff into the future the more it becomes a Science Fantasy Chick Flick Soap Opera. Everything will get magically solved with magic science at the end of every episode. Engines going to blow up? Push the 17th dimension button that supercools them to 1 billion degrees below absolute zero. Then fly through the sun with your sun protector shield. Naturally.
My corporate environment is close to implosion from the unending requirements for yet more passwords. You need a password to power up your machine, a password to start Windows, a password for Lotus Notes, a VPN dialer password, an intranet password for web apps, timecard apps, expenses, etc, an IM password (generally the intranet password), a password for HR apps, a password for benefits information. And we check for all of them and they expire but not at the same time and various password delivery subsystems employ different rules with different strengths. So it's almost impossible to keep it all straight without your own database. Once you find a new password that meets a given criterion you really just want to reset all of them to the same password - even though they are on different systems. So you wind up either with a lot of different passwords or exactly the same one. Or some messed up place in between.
I don't suspect MyAss users have more than two passwords to worry about - IM and MyAss. So they can afford to get creative. I don't, if I screw it up it's huge pain in the ass to get a reset.