Anyone who thinks this is no big deal, was either never fired or didn't like the job they were fired from.
Not at all. If I'm ever in the position where I need to fire somebody, I would definitely do so in person.
I know this is a huge deal for the people involved, and I'm not excusing Radio Shack's actions; I'm saying that there could have been far, far worse mistakes than the one they made.
I don't see anybody endorsing this course of action; I know I'm not. I just think this is not the worst possible outcome. Employees could have not been given any warning; they could have been fired without a severance package, instead of up to nine months of free pay; or they could have been escorted off the premises by security instead of a manager. Radio Shack's blunder seems mild compared to what others have done.
I also disagree with this being "soul-destroying," but for a slightly different reason. It could have been a lot worse - TFA says that there were multiple face-to-face meetings prior to the announcement, with an opportunity for employees to ask questions. There was also a severance package. It wasn't the best way to approach the problem, but at least it wasn't unexpected.
I have been told that the problem with using an external hard drive as a backup system is that it is difficult to verify whether a backup was completed successfully, and is recoverable.
That's true, but it's not limited to hard drives - it's a general problem that affects tapes, DVDs, and any other media you back up to. The reasoning is simple - for the vast majority of people, the "restore" operation happens much less frequently than the "backup" operation, and thus isn't tested as well. The data isn't the only piece of the puzzle - you have to be sure you can get the system to a state in which it can successfully read the backup media.
For companies that are serious about data integrity, recovery drills are standard operating procedure, and they go far beyond checking a "verify backup" box in the software. At the minimum, a random backup set will be partially restored; more careful training may include a complete restore to bare metal in a lab environment. Ideally, you want system recovery to be routine for the people who will be in charge during a crisis.
He made a typo. You could change a single "s" to a "d" and the post would make perfect sense. (Note that the "s" and "d" are right next to each other on the qwerty keyboard.)
While we're nitpicking, metaphors are not proper nouns.
I did read TFA, but I didn't understand how the scrolling UI works. The photos weren't much help. If the Zune does have a wheel, though, that will be a very interesting development - that's really the feature that makes or breaks the iPod, and I was under the impression that Apple patented it. If Apple didn't, why haven't any of their competitors picked up on it yet?
I know what you're saying, and I agree, but I wanted to point out a counterargument. The vast majority of DVD burners don't have the ability to write to the part of a DVD with the CSS coding. If you accept that the MPAA isn't going to allow you to burn an un-DRMed movie (however misguided they are), then you need a disc that's pre-formatted with the necessary CSS. The alternative would be a new DRM system that wouldn't play on regular DVD players.
The investment to make a movie is substantial. All the people in the credits get paid, equipment is rented and/or purchased, special effects need to be created. Even the film costs astonishingly large amounts of money. Obviously, there is some value in the movie, otherwise you wouldn't invest the time in pirating it. I agree copyright has been taken too far, but very few people are of the delusion that we can get rid of it entirely. If we didn't have copyright, who would pay for that movie you have shown yourself to value?
According to your logic everytime I make my own hamburger instead of buying one from McDonalds I am depriving some snot nosed kid of a living...but if you can do it better, faster, cheaper, etc too bad for them.
Your analogy is flawed. Nobody is preventing you from making your own movie, paying for the videotape, the equipment, and the labor. If you can produce a better product than Hollywood for less, good for you. By your logic, however, you could buy a master print from the first movie theater to release the cool movie of the moment and undersell the distributor. The creators of the movie get nothing, and you make pure profit for doing nothing. I'm sure you'd like that a lot, but honestly, how long do you think that would last before movies stopped getting made?
Incidentally, the same logic works for patents. It's nice that we have all this wonderful medical equipment and drugs to keep you alive, but who will pay the researchers if somebody else can easily come along and trivially steal the knowledge that was accumulated through substantial financial investments?
It's not hard, but it's not what we want. It should not be possible for a voter to prove who they voted for; if they could, an entirely different problem, voter coercion, becomes possible. What is hard is creating a safe process for counting votes given the requirement that votes be anonymous.
Why do we even need computers for a process as trivial as counting votes? It seems infinitely simpler to put a representative from every political party in a room, in front of the press, and have everybody agree on where the "X" is.
I'm a fan of optical ballots - the voter's intention is clear, counting is fast, a significant audit trail is created (the ballots themselves plus the electronic counts in both the precinct machine and the central counting machine), and people are already used to filling in the bubble. You can tamper with any voting system, but at least people are used to securing paper ballots.
When I delete a file, I want it to be gone, with no undelete possibility.
It hasn't been that way for a long, long time. Between backups, the Recycle Bin, and the restoration of deleted files fairly easy, the only way for a file to be gone is to use a secure wipe utility. I guarantee that most people don't know that.
This is a good thing. It's essentially Subversion with a GUI. I've been wondering for years why it's taken this long to appear, and why the Linux distros haven't got around to it yet.
The first two boxes of cards check that they're being run on the correct reader, and that they're Genuine (TM) IBM cards. Then, the next 500 boxes get fed into the machine, only to gum up the feed mechanism before anything productive gets done.
I'm a professional, and it's not uncommon for it to take me 3-5 hours to do a good job of getting all of the software, utilities, and configuration changes done for a typical business machine.
But a typical business machine is precisely the kind of machine that you should be able to re-image. The advantages of roaming profiles are enormous, and machines should be set up to use them. If they are, then repairing a virus or spyware infection would be a simple matter of rebooting with the image CD in the drive.
The good news is that if you know what you're doing (unfortunately many techs don't) VERY few problems require a rebuild.
True, but in many cases, a reimage can be faster. Even if configuration isn't saved, it might be worth the tradeoff to reimage the machine than to spend the time poking through the registry, tracking down media, and so forth.
It's very possible to clean off even the "worst" infections fairly quickly, with high confidence that everything is gone.
The worst infections tend to change system files to install hooks that a typical cleaner can't find.
If you are a tech and haven't learned this stuff, you are doing your customers and yourself a disservice.
I know this stuff, and having done it both ways, I'm pretty comfortable saying that a reimage on a properly managed machine is faster and more likely to rid the problem than a manual repair.
I haven't made up my mind about this issue one way or the other, but I would like to hear your opinion on something. I went to read my state's computer crimes law. All of the crimes covered by the law are limited to access "without authorization." Without authorization is essentially defined as lack of permission from the owner.
Here's my question: what constitutes permission? Consider web sites. Most do not explicitly grant permission on all their pages, and many don't have terms of service. Google doesn't even have a direct link to their terms of service from search result pages.
If a web site does grant permission, how can you know that until you've actually connected to the server and fetched the data? I'm not a lawyer, but it seems that I would be guilty of a computer crime every time I visit a site without the owner granting me permission beforehand.
Alternatively, the mere act of a public server responding to a connection request could constitute permission. If this is the case, why isn't an open access point also implicitly granting permission?
They get you to pay $2 for a song you don't want and their the ones that need to be hit with a clue stick?
This is the first step. If they see that they can make money without DRM, maybe they'll think about releasing the songs I used to buy from them without DRM as well.
Are spoken words copyright-able? In other words, if I listen to a song and transcribe the lyrics, is that copyright infringement?
In the U.S., copyright is extended once the work is "fixed in a tangible form." For lyrics, that means once the lyricist and/or composer touch pen to paper. Once you have copyright, you can't read or sing the idea from that paper, because that would be a "public performance" of the song. You wouldn't be able to transcribe the lyrics because that would be a copy of the original. It doesn't matter whether the copy is made by a Xerox of the original or a transcription from a licensed performance.
If true, newspapers have been infringing constantly with all of their so called "quoting" of sources.
Newspapers (and indeed, anybody who makes a copy of a short quote) are protected by fair use.
I seem to remember a case from my college years that it was found to be "fair use" for a student to transcribe and publish a teacher's lecture (spoken words) for the web, but it was illegal to copy-paste any printed notes he had provided.
Sounds about right. Of course, if the teacher had been reading from a script, that might be protected as well.
freedb.org claims the data is licensed under the GPL; therefore, you should have the right to distribute it as you see fit, provided you comply with the GPL.
As far as whether you can free it from the GPL, I believe the answer is no. While the data is arguably merely facts, and therefore not protected by copyright law, I think there was a copyright amendment recently that made a particular compilation of data subject to copyright. I don't know whether it passed or not.
Here's the Slashdot article on the subject. Unfortunately, TFA it links to is gone.
TFMs are at the FCC site. I'll go ahead and summarize for you.
EAS is equipped to transmit audio and data warnings (but not video, per se) originated from the President or a variety of national, state, and local government agencies. Broadcasters can also activate EAS locally if there is a need to.
Most broadcasters are required to have an EAS encoder and decoder (usually the same device) installed. In most cases, the unit is installed between the station's program feed and the transmitter, allowing the unit to automatically override the station's signal when an alert is issued.
Each EAS device monitors at least two audio feeds. Which feeds are monitored depends on the operating plan for the individual locality, but they can include other broadcast stations, a state or local government agency, or NOAA Radio.
The buzz noises you heard are called SAME codes (Specific Area Message Encoding). SAME codes are digital tones that convey the orginator of an alert, its type (national notifications, a variety of weather events, AMBER alerts, tests and system administrative messages, and others - around 80 total), the location (accurate to the sub-county level), the date and time of the alert and its duration, and the station that relayed the alert. The SAME code is transmitted three times for redundancy.
The EAS device decides what to do with the alert based on how it is programmed. Decoders have to be able to store an alert in case a higher-priority alert is being transmitted on its alternate feed. EANs (Emergency Action Notifications) from the President have to go out live. Video services (such as cable and broadcast television) are required to display a visual warning based on the SAME code. This is usually implemented as a message crawl.
At the end of the alert, the three final bursts are SAME messages that order the EAS decoder to switch back to station audio.
It's very possible the KQED talent were unaware a message was going out. EAS could have been activated, broadcasted the alert, and shut down, all without the studio knowing. Alternatively, you could have been listening to a tape.
I'd prefer if you specifically list how apple have changed the DRM restrictions rather than state it as a generic fact, when it simply isn't.
Certainly. A detailed list of DRM changes in iTunes is available at George Hotelling's blog. (Hotelling is somewhat well-known for having an eBay auction for a permanent sale of an iTunes song taken down for violating the "downloadable media" policy.)
Just in case clicking a link is as difficult as a Google search is for you, I'll summarize:
Songs can only be streamed to a subnet. Prior to 4.0.1, they could be streamed anywhere. The streaming functionality was further restricted in 4.7.1 to five computers in a 24-hour period, instead of five at a time.
Playlists can only be burned seven times, and switching the order of the playlist doesn't reset the counter. Prior to 4.5, playlists could be burned ten times.
A variety of third-party programs have been intentionally broken. Some stripped the DRM; others were more benign, such as a program that allowed DRM-protected files to be copied back to a computer, and a system that attached FairPlay DRM in a way designed to make a competing music service compatible with the iPod.
They do have an option, but they don't do a particularly good job of advertising or documenting it. Instructions are available at this link. I believe access to reports is free, but you need a certificate to get access, which costs several hundred dollars.
I'm not saying this system is ideal - only that it's available if you're looking to pursue it.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all. If I'm ever in the position where I need to fire somebody, I would definitely do so in person.
I know this is a huge deal for the people involved, and I'm not excusing Radio Shack's actions; I'm saying that there could have been far, far worse mistakes than the one they made.
I don't see anybody endorsing this course of action; I know I'm not. I just think this is not the worst possible outcome. Employees could have not been given any warning; they could have been fired without a severance package, instead of up to nine months of free pay; or they could have been escorted off the premises by security instead of a manager. Radio Shack's blunder seems mild compared to what others have done.
I also disagree with this being "soul-destroying," but for a slightly different reason. It could have been a lot worse - TFA says that there were multiple face-to-face meetings prior to the announcement, with an opportunity for employees to ask questions. There was also a severance package. It wasn't the best way to approach the problem, but at least it wasn't unexpected.
I have been told that the problem with using an external hard drive as a backup system is that it is difficult to verify whether a backup was completed successfully, and is recoverable.
That's true, but it's not limited to hard drives - it's a general problem that affects tapes, DVDs, and any other media you back up to. The reasoning is simple - for the vast majority of people, the "restore" operation happens much less frequently than the "backup" operation, and thus isn't tested as well. The data isn't the only piece of the puzzle - you have to be sure you can get the system to a state in which it can successfully read the backup media.
For companies that are serious about data integrity, recovery drills are standard operating procedure, and they go far beyond checking a "verify backup" box in the software. At the minimum, a random backup set will be partially restored; more careful training may include a complete restore to bare metal in a lab environment. Ideally, you want system recovery to be routine for the people who will be in charge during a crisis.
He made a typo. You could change a single "s" to a "d" and the post would make perfect sense. (Note that the "s" and "d" are right next to each other on the qwerty keyboard.)
While we're nitpicking, metaphors are not proper nouns.
We can lose together.
Never mind - I figured it out. I missed the first paragraph.
I did read TFA, but I didn't understand how the scrolling UI works. The photos weren't much help. If the Zune does have a wheel, though, that will be a very interesting development - that's really the feature that makes or breaks the iPod, and I was under the impression that Apple patented it. If Apple didn't, why haven't any of their competitors picked up on it yet?
I know what you're saying, and I agree, but I wanted to point out a counterargument. The vast majority of DVD burners don't have the ability to write to the part of a DVD with the CSS coding. If you accept that the MPAA isn't going to allow you to burn an un-DRMed movie (however misguided they are), then you need a disc that's pre-formatted with the necessary CSS. The alternative would be a new DRM system that wouldn't play on regular DVD players.
Source: http://www.isc.tamu.edu/~lewing/linux/
I don't have a YouTube account. Anybody want to ask toutsmith where the penguins come from?
Your analogy is flawed. Nobody is preventing you from making your own movie, paying for the videotape, the equipment, and the labor. If you can produce a better product than Hollywood for less, good for you. By your logic, however, you could buy a master print from the first movie theater to release the cool movie of the moment and undersell the distributor. The creators of the movie get nothing, and you make pure profit for doing nothing. I'm sure you'd like that a lot, but honestly, how long do you think that would last before movies stopped getting made?
Incidentally, the same logic works for patents. It's nice that we have all this wonderful medical equipment and drugs to keep you alive, but who will pay the researchers if somebody else can easily come along and trivially steal the knowledge that was accumulated through substantial financial investments?
It's not hard, but it's not what we want. It should not be possible for a voter to prove who they voted for; if they could, an entirely different problem, voter coercion, becomes possible. What is hard is creating a safe process for counting votes given the requirement that votes be anonymous.
Why do we even need computers for a process as trivial as counting votes? It seems infinitely simpler to put a representative from every political party in a room, in front of the press, and have everybody agree on where the "X" is.
I'm a fan of optical ballots - the voter's intention is clear, counting is fast, a significant audit trail is created (the ballots themselves plus the electronic counts in both the precinct machine and the central counting machine), and people are already used to filling in the bubble. You can tamper with any voting system, but at least people are used to securing paper ballots.
Depends on where you live. My state requires a government-issued photo ID.
It hasn't been that way for a long, long time. Between backups, the Recycle Bin, and the restoration of deleted files fairly easy, the only way for a file to be gone is to use a secure wipe utility. I guarantee that most people don't know that.
This is a good thing. It's essentially Subversion with a GUI. I've been wondering for years why it's taken this long to appear, and why the Linux distros haven't got around to it yet.
The first two boxes of cards check that they're being run on the correct reader, and that they're Genuine (TM) IBM cards. Then, the next 500 boxes get fed into the machine, only to gum up the feed mechanism before anything productive gets done.
But a typical business machine is precisely the kind of machine that you should be able to re-image. The advantages of roaming profiles are enormous, and machines should be set up to use them. If they are, then repairing a virus or spyware infection would be a simple matter of rebooting with the image CD in the drive.
True, but in many cases, a reimage can be faster. Even if configuration isn't saved, it might be worth the tradeoff to reimage the machine than to spend the time poking through the registry, tracking down media, and so forth.
The worst infections tend to change system files to install hooks that a typical cleaner can't find.
I know this stuff, and having done it both ways, I'm pretty comfortable saying that a reimage on a properly managed machine is faster and more likely to rid the problem than a manual repair.
I haven't made up my mind about this issue one way or the other, but I would like to hear your opinion on something. I went to read my state's computer crimes law. All of the crimes covered by the law are limited to access "without authorization." Without authorization is essentially defined as lack of permission from the owner.
Here's my question: what constitutes permission? Consider web sites. Most do not explicitly grant permission on all their pages, and many don't have terms of service. Google doesn't even have a direct link to their terms of service from search result pages.
If a web site does grant permission, how can you know that until you've actually connected to the server and fetched the data? I'm not a lawyer, but it seems that I would be guilty of a computer crime every time I visit a site without the owner granting me permission beforehand.
Alternatively, the mere act of a public server responding to a connection request could constitute permission. If this is the case, why isn't an open access point also implicitly granting permission?
- Open Volume Control. (It's usually in Start - All Programs - Accessories - Entertainment; alternatively, Start - Run - sndvol32)
- In the Options menu, click Properties.
- Click the Recording radio button.
- Make sure "Wave Out Mix", or your equivalent, is checked.
- Click OK.
- Make sure the appropriate channel's Select check box is checked.
Now, most apps that try to accept sound will do so from the output of your sound card.They get you to pay $2 for a song you don't want and their the ones that need to be hit with a clue stick?
This is the first step. If they see that they can make money without DRM, maybe they'll think about releasing the songs I used to buy from them without DRM as well.
Who's going to buy her music let a lone [sic] pirate it!
Me. $1.99 is a small price to pay to hit the MAFIAA with a cluestick. I can always delete the file later. (In fact, I probably will.)
IANAL.
Are spoken words copyright-able? In other words, if I listen to a song and transcribe the lyrics, is that copyright infringement?
In the U.S., copyright is extended once the work is "fixed in a tangible form." For lyrics, that means once the lyricist and/or composer touch pen to paper. Once you have copyright, you can't read or sing the idea from that paper, because that would be a "public performance" of the song. You wouldn't be able to transcribe the lyrics because that would be a copy of the original. It doesn't matter whether the copy is made by a Xerox of the original or a transcription from a licensed performance.
If true, newspapers have been infringing constantly with all of their so called "quoting" of sources.
Newspapers (and indeed, anybody who makes a copy of a short quote) are protected by fair use.
I seem to remember a case from my college years that it was found to be "fair use" for a student to transcribe and publish a teacher's lecture (spoken words) for the web, but it was illegal to copy-paste any printed notes he had provided.
Sounds about right. Of course, if the teacher had been reading from a script, that might be protected as well.
Note: I am most certainly not a lawyer.
freedb.org claims the data is licensed under the GPL; therefore, you should have the right to distribute it as you see fit, provided you comply with the GPL.
As far as whether you can free it from the GPL, I believe the answer is no. While the data is arguably merely facts, and therefore not protected by copyright law, I think there was a copyright amendment recently that made a particular compilation of data subject to copyright. I don't know whether it passed or not.
Here's the Slashdot article on the subject. Unfortunately, TFA it links to is gone.
TFMs are at the FCC site. I'll go ahead and summarize for you.
EAS is equipped to transmit audio and data warnings (but not video, per se) originated from the President or a variety of national, state, and local government agencies. Broadcasters can also activate EAS locally if there is a need to.
Most broadcasters are required to have an EAS encoder and decoder (usually the same device) installed. In most cases, the unit is installed between the station's program feed and the transmitter, allowing the unit to automatically override the station's signal when an alert is issued.
Each EAS device monitors at least two audio feeds. Which feeds are monitored depends on the operating plan for the individual locality, but they can include other broadcast stations, a state or local government agency, or NOAA Radio.
The buzz noises you heard are called SAME codes (Specific Area Message Encoding). SAME codes are digital tones that convey the orginator of an alert, its type (national notifications, a variety of weather events, AMBER alerts, tests and system administrative messages, and others - around 80 total), the location (accurate to the sub-county level), the date and time of the alert and its duration, and the station that relayed the alert. The SAME code is transmitted three times for redundancy.
The EAS device decides what to do with the alert based on how it is programmed. Decoders have to be able to store an alert in case a higher-priority alert is being transmitted on its alternate feed. EANs (Emergency Action Notifications) from the President have to go out live. Video services (such as cable and broadcast television) are required to display a visual warning based on the SAME code. This is usually implemented as a message crawl.
At the end of the alert, the three final bursts are SAME messages that order the EAS decoder to switch back to station audio.
It's very possible the KQED talent were unaware a message was going out. EAS could have been activated, broadcasted the alert, and shut down, all without the studio knowing. Alternatively, you could have been listening to a tape.
In IBM's defense, it's not a format they've made up. hCalendar's primary author is from Technorati.
Certainly. A detailed list of DRM changes in iTunes is available at George Hotelling's blog. (Hotelling is somewhat well-known for having an eBay auction for a permanent sale of an iTunes song taken down for violating the "downloadable media" policy.)
Just in case clicking a link is as difficult as a Google search is for you, I'll summarize:
They do have an option, but they don't do a particularly good job of advertising or documenting it. Instructions are available at this link. I believe access to reports is free, but you need a certificate to get access, which costs several hundred dollars.
I'm not saying this system is ideal - only that it's available if you're looking to pursue it.