170 hours a week? I should certainly hope not. Then again, if you work for a company where that's physically possible, then it can't bother you too much since you have access to the company time machine.
Actually, the parent poster had a better point. What's to stop someone from registering "McDonalds.Hamburger", "McDonalds.Fries", or "McDonalds.restaurant", other than the cost.
The fact that they'll be sued into oblivion for trademark infringement?
Even if most of your data fits into category 1, that doesn't mean it's not a pain in the ass to deal with losing it. I've been ripping all of my DVDs to full-quality h264 files (something that works out to iTunes compatible, really couldn't tell you what anymore) and while it wouldn't be the end of the world if it was lost, it would still be a tremendous pain in the ass to re-rip all of that stuff. Porn, whatever, it only gets used once or twice anyways... (I don't think I have ANY saved right now, if you can believe it) but I've got a ton of other media where it would be a considerable inconvenience to re-rip. I don't know about your internet connection, but any offsite system for me would have to be a sneakernet rather than an online service of some sort, and the cost of that is thoroughly offputting.
Never mind my photo collection, which could easily grow faster than my ripped DVDs on a busy day, especially once you figure in copies for editing. I'd have to use a four-point scale (don't care, inconvenient, better not lose this, can't lose it) and while the media would get a 2, the photos would rank between a 3 and a 4. And even 100GB can be quite daunting to back up for a home users at the "this should only be unavailable for more than a few minutes in the event of a very extended power outage or the house catching fire" level.
A very quick check puts an LTO4 tape drive at an entry point of $3700, plus media and actually interfacing it with a system. Most people (companies) with a budget that allow for that kind of hardware not only have such a system in place, but have someone on staff who knows how to avoid the problems that RAID5 can/will bring down the road. And that's fine for businesses. However, RAID5 is reasonably cost-effective for home users as well (at least until offsite via Amazon S3 and the like becomes practical, which is entirely dependent on how fast internet connection uplink speeds are), and much more likely to be employed by someone who isn't aware of these kinds of risks.
So, as someone who is clearly pretty well-versed in backup-related tech, do you have any ideas that would work for a home user who doesn't live on a yacht?
Look at Trism, which also sells for five bucks. The guy who made it has brought in over a quarter million already (as of when the article about him was written, at least a month ago), and I believe that's after Apple's fees. Granted, he had it out as a demo on the Jailbroken phones and got a lot of good advertising that way, not to mention the fact that he made a very damn good product.
Any app which has developers (in the plural) behind it is certainly expecting to be profitable. There are plenty of apps released by hobbyists, but there are also tons more that are being produced by real companies, and you can be damn sure that they're not doing it for charity.
I've only briefly poked with the SDK (I specialize in web work so it's a bit trickier to pick up coming from that whole coding style), but it seems easy enough to work with especially if you have prior Cocoa experience. Given that 9000 copies of an app sold means, by most reasonably-current estimates, that you sell only one copy for more than every thousand iPhone owners, that number hardly sounds unattainable if you have a product that doesn't completely suck. Tell your iPhone-owning friends, have them tell their friends... it'll go by that mark in no time if it's worth its salt.
Then go make an offer like this, and get all of the otherwise-free advertising? This is brilliant marketing. $30k for millions of views, and giving people a financial incentive to buy? Again, content is king, but if the game is any good they'll probably sell 50k+ copies thanks to this.
They do, inch-for-inch. You find me a 67" CRT and I'll find you a CRT that takes five times the power of a 67" LCD. When you replace your old 22" tube with a 50" LCD, you have to spew media across more than four times the surface area. They're more efficient, but not that much more efficient.
It's not just about uptime though. While I'll usually make the same arguments for the cloud, if something knocks out my internet connection I'm screwed regardless of whether it's available to everyone else or not. Yes, your data is on the whole a lot safer (at least with a company like Google that's not going away any time soon) in 99% of the cases, but the idea still scares a lot of companies.
When Google implements something where you can configure the Apps For Your Domain content to sync down to a server you're physically in control of, it will scare businesses and nervous geeks a LOT less. When they make some sort of OpenOffice plugin (where you log in to your google/apps for your domain account) or a Google Docs desktop suite as step 2, Ballmer will shit himself. When they make it have complete computability with MS Office documents, MS Office will die, and die VERY quickly.
Google Apps has the MAJOR advantage of having live document collaboration, which AFAIK isn't even close to available in MS Office or OpenOffice.org. For some people/companies this doesn't matter at all, but for others it'll make it the obvious choice. You can think of it like the collaborative features offered by Sharepoint and the like, but implemented in a way that is actually usable.
On the flip side, you're going to need a lot of love from Gears if a hosted solution scares you. While Docs is fine for what I do most of the time (and the rest of the time I really need more of a layout tool, like Apple's Pages), I envision them seeing a lot more adoption if there were a desktop app that synced up with the cloud (whether Google's, or your own internal setup which could be as simple as a network share). And of course, pretty much anything that's not MS Office tends to have compatibility issues with the MS Office-using rest of the world, whether you like it or not. You can whine all you want about the lack of truly open standards for document exchange (besides plain text) and I'd agree with you all day long, but that doesn't fix the problem.
Except that it makes the extender useless with anything except the Apple keyboard (including the Mighty Mouse), not the other way around.
That's just douchiness. Or they've become so full of themselves that only an Apple keyboard could be so worthy as to use that USB extension cord. I'll normally defend Apple when it's reasonable, but this doesn't make a damn bit of sense and claiming otherwise is going out of your way to be foolish.
Luckily it only applies to people who buy an iMac or Mac Pro. Maybe someday I'll find a use for that stupid extender.
Well that's the beauty of the singleton design pattern - you can create exactly zero instances if you want. Which in the context of patent trolls is definitely a bad thing, but it still technically fits the misused term.
Re:I hope it's unique!
on
Web Singletons?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Tubgirl, lemonparty, meatspin, 2G1C, etc. The implementation may vary a bit, but goatse certainly isn't the only shock site out there.
Well a singleton is a software design pattern designed to allow exactly zero or one instances of a class to exist (typically a database connection). But whoever thought the term applies to the services provided by web apps is just an idiot. Especially since as soon as anyone creates something new and vaguely useful, a dozen clones pop up within a week and do it better (though tend to fail anyways, since they never get the initial market share or publicity of the original - see: twitter). The only organizations that could create a "singleton" web app, if you really feel the need to misuse the term that thoroughly, are major patent trolls.
Looks like this does nothing to address encrypted traffic, it's just matching files transmitted in plaintext to a database of MD5/SHA1 hashes. Actually knowing the level of incompetence demonstrated by most enforcement agencies, probably something that generates a 40-bit hash or so, just to ensure as many collisions as possible.
Yeah, that's usually what I was saying about email when the exchange server at my previous employer went down every third week or so. Or when some rodent chewed through the line that handled the VOIP. Or when some transformer down the street got plowed by some idiot driver causing sporadic access to the mains for half a day. Word processors in the cloud may not make a ton of sense right now, but email is fundamentally useless without every machine in the chain working properly.
You try running your software without a power connection and let me know how it goes for you. Laptop batteries don't last that long, and desktop UPSs even less so (assume that the generator, if present, can only keep the servers online indefinitely, not the whole building).
Gmail being down for a few hours is a minor inconvenience at worst. If your dirt cheap or free and completely awesome email being unavailable for two hours a year is causing you to lose business, then you seriously need to rethink your operations. You have a landline, a cell phone, and a fax (among others), and if those are all also out of commission then chances are you've got bigger problems. You know, that mushroom cloud hovering overhead.
So override with a stylesheet that looks roughly like: * { color: #0F0 !important; background-color: #000 !important; } div { display: block !important; float: none !important; } and you'll be all set. The rest of us tend to like looking at something that doesn't resemble a terminal window all day long. There's a reason that browsers provide the ability to override stylesheets and disable javascript. CSS, JS, and all of that other stuff don't take the presentation layer away from you (in fact, they make it a hundred times easier to override rather than the inline styles of old), they just provide defaults.
You can make a site that works fine in every browser that's XHTML 1.0 Strict. Chances are that you'll have to use some non-standard (and probably invalid) CSS in a conditional stylesheet, but that a) doesn't count in terms of X/HTML validation and b) is only linked from the inside of a comment read only by IE, so even if CSS validity was part of being valid X/HTML it wouldn't be checked by the validator.
Granted, you may need to add in some extraneous tags in order to implement the proper CSS hacks, but that makes them extraneous not invalid. But that's just as true for implementing rounded corners, which is in CSS3 (and accessible in Safari and Firefox by using the -webkit-border-radius and -moz-border-radius properties respectively) but is an unnecessarily large pain in the ass to implement on any element that isn't of a fixed width and height.
You're absolutely correct that IE6 is a huge PITA to code for (as is IE7, but less so), but if you start with valid code that displays identically in Opera/Webkit/Gecko engines, you usually end up with something that doesn't take _too_ much hacking unless you have a really weird layout. My biggest problems, aside from those random 3px gaps that seem to occur mostly with floated elements, is font color inheritance on links and the various pseudo-classes,:hover in particular.
For plenty of the projects I've been working on recently, I can safely ignore IE6 entirely (making a conditional stylesheet wouldn't be TOO hard, but I can't be bothered right now) and IE7 doesn't usually have too many issues. It's certainly a nice change. Combined with fully cross-browser JS libraries like jQuery, my life as a web developer is a whole hell of a lot easier than it once was.
I expect that increasing efficiency is considerably more R+D-intensive than just increasing tolerances (see: Pentium to Core architecture transition), but the latter may make a decent short-term solution until the former can be implemented.
Of course, it's not just the processors that would need higher tolerances. Hard drives, while not generating nearly as much heat (or consuming as much energy) tend to be fairly picky, and as mechanical parts are probably much harder to improve tolerances, that could quickly become problematic even if Intel provided chips that could run pegged at 150c 24/365. I assume Google's servers like most are running ECC RAM so it may be less of a problem, but there are plenty of heat-sensitive components in computers besides the processors.
Yes, but fixing the problem (inefficient silicon) rather than the symptoms (hot chips) not only has the same effect on cooling costs, but also lowers the initial power requirements. So not only do you not have to crank the AC as much to maintain $safe_operating_temperature, but you're sucking down less juice to power the chips at that temp.
It's like replacing incandescent bulbs with CFLs, except that we want fast datacenters, not really bright ones (and without the nonsense whining about the tiny bit of mercury in the base of a CFL while forgetting that 10x as much is used in generating the power for a tungsten bulb). Sure, being able to run tungsten hotter without it melting on us would help the brightness issue, but it would still be sucking down more power and kicking off more heat. Invest in the R+D for the CFLs and you can get 5x the performance for the same power while not creating a furnace.
Obviously the numbers don't translate between the two concepts, but the basic idea is about the same. Other than the fact that the R+D is already done on CFLs, while you're looking at billions to be spent on creating ultra-efficient processors. But for what it's worth, we already did it once at the consumer level from moving to the Pentium 4 architecture over to the P3-esque Core architecture.
If set up properly, this kind of forum could actually be used to reduce how pissed you have to get at customers. Depends what's being supported really, but if it's something that goes beyond the level of "reboot your router, wait two minutes, and you should be online again", having a forum where people can post up problems, solutions, and additional feedback can make finding a solution faster and easier, potentially resulting in increased customer satisfaction (lower overall turnaround for solutions, resulting in word-of-mouth advertising, increased customer retention, etc), lower employee stress (they don't have to spend hours fucking around on the phone with a dumb customer trying to debug a known issue), and a central knowledge repo that could get pushed out into a public KB/FAQ after getting cleaned up a bit.
Despite the concept of a wiki I've never really found them that easy to use outside of REALLY big ones (Wikipedia), mostly because the forum design paradigm makes more sense as a whole for finding a solution to a specific problem. Wikis are great for exploring a huge amount of knowledge, but they don't work great for a Q+A system which is typically what you need in a call center.
A good search is absolutely critical, as well as keeping good logs of customer interaction (some sort of CRM system).
A little general discussion area isn't a bad thing, nor is a for sale section and whatnot. Dictating that employees use a forum through policy is one approach, but actually giving them a practical reason to show up is actually effective. If they get in the habit of going to the forum just for the water cooler chat, they'll still be exposed to the content that you actually want them there for. This is even more important for the telecommuting employees, as it would be nearly impossible to block off sites like Craigslist. It can be a tough sell for management unless you really show them the value, but reenforcing that providing tools that employees like to use will help everyone out is a strong value proposition.
And those that don't want the monthly fees of getting a new cell phone can get the iPod Touch. I'm a big fan of not carrying around more crap than I have to never mind having internet anywhere with a cellular signal (anywhere but my house, of course) so I'd choose the iPhone in this situation (well, if I didn't already own one anyways), but that doesn't make your comparison any less inaccurate - at least relative to any other contract-based cell phone on the planet. At least with razors, you aren't contractually required to buy new blades every month.
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170 hours a week? I should certainly hope not. Then again, if you work for a company where that's physically possible, then it can't bother you too much since you have access to the company time machine.
Can I get an invite to the beta?
The fact that they'll be sued into oblivion for trademark infringement?
Or just dyslexically transform "levitating" into "lactating".
Even if most of your data fits into category 1, that doesn't mean it's not a pain in the ass to deal with losing it. I've been ripping all of my DVDs to full-quality h264 files (something that works out to iTunes compatible, really couldn't tell you what anymore) and while it wouldn't be the end of the world if it was lost, it would still be a tremendous pain in the ass to re-rip all of that stuff. Porn, whatever, it only gets used once or twice anyways... (I don't think I have ANY saved right now, if you can believe it) but I've got a ton of other media where it would be a considerable inconvenience to re-rip. I don't know about your internet connection, but any offsite system for me would have to be a sneakernet rather than an online service of some sort, and the cost of that is thoroughly offputting.
Never mind my photo collection, which could easily grow faster than my ripped DVDs on a busy day, especially once you figure in copies for editing. I'd have to use a four-point scale (don't care, inconvenient, better not lose this, can't lose it) and while the media would get a 2, the photos would rank between a 3 and a 4. And even 100GB can be quite daunting to back up for a home users at the "this should only be unavailable for more than a few minutes in the event of a very extended power outage or the house catching fire" level.
A very quick check puts an LTO4 tape drive at an entry point of $3700, plus media and actually interfacing it with a system. Most people (companies) with a budget that allow for that kind of hardware not only have such a system in place, but have someone on staff who knows how to avoid the problems that RAID5 can/will bring down the road. And that's fine for businesses. However, RAID5 is reasonably cost-effective for home users as well (at least until offsite via Amazon S3 and the like becomes practical, which is entirely dependent on how fast internet connection uplink speeds are), and much more likely to be employed by someone who isn't aware of these kinds of risks.
So, as someone who is clearly pretty well-versed in backup-related tech, do you have any ideas that would work for a home user who doesn't live on a yacht?
Look at Trism, which also sells for five bucks. The guy who made it has brought in over a quarter million already (as of when the article about him was written, at least a month ago), and I believe that's after Apple's fees. Granted, he had it out as a demo on the Jailbroken phones and got a lot of good advertising that way, not to mention the fact that he made a very damn good product.
Any app which has developers (in the plural) behind it is certainly expecting to be profitable. There are plenty of apps released by hobbyists, but there are also tons more that are being produced by real companies, and you can be damn sure that they're not doing it for charity.
I've only briefly poked with the SDK (I specialize in web work so it's a bit trickier to pick up coming from that whole coding style), but it seems easy enough to work with especially if you have prior Cocoa experience. Given that 9000 copies of an app sold means, by most reasonably-current estimates, that you sell only one copy for more than every thousand iPhone owners, that number hardly sounds unattainable if you have a product that doesn't completely suck. Tell your iPhone-owning friends, have them tell their friends... it'll go by that mark in no time if it's worth its salt.
Then go make an offer like this, and get all of the otherwise-free advertising? This is brilliant marketing. $30k for millions of views, and giving people a financial incentive to buy? Again, content is king, but if the game is any good they'll probably sell 50k+ copies thanks to this.
They do, inch-for-inch. You find me a 67" CRT and I'll find you a CRT that takes five times the power of a 67" LCD. When you replace your old 22" tube with a 50" LCD, you have to spew media across more than four times the surface area. They're more efficient, but not that much more efficient.
It's not just about uptime though. While I'll usually make the same arguments for the cloud, if something knocks out my internet connection I'm screwed regardless of whether it's available to everyone else or not. Yes, your data is on the whole a lot safer (at least with a company like Google that's not going away any time soon) in 99% of the cases, but the idea still scares a lot of companies.
When Google implements something where you can configure the Apps For Your Domain content to sync down to a server you're physically in control of, it will scare businesses and nervous geeks a LOT less. When they make some sort of OpenOffice plugin (where you log in to your google/apps for your domain account) or a Google Docs desktop suite as step 2, Ballmer will shit himself. When they make it have complete computability with MS Office documents, MS Office will die, and die VERY quickly.
Google Apps has the MAJOR advantage of having live document collaboration, which AFAIK isn't even close to available in MS Office or OpenOffice.org. For some people/companies this doesn't matter at all, but for others it'll make it the obvious choice. You can think of it like the collaborative features offered by Sharepoint and the like, but implemented in a way that is actually usable.
On the flip side, you're going to need a lot of love from Gears if a hosted solution scares you. While Docs is fine for what I do most of the time (and the rest of the time I really need more of a layout tool, like Apple's Pages), I envision them seeing a lot more adoption if there were a desktop app that synced up with the cloud (whether Google's, or your own internal setup which could be as simple as a network share). And of course, pretty much anything that's not MS Office tends to have compatibility issues with the MS Office-using rest of the world, whether you like it or not. You can whine all you want about the lack of truly open standards for document exchange (besides plain text) and I'd agree with you all day long, but that doesn't fix the problem.
Except that it makes the extender useless with anything except the Apple keyboard (including the Mighty Mouse), not the other way around.
That's just douchiness. Or they've become so full of themselves that only an Apple keyboard could be so worthy as to use that USB extension cord. I'll normally defend Apple when it's reasonable, but this doesn't make a damn bit of sense and claiming otherwise is going out of your way to be foolish.
Luckily it only applies to people who buy an iMac or Mac Pro. Maybe someday I'll find a use for that stupid extender.
A sleeping mascot? Goes great with the speed of mobile data connections I guess.
Well that's the beauty of the singleton design pattern - you can create exactly zero instances if you want. Which in the context of patent trolls is definitely a bad thing, but it still technically fits the misused term.
Tubgirl, lemonparty, meatspin, 2G1C, etc. The implementation may vary a bit, but goatse certainly isn't the only shock site out there.
Well a singleton is a software design pattern designed to allow exactly zero or one instances of a class to exist (typically a database connection). But whoever thought the term applies to the services provided by web apps is just an idiot. Especially since as soon as anyone creates something new and vaguely useful, a dozen clones pop up within a week and do it better (though tend to fail anyways, since they never get the initial market share or publicity of the original - see: twitter). The only organizations that could create a "singleton" web app, if you really feel the need to misuse the term that thoroughly, are major patent trolls.
Looks like this does nothing to address encrypted traffic, it's just matching files transmitted in plaintext to a database of MD5/SHA1 hashes. Actually knowing the level of incompetence demonstrated by most enforcement agencies, probably something that generates a 40-bit hash or so, just to ensure as many collisions as possible.
So bring on net-wide encryption.
Yeah, that's usually what I was saying about email when the exchange server at my previous employer went down every third week or so. Or when some rodent chewed through the line that handled the VOIP. Or when some transformer down the street got plowed by some idiot driver causing sporadic access to the mains for half a day. Word processors in the cloud may not make a ton of sense right now, but email is fundamentally useless without every machine in the chain working properly.
You try running your software without a power connection and let me know how it goes for you. Laptop batteries don't last that long, and desktop UPSs even less so (assume that the generator, if present, can only keep the servers online indefinitely, not the whole building).
Gmail being down for a few hours is a minor inconvenience at worst. If your dirt cheap or free and completely awesome email being unavailable for two hours a year is causing you to lose business, then you seriously need to rethink your operations. You have a landline, a cell phone, and a fax (among others), and if those are all also out of commission then chances are you've got bigger problems. You know, that mushroom cloud hovering overhead.
So override with a stylesheet that looks roughly like:
* {
color: #0F0 !important;
background-color: #000 !important;
}
div {
display: block !important;
float: none !important;
}
and you'll be all set. The rest of us tend to like looking at something that doesn't resemble a terminal window all day long. There's a reason that browsers provide the ability to override stylesheets and disable javascript. CSS, JS, and all of that other stuff don't take the presentation layer away from you (in fact, they make it a hundred times easier to override rather than the inline styles of old), they just provide defaults.
You can make a site that works fine in every browser that's XHTML 1.0 Strict. Chances are that you'll have to use some non-standard (and probably invalid) CSS in a conditional stylesheet, but that a) doesn't count in terms of X/HTML validation and b) is only linked from the inside of a comment read only by IE, so even if CSS validity was part of being valid X/HTML it wouldn't be checked by the validator.
Granted, you may need to add in some extraneous tags in order to implement the proper CSS hacks, but that makes them extraneous not invalid. But that's just as true for implementing rounded corners, which is in CSS3 (and accessible in Safari and Firefox by using the -webkit-border-radius and -moz-border-radius properties respectively) but is an unnecessarily large pain in the ass to implement on any element that isn't of a fixed width and height.
You're absolutely correct that IE6 is a huge PITA to code for (as is IE7, but less so), but if you start with valid code that displays identically in Opera/Webkit/Gecko engines, you usually end up with something that doesn't take _too_ much hacking unless you have a really weird layout. My biggest problems, aside from those random 3px gaps that seem to occur mostly with floated elements, is font color inheritance on links and the various pseudo-classes, :hover in particular.
For plenty of the projects I've been working on recently, I can safely ignore IE6 entirely (making a conditional stylesheet wouldn't be TOO hard, but I can't be bothered right now) and IE7 doesn't usually have too many issues. It's certainly a nice change. Combined with fully cross-browser JS libraries like jQuery, my life as a web developer is a whole hell of a lot easier than it once was.
Who the hell would put bathroom light power settings under the file menu? Edit maybe, but this hardly seems like an appropriate use of menus.
Better than one of those god-awful treeview preference windows I guess.
I expect that increasing efficiency is considerably more R+D-intensive than just increasing tolerances (see: Pentium to Core architecture transition), but the latter may make a decent short-term solution until the former can be implemented.
Of course, it's not just the processors that would need higher tolerances. Hard drives, while not generating nearly as much heat (or consuming as much energy) tend to be fairly picky, and as mechanical parts are probably much harder to improve tolerances, that could quickly become problematic even if Intel provided chips that could run pegged at 150c 24/365. I assume Google's servers like most are running ECC RAM so it may be less of a problem, but there are plenty of heat-sensitive components in computers besides the processors.
Yes, but fixing the problem (inefficient silicon) rather than the symptoms (hot chips) not only has the same effect on cooling costs, but also lowers the initial power requirements. So not only do you not have to crank the AC as much to maintain $safe_operating_temperature, but you're sucking down less juice to power the chips at that temp.
It's like replacing incandescent bulbs with CFLs, except that we want fast datacenters, not really bright ones (and without the nonsense whining about the tiny bit of mercury in the base of a CFL while forgetting that 10x as much is used in generating the power for a tungsten bulb). Sure, being able to run tungsten hotter without it melting on us would help the brightness issue, but it would still be sucking down more power and kicking off more heat. Invest in the R+D for the CFLs and you can get 5x the performance for the same power while not creating a furnace.
Obviously the numbers don't translate between the two concepts, but the basic idea is about the same. Other than the fact that the R+D is already done on CFLs, while you're looking at billions to be spent on creating ultra-efficient processors. But for what it's worth, we already did it once at the consumer level from moving to the Pentium 4 architecture over to the P3-esque Core architecture.
Anyone you know that doesn't read Slashdot would be a good place to start looking.
If set up properly, this kind of forum could actually be used to reduce how pissed you have to get at customers. Depends what's being supported really, but if it's something that goes beyond the level of "reboot your router, wait two minutes, and you should be online again", having a forum where people can post up problems, solutions, and additional feedback can make finding a solution faster and easier, potentially resulting in increased customer satisfaction (lower overall turnaround for solutions, resulting in word-of-mouth advertising, increased customer retention, etc), lower employee stress (they don't have to spend hours fucking around on the phone with a dumb customer trying to debug a known issue), and a central knowledge repo that could get pushed out into a public KB/FAQ after getting cleaned up a bit.
Despite the concept of a wiki I've never really found them that easy to use outside of REALLY big ones (Wikipedia), mostly because the forum design paradigm makes more sense as a whole for finding a solution to a specific problem. Wikis are great for exploring a huge amount of knowledge, but they don't work great for a Q+A system which is typically what you need in a call center.
A good search is absolutely critical, as well as keeping good logs of customer interaction (some sort of CRM system).
A little general discussion area isn't a bad thing, nor is a for sale section and whatnot. Dictating that employees use a forum through policy is one approach, but actually giving them a practical reason to show up is actually effective. If they get in the habit of going to the forum just for the water cooler chat, they'll still be exposed to the content that you actually want them there for. This is even more important for the telecommuting employees, as it would be nearly impossible to block off sites like Craigslist. It can be a tough sell for management unless you really show them the value, but reenforcing that providing tools that employees like to use will help everyone out is a strong value proposition.
(Used to work in software sales)
And those that don't want the monthly fees of getting a new cell phone can get the iPod Touch. I'm a big fan of not carrying around more crap than I have to never mind having internet anywhere with a cellular signal (anywhere but my house, of course) so I'd choose the iPhone in this situation (well, if I didn't already own one anyways), but that doesn't make your comparison any less inaccurate - at least relative to any other contract-based cell phone on the planet. At least with razors, you aren't contractually required to buy new blades every month.