I travelled to Canada from Australia via LAX in 2003. For all the "post-9/11" security theatre which was revving up, their response to me saying that I wasn't going to stay in the US was to require me to exit the airport into suburban L.A., walk around the boundary to the terminal my Canadian flight was leaving from, and re-enter.
Wow, that sure would have stopped me from getting access to America if I'd been lying, yes sir.
a stuck ALT or CTRL key can be hard to diagnose the first time.
By the 58th time, though, you start to recognise the symptoms - as well as those for stuck-down keys of almost any stripe.
"Pick up your keyboard, tilt it 90 degrees towards you, hold it half an inch above your desk, and loosen your grip just enough so that it drops that half-inch down onto the desk with a THUNK. Do that two more times. Now hold it firmly, turn it completely upside down, and shake the heck out of it for ten seconds. Now call the janitor and a dry-cleaner..."
Most people are not IT Specialists they have other focuses and concerns in their life.
That's not the problem. We don't expect them to be able to self-diagnose weird BSOD errors, intermittant memory faults, odd DLL interactions etc.
We do expect them to be able to figure out whether or not their computer is actually switched on, tell left from right, and be able to accurately read things which are in 50pt font on the screen in front of them.
It doesn't help when corporate users call up and over the course of a 10-minute conversation (and some remote viewing), the tech becomes better at the user's job than the user managed to achieve in five years. And the caller is making twice what the tech does.
Answer: It's not, unless our job descriptions specifically include "training". It's the job of management to train employees in the correct and best use of work equipment, and the job of members of the public to spend their own time and money learning to use their own belongings.
True, sometimes management will tell I.T. to provide specific training or documentation, and in general we'll be quite happy to because it means better-trained users and (hopefully) less basic-level questions later on. But when you're being monitored on how long you spend talking to employees, and dinged if you go over five minutes per person, providing additional information becomes an extremely low priority indeed.
And other professionals do get this with self-assist issues. Patients don't take their pills and don't get the recommended exercise. Car owners don't perform basic maintenance.
Consumers just want someone else to "take care of it", whatever "it" might be, even if that's not feasible.
The best this will be able to do is detect changes in latency patterns, possibly being able to narrow it down to certain network segments depending on how many devices are having their details analysed in real time.
"NSAapp: Latency change detected in segment AA23. No idea what it might mean. Send the intern."
As a corollory to this, one way you can get an IT job with a company is to get a menial job with that company and then get cosy with the IT department while becoming "the computer guy" for your area.
I've seen a lot of internal IT departments who had people with career histories which went menial job with same corp; unofficial local IT go-to guy; (semi-)official local IT guy; low-ranking IT job (helpdesk etc) at corporate HQ; junior sysadmin; senior sysadmin (with optional divergence here for programmer positions).
Drive a car like a BMW or Porsche or whatever -- I mean really drive it like it's capable of being driven -- and you'll understand a little better why cars like that cost more.
Dr. Henrik Ehrsson sure is basing his research career around this topic. And every time he publishes a paper basically saying the same thing as the last, the press jumps all over it as the realization of some sci-fi dream.
Admittedly, if the media fawned over everything I ever published on my favorite topic and it made me enough money to live on, I'd be sorely tempted to keep writing "just one more" paper.
Build the robots. Send them out. Have them hacked and running around executing the orders of 50 different script kiddies, botnet owners, and bored teenagers. Watch as anyone with money and a beef against a government can now buy US military killbots and launch a fully automated, heavily armed series of anonymous suicide attacks from the other side of the planet.
Watch as the builders' bosses fail to take the hint and decide that the solution is to build bigger, more dangerous killbots...
Use a completely different look and feel. If possible, use a completely different paradigm as the default installation. Get rid of any old-corp-specific buzzwords or terms.
Don't start by selling to the same crowd. Ideally, even have a different demographic. Make the software appear at a glance to be an unrelated product doing completely different things for other markets entirely. It's hardly your fault if your clients start using it for things it can technically do but was "never intended for".
And yeah, lawyers etc. Especially talk to one who's seen a lot of these cases come and go and can specify how to set up the business and the product to avoid or damp down most of the legal issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that sure would have stopped me from getting access to America if I'd been lying, yes sir.
Presumably, the book can be used to achieve the former and thus make it easier to move on to the latter.
How the Fording Ford is that Ford going to Ford all the Fords? By Fording his Fording Ford? Ford that.
You'll be able to download a copy from the RIAA for 99 cents...
By the 58th time, though, you start to recognise the symptoms - as well as those for stuck-down keys of almost any stripe.
"Pick up your keyboard, tilt it 90 degrees towards you, hold it half an inch above your desk, and loosen your grip just enough so that it drops that half-inch down onto the desk with a THUNK. Do that two more times. Now hold it firmly, turn it completely upside down, and shake the heck out of it for ten seconds. Now call the janitor and a dry-cleaner..."
Seconded. The first 50 calls about the switch, sure, take 'em. The subsequent 10,000 calls - forward them to the designers of the switch.
You think parents would give up the only source of information they have on a teenager's mind?
Did you send her manager a bill for destruction/damage of company property caused by actions directly in convention of corporate policy?
It's that they're executives.
That's not the problem. We don't expect them to be able to self-diagnose weird BSOD errors, intermittant memory faults, odd DLL interactions etc.
We do expect them to be able to figure out whether or not their computer is actually switched on, tell left from right, and be able to accurately read things which are in 50pt font on the screen in front of them.
It doesn't help when corporate users call up and over the course of a 10-minute conversation (and some remote viewing), the tech becomes better at the user's job than the user managed to achieve in five years. And the caller is making twice what the tech does.
Answer: It's not, unless our job descriptions specifically include "training". It's the job of management to train employees in the correct and best use of work equipment, and the job of members of the public to spend their own time and money learning to use their own belongings.
True, sometimes management will tell I.T. to provide specific training or documentation, and in general we'll be quite happy to because it means better-trained users and (hopefully) less basic-level questions later on. But when you're being monitored on how long you spend talking to employees, and dinged if you go over five minutes per person, providing additional information becomes an extremely low priority indeed.
Consumers just want someone else to "take care of it", whatever "it" might be, even if that's not feasible.
"OK, let's put the device into loopback mode. Er, I mean, diagnostic mode. Yeah."
Or one of the many programs which convert screenshots to something a little more compact than BMP?
"NSAapp: Latency change detected in segment AA23. No idea what it might mean. Send the intern."
Sudden surge in demand for device which will electromagnetically shotgun both RAM and hard drive if approached by raiding cops.
What gives any seller the right to a strong market?
I've seen a lot of internal IT departments who had people with career histories which went menial job with same corp; unofficial local IT go-to guy; (semi-)official local IT guy; low-ranking IT job (helpdesk etc) at corporate HQ; junior sysadmin; senior sysadmin (with optional divergence here for programmer positions).
Because they're always in the shop?
Admittedly, if the media fawned over everything I ever published on my favorite topic and it made me enough money to live on, I'd be sorely tempted to keep writing "just one more" paper.
If they ever got REAL funding, they'd probably ascend to another plane for their coffee breaks.
"P.S. - thanks for all the free worldwide publicity for this software, Amazon!"
Right up until your employment record gets wiped.
Watch as the builders' bosses fail to take the hint and decide that the solution is to build bigger, more dangerous killbots...
Don't start by selling to the same crowd. Ideally, even have a different demographic. Make the software appear at a glance to be an unrelated product doing completely different things for other markets entirely. It's hardly your fault if your clients start using it for things it can technically do but was "never intended for".
And yeah, lawyers etc. Especially talk to one who's seen a lot of these cases come and go and can specify how to set up the business and the product to avoid or damp down most of the legal issues.