Paul Hite

I perused over this Wall Street Journal article by Nick Wingfield and my heart immediately went out to the poor IT guys at the WSJ who have to put up with him. The title of the article, "Why You Can't Use Personal Technology at the Office", caught my eye because I thought it would be a nice overview of the various reasons bringing your personal techno gadgets to work causes headaches for your IT department. As it turns out, Nick was simply using the WSJ as a soapbox to cry his heart out about having to use "ancient" technology like "Windows XP" and how clever he is to have found a way around his companies IT policy enforcement to install his favorite toolbars and plugins. How he got a job at the WSJ writing about technology is beyond comprehension (I have a few ideas), but at least he gave me a good example of someone with just enough technical know-how to skate around corporate policies and not enough common sense to see how dangerous that is.

I had other items to write about, but my fury at having to deal with astonishingly bad tech support, advice, or recommendations is at a boiling point. It's not the inexperience or naivety that bothers me, we all have to start somewhere and some of us still struggle with new technology. It's the fact that these people, or companies, sell themselves as "experts"; after which I have to explain to the client that they would have gotten more from their money by investing in one of the many wonderful business opportunities available in Nigeria.

Despite deep-seated childhood fears of all data being consolidated into a single powerful system that touches everything, a little research (and extensive therapy) helped me to develop a healthy relationship with "cloud computing". And by that, I mean that nearly everything I do is contained in the cloud and I am completely dependent on it. Healthy is a relative term.

I stumbled across a very brief blog post concerning Google search suggestions and how they reinforce the idea of "txt speak" being associated with immaturity and generally less-than-stellar decision making skills. I thought I might expound on this with some screenshots.

Some clerk at the US Patent Office apparently had a seizure and scribbled his approval across this blatantly monopolistic patent  for a "Rights Elevator" filed by Microsoft in 2005. Here's the abstract:

Systems and/or methods are described that enable a user to elevate his or her rights. In one embodiment, these systems and/or methods present a user interface identifying an account having a right to permit a task in response to the task being prohibited based on a user's current account not having that right.

In Microsoft's defense, the patent indicates that they are improving on existing technologies. The patent was filed around the same time Vista was being defecated developed along with UAC. What really concerns me is the second sentence that states this "rights elevator" GUI will "identify an account having a right to permit a task". So essentially, if I'm Joe User trying to install the latest "Free Smiley Pack with Screensavers" application on my corporate network, but lack the permission to do so, my handy "rights elevator" will simply identify the username of an account that does. This seems like an unnecessary (and potentially insecure) feature to me, but I suppose that's Microsoft's modus operandi at this point.