kryptkpr - Slashdot User

Submission + - Geek Squad outsourcing their "In Store" re

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22, 2007 @01:09PM

An anonymous reader writes: BestBuy's GeekSquad has had hundreds if not thousands of employees silently laid off accross the country in the past couple of months. All these in-store technicians are being replaced by "Agent Jonny Utah". (Jonny Utah being a pop culture reference to the movie Point Break.)

"Agent Jonny Utah" is basically a KVM switch and a piece of software similar to PC-Anywhere that allows technicians from remote locations do diagnostics, virus removals, and software procedures on computers.

This is link where GeekSquad technicians can see what computers are being worked on listed be each store. http://www.dudev1.com/StoreViewExample/StoreView.a spx

Most disturbing is that GeekSquad agents have a tool to talk directly to the remote agent's, a majority of whom admit they work as far away as India, but BestBuy is claiming that all work is done from a remote center in the U.S.

All customer's private and sensitive data is being put on line and being accessed by people on the other side of the world and these customers are either not being told about it or are being directly lied to be BestBuy about it.

This is a call for GeekSquad agents to post what they know here and for everyone to start calling BestBuy and asking "who" really will be working your computer and how they intend to keep your data private on the other side of the globe.

Submission + - Merrill Lynch: 30% of U.S. Households to Own Wii b

Submitted by

njkid1

on Thursday February 22, 2007 @11:56AM

njkid1 writes: "According to a report in the Financial Times, the Wii's sales momentum is so strong that some analysts have upgraded their long-term outlooks for the console. Nintendo's new console just came off a very strong performance in January, easily selling more consoles than either the Xbox 360 or Sony's PS3. http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=1530 9&ncid=AOLGAM000500000000022"

Submission + - ESR gives up on Fedora

Submitted by

greginnj

on Thursday February 22, 2007 @11:49AM

greginnj writes: "Noted Linux evangelist Eric S. Raymond (ESR) has publicly announced that he is giving up on Fedora and switching to Ubuntu: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2 007-February/msg01006.html Not content to alert RedHat alone, it appears he has also sent out press releases to alert the media: http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/02/21/13402 37 . The announcement has already drawn smackbacks from David Cantrell of RedHat and Alan Cox."

Submission + - What is the cost of using hosted applications?

Submitted by foniksonik on Thursday February 22, 2007 @11:39AM

foniksonik writes: I work at a small company, less than 30 people, and yet the leadership refuses to consider using hosted applications for ANY purpose. They won't consider going to Gmail as a POP email provider, or using Basecamp for Project Management or Harvest for timesheets, Salesforce for CRM. etc. even though these hosted applications would save them a lot of effort/grief as well as time = money.

They claim that there is a huge downside to not 'owning' their own data in these areas and that it far outweighs the savings from not having to manage, maintain and support those tools internally. SO we have created a hodgepodge of opensource versions of the tools (dotProject, timesheet, Sugar) which don't interoperate well together either AND take a lot of time to set up, deploy, configure and customize for our needs. We have competent developers and a team in India we contract to for time intensive troubeshooting... but he time they spend on these apps takes away from time they could be devoting to PAID projects.

What do you think Slashdot? Are hosted apps a money loser, does not having ultimate control of your operational business data (as opposed to your code or other proprietary data) keep you from considering them as a time = money saver? If your company has already made the leap to hosted apps for business use, what are your experiences — good and bad?

Submission + - Egyptian Blogger Gets 4 Year Prison Sentenced

Submitted by bored_lurker on Thursday February 22, 2007 @11:26AM

bored_lurker writes: According to a story carried on the washingtonpost.com (among others) an Egyptian blogger was convicted of insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak and sentenced to four years in prison on Thursday in Egypt's first prosecution of a blogger. The judge issued the verdict in a brief, five-minute session in a court in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria. He sentenced Nabil to three years in prison for insulting Islam and inciting sedition and another year for insulting Mubarak. Nabil had faced a possible maximum sentence of up to nine years in prison.

In some places discussing politics and religion in the workplace is considered bad taste, but jail time for doing it in a blog? Will the rest of the world stand by and say nothing?

Submission + - What's missing from Vista's "official apps"

Submitted by

PetManimal

on Thursday February 22, 2007 @11:18AM

PetManimal writes: "Microsoft has just released a list of 800 applications it says are "officially supported" on Windows Vista. What's special about this list, however, are the programs that are not included:

Popular Windows software that is conspicuously missing from Microsoft's list includes Adobe Systems Inc.'s entire line of graphics and multimedia software, Symantec Corp.'s security products, as well as the Mozilla Foundation's open-source Firefox Web browser, Skype Ltd.'s free voice-over-IP software and the OpenOffice.org alternative to Microsoft Office
Another area in which Vista has found to be lacking is gaming, as discussed earlier on Slashdot."

Submission + - Conservapedia replaces Wikipedia with anti-science

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22, 2007 @11:03AM

An anonymous reader writes: Some conservatives have launched an alternative to Wikipedia due to bias: http://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_W ikipedia

The new resource is still small (only about 3200 articles, many weak and with gaps in coverage such as having an entry for mathematical "crisp sets" but not for "sets"), and understandably endorses religious and conservative points of view. But the encyclopedia also undercuts the search for knowledge with statements such as "But historical facts, or their absence, are irrelevant since we all know He existed. Historical sources and scientific facts are unnecessary," in the entry for Jesus (http://www.conservapedia.com/Christ), and bizarre anti-science entries (http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/02/conserva pedia_and_math_1.php).

Submission + - HDCP prevents PC from playing 1080p on TV

Submitted by

motherball

on Thursday February 22, 2007 @11:02AM

motherball writes: "Will hardware manufacturers and the movie industry stop at nothing to fight the consumer? An article in EDN mentions that newer TVs deliberately do not include the common HDMI connector but instead have the HDCP (high-bandwidth digital content-protection) connector which is intended to make it impossible to hook up your PC to your TV and render 1080p! Who stands to gain from this? Doesn't the consumer (I hate that word) have any rights?"

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