Disqus - Latest Comments for jmproffitt

Re: Opinion: Suspicious Deletion of 100,000 Cruiser Video Files by Columbus Police

jmproffitt — Mon, 27 Mar 2017 12:35:48 -0000

Setting aside the race questions, which are serious but I'm not qualified to address, I will address the technology issues with a few key points.

[1] As the old saying goes, never ascribe to malice what can easily be explained as incompetence. You're welcome to assume this was a deliberate deletion event to cover up something bad, but I can give you a bunch of ways this deletion could have occurred for tons of innocent reasons, and the explanation the police gave is on my list. Put simply, I totally buy that someone screwed up, because the software that comes with video storage platforms like these is just plain awful, and they likely had someone with very little experience do the maintenance. Boom. Erased videos.

[2] Storing all that video takes a tremendous amount of resources (and money). Making a BACKUP copy on a regular basis takes more than double the resources. Given this video platform is a relatively recent deployment (in tech years, anyway), and given the fact that police probably didn't even want the system to begin with (for cultural and/or cost reasons), it's not surprising that paying more than double for backups was considered low-priority and probably was never approved. If I were working there, I don't know that I would put backups of the video platform in general high on my list of priorities. I might backup the last 30 days and I would definitely backup any video from active investigations, but the rest I would just let roll off the system.

I'm not saying definitively this wasn't a cover-up, but I am saying there are a ton of good reasons why and how this could have happened by mistake and via systemic choices to not make backup copies.

If you believe the city should do better in their handling of video data, then press your elected representatives to allocate budgets for upgrades, for backups, for user training, and for clearly-written (and public) data retention policies specific to police video. It will cost very real tax dollars to do this, but until the policies and budgets are in place, it's not fair to saddle the police with expectations they can't realistically meet.

Re: A Moveable Glut

jmproffitt — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 14:06:49 -0000

This new assessment from Krugman makes a ton of sense, and its surprising it hasn't been talked about widely before. It's one of those "of course!" moments.

But he doesn't seem to point out the causes of the glut, which are two main, and related, problems. First, the disparity of rich and poor is concentrating unprecedented wealth in the hands of a few players. Those are the people that can't find viable investments, because they will only invest when the payout is privatized back to them. They won't invest in infrastructure or society as a whole; they won't pay higher taxes -- they will only invest when their money comes back to them with substantial interest. That's a spiral of bad decisions started 30+ years ago via legislative capture and it's getting worse all the time.

The second problem is the issue of productivity gains in business. That is, we need fewer and fewer workers to produce the food, shelter, and goods required to make a comfortable life for most people. This leads to decreasing employment levels, further exacerbating the rich/poor problem and creating a long-term problem we will solve either via enlightened social policies (more people work fewer hours for the same pay; guaranteed minimum incomes) or by violent revolution, much like we're already seeing in the Islamic third world rising up against its own rich leaders and the rich West.

These two problems promote the investment glut problem, which feeds back into the system and creates more problems -- burst bubbles that lead to unemployment, which puts even more money into the hands of the rich. You'd dead-on that we're way past normal and into a post-normal period, but this post-normal will never become a new normal until the feedback loop is cut off via new social contracts or complete social upheaval.

Now let's see if any candidate understands this in the 2016 race. (Yeah, right -- they're paid to *not* understand this.)

Re: An Open Letter To American Muslims on Same-Sex Marriage

jmproffitt — Tue, 07 Jul 2015 13:18:40 -0000

This article could be edited to remove the Muslim-specific language and then be turned into a manifesto on how to be an American. It's an expanded and much more lyrical version of "your freedom to throw punches ends where my nose starts." If only we could all remember this idea -- that there are two freedoms to balance: freedom FROM things and freedom TO DO things. You are free to reject homosexuality in your religious beliefs, but you are not free to take away civil rights from homosexuals.

Re: An Open Letter To American Muslims on Same-Sex Marriage

jmproffitt — Tue, 07 Jul 2015 13:14:51 -0000

Women are not a minority by sheer numbers, but they are under-represented in terms of pay, political power, corporate leadership, wealth accumulation, and other factors. I think that's what they meant -- women as disenfranchised members of society, not as a numeric minority.

Re: What Are Eye Floaters?

jmproffitt — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 21:42:19 -0000

You failed to mention that excessive floaters, especially if combined with light flashes in otherwise dark rooms and excessive black floaters (blood) can signal a retinal detachment in progress. Most floaters are harmless, as described in the article, but if you have any suspicion it's more than a normal amount, get checked out by an eyecare professional immediately. Untreated retinal detachments pretty much result in total blindness in the affected eye.

Re: Why do Windows journalists have to trash Linux?

jmproffitt — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 13:13:16 -0000

Jim, you just wrote a piece last week about how the Linux desktop still matters, is awesome, etc. Then you write this piece. You're actually demonstrating the chief problem with Linux promoters: you're out of touch with the vast, vast, vast majority of computer users, especially in the enterprise. It's not that Linux is a bad thing, it's just not a relevant thing.

I think it's also interesting to note both articles I mentioned are here on IT World -- as in Information Technology World, as in corporate IT World. We, as an audience, are very concerned about all the things that Linux is not (with the exception of security). We care about compatibility. We care about software selection. We care about support from first- and third-party vendors. We care that users can figure out their OS without going back to the drawing board (which is why Windows 8 is a flop).

We don't have a problem with Linux per se, we're just tired of hearing the pronouncements that THIS is the year of the Linux desktop, that Linux is great and everyone just needs to wake up. Please. If Mac OS X can't get a foothold in corporate IT, what hope does the Linux desktop have?

Basic economics has demonstrated the market will not support 3+ desktop OS platforms. Sorry, but Linux is #3, as was OS/2, Amiga and all the others. It's doing pretty well in handhelds, and server appliances though. So there's that.

Re: Effective Project Management: Three Critical Activities

jmproffitt — Mon, 09 Dec 2013 13:39:30 -0000

Great tips. For those that would like a little more direction on how to be a project manager (without changing careers!), there's a fantastic little book that's the perfect resource. It's called "Bare Bones Project Management: What You Can't Not Do" and it's by Bob Lewis. You can find it on Amazon.com here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/pr...

What's great about the book is that it's short and to the point and does not get bogged down in project management terminology. It's what you need to know to manage lots of basic projects in any industry -- including nonprofits. Highly recommended.

Re: A sullied date

jmproffitt — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 12:57:08 -0000

Yes. This. Thank you, Jeff. I don't know how long it will take for Americans to wake up, but we need messages like this to continue until everyone is awake.

Re: Another Reason Google Reader Died: Increased Concern About Privacy and Compliance

jmproffitt — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 12:37:32 -0000

Liz, you got played on the privacy angle. That was a Google head-fake and you fell for it.

Yes, Google has had plenty of privacy problems (because privacy stands in the way of their business model), but do you really buy that Google Reader is the one thing they looked at and said, "You know, we need to get serious about privacy, and killing Google Reader is how we'll prove to the world that we're really serious this time." If that were the case, the privacy reason would have come out in the closure announcement, not in some off-the-record whispers.

And furthermore, in what way does killing Reader show concern for privacy anyway?

I love your work, Liz, but you got played this time.

Re: Exciting Career News, Investigative Journalism Edition

jmproffitt — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 11:59:13 -0000

Exciting indeed! Great news, Adam. Congratulations and go get 'em!

Re: Google Nexus 7 display problems reported

jmproffitt — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 22:07:25 -0000

I have the backlight bleeding / low contrast image / LCD ghosting problem reported elsewhere. Frustrating. Spent 50 minutes on the phone with Google Play support to request an exchange. They still haven't sent me exchange approval or Instructions, more than 36 hours later.

Google needs to compete not just on price, but on quality and total experience, and in my case they are failing.

Re: The trouble with content

jmproffitt — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 16:41:46 -0000

Making content is easier than engaging with people. It's economically more valuable for the producer. I think we're just at the start of the collaborative / participatory revolution and it make take a generation before people are regularly willing to pay for participation / curation / engagement than just broadcasted content. But I think we'll get there.

Re: Is ABC News made in America?

jmproffitt — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 23:40:25 -0000

All that stuff is made elsewhere. Sadly for ABC viewers, their "news" is still made in America. Maybe we should outsource our journalism. Say... to the Guardian, maybe.

Re: SXSW 2012: #BigBabies – Why Baby Boomers = Public Media FAIL

jmproffitt — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 17:41:52 -0000

Holy crap! This one page, compiled from your panel, encapsulates my entire #pubmedia career (such as it was). GenX (which I am) is definitely the "lost generation" of public media. I couldn't get anywhere useful in the system after a few years. Boomers in the corner offices were all about the top-down and the maintenance of the old models -- experimentation and new thinking was a threat. Boomers also religiously defended their positions rather than focusing on mission in a changing media landscape. Where experiments were tried, it was done on the backs of cheap 20-something labor with no real direction, which yielded classic failure, which was punished.

I've concluded there is no hope for the current public media models, aside from guarding existing territory. There are pockets of good work where the money supports it (NPR), but broadly the system faces increasing irrelevance and collapsing funding in the years to come. The only hope is that an organization like NPR could take over public media as a whole, leading it with a clarified central mission (news) and greater efficiencies and economies of scale.

There's a future out there for the mission and principles of public media. But it won't be led by Boomers, who are just skating to retirement and taking everything for themselves along the way.

Today I'm back in healthcare technology, and lemme tell you something -- this is a fast-moving and fascinating industry comprised of multiple generations and players at all levels of government, nonprofits, and private companies. It's not as simple as public media, and there are many factions with different ideas about the future. But technology and communications and media are all part of that future and everyone knows it.

God bless you to the Millenials and GenXers still working in public media. You guys are doing great work and I hope you're not suffering too much. Just know there are places for you out there, outside public media, where you can have a community impact and don't have to be second-class citizens in your own workplaces.

Re: Grab Some Popcorn. You are Now Watching the Real Tech Bloggers of Silicon Valley.

jmproffitt — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 02:19:10 -0000

This reads like jealously. Offering shelter to Dan Lyons and wagging your finger at MG Siegler is simply picking sides. You're welcome to pick sides -- as we all are -- but don't kid yourself that you're writing awesome journalism and everyone else is an opinionated hack.

Dan Lyons hasn't done anything widely discussed or quoted in the tech news world since Fake Steve Jobs. The stuff that's gotten attention have been irrational screeds against Apple... just because he wanted to.

Consider, also, that Kara Swisher tweeted out the link to this article, because she wants to cheer on people who rag on Siegler and Arrington, who ragged on her when she ragged on them. You're just weaseling your way into the cocktail party.As for Siegler being bad with quotes and comma placement, that's an old rule in flux that's losing ground. Tech-oriented writers are more likely to use Siegler's style, no matter what the AP and old English teachers want.http://www.slate.com/articles/life...

Re: It’s too late for Dave Winer and John Battelle to save the common web

jmproffitt — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 21:00:31 -0000

AOL was a threat to the Internet, too -- the first major walled garden. And we all know how that turned out. Facebook, Google+, Twitter -- these are trends that will pass in time. Things will go private, public, private, public... again and again. The key is to pick your tools so they handle what it is you're trying to do with a mix of trade-offs that you find acceptable. That's it.

Google has been dominant in search for 10+ years, but it won't always be so. Their recent mis-steps are a replay of Microsoft's mistakes. They're stumbling. They're getting disrupted. That's life. What they're doing now with Google+ and modifications to search and Android are attempts to fend off the disruptors, or what you would call the closed web purveyors. They're just trying to create a "better" closed web -- one that they control. Might work for a while. But not forever.

The feather in Dave Winer's cap is that he's promoting infrastructure rather than platform solutions. RSS can't solve all problems, but at least it's just a protocol, and an open one at that. Your photo of CERN points to the birth of the open web. But it was open precisely because it wasn't built for a product or a company -- it was a collection of protocols. (Coincidentally that's why Android isn't open -- it wasn't created to be a protocol, but an advertising delivery platform.)

If you want to promote the open web, stop chasing the major for-profit corporations and start digging into the nerdy work done by the IEEE and other researchers and neckbeards -- the people that will actually create the next open protocols and interfaces that will make a real difference.

Re: Missing the Point of WordPress Entirely

jmproffitt — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:31:56 -0000

I moved some stuff to WordPress.com a while back and was very happy. Yes, there's less flexibility, but man was I happy to give up the updating and tweaking and messing around. You can consume tons of time dicking around with stuff and not actually blogging. WordPress.com took away the option of tinkering.

I now regularly recommend small businesses with no real web presence (or a bad one from 5 years ago) look at WordPress.com first. Yeah, it's a blog platform, but you can just push a bunch of pages out there and be done with it. The themes are fine for most shops (who couldn't come up with decent designs to save their lives anyway), and you can even hire a CSS programmer if you want to get fancy and pay a smidgen more. Hell, you can install special fonts in WordPress.com these days.

The only down-side to WordPress.com is speed of editing. It just lags a lot. Self-hosted WordPress -- if done well on a good hosting platform -- can be must snappier. Still, so long as you don't edit too much too often, who cares? It's cloud hosted, secured, simple enough for anyone to edit, and you still have time for dinner with the family.

Re: Missing the Point of WordPress Entirely

jmproffitt — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:26:08 -0000

Just read his "About" page and you'll learn all you need to know about this guy's qualifications. Business transformation consultant? Yeah. You go girl.

WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, Squarespace, whatever... they are all frameworks of tools to get some work done. And they all presume you don't want to code the entire superstructure of your site by hand. They each offer some prefab code in which to install your own content and possibly make some minor modifications to the prefab structure. That's the deal. That's always been the deal.

If a business transformation consultant can't figure that out, well... there's always Wall Street.

Re: The One Reason Your Business Can’t Afford To Ignore Google+

jmproffitt — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 03:53:56 -0000

Interesting sleuthing through Google results. I guess we shouldn't be surprised Google is promoting Google+ stuff up the charts.

What I'm actually excited to hear more about are Google's plans to turn Google+ into an enterprise social platform, competing with Yammer, SocialText and the rest, especially if you use Google Apps.

I'm doing a Google Apps pilot project and deployment right now, and the one thing that's missing is a Yammer-like social layer. I could buy Yammer, but that's a few thousand bucks a year (for this client), so it's not really feasible. But a free add-on to Google Apps? Yes, please! Even if it's a poor imitation of Yammer.

If the Google+ internal enterprise social layer could also be extended out to the public side of Google+, I can imagine Google winning over more of the professional social media landscape. Can't wait to see what happens.

Re: End of an Era: The Golden Age of Tech Blogging is Over

jmproffitt — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:54:14 -0000

Boy, Golden Ages sure are short compared to when I was growing up. ;-)

I think we're really just looking at a reshuffling for the most part. Yeah, there's a social layer that's building up, but that's just syndication / reflagging stuff to get eyeballs to the original content, wherever it is.

I do think "John" is correct that niche blogging (like healthcare tech) has a long way to go -- there are tons of industries where blogging STILL hasn't caught on and needs to. That will hopefully develop.

But the role of the central aggregator / reporter / analyst role in the tech sector should remain strong for a long time. Perhaps you're just talking about "blogging" (whatever that means these days) but I'm talking about writing / publishing / sharing. That's not going to stop.

Re: The Windows Phone Problem In Three Words: Way Too Late.

jmproffitt — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:49:12 -0000

Oh, and he ALWAYS writes too much. A little editing would help him out a lot.

Re: The Windows Phone Problem In Three Words: Way Too Late.

jmproffitt — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:48:31 -0000

Paris Lemon? Heh. I believe you'll find his name is MG Siegler.

Re: Please Don’t Be The McRib of Facebook Pages

jmproffitt — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 03:05:21 -0000

Anchovy? No worries about overloading on the Likes around here!

To me, I'd rather engage with a company/brand that is likely to engage with me. The old "where everybody knows your name" effect is powerful. It's tribal membership. It's shared values or experiences. And there's a chance to link my real world, online world, social world, and work world together. That's compelling.

Big brands can only have a deeply impersonal and asymmetric relationship with me for simply mathematical reasons. They can extend the social olive branch, but franky, I wouldn't trust them if they did (at least initially). There's also a stronger correlation between big brands and "doing evil" in the world. Scale brings power. Power corrupts.

Give me the local shop on social media channels any day. For the big brands, they should do as you suggest: socialize pieces of themselves that are more approachable. Don't socialize P&G, socialize Tide.

Re: Kindle family goes retail, coming to a store near you on November 15th

jmproffitt — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 01:42:56 -0000

Amazon press release converted to Plain English:

"We didn't sell as many pre-orders as we expected, so we're sending the rest of the first batch out to retailers. That'll goose our sales numbers nicely for the opening month because we'll just count the stuff we shipped to retailers as 'sold' regardless of whether they actually end up in consumer hands."

Re: Microsoft's Non-Response to the Secure Boot Problem

jmproffitt — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 15:03:07 -0000

PREDICTION: PC manufacturers will be able to buy one of two OEM licenses. One will be with a secure boot loader option turned on, locking the system to Windows. Another license will work with any boot loader approach. Guess which one will be cheaper?