Telecommuters Are Happier And Less Stressed, So AT&T Sends Them Back To Their Cubicles
With gas prices on the rise, telecommuting has encountered renewed enthusiasm lately. With that enthusiasm comes, of course, continued debate as to whether or not telecommuting is more or less productive. Well, the latest study (which is actually an analysis of 46 other studies) finds that telecommuters are happier, less stressful, and have better work-family balance. The study found that telecommuters did not hamper relationships, nor did it artificially stunt career development. According to the study, the number of people who telecommute at least once a month has increased 60 percent in the last few years. These findings really should not be much of a surprise. As more and more employers adapt to the growing numbers of telecommuters, the disadvantages once attributed to the rogue road warriors fade away. So, coupled with the time savings and environmental benefits, it seems that telecommuting is a win-win situation that is here to stay, especially as more and more homes add broadband. That said, it's slightly ironic that as a result of the SBC, AT&T and BellSouth mergers, as many as 12,000 AT&T telecommuters are being recalled to their home offices. If telecommuting increases morale, then it makes sense that the converse is true, and AT&T is about to find that out the hard way. d=20071121/002335&op=sharethis">Email This Story
(Via Techdirt.)
Verizon ups its FiOS speeds to 50Mbps, sets the internet on fire
Filed under: Networking
Not content with blazing up your local connection at 20Mbps downstream and up, Verizon has once again bumped its already-painfully-fast FiOS broadband service into the realm of ridiculous. According to reports, the company is now offering a 30Mbps / 15 Mbps service at $89.95 a month, and the nerve-shattering 50 Mbps / 20 Mbps speed at $139.95. The telecom has also introduced symmetrical connections in all 16 states where it currently offers FiOS service, with a 20Mbps / 20Mbps on the up and down, starting at $64.99. Of course, it's all bleeps and buzzes in our particularly lonely corner of Brooklyn, where we'll have to suffer the indignation of a lowly 10Mbps connection until the big V blesses us with some real speed... you hearing us, dudes?[Via GigaOM]
(Via Engadget.)
Twitter Updates for 2007-11-20
- Very. Very. Very. Very. ..... Happy. #
- Gooooooood mooooorniiiiiign Waaassssshington Deee Ceeeee! #
- Metro delays at Chinatown; Starbucks; misbehaving computer on the network; .htaccess editing; favicon making; calling in favors for a friend #
- Just ordered a new Dell 24 inch LCD (DELL E248WFP) - its marked down today to $399: http://urltea.com/251t #
- This disgusts me: Wounded Soldier: Military Wants Part Of Bonus Back http://urltea.com/251w #
- Today is a horn day. Zee horns on zee bull go up. Zee claws on zee bear go down for any of you that missed it yesterday... #
- @LeoLaporte Leo - in regards to you playing w/ the Alex voice the other week on MBW & TWiT: http://urltea.com/252p #
- Forgot my iPod at home today. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. #
- @jackhodgson I am completely jealous of your snow. #
- @jackhodgson I would be glad to do so if I could. I love winter + snow. #
- Woot - our offices are closing at noon tomorrow which means I will get home to the lake for thanksgiving at 5:00 instead of midnight. #
- @Ihnatko Thats great Andy! #
- @Veronica I deleted my Myspace about a month ago. Glad I did. #
- Plans for Thanksgiving? I plan to finish reading Alan Greenspan's "The Age of Turbulence" so hannah can borrow it on Friday. #
- They Might Be Giants concert Friday night here in DC at 9:30 club. Woot for Jon, Jon, Dan, Dan & Dan. #
- Wall Street ended on a Horn Day™ #
- @TakeIT2 As an economics professor once told me...Zee Horns on Zee Bull, Zey go up. Zee Claws On Ze Bear, Zey Go down. - I shorten to... #
- Horn Day™ and Claw Day™ #
- Hmmm...what shall I burn for dinner... #
- Searching for a digital version of "Take The "A" Train" originally composed by Duke Ellington - I'm looking for the version Tony Bennet sang #
- No luck on iTunes. Checking Amazon MP3. #
Pentagon Demands Wounded Soldier Return Re-enlistment Bonus
Just in time for the holidays, there's a special place in Hell just waiting to be filled by some as-yet-unknown Pentagon bureaucrat. Apparently, thousands of wounded soldiers who served in Iraq are being asked to return part of their enlistment bonuses -- because their injuries prevented them from completing their tours. From Pittsburgh's KDKA:
One of them is Jordan Fox, a young soldier from the South Hills.
He finds solace in the hundreds of boxes he loads onto a truck in Carnegie. In each box is a care package that will be sent to a man or woman serving in Iraq. It was in his name Operation Pittsburgh Pride was started.
Fox was seriously injured when a roadside bomb blew up his vehicle. He was knocked unconscious. His back was injured and lost all vision in his right eye.
A few months later Fox was sent home. His injuries prohibited him from fulfilling three months of his commitment. A few days ago, he received a letter from the military demanding nearly $3,000 of his signing bonus back.
"I tried to do my best and serve my country. I was unfortunately hurt in the process. Now they're telling me they want their money back," he explained.
Perversely, President Bush phoned Fox's mother to ask after Fox in May. Now his administration is taking money out of the pockets of wounded veterans like him.
Back in October, Rep. Jason Altmire (D-PA) introduced a bill, the Veterans Guaranteed Bonus Act, that would require the Pentagon to pay bonuses to wounded vets in full within 30 days after discharge for combat-related wounds. Back then, the Pentagon's flack vaguely assured The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "We are going to give our wounded warriors and their families what they need to recover and return to duty or private life." But apparently the policy has yet to change. It seems that the enlistment contract that at least some troops sign (whether it's service-specific is unclear) allows for withholding some of the signing bonus if a tour isn't completed. We're in touch with the Pentagon to clear this up, and we'll let you know as soon as we do.
Thanks to TPM Reader DB.
(Via TPMmuckraker.)
Amazon Kindle: the Web makes Amazon go bad crazy
Mark Pilgrim has a great, incisive post about the Amazon Kindle e-reader that sums up almost all of the reasons I won't be buying it -- it spies on you, it has DRM (which means that it has to be designed to prevent you from modding it, lest you mod it to remove the DRM), it prevents you from selling or lending your books, and the terms of service are nearly as abusive as the Amazon Unbox terms (and worse than the thoroughly dumb-ass Amazon MP3 terms).
Mark only misses one anti-feature of the Kindle: it comes with EVDO wireless through Sprint, which means that, inevitably, there will be world class Awful Crap that Kindle owners will confront, because it is impossible to involve a mobile carrier with a technology without infecting that technology with Awful Crap. When you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.
Act I: The act of buying
When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.
Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002
You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.
Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007
Here's the biggest mystery of the Internetiverse for me today: why is it that Amazon, the most customer-focused, user-friendly company in the world of physical goods, always makes a complete balls-up hash out of digital delivery of goods? You'd think that they'd be the smartest people around when it comes to using the Internet to sell you stuff you want, but as soon as that stuff is digital, they go from customer-driven angels to grabby, EULA-toting horrors. Why does the Web make Amazon go crazy?
(Via Boing Boing.)
Twitter Updates for 2007-11-19
- curse dallas - curse you #
- Painless metro commute; arrived at work on time; normal monday morning stupid IT issues; starbucks; skimming rss; So far so good. #
- Possible date tonight & movie....that is if my date doesn't succumb to her possibly increasing deterioration of health. #
- Twitter is converting my url (which is less than 140 characters) into TinyURL. The Irony? Its a URL to a blog post criticizing TinyURL. #
- Quote from an economics professor I once studied under: "Zee horns on zee bull go up. Zee claws on zee bear go down. Today is a claw day." #
- Updated post: Do Tiny URL Services Weaken Net Architecture? TinyURL Outage Highlights Possible Issues http://urltea.com/24k2 #
- @parcelbrat code monkey very simple man, with farm fuzzy secret heart, code monkey like you #
- @Nagumo You need a profile pic you newb. #
- There is no patch for human stupidity. I am saddened at which the degree some people drink the Faux News koolaid. #
Do Tiny URL Services Weaken Net Architecture? TinyURL Outage Highlights Possible Issues
I ran across this posting on Slashdot last night & thought that is was worth mentioning here:
Indus Khaitan writes "Thanks to twitter, SMS, and mobile web, a lot of people are using the url minimizers like tinyurl.com, urltea.com. However, now I see a lot of people using it on their regular webpages. This could be a big problem if billions of different links are unreachable at a given time. What if a service starts sending a pop-up ad along with the redirect. What if the masked target links to a page with an exploit instead of linking to the new photos of Jessica Alba. Are services like tinyurl, urltea etc. taking the WWW towards a single point of failure? Is it a huge step backward? Or I'm just crying wolf here?"
My thought on this is...what about the fact that twitter defaults to shorten all URLs using TinyURL whenever you tweet them & they're longer than 140 characters. Twitter is becoming really dependent on TinyURL for their service. What is TinyURL ceases to exist in 2 or 3 years....thats 2 or 3 years worth of history on every twitter user's page that is thus polluted w/ non-working URLs. If I were twitter, instead of becoming entirely dependent on TinyURL for shorting URLs w/ your service, I would purchase TinyURL or reverse engineer their service & run it in house to give insurance to your users that this wont be an issue.
That aside, this does present a question for the net in general...what if all of these shortened URLs suddenly stop working? What will this do to link dependent analysis such as Google's page rank? Anywho - just some things to ponder.
Update: Now this is funny.....not 5 minutes after I posted this, I noticed on Twitter that the TinyURL posting to this blog entry was broken because...wait for it...TinyURL was down. Har har! On that note, Read/WriteWeb has this to say on the subject:
Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick
The link shortening and redirection service TinyURL went down apparently for hours last night, rendering countless links broken across the web. Complaints have been particularly loud on Twitter, where long links are automatically turned to TinyURLs and complaining is easy to do, but the service is widely used in emails and web pages as well. The site claims to service 1.6 billion hits each month.
There are many free public alternatives to TinyURL, some with better ancillary features (see elfurl.com for just one example). The name TinyURL is very literal and memorable though. I use SNURL more often, myself.
It's not good when so much of the web runs through a single service. For some, politics could be a consideration as well as technical considerations. The man behind TinyURL, Keven Gilbertson, uses his hugely popular website to promote US presidential candidate Ron Paul, which I personally find somewhat distasteful, and encourages people to use TinyURL to obscure affiliate links on their webpages - which strikes me as extremely distasteful. Presumably a Paul supporter would want our redirects to run wild and free too, unbeholden to a centralized service provider capable of holding us under its thumb (I joke, but really.)
URL shorteners are important because they make long links much easier to communicate. The print world could learn a thing or two from these services; InfoWorld magazine, for example, used to to publish very short redirects through infoworld.com for all links it discussed. That's great for efficiency and brand recognition and makes me wonder whether all of us ought to have our own private TinyURL service.
If there was some sort of distributed standard or tool that could be good as well. The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) has run Purl.org (Persistent Uniform Resource Locator) since the 1990's but user experience is something only a librarian would put up with. A public institution solving this problem gracefully might be as realistic it would have been for the Library of Congress to have acquired Del.icio.us (my fantasy) instead of Yahoo!
The moral of the story, though, is that it isn't supposed to work this way. There ought not be one single point of failure that can so easily break such a big part of the web.
The bit above, that I bolded, concerning TinyURL & Ron Paul angers me a great deal. I am participating in Wonkette's "War On Paultards" in which the liberal blog, Wonkette, & the conservative blog, RedState, have banded together to wage war on the idiot supporters of Ron Paul that are polluting the net with their ilk.
Update 2:
David Winer has commented here with:
Creating a maintainable and thriving web
Steve Rubel writes about the danger of routing all our URLs through TinyUrl. I love what URL-shorteners do, it's especially important in Twitter when you're limited to 140 characters to express an idea. If you have to include a link, that could use up a lot of the space you have. The problem is if everyone uses TinyUrl, as Twitter does, what happens when TinyUrl goes down or is sold to someone we don't like, or disappears forever? I admit I don't know the owners of TinyUrl and what their motives are. Their service is reasonably long-lived, reliable and quick. Even so I've written my own URL-shortener and am running it on one of my servers, and I try to use it whenever possible. However, like all my sites, this one will likely disappear within a few days of my passing. I have to maintain my servers to keep them running. A better solution is surely needed. Rubel's epiphany just exposes the tiniest sliver of the huge problem below, creating a sustainable web. We're nowhere as far as that's concerned
Steve Rubel's post itself is worth looking at for the sake of its good analysis of the uptake in traffic that TinyURL has gotten due to Twitter.
Could a Billion TinyURLs Go 404?
TinyURL, a free and extremely popular five-year-old web service that shortens URLs and is a staple of tools like Twitter, has suffered some brief downtime lately. It's down as of this writing, as you can see from the screen shot below.As a result, some are starting to imagine what might happen if such a single point of failure should go down for an extended period of time or, worse, shut down or be acquired. Twitter is far from the only company using the TinyURL API service.
The thought of an evaporating TinyURL - a wonderful tool that remind you is provided to us all for free - especially considering its rising popularity is all more than a little bit frightening, yet fascinating. Take a look at the chart below, which comes from Google Trends. It shows TinyURL clearly rising. No wonder it's having a hiccup!
Perhaps Google or someone else will buy TinyURL at some point. Still, that's not a good solution since all roads still lead to one. All of this points to a big weak spot in the web as more people and services rely on the terrific TinyURL service (and its alternatives).
Update 3: David Berlind at CNET says: Yesterday, Slashdot asked ‘What if TinyURL goes down?’ Today, it’s down (and it hurts).