The New Normal.... (another attempt at humor)

Zeldman

Touchdown! Greaser!
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Billy
Does anyone else find this term annoying and useless.??

Was it the new normal when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.??

Was it the new normal during the depression.??

Was it the new normal during prohibition.??

Was polyester clothes the new normal.??

Or was it all temporary.??

The China virus is just temporary. A annoyance to be sure and we all need to do our part to prevent the spread, but it will end. We will be a little more germaphobic (is that a real word?) for a while, then we will return to normal. I mean if we learn to be more aware and stay home when sick instead of "I will work through this cold", less time would be lost due to one employee spreading it around the work place.

We will get over this and we will get back to normal.



I wonder if 100 years from now someone will find a secret storage room in an old house and find it full of hand sanitizer, toilet paper and mask....

(rant over...)
 
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It is the new normal because we went along with it. We decided collectively to allow a bunch of people who are "experts" to decide when we are "allowed" to do things.

I find it annoying that more people aren't alarmed by this and didn't stand up against it.
 

Happening both ways. Mayors who haven’t done anything but go to parades and business openings and look official, suddenly flexing muscles.

Of course it highlights a strength and a weakness of our highly distributed government. Which government am I supposed to follow?

Especially when one is issuing possibly unconstitutional orders?

Or just being partisan twits between two levels, which is the real problem.

Bunch of freaking children.

“Well I say the Serfs have to do X!”

“Well I don’t care, I want the Serfs to to Y!”

Serf: “How about you both kiss my ass?”

Serf 2: “Oh no. I looooove being ‘lead’ by someone who won a high school popularity contest with extra money steps!”

LOL. Fun.

Someone did point out last week that the freaking UK Daily Mail is doing a better job covering our LOCAL government spats here, than any of our own “reporters” for those keeping score on the media. ROFLMAO.

But anyway. Partisans arguing while people die instead of working together. Color this engineer not in the least surprised.

We had a ten or so person meeting for work recently where we all know we are a mix or political bents. We all cane to the conclusion that lining up and shooting all of our politicians wouldn’t hamper the local medical professionals, their 40 year counterparts in government, nor their Covid response one bit.

They know me well enough they said I wasn’t allowed to volunteer for the firing squad but I could probably arm whoever they picked. LOL.

Even the big government types were on board. Haha.

I was good. I just said Covid fixed the problem young lawyers had with unemployment! :)
 
@denverpilot "‘lead’ by someone who won a high school popularity contest with extra money steps!"/ Quite possibly the best description of national election process ever!
 
It is the new normal because we went along with it. We decided collectively to allow a bunch of people who are "experts" to decide when we are "allowed" to do things.

I find it annoying that more people aren't alarmed by this and didn't stand up against it.
"We" didn't collectively decide anything, it was decided for us by career politicians who have long since quit caring about what's best for their constituents.
 
"We" didn't collectively decide anything, it was decided for us by career politicians who have long since quit caring about what's best for their constituents.
“We” collectively, have elected those politicians.
 
Agree. The term "new normal" drives me nuts too. So do the terms "unprecedented times", "we are in this together" and of course "essential business".

It is the new normal because we went along with it. We decided collectively to allow a bunch of people who are "experts" to decide when we are "allowed" to do things.

I find it annoying that more people aren't alarmed by this and didn't stand up against it.

^^^^ Yep, that.
 
Does anyone else find this term annoying and useless.??

Was it the new normal when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.??

Was it the new normal during the depression.??

Was it the new normal during prohibition.??

Was polyester clothes the new normal.??

Or was it all temporary.??

The China virus is just temporary. A annoyance to be sure and we all need to do our part to prevent the spread, but it will end. We will be a little more germaphobic (is that a real word?) for a while, then we will return to normal. I mean if we learn to be more aware and stay home when sick instead of "I will work through this cold", less time would be lost due to one employee spreading it around the work place.

We will get over this and we will get back to normal.



I wonder if 100 years from now someone will find a secret storage room in an old house and find it full of hand sanitizer, toilet paper and mask....

(rant over...)

Zoom meetings will become normal. I hope so. The brevity and efficiency of zoom meetings can save the world millions of man hours of productivity.
 
Zoom meetings will become normal. I hope so. The brevity and efficiency of zoom meetings can save the world millions of man hours of productivity.

No. Zoom meetings are a curse on the world. It's like having to sit in a meeting and pay attention, but having nothing to look at. I despise remote work.
 
Zoom meetings will become normal. I hope so. The brevity and efficiency of zoom meetings can save the world millions of man hours of productivity.

Zoom is garbage software and banned by multiple major governments and corporations at this point.

Teleconferencing with professional quality software has been a thing since I started in that business in 1992. Doing it correctly and securely isn’t “free”.

But yes, it’s fun to watch the rest of the world figure out it’s always been an option.

Could have cut road traffic by massive numbers not commuting from one people box to another in a great many jobs for a very long time now. Should have even incentivized it probably.

But please. Use something your professional IT people recommend and have vetted other than Zoom. They were an also-ran for over a decade for good reason.

And bad software design culture doesn’t go away inside organizations just because the software got popular. Their lack of care about data security won’t be changed by money.
 
Zoom is garbage software and banned by multiple major governments and corporations at this point.
From my limited use of Zoom, I have to agree with you.
A friend of mine in Atlanta retired on April 30, right at the peak of quarantines. We had planned a retirement party and a couple of flight meetups, but everything had to be put on hold. So he has scheduled a couple of zoom "virtual" parties. I thought they sucked. Lots of dropped audio and it was hard to tell who was talking. The video would shift with voice input, but often after the person stopped talking. But I can really see how good quality software could definitely eliminate a lot of face to face business meetings. Perhaps that is one good thing that will come out of this, if it isn't taken to extremes.
 
Zoom is garbage software and banned by multiple major governments and corporations at this point.

But please. Use something your professional IT people recommend and have vetted other than Zoom. They were an also-ran for over a decade for good reason.

Agreed. I've got friends and family and clubs I belong to all using Zoom for chats and virtual happy hours and virtual club meetings, and it works well enough for that and it's free or cheap, depending on how many people need to use it and for how long. We're not attracting Zoombombers, and I think most of us are aware of the security holes and minimize use as best we can.

But it's not a solution for corporate use; there are real, grown-up tools out there for that. My company happens to use Webex exclusively, but there are others. They're not free.
 
My company happens to use Webex exclusively, but there are others
What makes you say webex is more “grownup” than zoom? I use both extensively and in basically all ways zoom is a better user experience. The only thing I could think of is that webex probably is integrated with Cisco’s corporate chat client (forget what it’s called these days) and maybe plays with exchange email and calendaring better (I don’t use either so I don’t know how well webex or zoom play with them). I’m in academia so we are a lot less restricted and controlled in terms of IT use than our corporate counterparts.
 
But it's not a solution for corporate use; there are real, grown-up tools out there for that. My company happens to use Webex exclusively, but there are others. They're not free.

Hearing that Google just changed their stuff to free recordings for personal accounts. If one doesn’t mind the whole Google thing.

Corporate Google (GSuite) still has more storage and marketing and Google-using-the-data protection in writing (since you pay for it — this also includes data mining of emails and the other product lines) than a Personal “free” GMail account...

But knowing Google the software itself will be a lot less dodgy than Zoom’s, even if the reason it is secure is to feed the Google beast and not leak the data they want. LOL. :)

Anyway - a change in options at the free tier. Figured I’d mention it.
 
What makes you say webex is more “grownup” than zoom? I use both extensively and in basically all ways zoom is a better user experience. The only thing I could think of is that webex probably is integrated with Cisco’s corporate chat client (forget what it’s called these days) and maybe plays with exchange email and calendaring better (I don’t use either so I don’t know how well webex or zoom play with them). I’m in academia so we are a lot less restricted and controlled in terms of IT use than our corporate counterparts.

Control of where data flows go and both in flight and data at rest encryption.

Has nothing to do with the UI.

Anyplace that needs auditable proven information controls, can’t use Zoom.

Easy and cheap usually can’t pass audits.

Zoom can be taken seriously when they have a strategy for meeting vendor requirements of NIST 800-53, SOC 2, PCI, and or FedRamp as a few examples.

Otherwise it’s a consumer quality toy. Can’t have the staff meeting on it discussing any controlled information otherwise.

Just the way it goes.
 
Agreed. I've got friends and family and clubs I belong to all using Zoom for chats and virtual happy hours and virtual club meetings, and it works well enough for that and it's free or cheap, depending on how many people need to use it and for how long.

But it's not a solution for corporate use; there are real, grown-up tools out there for that. My company happens to use Webex exclusively, but there are others. They're not free.

Correct. We have been using Zoom for the remote cocktails and MS Teams for business. -Skip
 
What makes you say webex is more “grownup” than zoom? I use both extensively and in basically all ways zoom is a better user experience. The only thing I could think of is that webex probably is integrated with Cisco’s corporate chat client (forget what it’s called these days) and maybe plays with exchange email and calendaring better (I don’t use either so I don’t know how well webex or zoom play with them). I’m in academia so we are a lot less restricted and controlled in terms of IT use than our corporate counterparts.

Mostly the security. The issues with Zoom are well documented. I'll agree the user experience with Zoom is fine. I don't know how robust the infrastructure is, though I know it's getting hammered at the moment, so others with experience using it on a large scale can comment. My company has 10's of thousands of users, and WebEx has held up remarkably well under the load.
 
Use a Fedramp certified instance of Zoom and it's secure enough. I'll assure though that nothing is really secure. Nothing. I worked that side of the business for 20 years. Everything can get got, it's just a matter of how much effort you want to put forth.
 
Mostly the security.
Yes that's fair. Zoom could change that pretty quickly though. They choose not to do real E2E encryption.

I don't know how robust the infrastructure is
Our university does all its online teaching through zoom. I am no longer taking classes, but my advisor and friends who are TAs said that they tried doing many people in a webex and it was horrible (which is what I've experienced in the past too). Zoom isn't great but it's better. The Profs also like the breakout room feature of zoom to send groups of students off to confer and then come back to the class as a whole.
 
Use a Fedramp certified instance of Zoom and it's secure enough. I'll assure though that nothing is really secure. Nothing. I worked that side of the business for 20 years. Everything can get got, it's just a matter of how much effort you want to put forth.

I don’t believe there is one unless it’s barely meeting unclassified non-PII now.

Without a contract that says they’re doing that for a FedRamp audited entity, no way they can use it without that signed, anyway.

Nothing is secure. That’s true. It’s about the liability of who’s paying when the info gets leaked. And knowing where the info goes.

One significant problem with Zoom is the permissions it doesn’t really need to give itself at the OS level, that it was, at least four weeks ago.

Because they were a total nobody, the researchers haven’t had time to keep up with doing those analyses.

The smart money is on stuff that’s been in the security spotlight for years. Everybody has zero days. Apple has one in Mail right now. Unless they fixed that last week.

We “quarantined” Zoom to Karen’s machine, made sure nothing sensitive was on it, and it can’t talk to anything else. It’ll get wiped and reloaded when she doesn’t need it anymore.

I’m pretty sure I trust ios not to leak things to it also, and destroy it completely at uninstall. That’s probably a reasonable option.

And definitely follow the FBI guidelines for user account setup. They already leaked a huge pile of those.

It’s kinda like handling... a virus. Proper hygiene goes a long way. But mixing it with a PC or Mac that has sensitive stuff on the file system, probably not worth it.

Throwaway accounts and throwaway machines or VMs or a mobile OS you trust to tell it to screw off if it wants data it doesn’t need to have.
 
From my limited use of Zoom, I have to agree with you.
A friend of mine in Atlanta retired on April 30, right at the peak of quarantines. We had planned a retirement party and a couple of flight meetups, but everything had to be put on hold. So he has scheduled a couple of zoom "virtual" parties. I thought they sucked. Lots of dropped audio and it was hard to tell who was talking. The video would shift with voice input, but often after the person stopped talking. But I can really see how good quality software could definitely eliminate a lot of face to face business meetings. Perhaps that is one good thing that will come out of this, if it isn't taken to extremes.

Honestly that’s usually a sign of poor bandwidth. The switching performance of the main video is roughly ok from what I’ve eeen and on par with most. The video compression causes time lag. Really good systems trigger the switch at the front of the video buffer. Takes DSP horsepower to keep the buffer short enough people don’t talk over each other.

Most studies say you want a two plus one interrupter audio mix for natural conversation also, so the two loudest mics are heard and any mic that goes louder or longer steals one of the talk slots. All open mics is bad, too much noise. One mic is bad, clipping upon loud interruptions like a dog mark. Muted all by default at start and any time one isn’t talking at the endpoint is always good practice.

The real deal is most calls don’t need video at all in the real world. Lots of bandwidth just to see people looking at monitors or notes. Muted is fine.

But for lockdown inmates and pandemic meetings, people want to see each other. An oddity in this space. Usually you want a presenter and their screen.

I hear teachers want to see if students are listening. And industrious students have figured out how to look like they are.

Show the kiddies how to use OpenBroadcast as one example. Or just enjoy for your own meetings! Haha. Looks better than a still frame.

You’ll at least blink occasionally in your prepared loop. Haha.. :)

Deviant Ollam can show how it works. :)

 
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