resources

T-Mobile employee: I used vacation time to go to the bathroom

Some stories make you wonder.

Some, however, make your eyeballs cease to move.

This, for example, is the story of a T-Mobile employee who says she was made to clock out to use the bathroom.

Which, to the average objective eye, seems a trifle inhumane.

Kristi Rifkin was employed by T-Mobile in its Nashville, Tenn., call center. It seems that, on the whole, she felt her job was relatively sweet music.

However, things changed when she fell pregnant for the second time.

As ABC News reports, her pregnancy was tough. On the advice of a doctor, she had to drink … Read more

App tracks the wise who hate their bosses on Twitter

Frustration is an essential element of the human condition.

Nowhere is it more essential than at work, where people can be openly hostile, appallingly manipulative or, if you happen to work in the San Francisco Bay Area, passive-aggressive till your toenails crack.

You don't know who your friends are, so you have to be careful where and to whom you air your frustrations. However, given its essentially public nature, perhaps Twitter is not the best place and Twitterers are not the best ears.

Some people, though, can help themselves no more than when they are confronted with a chocolate … Read more

Microsoft to U.S. expats in U.K.: Don't bring your guns

Having worked on several continents, I know how difficult it can be to adjust to different cultures.

In Poland, for example, men kiss men at work. In the United States, on the other hand, they sue for that kind of thing.

So you have to feel for any American who is suddenly asked very nicely by his employer to leave the deep safety of the nation and venture to, say, the United Kingdom.

They're different there. They're tight-lipped and generally superior.

Kinder employers, therefore, create little handbooks to prepare unwitting expats for a new world.

The Sun got hold of a book … Read more

Apple's biggest problem: People might quit?

There is something slightly entertaining about the alleged crisis at the world's most famous and successful company.

Just because a bunch of greasy-haired speculators have decided that Apple's shares are worth less than Google's (this week), garments are rended and teeth gnashed.

And then there's teens. Apparently, they're all fleeing the brand and rushing toward Microsoft's Surface. Which, apparently, isn't selling well.

In times of such rampant face-contorting and mind-numbing, I always remember the words of Mitt Romney: "Companies are people, too."

And so it is that in a rather more measured discussion … Read more

Fine-tune your Mac and access hidden settings with Cocktail for Mac

Everything on a Mac looks so polished on the outside that it may become unclear how to fine-tune settings under the hood of its graphical interface. Cocktail for Mac allows you to access an impressive number of useful tweaks and enhancements without entering a single line of code.

Cocktail for Mac can manually trigger maintenance scripts, optimize inactive RAM manually or periodically, toggle Spotlight indexing for chosen drives, force special startup modes, and access a lot of the hidden Finder and core app settings, to name just a few options. By "hidden," we mean those settings that are … Read more

Mining asteroids to 3D-print space stations: Beyond pie in the sky?

I'm in search of a new phrase to replace "pie in the sky" to describe the latest ambitious space mining startup. On its face, the notion of 3D printers on asteroids seems more ridiculous to me than a simple lemon meringue in the clouds, and yet that is exactly what the just-launched venture Deep Space Industries (DSI) proposes to do.

Less than a year after Planetary Resources announced its own plans to mine asteroids in space, DSI is upping the ante with its own vision for zero-gravity resource extraction that goes one step further to include actually producing things in space using the company's "MicroGravity Foundry... a patent-pending breakthrough in 3D printers able to output complex metal components using a simple process with few moving parts."

The idea is that it should be much cheaper and more efficient to build what's needed to further space exploration using resources extracted from asteroids than shuttling materials from Earth. Imagine sending a robot into a mountain with some mining tools and a 3D printer. The robot mines material to feed into the 3D printer, which prints up more robots and supplies to build a smelter at the mouth of the mine, which is then used to build even bigger things. You get the idea.… Read more

Best Web sites for older job seekers

The pundits can't decide whether the real unemployment problem is older people taking jobs from younger people or younger people taking jobs from older people.

Unemployed and underemployed folks in their 40s, 50s, or older just want a job that will keep the bill-collectors at bay, and maybe even provide a little fulfillment.

The recent slow decline in the U.S. unemployment rate may be misleading. Forbes.com's Peter Ferrara writes that the labor force participation rate has dropped from 65.7 percent in 2009 to 63.5 percent at the end of 2011. Ferrara claims the true … Read more

Google goes for a Drive

Stories from Tuesday's CNET Update:

Google Drive launches today Shortage of blue and white versions of Nokia Lumia 900 Startup wants to start mining asteroids Netflix earnings report Windows 8 preview in June Today's App to Watch: Lego Super Hero Movie Maker

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Planetary Resources seeks to mine asteroids' riches

Space startup Planetary Resources today launched an ambitious plan to capture water and precious metals from near-Earth asteroids, a feat founders say would enrich earthbound society and enable further space exploration

The two-year-old company announced its plans at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where its founders said that technology has advanced to the point that space-mining valuable natural resources is now economically feasible.

Some asteroids that pass near the Earth may hold water -- a vital commodity for making spacecraft fuel and supporting the lives of astronauts. And that's just the beginning. A single 500-meter-wide asteroid could contain … Read more