Re: The 1980s called and want their software development practices back.
This is basically what Project Treble did. However, the SoC part remains non-trivial, while margins remain slender.
12110 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
Won't exempt you from GDPR. Even first party cookies are limited in scope and the any data collected is also covered so that if you do, for example, pass nicht anonymous logfiles to a third party for processing without both advising the user, and giving them the chance to opt out, having a suitable contract with that third party, then you are breaking law.
When it comes to espionage getting access to the hardware is considered sine qua non and in most situations it will be possible at some point. There was a point where the spooks were worried about mobile phones because the hardware is harder to compromise and thus subvert but they seem to have found since.
While attacks like this are impressive and make for great films, low-fi tech is often the weapon of choice because it's so reliable. And when it's not possible, bribery is usually a good alternative.
I think this is an example of what's called "regulatory insecurity" where companies end up having to wing it. In absence of an agreement with the EU all existing agreements will lapse after 31st December meaning that Facebook Ireland will no longer be able to process data for UK citizens. The alternative of setting up a UK company for this purpose probably isn't possible so the UK gets the "WTO" treatment that many other countries will have.
Rinse and repeat for all regulatory requirements where the incorporated country is in the EU. This is why the EU is also offering the UK an arrangement for essential services in the event of a no-deal (personally, unless the transitional agreement is extended, I can't see being avoided) so that UK airlines can continue to fly into, out of and within the EU.
Oven ready indeed!
I used to be with Unitymedia (now Vodafone) but switched earlier this year back to DSL, because it just kept having problems almost inherent in coax, with some numpty on the line sticking something on that buggers the RF up for everyone.
1 & 1 has been pretty reliable since and faster (100 Mb/s ~ 12 MB/s) for the same price. Interestingly, the LTE backup is one of the Vodafone Gigacubes so depends a lot on where the nearest tower is, but I know that they do still have a very good mobile network.
Connecting individual properties is one thing, making the whole chain fast enough (DSLASM, backhaul, interconnects, etc.) quite another. It's the sort of thing that requires relatively expensive investments of the sort that the UK, with its preponderance for short term fixes, generally doesn't like.
My German LTE backup is faster and cheaper than the UK standard, albeit limited in volume.
Depending on the system, it's a reasonable approach because it acknowledges there is a problem and sets an expectation that the problem can be fixed soon — this is a much worse word to use — and that you should do something different for a couple of minutes rather than pressing refresh all the time.
A major outage like this can never be ruled out but should have some form of recovery plan. Individual plans for each system should also exist and are easier to test.
The important thing is the credit limit because you hand over the risk to the card operator who also licences service provider to comply with such limits. Might be some clauses in the T&Cs (on both sides) to work around this, and checks by the service provider to such cards for precisely this reason. But still a good place to start.
But, basically, this is the business model of all cloud ("as a service provider"): get the user to pay more than they expected to. Once they've uploaded their data it's not as is they're likely to leave any time soon.
And, also, what were they thinking not to check for recursion / duplicates in the first place?
25 years after registration in general so not relevant here. Things get more complicated with standards like H264 which are normally covered by a patent pool to prevent precisely this kind of case: manufacturers pay a single fee and are imdemnified. However, I don't know the details of this particular case but it is causing additional problems in the notebook channel.
There's also a big difference in the user experience: users are usually far less senstive to the OS or server software than they are to a new brand (or even just a new version) of their desktop software. And, much as I like OpenOffice myself, it's difficult to argue that Microsoft hasn't learned some lessons and focussed on better versions of its office software.
When it comes to databases, I'm pretty sure the 80/20 rule would apply: 80% of any companies databases could run on pretty much any RDBMS; the other 20% might take some, or even a lot, of work.
You're right nothing revolutionary but it's still bold and good luck to them. Google is the real loser here. If they weren't so obsessed with Chrome OS, we'd probably have had some for of Android on ARM for a couple of years. For many developers Apple has produced the most compelling notebook of the last ten years.
Replacing Access with something less likely to give you deadlocks should be pretty easy as Access' SQL is pretty limited. Though, if you've managed to run stuff on the web for years, you obviously haven't run into Access' many limitations.
You will probably have more challenges with VB. In theory, any kind of ODBC driver should let you work with VB and you can probably compile the VB in to run on .NET core – Mono is really for GUI stuff and if it's a website you probably don't need that.
For companies, the costs for MS Office are reasonable. Okay, support is basically non-existent but the permanent access to updates will swing the deal for many beancounters. Whether people should be using Office as extensively as they do without relevant training is another matter.
The bigger problem, as I see it, is the loss of control and the risks associated with that as Microsoft are more or less forcing companies to give them their data. Oh, and Exchange and Outlook are a dreadful combination of productivity killers.
I suspect more people like these "digital assistants" than we imagine. Personally, I don't and get annoyed every time I hit the key by accident when I'm trying to adjust the volume. It should be optional and the button could be better positioned but, in a sense, the more different providers there are, the better.
There's obviously still a market for them – 8 million units aren't to be sniffed at – but the difference between the Note and the other Galaxy's is much less marked. Doesn't mean they'll stop selling sensitive styluses, but these may just become accessories for the flagship.
NT was cross-platform and very easy to port
That was the the idea but it was only really possible for low level parts of the system and nothing that relied on MFC. This why versions of NT for the Alpha were always late and why DEC also invested in providing x86 support on the chip.
Later on, things got even worse as the kernel was optimised for x86 quirks, which is why Microsoft struggled with the x86_64 transition and later with the move to ARM. It had a definite interest in supporting as few architectures as possible and Intel kept promising that the next generation of chips would be faster… But how much was really a plot and how much was just "stuff" we'll never know. In the end, a bit like VHS versus Beta or VESA local bus versus PCI, the better technology looks like it will win.
Itanium was HP's last throw of the dice. The real damage to alternative architectures had been done by Microsoft's shafting of Windows NT for the DEC Alpha. The Alpha was so much better than x86 at the time that Intel really was worried.
By the time it came to the Itanium fabs were getting so expensive and TSMC et al. weren't able to step in, that HP had no choice but to go with Intel, who managed to get enough IP out of the deal to stick in future less-x86 x86s.
Very good nonsense if you ask me. Don't like hard yolks. For variety, if you're in Manchester, I can recommend the "Manchester Egg" which uses pickled eggs, which always have soft yolks, and black pudding.
Keep the hard-boiled ones for hurling at the clueless hordes of government ministers.
Yes, there is a lot of money being thrown at this. But costs per treatment are very low – AstraZeneca's will be around $ 5 per treatment, or 1/1000th of those for Remdesivir. Compare that with the juicy recurrent returns for statins, etc. and it's easy to see why Big Pharma still doesn't like vaccines.
All the more credit to those companies like Biontech, Moderna and AstraZeneca, et al. for putting the work into platforms that allowed for the rapid development of vaccines and, even more importantly allow for production at scale. This goes back to the scares around the so-called avian and swine flu a decade ago and depends upon the continuous advances in DNA analysis and manipulation.
I wasn't going to mention vaccines but if you look at the list of companies with advanced phase 3 trials, you'll see Big Pfizer is largely conspicuous by its absence. Yes, Pfizer is there but that is because it partnered with BionTech, which actually did the research for the platform.
When it comes to dissing innovation, Big Pharma is probably worse than IT because of the even cosier relationship it has with regulators. Remember Remdesivir? $ 4500 a pop and now considered to have no significant benefits. Compare this with the out of patent dexamethasone and Astra Zeneca's proposed pricing $ 5 per vaccine and you can see why. Why take on the risk of developing something new at such low prices when you can buy a company that has a new heart pill ($00s per month), or cancer drug ($000000s per treatment)? This is also one of the main reasons why US healthcare is so expensive and has such poor outcomes: vaccines are socialist by definition.
Maybe Salesforce has just figured out it will be easier to buy than build?
Pretty much sums things up and is why US corporations have slashed R&D so much. Outsourcing product development like this is much more expensive even though Slack's revenues hardly justify it, but seeing as the money is largely being transferred between pension funds, no one really seems to care.
The problem is that telco companies are luring people into contracts where they get a new phone every two years or so
That's been the model for years but is increasingly less the case as more and more users switch to SIM-only PAYG contracts, which are generally much cheaper and keep their "old" phones for longer, because they're generally still more than good enough.
5G was dreamt up by the networks in the hope that it would turbo charge the refresh cycle but this doesn't seem to be having that much effect. If you already have a good 4G signal, 5G doesn't offer very much and if you don't have a good 4G signal you almost certainly won't have a good 5G one!
5G has the same level of security as 4G, which is probably quite a bit above what most broadband has. All US network companies put backdoors in their kit when the NSA asks them to. But, so far, no one has been able to prove that Huawei does for the Chinese and they provide access to their kit and the source code.
Looking forward to giving it a test myself, but at least for MacOS I can recommend MailMate as having many similar features as M2 so it becomes a doddle to write a filter to, say, delete all e-mail from mailing lists that are more than a month old and which you weren't involved in.
Maggie's gambit actually caused more problems than it solved. It pushed many like-minded countries towards the federalists because that's how they could get most out of the situation. Once it became clear that the British approach would always be to demand an opt-out, the others simply engineered situations where making a small concession would keep the Brits happy, and the rest could do the horse-trading in peace. Game theory in practice, really.