Posts by WatAWorld 1360 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Feb 2012
Intel's graphics is only the most popular graphics choice for laptops and inexpensive desktop computers, i3s and i5s.
Putting fancy graphics on Core i7s displays a lack of understanding of customer needs.
Most people who buy desktop computers with Core i7 are going to want equivalent to nVidia GTX740 performance or better.
Since Intel can't put that in the CPU Intel is wasting money putting stuff in CPUs that is never going to be used.
@Ted: Apple's use Intel chips too. Linux runs on Intel too.
That trashes the "blame MS for everything" argument.
Intel's problem is Intel's problem, it isn't producing anything that makes old products obsolete.
Intel's problem is nothing to do with Microsoft.
Another point, MS's job is selling copies of its software, not selling Intel CPUs.
So when MS produces a new OS one of MS's objectives will be to make it lightweight so it does not require a bigger processor, that it can work on existing computers.
Dumb people will blame Windows 8, but real people with half a brain, real people using computers for useful purposes, they don't buy new computers just to get new operating systems.
When Windows 10 comes out, people will install it on their Windows 7 computers, since those computers will be powerful enough to run it.
You want people to buy your product, you must give them a reason to buy your new product.
All new Intel CPUs have offered us lately is lower power consumption.
Why spend $800 on a new computer to save $1 a month in electric power?
Laptops, tablets, yes. Desktops, I'd have to be stupid.
And in hardware,. the NUC, the little boxes, those aren't going to persuade me to ditch my desktop either.
Anthem is obviously motivated by money, like most of the rest of us. Why let them save money by saving the effort of cooperating with OIG audits?
Why does the OPM give Anthem a commercial advantage? Why the favoritism?
And why does the OPM not remove Anthem from its list of suppliers in order to use the money lever to motivate it to accept a standard OIG audit?
Why is the US OPM sending money to an uncooperative supplier that won't allow the standard auditing of US suppliers?
But setting the precedent that the mandatory audit is optional, the US Office of Personnel Management is making the audit optional for all suppliers.
This could result in corporate standards at other organizations forcing the to refuse to be audited too.
The fault in this, as far as government personnel breaches, is 90% US OPM and its failure to remove a supplier after the supplier failed to meet OIG standards.
Anthem is responsible for the breaches that lost other data.
Those who have a choice should stop doing business with them.
If you have a choice and don't stop doing business with a company that can't meet relatively simple security requirements, then its partly your own fault.
(Note: Nobody has been able to make a bullet-proof general purpose full function PC operating system. So using Windows after Windows breaches is not the same thing. There are alternatives, but those alternatives are not secure either.)
"If the keys were on a network not connected to the internet then how did they get them to their customers?"
Read up on Stuxnet.
Read up on the Equation Group (The Register hasn't covered this story much).
http://observer.com/2015/02/equation-group/
In plain terminology, usually enemy spies put stuff on internet-connected computers that gets hand-carried over to the victim's non-internet connected computers via disks or USB sticks.
There is also a history of some national intelligence agency intercepting US mail to alter conference proceedings CDs. So intercepting the physical transfer of information by mail or courier.
But they can also do spying via monitoring energy usage or physically copying the contents of the non-internet connected computers.
Nothing you can imagine as possible is impossible for the major state-sponsored spy agencies.
It does not matter how much care you take, the NSA, GCHQ, their Russian, Israeli, French and Chinese counterparts can get at your stuff if they decide you are a target.
This is what happens when you rush regression testing to meet externally imposed arbitrary 90 day deadlines.
We can work fast, or we can work accurate.
I've never worked for MS, but this has been true in every organization I've ever worked in.
And big organizations take a lot of time just to coordinate changes to system AA with changes to system ZZ.
90 day deadlines are a receipt for disaster. 180 day deadlines might be possible.
Unless of course if there is an exploit widespread in the wild, in which case errors may be justified in the name of security.
"Uh huh... so an ISP can try to force you to install software. What if you are running Linux? Will they justify kicking you off their network because they can't install their security tools?"
You are dreaming up stuff to worry about. You're the only one suggesting people not be allowed to run Linux.
The law says ISPs can assume consent to install security software that is solely to protect the security of the network. Getting the software to work is the ISPs problem. And if their software breaks your computer then they've broken the law.
"a program that is installed by a telecommunications service provider solely to protect the security of its network from a current and identifiable threat to the availability, reliability, efficiency or optimal use of its network;
a program that is installed to update or upgrade the network by the telecommunications service provider who owns or operates the network on the computer systems that constitute all or part of the network; and"
http://www.cwilson.com/resource/newsletters/article/1143-preparing-for-canada-s-anti-spam-law-part-two-the-installation-of-computer-programs.html
"To obtain express consent, certain information must be set out clearly and simply by the person seeking consent and installing the computer program. This information includes the purpose for which the consent is being sought, information identifying the person seeking consent6, their mailing address and either a telephone number, an email address or a webpage7, and a statement that the person whose consent is sought can withdraw their consent8. Although the consent may be given orally or in writing, it must be sought separately for each act described under CASL9 – that is, consent to receive a commercial electronic message is not also consent to the installation of a computer program.
"However, for the installation of computer programs, there are two additional consent requirements that don't apply to commercial electronic messages. The first of these is that the person seeking consent must also clearly and simply describe, in general terms, the function and purpose of the computer program that is to be installed if the consent is given.10 The second of these relates to specific functions of the computer program, and is discussed below."
Okay, so you'd do without laws on murder, rape and child molestation.
But in this case the need for the law goes beyond for that for those clear cut crimes.
In this case many people think these white collar crimes are legal and are committing them based on that belief, despite the fact that these crimes have always been unethical and immoral.
1. It looks like security and bug fixes are exempt, provided they don't add "features".
2. It looks like permission boxes must be de-selected by default.
http://www.cwilson.com/resource/newsletters/article/1143-preparing-for-canada-s-anti-spam-law-part-two-the-installation-of-computer-programs.html
"... Express Consent Requirements
While there are three main exceptions under which consent may be implied or is simply not required, the default position under CASL is that consent must be obtained before taking any action which would otherwise be prohibited. Because any person alleging to have obtained consent bears the evidentiary burden of proving such consent5, it is important for any company that installs computer programs to implement clear policies that provide for the proper documentation of customer consent for any computer programs that are installed. ..."
and later it says
"Exemptions
There are three exemptions to the above rules, where consent is deemed to have been obtained or is simply not required. These exemptions apply to upgrades, cookies and telecommunication service providers. ..."
And those exemptions are then defined.
"... The regulations under CASL also provide that a person is considered to expressly consent if their conduct is such that it is reasonable to believe they consent and the program is one of the following:
a program that is installed by a telecommunications service provider solely to protect the security of its network from a current and identifiable threat to the availability, reliability, efficiency or optimal use of its network;
a program that is installed to update or upgrade the network by the telecommunications service provider who owns or operates the network on the computer systems that constitute all or part of the network; and
a program that is necessary to correct a failure in the operation of the computer system or a program installed on it and is installed solely for that purpose.22"
Criminals, sure criminals will still commit crimes -- but if "some people will still break the law" was a reason to not have laws, we wouldn't have any laws at all.
Laws are what gives "bottom-line oriented" greedy people their consciences. You know the sort, they consider anything they can get away as totally acceptable.
The "high functioning" psychopaths and sociopaths whose disregard for ethics and morality brings them to the leadership of many companies, they care about laws and jail because laws and jail can reduce their personal enjoyment of life.
And of course fines reduce profits which reduces their personal enjoyment of life too.
So it actually does affect companies that Google and Yahoo that have offices here to sell advertising. It affects what they can do to Canadian residents.
(And of course it affects companies that EA, AMD, Corel, Microsoft, IBM that do major development work here.)
For foreign-based companies with no Canadian presence: If the company committed serious damage to computers by what it was doing, any officer of that company visiting Canada could be arrested. However I don't think extradition would work because extradition *usually* (not always) is only for acts defined as crimes in both countries.
Yahoo does business in Canada -- they have people here who sell advertising.
You know how so many companies get stuck obeying US law because they do business in the USA, accept our laws or don't do business here.
That's how it works other countries too.
This won't affect companies with little or no presence in Canada.
"If Amy Pascal loses her job heading Sony Pictures Entertainment, her credibility fatally damaged by an unending stream of private moments made public, who is liable? Pascal surely believed Sony would take appropriate precautions regarding her private business correspondence. If the theft and publication of that correspondence renders her unemployable, wouldn’t Pascal have grounds for a massive lawsuit against her former employer?"
and
"Sony Pictures Entertainment co-chairs Amy Pascal and Michael Lynton".
Amy Pascal was the employer, together with Lynton. The lack of security on her watch was her responsibility.
That said, she's got big bucks, she's an executive, so I'm sure she'll get a lovely golden goodbye despite the problem being her own negligence in failing to properly set corporate policy.
The percentage of the peaceful population being spied upon, no matter which government is in power when it is increased, will end democracy.
The reason it will end democracy is that it will cause intelligence agencies to have huge banks of information on the childhood and teenage years of future politicians.
Future politicians will come into power completely at the mercy of the police and secret police, completely under the thumb of police and secret police.
Judging by how government politicians in the USA, UK and Canada act towards intelligence agencies and police, we may already be there and just the rest of us don't realize it yet.
Spying on the peaceful public is an issue on the totalitarian/libertarian political axis.
Spying is on the peaceful public is not a left-wing/right-wing issue. Stalinist, Maoist and Marxist Communists do it. Nationalist socialists did it. Absolute monarchies do it.
Okay then, sort of like Texas and 99 year sentences.
The actual prison rules of Texas state any sentence longer than 30 years is interpreted as a 30 year sentence. It then goes on to explain how one day can earn two or even three days towards a sentence based on prisoner behaviour.
"There's two major sects and they are basically violently opposed to each other and regard each other as heretics."
How can any one say that makes Islam different from Christianity?
Individual preachers who can make their own interpretations? Islam and protestantism.
Go back a couple of hundred years and you'll see Islam is Mickey Mouse compared to Christianity.
And Christianity could return to evil at any time in the future, and probably will, because the bad stuff in Islam is all in Christianity, it is all teachings of Abraham, all still in the Christian Bible, and none of it has been declared apocryphal by any Christian preacher.
Go read your Christian bible.
All the bad parts of Islam are in there -- just most Christians currently ignore them for the moment.
No rights for women. Slavery. Genocide.
It is all in the Christian bible, mostly in the Old Testament -- a set of books that has never been expunged from the Christian bible in case it's later needed.
Saudi Arabia -- birth place of Wahhabi and Salfism -- the Islamic sect of terrorists.
Wahhabi is Saudi Arabia's official version of Islam.
And yet we're at war with countries like Iran and Iraq -- countries that have been attacked and defend against Wahhabis and Salfists.
Why are we defending a country that sends people out to preach that attacking the west is the easy way to get into heaven?
Why are our sons fighting to defend a country that evangelizes terrorism?
Canada's dental student fiasco is an illustration of why the term "feminazi" strikes such a tender nerve among female extremists -- it is so darn accurate.
As if female dental students don't gossip to one another about their dates and their dates sexual abilities -- male sexual performance is not an uncommon topic among anglophone female Canadians despite it being a betrayal of a confidence.
The misandry of the Canadian legal system ought to be a major issue, but we pretend it doesn't exist.
However misandry is not religious zealotry, its a form of sexism. We in Canada can say what we want about Christianity.
Judeaism and Islam -- we're less free to talk, but still no 1000 lashes. You might loose your job, but there will be no days in jail either.
Canada is not like that. I live here and knock religion all the time. No jail for me yet.
And books by prominent atheists are readily available. I've got a few by Dawkins and Hitchens myself, from bookstore.
You can even borrow them from public libraries.
I have spent so much time sticking up for Islamics, pointing out that Christianity and Buddhism also have terrorists.
Pointing out that terrorism by Christians is actually not uncommon -- we just don't call it that.
Think JFK, MLK and RK. Think IRA. Think ETA. And so on.
And then these Islamic extremists come along and blow my entire defense of regular Islamic people completely out of the water.
Now for the little secret we've been keeping from Islamic fanatics ...
This emoticon :)
That emoticon is actually a secret picture of The Prophet Mohammed.
:)
Je suis maintenant Charlie. Je suis Charlie !
You have changed the world. I can no longer argue for tolerance.
It makes me sick to my stomach to admit it, but sadly I must: It is now clear religious people no longer belong in advanced countries.
I look at the USA now and Germany in the 1930s and Christianity.
I look at Buddhism in Japan in the 1930s.
I look at Hinduism in India now.
It isn't just Islam, but Islam is currently the worst.
I feel religion no longer has a place in western countries -- no religion.
"Airwave doesn’t have much room to move as Macquarie ultimately has shareholders to service."
Uh hun, so Airwave has to charge a lot to keep Macquarie shareholders happy.
And how happy will those Macquarie shareholders be when their purchase looses all its value due to being priced out of the market?
Of course Macquarie does have an alternative: Have Airwave launch a PR campaign explaining/claiming there is no viable alternative.
APs taking seconds to load?
On specialist devices APs would take as long to load as they're designed to.
Powerfailures affecting 4G in other parts of the world?
Other parts of the world have learned from this and have upgraded UPS requirements and physical durability requirements for transceivers and towers.
And then the emergency comms are available for everyone with an emergency, not just government employees.
iPhones falling apart minutes after you hand them to a copper?
Contruction industry has the same issue.
If the stock models aren't rugged enough you can ruggedized anything to proper military standards.
"The NAO noted, however, that most large government suppliers are already 'supplied by several tiers of smaller subcontractors.'"
Does this mean several layers of intermediaries (middlemen) skimming the profits off before the money gets to the contractors actually doing the work?
Is it layers of sales companies chopping one huge contract up into progressively smaller contracts, before getting to the point where the contracts are small enough for companies with the technical expertise to actually do the work?
Answer me this: Why take the risk of making significant suggestions or working unpaid overtime if you cannot get promoted?
If you can't get promoted why not just work like an stereotypical "coolie" from the days of Empire:
Keep your head down,
Don't ask questions,
Do exactly what you're told,
Don't make innovative suggestions, and
Hate your employer.
If you can't benefit from making waves why take the risk in making them?
People outside of "statutory preference groups" can't fully benefit from their innovative suggestions to employers any more than they could in the days of the British Empire when the colours were swapped around and white and male was the "fashionable shade and gender to be".
Pretty soon every racial and gender group will have an aversion to working for Intel.
You've got the groups who don't want to work for Intel because of their cultural preferences, how they were socialized growing up, cultural heroes, etc.
And you're going to get additional groups who don't want to work for Intel because now they'll be discriminated against.
Sure they'll attract more black women, or more women in general.
But will attracting 50% more black women and 20% more women in general make up for a 20% drop job seekers from Asian male and white male backgrounds?
And it is the Asian, both Chinese and Indian, who are hit hardest (even harder than us white men) by this kind of racial discrimination, because they like these kinds of jobs and their culture steers them towards.
We have been having this in Canada for decades, where our quiet obedient natural character lead us to take affirmative action (what we call "Employment Equity") seriously.
We don't have "quotas" because quotas would be unfair.
Instead we have "targets", changing the name makes it fair somehow.
Now don't get me wrong. If you're not in Southern Ontario or BC, if you're in an area where people are less ambitious and there are few HQs, you won't see this. You need to be where the big head offices are, in and around Toronto, and then you'll see this plenty.
Every year or two I try out Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. Twice I've tried out Opera.
I need some of the extras FF has.
Comparing IE and Google Chrome add-ons to FF is like comparing Windows Phone add-ons to iPhone add-ons.
Except IE and Google Chrome aren't less expensive.
I find FF fast enough, and much faster than manually doing things in IE in Chrome.
Mozilla's Thunderbird on the other hand is really really slow.
Yahoo wants to be the default Firefox search engine.
Judging by how slow it is to fix bugs in its IM product and how many popular Yahoo services Yahoo has dropped without consultation, I don't think Yahoo gives a darn about reliability or customer service.
Why would I use them as my search engine?
First thing I did when I upgraded Firefox was to switch back to good old reliable Google.
Google is motivated by profits, but unlike Yahoo, Google knows that to make profits you have to care about customers and support them.
Žižek has been quoted as saying that his work is to engage in critique, rather than to answer questions or provide theories.
It doesn't require much genius to know it is far easier to provide criticism when it isn't constructive criticism.
In your shop, when you upgrade security by changing the code in a program that has a version number, do you not increment the version number?
Most of MS's recent versions, security is what they're about. You change the release and version numbers as you make coding security updates.
And this is especially important for major security updates because major security updates almost always introduce some degree of incompatibility with poorly written programs.
Many poorly written programs, and even some well written programs, depend on OS features that violate security.
It isn't just OS X, Windows, Linux, Apache, etc. that have this issue. The internet architecture itself is incompatible with security and to become anywhere near secure against non-state actors would require such massive architectural changes that the new protocols and new code (including most firmware and software) would be incompatible with the old.
And for those others in sales and manufacturing, the ones who want the OS to have some wild new feature to sell their products:
1. An OS isn't supposed to sell products.
2. An OS is supposed to run the products that do the selling.
Desktops, lap tops, smart phones, tablets, their sales are not in the doldrums because of Windows.
Their sales are in the doldrums because of the lack of new hardware that can do something useful that the old hardware can't.
Blame Windows 7? If there was something that for most people and most companies was better that is what people would be running. I mean, Windows is cheap for OEMs, but Linux is free.
The only reason Linux hasn't wiped out Windows is it isn't as good for most customers.
And OS X, why don't governments and banks all run it? Because it is less secure against custom targeted attacks than Windows 7.
The thing that is wrong with Windows and MS isn't so much the products (although no software is perfect), it is the marketing, the PR and the management of expectations.
In those 3 things MS lags far far far behind Apple and even Linux.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
