Posts by a_yank_lurker 4138 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2013
What level of proof does one need to shake money out of these slimes. The fact they lost critical customer data should be enough for them to make the customers whole. I smell a nasty lawsuit brewing. Also, does the GPDR have any sway on this breach (asking out of genuine ignorance)?
"Windows 11 will be based on 7 UI?" Slurp might really surprise us now that their flagship browser will be Slurpped up Chromium; they might announce Bloat11 will be based on Linux. Now that would be a complete surrender.
As odd as that sounds there might a solid business reason behind it. As long as one can run W32 software on it users will not care what the underlying code is. Systems admins will care as they will need to learn how to administer a registry-less system. Developers fundamentally will not care as long as they get code to run on it. If it is based on a common distro family, they could compile their code for either the distro base or W32. And Slurp will spend a lot less money on the OS if they base W11 off Debian for example but they will still supply "Windows" for the masses and the PHBs.
I doubt my conjecture will occur but consider what really is the practical definition of Bloat for a user. It is an OS the runs Bloat programs seemingly natively. What is done under the hood is not important to them.
I suspect this dimbulbery will end up being tied up in the feral courts for many years no matter what the original stupidity is. Too much is at stake and the Native Criminal Class (aka Congress) is more interested in playing tit-for-tat games than doing what they are supposed do to fix the problem.
This has the feel of an end run around the feral courts and their venality. If you have a couple of functioning braincells you have long suspect Suckerberg and merchants of sleaze had ethics that would make a mafioso puke in disgust. Thanks to the end run we know the suspicion is actually fact.
One problem for Google and web services in general is there is a finite limit to the number of users you can have (world population caps that). At some point growth will level out. Another constraint is every user will only spend a few hours at most a day on the web; thus out of 24 hrs/person realistically you might have 3 hrs/day/person doing something on the web (number for illustration only).
Cloudy solutions really only make sense for a limited range of cases. For most including individuals a local drive with an intelligent backup plan is the best option. Cloud usage would be for convenience; e.g. sharing files and backing up critical files for most. Cloudy vendor goes TITSUP and you are toast if you do not have a local copy of your files and programs.
Too often the breach is caused by not fixing a know problem such as SQL injection or by not patching the code because it is too inconvenient. So a breach is inevitable when a black hat stumbles across them and given some the problems just about barely breathing script kiddie could hack some of these outfits.
I do not know if AWS will on balance cost any IT jobs overall but they could put a serious hurt on outfits like Slurp and Leisure Larry and his Minions. Too many IT companies are not used to being in mature businesses like retail and Amazon is basically a retailer. Retail is a more brutal business as the margins are thinner, cost control is much more critical, and customer loyalty is vastly more important. IT by comparison is a stroll in the park by comparison. One key difference is in retail you need many smallish sales to repeat customers everyday to stay in business and generally you customers have multiple options readily available. And you customers are somewhat price sensitive.
I noticed part of the complaint was the ability to side step the 4th Amendment of the US Constitution. What the real concern is not specifically the UK but that allowing another country to snoop can be a way to avoid the US Bill of Rights by the Feral DO(In)J and state level counterparts. Look what they found and they were so nice to tell us about it (wink, wink, nod, nod) with no US warrant involved. The end run is a foreign country could 'investigate' someone as the nudging of a dirty prosecutor come up with something that could be used as the basis of charges or search warrants. All this when the dirtbag had real evidence to pursue someone and would not normally get a warrant from the court of any type.
@FozzyBear - Stirring governments to act is never a good idea. When they are stirred they will act and often it will be sledge hammer never a scalpel. I have little sympathy for many in the tech sector as they are forcing governmental action by their complete lack of ethics. It seems like Suckerberg, et. al. do not understand ethics is much broader than what is technically legal. An ethical person realizes often the law does cover an area but one should behave with clear, personal idea of right and wrong at all times. There will be gray areas that are rather murky at times but an ethical person will try find a good solution not a convenient one.
The answer is when a major client sues for breach of contract with some eye-watering damages that is a certainty to win. An alternate scenario is when a couple of major clients like the EU governments ditch Bloat and associated cruft very loudly and noisily. If it is a government, they start mandating that all office type documents be ODF formats only. Until then, nothing will happen.
@Korev - I think the fine is reasonable as Knuddels apparently copped a mea culpa and fixed the problem (the real intent here). The idea of having a massive fine available is for the Zuckerbergs of the world who did not make dumb mistake but don't care about protecting user data. For the dumb mistakes that are fixed, a mild fine for being stupid. For the Zuckerbergs, bankrupt the bastards.
This will only happen when one of the nasties hammers an major company. This would need to be a nasty that would not be caught by alpha/beta testers aka home users. This is a scenario that will almost certainly happen as alpha testers will not be testing most enterprise features. When it does watch for a nasty, noisy lawsuit that will be widely covered.
In the US, it is illegal to use the mail or phone in the commission of a crime. Mail fraud is automatically a feral level crime as it involves abusing the USPO. I believe wire fraud is also feral level. Basically these laws are really intended to nail crime syndicates on feral level charges but the ferals will use them on anybody. The mail and wire fraud occurred because the mail/wire were used to send the false information to the home office and send the money to the 'widow'. What crimes were committed in Moldava are not clear but the Ferals have something to nail them with.
@jmch - You would need to change the metadata of the photo to have consistent info with that fights the story. Not necessarily hard to do but something one needs to be alert to and make sure all the photos in the group are consistent, more of a pain than many realize. All it would take is a semi-bright spark to realize the metadata is inconsistent to start playing 20 questions with them. Looking at my photos, the camera model, timestamp, camera settings, and location (latitude & longitude) are recorded. Location may not be available depending on the settings used with the camera.
As I write this, it is Thanksgiving in the US. A holiday the vast majority have off with pay and those that are working often either get a extra money and possibly reduced hours. Many will also have Friday off as a holiday (4 day weekend automatically) or will take a vacation day tomorrow. So many will be off tomorrow also. So tomorrow (Friday) is a good day for sales as most will have the day off and can shop.
In the US the traditional start to the Christmas season is the Friday after Thanksgiving. For sometime retailers have been kicking off the holiday season with special sales on Friday. It is called 'Black Friday' according to lore because many retailers need the holiday sales to have a profitable year (hence 'in the black'). It is traditional in the US for Christmas decorations to go up after Thanksgiving.
Trying to import holiday practices such as Black Friday ignores the US context where it does make sense (sort of at least) over here. It would be like having the US observe Boxing Day because it is done in Europe when the US tradition so far ignores it completely.
Too many very dimbulbs try to say the desktop and laptop are dead because some activities can be offloaded on to other devices. Thus, in their non-functioning brains, all activities can be offloaded on to these devices. This ignores that many of these activities have difficult to meet except requirements that are met by a desktop or laptop. Also, many of the 'pundits' see the sales decline as evidence of the death of PCs when this this more likely caused by the nature or a mature market and the fact that aging kit is still viable for most activities.
More than liking she was in the upper part of the group given her experience for total sales and being on plan. I would have expected a couple of the younger, party animal men to be on the bottom (deserving to be fired) not a couple of middle aged women. (I am a male btw). Something smell rotten.
The public, those imbeciles the elites despise, show they have a better grip on reality than the elites as usual. Shiny new toys wont do any patients any good if there is anyone available to use them. New IT initiatives will fail so they are not addressing a fundamental problem in health care; it is incredibly personnel intensive with much of the personnel being highly trained and expensive on the payroll.
Most are aware of phishing and while virtually all will at sometime or another open a phish even if unintentionally I think this "study" is basically garbage. There are few simple rules to go by: if the email context makes no sense; trash it immediately, if the context makes some sense (an email from Amazon e.g.) but it is unexpected; open the website from your browser to verify the information not the link; if you have been to the country (I get a bunch from India); immediately trash.
Or the summary rule, if the email context is at all dubious it is guaranteed to be illegitimate. That is a simple rule that even the most technically dense but otherwise intelligent can live with.
"The chromebook on which I'm writing this was hardly unimaginable then but I never wondered how long it would take; I was happy to, among other things, submit the first word processed dissertation in my dept." - Not just Chromebooks but any desktop, laptop, phone, or tablet. The importance of Bill Godbout is hard to pin down as he was more in the background to the better known pioneers. But without him we would not have these devices at all.
Alas only 1 up vote.
RIP - Bill may you be tinkering in the hereafter.
For CPHBs at Slurps having the heads on a pike would not be a fitting punishment, something much more medieval should be used as there is no punishment to'cruel or unusual' for their crimes against humanity. Seriously, the Dutch should turn pursue the maximum fines under the GPDR against Slurp as punishment.
For a successful suit one has to prove Bloomberg knew the story was false at the time they published it. If the reporters have good notes, etc. the suit will go nowhere fast as Bloomberg would show it had information (erroneous to be sure) that said this was happening. The fact that many who have some real knowledge of manufacturing and inspection find the story dubious does not matter.
The more likely story is this was a plant by someone who wanted to short SupreMicro and needed a plausible story in reputable rag to trigger a stock price decline. If orchestrated correctly, it has a chance of working if a rag swallows the line and runs the story. The rag is an unwilling dupe and actually as much victim as SuperMicro.
@Defiler - Electric cars have a long and checkered history dating back to the 1890's/1900's Brass Era cars. They have failed several times in the market for basically the same reasons of inadequate range and lengthy recharging times. The range problem is partially fixable, bigger battery but at the cost of greater weight. So there is a trade off between range and overall vehicle weight. The recharging time is limited by the battery chemistry and cannot be safely pushed or you will have some very serious problems; problems that vary according to the battery used. Also, a problem for EVs is there only certain battery chemistries that are suitable for an EV (voltage/current discharge curves versus power demands).
Other issues include the lifetime of the battery pack and its replacement cost. Currently batteries need to be replaced fairly often (I have seen reports about every 60K miles/100K km). This is an expensive proposition as the battery packs are not cheap. Again a problem that has been around since the Brass Era.
So the question isn't the current frenzy but whether it will last unlike past efforts. The really becomes a question of whether most people will find an EV an adequate first or second car. If not, the frenzy will die as sales collapse.
@Jack of Shadows - There are many industries were bulletproof code is the minimum requirement; programming errors could cause a cascade of other errors that could lead to at best nasty financial problems or at worst someone dieing. I work in the medical industry so I am attuned to the fact that mishandling data could lead to a wrong decision that could potentially kill the patient; generally a rare event but one to be avoided. But other industries face the same requirements of avoiding software errors that could cause deaths because the user relied on bad information generated by the software.
So like you I have very little patience with the farce of Bloat10 and Slurp's refusal to get head out of..
@gerritv - Slurp is solely responsible for proper testing of their products. When they obviously fail to do so they deserve to be hammered mercilessly until they get their act together. In reality, the harsh statements on El Reg are doing Slurp a service if they bother to listen. The natives are restless and do not need more reasons to bolt; they need reassurance that staying with Slurp is the correct course.
The monopolist John D. Rockefeller noted to maintain a near monopoly you have to give the customers good reasons to stay. Part of that is prices but also providing quality products. Low priced, quality products keep customers happy. Treat them with disdain either by raising prices or giving poor quality and you create an opportunity for a competent competitor to permanently take customers away from you. Rockefeller had legal problems with the ferals because of his market dominance not with customers.
I am not impressed with web apps overall. For some situations they are fine but for most a locally installed binary is correct solution. A local binary allows the user to work on files without needing an always on connection; a secure one is not always available. Also a binary is more efficient as it is at worst running directly on the interpreter or virtual machine not inside a browser and then an interpreter.
Adding to the problems JackassScript is not a well designed language which makes complex software more difficult to write. There are many other languages available that are much better designed and are much better suited to writing complex software.
With software there is often little reason to buy/subscribe to any specific product now. Many have older versions that are more than satisfactory for their needs that still work; software itself really does not wear out. Most new 'features' are worth getting for the vast majority of users. So what a software vendor really can sell is paid support. Make the base product FOSS so tinkers can play with it and get a decent feel for it and sell support to those who are using in serious production. The money in software is not in specific product but in keeping production up for businesses. Business need their systems to stable, reliable, up, and available or they do not make money or worse lose money.
"Microsoft has been treating Windows as Bethesda treats an Elder Scrolls game- release it now, and we’ll fix it later." - This does not work for any long term success for anyone. Burn customers enough and they will vote with their wallets. What Slurp has forgotten is customers do have options, not necessarily great options now, but real options.
Another issue for Slurp is the family IT department might get fed up with constantly fighting updates that bork systems. They might say enough and convert their families and friends to other OSes/devices for their personal sanity. Technical problems with many Linux distros are often much easier to solve and tend to stay solved.
One item that will not be in any law is the Chinese option for the C-suites - execution. I am dubious that a GPDR like law will have all that much effect on the real miscreants as it is only talking fines. Wyden's idea of prison terms might have an effect on the few C-suites that can spell ethics let alone have any. The others will some sterner persuasion - the Chinese option. But I doubt it would pass muster with the Nine Seniles as would prison terms also not pass muster with them. So we are left with fines that again might not pass muster with the Nine Seniles.
In the real world in any STEM field you will various reference sources to solve a problem but that does not prove you understand the reference material. The idea behind testing students is to assess their understanding of the material not how would solve the problem on the job. So any testing strategy will be artificial in the sense that a competent professional will ask for help from others when needed. But to assess an individual competence requires no outside sources; otherwise you are testing a group's competence.
The only intelligence in AI is human intelligence to write a very complex algorithm. However there is an adage about curve fitting: "With enough variables you fit an elephant". So I wonder if 'AI' systems are fitting so many variables that with enough 'training' they can be made to say anything you want.
This strikes me as trial balloon to see how it fares overall with the public, politicos, and tech industry. Wyden is serious but the timing means it is highly unlikely it will get to Trump before the end of the session. But as a trial balloon, it is excellent timing as it will get a discussion going before the next session when the real bill can be introduced.
Wyden is doing another thing; he is telling the tech industry your antics are destructive to people and there will be a feral level law sooner or later. Unless you want 50 different laws to deal with come talk with me but you will need to grow up and act like adults.
Icahn has been a notorious corporate raider and general purpose fraud for decades. His MO is to get enough stock to dictate the destruction of the company in such away he makes profit but everyone else including employees get shafted. I suspect this is stall tactic so he can get more control and destroy Dell while making a profit off the carcass.
Personally I dislike both Gnome and KDE (for different reasons). My favorites are Cinnamon, Mate, and XFCE. RHEL is simplifying their support needs and costs by dropping KDE which sort of makes sense at first glance. But I wonder, other differing configuration methods, how much extra work supporting several desktop environments causes and is this a significant amount of work. My impression from other projects is there is some work to support each DE. Just have to have someone dedicated to doing the grunt work.
"Lie detectors are not 100% accurate and AI isn't going to change that." - Over here in feraldom lie detectors are not admissable in court as evidence. So either the EU is allowing something on the order of reading goat entrails to make 'decisions' for them or they go back to the old fashioned way of actually doing real police type work.
I am not sure of the long term value to either. Red Hat seems to be an odd duck and it looks Idiotic Brainless Morons badly over paid. So there were will fairly quick pressure to produce because of the size of the deal. I cannot see Ginni and crew keeping their mitts off RH after a few months to about a year.
It has been nice to know you. Itsy Bitsy Morons will the death of you by sheer incompetence and negligence.
I wonder what will happen with Fedora and Centos going forward as I doubt Ginni will understand the importance of the projects to the Red Hat ecosystem. They both serve very good outreach roles to the wider Linux community who would normally not use Red Hat.
My observation is based on working in retail. People buy the same brand because they have had their expectations met by it even if it is the house brand. Their 'loyalty' is to a brand that consistently meets their needs. If it stops, they will try others until they settle on another brand. Usually if someone has been burned by a bad product they avoid the brand altogether.
With computers, migrating to another OS is tricky because of the OS ecosystem. Without knowing the specifics of someone's situation it is hard to say if one can easily migrate or is basically stuck. I could migrate back and forth between Android and iOS because I do not much invested in apps on my phone. For may computer OS, I have more invested in software but switching would still be relatively easy as all my proprietary applications either have an equivalent or are already available on other OSes. But I recognize this is not always the case for someone.
I have helped people switch from Windows to Macs or Linux. But the key issue was what software did they have that was Windows only and were there any reasonable options for them so they could continue to use it.
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