Posts by hutcheson

Windows 10 S: Good, bad, and how this could get ugly for PC makers

Beer snobs...probably have chrome rims on their double-wides....

China leaves Apple books, movies on the cutting room floor

Encryption-related?

iCloud is allowed. iTunes, not so much.

iCloud backups can be encrypted by Apple upon demand-backed-by-force-majeur. iTunes backups can't.

Coincidence?

Oracle: Oregon's attorney general leaked our confidential memos in health portal row

State of Oregon. Obamacare. And ... Oracle.

Is there any chance, any chance at ALL, of a gingham dog, calico cat, and velveteen rabbit scenario?

And is there anything, anything at ALL, that mortals can do to increase that chance?

WHY can't Silicon Valley create breakable non-breakable encryption, cry US politicians

Re: There is...

>When a US authority says something like this, that the crypto should have an easy way for legal authorities to open anything after 'due legal process', what they seem to mean more often than not is that there should be a an easy way for _US_ legal authorities to open the material after whatever the _US_ thinks is due legal process.

>They appear to see no issue with other country's legal process or authority, since those don;t matter to them.

>I'm also not sure which depresses me more - that they know what they're asking for is impossible, but are asking anyway so the Dear People see them 'doing something' - or that they really think it can be done. Sigh...

You're being silly. Indisputably, once you generate math that works differently in the presence of legal paper, it is trivial to make that math work differently only in the presence of U.S. legal paper.

I propose a different approach: here's a game to introduce at your next party. Call it the "Mike Rogers" Game." The object of the game is to express the maximum amount of obdurate ignorance while simultaneously making the broadest demands--in as few words as possible. Extra credit, of course, if your example is a quotation or precis of something you've actually heard someone say. Herewith a few samples:

"I don't know anything about Maxwell's Laws, but I don't see why it's impossible to build a refrigerator that generates power instead of consuming it. That would solve all our oil-dependancy problems. I think it CAN be done and it SHOULD be done."

"I failed second-grade arithmetic, but I don't see why 2 plus 2 always has to be 4. It would solve all our economic problems if accountants could just think outside the box and be more open to alternate ideas."

"Statistics? I never heard of it. But the average of these numbers would be higher if you just had more numbers."

The winner, of course, is acclaimed "Mike Rogers For A Day" and gets to peek in everyone else's underwear drawer.

'Everywhere I look ... it's bad': HP claims email shows Autonomy CFO panic, pre-buyout

In totally unrelated news at a completely unreliable rag, Tech Titans aren't using Wall Street bankers:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/20/wall_street_woes_tech_companies_are_not_paying_the_bankers/

Bankers report the danger this poses to ... tech firms, who might (if not using their valuable services) overpay for acquisitions by ... who knows, 500 percent? 700 percent? And lose money -- who knows -- billions and billions of dollars!

Be warned, tech firms: always use Wall Street to guarantee that if what happens to HP happens to you--why then, they'll still have your money and it won't have been their fault.

EU justice chief blasts Google on 'right to be forgotten'

Dateline: Eurasia, 1984 + 30

Memo to Winston:

From: The Democratic Committee for Pure Thinking

Words to remove from Newspeak Dictionary:

"Freedom of Speech" -- replace everywhere by "Thoughtcrime"

"Right to be forgotten" -- we do not need a word for this. Does a fish need a word for water?

------------------------

I am Winston.

I WILL REMEMBER.

Comcast bosses: THAT pushy sales rep was only obeying orders

>Change throughout the industry is overdue here.

It won't happen with marketroids and other MBAs running technical support. Assuming they had the intelligence and imagination to contemplate any improvements (which most don't, or they wouldn't have gone that career path in the first place), they have their own incentives in place, which are exclusively "metricized" and monetary.

This is the old "we don't hire assassins, we just give huge financial bonuses when one of our enemies dies" defense.

Which is not quite as morally valid as "I'm not a prostitute: I just kidnap children, hook them on drugs, and sell them to pimps." Because at least the prostitute's customers get what they paid for.

Gemalto rash cache clash dashed: US courts trash Android patent bid

>We had estimated that if Gemalto had won the case the company could have been entitled to either a one-off payment in damages, or higher royalty receipts that could amount to €30m to €50m per annum," they said in a note, seen by Reuters. It thus erodes a three per cent earnings increase potential.

This decision, all by itself, generates an increase of €600m to €1000m (over the next 20 years) in the profits of people who actually manufacturer things that other people actually want to buy.

That's a static analysis. The actual value of this decision, to people who make and use electronic devices, is much greater. The risk and overhead of developing new products will be incrementally lower. From the all-money-that-isn't-corporate-profits-is-just-wasted perspective, some of these new products will compete with those existing products, driving profits down. But from the perspective of all-production-that-isn't-valuable-to-consumers-is-waste perspective, this will mean incrementally-cheaper, incrementally-more-valuable, and incrementally-more-massively-produced products -- in other words, win-win-win.

(There are other perspectives, the vituperation of which is left as an exercise to the reader: all-production-that-doesn't-produce-tax-revenue-is-wasted, all-production-that-doesn-t-create-lawyer-income-is-wasted.

Torvalds rails at Linux developer: 'I'm f*cking tired of your code'

Re: Odd timing

The Open-Source world is full of, shall we say, Differently-courteoused persons. That world doesn't select for courtesy--it selects for competence. The For-Profit-Business world is full of Traditionally-courteoused sociopaths who speak what some would call "grammatically-correct English" and what others would call "Marketroid". People don't have "skills", they have "brands". People aren't "liars" or "honest", they are "promoters" and "detractors" respectively. "Customer care" doesn't involve precision injection of prescription pharmaceuticals, or even changing bedpans: it means "emotional manipulation of other people for personal profit." "Excellence" doesn't involve doing anything well, let alone better than others, it means "spontaneous enthusiastic expressions of delusions of adequacy." They never say "shut the expletive-deleted up", but--because this is something they need to say so often, they have whole manuals of phrases that mean the same thing, from "I understand your concern" and "I feel your pain" down to "I don't care what you know; I don't know what you do; but with two weeks' training I could teach an idiot to replace you."